Daniel Hecht_Cree Black 02 (18 page)

Tommy heard his backbone crackle again, and he steered his thoughts away from the fading images of those faces. There wasn't
any refuge there.

So then at some point he'd decided,
Okay, I'll define myself.
From his reading about great artists and from his own drawing, he'd figured that you were defined by your passions, by what
you loved and believed in.

Sometimes he thought that might mean "doing something for the tribe." But what? The People didn't know what they wanted. If
you believed the
Navajo Times,
every little businessman who opened up a Laundromat was "doing something for the tribe" by contributing to Navajo-owned enterprise
and economic growth. When what it looked like to Tommy was just more greedy self-interest, like Mr. Clah said, just another
form of colonialism, co-opting real Navajo culture with white American consumerism.

His art was the one thing. He loved looking at something until its hidden meaning came clear and then distilling the image
and the meaning into something powerful. He could experiment with different ways of seeing the same thing, trying on definitions
of himself, his parents, his friends, his surroundings, life, the past, until one seemed to capture something unarguably
true.
Just the physical act was almost ecstatic—moving the pencil on the page, not so much drawing as
carving
the blank white into three dimensions. There were moments when he could believe that in the way he saw things and drew things
he was giving something back to the world. It had always been good, but it wasn't until he'd come to Oak Springs that he'd
learned how much he could do, how much it could mean. It was so much better than the other schools. He'd learned so much in
the few classes he'd had, Miss Chee and Mrs. McCarty had shown him how to put the way he saw and thought into his pictures.
Made him feel that his work was important, that it was a way to figure things out, a way to a halfway decent future.

The thing at his side moved suddenly, the fingers clenching and then clawing the air like someone scratching a bug bite. Tommy
grabbed it with his left hand and squeezed it hard, digging his nails into it, wanting to hurt it, feeling nothing.

His heart plummeted. It reminded him of another heartbreaking fact of where he was at. Without a right arm he couldn't draw.
If he didn't get better, he'd have to leave Oak Springs School. The one way through would be lost.

"You okay?" the nurse asked.

"Yeah." He realized he hadn't answered her earlier question.

"You want to tell me what you're feeling?"

He couldn't. Because as bad as the things with his body were, the
feelings
were worse—harder to describe and more frightening. Suddenly, he'd notice he'd been having something like a daydream, but
the instant he'd realize it, it would go away, he couldn't remember what it was about. It was like the one time he'd gone
to the multiplex theater in Gallup, watching one movie but hearing sounds and music from a different movie through the wall.
It didn't make sense, a mood that had nothing to do with what he was doing. A feeling or an urge would come out of nowhere.
He'd feel the need to
hurry,
like he had to go somewhere or do something very important. A couple of times he'd gotten sexually aroused, once even in the
examining room when Mrs. McCarty was there and might have noticed. Or he'd feel this horrible fear and then fill with hate
and want to hurt someone so much he could hardly hold himself back. Sometimes he wondered if it could be a witch or a ghost
trying to kill him, maybe all the things the kids talked about in the dorm at night were true: the black humping shapes coming
out of the desert at night, the strange noises in the wind, the unusual behavior of a crow on the roof. A shadow moving on
the rocks with nothing making it. Maybe he had a chindi in him. Or maybe it was coming from his subconscious, wasn't this
how schizophrenia worked? Maybe he was really a person full of fear and hate and violence.

Whichever, it was happening right now.

Mrs. Pierce was watching him and he realized that once more he hadn't answered her question, he'd been lost in the feeling
and the effort to fight it. He quickly let go of the arm thing and hoped she didn't notice the blood where he'd dug in his
nails. He looked over at her, and abruptly he wanted to spring at her, tear her to pieces. Afraid he couldn't stop it this
time, he picked up his speed so he got ahead of her, got her out of his sight.

From behind, Mrs. Pierce called in her phony cheerful voice, "Never mind. I'm sure you'd rather talk about something else.
Of course you would. We'll just walk along and just be good buddies for a while. Just good buds out for a walk."

20

BY THE TIME they'd made it back to the corral and cared for the horses, it was nearing sunset. Cree's head was throbbing,
and she knew she was too exhausted to try another session with Tommy right away. She absolutely had to be clearheaded and
strong enough to take a peek inside his skull. Anyway, Lynn had left a note, letting her know that she'd taken him for a walk
and then planned to go to the cafeteria for some dinner.

Cree seized the moment of comparative calm. She felt herself spiraling in on her bed, drawn irresistibly into its field of
gravity, but first there was some business to attend to. Ten minutes on the phone, then a nap. She'd spend time with Tommy
later in the evening.

It was late Saturday afternoon in Seattle, a good time to catch Joyce and Edgar before the evening's entertainments took them
out for the night. She commandeered the phone in Lynn's office to make the calls.

When Ed answered, she could barely hear his hello over the stereo blasting in the background: the Gypsy Kings, belting out
songs of unrequited passion.

Ed quickly brought the volume down. "Hey, Cree. Good timing. I was about to go out."

"I can call back later if—"

"No, this is fine. I won't be home later—going out to dinner. Now I'm just going to run some errands. What's up?"

"What're you going to bring, Ed?"

"Hm. Sounds like you have some recommendations."

"The lights flickered last time. Did I tell you? Very pronounced flicker phenomenon."

"So we'll need to rule out electrical system problems. I'll bring the kit for that, no problem there. But—"

"Yeah. We're getting into some EVP possibilities. Then there's the DNS issue."

It felt good to speak in the private vernacular they shared, to talk with someone who didn't need explanations or justifications.
Nice to pretend there was any kind of conceptual map to this territory. But the idea brought them both up short as they thought
it through.

EVP stood for electronic voice phenomena, a paranormal manifestation that had become evident only in the age of electronic
media. In some cases, voices or sounds not audible to the human ear could be picked up by electronic recording equipment placed
in haunted environments. Rarer still, telephones or radios sometimes produced sounds without a discernible signal source.
The implication was that some unknown energies or entities were directly affecting the wires and chips and magnetic media
of electronic equipment, creating patterns of electricity that ultimately emerged as audible noises or voices. Because it
was an easily faked medium, Ed had been highly skeptical of EVP evidence until, despite every safeguard against hoax or error,
he'd recorded a voice in an abandoned house in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

EVP was all the more complex because it tied in with a whole body of paranormal theory called DNS, direct neural stimulus.
The idea here was that the energies of paranormal entities might create only the
experience
of images, sounds, or sensations: They didn't actually create light, vibrations in the air, or tangible bodily contact but
directly activated the human brain and nervous system. Someone witnessing a phantom figure might not actually be
seeing
—receiving light through her eyes, which a camera would also record—at all. Rather, she might be having her optic nerve
or visual cortex directly stimulated by some other form of energy.

The DNS concept helped explain the difficulty of providing a physical record of a ghost's presence. It particularly appealed
to Cree because it supported her conviction that ghosts were linked to witnesses and manifested only within particular psychosocial
environments: People experienced ghosts when their mental and emotional states created neurological conditions that sensitized
them to the emanations of noncorporeal entities.

In the case of the flicker phenomenon, the well-documented pulsing of lights in the vicinity of paranormal events could be
related to either EVP or DNS. Some form of energy could be affecting the wiring of a house or the filaments of a lightbulb
and cause currents to fluctuate. Or it could affect the soft, wet wiring of the brain, causing the visual sensing circuits
to misbehave. Subjectively, the end result would be indistinguishable to a witness.

"So, for the DNS, you're thinking functional microelectroencephalogram?" Ed suggested.

FMEEG was a medical technology that monitored tiny variations in the brain's electrical activity. Beyond its use in detecting
brain impairment or seizure activity, FMEEG could be used to map normal brain function, allowing researchers to watch which
areas lit up when the subject felt a particular emotion or responded to a particular stimulus. It had several advantages over
functional MRI, one of them being that the scalp-wiring harness was light and minimally intrusive, and could easily be employed
at the sites of hauntings.

"Think you can get the stuff?"

"On a Saturday afternoon or Sunday morning? What're the odds, Cree? Shit."

"Call Frank. Tell him we need the gear for a week, we'll Air Express it back if we have to."

"Yeah." Ed paused, no doubt jotting a note to call their skeptical but helpful friend Frank Markowitz. Frank worked at Cascades
Neurological Research Institute, coordinating multisite research initiatives with other labs and clinics. He was occasionally
willing to bend the definition of "lab" enough to rent equipment to PRA.

"Okay," Ed said. "So. Otherwise. How's it going? You sound, um, good—decisive. In charge, um—"

"Bossy?"

"Well, I wasn't going to—"

"Julieta McCarty has an assertive side, okay? It's her get-things-done mode."

"So, what's the other side?"

"I'm
okay,
Ed," she said defensively.
The other side is grief and sorrow,
she thought,
fear and self-doubt. Spinning out of control into anger and regret and making huge mistakes by acting upon those feelings.
If only it were possible to screen out which aspects of a personality you absorbed. But of course it wasn't.

She repressed the urge to ask him where he was going tonight, wondering inappropriately if he was dating someone, at last
moving past his attachment to Cree Black and her indecisions and complications. But she just thanked him. He urged her to
take good care of herself, and they said good-bye.

After she hung up, Cree was left recalling the first time she'd heard the EVP recording Ed had made in Gloucester. They'd
listened to it together in his tech studio in Seattle, and it had left them both badly shaken. Emerging from a mist of electronic
noise, barely more coherent than static and hum, a plaintive human voice
Jenny? Jen? Where are you? I'm so sorry.
You must believe me. Where are you, Jenny?

Some person or fragment of a person, lost in a timeless electronic ether, searching for a companion and a world it once knew,
unaware that neither existed anymore.

She would never forget the anguish of fear and sympathy she'd felt as she listened to it. In a way, it was far more frightening
than the direct encounters she'd had. The fear was not one of danger in any ordinary sense—that the ghost could hurt you.
It came from understanding with stark clarity how lost and alone that being was, and wondering,
Is that what will happen to me?

She quickly packed the thought away, picked up the phone again, and pecked in Joyce's number. Busy.

Thinking to kill a few minutes and try again, she went back to the ward room to finally begin reading the materials Mason
had provided her. This time she went straight to some of the older source material. She read it in fascinated horror.

She was struck by how many of Tommy's symptoms resembled the typical case: the intensifying cycles followed by relative normalcy,
the convulsions and contortions. The often-reported breathing problems, she saw now, could easily result from the asynchronous
breathing they'd observed in Tommy—obviously, the intruder and the host vying for control of basic bodily functions. A chilling
idea.

On the bright side,
she consoled herself,
at least he ain't vomiting up toads and broken glass.

But reading on, she discovered another typical aspect of possession that struck her as particularly relevant and disturbing.
Even discounting most incidents as cases of what was now called hysteria, epilepsy, or schizophrenia, this was a well-documented
phenomenon that had been observed well into the age of rational medicine, right into present-day cases of dissociative identity
disorder.

Possession could
spread.
It was catching.

In fact, most historical incidents of possession weren't confined to single individuals; the records showed dozens of "epidemics"
of possession. In 1656, almost the whole community of Paderborn was "taken," but more often the contagion spread in contained
populations like hospitals, orphanages, schools, and convents. Groups of nuns seemed particularly suscep­tible: 1491 in Cambrai,
1526 in Lyons, 1554 in Rome, on and on, with the 1634 episode in Loudon being perhaps the most famous.

After nuns, children were the most likely to get possessed in large numbers. Rome, 1555, eighty children at an orphanage;
Amsterdam, 1566, thirty boys in a hospital; 1744, a group of young girls in Landes. In a famous American incident, the Goodwin
children, the problem began with the eldest daughter and spread to the other three siblings: They went into fits, had convulsions,
and contorted their bodies so that their spines, shoulder blades, elbows, wrists, and other joints appeared impossibly deformed.

The mechanisms of "contagion" might be responsible for the apparent paralysis of the other boys in Tommy's dorm, and the limb-locked,
shivering horses. Cree had felt it herself: that stunning, numbing force around Tommy during his extreme moments.

Then there were the reports of the victim hurting himself, or attempting suicide. Was that something they had to worry about
with Tommy?

Feeling overwhelmed, she pulled out of a particularly grisly case history and leafed through the remainder of the stack. There
was a lot more here deserving close review; of particular interest were Mason's own studies and others that drew parallels
between possession and multiple personality disorder, now called dissociative identity disorder. She really should read these,
and the sooner the better.

But not now, she decided. She glanced at her watch and was startled to see the time: She'd planned to give Joyce a few minutes
to get off the line, and here it had been over half an hour. She put the papers aside, went back to the nurse's office, and
dialed. This time it rang.

"Cree! Thank Gawd you called!"

"Oh?"

"I have no idea what you're supposed to
wear
down there. I mean, what? Cowboy outfits? I haven't got a thing."

Cree chuckled. It was nice to hear Joyce's Long Island accent and improbable husky contralto, and her spirit rallied considerably.
"No cowboy outfits. Your usual will do. If you want to walk around or ride the horses, you'll need jeans, a sweater, and hiking
boots. And a good coat—it's freezing at night. But definitely no cowboy outfits. Please!"

"Too bad." Joyce laughed. "So what's up?"

"Any chance you can do some preliminary research tomorrow, before your flight?"

"Not tonight? How very considerate of you."

"I assumed you were going out."

Joyce sighed with patient exasperation. "You have this impression of me as such a swinger. What, I was going down to Linda's
Bar and boogie? For your information, I was planning on calling my mom back east and then watching a video."

"Oh, yeah? What kind of video? With whom?"

"Tell me about the research, Cree. I've already worked up a brief on recent cases of possession for you. There's no shortage—
you'll see, there was a real wild one in New Jersey just last year. What else you need?"

Cree enumerated the avenues that had suggested themselves: "McCarty Energy, a coal-mining company that's big in the region.
Especially Garrett McCarty, the former owner, who died in 1999 at their Hunters Point mine."

"Aha. Think he's our entity?"

"Could be. Too soon, though, I'm just curious. While you're at it, I wouldn't mind some material on his son, Donny McCarty,
current CEO. Education, marital status, legal stuff, whatever's come up in the newspapers. Then, let's see . . . bring me
that Wilkins study on multiple personality disorder and anything else you can grab on the subject. You'll need to search for
dissociative identity disorder, that's the current DSM classification. Mason gave me some materials, but I want to know more
about the neurological mechanisms of identity disorders, see if there're any parallels, anything we can apply to possession."

"Smart cookie!"

"Also, some regional history, especially about Navajo culture. History, mysticism, contemporary social issues. I'm especially
interested in Navajo witches—the Skinwalkers, the Navajo Wolves."

"Right out of Tony Hillerman, huh? This is a pretty rich mix, Cree. I'm leavin' on a jet plane, right, in twenty-one hours—"

"Oh, and one more—livestock mutilations."

Joyce made a shuddering noise. "Now
that
stuff completely and totally grosses me out. Seriously. So, what—they've been having them? At the school?"

"I don't think there's any connection. Actually, I don't know what I think about mutes, I just—"

"'Mutes'?"

"Local term. Listen, there's likely to be a ton on the Web, gotta really weed out the idiots on this one."

" 'Mutes'!" Joyce said again. "Isn't it supposed to be a UFO thing? Little green men I'm fine with, but little green vivisectionists?
Brrrrr! You know?" While she paused to make notes, Cree distinctly heard the sound of the doorbell ringing in her Seattle
apartment, and Joyce said quickly, "Well, okay. That's it, then, right? Gotta go. Gotta call Mom and get to work on this.
See you tomorrow night, yeah? Take care. Bye-byee."

One last call, she told herself—this one for pleasure, not for business. It would be good to talk to Paul, to remind herself
that life wasn't exclusively about lost love, ancient regrets, paranormal beings, grotesque syndromes, and existential mysteries.
Talking to a living and romantically attractive man would help her get her feet on the ground. Remind herself that she had
her own life, she wasn't just an extension of Julieta McCarty's troubled psyche.