The Omega Point by Whitley Strieber
“Are these gates new?”
“They’re original to the estate.”
As they opened and he saw the great house standing off across the rolling, exquisitely kept lawns, he was struck as if through the heart with the most poignant déjà vu.
“You’re as white as a sheet, Doctor.” She put the back of a long, spiderlike hand to his forehead. “No fever, at least, young man. Memory can bring fever.”
“Stop the car.”
“Ignore him, Andy.”
“Stop the car! I’m not taking this job. No matter what, I’m going back to New York.”
The car didn’t even slow down, and as they approached the great redbrick house with its wide colonnade and broad terraces, the sense of déjà vu, rather than fading, became more acute.
“You feel it, don’t you?”
“I feel very strange and I do not want to go ahead with this. I don’t know what’s going on here.”
She laid a hand on his wrist. “Just relax and let yourself feel it. Memory will return.” She leaned back and gave him a smile as broad as a child’s. “You’ll thank me, young man, when you do remember.”
“Just tell me, for God’s sake!”
“You have to make the connections yourself or they’ll have no meaning. No emotional resonance. You need to find your commitment to your mission in your own heart. I cannot do it for you.”
“But you know.”
“I know that the class existed but not what you were taught in it. And I also know that you just this moment remembered being here. It’s written on your face.”
They pulled up before the portico. David opened the door of the car, which was so heavy that it felt like pushing open a safe.
Walking toward the great house, he found himself profoundly drawn to the sense of order and permanence that pertained everywhere. The docile clicking of the lawn sprinklers, the early green of the trees, the grand apple tree just by the south wall in full bloom—it all spoke of a world that elsewhere had already slipped into the past, replaced by the sense of the posthumous that was coming to define modern life.
But it was also part of his past. His own personal past belonged in some way to this place.
Aubrey Denman opened the front door using a fingerprint detector. He’d half expected the great door to be swept open by some sort of butler. Instead, an armed security man in a blazer and tie greeted them. Obviously, his orders were to wait until the fingerprint reader had released the lock.
“Where are the—” David’s voice died. He had been about to ask where the patients and staff were, but the splendor of the room he had just entered silenced him. He found himself looking across a wide hall with a magnificent inlaid floor depicting a hunt in full cry. It was marquetry, and yet not too fragile for a floor.
And, incredibly, he remembered: You slid across this floor in your socks.
The leaping horses and racing dogs in the floor led the eye to a grand staircase that swept upward as if to heaven itself, drawing the eye further, this time to a phenomenal trompe l’oeil ceiling that imparted an unforgettable illusion of a vast summer sky.
You lay on the landing and imagined yourself among the birds.
“Where are my patients?”
“The patients are in the patient wing. Study the records first, Doctor, please. Then meet them.”
“Will they know me? Are they also in amnesia?”
“They’re in a state of induced psychosis.”
He stopped. “What did you just say?”
“For security reasons, this place appears to be a clinic for the mentally ill. Most members of the class are here as patients, their real selves hidden beneath a combination of amnesia and artificial psychosis. Members of the class who are on staff have only the amnesia, and one or two of them, who will guide the others, retain clear memory.”
He turned to her, and on her. “This is totally unacceptable. Who did such a thing to these people? I can’t be a party to it.”
“You can be a party to waking them up, then, and ending the need.”
“This is all insane, the whole thing. Who would ever induce mental illness to conceal somebody’s—what, their knowledge, their identity? Why was it done?”
“The enemies of our mission are incredibly ruthless and they’re going to get more so. If they found the class, they’d kill every single one of them. And you, David, make no mistake. But beforehand they would tear your mind to pieces with drugs and torture beyond anything you can imagine. And in the end, they would obtain your knowledge, amnesia or not.”
Never in his life had he struck another human being, but he was tempted to now, as he found himself coping with a disturbing impulse to shake the truth out of this old lady.
“Who are these enemies?”
“Presidents, kings, the rich and the famous, not to mention the members of the Seven Families who control the wealth of this planet.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“The more you remember, the more you’ll understand. Come with me. My time is short, and I need to show you your office.” She touched his hand. “David, you’ll regain control of your situation and I know how badly you need control; I wrote your personality profile.”
“Wrote it? Where is it? How could you write it?”
“I’m a psychiatrist, David, just like you. I managed the mental health of the class.”
“You did this to these people!”
Her eyes sought his, and in them, brown and hazed, he saw that hunted expression again.
“How did you do it? What method did you use?”
As if in shame, she turned away from him, and he knew that whatever she had done had been traumatic for all involved, including her.
Causing amnesia was a matter of hypnosis and drugs, but to make a person psychotic must be a ferocious process.
“How can they be released from this?”
“I’ll come back, and I’ll release them.”
“When?”
“We’re working on a very exact timeline. But I can assure you that it will be done.”
“Wait a minute. What timeline? I need to know!”
“If somebody who knew that was caught, it would be an incalculable disaster.”
“Caught? Could I be caught? By whom? Who are these enemies? Are they here?” He followed her up the staircase. “Damn it, I want answers!”
She mounted the stairs with the deliberation of a heart patient, her nostrils dilating as she sucked each careful breath.
“The house itself is lived in by staff and service. The patients are in the back, in the new wing.”
“Answer my questions!”
“Time will answer your questions.”
“Too damn late!”
“At exactly the right moment. Now, please focus on this. You’ll meet your staff later, then be introduced to the patients. I want to talk to you about your colleague Marian Hunt before you meet her.”
She stopped before an imposing mahogany door.
“Are you ready?” When she smiled, that expression came again.
The office was gigantic.
“I can’t work in this. It’s ridiculous.”
“Nonsense. You ought to be grateful to be surrounded by all this beauty.”
It was the size of a ballroom, but constructed out of mahogany inlaid with many other woods. A broad bank of windows looked south, another north, and the walls were lined with shelves and shelves of books, all old, all leather bound. An immense Persian rug filled this end of the room, under an equally huge and ornate desk. At the other was a fireplace fronted by a leather couch and wing chairs. In the paneling above the door were two glyphs of Mesoamerican gods, exquisitely carved, their faces glaring and ferocious.
“Who are they?” he asked.
“What principles do they represent? I haven’t the faintest idea.”
“I thought you were an expert on Aztec crap.”
“Thank you. Each of us knows only what h
Unlike the downstairs, he had no sense of déjà vu about this room. He surveyed the library. Every shelf was filled.
“Is there room for my books?”
She pulled down a row of what turned out to be book backs, revealing some empty shelving.
“Your predecessor kept his here.”
“Ah. Is the whole library fake, then?”
“Hardly. There are some extraordinary texts here.”
She handed him a volume with a gold-embossed glyph on the spine. He opened it to magnificent color plates of glyphs, hundreds of them.
“It’s entirely in . . . what is this? Is it Mayan? Toltec?”
She looked at it. “You’ll have access to scholars.”
“Where?”
“Here. Among your class.”
His only choice, he saw, was to just roll with this. There was no question in his mind that, as a child, he’d been to this house. Certainly, he had seen the downstairs. But what this class was all about, and why the security, he could not imagine—or rather, he supposed, remember.
Or could he? There might be vague memories in the back of his mind of the names of the old gods. But it was also true that their names were everywhere these days. And yet, he recalled other children, and being happy here.
He remembered, also, that there had been an enormous security issue.
“We need to discuss Marian Hunt.”
“Yes. She’s been assistant director here for what, ten years?”
“Since it opened.”
“Then surely she was the ideal choice for director.”
“She wasn’t part of the class. But she doesn’t know that and cannot know it; so as far as she’s concerned, she’s been passed over for a mere boy.”
“If the board doesn’t have faith in her, perhaps she would’ve been better off leaving.”
“Where would she go?”
A question without an answer. Or no, it did have an answer: she would go nowhere.
“Let me show you the surveillance toys,” Mrs. Denman said. “Every patient is available to total monitoring.” She pressed her finger against a discreet fingerprint reader embedded in the bookcase beside his desk. Two more shelves of fake books slid away to reveal a very large screen populated by dozens of small video images revealing what he felt sure would turn out to be every inch of the public spaces in the facility, indoors and out.
She touched a button and new rows of images appeared.
“These are the patient social areas,” she said. She tapped one of the images, which expanded to fill the screen.
For a moment, David did not understand what he was seeing. Then he did, and he was so shocked that he must have gasped aloud, because Aubrey Denman’s bird head snapped toward him, and the expression of fear on her face was almost as appalling as the straitjacket confining the patient.
At Manhattan Central, he’d seen patients under restraint, of course, but not being kept in one of these things. If not illegal, it was certainly a spectacular medical failure.
“I can’t allow that,” he said.
There were three patients in a sunny, pleasant room. Each one had a nurse in attendance, not surprising in a facility that offered the extreme level of care found at the Acton Clinic. But one of them was in this primitive restraint.
“He’s unable to bear . . . anything. At any moment he’ll just lose himself.”
“Do you know him?”
Her eyes closed, she gave a slow nod, one that communicated a sense of the anguish that her work clearly caused her. “There has been a great deal of sacrifice here, David. Lives sacrificed—the happiness of youth, David—all for the mission.”
“Which is what?”
“David,” she said, “the future. The future!”
She took his hand—snatched it—grasping it as if it was a lifeline in a storm. And suddenly, there came a memory.
He was trying urgently to explain something to a tall man, and to emphasize his point, he had grabbed this man’s hand.
“I told him I couldn’t do it. I told him!”
“But you can, David.” She glanced at her watch. “I’m out of time.”
He would have to keep his questions and his considerable doubts to himself. But he did not agree with her optimism, not at all. How could anybody save anything, given what was coming?
Well, perhaps he had a mentor in her. She was hardly the wealthy old fool she had initially seemed.
“You’ll be back,” he said. It was not a question, and not intended to be one.
“Of course. And I’m always available on my cell.”
“I need to get to know my staff,” he said, “and the class. Who are my classmates?”
“There will be somebody coming to help you. Until they arrive, don’t breathe a word about the class, not a single word.”
“I’m sitting on top of an institution full of people who’ve been spectacularly abused and I’m not supposed to even say anything about it? I don’t think so.” He gestured toward the screen. “What about them, are they members of the class?”
“Two of them. The other is genuinely disturbed.”
“And you did this. It’s appalling.”
“David, we did what we had to. Without security this deep the class would have been found. That must not happen, David, it must not.”
“What’s so important about them? I’m sorry if I sound callous, but I really need to know why, in a world where billions are dying, a small group of people would need to be so carefully protected?”
She closed the control center. “Call a staff meeting, but I’d advise you to move carefully. After Marian, your next order of business will be to meet Katrina Starnes. Katie. She’s your assistant.”
“Isn’t it rather odd that she’s not here now?”
She gestured toward the book backs that concealed the electronic wonders. “She’s not a member of the class. She isn’t allowed access to this system or to know anything about the inner meaning of this place.”
“Which is what? I still don’t understand.”
“No, of course not.”
The moment he had experienced the déjà vu that had convinced him that he had been in this house before, he had made the decision to let this play out. These vague, amnesia-stifled memories he was experiencing were really very strange, and, if they were true, then he was potentially looking at a whole hidden life, and he had no intention of not exploring it.
“I need to know more. A lot more. Are there any records of what we studied in the class? Video? Even just a syllabus. What did we study?”
“I need to leave.”
“Oh, wonderful! Leave me with an insoluble mystery and an institution to run during the worst social collapse since the fall of the Roman Empire.”
“Your memories will come back to you.”
“And if they don’t?”
“Oh, they must! Young man, you see the stakes. They must!”
A moment later, she was heading toward the door of the office. He was appalled.
“What about Dr. Ullman? Was the fire really an accident? Am I in danger?”
For a long moment, she was silent. Then she said, “David, we don’t know. Maybe it was a fire set by resentful townies. Could be. Or it could be something worse.”
“I need to know more!”
“You have your security force and Glen MacNamara is very, very good at what he does. Start there.”
As she spoke, she hurried away across the large room.
“Wait! The fingerprint reader? How do I get programmed into it?”
“You’re already in it.”
“Nobody took my fingerprints.”
“Of course they did—in class. Your fingerprints, your DNA, we have it all.”
She neither spoke again, nor wished him well, smiled—any of it. She simply went stalking off down the hall.
Her hidden timeline was strict, clearly.
“Mrs. Denman, wait! I need help! I need my q
Her footsteps sounded on the stairs, quick, clattering away into the silence of the house.
As he heard the enormous car start up outside, he ran down the stairs, but by the time he reached the front of the building, she was already well down the driveway.
He yanked his cell phone out of his pocket and jammed her number in—and got nothing. The damn phone was deader than dead. He glanced up at the spotted, angry sun and threw it down onto the elegant brick driveway.
A moment later, there was a flash, followed at once by a sound so loud that it was like a body blow from a wrecking ball, an enormous, thundering roar.
He had never been close to a large explosion, and so did not know the effects and did not immediately understand what was happening. Then he did.
Shocked, disbelieving, he watched the smoke rising. She had been right and more than right. This place had enemies, and so did he. And he felt sure that they had just taken from him his most important ally.
From behind him, a siren began to wail. No police came, though, no fire department, no EMS. The siren was the clinic’s alert system, and it would be the only siren, because the Acton Clinic was alone. And he was alone, and they were all alone.
Not their enemies, though, hidden, aggressive, and lethally effective. Obviously, they were not alone.
2
THE ENEMY
In the disoriented silence that followed, a fireball erupted above the wall from the other side, then disappeared into the roiling pillar of black smoke. The car’s gas tank had exploded, ending any thought that its armor might somehow have protected the occupants.
Two white Jeeps came bounding down the driveway, with discreet ACTON SECURITY signs on their doors. They raced through the gate.
Finally absorbing the reality of the situation, David began running behind them. At once, though, powerful arms stopped him. He struggled but he could not escape from hands like great stones.