"You think . . . you actually think . . ." I couldn't finish. I was flabbergasted.
"Yes. It's taken years of study and experiment to reach this point, but yes. Using lightning as a road to the secret electricity, and the secret electricity as a thoroughfare to potestas magnum universum, I intend to bring Mary Fay back to some form of life. I intend to learn the truth of what's on the other side of the door that leads into the Kingdom of Death. I'll learn it from the lips of someone who's been there."
"You're insane." I turned toward the door. "I won't play any part in this."
"I can't stop you if you really mean to leave," he said, "although to go out in a storm like this would be the height of recklessness. Would it help if I told you that I'll proceed without you, and that would put Miss Knowlton's life at risk, as well as my own? How ironic it would be if she were to die so soon after Astrid was saved."
I turned back. My hand was on the knob; rain was pounding against the door on the other side. Lightning printed a brief blue rectangle on the carpet.
"You can find out what happened to Claire." His voice was low now, soft and silky, the voice of Pastor Danny at his most persuasive.
The voice of a coaxing devil.
"You might even be able to speak with her . . . hear her tell you that she loves you. Wouldn't that be wonderful? Always assuming she's still there as a conscious entity, of course . . . and don't you want to know?"
There was another flash of lightning, and from the mahogany box, a poisonous greenish-purple wink of light shot through a gap in the latch, there at one second, gone the next.
"If it's any comfort to you, Miss Fay agreed to this experiment. The paperwork is in apple-pie order, including a signed affidavit giving me power to cease so-called heroic measures at my own discretion. In return for my brief and entirely respectful use of her remains, Mary's son will be taken care of with a generous trust fund that will see him well into adulthood. There are no victims here, Jamie."
So you say, I thought. So you say.
Thunder roared. This time, just before the stroke of lightning, I heard a faint clicking sound. Jacobs did, too.
"The time has arrived. Come into the room with me or go away."
"I'll come," I said. "And I'll be praying nothing happens. Because this isn't an experiment, Charlie. This is hell's work."
"Think what you want and pray all you like. Maybe you'll have better luck than I ever did . . . although I really doubt it."
He opened the door, and I followed him into the room where Mary Fay had died.
XIII
The Revival of Mary Fay.
There was a large east-facing window in Mary Fay's death chamber, but the storm was almost fully upon us now, and all I saw through it was a tarnished silver curtain of rain. The room was a nest of shadows in spite of the table lamp. My left shoulder brushed the bureau Jacobs had mentioned, but I never thought of the revolver in the top drawer. All my attention was taken up by the still figure lying in the hospital bed. I had a clear view, because the various monitors had been turned off and the IV pole had been pushed into the corner.
She was beautiful. Death had erased any marks incised by the disease that had infested her brain, and her upturned face--alabaster skin set off by luxuriant masses of dark chestnut hair--was as perfect as any cameo. Her eyes were shut. Thick lashes lay against her cheeks. Her lips were slightly parted. A sheet was pulled up to her shoulders. Her clasped hands lay on it, above the swell of her bosom. A snatch of poetry, something from twelfth-grade English, came to mind and chimed there: Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face . . . How statue-like I see thee . . .
Jenny Knowlton stood beside the now useless ventilator, wringing her hands.
Lightning flashed. In its momentary glare I saw the iron pole on Skytop, standing as it had for God knew how many years, challenging each storm to do its worst.
Jacobs was holding out the box. "Help me, Jamie. We must be swift. Take it and open it. I'll do the rest."
"Don't," Jenny said from her corner. "For the love of God, let her rest in peace."
Jacobs might not have heard her over the drumming rain and screaming wind. I did, but chose to ignore her. This is how we bring about our own damnation, you know--by ignoring the voice that begs us to stop. To stop while there's still time.
I opened the box. There were no rods inside, and no control box. What had taken their place was a metallic headband, as thin as the strap on a young girl's dress shoe. Jacobs took it out carefully--reverently--and gently pulled it. I saw it stretch. And when the next stroke of lightning came, once more preceded by that faint clicking sound, I saw green radiance dance across it, making it look like something other than dead metal. A snake, maybe.
Jacobs said, "Miss Knowlton, lift her head for me."
She shook her head so hard her hair flew.
He sighed. "Jamie. You do it."
I moved to the bed like a man in a dream. I thought of Patricia Farmingdale pouring salt in her eyes. Of Emil Klein eating dirt. Of Hugh Yates watching as the faithful in Pastor Danny's revival tent were replaced by huge ants. I thought, Every cure has its price.
There was another click, followed by another flash of lightning. Thunder roared, shaking the house. The bedside lamp went out. For a moment the room was plunged into shadows, and then a generator clattered to life.
"Quickly!" Jacobs's voice was pained. I saw burns across both of his palms. But he hadn't dropped the headband. It was his last conductor, his conduit to potestas magnum universum, and I believed then (and now) that not even death by electrocution would have made him drop it. "Quickly, before lightning strikes the pole!"
I lifted Mary Fay's head. Her chestnut hair fell away from that perfect (and perfectly still) face in a dark flood that pooled on the pillow. Charlie was beside me, bending down and breathing in harsh, excited gasps. His exhalations stank of age and infirmity. It occurred to me that he could have waited a few months and investigated what lay on the other side of the door personally. But that, of course, wasn't what he wanted. At the heart of every established religion is one sacred mystery that supports belief and induces fidelity, even to the point of martyrdom. Did he want to know what lay beyond death's door? Yes. But what he wanted more--I believe this with all my heart--was to violate that mystery. To drag it into the light and hold it up, screaming Here it is! What all your crusades and murder in the name of God were for! Here it is, and how do you like it?
"Her hair . . . lift her hair." He turned accusingly to the woman cowering in the corner. "Damn you, I said to cut it!"
Jenny made no reply.
I lifted Mary Fay's hair. It was as soft and heavy as a bolt of silk, and I knew why Jenny hadn't cut it. She couldn't bear to.
Jacobs slipped the thin band of metal over her forehead, so it lay tight against the hollows of her temples.
"All right," he said, straightening up.
I laid the dead woman's head gently back on the pillow, and as I looked at those dark lashes brushing against her cheeks, a comforting thought came to me: It wouldn't work. Cures were one thing; reviving a woman who had been dead for fifteen minutes--no, closer to half an hour now--was another. It simply wasn't possible. And if a stroke of lightning packing millions of volts did do something--if it caused her to twitch her fingers or turn her head--it would be no more meaningful than the jerk of a dead frog's leg when electricity from a dry cell is applied. What could he hope to accomplish? Even if her brain had been perfectly healthy, it would now be decaying in her skull. Brain death is irrevocable; even I knew that.
I stepped back. "Now what, Charlie?"
"We wait," he said. "It won't be long."
*
When the bedside lamp went out a second time, thirty seconds or so later, it didn't come back on, and I could no longer hear the roar of the gennie below the roar of the wind. Now that he had slipped the metal band around Mary Fay's head, Jacobs seemed to have lost interest in her. He was staring out the window, hands clasped b
ehind his back like a ship's captain on the bridge. The iron pole wasn't visible through the teeming rain--not even as a shadow--but we'd see it when the lightning struck it. If the lightning struck it. So far, it hadn't. Perhaps there was a God, I thought, and He'd taken sides against Charles Jacobs.
"Where's the control box?" I asked him. "Where's the connection to that pole out there?"
He looked at me as if I were an imbecile. "There's no way to control the power that lies beyond the lightning. It would fry even a titanium box to a cinder. As for the connection . . . it's you, Jamie. Haven't you guessed even yet why you're here? Did you think I brought you to cook my meals?"
Once he'd said it, I couldn't understand why I hadn't seen it before. Why it had taken me so long. The secret electricity had never really left me, or any of the people Pastor Danny had cured. Sometimes it slept, like the disease that had hidden so long in Mary Fay's brain. Sometimes it awoke and made you eat dirt, or pour salt in your eyes, or hang yourself with your pants. That small doorway needed two keys to unlock it. Mary Fay was one.
I was the other.
"Charlie, you have to stop this."
"Stop? Are you insane?"
No, I thought, that would be you. I've come to my senses.
I just hoped it wasn't too late.
"There's something waiting on the other side. Astrid called it Mother. I don't think you want to see her, and I know I don't."
I bent to strip off the metal circlet that lay across Mary Fay's brow. He grabbed me in a bearhug and pulled me away. His arms were scrawny, and I should have been able to break his grip, but I couldn't, at least not at first. He held me with all the strength of his obsession.
As we struggled in that gloomy, shadow-haunted room, the wind suddenly dropped. The rain slackened. Through the window I could see the pole again, and small rivers of water running down the wrinkles in the bulging forehead of granite that was Skytop.
Thank God, I thought. The storm is passing by.
I stopped fighting him just as I was on the verge of breaking free, and so lost my chance to end that day's abomination before it could begin. The storm wasn't over; it had only been drawing in a breath before commencing its main assault. The wind rushed back, this time at hurricane velocity, and in the split-second interval before the lightning came, I felt what I had on the day I'd come here with Astrid: the stiffening of all the hair on my body, and the sense that the air in the room had turned to oil. Not a click this time but a SNAP, as loud as a small-caliber gunshot. Jenny screamed in terror.
A jagged branch of fire shot from the clouds and struck the iron pole on Skytop, turning it blue. My head was filled with a vast choir of shrieking voices and I understood it was everyone Charles Jacobs had ever cured, plus everyone he'd ever snapped with his Portraits in Lightning camera. Not just the ones who'd suffered aftereffects; all of them, in their thousands. If that shrieking had gone on for even ten seconds, it would have driven me insane. But as the electric fire coating the pole faded, leaving it to glow a dull cherry-red like a branding iron fresh from the fire, those agonized voices also faded away.
Thunder rolled and rain swooshed down in a rush, accompanied by a rattle of hail.
"Oh my God!" Jenny screamed. "Oh my God, look at it!"
The circlet around Mary Fay's head was glowing a brilliant, pulsing green. I saw it with more than my eyes; it was deep in my brain, as well, because I was the connection. I was the conduit. The glow began to fade, and then a fresh bolt of lightning struck the pole. The choir shrieked again. This time the band passed from green into a coruscating white, too dazzling to look at. I closed my eyes and put my hands over my ears. In the darkness the afterimage of the circlet remained, now an ethereal blue.
The interior screams faded. I opened my eyes and saw the glow embedded in the circlet was fading, as well. Jacobs was staring at the corpse of Mary Fay with wide, fascinated eyes. Drool dripped from the frozen side of his mouth.
The hail gave a final furious rattle, then quit. The rain began to slacken. I saw lightning fork into the trees beyond Skytop, but the storm was already moving east.
Jenny abruptly bolted from the room, leaving the door open. I heard her crash into something as she crossed the living room, and the bang when the door to the outside--the one I'd had to struggle to close--flew open and hit the wall. She was gone.
Jacobs took no notice. He bent over the dead woman, who lay with her eyes shut and her sooty lashes brushing her cheeks. The circlet was only dead metal now. In the shadowy room, it didn't even gleam. If it had burned her forehead, the mark was beneath the band. I didn't think it had; I would have smelled charred flesh.
"Wake up," Jacobs said. When there was no response, he shouted it. "Wake up!" He shook her arm--gently at first, then harder. "Wake up! Wake up, damn you, wake up!"
Her head wagged from side to side as he shook her, as if in negation.
"WAKE UP, YOU BITCH, WAKE UP!"
He was going to pull her out of bed and onto the floor if he didn't stop, and I couldn't have borne that further desecration. I grabbed his right shoulder and hauled him away. We staggered backward in an awkward dance and crashed into the bureau.
He turned on me, his face wild with fury and frustration. "Let me go! Let me go! I saved your miserable useless life and I demand you--"
Then something happened.
*
From the bed came a low humming sound. I relaxed my grip on Jacobs. The corpse lay as it had lain, only now with its hands splayed out at its sides, thanks to Charlie's shaking.
It was just the wind, I thought. I'm sure I could have convinced myself of it, given time, but before I could even get started, it came again: a faint humming from the woman on the bed.
"She's returning," Charlie said. His eyes were huge, bulging from their sockets like the eyes of a toad squeezed by a cruel child. "She's reviving. She's alive."
"No," I said.
If he heard, he paid no mind. All of his attention was fixed on the woman in the bed, the pale oval of her face deep in the swimming shadows that infested the room. He lurched toward her like Ahab on the deck of the Pequod, dragging his bad leg. His tongue lapped at his mouth on the side that wasn't frozen. He was gasping for breath.
"Mary," he said. "Mary Fay."
The humming sound came again, low and tuneless. Her eyes remained shut, but I realized with a cold chill of horror that I could see them moving beneath the lids, as if in death, she dreamed.
"Do you hear me?" His voice, dry with an almost prurient eagerness. "If you hear me, give me a sign."
The humming continued. Jacobs put the palm of his hand on her left breast, then turned to me. Incredibly, he was grinning. In the gloom he looked like a death's head.
"No heartbeat," he said. "Yet she lives. She lives!"
No, I thought. She waits. But the wait is almost over.
Jacobs turned back to her and lowered his half-frozen face until it was only inches from her dead one--a Romeo with his Juliet. "Mary! Mary Fay! Come back to us! Come back and tell us where you've been!"
It's hard for me to think of what happened next, let alone write it down, but I must, if only as a warning for anyone else who contemplates some similar experiment in damnation, and may read these words, and turn back because of them.
She opened her eyes.
Mary Fay opened her eyes, but they were no longer human eyes. Lightning had smashed the lock on a door that was never supposed to be opened, and Mother came through.
*
They were blue eyes at first. Bright blue. There was nothing in them. They were utterly blank. They stared at the ceiling through Jacobs's avid face, and through the ceiling, and through the cloudy sky beyond. Then they came back. They registered him, and some understanding--some comprehension--came into them. She made that humming sound again, but I hadn't seen her draw a single breath. What need? She was a dead thing . . . except for those inhuman staring eyes.
"Where have you been, Mary Fay?" His voice
trembled. Saliva continued to drip from the bad side of his mouth, leaving damp spots on the sheet. "Where have you been, what did you see there? What waits beyond death? What's on the other side? Tell me!"
Her head began to pulse, as if the dead brain within had grown too big for its casing. Her eyes began to darken, first to lavender, then to purple, then to indigo. Her lips drew back in a smile that widened and became a grin. It grew until I could see all of her teeth. One of her hands trundled across the counterpane, spiderlike, and seized Jacobs's wrist. He gasped at her cold grip and flailed for balance with his free hand. I took it, and thus the three of us--two living, one dead--were joined. Her head pulsed on the pillow. Growing. Bloating. She was no longer beautiful; she was no longer even human.
The room didn't fade; it was still there, but I saw it was an illusion. The cottage was an illusion, and Skytop, and the resort. The whole living world was an illusion. What I'd thought of as reality was nothing but a scrim, as flimsy as an old nylon stocking.
The true world was behind it.
Basalt blocks rose to a black sky punched with howling stars. I think those blocks were all that remained of a vast ruined city. It stood in a barren landscape. Barren, yes, but not empty. A wide and seemingly endless column of naked human beings trudged through it, heads down, feet stumbling. This nightmare parade stretched all the way to the distant horizon. Driving the humans were antlike creatures, most black, some the dark red of venous blood. When humans fell, the ant-things would lunge at them, biting and butting, until they gained their feet again. I saw young men and old women. I saw teenagers with babies in their arms. I saw children trying to help each other along. And on every face was the same expression of blank horror.
They marched beneath the howling stars, they fell, they were punished and chivvied to their feet with gaping but bloodless bite wounds on their arms and legs and abdomens. Bloodless because these were the dead. The foolish mirage of earthly life had been torn away and instead of the heaven preachers of all persuasions promised, what awaited them was a dead city of cyclopean stone blocks below a sky that was itself a scrim. The howling stars weren't stars at all. They were holes, and the howls emerging from them came from the true potestas magnum universum. Beyond the sky were entities. They were alive, and all-powerful, and totally insane.