The Reach

the wooden trim as black as blood.

She pauses to listen. Monsters are chasing her, and she does not know which way they have gone. Paranoia creeps like stealthy dark figures into her mind. She feels them around every corner, watching her from every door frame. She hears them running after her. But she is searching for something, and she cannot leave until she finds it.

Jess hears her mother's drunken voice echoing through the empty stone corridors; crashing into things, knocking over a lamp that shatters all over the floor, laughing and shouting. Glass tinkles and crunches. Others hissing at her to be quiet. A door opens somewhere close by. The sound of voices becomes very loud. Jess presses herself into a shadowed doorway, listening in a near panic as the footsteps become louder. She has nowhere to go. If they find her they will rake her away and lock her up.

She reaches behind her and turns the knob, stumbling into an open room. White carpet shows bloody footprints leading across a sea of broken and dissected toys, past a toy sink and through a plastic tunnel. Something seems to catch in her throat. What has she been looking for?

She hears a noise over by the bookcase. A little boy stands with his back to her, his blond hair curling over his collar. Both arms are raised and she sees the blood running down his wrists and dripping onto the carpet.

Michael? she says. Her brother turns. Blood pulses from holes in both palms. The look on his face is one of sadness. She sees her mother in him. But something is missing. She does not see any trace of the autism that has plagued him from the moment he was born.

Then the look changes. Suddenly she is afraid. Michael frowns, little furrowed brows coming together in a pantomime of adult emotion. He raises his hands higher. The door swings shut behind her with a bang. Papers pick themselves up off the carpet and whirl through the air. Michael's shoulders shake, his eyes roll backward into his head.

The plastic tunnel shivers, rocks, lifts into the air. Books slam against the walls and flop like broken birds. Glass shatters in the window with a crack like a lightning storm.

Toys batter her face as a wind picks up and whips through the room. Glass shards flash like little silver arrows in the sun. Fists pound at the door, voices shout her name. She looks at her brother and sees the light of revenge in his eyes. She realizes too late, she hasn't been running away from them, after all. She has been running away from him.

***

Miles away, a little girl opens her eyes to inky darkness. Her throat is tight, her limbs slick with sweat. The dream remains with her, of a woman, and a little blond boy, and blood. Lots of blood.

She tries to turn over, but her wrists and ankles are strapped down.

Voices come to her like ghosts now, murmurs in an alien tongue. It is difficult to separate them from the things that happen inside her mind, these other voices that come and go and bring the dreaded gray fog. She isn't sure right now whether any of them are real, or whether she is truly lost inside herself.

The gray fog is a method of control, a weapon in battle, maybe the only one they have.

She used to think about what might happen if someone came for her. She has only the faintest memories of a woman who might or might not have been her mother. Would this person care for her, would she take her away and soothe the voices, take away the pain? Would someone please, please help?

She knows the woman in the dream she has just had, knows her face. But the truth is frustratingly out of reach. She was here recently. What has happened? Please, remember.

But it does not come. There is only the dream, the terrible, bloody dream.

Her head pulses slowly, throbbing with the pain of a thousand pinpricks. She is lost, and alone, and too weak to move. She lets out a single, choked sob, and lets the gray fog swallow her whole once again.

She keeps her heart jealously guarded, and does not let it beat too loudly for fear that they will hear it.

--22--

Jess awoke into darkness close and cool, got up, and shuffled into the kitchen, hugging herself in the soft tick and hiss of early morning heat as the radiators sputtered to life.

Okay, so suppose Patrick is right. Suppose for one moment that they 're not all off their rockers, that there actually is a portion (where? how?) of the human brain that is capable of exerting an effect on the outside physical world, simply by a particular sequence of thought.

The question then became: where to go from here?

Of course, Patrick wanted to see this miracle child right away. He was already mapping out a plan to test her, record the results, contact the people in Carolina and elsewhere. But it would not be that easy; there was Wasserman to contend with, for one. And it was important to consider what was best for Sarah.

There was also the question of how far this talent could reach. There was still a big difference between levitating parlor tricks and the ability to bring the very walls down around their heads. A rain of stones. Or something larger. A little girl with a mind like that could be very valuable to the wrong people.

Jess sat clutching a cup of tea at her kitchen table, while Otto rubbed his fluffy tail against her bare legs. Outside the window it was still dark, though it must be approaching dawn; she had not heard the trains running for a while now, and the traffic was almost nonexistent. Soon it would pick up as people resumed their daily lives, rushing into work so they could hurry up and go home again.

As she sat there in the empty kitchen, the silence hit her like a backhanded slap. For some reason she thought of Patrick's face, and she stood up and went to the sink. Not good to think about him now. She needed to focus.

When she used to wake up like this as a child she would sneak out onto the front steps, hug her knees to her chest, and look at the stars. The stars were always larger and brighter in the country. If she tried very hard, she could find the answers there. The night sky gave her perspective. She would feel impossibly small in a universe of endless planets. Somewhere up among the stars, she felt sure, someone was looking back at her.

At the window now, she leaned over and craned her neck to see if she could see the sky. She felt a moment of numb heat in her palm, before something bit down hard.

She yelped and yanked her hand away from the still-hot coil on the stove, then pressed her palm to her mouth. Already the skin was throbbing. Damn it. Unreasoning anger welled up inside, the product of too much stress and lack of sleep, and as she turned to run her hand under cold water from the tap, her half-full mug of tea slid off the kitchen table and shattered on the floor.

She stood for a few moments in disbelief. Brown liquid had spattered across the linoleum, up the front of the refrigerator and cabinets.

Someone pounded on the floor from the apartment below and shouted at her. She swore to herself and went about cleaning up the pieces of ceramic, being careful not to cut herself on the sharp edges. Otto padded over and licked at the tea with a pink tongue. She grabbed a wet sponge from the sink and wiped all the surfaces down before he made himself sick on milk and sugar.

When she had finished cleaning up the mess, she soothed her burn with an ice cube from the freezer. By then the sky had lightened with the coming dawn.

The day was not off to a very good start. First the dream, then this. Somehow the shattered cup seemed to symbolize where her life had gone. And she still had to come to some sort of decision about Sarah. What was she going to do?

Just because you don't understand something doesn't mean it isn't there. How do you think Isaac Newton felt? Or Ben Franklin?

Okay. All right. But we're losing track of what's important here. Inside this hypothetical situation was a very real little girl. A girl who was confused and alone and very probably scared to death. No matter what happened, Jess would not allow a witch hunt. That was far too dangerous.

Perhaps Shelley could help. Jess looked at the clock by her bed. After four; she considered calling anyway. Instead, she dialed Charlie's number. She was surprised when Charlie seemed to be expecting her. She did not even mention the hour.

'Patrick's a good boy,' Charlie said. 'He may be a little intense, but he's honest.'

'I know, Charlie, but do you trust him?'

'Absolutely. Listen, you trust yourself, girl. Then let the rest come.'