Nightmare’s Edge (12 page)

“An interworld what?” Nathan asked.

“Interworld audio receiver and transmitter unit.” He set it in Nathan’s hand. “Just call it IWART. That should be easy enough.”

Nathan suppressed a grin. That was really an awful moniker, but he was right. It would be easy to remember. “What’s it do?”

Simon Blue touched a round plastic knob at the center of the IWART’s front casing. “This switch has three settings, one for each of the three Earths. For example, if you use the Earth Yellow device while you’re here and turn the switch to the Earth Blue setting, you will be able to talk to someone holding the Earth Blue device while he is in that world, regardless of the difference in time passage. First, you press the talk button.” He pointed at a black button on the side. “Then you say something and let the button go. It transmits the sentence or paragraph or whatever in its entirety, allowing the receiver to play it at a normal rate. The only drawback, of course, would be for the person on the faster world. It would seem to him that the person on the slower world is taking forever to record his reply.”

“Sure,” Nathan said. “That makes sense.”

Simon pointed at one of the computers on the desk. “We have the same technology in our transmissions between the laboratories, but this allows someone to be mobile; that is, he would be able to use it outside of the lab. You would still, however, have to be stationary for it to make cross-dimensional contact. It doesn’t work while you’re moving, but since it also has a built-in GPS receiver, it might come in quite handy for many applications, don’t you think?”

“Definitely.” Nathan eyed the switch on the IWART. The three settings were labeled “Yellow”, “Blue”, and “Red”. “What happens if the Earth Yellow device is set to the Earth Yellow position?”

“It contacts us here in the observatory, and, as you might expect, the Earth Red device’s Red setting would contact Earth Red headquarters, and so on. We will be sending the IWARTs to those worlds soon. But now we must turn to other matters.” Simon Blue nodded at Dr. Gordon. “Is the Scotland mirror locked in place?”

“It is. I can show them the local energy emission first. Perhaps by the time they synchronize, we can look deeper.” Dr. Gordon leaned over his laptop and tapped a few keys, then turned toward the center of the room and pointed upward. “As you watch, I’ll explain what you’re seeing.”

Nathan looked at the ceiling. As he expected, a curved reflection of everyone in the room looked back, their heads tilted. Soon, the mirror darkened, and pinpoints of white light dotted the purple canopy — stars twinkling in the night sky. Then, the darkness in a third of the mirror broke apart and scattered, like oil droplets on water. They changed into oddly shaped globules of various colors, much like the patterns at the other observatories — shapes that represented the noise gathered from space by the radio telescope. It seemed that a wedge of dark pie had been removed, revealing part of a circle covered with crawling, multicolored worms.

“Instead of one radio telescope,” Dr. Gordon explained, “we have three. With the wounds in the cosmic fabric, we can hone in on the sounds from each universe and compare them to see how they function as a tri-universe whole. What you are seeing is the noise generated here in Earth Yellow. As you might expect, it has the strongest signal. The computer will lock on the closest dream and interpret its sound emission. Then we should be able to see a visual representation. All the light energy we collect is now sent through the mirror Tony brought from Scotland, and we believe that is the key to viewing the dream world. This should allow us to visually search the three realms safely. And I hope we will eventually learn how to open a portal to the stalkers’ world. From what I have learned, eliminating those creatures would help our cause greatly.”

“Can you play the transmissions out loud?” Nathan asked. “I’d like to hear them.”

“Very well, but it will be severely garbled until we translate it.”

“I’d like to give it a shot, if you don’t mind.” As Nathan continued to stare at the scene above, static began buzzing from hidden speakers. He concentrated on the noise, trying to pick it apart and decipher the tune as he had once before.

Francesca Yellow scooted toward him. “You don’t have to tax your brain, Nathan. The computer can do it.”

“I need to get better at this. Without Kelly around, I might need it.” He closed his eyes and imagined a blank musical staff floating in front of him while a mental vision of himself held a violin. As he caught each note from within the static, his imagined self played it. A black spider formed on his strings and flew to the staff. After a few seconds and many more notes, a page of music filled his mind.

During his previous try, he had a real violin and played the piece out loud. This time he wanted to do it all in his head and really get the hang of interpretation, something his mother was able to do without any effort. If he was gifted, too, he should be able to learn this skill.

When his mental picture played the first measure, he hummed along. The static began to clear. Just like last time, his physical ears heard what his brain composed.

Dr. Gordon’s voice broke through. “Shall I begin the translation? Nothing will happen without the appropriate music.”

“No!” Francesca said sharply. “Let Nathan do it. He must do it.”

Someone shushed her, and then static blended with the music. His eyes still closed, Nathan concentrated. He had to get it back.

Soon, the melody flowed once again, and it took only seconds to recognize it — “Be Thou My Vision” — the same piece that had cleared the air during Daryl Blue’s nightmare. Yet, this didn’t sound like a choir of angelic singers. It was more like a duet — a violin and a piano, beautiful in passion and haunting as each piano note echoed in perfect precision with the violin’s long strokes.

Someone slipped a violin and bow into Nathan’s hands. “Now play it, son. Play it with all your heart.”

He recognized his mother’s voice. “But my hands, they’re — ”

“Play it anyway!” Her voice sharpened. “Let the pain flow. Without pain there is no passion.”

Nathan rubbed his fingertip across the violin’s smooth wood grain. It felt good . . . very good. Maybe his mother was right. Maybe he could still play. “Okay. I’ll try.”

Keeping his eyes closed, he raised the bow to the strings. His mother’s voice smoothed to a poetic cadence. “Only sacrifice draws a holy flow from within, and only a bleeding soul can reach down deep enough to find the blazing fire — the God-given inferno that purges every particle of dross that spoils the master’s silver.”

Cringing at the pain, Nathan pressed down on the fingerboard and pushed the bow across the strings. A note screeched through the air, worse than nails on a chalkboard.

He lifted the bow. “I can’t. My hands hurt too much.”

“Consider them healed,” she said. “Imagine yourself playing with soft, supple, perfect hands. Let the pain melt away.”

Nathan focused his mental image. As his mother probably suspected, the teenager in his mind had bandaged hands. He forced the imaginary Nathan to strip off the wrappings, but the hands were still raw and oozing blood. He couldn’t make the redness go away.

Again he pushed against the strings, and again a horrid screech erupted. Pain ripped from the tips of his fingers to his shoulders.

“Let’s just do it with the computer,” he said, lowering the violin. “I just wanted to see if I could translate the noise.”

“Nathan.” His mother’s voice was still calm, yet forceful, “I have told you a hundred times that you have more talent than I do, yet you have not reached into your soul to grasp it. You have to roll away the stone that’s keeping that talent from rising into your heart and into your hands.” She pressed a fist against her chest. “If you don’t let God play through you, your music won’t come from a heart of pure passion. It will be nothing more than a mechanical recital of rigid notes on a page.”

Nathan touched his own chest with the butt end of the bow. “But there isn’t a stone in the way. There isn’t anything blocking my passion.”

His mother’s brow eased upward. “Isn’t there?”

“No.” He lifted his bandaged hand. “This isn’t pretend. We’re dealing with reality.”

“I see.” She took the bow and pointed it at the violin. “I will need that, please.”

As the static continued, Nathan laid the violin in her extended palm. His makeshift bandage had loosened, exposing her bloody gash. “Mom. Your hand. There’s no reason to — ”

“I told you I’d show you some of my old spunk,” she said as she set the bow over the strings. “You might want to take notes.”

Grimacing as she pressed down on the fingerboard, Francesca played the last few notes of the song, apparently matching what she heard in the static. Although she began with a slight hint of flatness, the melody soon sharpened to the proper pitch. As she glided into the first phrase, cringing with every note, the tune’s lyrics came to Nathan’s mind, as if bidden to rise by the matchless virtuoso.

Be thou my vision, O Lord of my heart;
Naught be all else to me, save that thou art.
Thou my best thought, by day or by night,
Waking or sleeping, thy presence my light.

She took a breath and looked up at the ceiling, tears flowing. Then, raising the bow again, she played the same notes, this time even more beautifully than before. Every push and pull of the bow brought an anguished frown and the weakest of grunts, but she played on, sweating, crying, and — Nathan looked at the hand running up and down the fingerboard — and bleeding.

A trickle of blood dripped and streamed down the fingerboard. Francesca Shepherd seemed to pay no mind. Playing on and on, she had lost all awareness of her surroundings. Only the slightest bend in her brow gave any indication that pain still shot through her fingers. She was a woman in love, but Solomon Shepherd was not the man on her mind.

As the tune began again, the words to the second verse flowed through Nathan’s soul, each one echoing from ear to ear as they faded.

Be thou my wisdom, and thou my true word;
I ever with thee, and thou with me, Lord;
Thou my great father, I thy true son;
Thou in me dwelling, and I with thee one.

He looked up. The globules in the curved mirror had already burst open, and the colors had merged into a scene within the pie-slice wedge, blurry but discernable. Little Francesca Shepherd stood in her old bedroom, no more than ten years old, playing her violin in front of a music stand.

Nathan gaped at the sight. How could this be? Gordon had said they would pick up the strongest signal, but his mother wasn’t dreaming. He looked back at her face — eyes closed, breathing steady, body moving in a flowing rhythm.

Or was she?

In the scene above, little Francesca stopped playing and crawled under her bed. As if followed by a movie camera, she appeared in the dim shadow of her bed’s frame, her eyes peering under a frilly dust ruffle at shoes rushing past her hiding place. Then, closing her eyes, she folded her hands into a praying clench and moved her lips rapidly.

Francesca’s violin played on. Nathan glanced at his mother out of the corner of his eye. Deep lines creased her brow. Blood dripped from her hand to the floor. More words arose in his mind, now fainter, more desperate.

Be thou my battle shield, sword for the fight;
Be thou my dignity, thou my delight;
Thou my soul’s shelter, thou my high tower:
Raise thou me heavenward, O power of my power.

Little Francesca crawled out from under the bed. Kneeling by her mother’s body, she wept pitifully, rocking back and forth in time with her sobs. Soon, a large hand came into view. Francesca took it, rose to her feet, and walked away with Nikolai Malenkov, hand in hand, into a dense fog.

The scene shifted suddenly. Now in the backseat of an old car, she gazed out the window, watching her home shrink in the distance. As she held a stuffed bear in her arms, tears streamed down her cheeks.

The lyrics marched on.

Riches I heed not, nor man’s empty praise,
Thou mine inheritance, now and always:
Thou and thou only, first in my heart,
High king of heaven, my treasure thou art.

The scene shifted again. Francesca, now a young woman, walked down the center aisle at a church. Dressed in silky white and her raven hair decorated with tiny white flowers, she glided like an angel, her bridal veil unable to hide her brilliant smile. Nikolai, dressed in a black tuxedo, walked at her side, his smile nearly as wide as hers, though a tear sparkled on his cheek.

A tall, broad-shouldered gentleman, also dressed in white, waited at the front. His smile, muted and trembling, communicated much more than joy. It shouted, “I can’t believe the amazing blessing that walks my way.”

When they reached him, Nikolai laid her hand in the groom’s and seated himself in the front pew. Then an organ blended with the violin, also playing the wondrous hymn.

Now breathless, Nathan again looked at his mother. Her bleeding had eased. The lines in her forehead had disappeared. Her eyes still closed, a gentle smile graced her lips — soft, pain-free, content.

As her playing slowed, the notes lengthened, growing stronger, deeper, richer. Majestic lyrics broke into Nathan’s mind like a flood.

High king of heaven, my victory won,
May I reach heaven’s joys, O bright heaven’s sun!
Heart of my own heart, whatever befall,
Still be my vision, O ruler of all.

The final note rose from the strings — stretched out and fading to a whisper. Francesca withdrew the violin and dipped her head low, letting her black hair drape the front of her shirt. After taking a deep breath, she looked at Nathan and gave him the violin and bow. Her smile was weak and sad, but she said nothing.

Nathan held the bow and violin. He couldn’t say anything either. There was nothing to be said. She had once again proven that something was wrong inside him. If he really did have her talent, he hadn’t yet dug deep enough to let it flow. Somehow, he had to find a way. The fates of three worlds might well be hanging in the balance.