The Reality Conspiracy (13 page)

"Food was always my undoing," Sullivan said after rinsing his mouth with ale. "I was always a little fat kid. At the orphanage, St. Luke's—gosh, I must have been fourteen, fifteen years old at the time—they wouldn't exempt me from physical education in spite of my weight and my asthma. And, man, I hated to go to that gymnasium, not because of Father Mosely—he was the coach—but because of the other kids. They made fun of me." Sullivan chuckled sadly as he remembered. "When Father wasn't looking they'd pull down my shorts, or snap me on the ass with a wet towel. Then they'd remind me to turn the other cheek. After a while I refused to shower at all. Father would overlook this little breech of protocol and let me go directly back to class, drenched with sweat. Then they'd make fun of my smell'. 'Do you smell bacon frying?' they'd say."

LeClair half smiled. "Children are such . . . savages, but I've always thought the little Catholic children were the worst of all. Little demons. Horrible little sadists."

"You can imagine what my self-image was like. I remember one time when physical education was the last class of the day. We all had to do ten chin-ups before we were permitted to leave. The meanest kids, of course, were also the strongest—it must be some kind of natural law—they'd do their chin-ups and get out. But there were enough kids left over to give me plenty of guff.

"After a monumental effort—a small miracle, really—I had just two chin-ups to go. Just two. I'll never forget it. After the eighth, my arms felt like they were going to stretch and rip apart; my shoulders hurt like hell. I pulled and pulled, grunting all the time. Kids were cheering and laughing. Someone oinked every time I grunted. Sweat just pumped out of me in buckets. Finally, I hung there like a fat apple on a limb, almost ready to drop. 'I can't do it, Father,' I said. I think I was crying but no one could tell because I was sweating more. 'Please, Father, I can't.' I was begging, actually begging; I remember every humiliating syllable. All I wanted to do was give up and get out and hide forever. I was terrified that I couldn't hold on much longer and I knew if I lost my grip and fell I'd be even more of a laughingstock. So I was trying to get Father Mosely to excuse me. I wanted him to let me off the hook, comfort me. I wanted him to say, 'It's all right, Billy.' But he wouldn't; he'd have no part of it.

"He said, 'You can do it. Concentrate, William.'

"And of course, I did. I hated him just then. But only for a while. Funny, isn't it, how a little thing like that can change the whole direction of your life? He'd taught me something, you see. The moral of the story is nothing I can articulate, but I definitely learned something important. After that. I took care of myself, lost weight and stayed fit. In fact, I think it was then that I first thought about becoming a priest."

The waitress brought another ale and another cider. Sullivan smiled at her. "I think you're trying to get me drunk." She grinned back at him and winked mischievously.

A high-pitched beep, its source unknown, puzzled the men for a moment. "It is my pager," Father LeClair said in surprise. "Please excuse me, Bill. I'll just be a minute."

As LeClair got up to phone the hospital, Father Sullivan took a folded piece of paper from the pocket of his jacket. It was a photocopy of a church document; the subject: Father Hamilton Mosely. Again Sullivan looked at the form, nearly certain he wasn't reading it correctly. Could it be a misprint? A typographical error? Yes, he thought,
it has to be a mistake
. Father Mosely had seemed like an old man even then, back in high school, in 1941. On the folded paper, the old priest's birthday was given as January 5, 1886. That would make him more than one hundred years old! Was it possible? Could the withered fetus in the hospital bed be the same Father Hamilton Mosely listed on the paper? Was there some possibility that the shriveled old man was not the person Sullivan remembered?

No. Impossible. There could be no mistake.

"Bill." Father LeClair hurried toward the table. He looked worried. "Something's wrong at the hospital," he said. "We have to go back."

Boston, Massachusetts

S
tanley Gudhausen phoned Gloria to tell her she could take Monday off. There was no reason for her to keep the office open while he was up north in Vermont.

Now he looked around with great satisfaction at the orderly way she had left everything before leaving work yesterday
. If there is a God
, Dr. Gudhausen chuckled,
I should thank Him for creating obsessive-compulsives
. The trouble with them—with Gloria away—was that he couldn't find anything! Where would she have filed Dr. Ralph Aldrich's paper on the dangers of treating multiple personality? It wasn't under "A-L" for Aldrich. Or "APA" for the annual American Psychiatric Association meetings.

Damn it, he should have asked her while he had her on the phone.

Gudhausen sighed and looked at his watch. In less than an hour Karen Bradley would pick him up and they'd be off to Vermont. He couldn't afford to waste any more time poking around in the filing cabinets.

He returned to his office and sat at his desk, eagerly fishing around the bottom drawer for one of the Cuban cigars he'd smuggled back from Toronto.

With Gloria away, he could smoke in peace, without listening to her sputter about the smell and his heart condition and the bad example he was setting for his patients.

Gudhausen laughed out loud in the empty office.
She's a great gal
, he thought,
and I'm lucky to have her. But when she puts something away, God damn it, no one can find it but her! Must be some feminist plot to make herself indispensable
.

Reclining, feet on the desktop, he puffed and thought, trying to recall the controversial assertions Dr. Aldrich had made about multiples.

The various personalities a patient displayed—called alters—were often remarkably dissimilar. Different, highly contrasting IQs were routine among alters, so were different aptitudes and talents. But Aldrich had gone further than that. He had argued that there were sometimes physiological changes, too. Some alters had eye problems, some did not, suggesting the shape of the eye had, in reality, changed. Muscle and skin tone varied dramatically. Wounds and blemishes could appear and vanish. Aldrich had demonstrated that changes in personality are always accompanied by changes in brain activity. He had used PET scans to show separate cortical activity in the brain of each personality.

The extent of physical change possible, of course, remained to be determined. Aldrich had suggested that in certain advanced instances, crimes committed by mutated alters might make identification impossible.

But the most controversial assertion of all was when Aldrich stated that certain of the alter personalities can be quite psychic. He emphatically encouraged his assembled colleagues to study multiples in order to learn how science can help develop psychic capabilities in healthy subjects.

That notion had gone over about as well as a fifty-pound sack of horse shit, Gudhausen recalled.

Still, his imagination locked on that one charged word: psychic.

At that time Gudhausen himself had been skeptical, but he hadn't rejected the possibility out of hand. Now he wondered, could a shared consciousness exist, psychically, between two multiples who were two hundred miles apart? Suppose little Lucy Washburn of St. Albans, Vermont, and Herbert Gold of Andover, Massachusetts, were in some kind of "psychic link"? Might that not explain the arrival of the mysterious Mr. Splitfoot?

"Hell," he said, "I'll just phone Aldrich. I could easily spend the rest of the day looking for that goddamn file." He began to rotate his Rolodex, looking for the California number, when he heard a gentle tap at the study's door.

He looked at his watch; too soon for Karen Bradley. Must be Gloria coming in to tidy up or do a little weekend organizing. "Come in," he said, thinking, What luck! Now she can find the file and save a long distance call. He wouldn't mention the call, of course; she always teased him about his unnecessary and inconsistent frugality.

Again the tapping.

"It's unlocked, Gloria."

The door opened a crack and the smiling face of Herbert Gold peeked in.

Gudhausen stood up. "Herb! I must be psychic; I was just thinking about you."

Gold kept smiling.

"Well, come in, come in and sit down. This is a wonderful surprise!" Dr. Gudhausen extended his right hand.

Grinning like a goofy redheaded farmboy, Herbert Gold shook hands and shuffled his feet. "Hope you don't mind me walkin' right in. Guess Gloria must have stepped out or something."

"Of course I don't mind. But Gloria doesn't work Saturdays. I know she'll be sorry she missed you. Hey, it's great to see you, Herb."

Gudhausen sensed something wasn't right. Something was just a little off, a little . . .

"But how'd you get in? Wasn't the main door locked?"

"Oh no, nothing's locked, but if this is a bad time—"

"No, I don't mean that. It's just that it's such a surprise. Sit down, Herb. Tell me how things are going. How's the family?"

Herbert sat in the chair next to Gudhausen's desk. The strange grin never leaving his freckled face.

Gudhausen extruded a mushroom-shaped blast of cigar smoke, then he thought: "Does the smoke bother you? Should I put this out?"

"No, hell, I like smoke."

"Can I offer you one?"

"Tryin' to quit. But you'll smoke enough for both of us." He took an exaggerated deep breath and laughed nervously.

"So tell me, Herb, what brings you here? I was beginning to believe I might never see you again."

Still smiling, the big man squirmed in his seat. "Well, I . . . know you've been awful good to me and my family . . . ."

Dr. Gudhausen could see that Gold was struggling with something. The man shook his head, his lips pressed tightly together. Still smiling, he began to perspire.

"Is there someone else who wants to talk to me?"

"Ah, no. Not really. The others, they all left me to do it."

"Do what, Herbert? You are Herbert now, aren't you?"

"Yes, I'm Herbert. We're all Herbert. That's what you showed us, Doctor. We're all Herbert."

It was as if Gold could not keep from smiling. His lips and cheeks seemed to stretch and lose color. Sweat and plump teardrops rolled down his face.

"Herb . . ."

Gold stood up, visibly agitated. He paced around the office. "You know me better'n anybody else, Doctor G. I mean you're the one who found out what kind of sickness I got. You understand I ain't a bad man . . . ."

"That's right, Herb. I know you're a good man, no matter which of the voices is speaking out of your mouth."

"And you know I've never done nothin' bad, nothin' really truly bad."

"Yes, I know that."

"So I gotta tell you, Doctor, somethin' real bad's happenin'. Somethin' real, real bad. And the thing I don't understand is that it's me who's doin' it. I feel it happenin'. I see it. I watch through my own fuckin' eyes as I . . . as I . . ."

"It's okay, Herb. We've got time. You relax now. Just sit back down in the chair and try to relax."

The big man dropped heavily into his seat beside the doctor's desk. He held his hand above the desktop. "See that," he said, "steady as a statue. But inside I ain't steady; I'm all tore up. I don't know what's happenin' to me."

"Go on . . . ."

Herbert let his hand fall to the desktop. Pale and freckled, it lay before Dr. Gudhausen like a squid on a dinner plate.

After a moment the big man shook his head, violently, like a dog throwing off rainwater. "I got this song or poem or somethin' rollin' around in my head. Don't know where I picked it up, don't know where it come from. And, Christ! I can't shut it off!"

Gold lifted his head to face Gudhausen. His cheeks were slick with tears. Instantly, the frightened look vanished and the unsettling grin returned.

"Can you tell me the poem, Herb?"

Herb shook his head. "No, I don't think I can do that."

"Can anyone tell me the poem?"

Betsy Bottom's voice spoke through Gold's mouth, high-pitched, simpering, petulant. "It's not a poem, silly, it's a riddle."

"Say it."

"Noooooo." Gudhausen recognized Sasha's low, sensual tones coming through the rugged mechanic's grinning mouth.

The doctor tried an old tack. "Then tell me something else instead."

Now Thornton: "The raging rocks, with shivering shocks, shall break the locks of prison gates; and Phibbus' car shall shine from far, and make and mar the foolish Fates."

After all his years of experience and study, this was a phenomenon that continued to baffle Gudhausen: just how was it possible for a burly middle-aged automobile mechanic with an eighth-grade education to quote satirical doggerel from Shakespeare?

"Is that the riddle?" Gudhausen asked.

Betsy Bottom shook her head coyly and pouted, "No, silly."

"I'd like to hear the riddle. I'm pretty good at riddles."

"Okay, now I'll tell it to you." Prissily, Betsy Bottom began to recite: