A Charmed Place (11 page)

She found the bag next to the microwave. Scooping it up in a swoop onto her shoulder, she said as gaily as she could, "I guess you're right; it is a bit of a madhouse around here. My brother's arriving tonight with his family and I've got shopping to do. Please don't think I'm rude—"

"Not rude," he said, stepping between her and the door. "Afraid."

"Don't be asinine," she said flatly. Her cheeks burned from the dead-on accusation.

"You can't expect this to be the end of it, Maddie," he said in that urgently persuasive voice of his. Once it had rallied a band of idealists into doing wildly destructive things; she couldn't forget that.

"This
is
the end of it, Dan."

"I didn't come here just to pay my respects," he said, spitting out the word. "I came here to—"

"To what?" she cried. "To thrash it out, once and for all? Because
you
decided the time is right? You want me to drop everything—drop my life—and listen to what you in your accumulated wisdom have to say?" She let out a harsh and bitter laugh. "I don't think so."

It shocked her, the depth of her anger. She tried to brush past him through the wide door, but he grabbed her arm to hold her back. The act infuriated her; she yanked herself from his grip and jumped away, like a cat, and then lashed out at him.

"You want my forgiveness? Fine! All is forgiven. My father's dead now; the chapter's closed. There. Feel better? Were you haunted by the memory of what you did to him? Did you need my forgiveness to make your glorious life complete?"

Her voice dropped to a menacing whisper as she said, "Oh, yes, I—we—forgive you. But if you want me to forget, then
you
can forget it, Daniel. It's not going to happen. Good-bye. Lock the door on your way out. There are crazy people out there."

Shaking with emotion, she forced herself to walk deliberately to her car. Without once looking at him, she backed the Taurus out of the drive, sending quahog shells flying in every direction.

That night, he dreamed about her.

He dreamed that she was naked, and he had her in his arms. He was kissing her passionately
,
willing her to love him. But she was resisting; she kept telling him, "Don't you get it? It's over. It's over." At last she broke away, and she ran for the door. But he was faster than she was, and stronger. He slammed the door closed and locked it with a key that wasn't a key, but a rawhide dogbone. He could see outrage in her face as he turned and began to walk steadily toward her. She began to back away from him, not so much in fear as with revulsion. That infuriated him—and it turned him on.

He grabbed her and threw her across the bed, only it wasn't a bed, it was the top of the lighthouse tower, and as he plunged himself into her, the water around them kept rising. Only he didn't care; he kept driving himself into her, because he was convinced he could make her love him. And when the water level rose above her face she stopped crying, and he took that to mean she loved him. But the water kept rising; he could feel his mouth and nose go under, and he could feel the water filling his ears....

He called out, and his own voice woke him from the nightmare. He sat up in bed, convinced he was sitting on top of the light tower, and looked around in the hushed light of dawn. No, he was in his apar
tment, all right: the same two-
bedroom flat, carved from a once-elegant rowhouse in
Boston
's
Back Bay
, that he'd lived in since Maddie threw him out four years ago.

The bedroom was a mess. His dirty clothes, weeks of them, were everywhere—draped over the chair, the bedposts, the closet doorknob. A red tie
peeked out from one of the bedpillows
. (When had he last worn a tie? He couldn't remember.) The blinds, broken on both windows, hung in the same cockeyed disarray that had recently prompted a neighbor to leave a note in his mailbox offering to buy him new ones.

Canvases on stretchers, some of them blank and the rest of them failures, were stacked up against the wall opposite his bed, flaunting his collapse as an artist. Once upon a time his canvases had served him well. "Come and see my paintings," he'd suggest to an aspiring student, and into the bedroom she'd stroll. But these were a joke. He'd die before he'd show them to anyone.

He rubbed his temples. The headache was back and he was due at the lab. He was convinced that his headaches were psychosomatic nowadays; whenever he knew he was going to be tested, he felt one coming on. Still, he was also convinced that he could make it go away. It was just a question of mind over matter, and he knew that his mind was more powerful than most.

That's what they're paying me for, he told himself grimly as he threw back the covers.

He went through his morning routine, unable to shake the sickening sensation that he'd just raped his ex-wife. When he wiped away the steam on the bathroom mirror, the haggard face that stared back at him looked guilty. After breakfast, when he caught a glimpse of himself in the hall mirror: guilty. In the rearview mirror of his beloved BMW: guilty. Even in the glass doors of the Brookline Institute of Research and Parapsychology, the face that looked back at him as he grabbed the door handle said
guilty
.

"Good morning, Mr. Regan; hot enough for you?" asked the department secretary as she nudged the visitors' book toward him.

He had no idea whether it was hot or not. He glanced back through the glass doors out at the parking lot across the street. The cars looked hot.

"A real scorcher," he said with an amiable smile as he signed his name.

He walked down one of several long halls, all of them painted dreary mint green and separated from beige linoleum floors by mopboards of black vinyl. The off-putting smell of disinfectant persisted as he pushed through swinging steel doors into a lab whose purpose seemed vague. There were no porcelain-topped tables, no sinks, no Bunsen burners. Nothing but four steel desks, each of them accompanied by a small cart and two chairs with plastic seats and metal legs.

An EEG machine standing next to the middle desk, a computer on the same desk, and a video camera mounted high on one wall were the only electronics in the room. Everything else was surprisingly low tech: green boards, washed clean of chalk, on the long wall; folding screens stacked in a corner; a brown metal locker that Michael knew held printer paper and other stationery supplies.

The room was windowless. Only the wall opposite the swinging steel doors had any glass, and that glass was tinted. Michael had never been on the other side of that wall, but he knew that he'd been observed during every one of his tests by someone or other—faculty; parapsychologists; government observers.

Call it intuition, he thought with grim humor.

With an upward nod of his head he greeted the lab assistant seated at one of the middle desks. "Hey, Stuart. How's it hangin'?"

The goateed grad student, scruffy in jeans and a Grateful Dead T-shirt, grinned and said, "Higher, after last night."

"Hot date, hey?"

"Cookin'."

"Good for you. Well, what's on my plate for today?" Michael asked, wanting to get it over with. The testing, once fascinating to him, had seemed numbingly repetitive in the last few weeks. The initial excitement was fading, replaced by the growing realization that success would be neither overnight nor automatic. It was a little like being in third grade again, and having to do multiplication tables over and over and over until he got them right.

And they wanted him to get it right. He had no illusions about that. Geoffrey Woodbine, Director of the Institute, had impressed upon him how important it was that he, Michael Regan, get it right. The Institute was testing half a dozen other subjects with supposed psychic powers, and of them all, he, Michael Regan, had consistently scored the highest.

He wasn't surprised to hear it. All his life, he'd been aware that he was psychic. He had never done much with the gift; the circles he moved in were too cynical for that. But in the last several years he had read a lot, and had tested himself, and had gone so far as to respond to a discreet ad placed in the
Journal of Psychic Phenomena
seeking subjects for various studies.

Call it middle age, call it the millennium—but here he was. Was he good enough for the Pentagon to keep the spigot of funds flowing? Absolutely.

"We're going to work with lights today," announced Smart, dropping Michael into an instant funk.

Lights. Lights were the least exciting of all. On. Off. On or off. On, on, off, off. That was it. Try to visualize the little red light on the panel behind the tinted windows as either glowing or dark. That's all he had to do. After the first fifty or so responses, he would find it almost impossible to keep his attention keyed up to the level necessary for testing his psychic powers. Had the great seers in history squandered their gifts divining about lit and unlit candles?

I think not, Michael decided, allowing only a lift of an eyebrow to express his boredom and displeasure.

Nonetheless, he let himself be hooked up to the EEG electrodes that would read his bodily functions while he tried to identify the status of the little red light on that panel behind the glass.

"We're going to do it a little differently today," Stuart said as he taped the last electrode to Michael's forehead. "The light will be triggered by random number generating software rather than manually by another research assistant."

"Whose idea was that?" Michael asked, surprised.

"The government's. They want to tighten our methodology. Dumb shits. What do they know about methodology?"

"I take it they're not here today?" Michael said with a gingerly, wired-in nod toward the tinted glass. Stuart wouldn't be so candid if they were monitoring his remarks.

"They'll be here, don't worry," the graduate student said.

Michael frowned. Why change the game plan now? If the Pentagon were satisfied with the progress of the project so far, they wouldn't be tinkering with the setup. It could mean only one of two things: either they thought the results were
too
impressive and were trying to break him, or they were wildly enthusiastic and were trying to hurry the project along.

Either way, he wasn't worried. He had what it took.

Stuart placed the counting device on a low table to Michael's left, asked if he was comfortable, and then walked over to the door of the windowed wall, opening it to murmur something to someone in the viewing enclosure. After that he came back and locked the door from the lab into the hall, took a seat at the desk, and with one eye on the wall clock, said to Michael, "Two minutes."

They sat in silence with Michael centering his thoughts during the countdown. He closed his eyes and kept them closed. He pictured the red light on the panel, pictured a small red glow. He pictured the small red glow, then the glow being extinguished. He felt his heartbeat slow and his mind begin to enter a zone barren of any other image but the red light on the panel. His breathing slowed and his mouth fell a little open, to draw in air more easily. He became utterly relaxed, as if he were floating in a warm, dark place. From a great distance he heard Stuart's voice, soft, feminine, almost erotic, say softly, "Begin."

His mind stayed blank, a dark and formless place. For a long while it stayed that way, and then
... a small red glow. He saw it. He could
hear
the color red, broadcasting in the dark cavern of his mind. He pressed the counter, and when the dull red light faded to black, he drifted back into darkness.

And waited.

****

An hour later, Michael Regan, free of electrodes and free to go, stood up on shaky legs. Stuart said something to him, but Michael had no idea what. He was, as usual, entirely disoriented and more than a little afraid. He had been to a place where no man was, and the profound and deadly isolation had unnerved him. Alone, so completely alone
... he couldn't bear to be alone like that again. He would not submit to testing again.

"Hey!" he heard Stuart yell.

Dazed, Michael turned around in the hall and came back into the lab.

"Didn't you hear me?" the grad student asked. "Dr. Woodbine wants to see y
ou in his office—which is that-
away," he added, hooking his thumb down the hall.

"I know the way," Michael mumbled. He reversed direction and started off toward the office, trying hard to shake off the oppression he felt. It
took
a few minutes, he reminded himself. But the oppression seemed deeper, the recovery longer, every time he was tested.

The Director's office was a soothing oasis of books, plants, and mahogany in an otherwise sterile environment. Velvet moss green drapes with nothing to do but look good hung alongside lowered wood blinds that were themselves doing a fine job of blocking the summer sun. A dark hued Persian rug, undoubtedly of value, added one more layer of dignity to a room that was already intimidating, giving it the look and feel of a psychiatrist's office in a venerable building in downtown
Boston
. The room commanded respect and demanded confidences. Michael distrusted it.