"Oh, they tracked a representative number of cures, too--you weren't the only one interested in aftereffects, Jamie--but that wasn't their main job. Starting ten years ago, they found several hundred of these unfortunate sufferers, and sent me regular updates. Al Stamper minded the dossiers until he left my employ; since then, I've done it myself. Many of those unlucky people have since died; others replaced them. Man is born to illness and sorrow, as you know."
I didn't answer, but the thunder did. The sky in the west was now dark with bad intentions.
"As my studies progressed--"
"Was a book called De Vermis Mysteriis part of your studies, Charlie?"
He looked startled, then relaxed. "Good for you. De Vermis wasn't just a part of my studies, it was the basis of them. Prinn went mad, you know. He ended his days in a German castle, studying abstruse mathematics and eating bugs. Grew his fingernails long, tore out his throat with them one night, and died at the age of thirty-seven, painting equations on the floor of his room in blood."
"Really?"
He gave the one-sided shrug, accompanied by the one-sided grin. "Who knows for sure? A cautionary tale if true, but the histories of such visionaries were written by people interested in making sure no one else followed their paths. Religious types, for the most part, overseers of the Heavenly Insurance Company. But never mind that now; we'll speak of Prinn another day."
I doubt it, I thought.
"As my studies progressed, my investigators began a winnowing process. Hundreds became dozens. Early this year, dozens became ten. In June, the ten became three." He leaned forward. "I was looking for the one I've always thought of as Patient Omega."
"Your last cure."
This seemed to amuse him. "You could say so. Yes, why not? Which brings us to the sad story of Mary Fay, which I just have time to tell before we remove to my workshop." He gave a hoarse laugh that reminded me of Astrid's voice before he'd cured her. "Workshop Omega, I suppose. Only this one is also a well-equipped hospital suite."
"Run by Nurse Jenny."
"What a find she was, Jamie! Rudy Kelly would have been at a loss . . . or have gone yipping down the road like a puppy with a wasp in his ear."
"Tell me the story," I said. "Let me know what I'm getting into."
He settled back. "Once upon a time, in the seventies, a man named Franklin Fay married a woman named Janice Shelley. They were graduate students in the English Department at Columbia University, and went on to teach together. Franklin was a published poet--I've read his work and it's quite good. Given more time, he might have been one of the great ones. His wife wrote her dissertation on James Joyce and taught English and Irish literature. In 1980, they had a daughter."
"Mary."
"Yes. In 1983 they were offered teaching positions at American College in Dublin, as part of a two-year exchange program. With me so far?"
"Yes."
"In the summer of 1985, while you were playing music and I was working the carny circuit with my Portraits in Lightning gaff, the Fays decided to tour Ireland before returning to the States. They rented a camper--what our British and Irish cousins call a caravan--and set out. They stopped one day for a pub lunch in County Offaly. Shortly after they left, they collided head-on with a produce truck. Mr. and Mrs. Fay were killed. The child, riding behind them and strapped in, was badly injured but survived."
It was an almost exact replay of the accident that had killed his wife and son. I thought then that he must have known it, but now I'm not so sure. Sometimes we're just too close.
"They were driving on the wrong side of the road, you see. My theory is that Franklin had a beer or glass of wine too many, forgot he was in Ireland, and reverted to his old habit of driving on the right. The same thing may have happened to an American actor, I think, although I don't recall the name."
I did, but didn't bother to tell him.
"In the hospital, young Mary Fay was given a number of blood transfusions. Do you see where this is going?" And when I shook my head: "The blood was tainted, Jamie. By the infectious prion that causes Creutzfeldt-Jakob, commonly called mad cow disease."
More thunder. Now a boom instead of a mumble.
"Mary was raised by an aunt and uncle. She did well in school, became a legal secretary, went back to college to get a law degree, quit the program after two semesters, and eventually resumed her former secretarial duties. This was in 2007. The disease she was carrying was dormant, and remained so until last summer. Then she began suffering symptoms that are normally associated with drug use, a mental breakdown, or both. She quit her job. Money was in short supply, and by October of 2013, she was also suffering physical symptoms: myoclonus, ataxia, seizures. The prion was fully awake and hard at work, eating holes in her brain. A spinal tap and MRI finally revealed the culprit."
"Jesus," I said. Old news footage, probably watched in some motel room or other while I was on the road, began playing behind my eyes: a cow in a muddy stall, legs splayed, head cocked, eyes rolling, mooing mindlessly as it tried to find its feet.
"Jesus can't help Mary Fay," he said.
"But you can."
His answer was a look I couldn't read. Then he turned his head and studied the darkening sky.
"Help me up. I don't intend to miss my appointment with the lightning. I've been waiting for it my whole life." He pointed to the mahogany box on the end table. "And bring that. I'll need what's inside."
"Magic rods instead of magic rings."
But he shook his head. "Not for this."
*
We took the elevator. He made it into the lobby under his own power, then dropped into one of the chairs near the dead fireplace. "Go to the supply room at the end of the East Wing corridor. In it you'll find a piece of equipment I've been avoiding."
That turned out to be an old-fashioned wheelchair with a wicker seat and iron wheels that screeched like devils. I rolled it down to the lobby and helped him into it. He held out his hands for the mahogany box, and I handed it over--not without misgivings. He held it curled to his chest like a baby, and as I rolled him through the restaurant and into the deserted kitchen, he resumed his story with a question.
"Can you guess why Miss Fay quit law school?"
"Because she got sick."
He shook his head disapprovingly. "Don't you listen? The prion was still dormant at that time."
"She decided she didn't like it? Her grades weren't good enough?"
"Neither." He turned to me and gave his eyebrows an old roue's waggle. "Mary Fay is that heroine of the modern age, a single mother. The child, a boy named Victor, is now seven years old. I've never met him--Mary didn't want that--but she showed me many pictures of him while we were discussing his future. He reminded me of my own little boy."
We had reached the door to the loading dock, but I didn't push it open. "Does the kid have what she has?"
"No. Not now, at least."
"Will he?"
"Impossible to be entirely sure, but he's tested negative for the C-J prion. So far, at least." More thunder boomed. The wind had begun to pick up, rattling the door and making a momentary low howling beneath the eaves. "Come on, Jamie. We really must go."
*
The loading dock stairs were too steep for him to negotiate with his cane, so I carried him. He was shockingly light. I deposited him in the passenger seat of the golf cart and got behind the wheel. As we drove across the gravel and onto the downward-sloping expanse of lawn behind the resort, there was another clap of thunder. The clouds to the west of us were purple-black stacks. As I looked, lightning forked down from their distended bellies in three different places. Any possibility of the storm missing us was gone, and when it hit, it was going to rock our world.
Charlie said, "Many years ago I told you about how the iron rod on Skytop attracts the lightning. Much more than an ordinary lightning rod would. Do you remember?"
"Yes."
"Did you ever come here and see for yourself?"
&nb
sp; "No." I told this lie without hesitation. What had happened at Skytop in the summer of 1974 was between me and Astrid. I suppose I might have told Bree, if she'd ever asked about my first time, but not Charlie Jacobs. Never him.
"In De Vermis Mysteriis, Prinn speaks of 'the vast machinery that runs the mill of the universe,' and the river of power that machinery draws on. He calls that river--"
"Potestas magnum universum," I said.
He stared at me, bushy eyebrows hiked to what had once been his hairline. "I was wrong about you. You're not stupid at all."
The wind gusted. Ripples raced across grass that hadn't been cut in weeks. The speeding air was still warm against my cheek. When it turned cold, the rain would come.
"It's lightning, isn't it?" I said. "That's the potestas magnum universum."
"No, Jamie." He spoke almost gently. "For all its voltage, lightning is a mere trickle of power, one of many such that feed what I call the secret electricity. But that secret electricity, awesome though it may be, is itself only a tributary. It feeds something much greater, a power beyond the ability of human beings to comprehend. That is the potestas magnum universum of which Prinn wrote, and it's what I expect to tap today. The lightning . . . and this"--he raised the box in his bony hands--"are only means to an end."
We passed into the trees, following the path Jenny had taken after she'd gotten her eggs. Branches swayed above us; leaves that might soon be ripped away by wind and hail were in agitated conversation. I abruptly took my foot off the cart's accelerator button, and it stopped at once, as electrically powered vehicles are wont to do.
"If you're planning to tap into the secrets of the universe, Charlie, maybe you should count me out. The cures are scary enough. You're talking about . . . I don't know . . . a kind of doorway."
A small one, I thought. Covered with dead ivy.
"Calm yourself," he said. "Yes, there's a doorway--Prinn speaks of it, and I believe Astrid did, as well--but I don't want to open it. I only want to peek through the keyhole."
"In God's name, why?"
He looked at me then with a species of wild contempt. "Are you a fool, after all? What would you call a door that's closed against all of humankind?"
"Why don't you just tell me?"
He sighed as if I were hopeless. "Drive on, Jamie."
"And if I won't?"
"Then I'll walk, and when my legs won't carry me any further, I'll crawl."
He was bluffing, of course. He couldn't have gone on without me. But I didn't know that then, and so I drove on.
*
The cabin where I'd made love to Astrid was gone. Where it had stood--swaybacked, slumping in on itself, tagged with graffiti--was a nifty little cottage, white with green trim. There was a square plot of lawn, and showy summer flowers that would be gone by day's end, stripped clean by the storm. East of the cottage, the paved road gave way to the gravel I remembered from my trips to Skytop with Astrid. It ended at that bulging dome of granite, where the iron pole jutted toward the black sky.
Jenny, dressed in a flower-print blouse and white nylon Nancy Nurse pants, was standing on the stoop, arms crossed below her breasts and hands cupping her elbows, as if she were cold. There was a stethoscope looped around her neck. I pulled up at the steps and walked around the golf cart's snout to where Jacobs was struggling to get out. Jenny came down the steps and helped me get him on his feet.
"Thank God you're here!" She had to shout to be heard over the rising wind. The pines and spruces were bending and bowing before it. "I thought you weren't coming, after all!" Thunder rolled, and when a flash of lightning followed it, she cringed.
"Inside!" I yelled at her. "Right now!" The wind had turned chill, and my sweaty skin was as good as a thermometer, registering the change in the air. The storm was only minutes away.
We got Jacobs up the steps, one on each side. The wind spun the thin remnants of his hair around his skull in whirlpools. He still had his cane, and hugged the mahogany box protectively against his chest. I heard a rattling sound, looked toward Skytop, and saw bits of scree, smashed out of the granite by the lightning strikes of previous storms, being tumbled down the slope by the wind and off the edge of the drop.
Once we were inside, Jenny couldn't get the door shut. I managed, but had to put some real muscle into it. When it was closed, the howl of the wind dropped a little. I could hear the cottage's wooden bones creaking, but it seemed sturdy enough. I didn't think we'd blow away, and the iron rod would catch any close strokes of lightning. At least I hoped so.
"There's half a bottle of whiskey in the kitchen." Jacobs sounded out of breath but otherwise calm. "Unless you've polished it off, Miss Knowlton?"
She shook her head. Her face was pale, her eyes large and shining--not with tears, but with terror. She jumped at every clap of thunder.
"Bring me a small taste," Jacobs told me. "One finger will be plenty. And pour one for yourself and Miss Knowlton. We'll toast to the success of our endeavor."
"I don't want a drink, and I don't want to toast anything," Jenny said. "I just want this to be over. I was crazy to get involved."
"Go on, Jamie," Jacobs said. "Bring three. And speedily. Tempus fugit."
The bottle was on the counter next to the sink. I set out three juice glasses and poured a splash into each. I very rarely drank, fearing booze might lead me back to dope, but I needed this one.
When I returned to the living room, Jenny was gone. Lightning flashed blue in the windows; the lamps and the overhead flickered, then came back bright.
"She needed to see to our patient," Jacobs said. "I'll drink hers. Unless you want it, that is."
"Did you send me to the kitchen so you could talk to her, Charlie?"
"Nonsense." Smiling on the good half of his face; the other half remaining grave and watchful. You know I'm lying, that half seemed to say, but it's too late now. Isn't it?
I gave him one of the juice glasses and set the one meant for Jenny on a table at the end of the couch, where magazines had been arranged in a tasteful fan. It occurred to me that I might have entered Astrid's body for the first time on the very spot where that table stood. Hold still, honey, she'd said, and then, It's wonderful.
Jacobs raised his drink. "Here's to--"
I tossed mine off before he could finish.
He looked at me reproachfully, then swallowed his--except for one drop that dribbled down the frozen side of his mouth. "You find me odious, don't you? I'm sorry you feel that way. More than you'll ever know."
"Not odious, scary. I'd find anyone scary who's monkeying around with forces beyond their comprehension."
He picked up the drink that had been meant for Jenny. Through the glass, the frozen side of his face was magnified. "I could argue, but why bother? The storm is almost upon us, and when the skies clear again, we'll be done with each other. But at least be man enough to admit you're curious. That's a large part of what brought you here--you want to know. Just as I do. As Prinn did. The only one here against her will is poor Jenny. She came to pay a debt of love. Which gives her a nobility we cannot share."
The door behind him opened. I caught a whiff of sickroom odors--pee, body lotion, disinfectant. Jenny closed it behind her, saw the glass in Jacobs's hand, and plucked it away. She swallowed with a grimace that made the tendons in her neck stand out.
Jacobs bent over his cane, studying her closely. "May I assume . . . ?"
"Yes." Thunder boomed. She gave a little scream and let go of the empty juice glass. It hit the carpet and rolled away.
"Go back in to her," Jacobs said. "Jamie and I will join you very shortly."
Jenny re-entered the sickroom without a word. Jacobs faced me.
"Listen very closely. When we go in, you'll see a bureau on your left. There's a revolver in the top drawer. Sam the security guard procured it for me. I don't expect you'll need to use it, but if you do, Jamie . . . don't hesitate."
"Why in God's name would I--"
"We spoke o
f a certain door. It's the door into death, and sooner or later each one of us grows small, reduced to nothing but mind and spirit, and in that reduced state we pass through, leaving our bodies behind like empty gloves. Sometimes death is natural, a mercy that puts an end to suffering. But all too often it comes as an assassin, full of senseless cruelty and lacking any vestige of compassion. My wife and son, taken in a stupid and pointless accident, are perfect examples. Your sister is another. They are three of millions. For most of my life I've railed against those who try to explain that stupidity and pointlessness with prattlings about faith and children's stories about heaven. Such nonsense never comforted me, and I'm sure it never comforted you. And yet . . . there is something."
Yes, I thought as thunder cracked hard enough and close enough to shake panes of window glass in their frames. Something is there, beyond the door, and something will happen. Something very terrible. Unless I put a stop to it.
"In my experiments I've glimpsed intimations of that something. I've seen its shape in every cure the secret electricity has effected. I even know it from the aftereffects, some of which you have noted. Those are trailing fragments of some unknown existence beyond our lives. Everyone wonders at one time or other what lies beyond the wall of death. Today, Jamie, we'll see for ourselves. I want to know what happened to my wife and son. I want to know what the universe has in store for all of us once this life is over, and I intend to find out."
"We're not meant to see." Shock had stolen most of my voice, and I wasn't sure he'd hear me over the rising wind, but he did.
"Can you tell me you don't think about your sister Claire every day? That you don't wonder if she still exists somewhere?"
I said nothing, but he nodded as if I had.
"Of course you do, and we'll have answers shortly. Mary Fay will give them to us."
"How can she?" My lips felt numb, and not from the alcohol. "How can she, if you cure her?"
He gave me a look that asked if I were really that clueless. "I can't cure her. Those eight diseases I mentioned were picked because none are amenable to cure by the secret electricity."
The wind rose to a shout, and the first erratic bursts of rain struck the west side of the house, hitting so hard they sounded like thrown pebbles.
"Miss Knowlton turned off Mary Fay's ventilator as we were coming here from the resort. She's been dead for almost fifteen minutes. Her blood is cooling. The computer inside her skull, wounded by the disease she carried from childhood but still marvelous, has gone dark."