informally dressed to be an academic of any kind, let alone head of the psychology department of a major university.
'And I think that should be our last question for Dr. Black today. Thank you, Lucretia, for a provocative talk, and for taking so many questions. You've given us a great deal to think about. And thank you all for coming. Dr. Black's lecture is the final event today, but I hope we'll see you all here tomorrow for the final presentations in this year's Horizons in Psychology seminar.'
The wash of applause was genuine, but as the room lights came up Cree didn't feel the gratifying release of tension that typically came after she'd delivered a lecture. Mason Ambrose didn't just casually show up at conferences, and his presence disturbed her. She hadn't seen him in four years, hadn't even spoken to him in perhaps two. If he was here, he had a reason. She realized that her body had something of a Pavlovian aversion to him, derived from the two years she'd spent working and studying with him. It wasn't just his grotesque physical appearance, or that he seemed to relish the more gruesome aspects of paranormal research: Mason Ambrose liked to push you into a learning curve so steep it could give you a nosebleed.
Dr. Zentcy had turned to Cree with a puzzled, pleased frown. He tipped his head slightly toward the back of the hall and asked under his breath, 'Is that… that isn't by any chance-'
'Why, yes,' Cree said, pretending she hadn't noticed earlier. 'Mason Ambrose. I believe it is.' Internationally renowned neuropsychiatrist and expert on abnormal psychology, internationally controversial scholar of parapsychology. My mentor.
'I didn't know…' Zentcy tried, 'I mean, I had no idea he was actually…'
'Still alive? Good point.' Cree leaned toward him with a bogus paranoid face and whispered, 'What makes you so sure he is?'
For an instant, Zentcy's eyes widened, and Cree regretted teasing him-it was an indication of her own uneasiness. Zentcy was a good guy who deserved kudos for putting Cree and her radical ideas on the agenda here. The academic world was simply not ready for the idea that ghosts were real, and that the experience of death-and living people's relationships with the dead-must be central to any theory of psychology. His open mindedness had no doubt earned him some scorn from his colleagues here at the University of New Mexico, yet he'd treated her with only respect and consideration.
'I'm kidding,' she reassured him. 'But I know what you mean. With Dr. Ambrose you're never quite certain. I'll introduce you, if you like.' Zentcy nodded with equivocal enthusiasm.
A dozen audience members had assembled at the front of the room, waiting to speak with her: students with theoretical questions, professors with bones to pick, even a few local residents with personal tales of ghosts and hauntings. By the time the last of them left, the figures at the back of the room had vanished.
Cree left the building feeling a mix of disappointment and relief at Mason's disappearance. Why would he have taken the time to attend her talk if he didn't want to meet with her? Just playing Mr. Mysterious, she decided; she'd hear from him again before she left Albuquerque. She drove back to her hotel to find a faxed note that confirmed her hunch: Take the Sandia Peak tramway at 5:00. See you at the top. Ambrose.
3
The aerial car started toward the peak, swinging up the slope and quickly leaving the embrace of the lower tramway station. Cree gripped a pole as she looked out over the heads of the kids who had pressed themselves against the windows. Ahead stretched a steep rocky incline almost bare of vegetation; below, beyond the concrete planes and angles of the station, the flat valley and the streets of suburban Albuquerque began to open and fall away. The southern slopes of the Sandia range came into view, tinged pink by the westering sun, their rocky turrets set against hard shadows.
Space. Light. Rock. Sky.
A grand land, Cree realized. A place of heroic proportion. There were fifteen other excited sightseers standing with her in the car, but their chattering stopped as the ground dropped away and a gulf of air opened beneath their feet. Everyone was experiencing the same awe. For a long moment there was a collective suspension of breath broken only by the hum of the drive machinery. Then the kids' excitement boiled over in exclamations of astonishment, and people started talking again.
The views mesmerized Cree, but she couldn't suppress her apprehension. Drama aside, Mason would have some reason for meeting her on Sandia Peak when any coffeehouse or hotel lobby would have been sufficient. He always had a reason. It no doubt had to do with 'instructional value,' but Mason's motives were mysterious and would remain so until he revealed them. And then he'd stick it to you hard and enjoy watching you squirm. There was a sadistic quality to Mason and his methods.
So why take the effort to see him?
Actually, the answer was simple. Whatever he had in mind, it would be something eye-opening. Mason Ambrose was a genius, a pioneer in psychology in Cree's estimation as important as Freud or Jung. He was also a brilliant teacher, infinitely giving and subtle and patient despite what could seem a purely self-absorbed and confrontational style. In Cree's case, he'd served as guide, guru, and therapist as much as teacher. He'd had the insight to accept her as his research assistant seven years ago, even though he'd seen her for the damaged merchandise she was. When she'd applied for the internship advertised in the Harvard grad school bulletin, she had been a widow for almost three years, still deeply wounded by the loss of her husband, crazy and sick with it. The grief alone would have undone her, but the way she'd found out about Mike's death-his appearance in Philadelphia at his dying moment, three thousand miles from the Los Angeles car wreck that killed him-had upset all her beliefs about the world. About life. When she'd come to Mason, she'd been lost and frightened, a spiritual seeker floundering and flailing in her quest to find answers to life's mysteries. A swimmer about to go under.
Mason had seen all that in his first glance. He'd spent two years redirecting her anger and fear, merging them with her hunger to learn and helping her focus them on her work. He'd goaded or finessed her into disciplining her talents. He'd helped her accept that her urgent fascination with the paranormal was not compulsion but passion, not useless but crucial. Most important, he'd believed in her and affirmed that the empathic techniques she used to commune with ghosts and those haunted by them were valid and necessary.
But his methods were, as he liked to put it, 'rigorous.' He'd plunged her into experiences of the paranormal that drove her nearly to insanity. One of the first, long before she was ready for such an encounter, had been the New Jersey motel ghost. She'd lived in the squalid, piss- and cigarette-stinking room for a week as she slowly got to know the revenant of a serial killer whose dying moments consisted of remembering his murders. Mason had seemed to relish every detail, including Cree's terror and distress.
Huge tubes of blue steel intruded suddenly across her field of vision, jolting her out of her recollections. Just as startled, the other passengers gasped and laughed uneasily. The tramcar had reached one of the support gantries partway up the mountain, and as it came to the peak of the first swoop of cables and changed incline it bounded gently, suspending gravity and leaving Cree's stomach hanging. The gargantuan tower's passing revealed how fast they were moving and how high they were.
Below, a vast space had opened between the car and the slope. To the west, the grid of Albuquerque's streets stretched out on a plain so flat it could have been pressed by some titan's rolling pin. Beyond lay a breathtaking sweep of desert, slightly hazy with distance, bounded at the far horizon by purple mountains.
Cree gawked like the rest of the passengers. What was it about the Southwest? Maybe the New Agers of Santa Fe and Taos had it right after all, and it was a magical land, a place of Earth energy convergence. She had spent only a week in Arizona, three years ago, and had never been to New Mexico, yet the place felt familiar, as ifthe size and smell and feel of it had been latent in her blood for a lifetime. The light was stronger, purer. The sun was more immediate and commanding. Here on the Sandia ridge, the mountains were carved with gullies and clefts as expressive as the lines of ancient faces. Between dense stands of pine, towers of rock thrust naked from the escarpment; you could feel the geology here, millions of years of tectonic and mineral processes exposed to the eye.
That's what it was, she decided: Time itself was here. And time was big and there was lots of it. Good to remember.
Cree's ears popped for the fourth time. Another gantry loomed, and again the car did a hydraulic-suppressed
