We Will All Go Down Together (29 page)

“It seems we have a skeptic in attendance.”

“Oh, more than one, probably.”

Another ripple of giggling. Abbott made a graceful gesture in response to its erratic percussion, half debonair shrug, half placatory salute.

“Easy to mock, isn’t it?” He asked, rhetorically. “Of course, if said ‘skeptic’”—and here he stressed the word oddly, making Carra raise an eyebrow in response—“were willing to put her mind where her, eh,
mouth
is, she might come up onstage and help me jumpstart the more . . . practical . . . portion of today’s lecture.”

He trailed off, perhaps expecting Carra to back down. Instead, she shrugged too, and rose; shuffled sidelong into the aisle, then down. Murmuring, as she brushed past me:

“I guess I’ll see you later, then. Janis.”

It wasn’t until she was already halfway to the stage that I realized we’d never been—formally—introduced.

Dim hush, followed by a pen-sized flashlight directed into Carra’s eyes; she’d folded herself bonelessly into an armless industrial chair, while Abbott hovered above. He kept his voice low and soothing, starting almost immediately in on some elaborate rap about moving down through water, dark fathoms, away from the surface: “Further and further, counting backwards, as the sun shrinks and fades. I say counting backwards, starting from ten . . . 
now
.”

There was a pause, as though Carra might or might not be deciding whether to respond. Then:

“Ten . . . nine . . . eight . . . seven . . . six . . . five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one.”

“Very good. Close your eyes.” As she did: “You are now fully asleep, but will answer and obey all questions or commands I put to you. Confirm this.”

“I will answer and obey all questions or commands you put to me.”

“
Very
good.” He rummaged inside his coat, bringing out a small square of cardboard. “I am handing you something. Open your eyes, and tell me what it is.”

“The back of a Kraft juice-box.”

For just a second, the gigglers had rejoined the party, though—if tone and pitch were any indication of emotional stability—sounding considerably less sure of themselves. Abbott smiled, tightly.

“In fact, it’s a mirror. Turn your back on the audience, raise it, and tell me what you see reflected in the area located directly over your right shoulder.”

Two things happened, pretty much simultaneously: I realized that I was sitting in the space indicated and felt myself tense, uncontrollably, at that same knowledge. So I kept my eyes level, my breath steady, concentrating instead on the faint pattern of bruising which stippled itself up and down Carra’s long pale arms. . . .

. . . bruises that, soon enough, seemed to shift in the auditorium’s dense shadow, to pixilate. To form, almost—

(words)

I was too far away to read them, not easily. But they were mostly four-lettered, far as I could tell—and appeared, even from a distance, to be in several different types of handwriting. Some, perhaps, not even in English.

Carra, slowly: “I see . . . the audience. Where I was sitting. The woman sitting next to me. . . .”

“Describe her.”

“Wearing a coat with a brooch in the shape of a scarab beetle; good-looking, doesn’t think she is. Her name’s Janis Mol. . . .”

And:
Yeah
, I thought, sullen.
Pretty good call, ’specially if you’re around the Institute enough to get hold of Abbott’s records.

Abbott: “Concentrate, please.” To me: “I’m now addressing the young lady in question. Would you be so kind as to do something with your hands?”

“Anything?”

“Within reason.”

(Well—okay.)

I shrugged and raised my hands, steepling the fingers together in the universal gesture for prayer. Held it, feeling silly.

Abbott: “Can you see what she’s doing?”

Carra nodded.

“Praying,” she said, simply; I flinched. “But she’s lost it—let it fall sideways. She’s looking scared. She doesn’t want to believe I can see her, but she does.”

“You can stop now.”

Carra shot him a thin thread of a look under lowered lashes, like: Can I? “Now
you
’re starting to sweat, doctor. There’s a triangle of soaked cloth right over the base of your spine. Your ulcer is playing you up, because you forgot to take your pills this morning; had to get to that first interview while you were still feeling fresh.”

“
Thank
you—”

Coldly: “Oh, don’t thank
me
. The audience isn’t liking this much, by the way. They think you’re a big fake, that this is some routine we worked out beforehand. Some of them want to leave, but they’re telling themselves it’s because they have to go to the bathroom really badly. And now, just as things reach their pitch, your spotlight is about to—”

—snap off, plunging the place into darkness. Which . . . it did.

I sat there, frozen. Hearing nothing but Carra’s voice, small, yet definite as God’s amidst my fellow watchers’ gasps and squeals and hoots. Finishing, while Abbott was still too surprised to object:

“—malfunction.”

When the lights came up, she was gone: a predictable twist, oddly reassuring in context. And as everyone else got up to go, I knew I was the only one who’d felt her brush by in the dark, the gentle pressure of her cold fingers on mine. Her voice in my ear, murmuring:

“Just so you know; Carraclough Devize. Feel free to look
me
up, when you can.”

I wouldn’t, though, not for years. Not until we were both in the Clarke, bumping elbows in the cafeteria line—and even then, believe it or not, that was by accident. I got a copy of her dossier, thirteen years’ worth of material padded out with contents sent over from the Freihoeven; all that wasn’t because I went
looking
for it or anything, though. No. It was because someone else had copied the contents, took the copy away, and forgotten the original—left it behind, stuck in the machine’s out-feed tray. Nobody even asked me what I was looking at while I paged through it, walking back to my room.

Like most things to do with Carra, it seemed coincidental. At the time.

Once I got past all the boring biographical bullshit—D.O.B., birth certificate, parents—I found myself leafing through a series of genealogical charts and records tracing the descent of several recurring names: the Devizes (of course), the Glouwers, the Rokes, the Druirs, and the Rusks, among a few scattered others. It reminded me of the family trees I’d seen depicting the royal bloodlines of Europe: a tangled, interleaved recursion of marriage, bastardry, and (in at least one case) incest. Only instead of hemophilia, the poison inbred into this tangle was a mix of madness, mediumship, and—depending on the beliefs of the writer—magic. Satanism or psionics, take your pick; one man’s is another’s, etc.

Born in 1968, a clear and powerful medium from early childhood, Carra had been drafted—at age thirteen—to be part of the last recorded scientific expedition to Peazant’s Folly, before it was turned into a tourist attraction and finally exploded some years later. In the late 1980s, she’d gathered a small coterie of like-minded Ryerson students around her; the Black Magic Posse, they’d called themselves. All well-known figures in Toronto’s occult/psychiatric underground, and all marked by the fallout from whatever supernatural radiation she carried with her. Franz Froese, vanished. Jen Cudahy, dead of nothing an autopsy could confirm (or deny). And Jude Hark, or Hark Chiu-wai, who—at the time the record was made—hadn’t left his apartment for close to a year.

Psychic, I thought. From Psyche, the Greek goddess of the soul or spirit; the same root spawning psychiatry, “soul-healing.” Which implied, like day did night, that Carra, that I, that everyone here, all those helpless disconnected ravers up and down Toronto’s streets, suffered from something far beyond aberrant brain chemistry: a
soul
-sickness, plain and simple.

Soul-sick.

And if science and the scientific mindset had made one mistake—alchemizing
psychic
into
psionic
to give a false impression of under-standing, predictability, mastery—it had, all unknowing, illuminated another great truth: that what we have, like all too many other sorts of sickness . . . 

 . . . is infectious.

When Dr. A. finally got out of the theatre, I swung in beside him, pacing him back to his car. Starting in, before he could fob me off—

“Are you sure you’ve got me down as a sender?”

“I beg your pardon, Ms. Mol?” But he sounded more relieved than annoyed; probably just glad I didn’t want to talk about his quasi-abortive demo, in all its egg-meets-face glory.

“Three times now I’ve tried to draw the first thing that came into my head,” I told him. “All the way through, I try to draw what I’m seeing, what I’m trying to concentrate on—and all three times, so far, it’s turned out like something else.”

Abbott held his clipboard up against his chest with one arm, keeping it between us like a shield. As we reached the main doors, he studiously avoided looking in my direction, his voice gone suspiciously, annoyingly even: “Are you sure it’s not just—”

“I tried to draw a tree; it turned into a case of spontaneous human combustion.”

That got him to look at me, at least—to stop moving, too. And stare.

I just stared back, arms folded. Not smiling.

“I think we’d be better off relocating this to the office,” he suggested, abruptly.

The trip Institute-ward was faster with wheels. Once there, I cupped my hands round the mug of tea Abbott had given me, grateful for its warmth against my palms. The building didn’t even have its own lot; we’d had to park a block and a half away and sprint here through the sleeting rain, leaving melting slush to trickle down out of my limp hair and drip clammy-cold into my collar. I could feel my shirt sticking to me, the everpresent itch between my breasts swelling and fading, like breakers on a beach.

“I don’t know if my receiver’s been in touch with you about not getting anything,” I said, looking up at him, “but if this stuff works at all, I’m on the wrong end of it. Actually, it sort of feels like . . . something’s . . . been screwing with my head—putting in shit I never meant to draw.”

“Modifying your sense of perspective?” Abbott tilted his jaw towards me, like a dog seeing something it wasn’t sure might be food or not.

“No. I mean . . . when I draw something, I see it in my head first, right? Fairly normal. But what I’m seeing isn’t what I end up drawing. Not even close.”

“How close is close?”

I shook my head: holy Jesus fuck! “How many times do I have to say it, Doc? This isn’t just close-one-eye and squint-the-other time.” I leaned forward, tea cooling on command, as though it sensed my urgency. “I try to draw a book, and it turns into a snake; ‘perspective’ ain’t the problem. Unless you’re using it as some hitherto obscure shorthand for ‘rampant waking hallucination.’”

Abbott nodded, soberly: “Of course, I’m no artist.” A dry flicker of a smile. “Look, Miss Mol—granted, I can’t show you the files to prove this, but please rest assured, you
are
recorded as a sender. None of the other group members have any instructions to try transmitting to you, let alone any personal information with which to gain the requisite physical—or mental—bearings.”

I frowned. “I’ve got a file?”

“Certainly. And since we already have you linked to a receiver, for you—or we—to have any more information than we have already prior to the experiment’s conclusion would ruin the double-blind insulation we need in order to preserve some semblance of scientific consistency.” Abbott spread those long thin hands of his, knuckles like twig-knots. “We
could
tell you right now, of course, but on one sole condition. . . .”

“Which is?”

“That you resign from any further participation in the test, immediately.”

“Hmmm. And let me guess: this
doesn’t
come with a two-week notice and severance package.”

Abbott shook his head. “’Fraid not.”

All the way down the line, that was what it felt like, the choices I had: go crazy now or go broke and starve later. That’s why it pissed me off so much, later on, when I realized I’d pretty much done both.

“I do have one suggestion.” I waved a hand; he took it as assent and went on. “It sounds to me like you may be experiencing some, er, intersecting wave disruption. Even if no one
is
sending to you, you might be picking up on whatever might be being . . . broadcast . . . nearby. Which means that the concentration you’re putting on simultaneously drawing and transmitting is opening up your channels, as it were.”

He hesitated, then leaned over and opened one of his drawers, rummaged. “Hang on.” Pulled out a small travelling shaving mirror and handed it to me.

“What’s this for?”

“A concentration aid. You put that somewhere in your room, angled so you can keep it in peripheral sight, then concentrate on sending to
it
, not to your receiver—to the person in the mirror, as it were.”

“In other words, me.”

“In
other
words, yes. The key is to be aware of the mirror peripherally, to identify the mirror with the sending. That way, your conscious mind can concentrate on your drawing, while your subconscious maintains the sending focus.”

“Like I’m sending through the mirror itself.”

“Quite,” said Abbott, smiling.

I turned the mirror over and over in one hand. I hadn’t realized what the other one was doing until I noticed Abbott leaning forward a little, trying very hard to not look like he was staring at where it lay—nestled between my breasts, scratching furiously.

“Ah. . . .” he began, delicately. “Miss Mol . . . ?”

“Rash,” I replied, shortly, stuffing the mirror into my bag. And left him to his own devices.

In the Institute’s one bathroom (up two flights of stairs, usually only accessible by key, though a quick flick through Nail-lady’s desktop easily netted the one marked “Ladies”), I played
Flashdance
and peeled my bra-straps down without shrugging completely out of my top; the marks beneath were bright red now, slightly suppurating, hot to the hesitant touch.