Gillian Anderson - A Dream of Ice

Caitlin thought back to the profound experience with the snake in Haiti.

“What are you doing?” Caitlin asked aloud, pondering the snake. “Observing? Waiting? Ignoring?”

Perhaps all or none of the above. Caitlin thought about other snakes that had fascinated her throughout her life, from the serpentine shape of her “spirit” headed toward Chinatown, to the snakes of Medusa and the Garden of Eden, to Cleopatra and the caduceus—the symbol of the medical profession. Her world.

“Why you?” she wondered, watching the big snake on TV. “Maybe the scientists are right,” she mused. It was all there in an airplane magazine article she read a year or so ago. Researchers believed that superstring structures bound all matter on a subatomic and supercosmic level. Perhaps they got the name wrong. It could be the strings were snakes.

The news report concluded with a late-breaking update that emergency room visits were up dramatically with victims of bites, mainly from dogs, cats, rodents, and what were being described as “kamikaze pigeons.”

Caitlin bolted from her seat and went searching for Arfa. She found him in her bedroom closet, having forced his way under the door. He was cowering and emitting the tiniest of mews. He hunched even more as she ventured closer. Unlike the other animals, he did not attack.

“I understand,” Caitlin said with a soft smile. “I’m kind of radioactive to you. Attacking will hurt you more than me.”

She returned to the living room, shut off the TV, and began to pace just as the intercom buzzed. Caitlin hurried to it. “Yes?”

“I am here,” said an unfamiliar voice. Her accent was odd enough that Caitlin couldn’t place it.

“Come up,” she said.

“There is one condition,” the woman said before Caitlin could hit the buzzer to release the door.

“What is it?” Caitlin asked.

“Do not access Galderkhaan while I am there. For both our sakes.”

“Fine,” Caitlin said grimly. “You answer my questions, I won’t push the boundaries.”

“And I won’t cause you harm,” the woman answered coldly.

Caitlin hesitated, then buzzed the woman in. Standing outside the door of her apartment, Caitlin watched as the woman approached. In person, she was much smaller than she loomed in Caitlin’s memory. And here, outside the rocking subway car, she moved with a grace that seemed utterly without effort. She did not meet Caitlin’s gaze and seemed to flinch almost imperceptivly as she moved past Caitlin inside.

The woman remained with her back toward her host.

“I’m a damn good psychiatrist,” Caitlin announced as she shut the door. “If you lie to me, there is a very good chance I’ll know it.”

“I trained with wild hawks and horses in Mongolia,” the woman said. “You don’t intimidate me.”

“Nor you, me,” Caitlin assured her. For a moment she just stared at the woman’s back, waiting for something to happen.

“It obviously took some kind of knowledge to show up in my living room like you did before.”

“Yes, some kind of knowledge,” the woman replied, looking around the apartment. “That is something we possess.”

“We?” Caitlin said. “Who?”

The woman turned and looked at her for the first time. “Descendants of the Priests of Galderkhaan.”

Caitlin wasn’t surprised or alarmed, yet she still felt a profound chill. It’s one thing to believe something in spirit, in theory. It’s another to look upon the very embodiment of those ideas.

The woman turned away and stared especially hard at the hallway that led to the bedrooms. Caitlin moved between the woman and the hall.

“What did you do to my son?” Caitlin demanded.

“I did nothing,” she insisted.

“I don’t believe you,” Caitlin spat.

“Dr. O’Hara, consider your words before you use them, or you will continue to grope.”

“Don’t lecture me, please,” Caitlin retorted. “I asked you here to get answers.”

The woman regarded at Caitlin before answering. “I didn’t access his mind. Location is accomplished via the entire spirit. I read yours in the subway, easily. To me, you glow like a beacon.”

“If you didn’t do anything to my son, who did?”

“An ascended soul, or souls,” the woman said. “Only the dead can do such a thing.”

Caitlin fought the sudden urge to drop into a chair.

“Does that mean—” she started, breathed, and then started again. “Does that mean Jacob is beginning to undergo the same process as the teenagers I’ve encountered?” Caitlin’s mind did not go to the two young women she’d helped but to the one she’d failed to save, the Iranian boy, Atash.

“Think,” the woman said. “You will not always have a guide.”

“As if you’re actually guiding me now?” Caitlin said.

“You must learn to see with different eyes, reason with a different mind,” the woman said. “That is as important as data.”

“No. It isn’t,” Caitlin replied. She had done enough thinking, with Ben, on her own, on the run. She did not want to think , she wanted to be told . But clearly answers were going to come on this woman’s terms.

Resigned, Caitlin exhaled and attempted to “think” aloud. “The… the ‘ascended,’ the dead, can reach anyone alive.”

The woman’s eyes opened slightly with encouragement.

Who had reached souls in the modern day? Caitlin asked herself. “Not just the dead,” she said. “The bonded dead. The souls who performed the ritual.”

Caitlin paused and looked to the woman for confirmation, received none, but at least she wasn’t told to “think.” So she was apparently on the right path.

“I freed Maanik and Gaelle,” Caitlin went on. “If that link could be broken, so can this.”

“Perhaps.”

“Perhaps?” Caitlin cried.

The woman’s look told her to think harder.

“Okay. All right.” She thought of the earlier cases. “I see. To free them, I had to go back. I had to break the cazh of those who were attacking them. You’re saying this a cazh ?”

“I believe so, from some ancient moment of death,” the woman said, at least giving her that much.

“But we don’t know who .” It wasn’t a question Caitlin had uttered. It was a desperate statement of fact. She regarded the woman. “What’s your name?”

“Yokane,” the woman replied.

“How long have you been watching me… Yokane?”

“Since you first visited Galderkhaan,” she said. “You and the young girl created quite a ripple.”

“You felt it—where? How?”

“I am not prepared to tell you that, yet,” Yokane said. “May I see your boy?”

Caitlin winced inside at the overfamiliarity. “To do what?”

“Observe,” she replied. “Only that. It may help answer your questions.”

Caitlin wasn’t happy with the idea but she understood that it was probably necessary.

“Briefly,” Caitlin warned, making it clear that she would remain on the edge of active defense. “Lead the way,” she added. “I’m sure you know where he is.”

Yokane looked around. “I must leave something outside of his room,” she said.

The woman pulled a small package from inside her coat, wrapped in a beige material. Caitlin was instantly on alert, as any New Yorker would be, but realized that if the woman had wanted to harm her she’d have done so already.

Yokane walked to the dining room table but still, she hesitated to put down the package. “I haven’t parted with this in twenty years,” she said as she unwrapped a small, rectangular stone with embedded green crystals. Caitlin started.

“I saw that—in a vision!”

“When?”