'We're all scared,' whispered Sammy, in his tiny voice.
The gray around the window had grown lighter. Bondurant closed his eyes. The sun was climbing over the mountains outside, and soon he would be able to see the things that were talking to him in this empty room.
'Well,' came a new voice, a strong and confident man's. 'That's enough for one session. We don't want to solve all our problems, or I'll be out of a job.'
Bondurant forced his eyelids to stay shut, trembling with the effort. The room was as cool as December, and Bondurant caught a faint whiff of dirt and decaying leaves.
Sammy's voice was at his ear. 'Bye, Mr. Bondurant. See you around.'
One of the chairs fell over, then silence.
After ten minutes, Bondurant opened his eyes, his cheeks wet with tears. In the dim light of daybreak, he looked around the circle of vacant chairs. He reached into his pocket and touched the flask, swearing for the hundredth time that he was through. Then he looked at the door.
Against its metal face he saw an image of the old man in the gown. The man's lips moved, but no sound came out. As the shape dissolved under the sunrise, Bondurant thought he knew what words the ghostly lips had formed We 're getting closer.
TWENTY-NINE
'Are you comfortable, Miss Rogers?'
Starlene nodded at the mirror on the wall. An apparatus that looked like a high-tech chandelier lowered from the ceiling, stopping several feet above her head. The humming rose in intensity, vibrating the cot to which she was strapped. Her skin itched beneath the electrodes stuck to her temples. The pinprick of pain had faded where Dr. Swenson had injected the radiopharmaceutical that would allow Kracowski to track her brain's chemistry and blood flow.
Randy had fastened the restraints, ignoring her questioning eyes. Now she was alone in the room. She gripped the sides of the mattress and waited for Kracowski to flip the switches that would send the currents racing through her brain, the weird waves that would oscillate through her molecules and send her into the unknown.
Kracowski's voice came from the speakers again. 'Remember that this is strictly voluntary.'
'I know,' she said. 'Just like it is for the kids.'
'This is not a good time for a debate on the merits of traditional counseling versus Synaptic Synergy Therapy. My results speak for themselves.'
'Are you talking about your therapeutic results or… you know, all that other stuff?'
'Ah, the phantasmagoria effect. Don't you Christians believe the souls of the dearly departed are immediately vacuumed off to hell or heaven?'
'Only people who actually have souls.'
'You are a doubter, Miss Rogers. I've had many doubters. In that respect, I am not unlike your beloved Jesus of Nazareth.'
'Except Jesus did what He did for the good of others, not to boost his own ego.'
Laughter crackled over the speakers. 'If Jesus had computers and a better understanding of electromagnetic fields, He would have invented SST himself.'
The lights in the room dimmed, and Starlene tried to relax. Her sleep had been short and interrupted by nightmares. Each time she had awakened in her cottage, sweaty and tangled in sheets, she prayed the fear away. The Miracle Woman had drifted through her fleeting dreams, holding out those tragic eyes. The dread of the treatment had also kept her restless and anxious.
But it was too late to back out now. If she wanted to understand what Wendover's children were going through, she had to endure the same treatment. She stared at her reflection in the mirror and told herself to be brave.
'Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of Kracowski,' she whispered to herself, 'I will fear no evil.'
The humming grew louder and the floor pulsed. A faint tingle trickled across her skin and the walls became softer. Above, the ceiling spun and lifted away, but instead of morning sky there was only a black void. Starlene's heart accelerated racing to the rhythms of Kracowski's machines.
She concentrated on her face in the mirror, but the glass warped and melted away. Now the walls were gone, and so was the bed she had been lying on. She panicked and reached up to her temples to yank away the electrodes. The restraints had vanished, as well as the electrodes.
She tried to stand but her legs were warm taffy. The floor opened beneath her and her stomach tightened in anticipation of falling. Starlene closed her eyes but still saw the floor yawning like a hungry mouth, and in the dark throat of the basement, faint wisps of light floated upward.
Starlene screamed at Kracowski, but the sound was swallowed by the roaring of reality's death. The wisps solidified and the Miracle Woman stood on nothingness, holding out her palms, showing her dead eyes. Around the Miracle Woman came others, formed from the milk of afterlife, all wearing the lost and crazed look of the eternally restless.
The Miracle Woman's lips moved, and her words came not as sound, but as thought. 'Starlene Rogers.'
Starlene pushed toward where she thought the door was, but the door had disappeared along with the rest of the room.
The Miracle Woman smiled, and things fluttered around her tongue. Her thoughts came to Starlene like wind through graveyard grass. 'The door is below you.'
Starlene turned and came face-to-face with the old man in the gown, the one who had walked into the lake. He spoke-thought into her skull. 'I can make you better.'
'I don't want to be better,' she thought or screamed or whispered, and she clawed frantically at the air, trying to move in whatever direction she could.
'My motto is, 'Heal you or kill you,'' said the old man. 'I win either way.'
A young guy, thin and ragged and pale as a maggot, drifted down from above. A sleeveless institutional gown draped him like a funeral shroud. He waved a hand at Starlene's hair, seemed surprised when his flesh passed through her, and said, 'Can we keep her?'
The Miracle Woman said, 'She's not ours yet.'
The young man whimpered. 'The doctor said we could. I promise to play nice.'
'Since when have you ever believed your doctor?'
'Since yesterday.'
'You weren't alive yesterday'
The old man said, 'And you never took your medicine. No wonder you ended up like you did.'
The young man looked down at his wrists. Long scars, gray against the white threads of his skin, ran from the base of his thumbs to his elbows. 'Can I take it back?'
Starlene pressed her hands over her ears, but still she heard the words from those impossible mouths.
The old man said to the suicide victim, 'You'll have to do better than that. You've been very, very bad.'
'Leave him alone,' said the Miracle Woman. 'Haven't you harmed him enough already?'
'I was only trying to help.'
'I know. That's the worst part. You never saw the patients as human beings. You saw them as numbers, experiments, sets of diagnoses. As problems to be solved.'
The old man drifted nearer to Starlene. He put a hand out, like a Catholic priest bestowing a sacrament, and his cold touch penetrated the bones of her skull. She couldn't twist away, no matter how she struggled. Behind him, in the shadowy ether, more shapes hovered, their faces blank.
'If only I had another chance,' the old man said. 'I know what to do now. I know where I made my mistakes.'
'Keep away,' the Miracle Woman said. 'This one needs a different kind of healing.'
The Miracle Woman closed her hands, hiding those hideous, wounded eyes. She grew brighter, her words falling more softly in Starlene's head, no longer shrieking.
