Blessed Child (12 page)

“I wasn't aware we were running a zoo,” Leiah said.

Jason chuckled nervously. “She's an old friend from school, Leiah. A correspondent for NBC.”

“And this is news?”

Donna smiled. “Leiah. Pretty name. By your speech I would guess you're French Canadian. Am I right?”

Leiah ignored her.

“Let's just say accents interest me,” Donna said. “With a face like yours and the French voice, you really should consider finding work in front of a camera. Don't worry; I won't hurt a soul.” Donna walked up to the glass and nodded at Nikolous, who dipped his head in return.

“So what's the boy's name?” she asked.

Jason stepped up between Leiah and Donna and gazed at the table below. Dr. Caldwell sat stiffly on one side of an oak table studying her subject. She wore a bundle of blond hair in a bun, held together by a long wooden pin. Thick round glasses perched on the bridge of her sharp nose, effectively nullifying the soft smile that had fixed itself on her face. Behind her, a freestanding chalkboard stood like a teepee, wiped clean of all but a few white smudges. Two huge yellow beanbag chairs were stuffed into each corner. Between them sat a large box of alphabet blocks and other geometric objects. A long counter with a dozen drawers ran along the wall, where an oscilloscope of some kind displayed a horizontal amber line.

“His name's Caleb,” Jason said. The boy sat slumped in a folding chair, fiddling with a pencil. To say he looked bored would be an understatement. Leiah might not have completely grasped the meaning of tact, but she did understand Caleb better than any of them, Jason thought. “Nothing yet?”

Nikolous humphed.

“I'll take that as a no.”

“He's gone from answering with one or two words to not answering at all. This can't be helpful,” Leiah said.

“What kind of tests has she been giving him?” Donna asked.

“You know anything about psychokinesis?” Jason asked.

“Mind over matter.”

“Something like that. Evidently UCLA made a bit of a name for itself in the seventies—some parapsychology research with a healer they studied.”

“Dr. Thelma Ross,” Donna said.

Jason looked at her with a raised brow.

“I was a psych major, remember? She studied a man named Jack Gray, a supposed healer.”

“And?”

“And it depends on how you interpret the research, but they claimed he was capable of assisting in a person's recovery over a period of time. I don't remember too many professors taking the case seriously, but it was a flash point for the parapsych people in the department. So you think the boy's exhibited pyschokinetic powers of some kind?” she asked with a twinkle in her eye.

Jason returned his gaze to Caleb, who sat innocently in the folding chair across from the harsh-looking doctor. It all seemed a bit silly just now. Bringing a boy into UCLA to have him tested for magical powers.
Yes, Donna. We have landed some evidence that green men do indeed live on Mars, and we are here to break the news to the world
. Leiah was right; this whole thing was nonsense.

“We're just having some tests run on him. I'm sure it's nothing.”

“So they've asked him to bend steel rods and see through walls and guess the president's third cousin's birth date, is that it?”

Jason smiled, suddenly embarrassed for even coming. “Pretty much.”

“I see. Interesting.”

Leiah reached to the wall and flipped a black switch. A small square speaker in the corner hissed to life. “If you don't help me, I can't help you, Caleb,” Dr. Caldwell's voice crackled gently.

There was no sign the boy heard her. He simply sat in his chair, swinging his legs and staring at the pencil in his hands.

Dr. Caldwell reached into a drawer, pulled out two large cards, and stood them on edge so that only she could see their markings. “Let's try something simple again. Have you ever played a guessing game? Hmm? I'd like to play one now, if you wouldn't mind. Is that okay?”

This time the boy hesitated but nodded slowly.

“Good. That's good. Now I have two cards here and I want you to tell me if they have colors on them or numbers on them. Can you do that?”

He stared at them for a moment and then looked over to the mirror behind which Jason and the others watched.

“You're sure he can't see us?” Donna asked quietly.

“That's what the good doctor told us,” Jason said.

Dr. Caldwell spoke again. “Please, Caleb. Try to concentrate. There are some people who think you may be able to do special things, but how are we ever going to know unless you cooperate. Hmmm?”

He looked up at her. “I'm a simple boy.”

“Well, maybe you are. But we'll never know unless you play our little games, will we?”

“Do you know why I am put in this house at the church?”

The doctor stared at the boy and then set her cards facedown, clearly frustrated. “I'm not here to talk about your housing arrangements, Caleb. I'm here to try to help you.”

Jason could almost hear Leiah grind her teeth. She glared at Nikolous, who ignored her entirely. She faced the window again. “How can she talk to him like that? Is that the way you talk to a lost child?”

“She's a doctor,” Jason said. “She's got to know what she's doing.”

“She's a spook. Clearly not a child psychologist.”

“If you wouldn't mind,” the Greek spoke up. “I am listening.”

Leiah swatted the switch off and turned to the clergyman. “Haven't you heard enough? You've watched her administer written tests, which he clearly shows no interest in taking; you've heard a hundred questions, which have produced absolutely nothing but the child's clear need of love; you've even watched while the good doctor has suggested Caleb move a marble along the table by looking at it! And somehow you hold the illusion that this is instrumental? What in heaven's name are you thinking?”

“Nonsense!” Nikolous boomed. “A boy comes into my care and exhibits the power to give sight; you think I have no obligation to have him properly examined?”

“Then you've examined him already and he seems normal enough. You have an obligation to see to his well-being, not explore his mind.”

“She's right, Nikolous,” Jason said. “The boy's had enough.”

“We will allow professionals to decide what is enough. You are here on my request; do not forget that.”

“We're here for the
boy's
sake, remember. Including you.”

Donna cleared her throat. “I hate to interrupt, but it may not matter.” She nodded to the room and they looked as one. Dr. Caldwell was talking toward the window. Leiah hit the audio switch.

“ . . . so if you wouldn't mind coming in now, I think we can wrap this up.”

Evidently the good doctor had given up.

“She mean all of us?” Jason asked.

Leiah turned toward the door without responding. The Greek quickly followed. Jason looked at Donna, who had her arms crossed and was smiling, as if enjoying this show. “You go ahead, Jason. I'll wait here, if it's okay with you.”

He nodded. “Don't go anywhere. I'll be right back.”

“I'll be here.”

When they entered the testing room, Dr. Caldwell smiled a tad condescendingly and asked them to sit at the table. He and Leiah seated themselves adjacent to the doctor and across from Nikolous. Caleb watched them with round eyes, but he seemed unruffled.

“I'm sorry this has taken so long, but you must understand that I can only follow the subject's pace.” Caldwell looked from Jason to Father Nikolous. Her coke-bottle glasses flashed with the reflection of the room's overhead lights. Surely with today's technology she could have found a better presentation for her eyesight correction, Jason thought. Contacts would have suited her sharp features better.

She continued. “Unfortunately, I can see no evidence for psychological anomalies of any kind. He is traumatized perhaps, but otherwise he shows no signs of characteristic behavior.”

“No one suggested that he had any anomalies,” Leiah said.

The doctor faced her. “Father Nikolous told me that a boy regained his sight after his interaction with Caleb. I don't know about you, but in my book that's rather unusual. Assuming of course that Caleb had anything to do with the event. And assuming that the other child actually did regain his sight. Most cases of this nature are simply misinterpreted events.”

“No, no,” Nikolous objected. “Samuel did receive his sight, and it was only after the boy's interaction with him.
I
am not blind, Doctor.”

“Of course not. But you must understand that I've spent two hours administering a string of tests specifically designed to betray even the slightest paranormal occurrence and I've found nothing.”

“And these tests of yours are accurate?”

Dr. Caldwell stiffened slightly. “I assure you, Father, we're not talking about the dark ages here. I've run tests for micro PK without any indicative results. The macro PK tests were even less responsive. You see that machine behind me?”

He glanced at the monitor with its single flat line.

“That's a REG machine. A Random Event Generator. It creates a pattern of random electrical events. Through concentration a subject with psychokinesis can repeatedly vary that pattern. It's no longer a question of whether the human mind
can
change physical events; it's a matter of how. In fact, portable REGs like the one behind me have been placed in blind studies— the Academy Awards and the Super Bowl for example—and the patterns in the electrical events have changed to reflect the audiences' reactions to the shows. In other words, a roomful of people have unwittingly influenced the pattern of a machine by their thoughts alone. We are talking science here, Father, not faith.”

The diatribe left them silent. It sounded impossible that a person could change anything by thinking about it.

“And Caleb?” Nikolous asked.

“It turns out that psychokinesis is more common among children than adults, and environments of high stress often trigger the events. That was what interested me about him when you explained the situation. But I'm telling you that I found nothing. Not even a blip.”

“We're dealing with a healing here, not a blip on a machine,” Nikolous pushed. And what did the Father want in all of this? Why was he so determined to demonstrate the boy's abilities anyway? Jason had considered the matter earlier, but hearing the Greek now, he felt a nudge of concern.

“Healing is generally accepted as a form of psychokinesis,” Caldwell said. “In fact Dr. Thelma Ross made the case pretty strongly here at UCLA over twenty years ago. But either way, healing or not, the boy here shows none of the signs.”

Caleb had been studying the machine behind the doctor with mild curiosity. Now he crossed his legs and stared at the wall to his right, still slumped in his seat. His right leg swung over the other in short, absent arcs. Jason had the notion that his mind was still trying to understand what had become of him since his rude departure from the quiet monastery. Their conversation was probably the furthest thing from his mind.

“So your final analysis?” the Greek asked.

Patricia Caldwell sighed. “My final analysis is that you may have a disturbed child on your hands.” She looked at Caleb. “Maybe one who is retarded . . .”

Jason felt Leiah stiffen beside him. Caleb's legs stopped their swinging, but he didn't remove his eyes from the wall. An uncomfortable silence descended over them.

“But otherwise he is normal.”

Jason wanted to leave then—take the boy and leave the campus for good. But Dr. Caldwell was not in the frame of mind to hold her thoughts captive.

She put on a plastic grin. “As I see it, your Caleb here is no more a psychic than Jesus Christ was God's son. But then we all make mistakes, don't we?”

Something in the room changed with those words. A pin could have dropped, and Donna would have heard it like a bell in her perch above them. There were two people in the room who presumably thought much of Jesus Christ: Father Nikolous and Caleb. But it felt like the good doctor had just cast a gauntlet before the pope himself.

The boy looked slowly at first toward Leiah, then Jason, and then at Dr. Caldwell, who held her smug smile. He stared at her as if she'd just suggested that they all jump into a meat grinder or something. The scene stuck like that—with the boy drilling Caldwell with his round stare and the others sitting in an awkward silence.

The smile was still stuck on Caldwell's face when the coke-bottle glass in front of her left eye suddenly cracked.

A single line from top to bottom that sounded like a small whip cracking in the heavy silence.
Crack!

The good doctor caught her breath and her smiling lips twitched, but she did not budge. A second crack grew from the first at a forty-five-degree angle, slowly, etching white along the thick glass.

It all happened so very deliberately, freezing them all with incredulity. The crawling cracks spread to the other glass, the right lens, horizontal this time.

And then the left coke-bottle lens exploded outward as if Patricia Caldwell's eye had become a cannon.
Pop!
The right eyeglass followed a split second later. One, two.
Pop! Pop!
Small pieces of glass scattered over the table, rattling like beads.

The doctor shrieked and threw her hands to her face. As one, Jason, Leiah, and Nikolous bolted to their feet, spilling all three chairs. Caleb did not flinch.

“I'm blind! I'm blind!” Caldwell shrieked.

It occurred to Jason that he wasn't breathing. His heart thumped in his chest. The doctor's trembling hands covered her eyes so he couldn't see what had happened, but he half expected to see blood seep between her fingers. Maybe he had imagined the shattering glass thing. Then again, the table lay covered in shards of the stuff, and it hadn't come from thin air.