Broken Souls (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 2) (27 page)

“The disease is talking to us with this dermatologist’s voice?”

“I don’t think so. I think it may be Prado himself.”

“We watched him get shot and turn to ashes on that video. How could it be Prado?”

“I’m not sure. I think he may be able to transport himself into the bodies of other people through that black mist somehow.”

“But that mist is infecting dozens if not hundreds of people. Is he jumping from person to person?”

“It doesn’t appear so. When we heard the security guard speak in the hospital, when he said ‘I am Legion,’ those words came out of every single person afflicted with the shedding at the exact same moment. That scream we heard from the lady in the hospital was the mother of the little girl we saw on the phone video. Prado’s voice coming from her daughter’s decomposing body caused her to have a breakdown. She heard the ‘I am Legion’ line come from her daughter at the exact same time we heard it from the guard.”

“What are you saying? What does that mean?”

“I think somehow Prado’s essence, his spirit if you will, has gone viral. It is spreading from person to person. He is not jumping from person to person. He is possessing all of them simultaneously.”

“That’s insane. Even if that were possible, what would be the point in that?”

“I don’t know. It’s only a theory, but, if I’m right, those words that Buddy said a few minutes ago . . .” Ping pointed to Sam’s phone. “ . . . would have come out of every person who has been exposed to Prado’s mist, to this shedding disease.”

“If that’s true, it should not be too hard to find out. Sam, turn on the television,” Mara said.

He put down his phone, picked up the remote and pointed it at the screen nestled in the bureau. The screen ignited midreport, with a video centered on an old woman’s haggard gray face marked not just by wrinkles but by black crags that ran the length of her skull. At the bottom of the screen, scrolling text read: Doctors cannot explain strange voice coming from victims suffering from the condition known as The Shedding.

The old lady’s eyelids slid open, exposing oily black eyes, and she said in the recognizable baritone, “Soon I will be you. I will be all of you.”

The screen switched to a little boy clearly suffering from the shedding, and, after exposing his blackened eyes, he too said, “I am many now. I am everyone, everywhere.”

“Cut it off, please,” Mara said.

Sam complied and turned to Ping. “How is he forcing their ghosts out of their bodies?”

“They are not ghosts. These people are still alive. Isn’t that true, Ping?”

He shrugged. “I’m not sure what kind of dynamics are at play here. It could be possible that these transparent images are the consciousness of the people Prado has possessed. Does that mean they are alive or dead? I cannot answer that.”

Sam picked up his phone and scanned the room with its camera lens. He stopped when it pointed at Mara. “Buddy’s still here. He’s lying on the floor at your feet, curled up in a fetal position. It looks like he is crying.”

“Put that thing down. You’re making this harder,” Mara said. She glanced down at the floor and pulled her feet closer to her chair.

“Maybe we should try to communicate with him,” Sam said. “If nothing else, you could make him feel better and let him know we are trying to help.”

“That is ridiculous,” Mara said, about to expand her thought, but stopped when Ping raised a hand.

“Maybe he’s right. If we could talk to Buddy, maybe he could give us some insight into what happened to him. Any information we could glean from him might help.”

“How are we supposed to talk to somebody’s consciousness outside of their body? We can’t see or hear him. It appears we can pick them up on video, but there doesn’t seem to be any audio.”

“You’re the one who does stuff with pixels. Put some pixels on him and make him visible,” Sam said.

“Where do you come up with this stuff?” Mara said, shaking her head.

“Hold on, the boy might be onto something. It’s not unthinkable that you could add some substance to the spirit, as it were. It’s another take on your abilities to alter reality. If you can make a radio send and receive a cell phone call, you should be able to attach a few pixels to an ephemeral being.”

“You are both nuts.”

“Try to open your mind to the possibilities, Mara. Sam comes from a place where using metaphysics to alter reality is not unheard of. His imagination isn’t limited to this world of perception the way yours has been all your life. You should give him more credence in matters like this. That’s where he comes up with this stuff.”

“Yeah, give me some credence, sis. Let’s put some pixels on Buddy and chat him up. It’ll be like having a metaphysical séance.”

“I wouldn’t even know how to begin something like that,” she said.

Diana walked in with a plate of sandwiches and a pitcher of tea. “Begin what?”

Sam grinned. “We’re going to have a séance, Mom.”

Ping and Sam lifted the ends of the couch and moved it back a couple feet, fully exposing the ornate circular rug that lay on the worn wood floor in front of the stone hearth. Having cleared the dishes after the quick meal they’d just finished, Diana returned from the kitchen, meeting Mara at the foot of the stairs. She had gone upstairs to check on Buddy, who appeared slightly healthier after the session with Denton Proctor and seemed to be sleeping soundly. Mara stopped at the large entryway to the living room and leaned against its frame, staring across the room at the night through the large window. She wondered what she was getting herself into.

“Hey, you ready to get started?” Diana asked.

“I don’t even know where to begin,” she said, turning to Ping. “How should I go about doing this?”

Ping sat lotus-style on the edge of the rug with his back to the large window and pointed to the opposite side. “Take a seat, and we’ll figure it out.”

She stepped into the room and took a seat. Diana walked over to the mantel and picked up the green demontoid crystal, the one Mara had carried with her the night she had battled her mother’s counterpart on the Oregon City Bridge. Taking a seat on the floor between Mara and Ping at the edge of the rug facing the fireplace, Diana placed the round crystal equidistant between them, at the center of the intricately woven pattern of the rug. She glanced over her shoulder and said to Sam, “Honey, can you turn down the lights?”

“That’s not really necessary,” Mara said. “This isn’t a horror flick we’re living here.”

Diana nodded to her son to continue. “I’m not trying to set the mood for a séance. The muted lighting will help you focus on, well, on whatever it is you are about to do. The crystal is for good luck. You’ve had good results with it thus far, haven’t you?”

Having dimmed the lights, Sam took his place with his back to the hearth. Mara turned to him and said, “This was your bright idea. How do you suggest we proceed?”

“I don’t know. Just do it. You’re the progenitor,” he said.

Mara turned, exasperated, to Ping. “This is ridiculous. We’re sitting here in the dark, trying to make a living person’s consciousness visible. It makes no sense whatsoever.”

“You saw Buddy’s image on the recording, didn’t you?” Ping asked.

“Yes, but we don’t know what that means. It could simply be some kind of reflection, a visual echo of him. Who’s to say that what we are seeing is his soul?”

“Think, Mara. Do you think it is some kind of trick of light? We saw his image down here in the living room, and he’s not even in the room. He appears to be moving, gesturing and trying to communicate independently of his body. I think it is safe to say we are seeing more than a reflection of some sort.” He pointed to the crystal on the rug between them. “Focus on trying to see him. Use the crystal to shine a light on him.”

Mara released a stuttering sigh of frustration, and rolled her shoulders and head, like a prize fighter getting into the ring. “Okay, I’ll give it a shot. For Buddy’s sake.”

With a final twist of her neck, Mara looked down at the green crystal and sought out a glint or a sparkle on which to focus. A trapezoidal window of light caught her eye, and she allowed herself to be drawn in, to be engulfed by the emerald light. In her mind’s eye she became surrounded by sheets of green, panes of refracting glass that shimmered and spun around her, as if she’d fallen into a kaleidoscope.

Rays of light spiked out of the unmoving crystal, gyrating wildly and illuminating the room so intensely that the others held up their hands to shield their eyes. Light and shadow careened around the room, turning every surface into a staccato, disorienting beacon, flashing in and out of sight, inducing a sense of motion where there was none. Instinctively leaning away from the buffeting luminescence, Ping called out loudly as if trying to be heard over a windstorm, “Mara, focus on Buddy. See him, in your mind.”

The flashes grew erratic, spun back upon themselves. Light seemed to collide in bright bursts and to sink into pits of darkness. The crystal on the floor sputtered, then exploded in a single blinding burst. And then it winked out.

Fuzzy green spots filled their eyes for a few seconds as they adjusted to the muted, mundane white light coming from the recessed fixtures in the ceiling above the fireplace.

“What happened?” Sam asked.

Mara shook herself and widened her eyes in an attempt to focus. “I couldn’t seem to make the leap.”

“The leap? What do you mean?” Ping asked.

“Whenever I do this stuff, this metaphysical stuff, consciously there’s always a moment when I have to make a leap from wanting to do something to knowing I can do it. This making Buddy visible out of thin air doesn’t feel like something I can do.”

“You are overthinking it,” Ping said. “All you need to do in this
leap
of yours is clear the hurdle of doubt. You don’t have to have a perfect knowledge of your abilities for them to work. They exist whether you acknowledge them or not. We’ve demonstrated that many times. You didn’t know you could move within space until Sam threw that snowball at you that night in the warehouse. You didn’t know you could alter reality until you heard Buddy’s voice come from that old radio case that first time we worked together. The ability is there. You need to stop putting up barriers, and you will be able to access it.”

“You want to give it another try, honey?” Diana asked.

“I don’t think it would do any good. I think the idea of doing this is ludicrous, and that may be a hurdle I can’t get past right now.”

Sam leaned over and tapped Ping on the knee. “Could you switch places with me? I’m getting hot sitting so close to the fireplace.”

Ping nodded and stood up. Sam crawled over to Ping’s spot and sat across from his sister while Ping sat back down.

“I think this is something you could do, if you were willing,” Sam said.

“Is that another expert metaphysical opinion from the realm where they understand so much more than the dunces who live here?”

“Mara, don’t get snotty. He’s only trying to encourage you,” Diana said.

Mara raised a hand and decreased the antagonism in her voice. “Okay.” Turning to her brother, she asked, “Did your version of Mara ever do something like this, try to make some sort of apparition become visible?”

“No.”

“Then what makes you think I can?”

“You have the ability to do it if you want.”

“What makes you so sure?”

“I just know it.”

“You’re going to have to make a better argument than that if you want to convince me.” Mara grabbed the green crystal from the center of the rug and rolled it from one hand to the other.

“I can show you,” Sam said.

Mara snorted, continued rolling the gem back and forth. “Go ahead, smart boy.”

“Look at me,” he said.

Mara looked up and locked eyes with her brother.

“Make Buddy visible,” he prompted.

Mara’s eyes glazed over, and she slowly lifted up the green demontoid in her right hand. She gradually unwrapped her fingers, allowing the crystal to sit freely on her palm. With an upward flick of her eyes, it rose in the air. Floating, it stopped, suspended parallel to the bridge of her nose. It rotated, casting green translucent shadows that swept lazily across Mara’s eyes. A glint in her eye intensified, grew more radiant, sending a ray of white light into the hovering stone.

And it glowed and pulsed, brighter and dimmer, brighter and dimmer, gaining intensity with each cycle like something coming alive, then like a heartbeat being fueled by adrenaline. A visual
thump-thump, thump-thump
, as primal as life rushing through veins, but a bright light in the place of hot blood.

Sam, Ping and Diana found themselves enthralled in the rhythm of the light, mesmerized by the slow spin and the hypnotic beat. They were jarred when it paused, on the downbeat, when the light was dimmest. Almost as if the floating demontoid had inhaled then stopped breathing for a second.

Sam leaned sideways to see around the hovering crystal, to catch his sister’s attention. Mara’s gaze, still bathed in emerald light, slid from the crystal to Sam. Without changing expression, she said in a calm whisper, “Now.”

An explosion of blinding green light burst from the crystal and filled their senses. Not only could they see it, they could feel it pass through them. The flash of brilliance had texture and smell, taste and temperature. It had substance, like a spring breeze with a pleasing touch of static that clung to the skin with a slight tickle.

A loud
THUNK
broke the moment.

The crystal had fallen to the floor.

“Whoa, sis! That was intense!” Sam said, holding up his arms before him. They luminesced, emitting a light green glow. He looked down at this body, and it too cast off an emerald sheen. “It’s like looking into a pair of the night-vision goggles. Look, Ping, you and Mom are all shiny too.”

Mara rubbed her eyes and froze when she saw her brother. “What happened to you?”

“I don’t know, I think maybe you made the light stick to us somehow.” Sam smiled. He bent over to examine his forearm closely. “It’s little glow-in-the-dark pixels embedded in our skin. Kind of like lime-green glitter. You peppered us with glitter.”