her.
When she turned, she found herself confronting Katrina Starnes and waves of hate unlike any she had ever felt, and she knew that this was the pure hate of darkness and, even worse, the hate of a scorned woman.
“I was just leaving,” she said faintly.
“Oh, no,” Katie snarled. “Fuck him again. Fuck him on the floor, you rich, spoiled filthy
“Now, wait.”
“I’ve been waiting all day. And hearing!” She turned on David. “You sob a lot, asshole. Sob with pleasure. You sound like a complete jerk when you’re fucking, did you know that? And you’re even worse than Marian says. You’re not only a self-centered piece of shit, you’re an incompetent doctor. If we could get out of here, or we could get the goddamn phone working, your license would be history. And it will be. Because when this is over, you’re going down, Doc.” Now the jewel-hard eyes returned to Caroline. “Like his dick? Tell him to wash it next time, between fuck toys.” Her voice dropped low now. “Guys like him—human garbage—they end up in pieces. Be warned.” She strode out. “There’s a list on your desk, Doctor,” she said over her shoulder. “The patients you missed, the problems you ignored.”
Silence followed. Hardly above a whisper, he said, “It’s dark. We’ve been here all day.”
“An uncontrolled move through time.”
“I have a problem with her now, Caroline. Big problem.”
“I have to go work on my painting.”
“I know.”
Their eyes met, and their hearts danced, but it was a slow dance, full of sorrow and full of fear.
She wanted to stay with him but she could not stay with him, there wasn’t time. She left, moving quickly down the halls, intent on her task.
Neither of them was aware of the other eyes that watched them via the surveillance system, Katrina’s eyes, or the true intensity, the towering fury, of the hate that was there.
DAVID FORD’S JOURNAL: FIVE
I’ve always moved too fast with women, and now I’ve got two of them on my case. It’s happened before and I’ve always been ashamed, and I feel that now.
Caroline Light wants my love but I just do not feel anything there. Katie wants it and, again, I just want the comfort of her body.
Both women are furious at me, of course, but I’m dealing now with a new issue, and they’re going to have to wait their turn. To be frank, I believe that I know what Herbert Acton did to look into the future.
Educated as I am in modern science, I have always viewed alchemy as the first primitive fumbling of what became chemistry. However, what I now suspect paints a different picture. Alchemy, as we have known it through history, is the degenerated remnant of a chemistry far more advanced than what we have now.
The shibboleth has always been that the “philosopher’s stone” is supposedly capable of turning something like lead or iron into gold. In the Middle Ages, mountebanks went about in Europe using sleight of hand to convince the wealthy that they could do this, with the intention of fleecing them.
There is a truth behind it, though, and it is the explanation, I am convinced, for Herbert Acton’s abilities. And, in fact, as I write this, I feel a sort of deja vu again, as if the words are a kind of echo. I would surmise that this is information from our class, being drawn through the amnesia.
What this ancient science concerned, I believe, were manipulations that are presently far beyond our ability. It was able to see into the future, and, I think, holds the promise of actually enabling physical movement through time—an orderly, organized version of what happened to that dire wolf in Utah.
I have made a most interesting discovery about this room. It contains a time machine—not one that can enable physical time travel, but one that can facilitate the sort of seeing that Herbert Acton was so expert at. I think of it as a time telescope, and it stands on this desk, the Tiffany masterwork that is far more than a desk lamp.
It was the alchemical colors that revealed the lamp’s true purpose to me. The master who created them understood the uses of light frequencies, and when I close my eyes and let the colors wash across my forehead, I am able to see brilliant images of the future. In other words, the legend of the crystal ball or the magic lantern is about lamps like this.
Accelerating vision into the future—perhaps bodies, too—need have nothing to do with arcane contraptions like supercolliders. It has to do with changing the temporal frequency of the body, and that can be done with light.
You look into a color of the type produced by this lamp until, when you close your eyes, it fills your head—and then, after a few moments, you will see what for me are flickering, indistinct visions, but which for a master like Herbert Acton must have been exquisitely detailed images.
Even with my limited skills, though, I have seen the future, and, frankly, I am terrified. Not because of what is there, but rather what is not.
In my mind’s eye, for example, I can see this room as it will be later tonight, empty, the darkness flickering from the auroras.
Then something else happens, involving strange light rising in the east—a piercing violet object in the sky. And that light—the color is like that of the Great Elixir, a light frequency of great power, both creative and destructive.
No sooner does this light wash in through the windows than all light disappears. It’s not night, it’s another kind of dark entirely. When I tried to see into it, it almost seemed to want to suck me in, as if it was in some way hungry. I think that I was seeing the absence of reality itself, the absolute emptiness that surrounds the universe, that is, what exists before light has come and after it has faded, beyond the limits of time.
In other words, we are almost at the end of time, probably just days away, or even hours.
And yet, it’s not the entire and complete end, because something else is there, a glimmer in the black ocean.
I think this is the beginning of new life on earth, thousands of years from now.
And getting there is our goal, and it is why Caroline refers to her painting as a navigation tool. As she paints, she is looking in her mind’s eye at a specific spot on the Earth of the future, the place she briefly took me to. Once the painting is finished, everybody who sees it, and is properly prepared—no doubt by consuming the substance they’re manufacturing in the arc furnace—will supposedly be able to navigate to the point in time it depicts.
I have also seen our world as it is right now, and what I have seen has almost made me sweat blood, because hell is unfolding here, and it is far, far worse than I imagined. Even as desperate as we are here at the clinic, compared to what’s going on outside, we are a splendid palace shining in the middle of a wasteland.
For example, the farm belt all over the world is a gigantic desert of brown, ruined crops. I sailed from Iowa to Texas on the lamp’s magical wings, and saw nothing but stubble and burning cities and long lines of dead cars on the roads, and everywhere bloated, dead cattle, and people in their millions cutting and eating the carrion meat.
Also, I saw ever more of the huge objects that I glimpsed out my window the other night, drifting over the face of the land, lingering over cities, marching in enormous platoons across the suffering world. I saw them drawing people into themselves in vast numbers, but I could not see what was happening to them. I do remember, though, that it was beautiful. Were these the biblical elect, then, those who have finished with earthly life, being raised up? Or was it something else, the harvest of mankind, perhaps, as slaves or as a DNA pool?
I could see what was happening, but there was nobody to tell me why.
I have also seen people cutting themselves to the bone—literally butchering themselves—to get rid of the strange quasi-physical shadows like the ones on Katie’s neck and probably on Tom Dryden. I fear that I know why,
