Izzie thought about her aunts back in New Orleans, who had worked as maids in fancy houses in Bywater and the Garden District or housekeepers in upscale hotels in the French Quarter when she was a little girl, and how they’d talked about feeling like they practically blended into the furniture and wallpaper for their employers and their guests. Unless something went missing, of course, in which case they were the first ones to be blamed.
“The ground floor of the place was pretty much exactly what I’d expected,” Jett went on. “Big auditorium, bunch of meeting rooms, a dining room. I checked out the second and third floors, too, and it was almost like a hotel or a hunting lodge or something like that, with lots of rooms for guests to stay, lounges with couches and chairs, a sauna, Jacuzzi, all sorts of rich white people stuff. But no hippie kids, and no sign of the four kids in particular I was after. The knack wasn’t giving me much, either. I was still getting that same sense of dread, of wrongness, but I wasn’t seeing anything. I knew it was close, though, but it wasn’t until I was checking out the indoor pool up on the fourth floor that I realized that the feeling was getting weaker the higher up I went. I needed to go down. Took me a while, poking around back on the first floor, but I finally found a stairway that led to a basement. At least, that’s what I thought when I started heading down, but it wasn’t any basement that I found.”
He drew one of his gnarled hands slowly down across his face, blinking slowly and taking a deep breath.
“That feeling of wrongness, it got stronger every step I took down those stairs, and it was stronger still when I walked out into what looked more like a school or training facility. There was one room where a lady was standing up in front of a big group of folks, talking about wisdom and higher knowledge and truth flowing down into their minds and souls from the higher dimensions. The same kind of guff that the Ridden kids were pushing in the streets, basically. Further down the hall there was another huge room filled with young people sitting in row after row of chairs, facing something on the far wall and chanting in unison. Had to sidle around to see what they were looking at, and then I saw that it was some kind of mandala or something like that, but it made my eyes water to look at, like it seemed to have too many angles to be just a flat image printed on a piece of poster board. All of the kids in the room were wide-eyed and staring at the thing, and I don’t think I saw a single one of them blink while I was standing there.”
“Were they Ridden?” Izzie asked. “Could you see those . . . those shadows around them?”
“Nah,” the old man answered, shaking his head. “When I tried to stop using my eyes to see them and start using the knack, there weren’t any shadows on any of them. But I could see that something weird was happening to them. It was like, looking at that thing up on the wall was changing things inside their heads, almost like it was pushing thoughts out of the way to make room for something else.”
“You could see their thoughts?” Joyce was clearly skeptical about the idea of reading minds.
“Not exactly. I mean, I’ve heard of some folks who have the knack strong enough that they can hear what folks are thinking, but I never was able to pull that off. It was more like being able to see about how many pages were in a book without opening the cover, just by looking at how thick the spine was. Things were getting rearranged in there, but I couldn’t have said just what it was, one way or the other. When I found out what was happening, a while later, I was glad that I hadn’t spent too much time looking at that mandala thing, though. But I’ll get to that in a minute.”
Izzie ran through her memories of what she had learned from Nicholas Fuller’s papers and Roberto Aguilar’s journals, trying to see if she could think of anything that would account for the important of some kind of “mandala” in all of this, but came up empty. This was a new piece of the puzzle.
“I found another stairway at the far end of the hall, leading down deeper still. As I went down the stairs, the wrongness got stronger and stronger still, and the stairs just kept going and going. When I got to the bottom and looked out the door, at first I was expecting more classrooms or whatever like the level above, but this one was more like a church or something. It was one enormous space, with high arching ceilings that had to be fifty feet above the floor, and the whole thing looked to have been carved out of the living rock of that hill. There were rows of pews set up, and some kind of ceremony going on at a dais at the far end of the room. The only light in the space came from bright fluorescents on the rear wall above the dais, and the edges of the room were in near total darkness. I hadn’t seen any janitors or custodial staff since I’d left the ground floor, so I kept to the shadows as I crept closer along the side of the room, trying to get a better
