Zig Zag (65 page)

Victor
turned to the door and then back to Carter. In the flashlight's glow,
the door and Carter's steely eyes were the same color.

"I
can't say it's the worst thing I've ever seen, after Craig, Petrova,
and Marini. But I can say that what I saw behind that door was the
worst thing I'd ever seen up until that moment. And I've seen a lot
of things, believe me." Carter's breath was visible, just
barely, in the cold of the pantry. The flashlight made his eyes
flicker. It was as though he was on fire inside. "Good soldiers,
like Stevenson and Bergetti, people who think on their feet, who've
been through a lot, they went nuts after seeing what was down here.
And Harrison, Eagle's man who's after us right now, even he lost his
marbles. He's seen more victims than anyone else, and he's completely
deranged. He has panic attacks, crises, shit like that. And Harrison
is not exactly a sensitive guy."

Victor's
Adam's apple bobbed in a useless attempt to swallow. Carter's voice
trailed off a little, as though he were no longer addressing Victor
but speaking to the darkness surrounding him.

"I'm
going to tell you something. Thousands of miles from here, my wife
and daughter live in a house in Cape Town. They're black. I have a
gorgeous, gorgeous black daughter. She's ten years old and has
beautiful curly hair and the biggest eyes you've ever seen. Her smile
is so sweet I could stare at her all day; I'm besotted. My wife's
name is Kamaria. Means 'like the moon' in Swahili. She's tall and
stunning and dark as ebony, with a perfect, firm body. I'm so in love
with her sometimes I think I'll lose my mind. And for two years, not
a night has gone by that I don't dream of locking her up in this
pantry and tearing her to pieces. Doing exactly what
he
did
to Cheryl Ross. I can't help it. He appears, orders me to do it, and
I obey. I rip my own daughter's eyeballs out and eat them."

He
fell silent, breathing deeply. Then he turned back to Victor, calm
and indifferent.

"I'm
scared, Father. Like a little boy who's afraid of the dark. Ever
since all this started, I scream if a friend startles me. I'm scared
shitless if I have to spend the night alone. I've never been so
scared in my whole life. And I know that if your God exists, then
this
thing
is
the opposite of God. The Antihope. The Antigod. The Antichrist. Isn't
that what you call it?"

"Yes."

Carter
stared at him.

"Don't
worry, though. He's after us, not you. If your friends don't find a
way out of this soon, he'll kill us all, but he won't kill you.
You'll just lose your mind." Suddenly, he was scornful. "So
stop being such a sissy about the fucking cockroaches and get back to
opening boxes."

Then
he turned on his heel and left.

HE
woke
up with a start. He was at home. He and Ric Valente were cutting up
girls' pants. Everything else (the island, the murders) had been a
bad dream, thank goodness. The unconscious works in mysterious ways,
he thought.

"Look
at this," Ric was saying. He'd invented a machine that shredded
pants at top speed.

But
that wasn't right. He was on the floor, his bare back pressed against
a cold metal wall. He recognized the station's narrow galley kitchen.
Daylight streamed in through the window. But that wasn't what woke
him up.

"Victor?"
The two-way radio on the shelf was talking to him. "Are you
there, Victor? Could you get Carter and come to the screening room?"

"Did
you find something?" he asked, struggling to stand up.

"Just
come as fast as you can," Blanes replied.

If
the tone of his voice was anything to go by, he was terrified.

29

"THE
image
on the left is from a video; the one on the right is of a time string
from the recent past, about twenty minutes ago. We opened it using
the video. Look at the shadow behind it..."

Blanes
went up to the screen and scrolled his index finger down the image on
the right, to demonstrate. The photos were very similar. They showed
a brown laboratory rat with whiskers around its snout and little pink
claws. But the one on the right had a slightly sepia tone and a dark
halo, as if it had been superimposed several times.

There
were other differences, too.

"The
eyes on the second one...," Elisa murmured.

"We'll
get to that," Blanes cut her off. "Now, look at this."
He walked across the room again and projected another image. "This
is a copy of the Unbroken Glass. Notice anything?"

Everyone
leaned forward. Even Carter, who stood in the doorway, came in for a
closer look.

"There's
a shadow around the glass ... like the rat...," Jacqueline
ventured.

"Exactly.
We thought it was just a blurry image, but it's actually the split."

"What's
that?" asked Elisa.

"Marini
explains it all in his files. He discovered it and never let me
know..." Blanes was obviously nervous, almost in a state of
anguish. Elisa had never seen him like this before. As he spoke, he
flicked between images on the screen, rapidly clicking through them
with the mouse. "It seems that when we obtained the Unbroken
Glass, something strange happened. He saw the
same
glass
twenty minutes, three hours, and nineteen hours after the experiment.
It just kept reappearing before him: on a bus, in bed, out on the
street... Only he could see it. When he tried to pick it up, it would
disappear. He thought he was hallucinating, so he didn't say anything
about it. But he started experimenting on his own and quickly learned
that the images obtained from recent time strings had that effect on
objects. Then he tried living creatures: rats, at first. He'd film
them and open time strings from the recent past. From then on, the
same rat would appear every certain time, just like with the glass:
at home, in the car, wherever he was ... and only to him. The rats
didn't
do
anything,
they just appeared. But the lights in the surrounding sixteen inches
or so would go out. Marini was sure that the rat was using that
energy to appear. He called the appearances splits. He deduced they
were the direct consequence of joining the past with the present."

The
rats on the screen switched to cats and dogs.

"He
started practicing on bigger animals and noticed other properties.
Although there might be several animals in an image, only one would
split, and not always the same one. He thought it was random. He
could predict which one it would be by the shadows around the open
time string image, which seemed to be how it began. He also
discovered that if the animal died, there was no split. So you could
never have a dead animal and also have the
same
animal
be alive, even if they were from different time strings. Once armed
with that information, he recruited Craig. They did some more tests
and concluded that the splits were real, but that they only appeared
in the space-time of whoever had done the testing."

"How
is that possible?" Victor asked. "I mean, how can any
object or living being be in two different places simultaneously?"

"Well,
keep in mind that each time string is unique, and so is everything
they contain within them, including objects and living beings.
Reinhard had an interesting way of explaining it. He said that every
fraction of a second, we are someone new. The idea that we're always
the same is an illusion created by the brain to keep us from losing
our minds. Maybe schizophrenics just pick up on the different beings
that we all are throughout time. But when you isolate a time siring
from the recent past, the unique objects and beings inside it are
also isolated from the passing of time and ... they keep living for
the corresponding period."

Carter
snorted loudly and changed position, leaning one hand against the
doorframe.

"If
you don't understand, just ask, Carter," Blanes said.

"I'd
have to start by asking if we even speak the same language,"
Carter sneered. "Nothing you've said has made any sense to me.
It's all a bunch of mumbo jumbo."

"Just
a minute," Elisa interrupted. The colors on the screen were
reflected onto her bare legs as she sat straddling her chair. "Go
back a second, put that last image back up ... No, not that one, one
more, the enlargement of the rat's wound... That one."

The
sepia photo took up the whole screen, showing a deep gash on the
rodent's nose and another cut on its haunches. But they were clean
cuts, with no blood.

"Does
that remind you of anything, Jacqueline? That mutilation?" Elisa
could tell that the paleontologist had already caught on.

"The
Jerusalem Woman..."

"And
the dinosaur feet. Nadja pointed it out to me..."

"Notice,
too, that you can't see several of the dogs' or cats' pupils,"
Blanes pointed out. "You were going to say that before, weren't
you, Elisa?"

White
eyes.
Elisa
caught her breath.

"What
does that mean?" Victor asked.

"Marini
and Craig figured it out. It actually occurs on parts other than the
face and extremities, too. Wait." He flicked back to the
Unbroken Glass and enlarged the image. "Look at the right side.
There are tiny particles of glass missing ... even ... Look, can you
see those minute holes in the center? They aren't bubbles; there are
actually tiny pieces missing. Our brains only tend to perceive what
we could call the most anthropomorphic defects: on faces, fingers ...
But
all
of
the objects from the past, including the earth, the clouds, they are
all mutilated... The explanation is mind blowing ... and very simple,
really."

"Planck
time," Elisa murmured; it had suddenly hit her.

"Exactly.
We thought of these images as photographs, or recordings. We
knew
that
they weren't, but unconsciously we made ourselves believe it. But
these are open time strings. Each string corresponds to a Planck
time, the shortest possible interval of reality, so brief that light
can hardly travel through it. Matter is made of atoms: nuclei of
protons and neutrons with electrons spinning around them, but in such
a short space of time that the electrons haven't had time to fill the
object completely, no matter how solid it is. There are gaps, holes.
Our faces, our bodies, a table, even a mountain would all look
incomplete, mutilated. But we only realized it when we saw the
Jerusalem Woman."

"Are
you saying that during that time we
have
no
face?" Carter asked.

"We
might or might not, but most likely we don't have
all
of
it. Imagine a frying pan with a few drops of oil in it. If you tilt
if around enough, eventually the oil will cover the whole bottom of
the pan, but that takes time. In a Planck time, it's more likely that
there are still places the electrons haven't been able to reach: our
eyes, part of our face or head, an extremity, viscera. On such a tiny
scale of time and space, we're constantly changing, and not just in
appearance. You can't even send a thought from one neuron to another
during one Planck time. It's just too fleeting. So, again, what I'm
saying is that we are actually
other
beings
in
each time string. A whole different person. There are as many
different beings in us as there are time strings that have transpired
since we were born."