Thirst No. 4 (23 page)

“Too much power concentrated among too few. You’re like the Nazis.”

“Hitler was insane. Do you think I am?”

“You have too much control. I was present when the founding fathers created this nation. There was a reason they split the government into three parts. The checks and balances were all designed to keep power-driven people from seizing absolute control.”

Brutran is thoughtful. “How little you understand what’s really going on here.”

Her remark sounds degrading but again I hear truth in it.

“We’re alone. It’s just us girls. Enlighten me,” I say.

Brutran continues walking. I follow.

“To understand you’d have to go back to the beginning days of IIC. I know now that you’ve spoken to Professor Sharp and Freddy, and I assume they gave you a reasonably accurate idea of how the Array and the Cradle came into existence. At the same time, you have to understand their point of view is limited. They were always on the outside looking in.”

“Because you’re the real founder of the company.”

Brutran hesitates. “I thought so at the time. Freddy told you about the loss of our son. What he couldn’t tell you is how the pain refused to fade with the passage of time. I think I went
a little crazy during those days. I knew Henry for only a week, but I talked to him in my head for years. And I had but one wish. That he would talk back to me.”

I feel a disquieting chill. “I don’t understand.”

Again, she stops me. “Before I go any further I need you to answer a question. It’s the most important thing I’ve ever asked of anyone. Please be honest with me.”

“Ask.”

“We know your small group battled the Telar in Colorado, outside the town of Goldsmith, and that you escaped the area in a helicopter by flying into the Rockies. We’re not sure what happened up there but our best information says that you were killed.” She pauses. “Is that true?”

I’m silent a long time. Knowledge is power and I’m reluctant to tell this woman anything that could give her leverage over me or my friends.

Yet I see the desperation in her eyes. The loss.

“Yes,” I say.

“You died?”

“Yes.”

“How did you come back to life?”

“I don’t know.”

“Alisa, please, this is important to me. What happened to you when you died?”

I tell her a
version
of what happened.

“I lost two days of memory. Then, when I began to experience
the world around me again, I found myself floating near my body. Eventually that sensation passed and I was back inside it.”

“And Teri Raine was dead. How did she die?”

“It was in this morning’s news. She fell and broke her leg. The shattered bone ruptured her femoral artery.”

“That must have been a hell of a fall. How did it happen?”

“Does it matter?”

“Yes. You’re leaving out a huge part of your story. You act like you were killed days before Teri.”

“I was.”

“How were you killed?”

A note of bitterness enters my voice. “We’ve gone over this. Your Cradle possessed a friend of mine and forced him to shoot me in the heart.”

“Who?”

“It’s none of your business. Besides, you must know.”

“I know nothing about this incident.”

“Gimme a break.”

“It’s true, and you know it’s true as I say it. How did you recover from the wound that killed you?”

I shrug. “There are qualities to my vampiric blood even I don’t understand. The wound healed and I recovered.”

“I find that hard to believe.”

“Your own spy saw that I was dead. You can see I’m alive. What’s there to believe?”

Brutran is suddenly emotional. The change in her is so
unexpected I’m shocked. “What’s there to believe? Alisa, you of all people must know the questions that haunt us above all else. Is there life after death? Does the soul exist? Is my son still alive somewhere?”

A mother’s grief over the loss of her child. Even the Wicked Witch is not immune to it. For the first time since I met the woman, I feel sympathy for her.

“Krishna brought me back,” I say.

“What?”

“It was Krishna. That’s all I can tell you.”

Brutran grabs my shoulders. “Did you see him when you died?”

“I told you, I don’t remember what happened. I wish I could. You have no idea how I’ve struggled to fill in the blank of those days. But I can’t, they’re just empty.”

“Then how can you say Krishna saved you?”

“You just have to trust me.”

“Trust you?” she shouts. “Now you sound like a Christian asking me to believe in the resurrection of Christ. I can’t believe something because someone tells me to believe it. Faith is for the foolhardy. Can’t you see that’s why I returned to experimenting with the array after I lost Henry?”

The pieces of her story are finally beginning to fit together.

“I thought you used it to make money,” I say.

Brutran waves her hand impatiently and resumes walking. “I needed money to create a powerful array. So yes, in a sense,
I focused on money to start with. But my ultimate goal was to find out what had happened to my son.”

“Was this during the time Freddy was creating his scientific form of astrology?”

Brutran snorts. “He came up with the idea. He didn’t create it all by himself.”

“Explain.”

“Freddy had his obsession, I had mine. We were both trying to drown our grief. Drugs and alcohol could only help so much. Once I had a new array up and running, and enough money to sustain it, I changed the focus of the work.”

“You wanted to get it to talk,” I say.

She glances over. “It seemed a natural next step. After all, you would have asked the same questions I did.”

“Give me examples.”

“Who are we talking to when we ask the array for information? Who or what is giving us insights into the market?”

“You had grown weary of yes and no answers.”

“Yes. I wanted more, a lot more.”

“So how did you get it to talk?” I ask.

“You might find this amusing. At first I split my two thousand kids into a thousand pairs and gave them each an Ouija board. Then I posed the simplest question of all: ‘Who are you?’ I allowed the answers to come just one letter at a time. It took discipline to stick with this program.”

“Why?”

“Because many of the messages coming through the Ouija boards were fascinating. The spirits we channeled would say they were guides or angels, and they would give us page after page of esoteric knowledge. Most of it was garbage but some of it was heartbreaking in its beauty and with its insights. Still, I forced myself to only keep track of the responses the group as a whole generated.”

“You were sticking with Professor Sharp’s idea that ESP is basically a weak signal that can only be picked up by a large array of minds?”

“Exactly. I couldn’t trust individual or paired responses. They had never been able to predict the market accurately. Why should I trust them to talk to me about spiritual matters?”

“What answer did you get to your original question: ‘Who are you?’”

“The answer was disconcerting. It said, ‘I am no one.’”

“Nothing else?”

“Not at first. Not for a long time. I tried switching our method of receiving the answers. I used applied kinesiology, or muscle testing. That’s where you have a subject stick out their arm, ask a question, and then test the arm for strength. Generally, if the arm is strong, the answer is yes, and if the arm goes weak, the answer is no. In many ways that worked better than the boards. I’d have each person start at the beginning of the alphabet and have another person keep checking them until their arm muscle went strong. Then I would write down that
letter and repeat the process with everyone in the group.”

“You did all that just to get one letter of one word?”

“Yes. I know what you’re going to ask next. How many out of the two thousand would come up with the same letter? At first our results were dismal. We were lucky if any letter would stand out. But as we continued to work together, it was like a group mind formed and most of the kids started to get the same answer.”

“Another amazing example of ESP.”

“Yes. I thought Professor Sharp would have been proud of me.”

“Were you in contact with him at the time?”

“He was recovering from a stroke. But we spoke occasionally.”

“Your work had nothing to do with his stroke?” I ask.

“Don’t be silly, Alisa. The Cradle didn’t even exist at the time.”

I ask my next question as gently as possible.

“Were you able to contact your son?”

The question still hits her hard. She takes a moment to recover. “It seemed, from time to time, that we would contact a kind spirit that said he was my son.”

“Why do you say it was kind?”

“It felt that way when he was in the room.”

“What did he have to say?”

“That he was my son and that he was happy where he was.”

“Did he give you any practical advice?”

“I don’t understand.”

“Did he urge you to let go of your grief and get on with your life?”

Cindy lowers her head. “I don’t recall every message that came through.”

We walk for a while in silence, and it seems to me that no matter how hard Cindy tried, she never did get to talk to the son she had lost, not really. However, after a few minutes, she begins to describe a breakthrough of sorts.

“The being that came at the start, the one who said he was no one, returned and took control of the sessions. He blocked any other beings from talking. I didn’t mind because he began to give out information that I could validate.”

“Give me an example,” I say.

“Besides predicting fluctuation of the stock market, he began to foretell other worldly events. Bad weather in certain countries. Plane crashes. Huge fires. Earthquakes. His accuracy level was higher than ninety percent.”

“Your test subjects must have been blown away.”

“You misunderstand. When this being showed up, I stopped sharing what was being channeled with my test subjects.”

“How did you keep the truth from them?”

“I separated them. The experiments worked almost as well on the phone.”

“But kids are curious by nature. Some of the older ones must have tried to contact each other.”

“Of course. I put a stop to it.”

“Did this brilliant being have a name?”

“It’s ironic you should phrase your question that way. It called itself Ta-Ra-Na.
Ra
, as you know, is the name for the sun god from ancient Egypt. It also means ‘light’ or ‘brilliant.’ All together the symbols mean the ‘Light Bearer.’”

I stumble on the path. Brutran has to reach out to steady me.

“What’s wrong?” she asks.

“Nothing.”

“You’ve heard the name before. Tell me.”

“It just reminds me of the Bible.”

“About Lucifer being the Light Bearer?”

“Yes.”

Brutran stares at me in the dark. “You know more than you’re telling me. I wish it didn’t have to be that way between us.”

“You’re not exactly the sort I would confide in.”

“Right now, I’m telling you things I’ve told no one else. Not even my own husband.”

“But I’m your enemy. You said it yourself. I want to destroy you. Why are you confiding in me?”

She lets go of my arm and continues down the path. “Let me finish my story. Tarana became the focal point of my research. The Array began to channel him exclusively. His knowledge was breathtaking. He taught me simple herbal formulas and physical and mental exercises to halt the aging process. He explained how best to choose candidates for the Array.
He even gave me lessons in management. IIC was organized under his directions.”

“You speak of him like he was your mentor.”

“In a sense, he was.”

“He wasn’t real! He was just your subconscious speaking. Or else the combined subconscious of every kid in your Array. He wasn’t the Light Bearer.”

“You say that like you’re trying to convince yourself. If you don’t believe me, then maybe you should have another talk with Freddy. Oh, I don’t suppose he told you how often he came to me for Tarana’s insights on how to make his astrological system work. It was Tarana who dictated the bulk of the planetary influences that Freddy came to depend upon.”

“Freddy said he pinpointed the influences by using the lives of thousands of people as examples. He told us how he wrote computer programs designed to find patterns in their lives.”

“Sure, Freddy did all those things.
After
he asked me, and Tarana, what to look for.”

“Freddy said you stole his system.”

“Nonsense. I stopped supporting him and he ended up on the street. I’m not saying he isn’t creative. He has one of the most imaginative minds I’ve ever encountered. But when it comes to reality, he’s a failure.”

“So says the woman who talks to spirits. If Freddy was such a failure, why did you have another child with him?”

“Jolie was an accident.”

“You forget, I’ve met Jolie. She was no accident. She was one of those kids that was designed to be born at a certain time and place so she could be used to focus the mind-warping power of your goddamn Cradle.”

My last remark is an educated guess but I can tell from Brutran’s reaction that I’ve scored a bull’s-eye. She looks devastated. I don’t care. I take advantage of the vulnerable moment and try to discover what I need to know.

“Freddy was more than creative,” I say. “He was your example of what a true psychic could do when channeling the full power of the Array. What he did to Tom’s heart was your inspiration for the Cradle. I bet the same day Tom was fighting for his life in the hospital, you were thinking what an awesome weapon the Array could be turned into. If the others would just leave you alone to play with it.”

“The others you speak of all joined me when I founded IIC.”

“Which reminds me. Where are Noel and Wendy?”

“They left the company two years ago.”

“And they’re still alive?”

“Yes.” She pauses. “Don’t look so surprised.”

“But I am surprised,” I say.