Black Jack (23 page)

‘No news.’ The words were slow and thick, but he had her speaking.

No news channels? ‘How many channels have you got?’

She held both her hands up and carefully counted out four fingers and showed them to him.

‘I see.’ He looked around him and noticed her food tray. He touched the base of a dish. It was cold.

‘Hungry,’ she said.

And Black felt fury, white hot, at her destruction, at the men who had done it. He had to turn his face away from her so she would not see it and misconstrue it as directed at her.

‘Dakota lonely,’ she muttered suddenly.

He turned back, full of compassion. She was trying to stand up. Clumsily, unsteadily. There was something wrong with her feet. They would not obey her. He could not risk going closer. If her hand went through him she would be frightened. She gave up, fell back, and looked confused.

He looked at his watch. His time was very nearly up. ‘I’ve got to go now, Dakota, but I will be back.’

‘Promise.’

He smiled at her. ‘You will wait for me, won’t you?’

She nodded.

‘You won’t tell anybody about me, will you?’

She shook her head vigorously. A three-year-old child.

Then he was back in his body. Carter was clicking his fingers smartly. ‘Well, well, look who’s made it simultaneously on CBS, ABC, and NBC?’

Seek not the kingdom of shadows,
For evil will surely appear.
For only the master of brightness
Shall conquer the shadow of fear.

 - The Emerald Tablets of Thoth

‘I want to help her.’

‘Not a good idea, Black.’

‘Why?’

‘The only way you can help her is if you went back in time. And that would be very unwise.’

‘Unwise?’

‘Remember when you watched Superman turn back time by turning planet Earth at dizzying speed in the opposite direction?’

‘Mmmm.’

‘Well, it won’t be as simple as that. Going back in time is fraught with great danger. There is a very high probability that you could get stuck in it.’

‘Stuck?’ Black felt fear slice through him - a premonition? He brushed it away before it could take root.

‘Any manipulation of time usually causes it to solidify. First, it will appear to be racing through you, while moving at normal speed for everything else around you. That will be your only warning and your last chance to get out. If you are unable to at that moment, then the very air around you will change. It will take on a soup-like thickness and turn greenish. The sensation will be similar to being in a storm shelter while a tornado is raging directly on top.

‘Movements will then be restricted only to those you can make in quicksand. For a few seconds the green will fade out and the objects around you will start to shimmer and lose their solidity. Physical objects will become clear liquid - not because they have lost their physicality, they are still there, but because solidity is a function of time. They will appear to you with waves running through them. Then the thickness will set around you like jelly around a fly, trapping you so thoroughly you cannot move a single muscle. But you will be able to feel everything, though.’

Black gave a nervous laugh. ‘Not much difference to what I live through every day, then.’

‘No, it is indescribably worse. The realm between life and death is like being in a deep freeze, but most humans will experience that mixed state badly. It is an environment that is so incomprehensible and so frightening to humans that almost all who have ventured there have spontaneously combusted. And because their perception will be so distorted by their surroundings, it will become impossible for them to tell whether a minute or a century has passed. As such they will experience themselves burning for what appears to be years, even if only minutes have passed before they are pulled out. And the one or two who have escaped and come back have gone mad owing to their inability to comprehend what happened to them.’

There was a short pause. Black thought about Dakota - poor, dribbling Dakota -  speaking in the third person: ‘Dakota lonely.’

‘I will take the risk,’ he said.

‘You are very courageous.’

‘No, I’m not. I’m actually afraid, but I care about her. And I must do this.’

‘Love. What a beautiful thing it is when it touches the human heart.’

‘Show me what I should do.’

‘All right. The easiest way for you to get to her is to meet her in the past just before her de-programming and do something that will change the course of her actions. Choose your entry into the past carefully and plan your moves even more carefully. There is no going back. If you snag your clothes on a twig or a nail don’t look back. The artificial matrix is designed with tricks and traps to snare you. Never look back, no matter what happens. Do what you have to do and get out.’

‘OK.’

‘I see that you already have a plan.’

‘Is it a good plan?’

‘Yes, very imaginative, a trait much admired by my kind.’

‘Will it work?’

‘If we are in the timeline where it does.’

‘And if we aren’t?’

‘Then what can go wrong will go wrong.’

‘No matter what happens, thank you for all your help.’

‘Be as quick as you can.’

‘I am ready whenever you are.’

‘Remember, any intervention at all from me will cause me to get stuck in this dimension, so expect no help. Good luck and do not tarry for a second longer than necessary and never repeat any action.’

‘Even if I get stuck, I will have changed the future for her, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m ready.’

A blindingly bright light shone from Green’s forehead and something resembling a tunnel opened up. It was like a three-dimensional fractal, a dancing five-pointed star full of light. Black stepped into it and felt it pull at the soles of his feet and the palms of his hands. Locked into the tunnel he could not decide if he was spinning or if the world outside the tunnel was spinning.

When the spinning stopped the tunnel opened out to a corridor. She was in front of him. She was pulling her hand out of a thick door, the door to the room where he was held. At that moment she turned to look back at the corridor. He had arrived seconds before the jump. Instead of seeing an empty corridor she saw him. She turned around to face him.

‘Don’t go in there,’ he warned. ‘It’s a trap. I’ve come from the future and I’ve seen what happens if you do. You will be sucked out like a rag to a place where you will become nothing, and Dakota will be de-programmed. Her brain will be so badly damaged that she will barely be able to function.’

‘But I am supposed to give her to you.’

‘You already have. Now go back and quickly. Pretend you have never been here. Do nothing to call attention to yourself. There are things afoot - big changes are about to happen.’

‘There is a video record of everything I have done, and this trip.’

Black did not hesitate. ‘I think I can erase it for you. Quickly, we must hurry. Go the way you came and I will follow you.’

She made her jump back into the session room and he followed. The tunnel stayed next to him. Teddy and the Biotech were waiting for her return, but they could not see him. Black immediately set about erasing the video records.

When Shekina came out of the trip seat she said, ‘Don’t worry about their memory banks. I’ll take care of that. But there are also the images from the corridors and those from my room. They are held in the central unit.’

‘OK,’ he said, and did to the central computer digital image records what he had done to the computer records in his room. Seconds later the job was done and Black knew it was time to go. He turned toward the tunnel that was waiting beside him, but his eyes caught a flying cockroach. It landed on Teddy’s cheek. How strange that such an insect should live in such a clinical place. What did it eat to survive, he wondered, and automatically looked back at it. It was only for a split second, but that was all that was necessary. The artificial matrix had set him a trap and he had fallen into it.

Almost immediately he felt that first and last warning to ‘get out’ that Green had told him about. Time rushing inside him while all around him everything was normal.

Shekina, her face contorted, shouted out, ‘Run, Black, run.’

But even then it was already too late. The air was turning green around him.

Before he could react, jump into the tunnel, the green faded out and Teddy and the cockroach began to shimmer and undulate. The effect was similar to what heat waves do to things in the distance. Teddy became as liquid as a glass before it shatters under the influence of a soprano’s high note.

Black turned and tried to make for the tunnel, but it was as if he was running in wet cement. Without warning it hardened and he was unable to move a single muscle. Not even his eyes. He started to become disorientated. A sickly yellowish light shrouded him. It smelled of rot and decay. And fear. Terrible fear. Suddenly, true to Green’s word, he began to burn from the inside out, the horror of which was beyond anything he had ever encountered or could ever have imagined.

Eshu throws a stone today and it kills a bird yesterday.

 - Yoruba poem

Miss Monroe walked into the girl’s quarters carrying her lunch. The girl was sitting in front of the TV, but it was turned off. At Miss Monroe’s appearance, she turned and smiled at her.

‘What are you doing?’ asked Miss Monroe, straightening up and looking her in the eyes.

‘Thinking,’ replied the girl, her eyes bright and full of life. ‘Did you bring me chocolate?’

Miss Monroe put her hand into her pocket and brought out a bar.

‘Oh, good,’ she said and, as she took the bar, slid a piece of paper into Miss Monroe’s hand.

‘Well, I’ll be back later to pick up the tray.’

‘Thank you.’

Miss Monroe did not get a chance to look at the paper until she entered her own quarters and sat at her desk as normally as she could. The girl had neat small writing.

I remote viewed your psychiatrist – he’s one of them. Do nothing out of the ordinary (not even chocolates for me). Stay down for now and don’t try to get any kind of help for me. Things are afoot. There is a way out for us.

Miss Monroe felt strong gratitude fill her heart for the girl. She did not know that her real savior was a boy lying in a bed deep underground who had gone back into the past and changed the future. In this future she did not have to see a brain-damaged child and in a rush of emotion confront Dr. Klaus. In this future she did not have to die.

Back in her quarters Shekina ignored the food on the table and returned to doing what Miss Monroe had interrupted. Helping Black. She vowed that she would not stop until she had won them all over. She began with Africa and stop just before she reached China.

Learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.

 - Leonardo da Vinci

Schooner Klaus came awake gently in his darkened bedroom. For some delicious minutes he relished the luxurious softness of the goose down pillow under his head and neck, and the lovely warmth of his deep bed. He stretched slowly, enjoying the languorous movement inside his muscles. Quietly, avoiding the sight of the woman beside him and without waking her up, he slid out. He did not enjoy the sight of his wife’s overly bronzed, sagging arms, which were inevitably exposed at this time of the morning.

Last night was fuzzy in his memory. He remembered going to a club, a special place where they played kings and queens in the back rooms. He didn’t know why he still felt the need to frequent such seedy places, but it was only there amongst the most degenerate of humans that he felt he could be himself. In places like that there was no need to pretend and hide. All was filth, and so was he.

He walked silently into their bathroom. When they had been on their honeymoon his wife had seen this design in a ladies’ toilet in Richmond, England. And she had never forgotten it. Ten years ago when they had moved into this house she had recreated it. An English design. Blue patterns on white, like china. Pretty. He switched on the lights and stepped up to the mirror and blinked, his eyes still unused to the sudden brightness. Someone had written on his bathroom mirror with pink lipstick.

His jaw dropped as he read the message that was scrawled across the mirror in bold handwriting. His first reaction was one of fear. That someone had entered his bedroom while he had slept and written on his mirror. Then the expression in his eyes changed to one of disbelief. Below the mirror, lying without its lid, was the lipstick used. He picked it up slowly and looked at the blunted edge. And tried to remember. How? When? He looked again at the words.

FOR HEAVEN’S SAKE CATCH
ME BEFORE I KILL
AGAIN. I AM PURE
EVIL

No doubt about it. The handwriting was his. He sat on the broad, wooden toilet seat - an English antique specially flown in. He turned toward the mirror and looked at his own shocked face behind the writing. He had no memory of writing the words. He closed his eyes and thought hard about the night before. But it remained illusive. Shadows. And it occurred to him that this was not the first time there were gaps in his memory.

There was only one explanation and that one was totally unacceptable. Alters inside him! That he was not the puppet master he had thought, but a puppet with others higher up pulling at his strings was too horrible to contemplate. He refused to consider it. For now, damage control.

He went to the door and looked in on his wife. Her sagging arms were lying above the bedclothes, and her breathing was even. She never awakened early - the pills always kept her dead to the world until her alarm went off in a couple of hours’ time. He went back into the bathroom and locked the door.

Meticulously, using toilet paper, he cleaned the lipstick marks. They came off easily. He peed on top of the soiled toilet paper and flushed it. Then he brushed his teeth, shaved, and went into his dressing room. He opened his wardrobe door and looked at the row of faultlessly tailored identical uniforms. He selected one and carefully dressed in it. When he was ready he stood in front of the mirror. There had been no writing on the mirror. Of course not. He had been overly imaginative even as a boy. He was no puppet, he was the puppet master.