Gillian Anderson - A Dream of Ice

The question was quite unexpected.

“No. Why do you ask?”

“All this talk of hypnosis—and you seemed to stumble back there,” Flora said, taking her own seat and gesturing for Caitlin to do the same.

“Did I?” Caitlin replied weakly.

“A little.” She smiled thinly. “Was there anything specific this Yokeen said I could help you with?”

“Yokane.”

“Yes, of course. What did I say?”

Caitlin didn’t answer, nor did Flora wait for a response. It was a transparent but necessary game the woman was playing. Caitlin sat but decided that in the next five minutes she was going to get the hell out of this building. Davies had intentionally mispronounced Yokane’s name, lied about knowing her, and everything else she’d said was just too facile, too controlled. Caitlin had nothing to show for her investment of a half hour.

Damn it. Moving pawns on a board wasn’t going to cut it. Yokane had been clear that there was a spirit affecting Jacob, so whatever was happening here, whatever its consequences, was just a second priority for Caitlin.

“I’m sorry,” Caitlin began. “I think there’s been some kind of mistake.”

“What do you mean, doctor?”

“I mean, I don’t know why I’m here.”

Flora smiled. “Well, you are here,” she said. “Do you have any idea why your friend might have suggested you come?” Her eyes were still, like little cameras, her expression showing curiosity but not concern.

“I’m not certain,” Caitlin confessed. “Look, I’m—could I use your restroom actually?”

“Of course.” Flora did not stand up. “Back in the low hallway, second door on your left.”

Caitlin rose carefully to make sure she didn’t pass out.

After the psychiatrist had exited, Erika heard the tiny squeak of the door that drove her crazy every time Flora entered the basement. She poked her head into Flora’s office and, seeing her there, warned her where their guest had gone. Flora nodded. Once Erika had returned to her desk, Flora wrapped her hand around a heavy glass paperweight, placed it in her trouser pocket, and quietly followed Caitlin to the basement steps.

At the top of the narrow concrete stairs, Caitlin’s slight vertigo returned but quickly passed. But the fear beneath it stayed.

There’s no safe way out of this , she told herself. You’ve got to get as much information as you can.

She quickly but quietly descended the stairs and, at the bottom, caught a glimpse of a long corridor full of deep freezers. Her mind flooded with images so suddenly that she lost her balance and had to flop down on the last step. The flashing, strobing visions jumped from a young woman in a lab coat lugging several black panels down the hall, to Flora carrying a tray of objects going the other way, to a skinny man pacing down the hall, sticking his head through each doorway before he turned and walked up the steps through Caitlin. And then it made a giant leap—to a great airship, clouds, burning clouds, burning passengers—

Caitlin put her face in her hands but they couldn’t block out the images that kept coming, of Flora and a man who looked Spanish or Italian arguing on the steps; a tall blond man in a white shirt walking away while unbuttoning a lab coat—

Unwinding… time unwinding.

Something down here was spooling her through the recent history of the hallway. How was that possible and how could she stop it?

Unseen by Caitlin, who was blinded by time, Adrienne Dowman appeared at the end of the corridor. “Dr. Davies!” she cried.

At moment later, Flora paced down the stairs toward the unheeding guest, her right hand gripping the paperweight in her pocket. Adrienne was already there, leaning slightly over the woman but not reaching down to help. She caught Flora’s eye.

“Who is she?” Adrienne asked.

“Not now,” Flora said, indicating Caitlin with a nod. “What happened? Why did you call me?”

“It lit up.”

Flora stepped past Caitlin. “Dr. O’Hara,” she said over her shoulder, “it’s best if you sit quietly for a moment. Do not follow—”

But Caitlin grabbed her ankle. “That doesn’t work for me,” she said.

Flora turned, and spent a moment she did not have. “What are you talking about?”

“You have a mosaic tile in this building,” Caitlin said through her teeth. “It’s not very happy to be here.”

She saw triumph in Flora’s eyes. Caitlin had cracked first. Flora believed this was her game now.

“Stay here,” Flora said.

“You don’t know what you’re doing,” Caitlin replied letting go of the woman’s ankle.

“On the contrary. We have control of it,” Flora said evenly.

Caitlin decided not to mention the other tile, the masses of them in the South Pole. That, and the details about Yokane, was information she would trade if necessary.

Shooing Adrienne ahead, Flora turned and strode toward the room the younger woman had exited. Caitlin tried to stand but wavered immediately and had to sit back down. The reverse flow of events had dimmed but not stopped. She tried making the “cut off” gesture she had used on the subway but it didn’t work. She was weaker in this mansion than anywhere else. She huddled into herself, feeling enhanced and powerless at the same time.

Flora, on the other hand, was fueled by purpose. She entered the chamber as if it were a shrine and cautiously approached the Serpent. Its former resting place, the room with the ruined floor, was locked away from sight with a mat rolled up outside the base of its door to disguise the damage to the cement. Here, in the new chamber, Adrienne had restored the acoustic levitation and once more the symbols on the stone were face-up. As Adrienne had indicated, the symbols were indeed glowing an ivory white. The luminescence wasn’t very strong and nearly disappeared by the time it hit the black soundboard looming above it. The light was leisurely flickering through the symbols in some kind of sequence and the stone was still vibrating faintly.

“Any indication that it’s going to flip again, or alter its position in the node in any way?” Flora asked.

“None,” Adrienne said, “and no changes to the environment.”

They both involuntarily glanced at the floor: it was smooth and normal.

“Video?” Flora asked.

Adrienne pointed at a camera she’d set up on a tripod in a corner, behind a wall of bulletproof glass in case of an explosion.

“Get yourself a chair,” Flora said, gazing adoringly at the object. “I don’t want you to take your eyes off this thing.”

“Not in here,” Adrienne started. “We can hook the camera into—”

“Sit in the doorway then, Adrienne.” Flora snapped as she walked away. “I won’t have data slipping through the pixels.”

As she arrived at the stairs, without asking, Flora reached down, put a hand under Caitlin’s elbow, and hauled her to her feet. She walked the psychiatrist down the hall to the room she still thought of as Arni’s lab and plopped her on a stool.

Caitlin looked up. Her visual feed immediately reset itself to the present time. She was able to focus on Flora’s eyes now.

Flora noticed her gaze. “I recognized you,” she said.

“From where?”

“I saw you in a video and I wondered if you were just a Vodou voyeur.” Flora smiled with a mean twist to her mouth. “Yet here you are with all sorts of knowledge. Tell me what you know.”

“About what?” Caitlin asked. She was not being coy.

“Start with Galderkhaan. What have you to do with it?”

It was still strange to hear someone other than Ben say that word. Beaten mentally, psychologically, and now physically, Caitlin opened up—selectively. First she explained her history with the Galderkhaani Priests who had failed in their cazh , taking care not to mention the names or locations of the teenagers who had been affected. Flora pressed for details but did not fight her when Caitlin resisted.