Doug Allyn - v108 n03-04_1996-09-10

“Just Dr. Leeds. She’s downstairs.”

“Is she armed?”

“Of course not. What do you think we—?”

“Let’s go.”

Veil and Sharon followed the man in the tweed suit down two flights of stairs to the basement, which was spacious and had been cleared to make room for a wooden table, a desk, chairs, two hospital gurneys, and an array of medical equipment that was now pushed back against the wall at the opposite end of the room. Half of the wall to their left was covered with a large mural comprised of dozens of separate, framed panels and illuminated by spotlights recessed in the ceiling. A big-boned, white-haired woman who was standing at the table and making notes on a pad looked up and started with alarm as they entered the room.

“Just stay calm, Gail,” the man in the tweed suit said quickly, walking across the room and touching the woman’s hand. “Dr. Solow and Mr. Kendry have agreed to cooperate with us.”

“Veil,” Sharon said in a voice just above a whisper as she turned to look at the multi-paneled mural. “That’s—”

“It certainly is,” Veil replied drily as he stepped closer to the wall to examine his work.

The predominant color of the painting was a brilliant, electric blue surrounded on all sides by clouds of gold-specked black and gray. Brush techniques and alternating patches of thin and thick layers of pigment projected the illusion of movement, of flight toward a gray figure with outstretched arms silhouetted against a pool of brilliant, pure white light. In the space where the figure’s heart would be was an open rectangle where the brick wall behind the mural showed through. “I painted ‘The Lazarus Gate’ a long time ago,” Veil continued quietly, turning back to the two scientists. “The Company must have gone to considerable trouble and expense to find and put all these panels together. My work doesn’t come cheap.”

It was the white-haired woman who answered. “It took years. The individual panels were in museums, galleries, and private collections all over the world. But we never could find the last panel. Would you tell us what’s there?”

Veil’s response was to point to the strips of paper that were EKG printouts taped to the wall next to the mural. Each clearly showed the signature Lazarus Spike of someone who had been clinically dead and then brought back to life after having seen the Lazarus Gate. “Have you tried to send anybody there yet?”

“No,” the woman replied evenly. “We needed more information before we tried to conduct the experiment. That’s why we were so anxious to speak to you and Dr. Solow. Is it true that humans who approach the Lazarus Gate as they are dying become telepathic?”

“Where did you get these EKG printouts?”

“From the hospital records of Lazarus People, men and women who had a near-death experience naturally.”

“I assume you questioned all of them. What did they say when you asked them if they’d become telepathic when they were dying?”

The woman flushed slightly. “They just laughed. All of them.”

“Well, there you are.”

“But there is something there. You painted a picture of it.”

“Of course there’s something there. Death. That’s why we say that people who’ve seen it and survived have had a near-death experience. It’s not complicated, Doctor. For some people, all they have to do to get there is to die. Things are going to become complicated when you start sending living people off to find this place and they don’t come back.” Veil paused as Denny Whalen, looking thoroughly shaken, walked through the door. Then he turned to Sharon. “Now that everybody’s here, tell them what they want to know.”

Sharon nodded, said, “I’m a physician, as you know. What you may not know is that I’m a thanatologist — a specialist in death and the dying. For years it has been known that a small percentage of people who ‘die,’ as it were — that is, their hearts stop beating and they are clinically dead — revive and tell a story about being in a corridor and seeing at the end of it a blinding white light and a shadowy figure beckoning to them. At this moment they report feeling completely at peace, with no fear of death. Every single one of them reports desperately wanting to fly into the arms of this figure and be washed in the white light. Those who don’t, who turn back at the last moment from the cusp of death and revive, uniformly do so because of some compelling personal reason, a sense of unfinished business which can be anything from a belief their family can’t survive without them to an unpaid utility bill. The experience has been reported by people from all cultures in societies all over the world, by those who are religious and others who are atheists. The vision is seen by about two percent of the people who’ve had a near-death experience, and we refer to them as Lazarus People. All report feeling remarkably changed, and all had an identical reading on their EKGs a moment or two before they revived. That’s what we call the Lazarus Spike, and we say that they’ve been to the Lazarus Gate.”

The man with the withered arm pointed to Veil’s mural. “That’s what they see? That’s the Lazarus Gate?”

“That’s it,” Veil replied curtly. “Go on, Sharon.”

“Years ago I was in Monterey doing secret research — the Lazarus Project — for an ex-astronaut named Jonathan Pilgrim who’d had a near-death experience and believed he’d found heaven; he was looking for a way to control the experience. I worked in a hospice that was separate from Jonathan’s main operation, where researchers studied individuals with highly developed talents or unusual traits. Veil had been invited to come there as a test subject, and he wound up with me at the hospice because—”

“That’s irrelevant,” Veil interrupted.

Denny Whalen shook his head impatiently, said, “But you said you’d tell us what we wanted to know!”

“There’s nothing of any value for you to learn from my experience. I ended up in Dr. Solow’s hospice by accident because of some funny business with a KGB operative who was monitoring the whole situation at Pilgrim’s Institute. My experience is irrelevant to your purposes because I wasn’t dying when I wound up in the hospice, and I’m not a Lazarus Person.”

The three researchers exchanged puzzled glances, then looked back at Veil. The white-haired woman said, “But there’s your painting...”

“How do you know I didn’t work from some Lazarus Person’s description of the experience?”

“Did you?”

“No. Listen up, folks, because I’m only going to go over this once — and I’m not going to answer any personal questions. Denny here will tell you just how jealously I guard my privacy. The problem is that you’ve already shoved your noses so far into my private business that I have to give you this information to push you back out. By definition, a Lazarus Person is a child or adult who has suffered a very particular near-death experience. A consciousness of the world and a sense of self had been formed in the individual, and it is this perception of the world and self that is so profoundly changed when a person sees the Lazarus Gate and then returns to life. That isn’t what happened to me. I almost died at birth, and a newborn infant has no sense of self or the world. I was born with a cawl, and my parents named me Veil as a kind of prayer. Obviously, I lived, but I suffered — suffer — brain damage. I was left a vivid dreamer, a condition that can best be described as a kind of rupturing of the protective membrane separating dreams from reality. I dream in technicolor and surround sound, and those dreams are every bit as coherent and vivid as what I experience when I’m awake. The condition can drive you insane, and not a few vivid dreamers die in their sleep of heart attacks; vivid dreamers not only get chased by ogres, sometimes they get eaten. Denny here may harbor suspicions that I’m a violent person. I became one because of my vivid dreaming, and I eventually learned to control both the violence and the dreams through painting. Now I can go virtually anywhere I like and do anything I want in my dreams — but I’m still just tucked in bed, dreaming. There’s no astral projection, no telepathy, no precognition, and none of those other wet dreams the Russians were having. Just dreams, with absolutely no practical application — unless you want to count my work as an application. It’s just imagination. That’s how I discovered the Lazarus Gate, which seems to be a kind of shared racial consciousness some people experience as they die. It probably has to do with endorphins and hard-wiring those people have in their brains. The point is that I got there through the back door, in a manner of speaking. I was able to go to the Lazarus Gate and return, literally without losing any sleep over it, because I wasn’t dead, just dreaming. I’d learned to control my vivid dreaming, so I just checked out the neighborhood, then turned around and went home. When I woke up, I started this mural. Anyone you try to send there by artificial means, with your machines and your drugs, isn’t going to be so fortunate. You can manipulate their brain waves to match that pattern, all right, but anybody you kill and try to send there is going to stay dead. That’s all the Lazarus Gate is — death. The drugs you need to use to artificially create that brain-wave pattern block the way back. Your test subjects aren’t going to be sending messages from submarines, or anywhere else, to other test subjects because they’ll very quickly become biologically as well as clinically dead. End of story.”