Afterlife.

1.

"Julie," he said, his hands going up. She kept the flashlight on his face. She thought about the gun. Upstairs in the bedroom. She thought about how fast she could run there. Could she get there fast enough? Could she lock the bedroom door behind her? Could she get the key out-in the dark-and open the metal box-and get the revolver and get back out to make sure her children were safe from the man who she was now sure had murdered her husband?

"Julie," he said. "I"m not trying to scare you."

"Shut up," she said. "What...you broke into my house?"

"No," he said. "The door was open. The lights were off. Please. Let me explain."

"What in h.e.l.l are you doing here?" she asked, and then wondered how long it would take for her to find the cell phone and call the police.

2.

"Please. I can understand every single thought you"re thinking of. I was the boy who was burned."

"You said he died."

Michael didn"t respond to this. "But my memories are like flashes of lightning, Julie. I can"t see everything. You know what I did with you. You know where I took you, where you showed me what was inside you. You were there. You aren"t crazy. This makes sense if you believe, Julie. If you believe. You resisted me. I could feel it when I went into you. You had fear, and fear is the thing that has power over you now. But you"ve got to let it go. Somehow. You know how I Streamed into you. How you went to doors in your mind. You saw things. You relived things. But there"s something important now. Something more important than that. There"s a door in you that needs opening, but they"ve blocked it."

"They?"

"If I told you who, you would not believe me," he said.

"Try me."

"Your husband," he said.

"My husband is dead."

"There is no death, Julie," Michael Diamond said. "Let me show you."

He moved toward her, and she stepped backward, and felt fear clutch at her. She was sure he was going to kill her, she stepped back, and felt for the door k.n.o.b to the front door. She turned it. But it was still locked. The chain was on, as well. She pressed her back against the door. Her mind flashed on things-on what she could grab to protect herself. Where she could run. Her heart beat a mile a minute as she began hyperventilating.

He came nearer, and she kept the flashlight beam on him. He unb.u.t.toned his shirt.

The light shone on his skin. It was scarred and layered. "They set fire to me. They wanted me to burn, Julie. They stood by and watched me die. But I can show you. Just as you showed me what was inside you. I want you inside me. I want you to see this," he said, and reached out and took her trembling hand while she kept the flashlight on his chest. He drew her hand to the middle of his chest and she felt a surge of energy, and she knew it was the Stream because she felt herself-not her body, but her true self, something in her mind-flow into him, sucked along as if she were liquid and were being poured into a dark lake.

3.

The first thing she felt was that gradual warmth and a sense of safety, and then pleasure sensations ran through her. She heard his voice, with her, guiding her. "Julie, this is the Stream, I"ve brought you into it," and she tried to resist moving along with his voice, but she didn"t feel the same fear as she had seconds before. She saw memory screens inside the darkness: his father holding his hand as he led the little boy toward the doctor who took him through several doors, into a room with a series of beds. Two boys and three girls, of varying ages, lay on the beds, their eyes closed, small wires attached to what looked like polka dots on their foreheads and just beneath their left nipples-for they were in their underwear, sheets drawn up just to their stomachs. He cried when he was told to take his clothes off and get onto one of the beds, and watched in terror as the polka dots and wires were attached to the top of his head, making a slurping sound as they suctioned his forehead.

"This one for your heart," the doctor said as he placed his cold hand near his chest. "It"s so we can make sure you"re okay."

The lights were kept on, and his arms were tethered to the bed so that he had a range of movement but he couldn"t get up. "I have to pee," he said, repeatedly, but no one came to take him to the bathroom. He was in a white room with long mirrors on all the walls. He wasn"t even sure where the door was.

Eventually, he peed in his underwear, and fell asleep, exhausted and a little scared.

Another memory screen: a cla.s.sroom of twenty children, with three stern-looking women at the front of the cla.s.s, near the big teacher"s desk. He sat in the third row back and they were all being told to close their eyes and try to think of nothing but darkness. But he couldn"t. Every time he shut his eyes, he saw something awful, although as soon as he opened them, he couldn"t remember what it was.

"You don"t go home?" Julie asked in the Stream, shocked that she was able to speak at all.

The little boy answered her. "For some of us, our mommy and daddy never pick us up. We stay in that room with the lights and all the mirrors. They put the polka dots on us every night."

It was night, she a.s.sumed, but the lights above never gave an indication of morning or midnight. One of the boys plucked the polka dots off his forehead, and laid them on the bed. "Mikey," he said. "They"re stealing your dreams."

"Are they?" he asked. "My dad wouldn"t do it."

"Don"t lie to him," the sad little long-haired boy said. He must"ve been about fourteen, but he looked younger than Michael, who was almost thirteen. "They"re checking for brain activity. That"s all. They want to see patterns while we dream. Don"t worry, Mike, n.o.body can steal your dreams."

"They are too," the older boy said. He was at least fifteen, but seemed older. "They"re trying to steal from us."

The girl of eleven or so who Julie thought might be the long-haired boy"s sister, piped up, "I just want to go home."

"There is no home," the older boy said. "None of us have parents."

"I do," Michael said, and the little girl nodded, "Me, too."

The older boy smirked. "If you call those people parents. They"d sell you if they thought it could buy them something. Don"t you think that, Mikey? Don"t you? Since as far back as you can remember, don"t you remember how they hated you? How they think you"re a freak because of what goes on in your head? That they think you"re going to go nutso because you keep predicting things-bad things-like you"re a bad luck charm? Like you"re a jinx? I wouldn"t want a kid like that around the house," he said. "Who would?"

The long-haired boy said, "What about you?"

"My parents died," the older boy said. "In a car crash. I knew it was coming, only I didn"t tell them."

"That"s mean," one of the girls said.

"Is it? I was only four. What did I know? I didn"t know people died like that," the older boy said.

"Don"t you feel bad?" Michael asked.

"Why should I? I didn"t make them die. It was an accident."

"But you saw it coming."

"There"s a lot of things I see coming," the older boy said, looking at the boy with the long hair.

(A voice outside of the memory, Julie"s, "Who are they? What are their names?" and it jolted her off one memory screen and onto another.) There was an isolation booth. A gla.s.sed-in cage, but with a doorway that led into a larger room that was the testing room.

("Why is this important?" Julie asked.

"Something bad happened here," Michael said.) Then, another memory: the older boy and three girls and one other boy stood on the stairs in the schoolhouse, blocking the way for Michael to pa.s.s.

"You can"t come up," the older boy said.

"Why not?"

"We"re testing someone."

"You"re testing someone? You"re not supposed to run the tests. Where"s Dr. Stone?"

"Getting a taste," one of the girls-a tall, wiry one with braces, "of his own medicine." She and one of the other girls giggled.

"If you know what"s good for you," the boy said, "you"ll just go back downstairs."

Michael noticed the way the five of them had carved spirals and things on their bodies. "Why"d you do that?" he pointed to the girl"s arm.

"We"re a special secret club now," she said.

"You can"t join," the older boy said, quickly.

"Why not?"

"You"re not good enough," he said. "You"re fake. You"re one of the twenty-six percenters. We don"t want you. We want the ninety-nine percenters."

Another memory screen: Michael was weeping, wiping his eyes out as he walked down the corridor, and when he came to the Sleep Room, he looked through the door window and saw something that almost made him laugh, and then it scared him.

("What is it? What did you see?") In each of the narrow beds, the doctors and teachers and the parapsychologist, all lying down as if sleeping, polka dots on their foreheads. Michael tried to make his mind roam into the room, but something blocked him. Why were they just lying there? What had done this?

His mind sped through possibilities-thinking of his cla.s.smates, and he knew it was the older boy. Something terrible. Something they had done: the ones who gathered at the top of the stairs. They had scrambled the minds of their teachers, of their doctors, and of Mr. Boatwright, and maybe even his own father.

They weren"t dead, he was sure. Their eyes were open, and their lips seemed to open and close as if they were fish pulled from water, dying on dry land.

And then, Julie heard what sounded like an explosion and saw a little girl screaming as she tried to open the door to a gla.s.s booth-inside it was an inferno. The door finally opened, and a boy, on fire, came running out.

And then, Julie felt other things. She felt a sense of benevolence like she"d never experienced. She felt kindness. She felt something sacred. Michael"s voice in her mind, "I died, Julie. I died then. You"re with me, feeling that. Don"t forget it. Don"t ever forget what you"re feeling. It"s not a terror. Death is not a terror. It is the doorway to something sacred. See, how I felt it? Stay with me. Stay with it."

Wave after wave of elation seemed to sweep through her. "It"s the human soul," he said, with her inside him. "It"s the human soul, inviolate. Don"t ever forget that, Julie. Don"t. Death is just a stop along the way."

Then, she felt herself heave as if about to vomit, and she sucked air-but it was not her, was it? She experienced his memory-his fragments. He was alive. They stood around him, pointing. The other children.

The older boy stepped forward and whispered in the ear of the boy who had been burnt. "You pa.s.sed the test," he said.

It was Hut. She knew it was Hut. She could see in the boy"s face that it was Hut. Hut was the older boy. Hut helped set the boy on fire. Hut was doing something evil. Something terrible as a child.

The fear rose up in her. The fear grew quickly, like a fire itself in her mind, and she felt Michael"s consciousness grasp at her, trying to tug her back, but the fear shot her out of the Stream and she was once again in her front hall, her back pressed against the front door, but the flashlight had fallen to the floor.

Michael Diamond had released her hand.

"Julie," he said, his breathing heavy. "I did kill him. But not because of revenge. But because he was bringing things into existence. He was doing something terrible."

She stood there, breathing heavily also. She crumbled to her knees and sat down on the cold floor.

"You murdered my husband," she said. "And now you come here with this. This...magic trick. To make me feel things. To make me think you"re not the man who stabbed my husband. Who s.a.d.i.s.tically killed him."

"You believe," Michael Diamond said. "You can"t go back from that. Once you believe, you can"t."

4.

Inside her own consciousness, without the sense that Diamond was inside her, Julie felt a growing belief. She felt it more than she had ever felt anything before. His words: the human soul inviolate. Inviolate. There was something more than just this existence. She"d sensed it, she"d been exposed to it in the past, but she had never believed it because she had no direct experience. But now, here all this was. As if it were meant to come to her. As if it were falling into place for her.

And yet, he murdered Hut.

"I want more," she said, feeling hungry. "I want to be inside you. I want to see more. I can"t live like this. I can"t be like this. I can"t have all these things in my head. What I"ve seen. What I"ve experienced."

"It"s unexplainable in words," he said. "Here, take my hand. Just take my hand. I can bring you back inside me, but there"s something inside you that"s still blocked, Julie. Something they blocked."

"They?"

"There are at least five of them, still. They"ve done terrible things. Worse than you can imagine. If I were to tell you," he said.

"Show me."

5.

In the dark, he took his shirt off and crouched down beside her. Then, he guided her hands to his chest. "Accept the Stream," he said. "I"ll bring you in. I"ll show you what you want."

Soon, she felt as if she were flying into shadows. She knew from her reading that this was the astral projection that was often written about-the remote viewing, where one consciousness invaded another. And she saw the memory screens-it was like blinking, and each time a new image or moment of his life came up.

From his early life and his first experiences of Ability X (even his language invaded her mind, and she understood and accepted it) when he was seven and his father, in his military uniform, in a boardroom of some kind, tested him with cards, and then with mind games where the boy had to tell what he saw in pictures from his father"s thoughts. The little boy scribbled houses and horses and cats and women and his father each time nodded, and then the boy was in a room with his little sister Margie, and more tests. And she saw the building that was the Chelsea Parapsychological Inst.i.tute, and she was there when the sleep study began, but his consciousness guided her through these screens, into other memories, after the fire. Of the hospital where he spent nearly a year, and she watched from above as skin graft procedures were done, and painful salt water treatments, and the boy in the bed howled in pain and begged his father to see his sister. Then, the roaming through the open Stream-floating down the halls of the hospital while the pain intensified for the boy in the room. Moving through windows, out into daylight, out into the world and traveling above the trees until finally, coming to a graveyard, and drifting down among the oaks like a kite falling to the ground, coming to rest on the grave of a little girl named Ca.s.sandra Diamant. His sister. More screens came up, and she blinked through them feeling as if she were swimming underwater with her eyes only half open.