The Omega Point by Whitley Strieber
She resumed playing.
“Linda, we need to stop now.” Slowly, carefully, he moved closer, until he was standing directly beside her. “Linda, we need to stop.”
She played on.
There was another of the terrific flashes. In the second or so that it filled the darkness, Linda Fairbrother seemed to turn into something else, a complicated creature full of flaring colors—her god, or, as we call it now, her subconscious. And then the light was gone and all he could see were two red dots. But the music never stopped. She didn’t miss a single note.
Unlike him, she had not startled. So she was expecting the flash, she must be.
“Linda, what was that?”
He put his hand on her hand, dropping the music into discord.
She stopped, and in the silence, he heard something unexpected—a hissing noise that had been covered by the sound of the music . . . which, he thought, was meant to have been covered by it.
It came from the art room.
“Linda,” he said, “what is that?”
She sat staring into the dark, silent.
“Linda, I need you to step out of here because that sounds like a major gas leak, and I’ve got to—”
Another flash, and again he was looking at the fluttering, dangerous, wonderful deity of music.
Whatever was happening in the art room had to be dealt with. He went to the wall phone and snatched it up, only to find that there was no dial tone. Wonderful.
He called back to Linda, “You can play, go ahead and play.” He didn’t need this one to be wandering right now. But the music did not start again and he had to prioritize. Clearly, the possible danger to the whole structure took precedence, and he pushed his way into the art room.
At once, his eye was drawn to the kiln, out of which there glared an unearthly blue light. Here, the hissing sound was a roar. There were figures clustered around the furnace—it was no kiln, that could not have been more obvious. They were wearing welder’s masks.
“Excuse me!”
As if in a nightmare, nobody seemed to hear him. He went right up to them, but here the light was so intense that he had to shield his eyes.
“This has to stop!”
He saw a big square tray from the kitchen’s baking department. On it was a measure of white powder, and two of the concealed figures were carefully pouring it into tiny jars, mixing it with a liquid. Others took trays of the jars toward the kitchen.
A yellow flash so bright that he was ready to believe he’d been blinded forever this time came out of the furnace. In it, though, he saw something completely unexpected, not glowering Aztec gods but a beautiful field, a green and smiling land, incredibly detailed. It was there for only a second, but it was as if he was actually in this field.
Then it was over—and there was a smattering of applause. Applause! And still they were acting as if he wasn’t there at all.
An instant later, he saw the face of Caroline Light three inches from his own, the eyes tight with anger, but also—what was it? Humor? The kindness, he thought, and the danger of the gods.
Then the room was filled with clouds, beautiful, soaring clouds just becoming visible in the light of the predawn. Clouds . . . he was looking up at clouds.
Dear heaven, he was in bed! He was in bed and those were the clouds of his ceiling, one of the many trompe l’oeils in the mansion.
As if the mattress was on fire, he jumped out and onto the floor. But nothing was on fire. He was simply alone in bed at dawn, that was all.
But no, that couldn’t be. It could not be. That had not been a dream, nobody dreamed that elaborately, it wasn’t possible.
He was still in his jeans, anyway, so he went back downstairs.
There was nobody at the piano and the kiln was dark. But, God, how disorienting. What had happened to the time?
Exactly.
Whatever they had been doing with the kiln had affected not just the brain, inducing hallucinations, it had, he thought, done something to space-time itself. Warped it, twisted it, sent him racing across the hours from three o’clock until dawn in just seconds.
He went to it, opened it, and thrust his hand into the firing chamber. A faint warmth was all he felt, exactly as if it hadn’t been fired since yesterday.
But he had seen Caroline Light in here, and Linda Fairbrother had been in the other room playing music to cover the sound of the superintense fire.
They’d made some sort of powder, he had seen it. And they had also been fools, because everybody in the place must have noticed the flashes, except for the staff in the four bedrooms on the far side of the building, and maybe them, too. Maybe Katie had lied.
What a hell of a situation. What was real? Who could be trusted?
Those people could. That had been the class, and Caroline had been there. They could be trusted. But who were they?
She must be waking them up. Of course she was, they’d been taught to use the glyphs and she was doing it.
Not all of them, though, and not the ones likely to be needed the most, they were still trapped in their various insanities.
It was while they were making that powder that space-time had gotten all twisted. So the opposition was going to try to take it. Therefore, bloodshed was coming.
He took the stairs leading to the second floor of the patient wing, running up, then through the door and down the hall to the central nurses’ station.
“Nurse!”
Nurse Fleigler came up from behind her small, electronically dense station.
“Doctor?”
Behind her was a bank of screens. Cameras covered each room from two directions. A computer continuously analyzed sounds, and immediately warned her if there were any screams, breaking glass, thuds, any sound suggesting violence. It also warned her when a room became too quiet.
“You’re up early, Doctor.”
“What kind of a night?”
“We had a security check. Some lightning flashes. Aside from that, it’s been quiet.”
David noticed movement in Mack Graham’s room.
“What’s four doing?”
It was perfectly obvious that the man was engaged in sexual self-stimulation.
“This is the third time tonight. He claims that he’s entertaining me.”
“He’s been in there all night?”
“Absolutely.”
“Have any confinement patients been recorded outside of their rooms tonight?”
She shook her head. “What’s the matter, Doctor?”
Could those have all been staff members? But no, he’d seen Caroline—or had he?
“How’s Caroline?”
“I’ve got a good sleep signal. Normal breathing pattern. REM sleep.”
“But she was agitated earlier, after Claire left her?”
Fleigler nodded, her plain, broad face registering sadness and, perhaps, a degree of accusation.
“The poor woman—she did not like that locked door.”
“I want to see her tape, if you don’t mind. Just roll it back to, say, three, and play it for me.”
The screen flickered, then flashed, and he saw what at first appeared to be a static image, but the status readouts confirmed stage four sleep, heart rate fifty-seven, breathing regular.
There was a flicker on the screen. “What was that?”
“What?”
“Roll it back.”
She did so. The flicker repeated.
“Run it slow.”
He watched Caroline sleep. Were the flickers caused by the flashes from the art room, or were they edits that concealed Caroline’s comings and goings?
“So everything’s been quiet? Definitely?”
“Quiet, Doctor.” She looked up at him, her brows raised in a suggestion of question.
On his way back to his suite, he came face-to-face with the fact that mystery was piling on mystery, and he was drowning.
Using the fingerprint reader on his door, he entered his suite. He retur
He tried the Internet, but it was useless. Finally, he called security.
“How many of those flashes did you record?” he asked.
“Two sets of two each.”
It was still over an hour to breakfast, and he was profoundly exhausted. He threw off his jeans and T-shirt and returned to bed. It was so very strange to draw these gorgeous silk sheets up around himself in the context of the world as it was. There was jeopardy all around him, but the bed was here, the sheets were soft, and the mattress even somewhat tolerable. He closed his eyes and began to drift . . . and found himself having to will his mind away from the image of the woman running in the night, and thoughts of Caroline Light.
He redirected his longing toward Katie Starnes. Her dark Gaelic eyes and cream-white skin were well worth a few moments of presleep contemplation. He shouldn’t have been such a damn fool when she’d offered herself. He needed to fix that.
He wondered what Katie actually knew about this place. She hadn’t been in the class.
It was as this thought was forming in his mind that he slipped through the invisible door into sleep. His breathing became more steady, his shoulders relaxed, his lips parted slightly. After a moment, his body turned onto its right side, entering its preferred sleep position.
The dreams were immediate and once again he was facing the kiln, watching it flare with that amazing light. Then the broad clearing once again spread out before him. There was thick grass. A distance away was a tall oak, its leaves spring-fresh. Beside it was a thickly blossomed apple tree. In fact, the scene looked very much like the clinic’s grounds, but in far, far better days. Caroline Light was there, standing near the trees. She gestured to him, smiled and gestured again.
He thought that this sight of this woman in this place was the most beautiful and compelling thing he had ever seen.
Then there was a crash, followed by a long, retreating rumble, and he was again in bed. More crashing thunder and, coming with it, more flashes, but ordinary lightning this time.
He opened his eyes. Seven ten by the clock. More than an hour had passed in a sleep that seemed to last only a few seconds. Outside, thunder roared and bellowed, and lightning flashed.
The first thing on his agenda this morning was yet another staff meeting, more bad news about supplies and infrastructure, he supposed.
He thought that he needed to understand more about that powder. He needed to gain the confidence of the makers.
He should damn well remember it from the class but he didn’t . . . or did he?
Gold? Was it connected with gold?
Rain struck the tall window behind him, crashing torrents of it, and the great house groaned from the pressure of the wind, and the eaves mourned.
Exhausted, confused, and deeply, deeply afraid, David prepared to meet his day.
8
EXTRAORDINARY MINDS
Nurse Beverly Cross and Dr. Marian Hunt came in at the same time, taking seats in the huge office. As David greeted them, he came around from behind his desk. The office enforced the formality of another age.
Nurse Cross gave him a weak smile. She looked exhausted, her eyes hollow.
“You lit us up,” she said.
“Sorry about that. I thought I saw a patient in the grounds.”
“We have trouble after a light-up. The patients need support.”
Bill Osterman, the chief engineer, arrived.
“We have a supply problem,” he said as he came in. “Critical low oil and there’s nothing in our pipeline.”
“Okay, Bill, is there any other supplier we can try?”
“We need to start thinking in terms of a shutdown, to be frank.”
“How long do we have left?”
“On full use, four days.”
Nobody mentioned the flashes or the activity in the rec area, and he felt that the omission must be intentional.
“All right,” he said, “the first thing to do is reduce air-conditioning use. Drop it back to the sleeping areas at night only. The rest of the time, it’s off. How much more time does that give us?”
“Another forty-eight hours, maybe. So say a week.”
It seemed a great gulf of time, a week, but that, he knew, was just an illusion. What would he do when the generator shut down for good? How would they run the well? And how did you manage a building full of crazy people at night without the use of lights, let alone monitoring equipment?
“I want max possible power down, then. No air at all except in confined spaces where we can’t do without. No lights except emergency lighting and as needed for patient control.”
Bill nodded. David didn’t ask him how much longer this regime would give them. He’d do that later, in private.
Ray Weller arrived announcing that he would be reducing portions and simplifying meals until he could get more reliable deliveries.
“Supply fell out of bed,” he said, “everybody just stopped coming and communications are so bad, I can’t even tell you why.”
On food, they had five days.
With the nurses, handlers, counselors, and other personnel, there were now twenty-one people in the office.
“All right,” David said, “obviously we’re in serious trouble. Can we send any patients home?” He turned to Glen MacNamara. “I assume we shouldn’t even try.”
“From what we can tell, it’s a probable death sentence. I asked that new intake. She said she was lucky to be alive. She’s worried about her chauffeur, not to mention her father back in Virginia. Terribly worried.”
He remembered Charles Light as young and vibrant, bursting with sheer joy because of the value of what he was teaching. What charisma, and what a man to have for a father. She must be beside herself.
David decided to try to deal with the unspoken issue in the most straightforward manner that he could.
“Let me be frank. I observed people in the art room last night doing something with the kiln that was producing extraordinary flashes of light. I couldn’t tell who it was, they were wearing welder’s masks. But I think more than one person in this room knows what I’m talking about, and I’d like an explanation.”
Marian Hunt said, “What I find interesting was that you were down there at all.”
“This place is my responsibility, Marian. And I think that the new intake, Caroline, was out of her quarters at some point last night.”
“She was confined,” Marian said, “on your orders.”
“And your tone says that she shouldn’t have been.”
“She showed no signs of violence.”
“She was distraught. She needed to be controlled. Supported.” Also protected, but he certainly did not intend to add that.
He could see the color rising in Marian’s face. She was looking at it entirely from a professional point of view, from which standpoint he’d obviously made a misjudgment.
“I was with her for a time. Claire and I spelled each other. Doctor, to be frank with you, it’s not appropriate to bring procedures you learned at a public facility into this environment.”
“Doctor, if you don’t mind, I’d like to continue this outside of staff.”
She nodded. He continued playing his role.
“Mr. Osterman, I need you to deal with that kiln. I want it moved out of the art room.” Actually, he was terribly excited by what had been done. Even if he was still only peripherally in the picture, progress was being made and that was the first hopeful thing he had known since he’d realized the true import of what was happening.
Claire, who had been shaking her head, now burst out, “That’s a therapeutic tool! I want an explanation!”
“It’s being used in an unauthorized manner by unknown parties in the dead of the night, which is a damn good explanation, in my opinion.”
She gave him what he interprete
“Leave the kiln,” he finally said. He was no actor, and the whole process involved made him uncomfortable. But he had no choice, obviously, not until more was known.
It was time to shift subjects, and he turned his attention to Katie.
“Is there any word from Maryland Medical Supply?”
“They’re expecting to ship day after tomorrow. But even if the shipment gets through, we can expect massive shortfalls and no-ships on most drugs.”
“So, basically, we’re in a tailspin. We’re going to have to cut to the bone. As far as our therapeutic service is concerned, it looks like we’re headed back to about the mid-fifties, before there were even any tranquilizers.” He looked to Glen. “Given that we’re leaving the kiln as is, I want the recreation area patrolled regularly at night, but if you find anything unusual, don’t intervene. Call me.”
Glen’s eyes told him that he understood. The workers at the kiln would be carefully guarded.
“And nurses, if you have patients missing from any confined setting at any time, I am to be informed personally and at once. Is that clear?”
Nobody spoke. Finally, Claire said, “Well, I think we have our marching orders.”
As far as they were concerned, he’d gone too far. Never challenge a nurse’s professionalism, not if you expect peace in your hospital. He tried a little diplomacy.
“Obviously, circumstances are presently working against us, so I want us all to stay as focused as we can on our mission, which is to keep this institution running, which means working together as best we can. But, if I am going to manage this place, I am asking you, please, to cooperate with me. We have a terribly hard time ahead, and we also have this security issue, given what happened to Mrs. Denman.”
“Here,” Katie asked, genuine surprise in her voice, “a security issue in the clinic?”
“With the town,” he explained hastily.
“Well,” Katie said, “I don’t know about the rest of you, but I’m doing my best.”
“We all are, and we’re certainly willing to carry out your policies,” Marian Hunt added.
“And the kiln is just a kiln,” Osterman muttered.