Daniel Hecht - Land of Echoes

"Your drawings have been changing since then."

"Yeah, Mrs. McCarty and Miss Chee, they're great teachers."

A nurse came in, checked on them briefly, then went to confer in hushed tones with the other boy and the old woman. Cree was thinking about the ravine, the shadow beings skipping down, and the awful thing that she'd feared would devour Edgar. And more and more she felt the thing crouching in Tommy: tense, balled up as if hiding or as if gathering itself to spring. But she didn't feel she could ask him more specific questions without risking programming his responses, giving him ideas. Or scaring him to death.

But she had to make progress. She had to jolt Tommy, or his parasite, off the dime. Provoke a response that would give her something to go on.

She took a deep breath and drew as much calm from it as she could. Then she sat at the head of the bed next to Tommy. The arm lay lifeless on the blanket, bandages crossing the upturned palm and disappearing into the sleeve of his robe.

"Tommy, what's this?" She touched the curled fingers gently. He looked down at it, dismayed. "It's my hand," he said immediately. "My arm." But the question frightened him.

"That's what you've learned to say, isn't it? That's what Dr. Corcoran wants you to say."

"It's my arm! It looks like an arm, what else could it be!" He sidled away from her. Or from it-the slack appendage dragged across the blanket after him and for an instant she saw it as he must, a foreign thing pursuing him, a snake in the bed.

"If you drew a picture of yourself right now, your whole body, what would it look like?"

He glanced back at the doorway as if hoping someone would interrupt. But the nurse had withdrawn again, and the curtained third bed was silent. He refused to answer.

"If it's not an arm, what is it?" Cree persisted.

"I don't know!"

"Okay, so it's a thing of some kind," Cree said. "An unknown thing, yeah?" She touched the bandaged palm, and then, overcoming her revulsion of it, picked up the hand and held it in both of her own. The deadweight was surprisingly heavy.

"Hello, thing," she said to it.

Tommy looked at her, wide-eyed and appalled. "You're crazy," he whispered.

"No! I just refuse to be frightened by things I don't understand." She lightly caressed the inert object, then looked directly into Tommy's face and mustered everything she had to break through to him: "Listen to me, Tommy!" she whispered forcefully. "I'm a scientist. One thing I've learned is, this is a strange world. Man, I have had one damned hard time with how strange it is! But you know the way you feel about being here with a sick kid in the next bed, and guys like Dr. Corcoran treating you like you're retarded, and thinking maybe you're going to be here forever? That feeling of being in a box? Well, just like you, I refuse to be in that box. Being afraid of stuff like this is a box. A cage. I won't stay in it."

She looked down at the hand again and said with all the calm and cordiality she could muster, "Hello, unknown thing."

Tommy made an expression of surprise, as if her words had penetrated him deeply and painfully. For an instant, he looked as if he were going to answer, but instead he made a moan, a shockingly deep voice emerging from his round mouth.

He was off balance now, and she sensed the thing in him moving, flushed from its cover. Cree seized the opening: "Who are you?" she hissed. "What do you want?" Is that you, Garrett McCarty? Or are you the one from the rocks?

Tommy looked paralyzed with fright. Abruptly, the hand twitched, and it turned to grip her hand, a quick hard clench as sudden and startling as an electric shock. In reflexive horror, she stood up and flung it away from her. The arm flopped limply back onto the bed, but for a few seconds the fingers clenched as if groping for her hand again, then curled and rolled like the legs of a dying spider. Tommy sidled away from it in terror and it dragged after him over the rumpled bedclothes.

Cree cursed herself. She made herself sit again and take the awful thing back, holding the hand gently and cautiously as if it were a wild animal. But Tommy's look of betrayal showed he wasn't buying it. No wonder! she thought. She'd shown him her hypocrisy: how close to the surface her fear and revulsion were, how marginal her own control. Worse, she had addressed the thing, he now knew how she was thinking of his problem. She'd confirmed what had to be his worst fears. And she might very well have programmed his future explanations and descriptions.

"That's why," Tommy said tremulously.

"Why what?" Cree managed.

"Why I stabbed it. It did that. It's doing it more and more. It scared me."

Oh, man, Cree thought. It's so obvious. They'd all assumed that the entity had made Tommy attack himself, and Cree's only concern had been whether the act suggested intentional malevolence. But they all had it backward. Tommy had done the stabbing, attacking his persecutor in an effort to hurt it or drive it out. The full complexity of what she was up against struck her for the first time. With the thing progressively taking control, how long could they be sure who was Tommy and who the invader?

"Mrs. Pierce says it does other things. When I'm asleep." Tommy's rasping whisper sounded like the fear-awed voice of a much younger child. "Some of it was these ordinary gestures, things you do with your hands when you're talking to somebody or just sitting around." His voice dropped almost to inaudibility: "But some were like it was trying to figure out where it was. And some were like… it wanted to hurt somebody."

Cree met his round eyes and shared his horror. But they were getting close to something important. If she could frame her next questions just right, she might learn a great deal.

"Hel-lo, people!" The jovial voice startled them both. Cree turned to see Dr. Corcoran padding toward them, stooped like a white-coated vulture and wearing his biggest smile and best bedside manner. "How's the man of the hour, Mr. Keeday? Making any progress, Dr. Black?"

Cree wanted to kick him. But Tommy reflexively nodded and mustered a miserable grin for Dr. Corcoran. His first instinct was to please the man, treat him with respect. And, she suspected, by now he'd surely have guessed that acting normal was his only ticket out of the hospital.

Donny McCarty spun away from his computer, surprised that the supposed parapsychologist's bona fides checked out. He had visited the Web site listed on her business card, and though it struck him as a pile of supernatural manure cloaked in psychobabble, it did at least seem like a genuine snake-oil stand, not a dummy site. To double-check, he'd done a Google search on her name and had come up with several hundred hits, some linking her with paranormal research topics and some with more mainstream, academic psychology. Just out of curiosity, he'd gone to the University of New Mexico site and brought up the events calendar, where, sure enough, she was listed as a speaker at some conference they'd just had. So she was what she claimed to be.

That is, if the woman who had accompanied Julieta was indeed the mysterious Dr. Lucretia Black referred to. There were no photos on her site, so determining that would take a little more digging, something Nick Stephanovic could see to. Maybe he was just being paranoid, but paranoia had its uses. It had certainly saved his ass more than once.

Donny stood up and went to the big window that covered most of the west wall of his office. There had never been much to see- Albuquerque was a flat town, and the nearby buildings of downtown blocked any views of the land beyond-but since they'd built the Maynard monstrosity across the street there was even less, just a bleak facade of blue-green glass and the wavy reflection of his own building. The sight only served to irritate him, as always.