Pathways - Jeri Taylor [129]
His eyes snapped open suddenly in the darkness at an imagined sound—at least he thought it must be imagined, because he couldn’t account for it otherwise. It was a faint sigh, as though wind were slipping through an abandoned attic, but of course there was no wind on a starship.
A motion caught at the corner of his eye and he swung his head toward the window, which looked onto space. A dark silhouette stood there, rimmed by the streak of warp stars. The features were dark and indistinguishable, but from the tuft of hair that protruded from the top of the head, there was no mistaking who it was.
It was Charlie.
Terror clutched at him and his hands began to shake violently. He clawed awkwardly toward the control pad at his bedside, desperate to turn the lights on and banish this unwelcome visitor. In his panic he couldn’t find the pad in the dark, and he began pushing frantically at all the controls, hoping to find the lights at random. Nothing happened. He was afraid to glance back over his shoulder toward the window, for fear Charlie’s figure would be moving toward him, ready to reach out and seize his shoulder. Frenzied, he pounded his fist on the controls—
Light erupted into his eyes, blinding him briefly, and then he forced himself to look back toward the window to verify that the apparition had vanished.
Charlie stood there, silent, pale skin etched with blood, staring at him not in accusation, but in wistful sadness.
And flanking him were Odile and Bruno.
Tom’s body jerked in a violent spasm, and he hoped he was having a heart attack, that death and oblivion would overtake him swiftly and he could be free forever of these awful specters. But he remained conscious, chest squeezed in a vise, perspiration spilling from his pores, eyes locked on the frightful visages before him. Their sadness was far worse than anything else he could imagine—if they were angry, or threatening, he could almost bear it, but this awful melancholy was terrible to behold. Through his panic, the thought occurred to him that they were sorry for him, but that didn’t make any sense, because he had cheated death and they had died at his hand.
He tried to scrabble backward on the bed, to get away from them, to get to the door, but his body wouldn’t obey his commands. It was like the dream everyone has had when they are trying to run from a monster, but the limbs are agonizingly slow, trapped in molasses, and instead of running one can only move in frustrating slow motion. He felt himself inch across the bed, kicking at the blanket, terrified that they would try to move toward him, would overtake and overwhelm him, smothering him in the putrefaction of the grave.
He tumbled onto the floor and could only scoot backward across it, for what seemed long minutes, eyes still firmly locked on the three apparitions, finally bumping into the door of his quarters, which opened automatically at his touch and closed behind him. Once in the corridor, he tried to get to his feet, but his legs seemed boneless, and he collapsed again to the floor. All he could do was to crawl on his hands and knees, which he did, like a demented six-month-old, all the way to sickbay.
The next several days passed in a haze. He had medical evaluations, psychological evaluations, medications, interviews. Through it all, he insisted he had to return to Starfleet Headquarters as soon as possible, an unacceptable demand from a junior officer, even one whose mental stability the captain of the Copernicus had begun to question. Finally it was the name of Paris that prevailed, Tom in his desperation invoking his father and imploring the captain to respect the line that had served Starfleet so well for so long.
And so it was that Tom was returned to San Francisco by shuttle, piloted by a lieutenant whose orders were never to leave Tom unattended because there was genuine concern about the possibility of his doing damage to himself.
That was fine with Tom, who more than anything else wanted to avoid being