A Vision of Fire (21 page)

“Correct.”

“So assuming all of that to be true, why are these loud, aggressive souls getting stronger now?”

“That I cannot say.”

Caitlin sat back hopelessly.

“But as you seek understanding,” Vahin went on, “keep this in mind. These ‘aggressive souls,' as you call them, may be from one event, souls that are already powerfully linked.”

“One event? But where?”

“The transpersonal plane is boundless. Do not seek them somewhere else. Look for them some
when
else.”

CHAPTER 28

M
aanik and her mother stood bundled in their winter coats, watching the morning sun from the penthouse balcony. As the golden rays warmed their faces, the young woman said, “It feels almost like summer.”

Hansa, shivering, hugged her daughter close, happy that she was feeling
anything
. This was an unexpected blessing after the difficulties of the last two days. Her husband had barely been home since the attack at Jammu. This morning when Hansa woke, he had already left again. Maanik had awakened early as well. Hansa found her lying on her side, absently stroking Jack London, and she had readily agreed to come outside.

“What do you think?” Hansa asked, looking across the long balcony, wanting to savor the time with her. “We could do some homeschooling out here, catch up on some of your homework.”

Her daughter seemed to be smiling, her head tilted toward the sun, her eyes shut.

“Maanik?”

“Yes?”

“What do you think about that?”

Maanik moved slowly in her natural spotlight. “I'm sorry?”

“Homeschooling, out here.”

“I like it,” she replied.

Hansa gave her a little squeeze and began to rearrange the chairs, pulling a couple of large potted plants out of the way. She was startled to see how weak she had become and resolved to start her walking routine again.

“Maanik, how do you think I would do on your father's NordicTrack?”

Maanik laughed.

“Do you think that's funny?” her mother asked, smiling. “Maybe when you're feeling better, you can teach me.”

“It makes me tired.”

“That machine? You can outrun your father.”

“I'm going back to bed,” Maanik said.

“Don't you want to stay out here a little longer? You look so happy here.”

“I want to lie down.” Suddenly, she sounded frail.

Hansa walked toward her. “Let me help—”

“I can do it.”

The woman watched as Maanik disappeared behind the shining glass of the terrace door. Then she continued rearranging the furniture, in case Maanik missed the fresh air and chose to return.

From inside, Jack London howled. Hansa dropped the chair she was moving and ran toward Maanik's bedroom. The girl was still in the hallway, blocked by the barking dog, who, facing the open bedroom door, was making short, tentative bounds forward, then skittering backward as if trying both to attack the entry and avoid it.

“Jack London, quiet!” Hansa yelled.

He partly obeyed, his yelps becoming low growls. Hansa turned toward her daughter.

“No!” she cried.

Maanik's left arm had stiffened and her right hand had extended.

“Maanik, stay with me,” she implored.

The dog began to bark again.

“Quiet!” Hansa yelled.

Kamala arrived, roused by the commotion.

“Take him away!” Hansa snapped.

Kamala edged around them, reaching for the beagle. Maanik made a swift, sweeping motion with her right hand in the air and without being touched, Jack London flew across the floor and hit the wall to their right. His howling turned into tiny frightened yips and he cowered low by the wall where he'd been thrown.

“Maanik!” Hansa grabbed at her daughter's left shoulder and spun her around.

Maanik's eyes were shut, her expression relaxed. She slipped from her mother's grip, heading toward the bedroom door.

“Don't go in there!” Hansa shrieked, and tried to pull her back, tried to turn her to face away from the bedroom. Maanik stiffened and shook her off. Hansa gasped as blood dripped down her daughter's wrists and along her fingers, even though her arms were still bandaged under her coat. Maanik's eyes opened and she began walking backward, lifting her hands and rubbing her forearms as she gazed stonily at her mother. Hansa followed her into the bedroom, reaching toward her child's ear, but Maanik jerked away.

“Stop!” Hansa cried, and again reached for Maanik's ear.

“You cannot take me back,” Maanik said.

“From where? Please talk to me!”

“When she burns, I burn,” Maanik said. “I have to go so it will stop.”

“Go where?” Hansa pleaded. She was trying to think like Dr. O'Hara, trying to get information.

“Up,” Maanik said. “That is the only escape.”

“Up where?” Hansa asked, trembling as they moved farther into the foul air of the bedroom.

“Beyond . . .
fera-cazh
.”

“Where . . .
what
is ‘
fera-cazh
'?”

Maanik's answer was a full-throated scream followed by the ritual clawing at her arms. Hansa tried to hug her but once again Maanik twisted out of reach, backing against the bed. Making a concerted effort to reach her ear, Hansa practically yanked her daughter's arm to her side—and was thrown back. Staggering, she saw a plume of smoke rising from the bed. Hansa circled, frantic, and only then saw that it was coming not from the bed but from the bottom of Maanik's nightdress, under her coat. With a hiss, another plume rose from near one of the girl's pockets. Maanik's hair was lifting into the air, rising not unlike the smoke trails—and Hansa realized she smelled burning hair. She violently slapped her daughter's hands aside, plunged her fingers toward Maanik's ear, and shouted, “Blackberries!”

Maanik wobbled on her feet but did not stop screaming or slapping at her arms. “Let—me—burn!” she choked out, before the seeming anguish of physical pain took over her voice again and she wailed.

Smoke rose from Maanik's left hand as a black spot spread across her skin. Hansa was trying to reach for it when suddenly Maanik spun and ran for the tall bedroom window. She slammed up the latch, flung open the sash, and with her bare hands struck and clawed at the screen beyond in an effort to shred it. Hansa shouted at her, grabbed at her, and struggled to keep a hold on her, but she didn't stop. Maanik punctured the black mesh and pulled at the ragged hole with both hands, making a large opening. Hansa screamed for Kamala's help as five black patches opened on the back of Maanik's coat, smoke coiling toward the ceiling. Then just as suddenly, Maanik thrust her hand onto the upper frame of the window and, searching with her foot for the lower frame, hoisted herself up.

Hansa felt a surge of power and adrenaline unlike anything she had ever experienced. Vaulting forward, she grabbed Maanik around the waist and wrenched her from the open window. They tumbled to the floor. She quickly pulled the lower edge of Maanik's coat up over her daughter's back and head and yanked it down so that her head and arms were encased. Hugging Maanik firmly, she dragged her across
the bedroom to the doorway. Maanik struggled and kicked and Hansa could hear her screaming—once more in the language she did not understand. The woman wanted to vomit from fear but the noxious odor from her daughter's hair and the impossible heat of her body kept her focused. Kamala finally arrived in the room with scratches evident from a struggle with the dog. Together they manhandled Maanik down the hall to the small bathroom with a stand-up shower. Dragging the young woman into the tiny cubicle, Hansa slammed her hand on the water lever and cold water flooded down on them. While Kamala peeled the girl's clothes from her struggling body, Hansa maneuvered a hand into the mêlée, pinched the girl's ear, and shouted, “Blackberries!”

Maanik went limp.

CHAPTER 29

M
aryam walked Caitlin to her Iran Air departure gate. It was a surprisingly emotional parting, given how little time the women had spent together, but what they had witnessed had altered them both.

Caitlin stepped into the queue for boarding. Almost immediately she got a text from Ben:
M deteriorating. Fire a real hazard.

The person behind her clucked her tongue; the queue had moved but she had not. Caitlin stepped to the side.

Juggling her phone, ticket, passport, and a letter from the Iranian ambassador providing clearance to go home, she typed back:
I have new info. I'll come straight from airport.

She waited; no response. She considered calling Ben but knew the explanations would not make a short conversation. Final boarding was called. Caitlin, last in line, hurriedly presented her ticket and was waved in.

Iran Air, it turned out, did not allow its passengers to use their cell phones or access the Internet during flights. That was frustrating; Caitlin knew that for thirteen hours she would wonder what Ben meant by “real hazard.” Had Maanik tried to set herself on fire like Atash? Negotiations be damned: if Maanik had harmed herself be
yond scraping her forearms, Mrs. Pawar wouldn't have waited. The girl would already be in the hospital—she would at this moment be drugged into an overmedicated automaton, and that would be the end of the exploration into what was truly happening to her.

Hold on
, Caitlin urged Maanik in her head.
Hold on till I'm back.

Of course she didn't believe Maanik would hear that, and yet the impulse did not seem so crazy after all she had experienced.

What if Vahin is right?
If Maanik's mind was open to this “transpersonal plane,” and Caitlin herself had some access to it as well, wasn't it conceivable that a message
could
pass from her to Maanik? Vahin had speculated that Caitlin may have acquired access because she had placed herself in such close psychic proximity to the affected young adults.

“Vibrations,” he had said to her, pressing pamphlets and booklets into her hands before she left. “Each of us is like a tuning fork that does not stop. Like the tea, the soul vibrates and survives outside the body, outside of time. In life, we change pitch and resonate with each other, sometimes in pairs, sometimes in groups. Why should the soul be different?” He added in parting, “There are those of us who believe it is the purpose of all life to achieve a complete resonance—all of us as one.”

“Make me one with everything.” Caitlin found herself muttering the oft-mocked phrase of Eastern mystics.

“New-agey” was the expression that came to mind. Yet everything she had seen, the gestures and words, the shared symbol, the reactions of the animals, was exactly that: new-agey, mystical, quasireligious, fantastic. Choose the outré word that fit. But she could not disavow any of it, from the floating hair and fabric to the shock waves to the visions. Those were a part of that strange reality Vahin advocated. What made his explanation less valid than any other?

Caitlin mentally reviewed the signs along the road to this point.

The shared symbol drawn by both Gaelle and Maanik seemed a good place to begin. If Atash had been able to use his hands, might he
have drawn it too? Caitlin still found the triangles made of crescents to be inexplicable. They were slightly Celtic yet not. They vaguely resembled a radioactive symbol—but that could be a time-biased comparison, looking back from the present instead of looking
toward
the present. If this symbol were really as old as a habitable Antarctica, perhaps it had been the unconscious inspiration for the modern symbol?

Habitable Antarctica.
The thought had occurred to her so easily. She remembered the apparent map Maanik had drawn. When they reviewed its shape and topography, it linked closely to a map of Antarctica as though surveyed from the air. Could people have flown that long ago? Caitlin had seen ice in the vision with Atash—was that
also
Antarctica? Perhaps an ancient someone had traveled above it by balloon? She thought back to one of Jacob's science experiments. All that would have required were thermal currents somehow directed into a big sheath of—what? Pelts? Leather?

Too heavy.

Animal tissue? In the past, whales had been harvested for nearly every part of their body. Thin tissue, sinew, skin—was
that
possible?

The word “fantastic” came back to her. Maybe she was making leaps—but nothing else came close to making sense.

Antarctica. A different time, a different climate. With
people
? Humans? A society, a civilization? What else could it be? There was a sophisticated language of words and gestures. She thought of all the stories and fables she had heard in her life, from Noah and the flood to the Greek myth of Icarus. Even scholars had always said there was probably a foundation to our most exotic tales.

The first thing she would do when she had Internet again would be to search for any cataclysms that had occurred at the South Pole over the millennia, right back to Pangaea if necessary. The patients had mentioned fire from the sky and something about a wave. There had to be some connection. Her mind might be arguing against it, but that's what minds did. Her gut was telling her this was the right direction.

The plane banked left and Caitlin watched through her window as the Caspian Sea tilted back into view, sparkling in the late afternoon sun. She closed her eyes and recalled her conversation with Ben in the park in Turtle Bay. Her breath fluttered at the thought of him. She decided to talk to him, to ask to start over when the immediate crises subsided.

If they subsided.

She thought of poor Maanik wobbling through the hallways of a psych ward, drugged to oblivion. She contemplated the larger populace struggling thirty thousand feet below, constantly at war or at the mercy of an unstable climate and formidable geology. What if Vahin was correct? What if some
ancient race
was correct: that the vibration of souls, their continuation out of the body, was the way to truly survive? What if, in some ancient theology, there lay the common, long-lost origins of Valhalla and the Elysian Fields and Heaven?

The transpersonal plane.

Caitlin focused again. More than anything else, she wanted to communicate with Maanik, tell her
I'm still with you, distance be damned
. Vahin said they were connected. Could she send a thought to Maanik? How? What kind of wave could she make that would touch the girl?

She tried to relax her thoughts. She recalled the park, with Ben. Sunshine, unbuttoning their coats. Ben exuberantly describing the words he had deciphered from Maanik's gibberish. “Fire,” of course, and “sky,” but also “water.”

Big water.

And then, suddenly, Caitlin had it. Atash had tried to form the superlative when she entered his hospital room—left hand angling away from the body, right hand crossing up the body on a diagonal. She didn't remember the spoken word that went with it but she didn't need to. The gesture had to be enough.

She closed her eyes and calmed herself as completely as if she were about to guide a client into hypnosis. She thought of Jack Lon
don first, the beagle barometer, remembered him sleeping and snoring. Then she thought of Maanik. She sifted through their moments together, remembered when Maanik had made a face for her, when she had seemed most like her normal teenage self. When she saw the girl clearly, when she felt the laugh they'd shared, Caitlin gently angled her left hand away from her torso and crossed her right hand up toward her left shoulder. Unexpectedly her lungs took a deep inhale and then exhaled—it felt as though she had pushed a physical weight away from her sternum, off her left shoulder. She kept her mind on Maanik and thought to her:

Ocean . . . big water . . . you and me together . . . hold on . . .

Suddenly Caitlin heard Maanik in her head, heard the girl say: “
I will.
”

Caitlin opened her eyes, shocked. She hadn't imagined that voice. That had been
real
.

She looked around, at the quiet passengers in the plane, at the empty aisle seat beside her. Everything was normal—but not. She felt closer to Maanik here, now, than she did to the window beside her. In that moment, the familiar sights and sounds of life were no longer a reliable foundation. Like the sea far below, they were just the surface of something greater. Perhaps
that
was the comprehensive explanation.

Caitlin was startled to feel the effects of that realization in her body. It was as though she were energized from her feet all the way up. Her torso felt bright, almost radiant; her mind was clear as the tone of a tuning fork; and she was ravenous. She rang for the hostess and asked for the menu.

Something had clicked into place, though Caitlin didn't know what.

Over dinner, she devoured the materials Vahin had given her. She read about the combined power of souls, of prayer. Connected in the transpersonal plane, souls could form a powerful group spirit capable of ascending even higher, outside the reach of time, space . . . and death.

A cataclysm
, she thought. Fire, ice, floods. A city or civilization beset by a volcano, an earthquake, a tsunami, encroaching ice. Caitlin remembered Maanik crying in their first session over an arm that had been ripped off and her dead pet that was not Jack London. Maybe that had happened to Maanik's counterpart in some ancient place—before that counterpart had died, burned to pieces by volcanic fire or an inferno caused by tremors.

But Maanik had said that she also became pieces first and
then
burned. What pieces? And how?

Okay, we'll come back to that
, Caitlin thought, forcing herself to stay focused despite the mental lull caused by her full stomach.

She thought about Atash's vision. Other residents of the city seemed not only prepared for the cataclysm but eager for it. Instead of running away from an erupting volcano, these people in robes gathered in a courtyard of columns, apparently waiting to die. Eager to die? Robes that were soaked in oil; a reference to
cazh
; a word and gesture meaning what? Some kind of transformation.

Those residents—Caitlin had seen them. They had a ritual they were determined to complete. Whether that rite was done to thwart the volcano or honor it in the hope of pacifying it, she wasn't sure. But if Vahin was correct, perhaps the ritual had transported their souls to the transpersonal plane, whatever it was. Their souls left as their physical bodies burned to fine ash. Maanik's consciousness split into fragments and lifted up as her physical body burned.

Presumably then, the souls that reached the transpersonal plane were ensured not a life after death, but life beyond the reach of death.

But why have Maanik and Gaelle and Atash connected with that? Shared trauma here and now cannot be the only reason.

Those prayerful residents in robes had denied help to Atash's counterpart. Why had they excluded him? They had accused him of placing faith in “things without true power” and said that he had crafted his own fate. She thought of people she had seen in war zones, those who had tried to leave and those who had gathered in a place of
worship and perished—difficult choices made under duress, but with the same goal.

Escape.

Then there was her father and the Norse-style longboat. Caitlin remembered Maanik talking about a dragon, perhaps a carved dragon head on a ship? Some residents may have taken to the sea, trying desperately to sail away as fire fell on an ocean already lashing them with steep waves. Atash's counterpart may have quailed at that choice. So he had begged the robed man to save his brother through
cazh
instead, turning to religion as a last resort. Rebuffed by the priest, Atash's counterpart had done the ritual without the help or sanction of the priests—and it seemed to have worked. Thousands of years later, with Antarctica long buried under ice, he had found Atash's soul, exposed by the trauma of his brother's execution, and somehow made his way in.

But why would that cause Atash to set himself alight? Had the soul given him the wrong message? Or—and the thought made Caitlin choke up—had that soul been trapped in that traumatic moment like some prehistoric insect preserved in amber, all this time.

Too many broad strokes
, she thought,
but a start
.
A place to go with Maanik
.

Caitlin leaned back, shut her exhausted eyes, and tried not to think of Atash locked in a burning body for millennia. She thought of the animals instead. What was their role in this? Jack London had to be aware of the presence of something unseen. What about his avoiding his mistress's right hand? One of Vahin's booklets said that energy from the world around us entered through the left hand, the heart hand. Then, filtered by the body and soul, negative, unwanted energy exited through the right hand. Maanik's left hand on Jack London would have safely received his loving energy. But her right hand would have been emitting all the suffering her counterpart felt in the transpersonal plane. No wonder the dog had avoided it.

As animals had avoided Washington Square—Caitlin suddenly re
membered the news reports just after the rats stampeded. A resident of the area had been briefly interviewed about how her black Lab would no longer enter the dog run in Washington Square Park, and neither would anyone else's dogs. Yet there had been no mention of the dogs avoiding their owners, only the location, and the behavior of the rats certainly didn't resemble Jack London's reactions. If there was a connection here, it was not apparent.

Some possible answers—more seemingly impossible questions. But at the very least, they all seemed to be pointing in the same direction. Her mind didn't tell her this in isolation, the way it usually did—her whole self told her. She felt again the bright radiance in her sternum.