Ageless darkness, ageless pain. She was within the corpus of the tree—yet slowly was becoming that entity. Already she could feel a little of what it was to be this thing—she could feel enough to know she wanted to know no more. The desolation of the hoary creature was excruciating. Limbs twisted in ancient grief, seeking solace; time-worn bark made bark-thick sounds of woe, torment, ageless pain.
Fantabel whipped past, searing one branch, setting another afire. Tangina cringed—that part of her that was already the tree-being—in agony, her fingertips in flame. The tree desperately waved its branch, and the fire went out: Tangina’s fingers throbbed with memory. Smoke rose from the blackened branches. Sceädu fluttered over, feasted on the smoke, then scuttled away, frolicsome, fugitive.
Tangina could not grasp the sense of it—the pain, the meaning, were incomprehensible. Yet only in meaning was there escape. Despair welled up in her.
No, she must not despair. This was not her hell; it belonged to another. To many others, perhaps. But not to Tangina. And not to Carol Anne.
Carol Anne, that was the crux. Carol Anne was the reason Tangina was here—the ache of the tree could not obscure that purpose. From the depths of her soul, Tangina cried out: “Carol Anne! Be! Carol Anne, deliver me from this ghastly wood.”
Almost immediately she felt it: “Mommy. Mommy, where are you?”
A child’s voice, Carol Anne’s. It appeared to Tangina as a color, rather than a sound—a color that grew in tone, that Tangina followed to its source, struggling, straining . . . until, with an exultant WHOOMP she found herself propelled far beyond the tree.
She looked back down to see Fantabel bolt once more through the branches, then rush off into another plane. Sceädu cavorted in the mists. The tree-creature railed.
Tangina floated in a cirrhus conformation. “Carol Anne! I am here for you!”
“Mommy!” came the call. “Mommy, where are you?”
“Your mommy’s not here, darling,” Tangina projected. “But I’m here to help you. Don’t be afraid.”
“Where are you?” echoed Carol Anne’s voice. “I want to go home.”
“You will, child. Only do as I say.”
Suddenly the ether crackled.
“Something’s coming!” Carol Anne whimpered. “I think it’s coming again!”
A high, quavery vibration expanded and contracted, like pulsing fear.
Then a vile grunting came.
“Carol Anne! Do you see a light? Go toward the light! Go toward the light!”
“Mommy told me not to!” squealed the voice. Terror, indecision; violation of vows.
“Carol Anne! Go toward the light, but don’t go into it! Your mommy just said not to go into it! Go toward the light, child. The Thing is afraid of the light! Stand near the light, Carol Anne, and the Thing won’t come near you! Stay near the light, but don’t look into it! Do you hear me, child?”
The smell of uncertainty clamored all around, like a great noise.
“Do you hear me, child!” Tangina screamed, trying to force her will on the frightened child.
The wind rose, buffeted Tangina’s spirit; she did not resist. Explosions of light flooded her; neither did she resist this assault. Her deepest, embryonic horror rose up in physical manifestation, ripped her open, poised its fangs. Still, she tossed without opposition, rolled with total surrender. The fear alone was almost unbearable.
And then it stopped.
All was silent once again. The lightless void, the infinity out of time.
“Carol Anne,” Tangina called weakly. She floated at her farthest reaches. It would be a long time before she got home.
“It went away,” came Carol Anne’s voice, quivering with relief. “I’m alone again.”
“Are you near the light, child?”
“I’m near it, but I won’t go in. I promise.” She began to cry.
“Don’t even look at it, Carol Anne. Don’t worry, child. We’ll have you home soon.”
The little girl continued to cry. Tangina’s strength was gone, though; she could do nothing more. Limply, she floated, letting the magnet of her body exert its warm attraction.
For a time, there was nothing. Then, for a while, a brilliant vortex took hold of her, spun her slowly at first, then faster and faster, into its center, spinning, screeching, approaching the speed of light, until at the last photon’s-breadth away, it whipped her out again, into the ether.
Once, two presences fought over her—part of her was shredded in the process—but the two nonsubstances became entangled with each other, and Tangina floated free, while they reveled and tossed in their own mutual agonies.
There were many ways into a place, and many ways out. Tangina knew she’d been touched by great evil as she’d guided Carol Anne to temporary safety; this evil clung to her, and made the ways out labyrinthine, cluttered with decay. But virtue had touched her, too, and not so long ago. She trusted the sureness of his hand to lead her back to the fleshly form that had so lately housed her soul.
For a long and delicate instant she floated, without intention, in the void.
Finally, she was aware of something calling her, something on another plane. Voices. A jumble of cries.
She felt a tingling, as of a sleeping limb regaining its circulation, the pins and needles of returning sensation. It was a characteristic feeling. It meant she was back in her body.
She opened her eyes. There was a hubbub of activity around her: nurses running all over, doctors calling out orders, medical students looking on in dismay or fascination. She closed her eyes again.
“She’s alive!” someone yelled. “I just saw her open her eyes!”
“Get that I.V. started anyway!”
“Doyle, draw some bloods!”
“She’s got a pulse again—thready, but it’s there!”
“Somebody check her pupils.”
Tangina felt somebody pull open her eyelids; then a bright light was shoved into her face. She knocked it away with her hand. “Get that light out of my eyes,” she rasped. She was too tired for this nonsense.
“Hey, she’s okay,” somebody laughed.
“All right, everybody, show’s over. Let’s get her back in bed.”
Tangina felt eight hands lift her off the floor, carry her unevenly for several steps, and set her down on a bed. She opened her eyes once more to see several people milling around now—one was drawing blood from her arm, one was starting an intravenous line, one was taping electrodes to her chest, taking an electrocardiogram.
Dr. Berman stepped into her field of vision. “You gave us quite a scare,” he smiled reassuringly. “We came in on rounds, and for a second, there, it looked as if you weren’t breathing.”
Tangina wished he would go away. She was simply too exhausted to deal with this earnest young man’s expectations and fears. Matters of greater moment depended on her full attention; she needed rest now, to prepare. Yet she knew this sentiment to be grossly unfair—in all likelihood, it was this earnest young man’s expectations and fears that had brought her back at all, had guided her, even seduced her back into her body, that she might regather her forces, to try once more to save the girl. Well. Later, she would thank him.
In any case, Dr. Berman kept talking, enunciating every syllable loudly and with exaggerated facial movement, as if Tangina were deaf or retarded. “Everything is fine, now, though. You just had a little temporary slowing of the heart—it’s not dangerous—now everything is back to normal.”
She closed her eyes again, courting bitter sleep—for nothing was back to normal, and danger panted at the door.
Martha Lesh sat uncomfortably at the end of a large oval conference table, picking at her cuticles as people began to filter into the room and take chairs. The conference room was big, with two closed-circuit television sets suspended from the ceiling at one end, a modern green blackboard along the side wall, a 16-mm movie screen at the back. Thirty wooden chairs surrounded the table. By the time Martha began her presentation, most were filled.
It was a joint committee meeting, called by Dr. Lesh expressly to have her tapes seen and to be heard out. Members of the Human Research Committee, the Parapsychology Committee, the Psychiatry Department, and a smattering of medical students were present. Consequently, vis-a-vis parapsychology in general, this collection of professionals included believers, half-believers, nonbelievers, and antibelievers.
It was a formidable ensemble; Martha was uncertain of her approach. A few of them were already looking at their watches.
“I called you all here on this rather short notice because of data I’ve collected during the past two days which is . . . striking. So striking, I hardly know what to think, let alone how to proceed.” She paused, looking for an encouraging glance from the assembled group; but there was none. She stood, and began to pace off her nervous energy as she continued speaking.
“Most of you are familiar with the basic form my research has been taking—hypnosis of paired subjects, suggestion of specific dreams to one, open-ended dreams to the other, then having blind independent judges try to match transcripts of one subject’s dreams to the other subject—to look for any correspondence which might suggest telepathic, or otherwise paranormal transfer of information from one dreamer to the other. As some of you know, my results have been quite promising in a few instances, more equivocal in others. A number of weeks ago, I began working with Subject T, a self-proclaimed, though putatively reluctant, psychic. Approximately sixty-five hours ago, our investigations took a troubling turn.
“We’d been tracing the frequency of her ponto-geniculo-occipital electrical activity as it correlated with observed psychic phenomena, when suddenly—in the lab that night—her PGO area started discharging out of control—unlike anything any of us had ever seen. Simultaneously, the Subject began speaking in the voice of a small child—apparently while she was dreaming. My colleague, Dr. Ryan Mitchell, noted, rather astutely, that the frequency of the brain wave in question varied according to the Subject’s position—specifically, when she faced a certain direction, the electrical spikes observed were much more active. The analogy we’ll refer back to, in this regard, will be to a receiving antenna which sustains maximal reception when aimed specifically at the source of transmission.”
“Did I hear that correctly?” interrupted Dr. Hoffman, from the Medical School. “Are you suggesting this woman’s
brain
was receiving messages that you were able to pick up on your EEG?” His voice was thick with derision.
“At the moment, I’m not suggesting anything. I’m merely presenting the data, as we gathered it, chronologically. When I am finished speaking—” she emphasized the last two words “—I will welcome any suggestions, postulations, or courses of action anyone can offer.”
Hoffman nodded in token apology, like a naughty boy caught making faces at the teacher. Lesh continued.
“Because of requests made by the Subject, and because this turn of events was so novel and unanticipated, we modified the remainder of the experiment—turning it into its own, new, pilot study—in the following way.
“On the next night, we placed the Subject, myself, and two assistants in a mobile unit with EEG and telemetric capabilities, and began driving in whatever direction resulted in an increase of the type of electrical brain-wave activity in the Subject that I have just described—
as if
she were, in fact, a receiving unit we were using to home in on a transmitter.”
Hoffman rolled his eyes to the ceiling. Lesh ignored him. “We arrived, in the morning, at the home of a suburban couple who appeared deeply troubled. They asked for our help. Subject T was in a state of exhaustion, so at this point I had my assistants bring her back here, to the hospital, while I remained with the family we’d contacted.
“During the interview which followed, they expressed to me the belief that their house had become inhabited by something like a poltergeist.”
At this, Hoffman stood, smiled, looked pointedly at the clock on the wall. “If you’ll excuse me, I have a one o’clock that I really mustn’t be late for.” He departed, followed by one of his junior faculty and two medical students.
Lesh waited until they were gone before continuing. “A poltergeist, for those of you unfamiliar with the term, is a ‘noisy, or rattling spirit.’ Mr. and Mrs. F described to me episodes in which pictures had fallen from the walls, winds had blown in closed rooms, knocks had been heard, lights flashed, and so on. However, most disturbing to them, understandably, was the fact that their five-year-old daughter had disappeared. And more upsetting still was the fact that they could
hear
her—in the television set.
“Not physically inside, you understand—but her voice, and sometimes a hazy image would appear when the set was tuned to the static of an ‘in-between’ channel. The higher UHF channels seemed to work best, they told me.
“They were . . . distraught. I didn’t know what to think—but since I’d gone this far, I decided to follow it to its conclusion, whatever that was. So we set up equipment that night—TV cameras, ion flux analyzers, magnometers, infrared lenses, and so on. The armamentarium of my discipline. What we saw, and finally recorded, has given me pause—as I said, I hardly know what to think.
“First, we examined the room in which the child was said to have disappeared—at least, we tried to examine it. Objects were moving inside it—flying about, actually—to such a great extent, we were unable to enter.
“Next, Mrs. F communicated with her daughter—Carol Anne—through the television in the living room. We all heard the girl’s voice on the set—the same voice, incidentally, we’d heard Subject T speaking in the night before. The little girl said she saw a bright light; we advised her to stay away from it. More of this later.
“Next we witnessed a series of materializations . . .” Here Dr. Lesh opened her briefcase and began passing around some of the artifacts that had manifested. “These items literally appeared in mid-air before us, and fell to the floor.” Some murmuring among the audience.
“Then there was this.” She pulled several 8- x 10-inch blow-ups from her briefcase. “One of my assistants went upstairs at this point, to investigate the possibility of there being a covert transmitter in the house accounting for the voice we were hearing. While in the course of this investigation, the assistant had the acute and painful sensation of being bitten in the side . . .”