Gillian Anderson: The Sound of Seas

“Another place,” Lasha said, snorting. “North, you mean.”

“That’s right. The girl who perished with her grandmother. Or… she will perish.” Caitlin looked at her hands. “I cannot be her… the grandmother. These are not old enough. I must be the girl’s mother.”

“You are confusing me,” Qala said. “Who are you ?”

The captive looked from Lasha to the glistening pool to the little boy near it. Her expression softened when she saw him and a sob erupted from her throat. Her legs fell from under her.

The Standor held her upright with strong but comforting arms. “What’s wrong?” Qala asked.

“I left a sweet young boy behind,” the woman said. “I have to find him.”

“And perhaps I can help with that,” the Standor said. “First, you haven’t told us who you are? Only who you are not.”

“I am Caitlin O’Hara,” she said, the name sounding strange in a tongue that was not her own, “and I must get home.”

“To the north?” Qala said.

Caitlin nodded forlornly. “To the north… and a world farther than that.”

It was nearly dawn when an exhausted Ben Moss left Lenox Hill Hospital on Manhattan’s Upper East Side.

Nothing seemed real to the British-born UN translator. But that was becoming the new normal ever since he and Caitlin had been delving into the long-dead world of Galderkhaan and its living emissaries—ghosts, spirits, energies, or whatever they were; during those few weeks he had lost his old perspective on what constituted “real.”

No, that is not entirely true , he thought. What is very real is that Caitlin is presently unconscious and nonresponsive .

Yet even as he thought that, his arms moved. He had been spending all his spare time trying to piece together and translate the language of Galderkhaan—so much time that it seemed almost unnatural not to make superlative hand gestures as he spoke.

That too was a new normal. Along with watching people who unconsciously moved their hands as they spoke, wondering, Are you descended from Galderkhaani?

Ben walked onto Third Avenue, into the lamplit darkness of the New York predawn. It was late fall and, in addition to the darkness, a cold wind swept in from the East River, adding to his sense of desolation. He was unsure what to do next. That unfamiliar confusion frightened him. Typically, Ben followed the lead of the UN ambassadors. He didn’t have to plan very much, to think further than the next few words. The one time he had tried doing that, as a student at NYU—loving Caitlin—it ended with an estrangement that lasted for years.

Galderkhaan had brought back all the old fears of wanting something, of planning for something, of being disappointed. Now Caitlin’s life might hang on him reengaging.

Not being a family member, Ben was only able to get answers from attending physician Peter Yang because the linguist was the only one who could explain—more or less—what had brought Caitlin to this condition.

“You told the EMT that she was—self-hypnotizing in the park?” Dr. Yang had asked as they stood in the hospital waiting room.

“Yes,” Ben had said. That was the only way he could think to describe what he suspected was going on.

“Do you know why?” the doctor had enquired.

“She was… she thought she might be able to contact spirits,” he said. “It’s become a professional hot topic for her.”

“Why?”

“Several of her patients needed help in that area—she didn’t tell me more.”

“Several?” the doctor had asked.

“Similar reactions to psychological trauma,” Ben replied.

“Coincidence, then?”

“That is what she was—exploring,” he said carefully.

“I see. No mental illness in her past?”

“None.”

“Do you know if she has experienced visions, hallucinations?”

That had been a question full of dynamite. Ben had thought carefully how to answer. “Yes, but I don’t think there’s a neurological—”

“You’re a doctor, Mr. Moss?”

“No. But she chose to do these things,” he said with some annoyance. He didn’t like being challenged on translations, and he didn’t like being challenged on this. “As I said a moment ago, Doctor, she was self -hypnotizing. A choice.”

“All right, then,” the physician went on. “What about drugs, alcohol—”

“No drugs, no alcohol in excess.”

“Depression, schizophrenia, hysterical reactions, near-death experiences?”

He answered yes to the last two, explaining—once again, revealing as little as possible—that Dr. O’Hara had been treating patients who suffered from both of those and she had experienced a kind of empathetic blowback.

“Not uncommon with good hypnotists,” Dr. Yang mentioned. “Is this similar to the trauma work she did in Phuket, Cuba, and elsewhere?”

Ben brightened. “You know about that?”

“I’ve read what she has published.”

“Yes, that work and this are very much related. Back then she was seeking a way to—short-circuit PTSD, if you will. She was continuing where she left off.”

The doctor seemed less alarmed when he learned there was a context for the experiments. The diagnosis, for now, was psychogenic unresponsiveness. Dr. Yang said they would keep her in the hospital for more tests, but that was all he would say. Ben would have to find out more from Caitlin’s parents. He had phoned them, waking them, trying and failing not to alarm them. It was one of the few times his smooth British accent and composure had been a total fail. They were on their way in from Long Island.

So Ben left the complex, largely uninformed, not quite aware of what had happened, and utterly unsure what to do next.

There were no phone messages. He hadn’t expected any; neither Anita Carter nor Flora Davies had his cell number. Anita was a colleague and friend of Caitlin’s, a psychiatrist who had stayed with Caitlin’s son, Jacob, at the apartment; Davies was the head of the Group, an organization based in a Fifth Avenue mansion and which collected information and relics from Galderkhaan. Ben did not know anything about the latter. Neither had Caitlin before she went down to its headquarters, a visit that led directly to her collapse in the adjacent Washington Square Park.

Bundled against the cold, Ben decided to do what he always did: take small steps and see where they went. He paused in the doorway of an office building to call Caitlin’s landline, to make sure Jacob was all right. That was what Caitlin would have wanted him to do.

Anita picked up in the middle of the second ring. She said that the ten-year-old was in his room, up early after a restless night, but that there was something more pressing.

“What’s wrong?” Ben asked.

“There’s someone here,” Anita said with concern in her voice. “First tell me—how’s Caitlin? Where is she?”

“In the hospital.”

“Is she all right?”

“She’s unconscious—doctors wouldn’t tell me much.”

“Shit.”

“Anita, who’s there?”

The woman hesitated.

“Just say it,” Ben told her. “Nothing would surprise me.”

“All right.” She lowered her voice, said closely into the phone, “It’s a Vodou priestess. And her son.”

“Madame Langlois and Enok?”

“Jesus, yes!” Anita seemed caught off guard. “How did you… was Caitlin expecting them? I assume she met them in Haiti—”