A Vision of Fire

As animals had avoided Washington Square—Caitlin suddenly remembered 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.

Her meal finished and cleared, Caitlin turned off her light, lifted her window shade, and leaned her head against the seat. Her eyes rested on the clouds, the deepening dusk.

Shared souls, shared trauma, she thought. If this is happening to other young people around the world, that might explain why Kashmir is rippling through those of us who don’t even know where it is. But is Kashmir causing this?

That didn’t seem likely. Yet a connection was possible. Kashmir: a locus of frustration and pain touching all the ends of the earth. The transpersonal plane: a locus of ancient pain touching all the ends of the earth.

It no longer seemed possible to her to accept one and deny the other.

CHAPTER 30

When the call came in from Mikel, Flora Davies was sound asleep on the chair in her office. Weary in mind, body, and soul, she had surrendered herself to the black leather.

Still jet-lagged despite a long rest, Mikel had wandered back to the club at four in the morning to take another look at the new artifact. He found Arni’s body in a pool of unsightly fluid and immediately called upstairs for Flora. They had at least three hours to erase the problem before any other Group members or staff came in for the day, and before anyone was likely to report Arni to Missing Persons. Friends and family knew that he was inclined to work late, especially when there was a problem to be solved.

The Group had never dealt with a dead body at the club. Not human bodies at least. Unusual creatures had occasionally found their way into the lab for study, all deceased and partial specimens hauled from the south polar waters—part of a giant squid, a ten-thousand-year-old coelacanth perfectly preserved in frozen mud, the body of a baby megalodon locked in ancient ice. They were rare, but Flora stayed in contact with a man equipped to deal with their remains. She located the contact on her phone and within minutes Casey Skett was literally running over from his walk-up in the East Village.

After hanging up, Flora went back downstairs and paced near Arni’s head while Mikel looked for clues about his death. She was cursing the Group through the disposable medical mask she had put on, angry that they did not have the equipment or personnel suitable to perform a fast autopsy.

“And look at that—Arni wasn’t even wearing his lab coat,” she railed. “God only knows what contaminants his body is adding to the environment.”

“You mean apart from liquefied brain tissue?” Mikel asked. He was also masked and kneeling beside the corpse.

She stopped pacing. “Is that what you think that is?”

“Judging by the color and small lumps of solid mass, I’d say so.”

“Lovely,” Flora said. “Nothing else unusual?”

“Not that I can see. Only the brain is where it shouldn’t be.”

She snatched latex gloves from a box on a shelf and began pawing over Arni’s table—an insufferable mess—until she found a glass stirring rod. Then, squatting beside the corpse’s head, she inserted the end of the rod into his left nostril.

“It looks like he was about to be mummified,” Mikel muttered. “Brain out, organs next.”

“His other organs still appear to be inside,” she observed.

“Maybe I scared off whoever was doing this.”

“This liquid has a film forming on top,” she said, referring to the pool that spread like a halo from Arni’s head. “He’s been this way for a while.”

“But you didn’t hear anything?”

“Soundproofing,” she said, while paying acute attention to the shape of Arni’s nasal cavity. Flora twisted and turned the glass rod until all but the half inch she was holding had disappeared up his nose into his skull.

“My god,” she said, marveling, “there’s no sinus wall, no sphenoid bone. Mikel, there is nothing up there.”

“Are you saying everything in his skull came out of his nose?” he said in a tone of total disbelief.

“Would you like to feel it?” She motioned with the end of the glass rod.

“No,” he said, wincing slightly. “What would do that to some of his cranial bones but not the whole skull?”