Prophecy (14 page)

All things considered, it hadn’t gone too awfully bad. Mariah was sure the audience was over their shock by the time the question and answer period ended.

She hugged her knees against her chest remembering how self-conscious she felt walking out onto that stage. It was the perfect setting for her to do something outrageous, like tell a dirty joke or (even more fun) set fire to that horrible toupee perched on the head of that stuffed shirt in the front row. But with great effort, she controlled the urge.

There were things she wanted done prior to “the show.” Mariah was thrilled when her hairdresser, Andrea Krey, agreed to come to the hospital and do her hair. Thomas left to fetch Andrea, first stopping at the house to pick up the outfit she had decided to wear.

Since the color of her hair was outrageous, she thought she might as well indulge in a dramatic cut. The layered, feathered look gave her face a narrow and sensuous appearance.

Next she called her brother. Poor Stephen; he was past shock, just permanently stuck in numb where his little sister was concerned. When he found out she was fine, he shifted into what she called MSM—Mad Scientist Mode—and demanded to see all the neat changes for himself. She promised him a private viewing by bribing him into calling their folks. He was far better at handling them than she was. She did call her sister Judith, however, who was as inured as Stephen to the constant changes taking place in Mariah’s life.

She knew her hair looked unusual when she stepped out from behind the curtains in the auditorium. Andrea had created the perfect look, one that caused Mariah to chuckle at her image in the mirror.

She looked like the woman in the old
White Owl
cigar commercial. The hair on the top and back of her head was layered to look stylishly messy, while the bangs and sides were feathered forward to frame her oval face, making her eyes look larger. Yup, that’s what she looked like—a human owl with yellow eyes.

Upon emerging from the bathroom all put together, the three men had risen. Their glances told her everything she needed to know.

Thomas’ eyes had softened with a look that always made her feel slightly breathless; Doctor Silverstein’s grin said he knew why she had chosen clothing that looked like an elaborate space suit; and Gabriel Winters just sighed elaborately and shook his head so Mariah could not see the approval he felt in her choice of strikingly colored clothes.

Winters’ first thought was;
she’s certainly not trying to downplay her appearance. Good. Her audience will see that she’s not shrinking from the public and is even subtly poking fun at them
.

The audience gasped collectively as she sauntered across the stage. Her hands were jammed inside the pants pockets of her sapphire blue jumpsuit, cinched at the waist by a wide silver belt intertwined with blue and red threads. The collarless neckline and the long cuffless sleeves were trimmed in silver and blue threads, while the outside seams of the pant legs and sleeves were overlaid with silver and red threads. A placket starting at the center of the neckline and ending at the waistband repeated the glittering silver, blue, and red pattern of the belt.

The stage lights and spotlights hit the tricolored threads, causing them to sparkle. Mariah’s high-heeled shoes (which enhanced her height to five foot eight), dyed to match the jumpsuit, sported tiny silver buckles across the insteps. She completed the outfit with spiraled titanium earrings of blue.

The blue jumpsuit caused her dazzling white hair to appear even whiter, if that were possible. The light mocha eye shadow heightened the yellow of her eyeballs—and, in turn, caused her hazel green irises to deepen.

At the lectern, Manny laid his hand on her shoulder. Then he winked at her and turned to the assemblage. “At this point, I believe an introduction would be superfluous.”

He walked to his seat on the stage. Mariah turned to face the crowd. Those not in the first fifteen rows stared at the monitors closest to them. In the shocked silence, a man’s voice was picked up by the stage microphones and carried throughout the auditorium as he said, “Jesus H. Christ.”

“My sentiments exactly,” she replied, the same microphones filling the hall with her gruff voice. When she smiled, the pointed teeth were slightly visible; nevertheless, her characteristic lopsided grin seemed to ease some of the tension and the comeback told them that she still had her wry sense of humor. When she rolled her eyes they smiled, the strain lessening a bit more.

She came around the lectern and stood at the edge of the stage. Jamming her hands into her pockets, her eyes swept the audience, recognizing many of the faces from previous interviews. Still smiling, she said, “Welcome. Nice to see you all again. So, did you hear the one about the farmer’s daughter?” Laughter hit Manny’s ears as he let out his breath in a sigh of relief.
With just a few words, she got them laughing. Amazing
!

Mariah walked slowly down stage then stopped and turned back to the audience. “Would you mind if I dimmed these stage lights? My eyes are supersensitive and they’re nearly blinding me.” When she heard assertive murmurs, she psychically did just that; the lights immediately dimmed by three quarters then increased slightly as she adjusted them to suit her eyes. A collective inhalation of breath followed her as she strolled back to the lectern.

“Sorry for the cheesy unannounced demo. Doctor Ward told you that nearly all segments of my brain are active and, as I continue to experiment, I find I can do all sorts of cool things. I’ll show you more as we go along.”

Scanning the faces once more, she continued. “Ladies and gentlemen, I’m here today because I refuse to hide. While I appreciate that each of you has a talent that is unique and persuasive, I hope that you’ll be encouraged to write what you see and what you hear and keep the speculation to a minimum. Believe me; the truth is going to be difficult enough for the man on the street to accept without a slew of sensationalized fabrications and personal speculation.”

Mariah proceeded to describe the peculiarities in her body from her point of view. They had seen the second heart on the 3-D echocardiogram; they now learned that it greatly increased her energy and stamina. Hands shot up in the air, waving frantically. Figuring they were not going to go away, Mariah smiled and nodded to the first one.

Fifteen minutes later, she stopped the questions by removing her hands from her pockets. The silence continued as she turned them front to back, remarking how handy the long thumb was, as were the hard-as-plastic fingernails.

They were understandably fascinated. The presentations by the doctors were X-rays and medical facts; however, before them was the astonishing reality. Again the questions came fast and urgent, and Mariah allowed them another fifteen minutes.

Surprisingly, her hoarse and rasping voice was what disturbed the journalists the most. The yellow eyeballs, elliptically-shaped irises and white hair were oddities that were incomprehensible. But the voice; it just intensified her alien-ness.

After an hour of talking, pacing, and more psychic demonstrations (she finally gave in to the urge and lifted the toupee off the stuffed shirt’s head), she stood before them, legs slightly apart, hands clasped behind her back. In the silence, she swept the room again. Afterwards, in sharing the experience with those who were there and those who were not, each journalist was sure she looked directly into their eyes. Some even felt like she had touched their mind with hers.

Mariah closed her eyes momentarily. Opening them, she looked directly into the camera lens and said, “I wish I could give you more. I wish I knew why these things are happening to me. I have to believe these changes are for a greater purpose that will continue to benefit mankind. If I have to give up my freedom—and my life—at least it would be for something meaningful.

“But I can’t tell you anything else. It’s a day-to-day thing. Although, I must admit, last night rolled many days into one
big
thing.”

There wasn’t a person in the auditorium that would ever take their mundane life for granted. So what if they had crow’s feet, or thinning hair, or ears that stuck out from their head like satellite dishes? Even genetic abnormalities, like a son born with Down’s syndrome or a daughter born with a harelip, were acceptable abnormalities in their society.

But Mariah Adele Carpenter had to live with genetic deviations that set her apart from everyone, everywhere. Compassion and sadness for her predicament mixed with thankfulness and relief for their own normal existences flowed toward her on an incoming wave of sympathy.

Shaking her head and waving her hand as if to negate their compassion, she strode over to the right side of the stage. Picking up a stool—and unabashedly balancing it on the tip of her finger—she brought it back to the footlights. They smiled at her way of showing off, and she grinned back at them. Sitting down, she concluded, “Thanks for your sentiments. Being a realist, I’m going to make the best of it since there’s nothing else I can do about it.

“Okay, I’m ready to answer more questions.”

Mariah sat in the living room surrounded by newspapers and magazines. After reading several columns generated by the press conference in the hospital, she got the general flavor and just glanced at the rest. She was pleasantly surprised; most of them were dead on accurate, even down to the precisely quoted presentations done by the physicians. And Manny had invoked his off-the-record requirements by forbidding the too personal, too outlandish, and too nonsensical questions. The photos that accompanied the articles, taken at the end of the session, were flattering, considering what they had to work with. Even the tabloid rags—invited at her insistence—were not too luridly sensational or blatantly fictitious. Evidently she hit the right nerve, convinced more than ever that honest disclosure had been the right thing to do.

Well,
almost
honest disclosure. No need for them to know about her astral projection to an alien laboratory and her encounter with the three men of historical importance that defied logical explanation. And she sure as hell was not going to tell them about seeing two large aliens through a transparent barrier. The public was not ready for that just yet.

Last night, lying in Thomas’ arms, she told him about following Emmanuel to the laboratory, meeting the three men and their disclosure about clones created by the Anorasians to take their place at the time of their imminent deaths. Mariah knew Thomas was desperately trying to act as if these occurrences were nothing more abnormal than what other couples went through in their relationship. Unfortunately, she could tell it was getting more difficult for him to feign nonchalance.

Acceptance was the key for him. Since nothing could be done about the genetic or physical changes, he was learning to live with them. However, he knew there would be a limit. If the changes became so dramatic that she was a totally different person, physically and mentally ... well, he would deal with it when it happened.

Mariah was grateful and amazed that his love for her was strong enough to carry him this far, but she was sure there would come a point in the not too distant future when even love would not be enough.

Bored with looking at the articles and reading the same words over and over, Mariah headed toward her computer. She hadn’t written to friends in a long time and suddenly felt the need to connect. Thomas was shooting a wedding, Super Snoop (a/k/a Agent Winters) was somewhere in the house doing something clandestine, and her watchdogs were either in the back yard goofing around or in the kitchen playing cards. It was the perfect opportunity to do some letter writing.

Mariah had set up her computer in front of the large bay windows at the end of the living room. She enjoyed looking out into the backyard, up the incline dotted with chaparral that ended in a line of trees as the hill leveled to a service road. Logging on to the PC, she watched all the icons come on-line as the hard drive clicked, whined, and whirled. When the mouse became responsive, she accessed a file called
letters to friends
. Moving the mouse, Mariah pointed the arrow at one file ... and heard an unidentifiable sound. With her exceptional hearing, she was sure the faint
brrrrt
did not come from the PC.

Frowning for a minute, she tried to shrug it off as she continued to retrieve the most recent letter from a close friend in Texas.

But she couldn’t. Had the sound come from behind her? That made no sense. There was nothing there except a short wall with an ornate mirror hung in the center.

Unexpectedly, something previously unimportant surfaced.

It was five days after moving into the house. Taking a more active interest in her surroundings, she remarked to Agent Winters that it was an odd place for a mirror—I mean, who was going to stand in front of the windows, look out into the back yard, then turn their head to the left and stare at their own reflection?

She remembered his off-handed remark about previous tenants and esoteric taste and, if she insisted it be removed, they would do it. He also pointed out that the wallpaper underneath the mirror would be a lot lighter than around it. Not offended by its location, she gave it no more thought.

For sure, the noise came from behind her
. Was the wallpaper the real reason the Snoop didn’t want to move the mirror?
Why did that thought enter her mind? Feeling a finger run down her spine, she took her hands off the keyboard.

Mariah stared at the monitor without seeing it then put her hands back on the keyboard. She closed out the letter, shut down the computer, and stood up ... and heard the short
brrrrt
again.

Her paranoia shifted into high gear and her imagination won the qualifying lap at the Indianapolis Five Hundred.

Mariah Carpenter was sure no one in the house could hear that sound except her. She walked away from the computer with her hands jammed into her pants pockets heading for the kitchen, her face a study in disinterest. Pouring a glass of water, she wandered back to the living room and plunked herself down on the couch. She reached for a magazine and skimmed through the pages, but nothing registered.

The flame always banked beneath her overactive imagination turned into a roiling inferno.

An unbidden thought came to her as she remembered a book she had borrowed from Stephen called
After You, My Dear
. It was a dreary and trite mystery about a woman who hires a private investigator to follow her supposedly unfaithful husband. In a predictable plot twist, the husband is having
her
watched by another PI who sets up some pretty sophisticated surveillance equipment in their home. The husband gets reports from his detective who monitors the cameras from a van parked at the end of their street.

One of the tiny cameras had been installed behind a picture. The PI had drilled a small pinhole into the frame for the lens. The whole thing sounded pretty hokey—how do you hide a camera behind a picture—but Stephen assured her that the expensive and advanced equipment was available to government agencies only, and it could be hidden just about anywhere.

If it could be hidden behind a picture
...

None of this made any sense. After a few more minutes of flipping pages, Mariah bounced back to the computer and turned it on. While it warmed up, she pushed the keyboard aside, slid a piece of paper out of the printer, grabbed one of the pens from the coffee mug she used as a pen holder, and began to write. She hadn’t scratched more than half a dozen words when she heard the noise again.

To confirm her suspicions, Mariah moved her chair slightly, hoping it looked like she was just squirming. She heard a different noise this time; a slight
zzzzzt
.
But it came from the same direction.

Tossing the paper aside, she pulled the keyboard back into place and, following a path of files, came to the one marked
diary
—and heard the soft
brrrrt
.

Had the camera lens been pointed at her face instead of the back of her head, Andrew Bellini and Jack French, the two CIA agents sitting in the van on the access road behind the house, would have seen her pupils dilate and a red rim encircle her lemon-yellow eyeballs.

Mariah would have been interested to see what she looked like when enraged.

Someone was watching her. Someone had planted cameras. Most likely throughout the house. To spy on her every move, her every word. She just knew this one wasn’t the only one
.

Two thoughts suddenly emerged nearly simultaneously. The first was a furious gut reaction; the second snapped her back to reality like she’d been brought out of hysteria with a slap to the face.

I’m going to burn this fucking house to the ground
and

Who’s doing this? And why
?

Knowing she
could
set the house on fire, Mariah forced herself to calm down. She no longer had the luxury of making idle threats when in an irrational state of mind. With her, they weren’t so inconsequential.

No. Better to find out who was behind this and then make the punishment fit the crime.

“What the hell is she doing?” Andy muttered, watching Mariah on the monitor. Chomping loudly on an apple he had just found in the little ‘fridge, Jack French strolled out of the kitchenette just in time to hear the remark. As usual, he was eating. He was very thin, his metabolism burning at breakneck speed. The long sleeved, red tee shirt and gray flannel pants hung off of him like he was a mannequin.

“What’s up, Hulk?” he asked. Andy Bellini’s high school football buddies gave him the nickname because of his size; it stuck with him long after the movie,
The Hulk
, was gone. And his choice of clothing further enhanced the image: sleeveless tee shirts which showed off his huge biceps and shoulders, and snugly fitted black pants which outlined his quads and hammies.

Andy glanced at Jack, a frown creasing his brow. “She’s acting weird,” he replied, his eyes sliding back to the screen. “First she’s reading newspapers. Then she goes to the computer and starts messing with it.
Then
she stares off into space for a few minutes, gets up, gets some water. Then strolls back to the couch. After five minutes of shuffling newspapers around, she’s back at the computer.

“And
now
she’s dusting everything in sight!”

“Maybe she just got the urge to clean. You know how chicks are,” Jack said wisely, talking with his mouth full. “What was she doing at the computer?”

“I don’t know. Acting weird there, too. I zoom in so I can see what she’s getting into, but it’s just a letter to a girlfriend. She stares at it a minute then closes it out without doing anything. Then it’s back to the couch. She sits there a couple of minutes and then up she pops, back to the computer. But instead of doing anything
this
time, she starts writing on a piece of paper! So I ‘peek’ over her shoulder, but can’t make out what she’s scribbling. When the computer finally boots up, she goes into a file called
diary
. Before doing anything with this file she shifts her ass, causing the damn chair to move, so I have to change the angle of the camera because now she’s blocking the freakin’ lens!”

Mystified, Andy paused. Jack finished the apple and tossed the core into a brown paper bag in the trash can. Staring at the screen again, Andy mused, “She never writes anything into the diary, just closes it up and shuts the machine down. When she finally gets up, out comes the dust rags and the furniture polish and the Windex. And
now
she’s cleaning everything, even the light bulbs in the lamps!”

Jack watched Mariah on the screen over Andy’s shoulder. He was baffled: she seemed to move purposefully through the house, her dust rag missing nothing. Jack’s young face turned thoughtful.

“Y’know, she’s not the same since she’s back from the hospital. And it’s more than just her looks. She don’t hardly sleep no more. Just curls into a ball wherever she happens to be and zonks out for an hour. Like a cat. Then she wakes up and prowls around for another ten to twelve hours.” Grinning, Jack added, “After she wears ol’ Raphael out every night and he passes out, she bounces around from room to room, playing cards with the Feds, watching TV, reading, like that.

“So now she’s in a cleaning frenzy ... so what? Maybe she’s on the rag. Are you gonna report it to Winters?”

“She does do a number on Raphael, but he keeps coming back for more,” Andy chuckled.