The Candlestone (13 page)
Karen opened her eyes and relaxed her grip on Bonnie’s hand. “It only lasts a little while, at least I think it’s only a little while, and then I get sucked right back, back into my glass thing. I can open my eyes, and everything’s back to normal, except—”
She stopped and covered her mouth, letting out an embarrassed laugh.
Bonnie laughed with her. “Except for what?”
“Well, the first time, when it was over, I ended up wearing just my underwear. But it was all right; I had on long johns, ’cause I get cold in that lab.” She held up her left hand, displaying a thin gold ring. “And this ring was on the floor next to my clothes. So was an ankle bracelet I used to wear. Every time after that, though, they gave me a long white robe to put on, sort of like a church choir robe, and I didn’t end up in my underwear anymore.”
“And what happened to Derrick?”
Karen pulled her hand from Bonnie’s lap and gave a wave of dismissal. “Oh, he was fine. I don’t remember what happened to his clothes ’cause I was worried about my own.”
“Do Beck and Stacey ever do anything?”
“Yes, they take my place sometimes, but it’s usually me, ’cause I’m older, I guess. It’s always Derrick in the other one, though.”
Bonnie thought for a minute, trying to fit the pieces of the puzzle together. She put a finger to her lips and spoke slowly. “I saw three glass domes out there. Did they ever use the third one?”
Karen shook her head. “They never told us what it’s for.”
Bonnie took a deep breath and blew it out in short, thoughtful puffs. “I can’t figure out what’s going on, at least not yet, but I’m going to have a look around tonight. Do you want to come with me?”
Karen shook her head again. “Ashley always checks on us and locks the hall door when she goes to bed. She’s almost like a jail warden. But she and Doc are good to us. We have good food and TV and computers and lots of nice clothes.”
“Hmmm.” Bonnie rubbed her chin as she looked around the room. Each girl had a computer system, and there was an assortment of dolls, board games, and stereo equipment either pushed against the walls or stored neatly on various shelves. Karen also had a collection of model cars on her side of the room, along with a short stack of automobile magazines.
“You like cars?” Bonnie asked.
Karen blushed and folded her hands in her lap. “Yeah. I like to read about them, and I have some videos. I want to be a mechanic someday, maybe even in a pit crew for NASCAR races.”
Bonnie then noted an encyclopedia set, an antique music box, and a huge collection of computer games. She let out a low whistle. “All this stuff makes me wonder where they get the money to finance this operation.”
“I asked that a long time ago. There’s lots of old rich guys who want to live forever, so it’s easy to get money.”
“Don’t they have to prove that what they’re doing works?”
Karen’s eyebrows raised, her eyes widening like glowing emeralds. “Oh, they have proof, all right. Ashley’s grandfather lives in the boys’ dorm, and he got healthier every day. He was in a coma for a while, but the last time I saw him he was walking around. His muscles were getting stronger all the time.”
“
Were getting stronger?
”
“Well, he sort of leveled out, I guess. I don’t think he’s getting any worse, though.”
Bonnie tapped her foot on the braided rug, then dug her toes into a groove. “I wonder if Ashley would let me see him. Maybe he would give me more information.”
Karen shrugged her shoulders. “Who knows? Ashley’s real nice, but she keeps a lot of secrets. She likes to say, ‘Too much information can make your brain choke.’”
Bonnie laughed and got up from the bed. She used both hands to help Karen to her feet and wrapped her arms around her new friend. “Yes, Ashley is secretive, but I’ll bet I can find the keys and get us out tonight. I think you and I had better figure out what’s really going on around here.” She pulled away and looked into Karen’s bright eyes. “Are you with me?”
Karen’s head drooped. She drew her hands into fists, making her knuckles crack. “I . . . I guess so.”
Bonnie hugged her again, this time wrapping her up with her arms and wings. “Don’t let your heart be troubled, Karen. Someone is watching, and He’s on our side.”
Chapter 9
Bonnie spent the remainder of the evening in her room with only a desk lamp illuminating the area near her bed. She rested on her pillow with her eyes closed, sometimes dozing, sometimes praying. Normally she would have taken the time to jot some of her thoughts down in her journal, but she knew the old notebook still lay where she left it, out on one of the lab chairs. She wanted it back. She had spent too many hours recording her amazing adventures, her lonely wanderings, and her heartfelt prayers to have them exposed to an unauthorized reader or accidentally thrown away.
One of her prayers had been that someday her writing might help someone, maybe even change someone’s life. Her own story had been one of heartrending loss changed into great gain—sorrowful valleys that had transformed into exhilarating heights of love and joy. Maybe other troubled souls could be encouraged in the valleys of their own lives.
Bonnie awoke from one of her short naps to find a dinner tray next to her bed. A huge sub sandwich perched on a stoneware plate next to a pile of rippled potato chips. The sandwich was stuffed with shaved turkey breast, a dark green lettuce leaf, and sliced black olives. Her stomach growled its approval. As she leaned over and squeezed the roll to fit her mouth, honey mustard oozed out the sides and dripped onto her plate.
Oooh! That’s so good! How did Ashley know what I like on a sandwich?
Next to her plate a ripe Anjou pear held down a folded note. Bonnie pulled it out and read the handwritten words. “I hope you enjoy your meal. We normally eat together in the kitchen, but I didn’t want to wake you. I’ll come by later this evening. By the way, I found your backpack and journal. I put them and your coat in your closet next to your shoes.”
My journal! Maybe Ashley really can read minds!
Bonnie took another big bite just as the door swung open. “Wake up, Bonnie!” Ashley called as she walked in. Ashley’s cheery tone made the room seem brighter even before she flicked on the ceiling light. “Oh, you are awake. How do you like your supper?”
Bonnie set the sandwich on the plate, chewing, then licking the drips of mustard. She laughed, her mouth half full. “It’s perfect! Thank you!”
“Do you want to finish it, or can it wait? It’s time to talk to your mother.”
Bonnie pushed the tray to the side and grabbed her shoes from the floor, chewing and swallowing quickly. “Does she know I’m here? Will she be surprised?”
Ashley withdrew a pair of dark brown hiking boots from Bonnie’s closet. “Here,” she said, setting the boots at Bonnie’s feet. “Your shoes still look wet.”
“They are.” Bonnie eyed the boots with a smile. She slipped off the shoe she had put on and pushed her foot into one of the boots. It fit perfectly.
Ashley watched Bonnie loop the laces through the hooks. “We told your mother you were coming, but we haven’t contacted her since you got here.” She rocked from her toes to her heels, carrying some kind of clothing over her left arm. “It’s all set up, though. We’re just waiting for you.”
Bonnie leaped to her feet and headed for the door. “Let’s go, then!”
The two stepped quickly through the hall and out into the lab, Ashley pausing only to relock the hall door. The ceiling lights in the chamber were dim, but Bonnie could see well enough to make her way toward the center where the candlestone sat on the pedestal, glowing crimson in the laser’s steady beam. She felt a wave of nausea as she approached, so she walked more slowly toward the control panel, trying to fight off the sickness.
“Bonnie, wait!” Ashley caught up and handed her a white robe. “Here. Put this over your clothes.”
Bonnie took the robe and slid it over her head while Ashley adjusted her wings underneath the material. When everything was smoothed out, Ashley pulled the robe’s hood up. “Good,” Ashley said. “It’s big enough to cover everything.”
Bonnie untwisted the long sleeves that wrapped her arms. She remembered what Karen had said about wearing a robe but wondered if there was another reason for it. “Is this some kind of protection?”
“Yes. It prevents light absorption. I don’t think it will be perfect, but it should keep you from getting too sick.”
“You knew about that? But how?”
“It stands to reason.” Ashley fussed with Bonnie’s robe, smoothing out a bunched place on one side so the hem would reach the floor. “But don’t worry about that now. It’s showtime.”
Ashley led the way toward the control panel where Bonnie’s father sat peering at the various displays and lights all over the board. Bonnie kept close behind, using Ashley as sort of a shield, though not to protect herself from the candlestone. The robe seemed to be working, but she felt nervous about seeing her father again.
Static filled the area with an irritating hum that nearly drowned Bonnie’s thoughts. Ashley cupped her hands around her mouth and shouted. “Bonnie’s here. Are you going to talk first?”
Dr. Conner kept his eyes fixed on the monitor as he picked up the microphone and spread the hood over the control panel. “Yes. I’ll do the introductions.” He turned a dial, and the lights dimmed further until they went completely out. He licked his lips before pressing a button on the mike’s throat. The static went silent. He spoke slowly into the microphone while Bonnie stepped closer, staring at the flaming red candlestone as it greedily drank from the glowing scarlet laser beam, spilling and spitting it out in red sparks on the other side. “Irene? Irene, are you there?”
He released the button and adjusted a knob on the panel, trying to smooth out the returning static. “Beta frequency is not as stable,” he said, turning to Ashley.
She reached to push a slider bar. “Try raising the distortion allowance. That’s worked before. I think beta’s a little off from what we guessed when we first calibrated the settings.”
The rasping noise died away, and they waited. Bonnie felt streams of sweat pour down her back, but her hands were like ice.
The speakers crackled back to life, a female voice pouring forth in a sweet, melodic alto. “I’m here. Is Bonnie out there?”
Bonnie took a quick step forward. Mama’s voice! There was no doubt about it! She shouted, “Here I am! I’m right here!”
Her father extended the microphone. “She can’t hear you without this.”
Bonnie hesitated. Her father’s eerie, dark silhouette morphed in the dim red glow that covered him with a deep crimson shroud. He looked like a specter of death handing her a bloody rose.
She reached to take the microphone, and when she saw her hand shaking, she grasped the throat with both hands. Pushing the talk button with her thumb, she lifted it slowly and spoke, her voice soft and trembling. “Mama? It’s Bonnie.” She released the button and waited a few seconds, nervously licking her quivering lips.
The voice boomed again from the speakers. “Bonnie, my darling! Is it really you?”
Bonnie’s tears flowed, and her legs wobbled. She replied, both laughing and crying at the same time. “Yes . . . yes, Mama, it’s me.” She wiped hot wet streams from her cheeks, and her voice broke into a mournful lament. “Mama, I’ve missed you so much!”
A few more seconds passed before a soft, comforting voice replied. “I’ve missed you, too, sweetheart! But don’t despair, we’ll be back together soon.”
“But how, Mama? How?” Bonnie looked at her father and then at Ashley, searching their eyes for an answer.
The voice from the speakers became softer, more urgent. “Bonnie, I need you to come in here, inside the candlestone. I’ll attach my light energy to yours, and you can draw me out.”
With cold fingers of fear creeping all over her body, Bonnie could barely speak, her voice cracking and choking. “I . . . I’ll do anything to help you, but I don’t know how to get in there.”
The loudspeaker coughed and spat out a round of rough static, and the voice disintegrated into buzzing chaos. Bonnie could barely make out the words. “Don’t worry, honey. They’ll teach you—”
The voice died. Dr. Conner twisted dials on the panel, but his adjustments were to no avail.
The microphone trembled in Bonnie’s hand. She laughed, though streams of tears spilled down her cheeks. Her mother’s confusing words mixed with the eerie lights and frenzied static. Steadying her hands, she pushed the microphone button again. “Mama? Are you there?”
Ashley touched Bonnie’s shoulder and turned on a small lamp attached to the control panel. “It takes a lot of energy for her to communicate,” she explained. “She has to decipher our energy input and then create a light energy answer for our computer to decode.”
She took the microphone and set it on the control panel. “The computer then uses her digitized voiceprint to make the output sound like her voice. It doesn’t take long for her to get too tired to continue.” She tenderly wiped a new tear from Bonnie’s cheek. “Remember, she was already mortally wounded when your father transluminated her, and her life force is still weak. But don’t worry. She’ll be fine. And if you’re willing, you can help us get her out in the morning.”
Bonnie’s father switched off the laser, and the gun descended toward the floor. “That’s the big ‘if’—if you’re willing. It’s dangerous. We’ve succeeded in sending people into the candlestone, but only for a couple of minutes, max. They’re not able to stay long, because they don’t have the same makeup as you do. They have no natural light receptors, so they go into the stone out of the proper phase. We believe that you can go in and attach yourself to your mother and pull her out.”
Bonnie gazed at the tiny stone, imagining a miniature universe within its crystalline cage. “How can I do that? Once I’m in there, won’t it trap me like it did Mama and the slayer?”
Ashley flipped a switch on the panel’s side. The static died away, and silence filled the room. “We have what we call an energy anchor, a boy named Derrick that we’ve trained to attach himself to the person going into the candlestone. He has a perfect record in being able to hang on to our diver.”
“Diver?”
Ashley motioned with her hand, making it look like a person diving into the water. “That’s what we call whoever’s going into the stone.”
Bonnie nodded slowly. “Okay, but how do they get changed back to normal?”
Ashley turned up the ceiling lights and gestured for Bonnie to come to the center of the room. While Dr. Conner put the candlestone away, Ashley explained the system of glass cylinders. “This one,” she said, pointing to the cylinder opposite the main panel, “we call the diver’s dome.” She rubbed a slender flexible hose joining that cylinder to one that sat to the left of the master board. “It’s hooked to what we call the anchor dome by this special tube. Each dome transluminates the person inside, and the anchor stretches his light energy through this tube and attaches himself to the diver’s energy.”
Bonnie imagined a stream of light leaping from one cylinder to the other, passing through what looked like thirty feet of vacuum cleaner hose and popping out at the other cylinder. The second cylinder stood a third of the way around the perimeter of the circle, so someone would have to stretch out real far to get it done.
“As you can see,” Ashley continued, pointing back to the first dome, “the diver’s dome has an outlet hole and a plain glass tube that ends near the candlestone. When I open the tube, the candlestone draws the diver’s light into itself while the anchor hangs on. The anchor remains here in the lab, because most of his energy is held in the special tube between the domes where he can attach to crystalline spurs that mimic the candlestone’s absorption properties, except that they don’t permanently entrap his energy.”
Ashley held out her two fists and pumped them like she was pulling down on a chin-up bar. “These spurs act sort of like friction grips for photons, something that Derrick can hang onto, anchoring him in place. After a while, as the candlestone keeps pulling, the anchor’s attachment point gets stretched out, and he begins to lose contact with the diver. That’s when we shift everything into reverse.”
Bonnie put her hand on the hose. It felt like dimpled glass, wrinkled and semitransparent. “Reverse? You mean you bring the diver back?”
“Right. I created synthetic photoreceptors, just like the natural ones your mother has in her blood and you have in yours. They change light energy into matter. That’s why dragons live so long; they’re constantly regenerating. I figured out how it all works by analyzing Excalibur’s beam. I was able to capture the beam’s profile, even though we were only able to turn the beam on in short bursts. I discovered that Excalibur’s effects can be reversed by slowing the newly created tachions and reversing their space and time framework, in effect, making them anti-tachions. As their hyperlight speed slows toward the mass-energy asymptote, the photoreceptors cause the energy to begin a reassimilation process, using light-encoded cell structure information, data that should still exist in your mother’s energy matrix.”
Bonnie tried to replay Ashley’s explanation in her mind, but the technical terms flew right by. As soon as her brain grabbed one of the hundred-letter words, another zipped through. It was like trying to grab a handful of fog. “I have no clue what you’re talking about,” she said, “but I heard one word that bothers me.”
“One word? What word was that?”
“You said, ‘should,’ that her information ‘should’ still exist. How do you know it’ll work?”
Ashley ran a single finger across the dome’s glass surface. “It worked for Derrick and the girls.” She pressed a button at the base, and the dome began rising. “We first transluminated rats and then larger animals before we considered using humans.” She sat on the base and rested her chin in her hands. “The animals didn’t go into the candlestone, though, until we started training Derrick to be an anchor. We lost a few animals until he learned how to hold on, but now he’s a real pro. He held on to a chimp that we sent into the stone, and it was a complete success. The chimp came back with all of her faculties and memories in place. After several perfect trials, we decided to send in Karen. We really needed someone who could tell us what it was like inside before we could analyze what it would take to draw your mother out.”