It was my idea. You belong to me.'
Kracowski pressed back against the wall, face blanched and blank, hands in his lab coat.
Dad chopped at the air like a stunt man in a kung fu movie. His arms passed through the ghosts, the ether barely stirred by the motion.
'Damn, Kracowski,' Dad said. 'The field is cooking with gas now. Just think, if we can make one big enough, we might fill up the whole fucking world with ghosts.'
Kracowski, his words nearly without air, said, 'What have we done? Good God what are we doing?'
Dad laughed blew a breath at the nearest ghost, a wiry figure who made a drawing motion in response. Freeman guessed it was the writer, the one who was forever fixed on that phrase, 'A white, white room in which to write.' Beside The Writer stood an old woman with a large iridescent scar across her forehead.
'The dead and the living, walking side by side,' Dad said to the stunned Kracowski. 'Who knows where it will end? What do you think, McDonald? Think your little secret society will find a way to take over the world using these tilings?'
McDonald said nothing in response. Drool leaked from one corner of his mouth, his pupils of different sizes. He crawled on his belly as if he'd lost the use of his legs. And his mind.
'The Mills Effect,' Dad said turning his attention back to Kracowski. 'What do you think? Catchy, huh?'
Dad slapped at the ghost of an old woman, who was hunched and wrinkled and ragged whose translucent face registered a sneer of suspicion. 'How about it, bitch? The Mills Effect. Do you like being the byproduct of my out-of-this-world genius?'
Starlene, leaning over Freeman's shoulder, whispered 'He's gone over the edge.'
'He was born over the edge,' Freeman said. 'Trouble is, he wants to drag everybody else over with him.'
'How do we get Vicky?' Isaac said.
'McDonald's down for the count, and I don't see any guards. I guess McDonald didn't want any witnesses.'
'Then we go for it?' Starlene asked.
'What about it, Dipes? What kind of future are you seeing?'
'I see four,' Dipes said.
'Four. Choices, choices. Do any of them have happy endings?'
In the silence, they heard Freeman's dad shouting at the ghosts.
'What about it, Dipes?' Freeman asked.
'I think we better leave now. I don't see the future where we leave, but it's got to be better than the ones I do see.'
Freeman watched as a shape appeared on the basement wall beyond the bright metal of the holding tanks. The shape flickered like a magic lantern, grew nebulous flesh, peered blindly at Dad and Kracowski and the machinery and the other ghosts.
Then the Miracle Woman came up from her cold and faraway land, drifted from the stones where she slept, stepped into the dim and restless reality that Freeman had never before so strongly doubted.
At that moment, Freeman understood the real world was nothing more than the collective nightmares of the sleeping dead.
FORTY-FOUR
Francis Bondurant sat on the cot in Thirteen, staring at his reflection in the two-way mirror. What had these kids seen, lying here blasted by Dr. Kracowski's forbidden fields? Had they come face-to-face with the Devil himself? The way they shook and whined and gurgled Bondurant wouldn't be surprised. After all, the troubled little sinners deserved that sort of punishment.
He fumbled with the restraint straps and the cold buckles. Then he picked up the wires ending in the padded electrodes that Randy and Paula stuck to the kids' heads. Kracowski's torture was complex, his tools of inflicted salvation full of arcane symbols and machines and invisible waves. But wasn't science the realm of Satan? Didn't lust for knowledge cause that first bite into Eden's apple?
Bondurant looked at his own image again, at the man staring back at him. That was a righteous man, a true servant of God. If his flask weren't empty, Bondurant would have toasted the man. The world needed more like him. Fair, stern, and charitable, but if the Lord so willed he knew how to deliver a Joshuan trumpet blast.
As he watched, the face shifted the image rippling against the glass as if the mirror were under moving water. The eyes staring back at him became dark and hollow, his thin red cheeks swelling into wrinkled puffs of gray flesh. The image finished its transition and Bondurant found himself looking at the old man from the lake, the worn and weathered creature who had long ago left his skin and bones behind. The man's cracked lips moved, and though no sound came from his mouth, Bondurant heard his words.
'Instrument of the Devil, eh? Isn't that a little bit melodramatic, Francis?'
Bondurant started to speak, then found he didn't have to, at least not aloud. For the man knew what he was about to say before the thought reached Bondurant's tongue. 'How do you know my name?'
'Your office used to be my office.'
'Y-you don't belong here.'
The man's silent laughter crept through Bondurant's forehead. 'I belong here more than you do, Francis. I was at Wendover before it was Wendover. I was head of the ward.'
'You drowned in the lake.'
'You can't very well drown when you're already dead.'
Bondurant's chest grew cold. 'Are you… Satan?'
'Not quite.' Again the inaudible laugh came, a soft sound that held as much sorrow as joy. 'Though some of my patients thought so. Then again, other patients thought I was God.'
'Our blessed Father in Heaven.'
'Yeah, Kingdom Come and all that. Well, Francis, take it from one who's been there, it's all a crock of shit.'
Bondurant shook his head.
The wisps of the old man's features faded a little, then sewed themselves more solidly together on the mirror's surface. 'If there was a God, then I would have looked Him in the eye when I died. Because there's one thing I've always wanted to ask Him. And I'll bet you've wondered the same thing. You know what that is?'
'No,' Bondurant thought, staring at the floor. He couldn't endure the black nothingness of the old man's eyes anymore.
'I'd ask him, 'Why do bad tilings happen to innocent people?''
Bondurant thought of the children who'd been entrusted to his care, the abused, the orphaned, the lame, the unrepentant. He'd allowed the children to talk about then-problems, submitted them to group therapy and individual counseling, let them speak their worries in confidential rooms. The sorry little sinners should have spilled their guts on their knees in Wendover's chapel instead. Just them and the Lord, heart to heart. The wicked would burn and those who saw the light would be saved. That was the way of God's Earth, and all else was smoke.
The old man's image shimmered again, drifted from the surface of the mirror and became whole. He stood in his dirty gown and bare feet like a wandering monk. A beggar. Or was this man sent by God Himself to deliver a message to Bondurant?
The room was quiet except for the faint hum of the machinery beneath the floor. Kracowski was playing games in the basement, him and McDonald and that new one, Dr. Mills. Wendover had been given over to dark forces. Bondurant's only hope now was for personal salvation. All the rest was lost.
The old man shuffled over to Bondurant, his feet making no sound. With each step he became more solid, until Bondurant could smell the soiled gown and the toothless breath. He put an icy hand on Bondurant's chest and gently pushed him back onto the cot.
'Rest, Mr. Bondurant.'
Bondurant wanted to struggle, to jump up and run screaming from the room, but the hand was insistent. Was
