Heart to Heart: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (14 page)

I told him, "I'm still working on that."

He said, "Yeah, it's nasty work but someone
has to do it, right?"

It was meant as a joke but was right on
nevertheless.

Someone, for damn sure, had to do it. It
seemed as

though I had been elected. And this day's
work could become very nasty indeed.

I wanted to find Windmere
Hill and have a little visit with Thomas Sloane, Jim's disabled
father. I was thinking that it would be interesting to discover how
the elder Sloane regarded his relationship with the mysterious
Valentinius.

At that moment I had no inkling—let me
assure you— of what I would encounter at Windmere Hill.

I would have gone anyway, of course.

Someone had to do it.

Chapter Eighteen: On Windmere Hill

Windmere Hill is a convalescent home for
millionaires. It boasts a full medical staff, including a
psychiatrist, two geriatric specialists, and a fully accredited
gerontologist. Gerontology, I learned, has to do with the
scientific study of the aging process, also with the problems of
the aged, whereas geriatrics is that branch of medicine that deals
with the diseases of old age.

The gerontologist was a fascinating guy, a
Dr. Cross— mid-forties, bright-eyed and energetic, sharp of wit and
seemingly enamored of challenging conversation.

I drew him by default, all
the other professionals being busy with their patients and the
administrator insisting that I speak with one of the staff before
being allowed to visit Thomas Sloane. He seemed delighted, offering
me in turn coffee and chocolate and tea and finally—in hospitable
desperation maybe—a snort of bourbon. We sat on a wide veranda at
the side of the main building in a beautiful environment of
flowering bougainvillea and roses, and I could tell by the way we
settled in that this guy wanted to talk, so I was resolved to make
it worthwhile.

"What exactly does a gerontologist do?" I
asked him, leaving Sloane aside for the moment.

"Around here, not much," he replied with a
relaxed laugh. "Afraid I'm here for window dressing. But the pay is
excellent and I can virtually write my own research program. I'm
available for consultation, of course, and I am a medical doctor so
I can help out in emergencies."

"I didn't ask it right," I told him.
"Actually I guess I was looking for the difference between
geriatrics and gerontology."

Cross scratched his head and replied, "About
the same magnitude as, say, a research chemist and a pharmacist. A
geriatric doctor treats disease and discomfort in the aged. A
gerontologist wonders why disease and discomfort accompany old
age."

I asked, "How would you qualify old
age?"

He replied, "We have only two directions in
life, Ford: up and down. Like firing a gun into the air. The bullet
goes up as far as the inherent energy can take it, then it reverses
direction and falls to the ground. Life is like that. The explosion
of conception sends us hurtling upward. When the inherent energy is
spent, we begin collapsing back toward the nothingness we started
from. What was the question?"

"How old is old age?"

"Semelparous or iteroparous?"

"What?"

"Depends on the reproductive mode.
Semelparous organisms reproduce once and promptly die—not from
disease but because they're programmed for it. The process is
called senescence or growing old, and for the semelparous it is a
very rapid senescence—and definitely programmed. Couldn't say
they're old, could you, at the moment of sexual maturity, but the
mating triggers senescence, as though their own purpose in life is
to reproduce. Once they've done that, what is there to hang around
for?"

I said, "Interesting."

"Sure it is. Salmon and eels are
semelparous, all of your annual and biannual plants, many insects,
but only a very few vertebrates like you and me. No no—" The doctor
laughed explosively. "Many married men may feel semelparous, but I
assure you that the human species is certifiably iteroparous—most
of us screw around as much as we can—however...we're talking old
age—semelparous forms of life require full vigor right up to the
very end so that they may reproduce. So old age for a moth—that is
to say, senescence—is a very brief affair, greatly accelerated
compared to an ape say—but the moth is not complaining because he
enjoyed vigorous life all the way through his entire reproductive
life span. The ape will live through maybe fifty percent of his.
Old age for this guy began at about midlife."

I said, "Yes, that's fascinating. But how
old is old for the human being?"

"In a practical sense," Cross replied,
"human senescence begins at about forty—but our clock has been
winding down from the moment we reached full maturity. Top

of the trajectory, see, and the bullet begins
to fall. But what we commonly think of as old age depends a lot on
the individual. In gerontology ninety years is given as the life
span of man. I would say the last one-third of that is old age. But
again, depending on the individual."

"What would you say," I asked him, "if I
told you that yesterday I dined with a three-hundred-year-old man
who played the piano like Liberace and spoke knowledgeably and
interestingly on virtually every subject in the arts and sciences
of mankind?"

Those knowing eyes danced with good humor as
the doctor replied, "I'd say sell me a ticket to that act. There
are outward exceptions to the life span—notably in sections of the
USSR, where they claim to have people living for twenty-five to
thirty years beyond the century mark, but I'd have to say that a
three-hundred-year-old man is an impossibility. We simply don't
have the program for it. Aging is a greatly misunderstood process
in the common mind. We don't simply grow older. We begin to break
up and dissolve. Lean body mass decreases steadily after physical
maturity, and dramatically so under senesence—so that a man of
ninety will have depleted two-thirds of his mature lean body mass.
Basal metabolism decreases as lean mass decreases, everything slows
down, the DNA/ RNA sequence becomes confused, the immune systems
fall apart, the brain loses mass, cells are dying faster than they
can be replaced, and even those that survive become less
functional, less responsive. So your three-hundred- year-old man
must be a bat."

I said, "Whoa! Ever hear of Dracula?"

Cross laughed, said, "Sure, but they got the
story all

wrong. It isn't vampirism
that gives the bat long life; actually the vampire is one of the
shortest-lived bats. The little brown bat—
myotis lucifugus
—has a life span of
twenty-four years. That's a hell of a long time for so small a
mammal. Has to do with conservation of inherent energy. I'm talking
metabolism. The total lifetime energy-burn for man is set at about
1,200,000 calories per gram of tissue. Compare that to 400,000 per
gram for your dog or cat. But see, that's tied to brain weight. The
highly cephalized animals have a prodigious output of energy, and
that feature is tied to longer life span. But a bat is a very small
animal with a tiny brain. No way could he live long enough to
produce that kind of energy. Yet some of them have very long lives,
if you want to call that living. They do it by turning down and
conserving energy instead of expending it. Eighty percent of an
insectivorous bat's twenty-plus years of life is spent in deep
torpor. A house mouse gets about three years—but, oh, he's a bundle
of energy while he's here."

I said, "So Dracula..."

"Yes, if I had written the story I would
have forgotten about the blood sucking and developed a way to
reduce the metabolic rate by about twenty-fold through torpid
states. Crawl into the coffin, yes, and snooze for several years or
several centuries with the metabolism near zero, then come out when
the coming was good and party like hell for a couple of
nights."

I said, "You lose a lot of friends that
way."

He laughed and replied, "And wake up each
time to a totally new world. Think I prefer it the way I have
it."

I said, "Other than becoming a hibernating
animal, do

you see anything in the
cards right now for someday greatly extending the human life
span?"

"Oh sure, it will come.
That's our next big breakthrough. Lot of brilliant people working
the problem. Sooner or later someone will find a way to rewrite the
genetic program."

I said, "You think it's basically a matter
of programming then, despite all that stuff about energy and
metabolism."

"Basically, yes," he agreed, "I think
so."

We then put Thomas Sloane on the agenda.
Cross gave me a bit of patient history and we talked a bit about
the quality of care at Windmere Hill. Sloane was under the care of
a cardiovascular specialist, a neurologist, and a psychiatrist. He
had suffered a massive stroke, sustained severe neurological
damage, and appeared to be in a mental state resembling catalepsy.
He had been at Windmere Hill for eleven months; he was seventy-five
years of age.

Each patient at Windmere
Hill enjoyed private quarters and around-the-clock nursing. Even
while the patient was asleep, a nurse sat beside the bed. The care
was, in Cross's word, immaculate.

"Not that Tom would know
it," Cross added with a sad smile. "I'm going to be perfectly frank
about this, Ford. As nice as it is, this place is no more than a
charnel house. These poor people require constant care and they
always will. There is only one way out of here."

I said, "But they hang on. Must be a reason,
wouldn't you think?"

He replied, "Sure, because they are being
urged to do so, and I think maybe they just don't know how to die.
I

don't call this living, my friend, what they
experience here."

I had to agree with the
good doctor when I saw old Tom Sloane. No way could he have weighed
a hundred pounds, though in his prime he must have topped
two-hundred easily. He was dressed, but the clothing was falling
off him everywhere. And he was seated in a comfortable leather
chair facing the window, but he could not have known if it was
raining or shining out there.

The thing that really
curled me—I mean really knocked me out—was the face of old Tom
Sloane. It was not a face but a leathery grimace, thin flesh pulled
tautly across that skull and the eyes bugging as though viewing
something unspeakably terrible, mouth open in a silent
scream.

I muttered, "Good God," and stepped quickly
back to speak to Dr. Cross. "How long has he been like that?" I
asked.

"Since they brought him here eleven months
ago," he replied solemnly. "Responds to nothing."

I had seen that face
before, twice, and recently. It had been worn by the younger Sloane
as he lay crumpled on the beach below Pointe House. And it had been
worn by the boy entrepreneur, Hank Gibson, as the medical
examiners fought his stiffened corpse from an office
chair.

"Prognosis?" I muttered to Cross.

"Oh, he's terminal. Came in here terminal.
Like I said, there's but one way out of here. A mere question of
time. For the lucky ones it's a brief senescent climax."

I went around and took the old man's bony
hand, forced myself to gaze into those horrified eyes—and then my
sense of humanity stirred itself and went inside of him.

It was much worse, in there.

It was chaos, in there.

I moved my other hand to
the top of his skull, and I said to him, through the mind,
“
Go home, Tom.”

I became aware of a faint
clearing from somewhere within the chaos, then I thought I saw
movement in the eyes. So I sent it again, “
Go home, Tom. It’s all done here. Thank you. Now go
home.”

Old Tom Sloane died in my arms.

Thank God, and thank God.
I feel sure that that liberated soul sang a happy song all the way
to wherever. And mine sang with him.

Chapter Nineteen:
Logia

There are those moments in direct experience
when you can touch something with the mind and be forever changed
in your own perception of who you are and what the human experience
is all about. That moment on Windmere Hill was one such revelation
for me. I do not pretend to fully comprehend the event, nor could I
have said with any certainty at the moment that I understood more
about the mystery of Pointe House than at any moment earlier—but I
did know that some fresh perspective on the situation was beginning
a movement at some level of my own consciousness.

Certainly I had been
deeply and strongly moved over the plight of Tom Sloane—though a
total stranger—and I felt nothing short of elation over my role in
helping him to escape it—but this is not to say I intellectually
understood that plight, the reason behind it, or my almost
instinctive response to it.

If you were walking in your neighborhood one
evening at dusk and saw a trash can upended and heard a commotion
beneath it, stopped to investigate, raised the can, and a small
furry animal shot out between your feet and raced away into the
gloom before you could get a good look at it—you might draw
reasonable conclusions as to the situation and your role in it.
But if pressed with questions as to what kind of animal?—how had he
gotten there?—why could he not get out on his own?—where did he go
when you set him free?—See, the answers to those questions lie
outside your direct experience in the matter, so you can respond
with surmise only: it might have been a squirrel or a cat; probably
searching for food; accidentally turned the can over and became
trapped beneath it; too small or confused or panic-stricken to
free himself; probably ran straight home, wherever that was, as
fast as he could.