MIND TO MIND

Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective

Don Pendleton

Creator of

The Executioner: Mack Bolan Series

and

Joe Copp Private Eye Thrillers

Books by Don Pendleton

Fiction

The Executioner, Mack Bolan Series

The Joe Copp Mystery Series: Copp for Hire; Copp on Fire; Copp in Deep; Copp in the Dark; Copp on Ice; Copp in Shock.

The Ashton Ford Mystery Series: Ashes to Ashes; Eye to Eye; Mind to Mind; Life to Life; Heart to Heart; Time to Time.

Fiction written with Linda Pendleton

Roulette

Comics by Don and Linda Pendleton

The Executioner, War Against the Mafia

Nonfiction Books by Don Pendleton

A Search for Meaning From the Surface of a Small Planet

Nonfiction Books by Don and Linda Pendleton

To Dance With Angels

Whispers From the Soul

The Metaphysics of the Novel

The Cosmic Breath

Mind to Mind: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective

Copyright © 1987 by Don Pendleton, All rights reserved. Published with permission of Linda Pendleton.

Cover design by Linda Pendleton and Judy Bullard

This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to actual persons, groups, organizations, or events is not intended and is entirely coincidental.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping, or by any information storage retrieval system, without the written permission of Linda Pendleton.

Smashwords Edition, License Notes:

This edition is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you are reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work and rights of the author.

Don Pendleton Books

The Ashton Ford novels

Ashes to Ashes

Eye to Eye

Mind to Mind

Life to Life

Heart to Heart

Time to Time

The Joe Copp novels by Don Pendleton

Copp for Hire

Copp on Fire

Copp in Deep

Copp in the Dark

Copp in Shock

The Executioner: Mack Bolan Series

Fiction written with Linda Pendleton

Roulette

Executioner: War Against the Mafia, Comic

Nonfiction

A Search for Meaning

Nonfiction with Linda Pendleton

To Dance With Angels

Whispers From the Soul

Metaphysics of the Novel

The Cosmic Breath: Metaphysical Essays

For Linda, who gave me the title in an airport, and whose mind touches mine every day in all the gentle ways.

Mens agitat molem.

(Mind moves matter.)

—Virgil (Aeneid, vi)

The conscious mind may be compared

to a fountain playing in the sun

and falling back into the great

subterranean pool of the subconscious

from which it rises.

—Sigmund Freud

Author’s Note

To My Readers:

Ashton Ford will come as something of a surprise to those of you who have been with me over the years. This is not the same type of fiction that established my success as a novelist; Ford is not a gutbuster and he is not trying to save the world from anything but its own confusion. There are no grenade launchers or rockets to solve his problems and he is more of a lover than a fighter.

Some have wondered why I was silent for so many years; some will now also wonder why I have returned in such altered form. The truth is that I had said all I had to say about that other aspect of life. I have grown, I hope, both as a person and as a writer, and I needed another vehicle to carry the creative quest. Ashton Ford is that vehicle. Through this character I attempt to understand more fully and to give better meaning to my perceptions of what is going on here on Planet Earth, and the greatest mystery of all the mysteries: the why of existence itself.

Through Ford I use everything I can reach in the total knowledge of mankind to elaborate this mystery and to arm my characters for the quest. I try to entertain myself with their adventures, hoping that what entertains me may also entertain others—so these books, like life itself, are not all grim purpose and trembling truths. They are fun to write; for some they will be fun to read. To each of those I dedicate the work.

~Don Pendleton

Chapter One: In the Silence

It was an eerie piece of business. This "Jane Doe" was very pretty, apparently in her late twenties to early thirties, very alert and responsive. I was convinced that she knew who she was and where she was—and why she was the way she was—but there was no way for her to communicate any of that. This Jane Doe, you see, had only half a brain. The left hemisphere of her cerebral cortex had been surgically removed after suffering massive damage when someone had literally tried to beat her brains out with a crowbar. The right side of her body was totally paralyzed. Not only was there no movement possible on that side, there was also no feeling and apparently no mental awareness of the right arm and leg; she did not even recognize them as her own. She was responsive to voices and other sounds but possessed virtually no language capability. The eyes, though alert and expressive, remained extremely deviated to the left; to maintain eye contact I had to keep myself positioned to her left side, but she seemed unaware of the problem.

My friend Jim Cochran had asked me to drop in and see the lady. Jim is a cop. He was in charge of the case for LAPD. Six weeks had passed since the attack on this young woman. She was fully recovered from the surgery—as "recovered" as anyone expected her to get—but she remained unidentified, and Jim did not know even where to begin his investigation. The nude, savagely battered victim had been discovered beside the Hollywood Freeway, obviously dumped there after the attack and thought to be dead. The weapon, a heavy crowbar, was found a few feet away. Photographs of the victim had been circulated nationwide. No one had come forward to identify her, and apparently she was unable to identify herself.

I had worked with the police before—missing persons and homicide cases—with pretty good success. At such times I am usually referred to as a "psychic consultant," though really I am not at all sure what it is I do. I was trained for intelligence work by the U.S. Navy. I also have played around with various mental disciplines over the years, and I have had an active interest all my life in philosophy and psychology in general, metaphysics in particular, and I have a pretty good grounding in the theoretical sciences. So I don't really know what the hell I do with my head in cases like this one.

I guess what I do, basically, is simply to expose myself to the problem—whatever it is—and flow with the reaction. Maybe it is psychic. Just don't confuse me with Mandrake the Magician.

Anyway, I went to see Jim Cochran's "Jane Doe"—and what I did with my head, that time, was next to nothing. I mentioned the eeriness of the encounter, but there was more to it than that. I felt damn near overwhelmed by this young woman's misfortune. And mad. Yeah. I felt mad as hell. I know, I know—a "professional" is not supposed to get emotionally involved with his subject. But this woman had really been wasted, and very savagely so. Maybe I am just not professional enough, because I cannot handle this sort of thing with cold detachment.

Consider her situation and put yourself there if you can. You can think and you can remember. You can smell the flowers outside your window and see the birds flying past. You can feel joy and anger, love and fear—but all those experiences and all those feelings must remain forever locked inside your damaged head because you have no way to think with words.

Words ... yes, how important are words to that unique consciousness that we identify with the human experience. Most all of man that is peculiarly man was arrived at through the gift of language. Take away the gift and what is left of the man? Take away the words and the ability to reason mathematically and what is left of science? Without science, what is technology? Without technology, what is a civilization?

And what, dear God, was left of Jane Doe? Though she could cuss with anger and frustration, hum a tune, even sing a nursery rhyme with pretty fair diction, she could not summon the sound of her own name. She could draw a crude picture of her home but find no clue to the street address or city or even nation.

The problem, you see, was that Jane Doe was left with only a "subconscious" mind. That is what we have always called it, anyway. Lately we have heard it called "the right brain." And that is what Jane was left with. The right brain, in most people, provides that part of the human personality that deals in creativity, emotion, feelings, visual images, intuition. It does not deal with language or mathematics, not after the age of about five or six when the process called "specialization" seats the objective faculties in the left hemisphere.

If Jane Doe's misfortune had occurred when she was five years old, the right hemisphere would have gone on to develop on its own all the left hemisphere functions, and she would have grown up entirely normal. But for a calamity of this nature to befall a mature person ... well, that half a brain is exactly that, half a brain, incapable of reconstituting itself into a fully functioning organ of human consciousness.

So ... was Jane Doe still fully human?

This was the eerie part, I guess. I had the same feeling once at the San Diego Zoo while locked in a staring match with one of the gorillas. The old fellow was looking me straight in the eye, and I had the strongest feeling that we were communicating somehow; that a mind-to-mind transfer was happening there. It shook me. I still think about the experience from time to time.

And I had that same eerie feeling while my eyes were locked with Jane Doe's. I got no pictures, no images of any kind, just that feeling of energy surging between the minds. It shivered me, spooked me. There was a person in there somewhere, locked behind those eyes. But how "fully human" a person?

I did not—could not—stay long. Jim jumped straight down my throat the instant we got outside. "What the hell kind of interview was that?" he growled, very unhappy with me.

"Sony," I told him. "I can't help you with this one."

"Sorry, my ass! You didn't even try!"

I said, “Look, you asked me to give her a look. Okay. I gave her a look. And I'm telling you I can't help you.”

He leaned against the wall, lit a cigarette, said very quietly, "Spooked you, didn't she?"

I admitted it.

After a moment of silence he said, "Well, I'll grant you, she may have the intelligence of a three-year-old child, but I believe she understands what we want, and I believe there's a way to get it out of her."

"Give it some rest," I suggested. "She'll improve with therapy. They're doing some amazing—"

"Oh, bullshit, Ash," he interrupted impatiently. "She hasn't moved an inch after four weeks of therapy. Chances are she never will. There just isn't much left to her. But, dammit, she's alive, and I think she can finger the guy that did it. I want that guy, Ash. I really want that guy."

I said, "Yeah. I understand how you feel. But I ..."

After a moment he said, "You didn't even try, Ash."

I told him, "Well ... let me sleep on it. Call you tomorrow."

He said, "No fee, pal, for today. You didn't earn it."

I knew I hadn't earned it. I had not come for the fee, anyway. I came because a friend asked me to. That did not, however, obligate me to become involved in the case. And I really did not want to do so. I watched my friend the cop walk away, then I lit a cigarette while wrestling with my conscience. Could I walk away from this one? Sure I could. The same way I had walked away from the San Diego Zoo. I had long ago decided that some things were just better left alone. I did not conduct séances or otherwise attempt communications with "the dead." I did not "exorcise demons," and I had no truck with haunted houses. I did not attempt mental telepathy with dolphins or gorillas. So why should I ...?

That line of thought was interrupted by the sudden appearance of Jane Doe herself. A candy striper pushed her wheelchair through the doorway and on toward the terrace. I was standing off to the side, sucking my cigarette, and Jane's left-deviated eyes swept me as she passed by. I experienced the eerie feeling again, a sort of tingle deep within the brain. Or was it deep within the right brain? Certainly it was something nonverbal, almost primitive ... a shiver of the soul?

Could that be the explanation? Not just this time but for all the eerie, shivery, nonverbal encounters of the mind? Had Jane Doe's nonverbal right brain just been in communication with my nonverbal right brain?

Perhaps it is true that some things are better left alone. But, after all, this was County General Hospital, not the San Diego Zoo—and that was a human being over there, not a gorilla. And I had the damnedest, most shivery feeling that this human being was screaming at me in the silence.

I could not walk away from that.

Chapter Two: Connecting

I took over from the candy striper and pushed the wheelchair across the terrace, down the ramp, onto the lawn. It was a nice day, a bit warm but with gentle, cooling breezes. There were squirrels out here and a variety of birds, and there was a sweet smell to the air. I made no attempt to connect with her verbally, since I knew that she could not respond in kind, and I was not sure that she could deal intellectually with anything I might say, anyway. Obviously she could and did respond to simple command statements, such as, "Raise your arm—blink your eyes," and so forth, but much of that response could be coming directly from the brain stem, so it did not necessarily indicate intellectual activity.

She seemed to be enjoying the communion with nature, though, appreciatively sniffing the air and cocking the good left ear to the songbirds. And she seemed totally at ease with me. I began softly whistling "Summertime" as I moved her toward the trees. She swiveled her head to look at me and smiled with the left side of her face, began humming the tune in perfect key with my whistling. As I was launching into the fourth repeat of the chorus, she laughed softly and reached back with her good left hand to touch me—and God, did it touch me!—as if to say, "That's enough of that."

I wheeled her to a good level spot where the grass was thick and dry, took the blanket off her lap and spread it on the ground, then moved her onto the blanket and left it up to her to find the most comfortable position. That proved a bit awkward. She would shift about, glare at the uncooperative side of her body with something like bewilderment, push at the dead leg as though trying to shoo it away from her, try again and again without much improvement. I was reminded of a dog I once had who liked to lie down with a stuffed toy but never could seem to get the darned thing positioned properly against his body—and I was aware of what was happening with Jane Doe. She had no sensory connection to that dead leg. It was just a "thing" that always seemed to be in her way.

I let her fight it alone for a couple of minutes before I knelt beside her and lent a hand. It then became obvious that she knew what she wanted to do; with my help she ended up lying on her good left side, arm bent and elbow supporting the torso at a slight elevation, legs drawn in a loose fetal curl. I lay down facing her in a mirror-image attitude, with plenty of separation between us. Because her eyes were fixed leftward, she had to swivel her head toward the right shoulder in order to look at me.

I positioned her head straight on with one hand and said to her, "Look at me." Her head fought my restraining hand, trying to comply, but I held firmly and kept repeating, "Look at me."

The only evidence that she was trying to do so was in the muscles of the good left side of her face as she squinted, scowled, twitched the cheek, curled the lip. After about twenty seconds of that she exploded with a frustrated expletive: "Shit!"

I laughed. She laughed. I released her for a moment, showed her how I did it with my own eyes, positioned her straight on again, said, "Now, dammit, look at me."

Again she yelled, "Shit!" But there was a movement there—a twitch, anyway. We kept at it. After a minute or so she was starting to get the hang of it, but I was not sure that the eyes were tracking together. Curious thing about the visual fields. Each eye has two of them, left and right field in each eye, each field wired to the corresponding control side of the brain. Right brain, left visual field; left brain, right visual field. Since Jane Doe had no left brain, she also had no right visual field in either eye. Which would indicate, I gathered, that she could not take in a whole image with a single glance; she would have to "scan" the object with the single field available to her and reconstruct the fractured pictures thus gained into a whole image. I had already noticed that she "saw" in somewhat this fashion, evidenced by a slight quivering of the eyes while locked leftward.

But don't get the idea that I was dabbling in physical therapy. I lay no claims to expertise in that area. I presumed that someone was working with this woman to restore all possible bodily functions. My interest was in her mind itself and how it worked through only half a brain, the surviving nonverbal side. It had immediately become obvious that she was processing information and trying to respond intelligently—"thinking," in other words. But thinking how and with what? It had been scientifically demonstrated that the right cerebral cortex is superior to the left in certain areas of human consciousness, but virtually all that we regard as intellectual processes are typically handled by the left hemisphere.

For example, if Jane Doe had lost her right hemisphere instead of the left, her closest friends would see little noticeable difference in her personality. Her speech may be a bit flat, unemotional, and tending toward the literal—no appreciation for metaphor or delicate shadings of meaning. Ask left-brained Jane, "What time is it?" and she may well respond, "What time is what?" Or ask her how she feels and she may tell you that she feels with her hands. She may get lost inside her own home, not be able to find the bathroom, have difficulty fitting her arms and legs inside her clothing, and never dream again, but she could sit and chat with you for hours without demonstrating any loss of intellectual ability.

But I was dealing with a right-brained Jane—a person whose memories were largely sensory and emotional impressions and whose thoughts were not structured through language. So how the hell were they structured, in what kind of format did she think, and how could I tap into those thoughts? I was not all that concerned about her fixated eyes; I was going for the mental reaction to all that.

What I got, though, was quite a bit more than I had been going for. I had been patiently wrestling with her head for about five minutes when she snarled, "Well, fuck it!" just as clearly and with the same level of disgust experienced by any normal person. She kissed my hand, then maneuvered herself close against me and nuzzled my throat, moaning softly and agitating her pajama-clad body against mine.

I thought, Oh shit! and was trying to gracefully extricate myself from the situation when an obviously very angry woman in hospital-white slacks and tunic came charging across the lawn with fire in the eye. "Just what the hell do you think you're doing!" she cried.

Jane Doe rolled onto her back with a soft little laugh as I struggled clear.

"Let's get her into the chair," I said to the angry woman, trying to be very cool while feeling entirely foolish. I noticed the candy striper, then, in my peripheral vision, all but wringing her hands in the background.

Then I saw the hospital security cop hurrying our way.

So okay, I decided, I had invited this one. Common sense should have warned me. A guy simply does not take over a female patient of questionable mental status and lay her on a blanket in the grass.

The woman grabbed my arm with both hands, as though to restrain me from running away.

I smiled and asked her, "Is this your dance?"

But then the cop arrived, gun drawn, wary.

I told him, "There has been a misunderstanding. I'm here on police business, examining this patient at the request of Lieutenant James Cochran, Hollywood Division. Call him and confirm it."

But this guy was not too swift. He looked at the woman for instructions.

She snapped, "Arrest him!"

The guy was fumbling with his cuffs.

I told him, "Forget the cuffs, pal, or you've got more trouble than you really need. I'll go to the security office with you while you call Cochran." And I told the woman, "Your sense of duty is commendable, but don't you think you're being just a tad ridiculous? Will you please let go my arm?"

Not that I was mad at her. Actually I admired her for the ballsy defense of her patient. Quite attractive, even under the circumstances—blond, petite, curvaceous. But enough was enough, and I'd had enough.

She released me, seemingly a bit embarrassed to realize that she was still clinging to me.

Jane Doe had been lying on her back and giggling through all of that. I put her in her chair and arranged the blanket across her lap. The security cop still had his gun in his hand, looking very confused.

The woman in white asked me, "Do you have some identification?"

I showed her my driver's license and handed her a business card. Her eyes were on that card as she told the cop, "It's okay, Harry. There's been a misunderstanding."

Harry looked very grateful about that. He grinned at me as he holstered the pistol and walked away.

The woman gave me her hand, said very calmly, "Sorry I missed you inside, Mr. Ford. I'm Dr. Saunders. Lieutenant Cochran did mention your name, but I'd ... I'm sorry if I interfered with your ... investigation."

"No interference at all," I muttered.

Jane Doe had me in her sights. And she was looking at me straight on. We'd connected, yeah ... somewhere.

Chapter Three: A Gross Perception

Alison Saunders, it turns out, is a doctor of philosophy, not medicine. She is a clinical psychologist who specializes in the rehabilitation of persons suffering brain damage—not very long a doctor of anything, I guessed, unless I'd missed her age by several years. As I said, she is very pretty—even more so now, with the strain of hostile confrontation gone. I am finding myself fascinated by her hands and their artful movements as she talks; they are very delicate little hands with beautifully tapering fingers and just enough nail extension to indicate an awareness of, and attention to, their appearance.

She has very nice soft brown eyes, too, and it is good that they are soft because she has a tendency toward direct eye contact when she is talking to you, so direct that it could be discomforting to be thusly impaled by such an intense gaze. With her, though, the feeling is more that you are being bathed rather than impaled, and it is a nice experience.

The mouth is nice, too; small, without seeming tight; sensuous, generous; altogether a proper mouth for a professional young woman who wishes to be pretty but not provocative. I am thinking, though, that this mouth could get provocative as hell under the right circumstances.

The whole face is like this, everything properly proportioned and harmonized with just the right complementarity; I mean, the chin beneath that delicately sensuous mouth is the chin that should be there, the plane of the cheeks so fittingly flowing into the gentle lifting of that delicate nose, the brows and forehead providing such pleasingly subtle emphasis to the warm eyes—even her hair, softly lustrous, sort of ash blond with just the right shading to perfectly backdrop all that.

If it sounds like I am a bit smitten, you are exactly right about that. Of course, I am especially vulnerable to beautiful women—sensitized, you might say, by a highly active libido that reflexively responds quite a few steps ahead of intellectual reaction. If the object of that reflex is especially alluring, then, of course, the intellect has a hell of a tussle on its hands. At this particular moment with Alison Saunders the intellect is already aware that it is locked in a losing battle, but it keeps trying, anyway.

We have returned Jane Doe to her room and made sure that she is secure and comfortable. Doc Saunders and I are now at a small table in the cafeteria—facing each other knee to knee, as it were, and I am electrically aware of those knees that are almost but not quite touching mine, except now and then, as one of us "accidentally" makes contact. Although we are engaged in a very absorbing clinical discussion of Jane Doe, one little corner of my mind is still under libido domination and wondering if she is feeling what I am feeling beneath all the shoptalk.

Alison has just finished summarizing the physical effects of Jane's hemispherectomy, and now we are getting into the psychological effects.

"Of course," she has just told me, "the human brain is a highly complex organ. It is probable that no two are exactly alike in the way they are organized. This is the first hemispherectomy I have dealt with directly, and the literature itself is not all that rich. But there have been cases—especially, it seems, in women—where lateralization before damage or surgery was not all that marked, and therefore both hemispheres have developed verbal abilities."

I was searching my mental textbook for that one. "Lateralization is, uh ..."

"Hemispheric specialization," she explained. "This usually begins developing at about the age of six, after the neural connections between the left and right hemispheres have matured. For most of us the lateralization process begins favoring the left hemisphere for verbal and the right hemisphere for spatial development. It has been discovered that in general, females become less lateralized than males. Don't ask me why, but it surely has something to do with natural selection and sex roles. However, that does not appear to be the case with Jane. She has only the most primitive verbal ability, which indicates that her right hemisphere—the surviving brain tissue—was strongly lateralized—that is, specialized—for nonverbal functions."

I said, "She cusses pretty well."

Alison laughed softly and replied, "That's characteristic, I'm afraid. Swearing seems to be a right-brain specialty. Most right brains, it seems, develop a capability for emotional verbalization. To some extent, too, even in the marked cases of lateralization, there seems to be a rather rich right-brain store of prelateralized memories—even verbal memories, such as nursery rhymes and other words learned by rote."

"Why can't Jane remember her own name, then?" I inquired.

"Perhaps she does."

"Then why has she not produced it?"

"Possibly she simply cannot access it."

"You mean, like ..."

"A proper stimulus. She swears because of an emotional stimulus—frustration or anger. About ninety percent of what Jane is right now, Mr. Ford, is emotion. I mean, that is what her consciousness is at this point; a nonverbal, nonassociative, noncommunicative person-ality caught up in a nonlinear, almost purely sensory, world of spatial experiences and memories."

"She's in a nightmare," I supposed.

"Something very similar, I would say, yes."

"Is that going to change?"

She spread the dainty hands. "I don't know."

"What do you know?"

"I know you'd better watch yourself if you intend to spend any more time alone with her."

"What does that mean?"

"For most of us, Mr. Ford, sexual expression is almost entirely a right-brain experience."

I said quietly, "See what you mean."

She told me, "It was very stupid of me to leap at you the way I did awhile ago. I really feel ... foolish. Because I—I have been anticipating just such a—a complication from Jane. You see, she is almost purely reactive. You turned her on. She reacted."

I said, even more quietly, "See what you mean, yeah."

She said, "Just try to remember that she is highly susceptible to ..."

I sighed and told her, "Actually I'm the one to feel foolish. I did a study a while back—even published a paper on it—on just that very thing."

She said, "What very thing?"

"Left-brain, right-brain sex."

She said, "Oh." After a moment of silence: "I had understood that your field is ... Lieutenant Cochran said you'd solved a number of cases for them through your—"

I told her, "Cochran would make a good press agent. Actually I've solved nothing for them. I get lucky with hunches sometimes."

She seemed a bit confused. "You're not a... you're not ...?"

I grinned and told her, "That's three."

"Three what?"

I replied, "Three times you've stumbled on ESP."

I'd embarrassed her. Those silky cheeks had a new hint of color to either side as she fumbled to reassure me. "No, I—actually I'm very interested in parapsychology. It's just that I've never had the privilege to meet a professional psychic before."

I told her, "You still haven't."

She said, "I don't understand why—if you—your card said, 'consultant.' Lieutenant Cochran told me that you solve crimes psychically, that you sometimes work with them as a psychic consultant."

I said, "Maybe. But I've never billed myself that way. Tell you the truth, Alison, I don't know what the hell I do. Until I do, I put nothing whatever on the marquee. The truth, I'm afraid, is that I do nothing. Things do me sometimes, and that's all I know. If I could do the things instead of the things doing me, then maybe I'd know what the hell I do."

She was giving me an intent little smile. "Maybe you just don't want the responsibility to have to live up to something."

I smiled and shrugged. "Okay."

She laughed. "You can't be this perfect," she said teasingly. "Surely you're reactive about something."

I said, "Lots of things, sure. Depends on the stimulus."

"For example?"

"For example ... if you brush my knee one more time with yours, I'm liable to just bear you to the floor right here in front of all these people."

Forget about "hints of color." That one sent the blood pounding into that whole pert face, from the throat to the hairline. She immediately tried to cover with a napkin to the mouth, then giggled and said, "I sure hope you don't read minds."

"No need to," I assured her. "Faces tell quite enough."

"What is mine telling you?"

I slowly found a cigarette, lit it, tried to release the smoke in a pattern that would avoid her, finally said, "You don't want to know."

The color was slowly dissipating. She was showing me a contemplative smile. She told me, still teasing, "You're afraid of being wrong."

I said, "Okay, that's a reactive, so just remember that you asked for it. You were thinking almost exactly the same thing about me but in a somewhat more delicate way. You blushed when I said it because I misrepresented your own thoughts in a gross way. What you were really thinking, just before I verbalized it, was coming straight from your right hemisphere. I believe you were visualizing my right knee clasped between your naked thighs."

She said, "God!" and lowered the napkin, lowered also her eyes. The teasing mood ended right there. When she spoke again, it was in a coolly controlled voice. "You didn't get all that from my face."

I said, "I wouldn't know. But was I right?"

She said very quietly, "God."

"What?"

"Are you busy tonight?"

I told her, "Not yet."

"You are now. Can you pick me up here, at six?"

I could, sure. The trouble with trying to control the libido by sheer will of intellect, you see, is that the whole effort is easily sabotaged by uncooperative environmental influences. Hell. I couldn't fight my libido and hers too. But I did not even have to try. Something else had crowded my mind, something very disturbing and maybe very ominous.

Alison misread the look on my face. She was obviously highly embarrassed as she murmured, "Well, I guess it takes two to tango, doesn't it?"

I was coming out of my chair as I told her, "It's not that. I believe Jane is in trouble. Call the floor and send someone in there and stat."

I did not wait for a reply, or even a reaction, but left Alison sitting there with a stunned face as I took off in a full-out run for Jane Doe's room.

Don't ask what I "got." I don't know what I got. Something from her mind to mine, I believe—a purely right-brain message, a nightmarish montage of frightening symbols and deadly intents.

And apparently I "got" it just a couple of heartbeats too late.

Chapter Four: Beyond the Detail

A modern hospital is somewhat like the world in microcosm. Maybe that is why the setting is such a popular vehicle for movies and television. Get all that talent and organization assembled under one roof, infuse it with high purpose and the constant struggle for life against death, and the drama is just naturally there. The people who play out their lives within such an environment are cast in one of the greatest shows on earth.

Of course, there are good actors and bad ones, inspired ones and bored ones. And sometimes we have to look beyond the detail to find the grand purpose behind it all.

All of which is preamble for the observation that hospitals, in their day-to-day routines, have evolved a way to cope with the high drama of their microcosm. They bureaucratize it, trivialize it, depersonalize it, anesthetize it, and ultimately deny it. In that movement there is also a tendency to dehumanize the entire experience.

I make the observation not to knock what they do but to marvel at how well they can do it, to go on day after day and night after endless night in the throes of fear and suffering, illness and despair, death and sorrow, while providing hope, comfort, cheer, and very often triumph without ever really losing the dehumanized rhythms.

Jane Doe was dead. She had died between Alison Saunders's tentative telephone alert to the nurses' station and my arrival on the scene after a heart-pounding run along endless corridors and up four flights of stairs. She had died beneath the smothering weight of her own pillow pressed determinedly onto her face by a person unknown. It had taken me no longer than three minutes to cover the distance between the cafeteria and that fourth-floor room, yet during that brief period a nurse had surprised the killer in the act and had fought with him, been bloodied, and knocked to the floor by him; a medical team had responded and whisked the victim somewhere for heroic resuscitation efforts, and the battered nurse had been relieved of her duties. In three minutes. And the overall rhythms of that floor had not been disturbed. Everything was business as usual when I arrived on the scene—bedpans and medication carts, orderlies with mops and aides with fresh linens, interns and nurses and volunteers processing the business of the day. Nothing remained behind to mark the passage of Jane Doe through that process, just the empty room and a slightly mussed bed, an orderly with a mop, a nurse's aide already preparing to change the sheets.

I asked a nurse, "What happened to the Jane Doe in four eighteen?"

A quick glance my way, a quick referral to a chart, and the quick reply: "She's been moved. You'll have to speak to a doctor."

But before I could find a doctor, a couple of plainclothes security men quietly found me and escorted me into a small lounge where I was offered coffee and delicate questions. And before that could really get off the ground, Alison Saunders made the scene and rescued me with a crisp, professional air. She was one of the rhythms of the place, so had a leg up on the situation. She identified me and vouched for me; the cops went on their quiet way; Alison told me about Jane. Even she did not know the whole story at that moment; she did know that her telephone call had sent the nurse into a surprise confrontation with a killer, she also knew that Jane was receiving emergency attention, and she was curious as hell about the "vision" that had alerted me to the life-threatening situation.

I was not too inclined to discuss the matter and still had not done so when the word came that resuscitation efforts had been terminated and Jane officially declared dead. Some L.A. homicide cops were on the scene by that time, and the small lounge was becoming crowded as the investigative routine began encroaching on the ordered processes of the institution. My friend Cochran arrived at some point during the early going, so I was spared some of the indignity that would naturally adhere to the situation. He smoothed the way for Alison and me to give our statements and get the hell out of there.

I am not ashamed to admit that I would not do well as a hospital professional. I do not possess the toughness of spirit, or whatever, required to regard the drama as mere process. Death affects me, involves me. Like John Donne, I suppose, I feel diminished by every death, and I cannot simply shrug it away when it confronts me. Even the very old and the very ill take away a piece of me when they go and I know it, and yet I do not regard death as a finality beyond which there is nothing. It is not a singularity but a natural and necessary change of state; by some accounts it is even a pleasant and ennobling transmutation, the means by which life renews and reinvigorates itself into an ever-broadening avenue of expression. That is my belief, too, so I do not really understand why I always feel so deprived by another's death. And I feel particularly resentful of a death of violence, even that violence produced by virulence and disease within a body, but especially that arrogant violence exercised by a conscious entity who would deliberately deny the full exercise of life to another.

I give you this here, only as an insight into my state of mind on that beautiful Los Angeles afternoon as I left the hospital with Alison Saunders—or, perhaps, to dimension my reaction to the death of a young woman, who, after all, I had only just met and who, at best, had something less than half a life left to live at the time I met her. Maybe also I hope to lend perspective to the reaction of an amateur, like me, versus that of a professional like Alison. She lived only a short distance from the hospital so was in the habit of traveling back and forth "the healthy way"—by foot. I was not in total agreement that the feet were the healthiest mode of transport for a woman on any Los Angeles street. I mentioned that, the statement producing soft laughter and the observation that, at any rate, the circumstances provided a good excuse for us to share the ride in my car. She had decided to leave work a couple of hours early and had changed from the hospital whites to a very becoming outfit, simple skirt and blouse, which made her look even younger and definitely more appealing.

I asked her, point-blank, "How old are you, kiddo?"

And she replied, point-blank, "Old enough for a Ph.D. and two years in the trenches. Old enough, also, to pick my own man, my own time, and my own place."

I decided that was old enough—she was on her own—and so was I.

As we walked to the car I told her, "Don't know how you handle the daily tragedy."

She said, "It's not exactly daily. And we don't lose them all, you know. Actually the mortality rate here is very low. We cure a lot more than we kill."

I observed glumly, "Well, that's a comfort. I guess. But how do you handle a Jane Doe—the loss of a highly personal patient?"

She told me, almost lightly, "It hurts, if that's what you mean. Just have to learn to take it in stride. And, after all, we did not kill her."

I had no response to that. We walked the rest of the way in silence. My car was in the visitor's lot, which meant a pretty good walk and therefore a long period of silence. I suppose she sensed my mood and was trying to respect it. But I was wondering about her and the anesthesia of feeling that was evident in the reaction to her patient's death.

I steered her to the car and opened the door for her. She started to enter but then checked herself, pulled back for an exterior view, exclaimed, "Wow! What is this? Porsche?"

I hoped the car had not heard. "Maserati," I corrected her, probably in a very offended tone. The Maserati is my chief indulgence. I do not take kindly to slights against her.

"Oh. I always wanted a Porsche." She slid in and buckled up while I went around, muttering under my breath and reminding myself that there is no accounting for tastes.

But already this lady, this clinical psychologist with a Ph.D. and a teenager's face and tastes, was becoming less attractive to me. I did not like the anesthesia and I did not like the valley-girl mentality that could not discern a diamond among rhinestones.

I buckled in and asked her, almost belligerently, “Where to?”

"Why don't you show me your place?" she replied with a teasing smile.

"That's at Malibu," I informed her, hoping she would think it too far removed.

"Perfect," she purred. "I always wanted a place at Malibu."

"With a Porsche in the garage, eh?" I growled under my breath.

But she heard it. "I suppose I would settle for a Maserati," she said playfully.

I supposed she would, at that.

But I was not so sure that the Maserati would settle for an Alison Saunders. That, of course, was before I displaced her anesthesia.

Chapter Five: States of Mind

It was the wildest, the loudest, the longest, and the most violent orgasm I'd ever encountered. She ended up crying as though her heart would break, and that brought a bit of dismay until I tumbled to what was happening with her. The stiff professionalism—the anesthesia—was melting, that was all, and sometimes that can be a painful process. So I held her and comforted her with gentle caresses and soft words while she worked her way through it.

Presently she moved onto her side and began stroking me back. For quite a while, then, we just stroked and talked.

"Slimebags."

"Is that for me—or just us guys in general?"

"No—I was thinking about—he slashed her throat, too, Ash."

"Jane? Jane's throat?"

"Yes. When the nurse—guess he was afraid he hadn't finished her. He knocked the nurse down and slashed Jane's throat before he ran away. But I was just thinking ... I see an awful lot of this stuff. Why do men do this to women? Why do they feel the need to totally degrade us in every way?"

"You're the clinical psychologist. You tell me. But make it a bit less general, please. I know lots of guys who have never felt that kind of need."

"Not that way, maybe. But you all do it to one degree or another. If we fuck, we're wicked. If we don't, we're cold. If we're pretty, we pay too much attention to our looks. If we're not pretty, we're pigs or dogs. If we want a career, we're trying to compete with men. If we don't, we're lazy. If we make it in a career, we got there on our looks. If we don't make it, nobody really expected us to, anyway. If we love a man so much we hurt inside, he walks all over us. If we don't and he can't, then we're incapable of love."

"That's all nonclinical. But I'll bet you have an answer for it."

"Maybe. I think it's our reward for motherhood. Little boys grow up adoring their mothers, yet resenting their domination."

"Love-hate relationship."

'You could say that."

"How 'bout little girls?"

"Why do you think women are so catty toward one another?"

"So maybe you've got a point. But what does all this have to do with Jane?"

"It has everything to do with Jane. How many battered men have you seen? Battered by a woman, I mean?"

"Not many, I guess. Not any, I suppose."

"But men batter women all the time. I mean, we get one or two cases every week. Vicious stuff. Savage! Not that I put Jane in that category. But I've seen some almost as bad. Some have also been raped, but most of these women are battered by husbands or lovers."

"Jane had not been raped."

"No evidence of it, no. That being the case, the odds are that she was attacked by a husband or lover. He thought he killed her. So he dumped her on the freeway, tried to make it look like a sex crime."

"You think it was not a sex crime."

"She showed none of the—Look, Ashton, a woman who has been violently raped has wounds other than those that show on the body. Wounds of the mind. No, I do not think—he killed her over something else, or thought he did. Came back today to finish the job."

"I need to call Cochran."

"Why?"

"Because he purposely told me nothing about this case. Wanted me coming in untainted, cold."

"But ... it's over now. Why do you—"

"You said the killer tried to make it look like a sex crime."

"Yes."

"Yet there was no evidence of rape."

"Well ... a sadistic sex crime."

"A sadist does not merely bash the brains out."

"Neither did this one. He decorated her body."

"How so?"

"Crudely so. Brutally so. With the glowing end of cigarette, it seems. Breasts and torso. Sick little design on her tummy."

"Design of what?"

"A satanic symbol."

"Shit."

"I've seen a lot worse."

I sighed, reached for a bedside pad, quick-sketched a design I had in mind, showed it to Alison. "Anything like this?"

She recoiled, sucked in her breath, said, "That makes me want to throw up."

"Seen it before?"

"Yes. Put it down, please."

I returned the pad to the bedside table. "Is that the symbol you saw on Jane's body?"

"Close enough, yes."

I sighed again. "I need to call Cochran." I was reaching for the telephone.

She caught my hand, held it, said, "Not right now. Please. Keep talking to me."

I settled back, resumed the soft caresses—not at all an unpleasant task—thinking, too, about the disordered male minds that enjoy desecrating such a body. I have never directly encountered a female body that did not awe me by its sensual softness and smooth warmth. I make no bones about it; I adore the feminine sexual mystique and everything connected with it. Maybe I never felt dominated by my mother. Certainly I can remember rubbing her smooth cheeks with my little-boy hands, and I have at least a phantasmal memory of snuggling happily to her soft bosom. Alison's suggestion of a love-hate tilt to the son-mother relationship was certainly not new in psychiatric annals; if the reasoning was valid, then I supposed that the reverse could also be true. If so, the mother-son relationships could set the tone for future man-woman relationships. But I voiced none of that to Alison.

She asked me in a whispery voice, "Do you think oral sex is a perversion?"

I thought about it for a couple of microseconds, then replied, "For some, maybe."

"How 'bout for you?"

"Couldn't have proper sex without it," I said casually. "The mouth is a primary organ, isn't it? How much could any of it mean without a kiss?"

"I meant ..."

I chuckled and traced an invisible line from an up-flung hip to her knee. "I know what you meant. And what I said still goes."

She took a deep breath, said, "Well I've always wanted to try it."

"So why haven't you?"

"Guess I never found a man with the—I mean, that I feel comfortable enough with."

"Do you feel comfortable with me?"

She did not directly reply to that but immediately twisted about and began a timid exploration of my torso with her lips.

We both became quite "comfortable" very soon after that. And, to tell the truth, I did not have another lucid thought for quite a long time. It was totally a right-brain experience, enacted beyond space and outside of time. So much so that I was a bit disoriented as to time and space when I came down from that, had difficulty extracting myself from the soft tangle of limbs, not sure as to exactly who I was or where I had been.

But I came out of that right-brain domination with a much better handle on who Jane Doe was and where she had been.

And I came out, I believed, with an "image" of her killer—an image formed of symbols, nightmarish shapes, and shadows.

I mentioned none of that to Alison. I let her sleep while I prepared a light dinner.

The ocean breezes were a bit cool, but she wanted to eat on the deck overlooking the surf in the moonlight, so we did. And without a lot of conversation. She was pensive, almost withdrawn. I was sort of in the same shape. I guess we each gladly respected the mood of the other.

She helped me clean up the mess in the kitchen, then quietly told me, "I have to work tomorrow. Guess I should get going."

So I took her home. We talked a bit on the way, but it was all small talk. I walked her to the security door of her apartment complex, and she told me good night there.

"I hope this is not good-bye," she said wistfully.

I smiled and told her, "We've hardly said hello."

Then I returned to the Maserati and sent her on a beeline for Cochran's place, in Hollywood.

I'd hardly said hello to Jane Doe, either.

Chapter Six: Pick of the Litter

The police had no leads at all in this case. And actually there had not been a lot of push toward developing any. She's a big city, Los Angeles is, with undoubtedly one of the finest police departments in the world but also beset by a criminal population that exceeds the total population of most American cities. The cops in this town are virtually under siege—to the extent, at least, that there is always considerably more crime than there are time and resources to respond to it. So Cochran's "Jane Doe" case—which only very lately had become a homicide—had not received a lot of attention.

What they had, until now, was an assault victim and a weapon. They did not know the victim's name or place of residence. No one had been pressuring for a quick solution here. No one had come forward to identify the victim or her assailant. It had been, therefore, one of those "backwater" cases that a guy like Cochran was expected to work on only when there were not more pressing matters at hand.

But this one had gotten under Cochran's skin. He'd been working it on his own time, for the most part. He had distributed her photograph around the country. He'd kept up with missing-persons reports from every region. He'd put the arm on every informant on his list, several times around, and he'd even taken to hounding the lockups and questioning suspects in other assaults.

Cochran was a good cop, and he had done all the right things with all the time at his disposal. He'd come to me as a last resort, and I suspect that he'd intended to pay my fee out of his own pocket. He was that kind of cop. He didn't even mind that I punched his door bell at midnight, though I suspect that his wife did, and even she plugged in the coffeepot and tried to put the best face possible on that midnight invasion of their privacy.

I had not met Georgia Cochran before that visit to her home. Jim had spoken of her, and of their two kids, but he was not the type to say a lot about his personal life. From what he had said, it was my impression that he had a happy marriage and a satisfying home life. I liked her instantly. And I liked the sleepy-eyed ten-year-old who came to the kitchen to investigate the late-night sounds in there. She wore an old-fashioned flannel nightgown, and her blond hair was braided and tied with ribbons, a vision straight from a child's storybook. What really arrested my attention, though, was this kid's strong resemblance to our Jane Doe. Jim saw me looking at her as her mother shooed her back to bed, and I guess he knew what I was thinking. Neither of us needed to say anything about the resemblance; I thought I understood why Jane Doe had found a place beneath this tough cop's skin and why he'd devoted so much of his own time to her.

But he could not tell me a hell of a lot more than I already knew. The killer was either very lucky or very cagey. Other than the unfortunate nurse who had walked in on the murder scene, no one at the hospital had noticed him. The nurse's description was worth nothing. The guy was wearing surgical togs and had the mask covering his face from the eyes down, cap pulled down onto the brows. She described the eyes only as being "very cold." As for the rest of it, he was "very strong" and wore blue-and-white running shoes. Apparently the guy had thought it out rather carefully; he also wore rubber surgical gloves; the outfit was found abandoned in a public rest room two floors up.

That was all the substance. I had told Cochran earlier, at the hospital, about the "mental alarm" that sent me scrambling to Jane's room but too late. We talked a little about that, that night at the Cochran home, and I told him about the rush of symbols that remained etched in my brain. I quick-sketched several of them for him; we drank coffee and talked a little about diseased minds and heinous crimes until Georgia shut us down with a shivery complaint about "the horror show."

I left a few minutes after that. Cochran walked me to my car, held the door, and leaned in to tell me, "I should have pulled your chain a week earlier. Wish I had. Sounds like you were getting onto something. Nothing you gave me jogged anything, but ... I already looked into the devil worship bit. There’s enough of that around, but all I could make of it is a few pathetic sickie kids who'd grab for anything to give them a sense of power. I tend to agree with Dr. Saunders that it was just a camouflage job, that cigarette tattoo on Jane's belly. I think the killer knew her, probably intimately. That was a desperation stunt, you know, walking into that hospital in broad daylight with murder on the mind. She could have identified him, I'm sure of that. Well ... I doubly want the bastard now. Let me know if something else floats in on you, eh?"

I assured him that I would, then followed an impulse to ask him, "What is your daughter's name?"

He gave me an odd look as he replied, "We call her Vicky Victoria because it means victory and she was the pick of the litter. She's adopted. So's the boy."

I said, "No need to tell me that, Jim."

"Plenty of need," he replied. "I caught your notice. The resemblance is almost uncanny, isn't it? I know how that murky mind of yours works. And you're right; I've had to wonder ... Jane Doe was old enough and apparently unrooted enough to ... could be, yeah, it's possible, who the hell knows in this crazy world. Vicky was a doorstep abandonment, hours old. So ... damn, Ash. I couldn't get it out of my mind."

I said, "Well, do so now, pal. More than five billion people on this planet. Not nearly that many possible facial configurations. There's got to be a lot of coincidental similarities spread around. Have you mentioned this to Georgia?"

"Christ, no! I was scared to death you would say something."

I zipped my lip and pushed him clear of the doorway, closed the door and fired the engine, told him, "Rest it. I'll take it for a while. You take care of Vicky Victoria."

"You'll take it where?" he asked, frowning.

"Along the synapses of my murky brain."

I was moving along the driveway, and he was pacing me out. "What the hell does that mean?"

"Jane gave me a picture," I told him. "I just have to decipher it. Keep you posted. But don't call me, I'll call you."

"No fee, asshole!" he yelled after me. "Work with me or work for nothing!"

That was okay with me. But I would not be working for nothing. I was working for Jane Doe.

And maybe, "crazy world" or no, I would be working for Vicky Victoria.

Chapter Seven: Right Side Up

It was past one o'clock when I got back to my place on the beach, but I knew I would not sleep with a burdened mind so I took the burden into my office and fired up the computer for a little cryptographic go. I call it an office purely because that makes what I do sound a little businesslike—and I get a bit sensitive with myself about that from time to time. Actually I have no desire whatever to be "in business" or "in" anything, for that matter. I think I am probably a constitutional bachelor. I know very well that I am lazy. And I make no apology whatever for a love of personal freedom. I am devoted to the idea that each of us inhabits the world of his own making. The personal worlds we build are constructs of our own consciousness, and our consciousness, in turn, is further shaped by the worlds we build with it. There's a constant feedback, to the general effect that I build my world and that world builds me while I am building it. Of course, I have to interface with all the worlds being built by everyone else. Problem with an interface of this nature is that, most usually, it's more of a conglomeration or accretion, sort of like crystals forming. It's like the whole human species constitutes a single organism and everyone is expected to look and act and think and feel exactly like everyone else if we mean to qualify as "human.'' I consider that a rip-off of the human spirit; more, it is a theft of mankind's most precious asset: the mind that knows itself and knows that it knows.

I doubt very seriously that dogs or cats or mice or turtledoves have any claim to objective reasoning power. A dog does not even "know" that he is a dog, I trust. In the wild state he may form packs and run with his own kind for mutual survival. But as much as I like dogs, I just can't see one ever painting a picture of a sunset or composing a sonata.

'Course, I know people who swear by their dog's "great intelligence" and can tell you story after story about how the dog responds to this and that. I love that stuff myself; it's all very cute. I had a dog once who could stand alone on her hind legs and dance, as a pup, without ever being trained or even asked to do so; it was a spontaneous talent, but the only tiling she ever danced to was Herb Alpert's recording of Taste of Honey. Turned her on every time, but no other music ever did. And, of course, it does not say a thing as to what came into that pup's head when I put Herb on the turntable. Except that it made me wonder about genetic memory; maybe she had show biz in her bloodline and Herb's music triggered something there. Why couldn't dancing be as instinctive as retrieving a bird?

Point is, the major difference between man and beast lies not so much in brain size (consider the elephant) or degrees of "intelligence" (whatever that is), but the wiring of the brain itself. You and I, pal, walk around in an upright position and eat with a fork not because we're smarter than the dog but because we are designed to do it—our brains are put together in a different way and for a whole different purpose—and that brain of yours defines the world you live in, the same as the dog's brain defines the world he lives in. A dog screws in the front yard and licks his ass at the dinner table because he lives in his world, not yours, and because such behavior is natural and right for him. That is why he looks at you so oddly when you scold him for breaking the social taboos of your world; your world is an alien world to him, pal, and you are an alien being.

You're a human. That defines not an organism but beings of a certain class who possess certain shared characteristics.

I have betrayed my family line because I elected not to assume a certain set of shared characteristics peculiar to my genetic trace. But, see, that is my option as a human. I can either dance or not dance when Alpert toots his brass. I get to choose my own world. Every male Ashton before me, since at least the American Revolution, was a career naval officer. Of course, that's only one side of the trace. Somewhere probably a derelict wino beachcomber who no longer even remembers his name is the repositor on that other side. If my mother ever knew his name, she never shared the secret with anyone. She assigned the name Ford to the record of birth as a humorous footnote to my conception upon the backseat of an automobile but raised me as an Ashton and gave me the name up front, maybe as a token compensation.

Even so, I allowed myself to become organized to the point of carrying through an appointment to Annapolis and the minimum mandatory service afterward. I earned a B.S. degree and went to work in the mystical, magical maze of naval intelligence, learned some very interesting routines in the wondrous worlds of electronic spying and cryptology, good stuff like that, attended every war college I could find my way into, and got the hell away just as quickly as possible.

I started off, here, by telling you about my "office" and the reason I call it that, even though I really do not regard myself as a businessman of any kind. I prefer to think that I do not work for money. I am lucky that I am in the position where I can afford to feel that way. I'm a kept man. Kept by my family line. Not in a grand manner, of course, but there is this tidy little trust that provides income enough to handle the essentials and allows me the options I so happily exercise.

I have a dowager aunt back in South Carolina who refers to me as "the bad seed." She thinks it's terrible that I have never really "committed" to anything. Seems that I had two honorable choices: one, a career in warfare (the U.S. Navy is always in a state of war), which is considered "service"; the other, the pursuit of wealth, regarded as the only sane alternative to service.

I am not knocking either of those. I just feel very fortunate to be in a position to do the things I enjoy doing. I enjoy tennis, for example, and I do a lot of that. I enjoy learning something new, and I try to do a lot of that too. I enjoy a puzzle or a mystery, and they do me quite a bit. I enjoy people, too, for the most part, those who will allow me the room to build my own world my own way.

More than anything else I enjoy being alive. And I take the whole bag with that. It's a hell of an adventure. I love it all. And I guess that is why I pretend that I have an office in my home. Maybe I feel like I have to pay for the adventure, and the "office" is my token way of taking care of the tab.

Well ... it really is an office, I guess. I mean, there's a desk, sort of. An acrylic table, actually. Serves the purpose just fine. The computer, of course. Couldn't live without a computer. This one's nice. I just upgraded to a hard disk. Tandy 1000 with 640K and ten megs on the disk. Color monitor. Telephone, naturally. Even an answering machine. Couch and a couple of comfortable chairs for clients. Yeah, I get clients in here sometimes. I try to discourage it. Usually, if someone wants to see me, I try to arrange a meeting at my tennis club. Also have a mobile phone in the Maserati, but I think I got a lemon; sometimes it works okay.

Well, like I said, I got home a little after one o'clock and went straight into the office and fired up the computer. A computer is a wondrous device. It extends the mind, redimensions it, formats it, gives it reach and expression not really found in any other way. Mostly left-brained stuff, but a good graphics program can give wonderful right-brain expression also. And in this application I was working primarily through my right cortex.

So I loaded in the graphics software and used my left hand on a touch pad, which is like an electronic paintbrush, to try some free association with my paintings from Jane Doe. This is similar to automatic writing, if you know what that is.

Remember that the right brain is largely nonverbal. But it is really quite superior to the left side in most applications of nonverbal mental activity. That's where intuition comes from. It is where we get our spatial concepts. Most of our emotions live over there. Virtually all creative movements originate on that side. Such mental constructs do not originate as language. Normally we have to involve the left brain's language capabilities before we can express the right brain's creations, and sometimes, as we do that, the left brain overrides the nonverbal right and presents us with something quite different.

Have you ever been in love and felt so damned tongue-tied trying to express the feeling? Ever wondered why the really deeply emotional ideas are so hard to put into words? It is because the left brain is trying to translate via language a purely right-brain movement of psyche, and something is always lost in any translation.

Okay. I was trying to outwit the left brain. To use my right hand on the touch pad would be to involve the left brain (which controls the right side of the body, remember) in a purely right-brain exercise. I wanted no translator. I wanted to hook up my right cerebral cortex to the computer as directly as possible. That is what I did. I sat there for twenty minutes or so with my left hand on the touch pad and my left brain occupied with the front page of the Los Angeles Times. I was concentrating very hard on that newspaper, and I guess I read every word on the page several times around. I was only vaguely aware all this time that my left hand was on the touch pad; occasionally I would be aware of movement over there, but I tried to keep the left brain aloof from all that.

And I got some good stuff.

I got some remarkable stuff.

I saved the designs to the disk and ran off a couple of copies on the printer. I still was not sure what I had there, exactly, but at least it was a place to start—like putting together the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle; it helps if you have the actual pieces in your hands to work with.

I give you all this here, mainly, I guess, to show that I was wide awake and rational, despite the late hour and trying day. Remember also that I had come straight into the office upon arrival home. I was in there for about thirty minutes. I stopped off in the kitchen and stood at the open refrigerator to drink a glass of milk.

I then walked through the dark bedroom and into my bathroom where I took care of the usual bedtime business, brushed my teeth, took a vitamin, the usual routine.

It is now right around two o'clock. I am still thinking that the mind is too alert to go to sleep, but I am resolved to give it a try. I have removed my clothes and left them in the bathroom. I turn out that light and proceed in the dark to my bed. It is still rumble-tumble from the visit of Alison Saunders. I turn on the bedside light to see what sort of repairs are necessary.

Suspend disbelief, please, at this point.

Jane Doe is lying naked upon my rumble-tumble bed. She is a three-dimensional object. I can even see the depression in the mattress from her weight. I have not seen Jane naked before this, but I recognize the cruel marks upon that otherwise flawless body from Alison's description. But this is not exactly the same Jane Doe. This Jane has no paralysis. She giggles softly and reaches for me with both hands. These are real hands, soft and warm loving hands. I am not dreaming. I am wide awake.

As God is my witness, I made love to an "alive" and ardent woman more than twelve hours after she had been murdered.

Chapter Eight: Zoned

You think I'm nuts. That's okay. I had to wonder about that myself. I was also considering various scenarios that would validate the experience as a sane one. My mind leapt to dozens of those, tumbling one after the other.

I even called Alison Saunders, asked her to verify Jane's death, asked her to locate the body and to verify that indeed it was there where it belonged. I guess she thought I was nuts, too, and I was not about to tell her the reason for my request.

I woke up Jim Cochran again also. He was not so hospitable this time. I heard Georgia's voice in the background, informing him in no uncertain terms that he was not to leave the bed unless the Russians were invading. I asked him if he had actually seen Jane Doe's corpse. He assured me that he had, and he confirmed Alison's story that Jane's throat had been slashed following cardiac arrest. I insisted that he look in on Vicky Victoria, but don't ask why I did that, and don't ask why I felt better when he reported that she was safe and snug in her bed.

Jim did not question my sanity. He quit doing that several cases back. He'd become conditioned to my "murky" investigative processes, and I like to think that he respected them. He asked no questions at all, in fact, and evinced no curiosity whatever as to why I rang his phone at three a.m. There was a tension in the voice, however, when he agreed to check on his ten-year-old.

I apologized for the early-morning wake-up and told him good-bye while taking a mental note to send Georgia some flowers or something. Cops' wives lead lousy lives. I was not unmindful of my trespass into hers, and I wanted her to know that at least I was aware of the trespass.

Trespasses notwithstanding, I was left with the same puzzle. Maybe I should explain that despite my earlier statement, I also long ago stopped wondering about my own sanity. If this case is the first time you've encountered me, I probably also need to explain that this was not my first bout with the seemingly inexplicable. I was telling you earlier about my views on life and the freedom to exercise options thereof. What I did not tell you, but I guess now I should, is that the free exercise of those "options" has led me into a pursuit of decidedly offbeat experiences. I have long held the conviction that we live in a truly magical universe—magical, that is, from the viewpoint rendered by our human sensory apparatus—so magical that the apperception of it tends to offend the rational (left-brained) interpretations of what we like to call "reality."

A "reality," we tend to believe, is something solid, textured, colored—something "real" that can be touched, held, beheld, or otherwise grasped and factually analyzed by the mind.

Trouble is, there is much of "reality" that is neither solid, textured, or colored but remains as "real" as electromagnetism and other undisputed physical properties—and I doubt that there is a scientist or philosopher alive today who would assert that the human mind has already "grasped" and/or analyzed all there is to know about this reality we inhabit. Most, in fact, would probably tell you that we are just beginning to get a handle on this fabulous thing we call existence.

One of the problems with apprehending "reality" goes to what we have experienced before, and a lot of it has to do with just plain common sense. Of course, the common sense of a few years ago told us that the earth was flat, that what goes up must come down, and that the moon was made of green cheese.

So we need to keep upgrading the common sense.

That is what I try to do.

And that is why, I guess, I've never hung out a shingle proclaiming myself an expert at anything. I don't want to be an expert. Experts are dumb. They are telling you and me that they have it all snockered. That, in itself, is an admission of dumb. It's one of the verities that you can trust: a smart ass is a dumb ass. But that is not necessarily true the other way around. A dumb ass could be and often is a highly intelligent person who does not recognize his own smarts, or does not trust his own smarts, or is afraid to assert his own smarts. He also could be a guy who is smart enough to realize that we are all dumb asses, in the final analysis. A smart ass has never tumbled to that truth, so he is the dumbest of all.

I don't like to be dumb, not consciously dumb. I hate a snow job too. And I despise being told that my particular apprehension of reality is false merely because it goes against someone's common sense.

So, as you might imagine—given the freedom I have, the willingness to exercise it, and the way I feel about this thing called reality—I often find myself groping through that state of being that Rod Serling dubbed "the twilight zone." But I have found it generally to be a nicer place than Serling saw it. Wondrous, sure, awesome, and often a little scary, but I have to tell you that all the "evil" I have encountered has been outside that zone, not within it. Evil seems to be a peculiarly human construct.

Of course, though, I am not a smart ass. Just because I have not encountered something does not mean that I never will. So be assured that I exercise a healthy respect for our reality. Be assured, also, that I shiver and shake like any other normal human being in the presence of the inexplicable.

I was doing both on that morning in Malibu.

Not just because of what had gone before.

I was shivering and shaking, even after the telephone conversations with Alison and Jim, because Jane Doe was still in my bed.

Chapter Nine: Places

Try to put yourself in my place, please. It is disconcerting enough to think that you have probably experienced something totally outside the normal range of human expectation and belief. It can be more than disconcerting if the experience appears to violate every principle of natural law, and this is especially true if you have been rather extensively schooled in those principles. You have an open mind, sure, and you're willing to consider the possibility that none of our so-called natural laws are absolute—but you have been schooled, after all, to look at your world and to interpret it via the common logic. So anytime you are confronted by the irrational, you are probably going to be looking for a rational explanation. You are trying to rationalize the irrational. That is sort of a contradiction in terms, isn't it? So okay. You can play the mental games, and you can even go along with contradictions—to a point.

So maybe you have succeeded in rationalizing ESP—to a point. You don't understand the vehicle or the medium of such expression because it really does not fit the natural model, but you have had an ESP experience from time to time or you know someone who has. You know that there is now even a quasi-scientific acceptance of ESP. You can study parapsychology at most colleges these days. So even if you don't really understand how it works (as no one does), you've sort of been going along with the idea; and even if you've never experienced ESP yourself (or think you haven't), you probably have widened your window on reality to admit some sort of ESP experience as valid.

I have to warn you, now, that you are in dangerous waters. Dangerous, that is, to your peace of mind if you are one who prefers a tidy reality. Because if any of the extrasensory experiences are valid—if any one is valid—then you've thrown the door open to them all. Give validity to one exception and that exception can rightfully claim the rule.

Dr. Louisa E. Rhine, one of the academic pioneers in parapsychological research with her husband, Dr. J. B. Rhine, put it this way in her treatise Hidden Channels of the Mind: "Scholars trying to comprehend the universe have recognized that back of the world as we perceive it must lie a reality quite different from the psychological concept of it with which we are familiar."

What this respected parapsychologist is telling us, there, is that common reality is a construct of the mind. Think I'm overstating? Check this out, from the same book: "It seems to mean that basically the different dimensions of reality are not divided as our senses show them. It seems as if perception by the senses has superimposed these distinctions on reality, and that in some ultimate way these differences of thought and thing, near and far, present and future, are only superficial, the creations of the human mind."

So where does that leave us, you and me, in our attempts to rationalize the irrational?

Yeah, right, it leaves us in my beach pad at Malibu with a dead woman who does not seem to realize that she is dead and insists on inhabiting space and time with those of us who are not really prepared to acknowledge her ability to do that.

I have had a few bundles of psychical experiences. I have even, I believe, had fleeting communications and "visitations" from the dead. That's okay. I handle that okay. Because except for a couple of small exceptions, that could all be rationalized as occurring entirely within my own mind. I have never had to reach too far outside my paradigm to explain to my satisfaction how such things can fit my tidy concept of reality.

But just look at this mess we're in now! I cannot rationalize Jane Doe as a dream or as a waking hallucination, and not even as some form of extrasensory perception. There is nothing extrasensory about it. The woman died more than twelve hours ago. Her cadaver is at rest in the county morgue at this very moment. Yet that same body—or a damned good copy of it—is also at rest this very moment in my bed. It has weight and warmth, it is animated by a crackling personality, and it seems quite content to just stay there, maybe forever.

So. Put yourself in my place, please. I don't care if you are male or female, pal; put yourself there and assign Jane to the opposite sex. How do we handle this? Do we treat her like a person or like a thing? Do we try to ignore her and hope that she will leave the same way she came?

And—if she won't leave—what then, old pal? What the hell do we do with her? She didn't bring any clothing with her! What if someone drops in? Do we introduce her—and if so, how? Does she need to be fed? If so, what? Should we put down a bowl of water, like for a stray puppy, in case she gets thirsty?

See ... this is the kind of stupid shit the mind retreats within when it is confronted with the inexplicable. I was not thinking sanely at all. I should have been pondering eternal truths or something equally noble; or maybe I should have been thinking of how sweet it would be to trot Jane Doe down to some sacred halls of science and watch those guys try to rationalize her away. There were any number of deep implications, having to do with the nature of life and death—religious implications, legal implications, scientific implications—medical implications, for God's sake.

But I was worried about what the neighbors might think. Like, I have a friend who teaches CPR, and she left her dummy at my place for about a week once. Bothered hell out of me, like having a sex doll lying about the place and what would people think.

See, this is not sane thinking, and I knew it at the time. I was busying the intellect with meaningless frick-frack, avoiding the necessity for really dealing with this situation. I got away with it for most of an hour, too, but then Jane herself began to force the issue. I heard her getting out of bed, and that shivered me with some nameless dread. Like, a monster was up and moving about my house. That was insane thinking too. It was nothing whatever like a monster but a very lovely woman who came into my office. She was sipping a Coke from my refrigerator. One of my bath towels was wrapped about the very shapely body. She sat in my chair at the computer and offered me a sip of the Coke. Her eyes were beautiful, compelling.

But, see, I had to deal with that Coke. I tasted it. It was the real stuff. I handed it back and watched her take another sip. It was going somewhere, sure as hell. An illusion—even an ectopiasmic emanation—would not, one should think, be able to interact with time-space matter. I could hallucinate an interaction with myself—even a sexual interaction—but unless I was in some weird mental warp, some kind of dissociative phenomenon, I very much doubted that I could hallucinate the biological processes involved in the disappearance of that cola.

I asked her how she felt.

She smiled, eyes and all, assuring me that she felt just fine.

I whistled a couple of bars of "Summertime."

She picked up where I left off, in the same key, humming softly for a couple more bars.

I made a verbal note that she was now in physical control of both sides of her body. She seemed a bit confused by the statement, suggesting that she understood what I said but could not relate to it. So I said it flat out: "Your paralysis is gone." She still seemed unable to relate to that, so I dropped it.

The paralysis was gone, yes, but the aphasia was not. She seemed quite a bit more alert and mentally responsive when spoken to than she had shown earlier, at the hospital, but there was not even an attempt at verbalization. Earlier, in bed, she'd cried out passionately several times. Except for the brief humming, she had not otherwise used her voice.

I was trying to deal with that—trying, you know, to intellectualize the body first of all, then this body responding normally with only half a brain, then why the paralysis was gone but the aphasia was not—all the while realizing that I was trying to deal with an impossibility, anyway. I mean, if she could resurrect a perfect body like that, why the hell couldn't she resurrect the whole brain with it—or did she? And I was not really thinking in terms of a resurrection, anyway, not in the usual sense. I mean, look, this simply was not the same body. Pretty good copy, yeah, but the original was lying on a slab at the morgue. And if it was not a real body, what about that Coke?

Dammit, it was a real body. I knew it was. The throat, now—that throat had never been slashed. It was perfect. On the other hand, the cigarette tattoos had been reproduced. Why? And if there was voice enough to cry passion and hum a tune, then why not brain enough to formulate language for it?

Are you in my place? Can you understand the mental confusion I was experiencing and the psychical crisis I was approaching? Here was a flesh-and-blood, living being, an obviously human being, strolling about my house and raiding my refrigerator in total contradiction to the known natural laws governing the situation.

I fired up the computer and loaded in the designs I'd copied from her living memory and showed them to her. Then I did a couple of freehand designs with the touch pad, hoping she would take a turn at it, but she showed no interest in that.

I took her temperature. It was within the normal range for Homo sapiens.

I put her on the bathroom scale, and everything checked out there too.

I broke out the Polaroid and took several pictures. They came out beautifully.

I fixed her a sandwich and she ate it. She also drank a glass of milk and polished off half an apple pie.

Then she took me back to bed and screwed my brains out again.

I know that this probably sounds terribly immoral or unethical or perverted or whatever, but I am asking you to understand my ambivalence in the matter, my mental confusions, the state of my emotions. There was certainly no sensation of making love with a ghost or a hallucination, absolutely not a corpse, and I was as awed as I had a right to be while at the same time, thoroughly captivated by the sensuality and passion of my partner in this madness. But it did not seem like madness. It was beautiful. She was beautiful. I was beautiful. The whole world was beautiful, and we both were tumbling through it, locked together in a total interchange of mind and body, fused into a single entity. For how long I simply could not say. It seemed endless, timeless. I do not remember the end of it. I just remember awakening in the awareness of daylight, alone in the bed. The telephone was ringing far away. I could also hear the water running in the shower, and I remember wondering about ghosts taking showers. The clock beside the telephone was showing six o'clock. The voice on the telephone was Alison's. She seemed very disturbed.

"What's wrong?" I asked thickly, trying to pull myself into the objective world.

"Something very strange has occurred," she told me, somewhat breathless.

I growled, "Ditto."

"What?"

"Tell me yours first."

"I—I don't know, I—this is more your kind of stuff than mine, I guess."

"What is?" I was waking up quickly.

"I—this will sound crazy—I believe Jane was here."

"When?"

"Just now. I woke up and there she was. Wrapped in a towel. Seemed to be trying to tell me something. She kissed my cheek. It was very ... real. I was scared to death! She removed the towel and showed me the ... the thing on her tummy, the design. I thought, Oh God I'm dreaming and I wish I'd wake up. I took my eyes away for just a second, to turn on the bedlamp, and she was gone when I looked back. Ash ... I was not dreaming."

"How do you know that?"

"Because the towel is still here, on my bed. It's damp. It's ...Ash ...?"

"Yeah, I'm here."

"It's one of your towels. I recognize it. The big blue one with the embossed—"

I growled, "Hold the phone," and rolled off the bed, staggered into the bathroom. The water was running in the shower, yeah, but no one was in there. One of the towels was missing. I turned off the water, went looking for Jane. But I was alone in that house. My computer was up. I vaguely remembered trying to encourage Jane to use it, guessed I'd forgotten to download it. But then I looked again. It was not as I had left it. A totally new graphic was displayed on the monitor. I shivered, picked up the phone in there, told Alison, "It's okay. You had a valid experience. Don't sweat it. But if you want to talk about it ..."

She said, "Be there in an hour." She sounded better, relieved.

I just wished there was someone around to relieve me. I hope you understand how I felt about all this. Are you in my place now? And are you, then, as unglued as I was?

Chapter Ten: Kingdom of Nonsense

If we are to finish this story together, I guess I'd better talk a bit about my view of reality.

I actually see two basic realities, or two ways of experiencing the one reality. Let's make no mistake about it, there is but one overriding reality. The differences in view, or experience, are a product of the way that you and I are screwed into that reality, our orientation to it.

Do not consider for even a moment any chance that the world you understand is anywhere near the same world that your dog or cat understands, the same one understood by the bird in the tree, or the tree itself, or the parasites clinging to the tree. For each of us, all of us who are caught up in this experience called life, the understanding is somewhat different. There is, I think, a more or less "common experience" that is shared to some extent by members of the various species. Most of us in the human species view the same world, more or less, though each of us in our unique way. I think probably birds do that, dogs do it, snails do it, flowers of the garden do it, the bees in the flowers do it; each group to their own common reality.

In my formal thinking I call this "shared experience" the Reality Quotient, or RQ. This may be somewhat arrogant, but I assign an RQ of 100 to the human species, as a measurement of self-conscious apprehension in the space-time continuum. Any RQ rating below 100 would indicate an intelligence that does not appear to have the capability of reflective thought; that is, consciousness but not self-consciousness, reactive awareness but not creative awareness. This category would include a spider as he spins his web; he spins not because he has rationalized this "creative act" (the creation of the web) as his best means to acquire food, but he spins because he is programmed to spin and his internal wiring provides him with no alternative solution to the survival problem. I arbitrarily assign the spider an RQ of about 30, considerably lower than a dog, although the dog shows no creative designs whatever. The dog, along with his peers the whale and the chimp, scores in the 80 to 90 range because he does frequently exhibit some sort of reflective thought process, however rudimentary, and sometimes displays altruistic behavior.

The man or woman who paints a picture of the spider and his web deserves a 100 + score even though the painting is less utilitarian than the actual web because RQ is a measure of awareness, not survivability, and the evidence suggests that the painter is considerably more aware of the spatial relationships of the web than the spider is, despite the fact that the spider depends upon the web for survival while the painter does not.

There is no evidence even to suggest that the spider is "aware" of any objective reality beyond his web. Like us, he creates his own world, but it is not a world of consciousness. The spider's web is his universe; objects that become trapped within it must seem (to the spider, if be thought about it) to have magically appeared from some other world.

But even the aboriginal human receives an RQ= 100. Surprising, really, how few of us have reached beyond that point. A genuine mystic or gifted theoretical physicist would score closer to the 200 mark. Most of us, you and I, fall somewhere between.

But we are discussing, remember, the perception of the one reality. You may recall something I said earlier about "the common logic" and the quotation from Dr. Rhine concerning the superficiality of common human perception. I must emphasize that there is but one reality, though the superficial distinctions of that reality that are superimposed upon it by the way our minds work produce conflicting versions of what that reality is.

At the aboriginal human level two basic views, or "superimpositions," tell us that the world is at once both physical and nonphysical, tangible and intangible, logical and magical. This is the RQ=100 reality. It is also a very innocent reality. As the human psyche develops, begins rationalizing and synthesizing experience, explodes into intellectual and utilitarian (technological) sophistication, the one (right-brained) view goes into eclipse and the other (left-brained) view begins to dominate in such a way that the human world has become almost singularly physical, tangible, and logical—in the common reality. This is a natural consequence of our apparently innate fascination with the dissection and analysis of reality. To dissect and analyze is to use the linear processes of the left brain. Both philosophy and science have led us along this narrow trail to the present, more or less common, worldview of a linear, cause-effect universe, which is validly perceived only by the senses. Thusly we have seen a general evolution of "the common sense" to a point where it no longer serves or even fuels our researches; it is a linear, material, mechanical model of the universe—a sensory universe—and a dead end for science. That dead end moved us to an RQ of about 120. So those of us who are comfortable there have also reached the end of our individual evolutionary trail, stuck at around 120.

Look at the words we live by: nonsense (foolishness); senseless (irrational, unconscious, incapable of feeling or perception); sensible (of good judgment, understanding); sensibility (discerning judgment, power to perceive). Our most hallowed concepts of the sane reality all deal with sense perception. Thus any idea or knowledge gained by other means is immediately and prejudicially declared to be "nonsense" (right; nonsensory, therefore unworthy of consideration; insane). Not by science, not in today's RQ=200 halls of science, but by the commonsense notion of the man in the street. Which is one major reason why the man in the street today finds science more and more incomprehensible.

The verbal left brain will brook no "nonsense" from the "senseless" intuitions trying to cross over from the right side; only "sensible" (perceived by the senses) "sensibilities" need apply.

But the leading scientists began to tell us quite a long time ago the same things the mystics have been trying to get across the corpus callosum (the neural trunk between the two hemispheres) since RQ = 100. Check this out: "When we survey the ... course of scientific thought [as of about the seventeenth century] up to the present day, two curious facts emerge. In the first place, the development of natural science has gradually discarded every single feature of the original commonsense notion. Nothing whatever remains of it, considered as expressing the primary features in terms of which the universe is to be interpreted. The obvious commonsense notion has been entirely destroyed, so far as concerns its functions as the basis for all interpretation. One by one, every item has been dethroned. [And yet] this commonsense notion still reigns supreme in the workaday life of mankind."

The italics are mine, but the words are not: Alfred North Whitehead said it, from the scientific point of view. And what are the "developments of natural science" of which he speaks? Let Dr. Einstein tell us, in his own succinct way: "It therefore appears unavoidable that physical reality must be described in terms of continuous functions in space." Italics mine.

And consider this one, from Heisenberg: "The world thus appears as a complicated tissue of events, into which connections of different kinds alternate or overlap or combine and thereby determine the texture of the whole."

Whitehead again: "In the place of the Aristotelian notion of the procession of forms, [the new physics] has substituted the notion of the forms of process."

Still unconvinced? Try this, from Max Planck: "[In field theory] each individual particle of the system ... exists simultaneously in every part of the space occupied by the system. This simultaneous existence applies not merely to the field of force with which it is surrounded, but also its mass and its charge. We are (therefore) compelled to give up the earlier essential meaning of [the particle concept]."

Finally, from Dr. Einstein again: "[Before field theory] people conceived of physical reality—insofar as it is supposed to represent events in nature—as material points, whose changes consist exclusively of motions. [With field theory] they conceived physical reality as represented by continuous fields, not mechanically explicable. This change in the conception of reality is the most profound and fruitful one that has come to physics since Newton." My italics.

What this means, to me and to you, is that we should not rely entirely upon the commonsense in our attempts to define reality for ourselves.

The esteemed gentlemen quoted above are discussing the Kingdom of Nonsense—a reality composed of electrical fields and little else, until you add mind to it. Reality is a process. This process, in which we are immersed, is also immersed in us, always involves us—whether or not we are able to observe and/or comprehend the involvement. The degree to which we are allowed to observe is dictated finally by the way our brains are wired; the degree to which we allow ourselves to observe, within the natural limitations of the brain, is largely determined by the individual RQ.

What do you wish to see? Who said to you, "Look and you shall see. Knock and it shall be opened. Ask and it shall be given." A rather famous mystic said it, and he was talking about reality too.

What is your RQ? What are you prepared to see? What are you willing to admit into your reality model?

Are you prepared to accept the universe that is revealed to us by the very high RQ minds of Einstein, Bohr, Planck, Jesus, Gautama, Rhine, and a field army of parapsychologists? It is a world where past, present, and future exist together without superficial delineation, where matter and energy and mind are all different names for the same substance, where space and time and in and out and up and down and far and near are all describing the same place at the same time, where life and death are synonomous with being and where being itself is mere process.

Are you ready for that?

If not, then you probably will not be comfortable with my story. I think you should put it down for now. Because we are now firmly seated in the Kingdom of Nonsense.

Chapter Eleven: Mirror, Mirror

Alison arrived at a little after seven o'clock, bearing fresh doughnuts from a nearby bakery. We consumed a pot of coffee and the entire sack of doughnuts while exchanging experiences of the night. I said nothing about the visit at Cochran's home but held back nothing else. The lady was understandably shaken by her encounter with the living dead. I felt I owed her total honesty in that connection, and I gave it to her—but not necessarily blow by blow. Some things, after all, are sacred—even as between a man and his ghost. Her story was essentially as she'd given it to me on the telephone; there was nothing to add to that except her own subjective reactions to the event. It had scared the hell out of her, jarred her professional wisdom, upset her framework of reality. I could sympathize with all that; I'd been through it enough for myself. This was not a first time for me, but don't get the idea that I was all cool and objective over the incidents. I still had the wriggles too. And don't get the idea that I was in a position to explain all this to Alison. I was most certainly not. I would have been thrilled to have someone to explain it to me.

But I was the more experienced in bizarre events. As she said, this was more my sort of thing.

Just so you'll understand where I was coming from, though, please be advised that a "psychic" is no better equipped to deal with this stuff than anyone else. I've never met a psychic yet who could pass an impromptu quiz on quantum physics. Just because we "see" something doesn't mean that we necessarily understand what we see or how we saw it.

But please understand also that I was trying to reassure a badly shaken psychologist and trying to share with her the admittedly limited understanding I had of the phenomenon.

Alison asked me, "Have you ever experienced dissociative phenomena? I mean, personally—have you experienced it?"

I admitted that I had. "In trance, yeah. I was playing around with self-hypnosis a few years ago. Did a PH (posthypnotic suggestion) trick with a kangaroo, took him around with me everywhere for a couple of weeks."

She said, "But that would be simply a visual hallucination."

I replied, "No, Rudy was more than that. He was present in all the sensory dimensions. He was very real. Only to me, of course. Sort of like Jimmy Stewart with Harvey."

She was thinking about that. "But I meant ... dissociative ..."

I knew what she meant. Dissociative experience is when a piece of your personality breaks away from the whole and "dissociates" itself from the rest of you. A hallucination, of course, which utilizes your own consciousness is, in a manner of speaking, a "piece" of you. A "split personality" is defined this way. I told Alison, "Rudy became dissociative. I had to consult another hypnotist to get rid of him. Became a real problem. Started showing up totally independent of the PH."

'This ... kangaroo ... evidenced personality, then."

"Sure did. Kept trying to involve me in nutty intrigues."

The pretty brow was knit in thought. "Okay, so ... how would you compare your experience with Rudy and the experience with Jane Doe?"

"Already tried that," I said. "Doesn't wash. None of—"

"No, no," she said quickly. "I wasn't trying— That would be even more farfetched than— We both, after all, experienced her. We didn't both ..."

"Neither of us dissociated," I assured her.

"Well, what I was going for... what I was trying ... say, just for argument, that the personality does survive death and that Jane's somehow managed to—what do they do, hover?—she stayed close, somehow, and she telepathically stimulated our minds to ... well, to hallucinate."

I said, "That doesn't wash, either."

"Why not?"

I sighed and reminded her of the towel. Then I produced the Polaroids I'd taken of Jane. "And how would you explain these?"

She said, "Yeah, yeah," in hushed excitement, tapped one of the photos with a nervous finger, added, "Same towel, that's it. God, this just blows my mind, Ashton."

I said, "There's more," and took her into my office.

"Message from Jane," I explained, and handed over the printouts from the Tandy's graphics program. There were three sets. "The first set is mine. My interpretation of the images from Jane's mind while she was dying. Second set is just doodling. Jane was here and I was showing her how it works, inviting her to communicate. She passed. I found the third set on the computer this morning, after you called me."

That third set was very heavy stuff. If someone had said to me, "Draw me a map of the subconscious mind," I might have produced something like that, if I had the imagination and talent to do it. I have neither, so knew very well that this was not my stuff, from whatever level of consciousness. It was a riot of images, much of it very distorted spatially, like images on a TV screen when the vertical and horizontal controls are messed up. Numbers appeared here and there, distorted faces, unrecognizable shapes and geometric patterns all jumbled together in a dimensionality that showed no respect whatever for space-time conventions. There were several feet of this, at an eight-and-a-half-inch width, all appearing as a single "painting" without borders or breaks.

It awed Alison, as it had me. I left her with it, to puzzle over on her own without distraction while I showered and got dressed. She appeared behind me in my bathroom mirror while I was shaving, held up the graphic, and pointed to a particular design as she inquired, "Did you get the significance of this?"

I stared at the image in my mirror. It all looked different, in reverse image. For some reason the spatiality seemed somehow more congruent. The particular design at question was a strange three-dimensional cube colored solidly except for tiny "unpainted" background areas that now leapt out at me as small numerals.

I told Alison, "Looks like a number buried within a cube, doesn't it?"

She replied, "Yes. And I've spotted four of them scattered about the mural. They—"

I growled, "Well, dammit!"

"What?"

"Mural! You didn't mean—you meant ...!"

Alison was affected by my excitement. "Well, like a mural, some murals. I know, a mural is a picture painted on a wall. I meant ..."

"Pictograph!" I nearly yelled. “It's a hieroglyphic, dammit! Pictures representing an idea. It's the most primitive form of writing!”

Alison seemed confused but still affected by my excitement. "Like the Etruscans? Early Egyptians? That kind of—?"

I said, "Sure. Straight out of the right brain. That's the way they did it. The writing matched the nonverbal symbols, not the sounds of the spoken language. It was fucking mind-to-mind communication!"

"I never heard it put that way before," Alison said uncertainly.

"Neither did I," I admitted. "But I'll bet it's true. And I'll bet Jane handled it the same way."

I was dying to get my hands on that graphic, but my hands were wet and I didn't want to smudge anything. Of course, the whole thing was stored in computer memory and I could run off all the copies I wanted, but my head was not settled enough to think of that. I told Alison, "Let me get this lather off my face and we'll have a go at that message from beyond. Do me a favor while I'm finishing up here. Take a mirror off the wall—the little hall mirror will do fine. Set it up on my desk in such a way that we can study this graph in mirror image."

She said, "Okay. But I came in here to tell you ..." She again found her area of interest on the graphic and again pointed it out to me. "I believe this is a highway sign."

I shot it a closely focused look. "You mean a—?"

"A route marker. I believe the numerals are one-five- zero. It is repeated several times."

“Highway 150?”

"Yes. I know it well. Goes through my favorite place in all the world. Ojai."

I said, "That's—hell, that's..."

"In the hills above Ventura, yes."

My excitement was growing. "What's his name, uh ...?"

"Krishnamurti."

"That's the one! He has a place there, a retreat or—"

"Yes, I've been there," she told me. "I even met Krishnamurti, shortly before he died."

Alison went on telling me about her meeting with the respected mystic, but I really was not listening to her now. My head was starting to burst with a swirl of kaleidoscoping visual patterns, and I knew that I was hooked on this case, locked into it for good or for bad.

Worse, it seemed that Jane Doe was locked onto me. Mind to mind, as it were. And she was painting like crazy in my right cerebral hemisphere.

Chapter Twelve: Of Shapes and Patterns

Alison called in and arranged for someone to cover for her at the hospital for the day. We worked on Jane's graphic until ten o'clock. One of the things we discovered was that the "ideas" presented in this strange form of writing were not only rendered in reverse image but were also in a sort of, reverse contrast, if that makes any sense—somewhat like a photo negative. I tried some computer enhancement on selected trial areas of the graph and that helped a bit, but it was damned slow going.

The large problem was that there was no linear sense of movement in the "scenes," if you can call them that. There was no logic to the spatial separation of events. Like, if you take a comic strip and cut it up into frames, then remove the borders from the frames and mix them all together without the speech balloons into a disorganized montage, it would be a bit difficult to recapture the cartoonist's original idea. Then if you add to that montage some dream sequences or flashbacks or whatever, the picture really gets jumbled.

I felt that I was working with something of that nature.

Add to that, then, the problem I was having with Jane in real time. I kept getting these color bursts in the head, which I took to be continuing communication from wherever, and it was very distracting.

I decided that the best way to tackle the job, from the crypto-analytical point of view, would be to assign each element of the montage a computer key, then try some reassemblies with a random-number generator and look for correspondences, but I really did not want to put that kind of time into the puzzle at this point.

You see, certain elements had emerged from the jumble—recognizable elements—and I was experiencing a strong compulsion to pursue those elements. Like, faces in the crowd. Oh, yes. Many faces were buried in that kaleidoscope of images. Mine was there. Alison's was. Jim Cochran was there. All entirely recognizable when the contrasts were worked out. There was an interesting group portrait in there too. Sort of a family shot. Starring Jim and Georgia Cochran and Vicky Victoria.

Alison, of course, had never had occasion to meet Cochran's family. She was positive that Jane Doe had never seen them, either. And she agreed with me that Vicky looked an awful lot like a young Jane Doe, even in this computer-graphics rendering.

So we elected to leave the crypto-analysis for a more leisurely moment, and we sallied forth into the real world of space and real time. I have to say, though, that it took me a few minutes to reorient to that world. It all seemed different now, somehow. Shapes and patterns took on new meanings, the depth perception was just a bit off, colors seemed more vivid. Time and motion seemed a bit out of whack, too, not entirely synchronized in the usual manner. I asked Alison if she was experiencing the same problem, but she apparently was not because she did not seem to understand the question.

At any rate, I did not immediately trust myself behind the wheel of a car. I also did not trust another driver behind the wheel of my Maserati. So I stalled a little, walked around the car several times checking the tires and bumpers and lights and so forth until the commonsense reality was back in place in my head. Then we took off for Hollywood, both of us in the Maserati.

I had a copy of the computer graphics sealed in a manila envelope as my "passport" into the Cochran household. I did not expect that Jim would be home; hoped that he would not. It was Vicky Victoria that I was interested in. I was hoping for a few minutes alone with her. And I wanted Alison to see her in the flesh.

It worked out just fine. The Cochran home is in the Hollywood hills, up by the reservoir. Nice place. The homes in this area don't look all that great from the street side because the exposure is to the rear; the yard is back there, the view is back there, therefore the actual "front" of the house is back there. You don't see a lot from the street approach. The lots are rather narrow, the houses therefore closely side by side. But half of Jim's lot was terraced hillside. He was a pretty good handyman, so he did a lot of improvements on his own. Built his own swimming pool and spa, had a nice little play area for the kids on the terrace.

Georgia was working in a small flower garden back there. A little boy of about eight answered our ring and took us through. He was "Manuel-Manuel"—Manuel being Spanish for Immanuel, which means "God is with us." He told us that himself, in transit from the front door to the back. This little boy was Latino. He had a withered left arm and walked with a sort of crabbing gait, the result of an also less-than-whole left leg.

I had told Alison that the children were adopted, to properly prepare her for the meeting. She caught my eye as we followed along behind the slow but enthusiastic lead of Manuel-Manuel and whispered to me, "These are good people."

I nodded silent agreement with that. It does take, I'm sure, a somewhat different "commonsense notion" of values to adopt a physically handicapped child. I mean, when it happens to you with your own, then I guess you just swallow hard and try to make the best of a heartbreaking situation. But to take on someone else's heartbreak ... well, yes, that presupposed a rather uncommon approach to the value system. And I guess I knew then why I had instantly liked Georgia Cochran, why I'd always had a special feeling for her husband too.

I introduced the women without going into Alison's background, and I lied a little as to the nature of our visit. I do that sometimes when a little lie seems appropriate. I placed the manila envelope on a patio table and explained that we were passing nearby the neighborhood, decided to leave the package for Jim rather than trying to track him down at work.

Georgia seemed to buy that, smiled at Alison, said, "Oh, yes, I recognize the name now. You're the psychologist for ... that poor girl."

She insisted on refreshing us. We decided on iced tea, and Georgia went inside to attend to that.

All this time Vicky Victoria has been silently watching us from atop a small sliding board on the terrace. She is holding a large book, open on her lap. As soon as Georgia goes inside the house, Vicky slides on down and comes over to join us. Alison and I are seated at the patio table. Vicky carefully deposits the book on the table and moves around behind to perch on my lap.

I catch the expression on Alison's face as she is inspecting this little squirt. She is obviously "taken" by what Cochran himself has described as the "uncanny resemblance" to Jane Doe. I can see it in Alison's eyes, the recognition, the wonderment, as she says, "Well, I see that you two are old friends."

Vicky Victoria apparently has no comment to that. She just sits there on my lap, sort of cuddling.

I smile past her shiny little head at Alison, reply, "We just met last night. Well, sort of met. We met with the eyes. Right, Vicky?"

This is a small ten-year-old. Dainty, all girl. Very soulful eyes. She places a hand on mine, just sort of rests it there, swivels her head to jolt me with very close eye-to-eye contact, leans over to place a soft kiss on Alison's cheek.

Alison is strongly affected by that. The eyes contract and the lips tremble just a bit before she says, "That was very sweet. Thank you, Vicky."

Vicky Victoria scoots off my lap and goes inside the house.

I comment to Alison, "Some kid, huh?"

"Uh-huh. Such a loving little thing."

Manuel-Manuel tells us, "Not always. She gets very angry sometimes." He is sitting at Alison's feet, rolling a toy car on her leg.

She shows me a quick smile, says to Manuel: "Sometimes anger is just love in disguise."

Manuel replies, "Mom says it's frustration. I don't take it personally."

This kid has verbal ability surpassing that of some teenagers.

Alison gives me a pursed-lip look, scratches Manuel's head, tells him, "Mom is pretty smart. So are you. Just hang in there, guy."

Georgia reappears with a pitcher of iced tea, Vicky close behind carrying a tray of glasses. Everybody gets some. The kids join us at the table.

Georgia apologizes, "I hope decaf is okay."

Alison and I agree that decaf is just fine, and Alison adds, "I had enough caffeine for breakfast to last me all day."

Manuel announces that he had enough oatmeal for breakfast to last him the rest of his life.

We all laugh about that—Vicky and Manuel, too, joining in, then Vicky slides her tea over and finds her way back onto my lap.

Georgia smiles at me and says, "I think you've made a conquest."

"You have a beautiful family," Alison volunteers, almost wistfully. "So loving. But come clean with this career girl now; is it always this great?"

"It is," Georgia replies, smiling and nodding her head for emphasis. "I was a career girl, too, once. And I have no regrets."

"What did you do?" Alison inquires with genuine interest.

"I was an actress," Georgia says. She laughs as she adds, "I'm utterly destroyed that you haven't recognized me."

Vicky Victoria has an arm under my coat. I can feel the little hand on my back. I am beginning to feel a bit uncomfortable.

Manuel-Manuel is saying, "She was a soap star. Didn't you ever watch Begin the Dawn? I didn't. I wasn't born. But you were."

Alison replies, "Gosh, I ... never saw much daytime TV."

And I am thinking it is time to leave.

I lift Vicky Victoria off my lap and deposit her in her own chair, kiss her on top the head, gruffly tell her, "Check you later, kid. See that your dad gets his package."

Georgia walks us to our car, leaving the kids behind. Alison again comments on "the beautiful family," then adds, "Vicky is simply precious. Such a quiet little thing."

Then Georgia hits us with the bomb. "She's aphasic," she tells us with about as much emotion as it would take to tell us she's blue-eyed. "It's congenital. But she manages to get her ideas across, most emphatically sometimes."

Alison and I get into the car and drive away.

Not a word is spoken until we are back to the Hollywood Freeway and streaking south. Then my eyes lock onto Alison's haunted ones in the rearview mirror and I say, very quietly, "Well, kiss my ass."

Chapter Thirteen: i.e.

The L.A. County Morgue is in a sizable building sharing the grounds of the county hospital. A lot goes on there, other than storage for homeless corpses. The coroner is there, the forensic medicine people are there. For a county this size, a full-blown bureaucracy is housed there. But it still feels like a morgue, a house of the dead. Not the sort of place to list as a tourist attraction. And you can't just walk in there and shop for bodies, which is why I had Alison at my elbow. Her credentials dissolved the red tape and passed us on through to the cold-storage area.

But something was awry in this bureaucracy. The attendant evidently rolled open the wrong drawer. This "Jane Doe" was about fifty years old and black. The guy double-checked the tag on the toe, consulted his list, muttered something under his breath, went to another drawer. The Jane Doe on that slab looked like the remains of a bag lady—about seventy, terribly wasted.

The only other Jane Doe locker was empty. The attendant stood there for a, long moment studying his list, then took us back to the office and consulted another list. Then he picked up a telephone and consulted a list with someone somewhere else.

Finally he sighed, showed Alison a tired smile, said, "There's a screw-up somewhere. I'll have to run this down. Would you like to check back later this afternoon?"

Alison told him, "She was here at three o'clock this morning. I called and confirmed it."

The guy said, "Well, yeah, she's here now, too, according to the records. I just don't know where, exactly."

I suggested, "Autopsy, maybe."

He scratched his nose and replied, "No, that's scheduled for tomorrow. We're backed up. It's been one of those weeks. Look, she's here. No chance she could have been released prematurely. Just give me time to run it down."

Alison seemed a bit pale. And the voice was a bit out of control as she told the attendant, "This is very important. I must see that body. I mean, right now."

The attendant stared at her in silence for a long moment, then asked her, "Exactly what do you have in mind?"

She said, "We'll just have to look for her."

He looked at me with a lopsided grin and asked, "Do you know what she's saying? Know how many corpses are cooling back there? Know the shape some of them are in? Can she handle this?"

I told him, "I guess we're game if you're game. It is important. Wouldn't take your time otherwise."

The guy said, 'Time? What time? I got all the time in the world. One thing you learn on this job is time. If you're breathing, you got time. If not ..."

You never know where you will encounter a philosopher. But all the time in the world would not have helped that fruitless search. We shook the place down thoroughly, even invaded the autopsy rooms, then went over to the med school and checked out the cadavers.

But we did not find our Jane Doe.

And I did not know whether I should be sad or glad. The thinking mind tends to rebel at too much mystery. I found that mine was growing numb, withdrawing. Alison's had already gotten there. Her body was not far behind. As I sent the Maserati hurtling toward Ojai she withdrew to the far side of her seat in a dark study, brooding, almost cataleptic.

I was definitely worried about her by the time we hit the Ventura Freeway. I did not feel much like talking about it myself, but I patted her leg and said, "Cheer up, kiddo. It's unraveling. We'll start separating some strands pretty quick now."

She looked at me then, and I shot a quick glance at her, necessarily quick because I was merging into a fast-running interchange off the Hollywood. And I damn near lost the whole ball game right there because I had to look back again with direct attention to verify what I thought I'd seen in the quick glance.

I'd seen it, all right.

They were Alison's eyes, yes, but with an altogether different cast and sparkle. And they were deviated full left.

I really did not think it out first. As I said, I was mind-weary. And I was hurtling along within a sea of traffic. I guess it was pure reaction. I let her have it with the back of my hand, hard enough to rattle her teeth and snap the head back. She woke up screaming. And I sent a quick prayer of thanks to wherever.

There was no going on after that. I left the freeway at Studio City and took her to Sportman's Lodge, a landmark motel where once you could catch your own trout from the man-made streams and ponds on the grounds and have them prepared to your own specifications by the chef. The waters are still there, but the "sportsmen" are not unless you broaden the concept to include bedroom games. But it is still a very nice place to spend a few hours or a few nights, has good restaurants, convention facilities, banquet rooms, etc., and a very popular lounge.

It was by now late afternoon. It had been a hell of a day, coming also on the heels of a hell of a night. We'd forgotten about lunch, had consigned nothing whatever to the belly since the early-morning doughnuts, except a few sips of decaffeinated tea at Cochran's. Then that gruesome afternoon ...

Well, I guess we were both pretty well shot. I checked us in at Sportsman's, and we went straight to the coffee shop for a quick fix to the stomach. We talked very little over the food, but Alison took a cigarette with her coffee, though obviously unaccustomed to sucking smoke, and leaned toward me in a conspiratorial huddle across the table to say, "I have never had an hysterical reaction like that in my whole life. What happened?"

I really did not want to tell her what happened, nor even to think about it, not at that moment. So I just shrugged and told her, "That's your field. You tell me what happened."

She laterally wiggled her lower jaw, made rueful eyes, and replied, "You slapped the shit out of me, that's what happened. But thanks ... I guess. Really, though ..."

I sighed and said, "Really, though, it has been a tough day. I think you need to regroup. There's food in the belly now. Next in order, I think, is a leisurely hot shower or a long soak in a tub and then some sleepytime. Then we need to skull this thing through before plunging off into the abyss. That is, unless you'd rather just forget the whole matter and get back to your sane, ordered existence."

She asked me, "Is that what you want to do?"

I said, "I was talking about you."

She said, "I am talking about you."

I told her, "I live for cases like this."

“You do?”

"Sure." I took a sip of my coffee, worked at the cigarette. "But it really is not your bag. So if you—"

She said, "Are you inviting me to leave? Are you afraid I will start screaming every time I get a little tired?"

"'Course not." Should I tell her what I was really worried about? Was her head settled enough now to handle that? "You've been a big help. I like having another opinion at my elbow, so to speak. And you were a lot more familiar with Jane than I was. But ..."

“But..?”

I took the plunge. "I believe Jane has attached herself to me."

"How do you mean?"

"I don't know how I mean. Just attached somehow. She's been battering at my brain all day. I won't let her in. I know how to control that. You don't. Neither did little Vicky Victoria. I believe that Jane invaded Vicky while we were there today. And I believe that she invaded you in the car a while ago."

Alison just stared at me blankly for a very long moment, then she took a deep breath, shuddered, began to hyperventilate, got it under control, said to me in a strangled little voice: "You're right, this—it's not—this is not my bag. It sounds ... totally crazy to me. So why am I so damned scared?"

"Call it awe," I suggested, "and go with it. But control it. Stay in charge. Keep questioning, don't let go of that, never stop questioning but question intelligently, not fearfully, keep the left brain dominant, don't surrender to the emotional right brain. Know what I'm saying?"

She nodded her head, reached for another cigarette, said, "I could get hooked on these damn things. In your crazy world, anyway. What do cigarettes do for you?"

"Other than load me with carcinogens?" I shrugged. "Recent research indicates a relief to the stress centers in the brain. Maybe they keep me from flying away."

She said, "You're not afraid of dying, are you? I mean, it doesn't ..."

I replied, "I don't want lung cancer, if that's what you mean. I also don't want ulcers, boils, or AIDS. But I don't subvert my expression of life to a plan for dying. Whatever death is, we're all going to experience it, you know. I am not afraid of that idea, no. And I'm damned if I'll direct my whole life toward that point. It will find me, in whatever form seems appropriate. Meanwhile there are a lot of interesting things to focus on."

"We've got one now, haven't we?" she said.

"For me, yeah, very interesting. For you ...?"

She smiled. "For me too." The smile faded but hung on there, sort of pasted on. "You think she invaded me, huh?"

I said, "Yes. You were physically withdrawn, almost cataleptic. Your eyes became Jane's eyes, even to the left deviation."

Alison shivered, placed the cigarette between her lips, lit it, choked mildly on the smoke, showed me a wan smile. “Why would she do that? If she's attached to you ... ?”

"I don't know how to explain it," I replied. "Don't really understand the process. But possibly she is trying to interact with me. I won't give her direct access, so she is trying alternate routes."

"Maybe she's in love with you," Alison said quietly.

"There could be that element," I admitted. "But I believe the problem goes much deeper than that."

"So why doesn't she just appear in her own body again? You know the only implication possible from that fiasco at the morgue. She stole her own body. How could she do that? And if she can do that, why is she buzzing around our brains now, out of body? None of this really goes together, Ash- ton."

I said, "It goes together somewhere. Maybe not in this world, but ..."

"Where is her body now?"

I said, "Hell, I don't know, Alison."

"Well where could it be?"

I said, "I don't know."

"Well, just what do you know, Professor Ford?"

I said, "For sure?"

"Yes, for sure. What do you know?"

I said, "Nothing."

"Nothing?"

I said, "Now you've got it. That is exactly what I know."

Chapter Fourteen: Belly of the Flea

My problem, you see, is that I have too much respect for the observed physical orderliness of the universe. This whole thing appears to be a living system, with our own earth and its biosphere in an intimate relationship with the rest of creation. I get this vision not from intuition but from the very precise revelations of natural science. We do not live in an accidental universe (despite pronouncements to the contrary by various scientific technicians) but in a beautifully ordered and brilliantly conceived evolutionary process that could—who knows?—be directly involved in the development of the ultimate God Being itself. In other words, if that is not clear enough, our solar system could be an atom in a cell of a toenail being developed on the embryonic God. Or if you don't like that analogy, make it an atom in a nerve cell of the embryo God's brain. Either way, that does not confer particular importance upon our solar system. Our sun and its planets constitute but one of several septillion similar systems in space. Our entire galaxy, which contains at least a billion stars, would constitute perhaps a single cell of the embryo.

This order of magnitude is difficult to handle by the human brain, so let's try another analogy. If we could shrink the known universe to the size of the North American continent, our galaxy would then be the size of a baseball lying somewhere in Mexico or the U.S. or Canada. You could then cover our solar system with the head of a pin.

So, see, you've just naturally got to respect the size of this universe—and it is getting larger all the time. If our solar system is no more than a flea upon the back of a dog somewhere in North America, where does that leave you and me in this scheme? Somewhere in the flea's belly, I would suspect.

So who the hell am I to be making pronouncements as to the nature of reality? When you say reality, pal, you're talking this whole magnificent production that is just the known universe so far.

Next time you find a flea on your dog, don't annihilate him right away. First put him in your ear and try to hear the hollow oration inside; see what the message from the belly of the flea can tell you about the American economic system, the arms race, or the rotation of crops in Illinois. Then see what he can tell you about acid rain in Canada, the financial crisis in Mexico, and the crime rate in New York City.

On second thought, don't bother.

The "reality system" within the belly of the flea surely could not even tell you the name of the dog upon whose backside he feeds.

Do I sound properly humble? Okay, then let me go on to say that, flea's belly or no, the human mind has become startingly aware of the dimensions and apparent attributes of the processes going on around us. We think, with reasonable confidence, that we know how and approximately when it all began. We think that we can count the atoms of the universe and compute their total mass. We think that we know how atoms are made and that we are made of them ourselves; we even know, we think, how many atoms and what kind constitute the human body and the processes that bring them together in a living system. We can know these things, or at least hypothesize them, only because the processes are so orderly no matter where they are encountered. It is not a capricious universe. Every time you step aboard an airplane or take a dose of medicine, you are acknowledging that fact with your faith that neither will kill you. We live in an orderly physical system. And the system was built with us in mind. We know that because our observations of the system tell us so. The atoms that now make your body were built inside a star, which itself may have been built inside another star, and so on back to the initial creative bang itself. Our astrophysicists find evidence to believe that our particular star, the sun, is a fourth-generation star, it is a great-great-grandchild of the big bang. Some of the atoms that now make up your body could have belonged to other bodies before yours, or they could have been part of a tree or a rock or a piece of volcanic ash; so say our gentlemen of science.

These same gentlemen tell us, however, that the atom is not an object, not really; what it is, really, is a "field" of electrical energy, possessing mass and charge. Mass means weight. Charge means polarity, like negative and positive. There are so many of these atomic fields in your body that the total number must be expressed in mathematical shorthand. It is usually given as 5 x 10^25—or 10 raised to the 25th power times 5. The 25th power of 10 is 1 followed by 25 zeroes. What this all comes to, as it would be written in the U.S., is 50 septillions. In case you are curious about that number, the progression goes thousands, millions, billions, trillions, quadrillions, quintillions, sextillions, septillions.

But it is not like counting from one through seven; these astronomical numbers use a much higher order of magnitude. A million, for example, is a thousand thousands; a billion is a thousand millions; and so on, raising each step on the order of "thousands of." Thus one million is one thousandth of a billion, a billion is one thousandth of a trillion, and so on. A septillion is a very large number, and you have to count it out fifty times to call roll on the atoms of your body. Don't try it, though; you don't have that much time. If you could count one atom per second for 24 hours a day without pause, it would require nearly 1.6 quintillion years to complete the task. This universe has been here for only about 15 billion years, so if you'd started counting atoms to stuff into your body at the very moment of the big bang, you would have now gathered something like .000000009 percent of the total required, maybe enough to start a toenail. Of course, you'd have had to sort and classify them while you counted, work out the complex molecular arrangements and all that good stuff, so I doubt that you could handle one per second. I mean, you can't just scoop them up and drop them in the sack. You and I weigh out at about one trillion highly specialized cells each, with roughly 50 trillion atoms per cell, and the speciality of each cell is determined by the intricate arrangement of those 50 trillion atoms.

I hope you don't think that I'm just trying to dazzle you with my footwork here. The point I am hoping to make is that we do, you and I, inhabit a splendidly ordered reality. But it is so large, in relation to us, that we are cast into the position of trying to apprehend the Milky Way from the interior of a cell within the belly of a flea somewhere in North America. It would seem impossible that we could do that. Impossible or no, we seem to be doing it. We do it, I believe, because there is some sort of marvelous linkage between the brain we use and the "brain" that uses us. I can no more hypothesize the dimensions or the complexities of that universal "brain" than could some thinker inside the flea examine the Constitution of the United States, nor can I rationally equate my standing under universal law as something similar to First Amendment protections for the being within the flea. The orator in the belly of the flea might thump the podium and declare himself protected by the American Constitution, but the U.S. Supreme Court has trouble enough deciding the issues of this larger reality; it can hardly be expected to concern itself or to even be aware of the world within the flea.

And yet the same universal laws that regulate the life of the flea regulate also the lives of you and me. The same atomic fields, the same organization into living cells—the same logic pervades this creation from the biggest to the littlest of things. I call that order and purpose, and I respect it.

I do not pretend to understand what is happening here. I am awed that I can even be aware that my perspective is somewhat analogous to that from within the flea, even more awed to realize that I am connected somehow, and involved somehow, in this stupendous process called existence.

Just remember, though, that I give you that from the belly of the flea.

Chapter Fifteen: Wherewith

We had a lot to "skull," all right. But first things just simply had to come first. We purchased a few necessities from a shop in the lobby, then drove around to our room. It was very nice, spacious, overlooking the interior courtyard with its pool and water gardens, but neither of us was in much of a mood to appreciate that. We showered together and toweled each other dry, then I put that neat little package on the bed and massaged her to sleep. Took all of two or three minutes.

I was pretty well shelled out, too, but I did not want to go to sleep. Well, I'll be honest...I was afraid to go to sleep. Afraid to let the guard down, I guess. And I definitely wanted to keep an eye on Alison. So I shaved and put my shorts on and took the vigil in a chair near the patio door, began reaching for some logic.

Several things had to be considered, and they had to be scrutinized very closely. First of all, Jane's body. Was she moving it around? If so, how? Not by any usual mode of transportation, for sure. I did not even like to think about it but had to. Would have been far simpler and much more comfortable if we'd found that corpse where it was supposed to be, but even that would have been difficult enough. I would have been faced primarily with a materialization phenomenon. As it were, I had to find a way to deal with teleportation plus reintegration of a departed personality with a corpse. And that really bothered me. I had done some parapsychological research on the first bother, teleportation, nearly a year earlier, with entirely negative results. Not that there are not a few authenticated cases in the official literature of parapsychology. All the experts seem to agree that it does occur. But they all also disagree on all of the officially advanced explanations as to how it occurs—and these run from bioplasmic theories to multidimensional manifolds and quantum lattices. Very esoteric stuff and hotly contested.

Even more bothersome is the question of carnal reintegration. Official parapsychology won't touch it. You have to go to religious "miracles" to get even close to that one. If you read the Christian Bible, then you know that Jesus did a neat reintegration job on Lazarus. And it seems that later he did one on himself. It is not all that remarkable in theology. Trouble is, these are all examples of divine intervention, and I hardly think that would apply to this case.

That all means absolutely nothing, of course, when you are confronted with the phenomenon in direct experience. It just is. You have to accept that it is. But it does help to have at least some shadow of understanding if you do not wish to feel like Alice in Wonderland. I had not the merest shadow of understanding in this situation.

And you hardly know where to begin. A disembodied spirit I can deal with—intellectually, at least. A lifeless corpse I can deal with. Put the two together; I cannot deal with that, not even if they belonged together before "death" occurred. And the thinking mind waffles. Is she really dead? Was there a mistake, a mix-up, and is poor confused Jane still really alive and well and merely seeking comfort as anyone would in the circumstances? If so, how did she get to Malibu—and how did she even know to go to Malibu? And how did she then get from Malibu to East L.A., my place to Alison's, wearing nothing but a damp towel and at the speed of light? How could so many professional people—from doctors and nurses to hard-boiled cops—be party to such a monstrous error?

So you tell the thinking mind to settle down and accept the facts. Jane died. Her body was transported from the hospital to the morgue, which share the same grounds, and the transfer was duly recorded. Time of receipt at the morgue was 4:22 P.M. An official autopsy order is filed, and the body is placed in cold storage. About twelve hours later the body is in my bed at Malibu; it is apparently physically healed, very much alive, and the resident personality is obviously the same Jane Doe. So one can only state that Jane Doe was there. She made love to me with overwhelming ardor. She ate and drank, walked about the house, left a message on my computer, took a shower, zipped over for a quick visit with Alison, then physically vanished.

How did she do that?

And where is the body now? What has she done with it—or what had it done with her? Is it parked somewhere or is she parked somewhere? And if either is parked, parked where? What is the time limit on the meter?

So much for Jane's body. I was left right where I started: nowhere.

Next item: Jane's personality. With all the other magic afoot here, why is she still aphasic? Why hasn't she just behaved herself and gone along with the other spirits, wherever that is? What does she want from me (other than what she already got)? What can I do for her now? Is she dangerous?

Yeah, still nowhere.

So: Vicky Victoria. Is there a connection there? In the file of incredible credibilities, could it be pure coincidence that she is the spitting image of Jane Doe...even to the aphasia? If wishes were fishes...

Vicky is ten years old. Her aphasia is congenital, according to her adoptive mother who has had her since shortly after birth. Jane is somewhere in the frame of twenty-five to thirty; her aphasia can be explained as the result of recent injury—but who the hell knows if that is true? If someone bashed Vicky twenty years from now, wouldn't the same presumption be made if no one was there to tell the truth? What the hell could this mean?

Why was I so uncomfortable with that adorable ten-year-old on my lap? I am not a pedophile. I had never felt that particular type of discomfort with a child. I did not make the "invasion scenario" in that respect until the incident with Alison in the car moments later. Thinking back, I had actually seen nothing in Vicky to warrant such a scenario; I had only felt a psychological discomfort I later linked to the incident involving Alison. Was the discomfort simply a natural movement of psyche caused by some unconscious linkage within my own mind between Jane and Vicky—as innocent, perhaps, as similarity of physical appearance?

Right: another nowhere.

And I did not know where to go from there. My instincts were telling me to bail out, get away. I did not like the "feel" to any of this. Yet I felt compulsively drawn to the situation, challenged by it, emotionally involved with all of the principals. Jim Cochran was a longtime friend. Not the type you hang out with or even keep in touch with between cases. But a friend in spirit. I liked the guy. His emotional involvement in the situation involved me also, even if that was all there was to it. But there was more than that. I liked that little family. I liked the mother and I liked the kids. I was emotionally involved there too.

I had to admit that I was emotionally involved with Jane Doe too. The emotion had begun with her. Only later did it spread to include Jim and his family. I was also intellectually involved. I really wanted to know what the hell was going down here.

Alison? Yes, I was involved with Alison. But not in a way that also involved this case, not essentially. Alison was a supernumerary in this case, only incidentally attached to it. Wasn't she? Well...she had been, until the incident in the car. And possibly I was reading more into that than it deserved. I had reacted to a situation, not analyzed it. People quite commonly deviate their eyes to one side or the other in normal reaction to everyday situations. You can even tell which side of the brain a person is thinking with if you ask a question and watch the eyes. An intellectual exercise will usually send the eyes rightward; an emotional one, leftward. Alison had been through a disturbing afternoon. She was beat. She relaxed in the car, lapsed into a wakeful right-brain state, avoiding the necessity to intellectually deal with a vexing problem—and that was all that I slapped her out of. Could be. Except that I had felt...

I shivered in the memory of what I had felt at that moment. I was at an intellectual dead end myself—emotional as well, probably; fully ensconced in nowhere.

So I picked up Jane's graphics and began studying them. I don't know how long I was engrossed with that—I mean, ten minutes, twenty minutes, who knows? I guess I had fallen more into a right-brain mode with only a background left-brain monitor. That is natural. I was dealing with shapes and forms, spatialities, patterns. Anytime you concentrate the attention on designs, the balance of power swings to the right without any conscious decision to do that. Which is why mandalas and various geometric patterns help in reaching meditative states. Meditation is a right-brain exercise except for that five percent of the population whose hemispheres are reversed. That is true of some left-handed people. If you are a leftie and write with the hand inverted—that is, turned back toward the body—then you are lateralized like the rest of us. But if you write with the left hand noninverted—hand straight, pointed toward the top of the paper—then your hemispheres are lateralized opposite to most people, with verbal abilities oriented right, spatial left. The same is true if you write with an inverted right hand. So if either of these cases apply to you, you are among the five percent to whom the left-right orientations apply reversely. I don't know that this has any particular significance in the workaday world; I note it here in case a few of you are confused by the eye-deviation matter mentioned just above.

Anyway...I was buried in Jane's graphics. I don't know how long. Not long enough, anyway, to have reached any startling new conclusions. I was seated comfortably in an overstuffed chair, holding the long scroll-like paper in both hands, mentally immersed in the subject, when the paper began to vibrate, as from a gust of wind, then spontaneously separated into two pieces along a precise line as though cut by invisible shears.

My small hairs erected as I gaped at the phenomenon, then I became aware of Jane's presence. I did not see her at once, only felt her close presence. I spoke her name softly, and instantly she began to materialize beside the bed. It was a slow process—well, relatively speaking; she did not just suddenly appear but began forming as a sort of fog without distinguishable features, then gradually resolved, like an image in a telescope or binoculars as you focus it in. I would say it was about a twenty-second process—then there she was, recognizable in every detail although still somewhat amorphous; that is, not solid but gaseous.

She was looking at me, arms sort of outstretched like in an imploring gesture—I don't know, just a few seconds of that—then she turned about and lay down inside of Alison.

So okay. We were somewhere now.

I just wished it was elsewhere.

Chapter Sixteen: Two-gether

It was another of those purely reactive processes. I was up and moving across the room before the intellect really kicked into the situation. I dashed into the bathroom and turned on the cold water in the shower full-force, then went in and scooped Alison's petite body off the bed. I refer to her in that objective manner because I did not know for sure who I had in my arms there; Alison's body, sure, but who was really there?

The eyes were deviated leftward. A soft moan escaped moistly parted lips as she snuggled to my chest and clutched me tightly about the shoulders. But then she stiffened as I lurched into the bathroom with her, and she began struggling in protest when she became aware of what I was trying to do. I was trying to get her under that cold spray of the shower, and she was fighting like the devil, pardon the expression, to keep us out of there, arms and legs flailing stiffly to block the doorway.

She was articulating like hell, too—grunts and groans and a string of expletives—Alison's voice, sure, but peculiarly tinged with Jane's vocabulary.

It was about a ten-second standoff before I managed to tuck her in and carry her through. The physical shock of the cold spray took my breath and hers too. She gasped, "Oh, no! Please wait!"—and that was the end of that battle. But then I immediately had another on my hands as Jane departed and Alison surfaced, sputtering and gasping in shock and outrage.

“What are you doing!”' she cried. "Ashton, for God's sake!"

I quickly mixed in some warm water and set her on her feet. I guess she could tell by the look on my face that I was not playing games with her.

"You okay?" I asked soberly, shivering with more than the recent cold shock.

She was frowning and rubbing an arm. Jane had not been exactly respectful of that flesh, flinging it about recklessly during the battle. "It's not the nicest way to wake up," she chattered. "What'd you do to my arm? God... my leg too. What... r

I turned off the water, began toweling her dry, and told her, "Jane was here."

She said, "Oh, God!" with a despairing little wail in the voice that also told me she'd already guessed it.

That incident put an end to the brief respite at Sportsman's Lodge. We got dressed—me without shorts, since they'd gotten soaked in the shower—and got out of there. Out of the room, that is. Alison was jittery, wanted to talk, but not in there. So we strolled the water gardens and soaked up some physical atmosphere while trying to collect the minds. Night had fallen. Which, for this time of year and with daylight savings time, meant that it was past nine o'clock. That surprised me; I had to glance at my watch to confirm the senses on that score.

Also I was experiencing another of those vague disorientation effects. Senses were heightened or something. No color bursts at the back of the brain, but the outside world was colored a bit more vividly, even in the muted artificial fighting of the gardens. Spatial sensing was somewhat out of whack, too, depth perception affected. I nearly stepped off into a duck pond; would have done so but Alison intervened. Just wanted to look at a duck, not join him.

She asked me, "Are you...feeling all right?"

I assured her that I was fine. We sat on a bench. I lit a cigarette, crumpled the empty pack, tossed it basketball fashion toward a trash receptacle, missed by a yard. I was never much at basketball, but never that bad. I told Alison jokingly, "Okay, so I'm a bit scrambled in the cerebral reflexes. Jane seems to do that to me. It'll be okay in a minute."

The clinician in her took charge, decided to check my proprioceptors. Those are specialized receptor nerves that inform the brain as to the body's mechanical status—what's happening where and why. She took my cigarette and ordered me to close my eyes and slowly bring together the tips of my index fingers. I failed that one four times in four tries. Then she stood me up, feet slightly spread, and gave me a gentle sideways push at the shoulder. That set me to wobbling like a top winding down, and I couldn't stop it until she steadied me again.

Alison said, softly, "Hmmmm."

I sat down, took my cigarette back, told her, "I'll be okay in a minute."

She asked, "How long has this been going on?"

"It has not been 'going on,' Alison," I said with some irritation. "I experienced it briefly this morning and a couple times since. It's connected with Jane somehow. It passes."

She said, "Hmmmm."

I took a long pull at the cigarette, said, still a bit defensively, "It's the cerebellum, isn't it?"

"Could be, yes," she replied—a bit worried, a bit clinical.

I felt suddenly better, had the world in better focus. I handed her the cigarette, closed my eyes, and passed the fingertip test three times in quick succession. "See?" I said smugly.

Alison would not give the cigarette back, kept it for herself, said, "You are driving me crazy, Ashton."

We resumed our stroll. I steered her toward the lounge, intent on finding some more cigarettes. I told her, "Welcome to the club. It's a crazy world sometimes, kiddo. How could she be scrambling my cerebral reflexes?"

"Doesn't sound like reflexes," the clinician replied thoughtfully. "I'd be more inclined to put it in the control group."

I said, "Part of it is visual. The world looks just a bit different."

"How much of a bit? Distorted?"

"Not distorted, exactly. Brighter. More colorful. Maybe..."

"Maybe what?"

"I think"—I was trying to think—"something in the delineations, boundaries of things. Yeah. A sort of fuzziness at the boundaries."

She asked me, "How about spatial relationships?"

"There, too, yeah," I replied. "More so in the perception of depth, though, than in lateral separation. Sort of a telescoping effect.

She said, "Hmmmm."

I said, "One more of those, kid, and you've had it."

Apparently she had a leap of mind—I doubt that I really scared her off that easy—because she came right back with: "You know, it's very much like dissociation. I've never experienced that myself, but I've talked to plenty of people who did."

I said, "I believe we've changed the subject."

"No, I was thinking—I mean, the different effects, you and me—Jane, you know, invading us. She's invading you, too, but you're holding her off somewhere—I mean, somewhere outside the—she's edging in on you when you're experiencing these perceptual and motor problems."

I told her about the background "color bursts."

She said, "That's like phantom excitation—neural firings when there are no stimuli present—or maybe... Something like direct stimulation with electrodes. This is scary, isn't it? A dissociated personality has different tastes, different responses, often a direct alter-ego effect, as though it isn't even using the same brain or the same parts of the brain. Damn! This is... But see, I get a whole different—my response to Jane is almost a classic example of split personality. I don't know about her. I'm not aware of it when she's in charge, and I have no awareness of her afterward. I fell asleep with you massaging me on the bed and woke up in a cold shower. See, that's all I have of that. My God! If I'd been alone, she could have gotten me up and moving around—God—she could've taken me anywhere, recruited me in a whorehouse, even! Ashton, these cases are—it's the same damn thing! I could've woke up in any situation!"

I said quietly, "Simmer down. Nothing has happened yet. Just have to see that nothing does happen."

We had arrived at the entrance to the lounge. I opened the door and steered her inside, told her, "I need cigarettes."

But she'd worked herself into a bit of a tizzy. She sank into a chair, said, "Go ahead, I'll wait here."

I could see the cigarette machine in a little hallway at the far side of the lobby. I gave her a quick visual examination, decided she was okay, went on alone to get the cigarettes. Had to get change from the cashier for the restaurant that used the same lobby, got my cigarettes, returned to find Alison standing at an easel-sign advertising the current entertainers appearing in the lounge.

I lit a cigarette and asked her, "Okay now?"

She showed me a brave smile, replied, "Fine, thanks. Can we go inside for a drink? I have friends here."

I said, "Really?"

She said, "Yes. Real dynamite duo. Haven't seen them since—they were at the Gardenia in Hollywood a few months ago."

The sign depicted a handsome young couple billed as Michael and jennifer. . . twogether.

I said, "Friends, eh," as we walked toward the lounge.

"Well...they're the kind you feel like you know even when you don't. I don't know them socially. But..." She smiled winsomely. "What d'you think a single girl does with her evenings when there's no man in the picture?"

I said, "I'd rather wonder why no man is in the picture."

She laughed softly and did not respond to that. I was just glad to see her bouncing back, leveling off emotionally.

The "dynamic duo" were duo-ing a fantastically harmonic version of "Memory" from the musical Cats as we entered. I was impressed. I'd heard various arrangements of that song by some of the big guns of the recording business, some good and some not so good, but none quite so pleasing as this. L.A. is like that; there's a lot of talent in town, and sometimes you can get musical concert quality for the price of a beer. These kids were good, damned good. The guy was about six feet, wore a tux, had dark hair and sparkling eyes, handsome, great voice, and good body language. The girl was a Doris Day type, blond and beautiful in a very wholesome way yet sexy as hell, too, in a sheath gown split to mid-thigh, great eye movements, soft soprano voice with a lot of dramatic involvement.

Have I told you that my secret ambition is to direct a symphony orchestra?—any symphony orchestra—but I'd rather start with the Boston Pops. I guess music is the second love of my life. I am a very talented listener. That's about the limit of my musical talent. But if I could get my hands on a baton...

These kids had it all. Took us a minute to find an empty table, far in the rear of the room, and by this time "Memory" had run its course. But they spotted Alison, even at that distance in the subdued lighting. Jennifer waved and sent a greeting via the PA system for all to hear: "There's Alison! How nice!"

Michael made a big thing of shielding his eyes against the glare of the spotlight and called over, also via PA: "Venison's nice but Alison's spicier."

The room laughed. We laughed. Alison waved back. We sat down. The band struck a downbeat. Twogether launched into a Steve and Edie up-tempo styling of "This Could Be the Start of Something Big." The waitress arrived and took our order. Alison's full attention returned to the bandstand. Her eyes were sparkling and she was moving subtly to the music. That was good. I was feeling better about her.

The drinks came and I paid for them. Alison tasted hers, smiled at me, again became absorbed in the entertainment.

I was being entertained, too, but my eyes sort of wandered. They do that. Force of habit, I guess. I'm an inveterate people-watcher. This time I wandered into a bit more than credulity can stand. This guy came in, stood at the bar. He was about fifty feet away from my table, but he was in good light and I saw him clearly. This guy was my old pal Jim Cochran. The bartender seemed to know him, served up a draft beer without being asked, and there was a brief vocal exchange.

A woman appeared in the darkened area at the entrance. I could not see her well enough to definitely ID, but there was something recognizable there. She wore skintight designer jeans and one of those blouses with the big piled collars, the kind that form a ruff at the throat then sag open to the breastbone. Extremely spiked heels. She seemed a bit agitated, anxious.

Cochran left his untouched beer at the bar and went to join her. They conversed briefly in the doorway, then departed together.

I followed, without a word to Alison, and I doubt that she was even aware of my movement. Cochran and the woman were rounding the corner into the lobby as I came out of the lounge. I caught just a glimpse, and he was shielding against my point of view, so again I could not ID the woman.

They were hurrying across the parking lot when I reached the main entryway. I had to stand back and let a large group file in through the tandem doors. By the time I got outside, the pair were entering a car that was parked about fifty yards away. There was a light standard there, and I could see pretty well, well enough to stand up the hairs at the back of my neck.

They drove away, moving uprange and out at the top of the lot.

There was no reason that I could think of why Jim Cochran should not drop into Sportsman's from time to time for a beer. It was not that far from the home turf; Hollywood lay just over the hill. That did not stand my hairs up.

A cop, on duty or off, sometimes has occasion to meet a lady at a bar. Even a married cop, when the lady is not his wife—and, after all, this is the real world. So that would not stand my hairs up.

But the lady he met was a dead ringer for his adopted daughter. That... yeah, that stood my hairs up.

Chapter Seventeen: Special Effects

The band was on break, and Twogether was encamped at my table when I returned to the lounge. Jennifer was even lovelier close up, younger than the stage lighting made her, very real and warm, greatly expressive eyes that fairly crackled as we shook hands. Michael was warm and friendly, too, laid-back with an easy laugh, a powerful- looking guy but with gentle eyes. He moved on to continue the break-time ritual of mingling, gripped my shoulder in a friendly gesture as he departed.

I was watching the interaction between the women, liked what I saw, decided I would not mention the latest craziness to Alison. They excused themselves to the ladies' room. I wandered down to the bandstand to check out the instruments, just a couple of keyboards and drums, but I have a fascination for the new electronic keyboards and the sounds that can be produced with those things.

Michael came up to check me out, I guess, while I was thus engrossed. He showed me a nice smile, though, and asked, "Are you a player?"

I admitted that I was just a fancier. We talked briefly about the instruments, then he told me, "You're with a nice lady. Just, uh, hope you know that."

I assured him that I did and asked him, "Known her long?"

He smiled and replied, "Just in the clubs. You develop a following, you know." He jerked his head toward the crowd. "Most the people in here go with us wherever we go. It's nice. Every night is like a party at home with friends."

I tried a shot. "Jim Cochran too?"

"Who?"

I said, "A cop I know. Saw him at the bar a few minutes ago.

He said, "Don't recognize the name," He turned on a keyboard, said, "Let me show you some of the effects on this little honey."

Ever notice how talent seems to flow in clumps? I could tell just by the way this guy's hands found the keyboard that they knew what to do once they got there. He was more than a singer. Effects, yeah, that's what he was demonstrating, but I'd give a few ounces of left-brain tissue to be able to elicit those sounds from that instrument.

I told him so. He laughed, turned it off, said, "It's the dirtiest business in town."

I knew that. And I was thinking how tough it must be for people like this to stand up there night after night beating their brains out for a thousand or so a week in smoke-filled rooms while lesser talents frolicked in an avalanche of riches. Every time I turned on my radio I was reminded of the success of mediocrity, and that is giving a kind name to much of what you hear under the guise of music these days.

Jennifer returned to the stage, dazzled me with a smile, said to Michael, "Get the guys, honey. Let's spread some sunshine here."

Michael ambled away to collect the musicians. Jennifer busied herself at a stack of music, I guess setting up the numbers for the next set. I was impressed by the professional poise of this young lady. As an impulse I asked her, "How long have you been at this?"

"We start at nine," she replied absently, absorbed in her task.

I said, "I meant, in show business."

She raised luminous eyes to give me a measuring look, smiled, replied, "I started studying at fourteen."

I asked her, "How long have you known Alison?"

“Isn't she a dear,” she said. "With some people it seems you've always known them. How 'bout you?"

"About a day, I guess. Do you know Jim Cochran?"

“The policeman? We see him now and then.”

"With Alison?"

She gave me a rather stiff look, replied, "Shouldn't you be asking Alison about that?"

I shrugged and said, "I could ask Jim, for that matter. We're old friends. I just..."

"He was just here," she said, primary attention once again on the stack of music.

I said, "Yes, I...did you happen to notice the woman who came in just behind him?"

She put down the music, turned to me with a smile of forbearance, told me, "We see a lot from up here. But we don't usually talk about it. What is this all about?"

I grinned. "Just trying to get your attention. You have gorgeous eyes."

She said, "Yeah, yeah—tell it to Michael, please. Pardon me. I need to set up the music for the band."

The guys were straggling back to the bandstand. Alison had returned to the table. I headed back by way of the bar, paused beside Cochran's untouched beer. The bartender came over, a question in the eyes. I asked him, "Didn't I see Jim Cochran here?"

The bartender replied, "Yeah. I guess duty called." He retrieved the beer, dumped it. "Can I get you something?"

"I already fixed," I told him. "Did you see the woman?"

The guy showed me about one half a smile, replied, "I see lots of women. You will, too, if you just stake it out."

I asked, "You get hookers in here?"

He said, "We get everything in here. What's you preference?"

I said, "About five-five, short blond hair, supertight designer jeans, spike heels."

He said, "Yeah, we get those. But not usually this early. Just keep the eyes open."

The bartender went on along the bar. I went on back to the table. Alison asked me, "What's going on?"

I told her, "Thought I saw Jim Cochran."

She said, "Really!"

"Yeah."

"Well, wouldn't that be a coincidence."

"No coincidence at all," I replied. "Seems everybody in here knows him."

She wondered, "Would this be on his beat?"

"He's Hollywood Division. Know him socially?"

"Me? No, I—well, we had a drink once."

"Here?"

"Gosh, no. I was here for a wedding reception once, years ago. That was the only time before now. What are you...? Hey, buddy, you brought me here—remember? What are you suggesting?"

I said, "Suggesting nothing. Just wondering. I hate coincidence."

She said, "Well, you're in for a rough life, then. There's a coincidence around every corner."

I said, "Let's get out of here."

"You've hardly touched your drink. Jennifer promised to do some Barbra Streisand for me."

I said, "Only Streisand can do Streisand."

"You won't say that after you've heard Jennifer."

I said, "Hate to be a party pooper, but I really think we should get out of here."

She gave me a moment of speculative attention, then pushed back her chair, waved toward the bandstand, said, "Something else happened, didn't it."

But I did not tell her about that "something else" until we got back to our room. Had to tell her then. Because that "something else" was occupying the overstuffed chair at the patio door. It had a bullet hole between the eyes.

Jim Cochran was dead in my room.

Chapter Eighteen: A Reconsideration

Along about this time you are probably starting to wonder, as I was, if someone had been playing games with me. I get as upset over that sort of thing as any normal person does. Hate to be a patsy or a pawn. And I needed to reconsider the entire march of events from that point of view, if only to dispose of it and get on with the problem.

The most obvious starting point in that reconsideration was the question: Is there more than one "Jane Doe?" That is, had I been dealing with two natural versions, two separate and distinct persons?

Had the one Jane Doe died in her hospital bed and had the corpse been stolen?—for whatever convoluted reason.

And had the other Jane Doe—not a "copy" but another whole person in her own right—been rung in on me, and for God's sake why? And how would this play to the mental phenomena?

See, the trouble with trying to rationalize the irrational is that the rational explanation is usually the most irrational. It was easier for me to buy ghosts and hobgoblins than to try to swallow a deeply contrived conspiracy for which there is no obvious cause or goal. The cause would have to deal with a problem, the goal with the solution to that problem. What sort of problem could warrant such a contrived solution?

I had to haul the whole thing out and look at it again. But I really could not do that in any systematic way, not at the moment, because at the moment I was primarily trying to deal with the moment itself.

So I called in the report, then immediately tracked down Jim's superior, a Captain Valdiva, to be sure that Georgia would not get the news from a TV reporter. And I was trying to prop up Alison, who appeared to be in danger of coming totally unglued. She had seen the unpretty sight before I could shoo her out. I just pulled the door closed and we went directly to the lobby to call the cops. We had a response inside of about two minutes, I think, and then it was stunned confusion for the next two hours. I was trying to keep Alison viable during all that—and working a bit at myself, in the bargain, so I was really in no position for a quick systematic analysis of the events of the previous thirty-six hours or so.

Complicating the whole thing, of course, was the fact that both Alison and I knew the victim, the fact that we had all been seen in the lounge just prior to the murder, and—of course—the fact that the corpse was in our room.

The evidence indicated, however, that the shooting had occurred elsewhere and the body dumped in our room. He'd been shot once with a powerful steel-jacketed bullet that had passed through and exited at the rear of the skull. It was a contact wound, meaning that the barrel of the weapon was pressing against the base of his nose when the shot was fired. A careful search of the room did not produce the lethal bullet.

So the logic seemed to suggest that we had nothing to do with the murder. Surely we would not have shot him, then brought him to our room to report the event. But the L.A. cops are very thorough—and, after all, this is the land of make-believe with tons of creative imagination in the atmosphere. So I had to go through the Q&A routines, account for every minute of my evening, over and over it. I held back nothing except the occult stuff; also, I just gave a general description of the woman who met Jim in the lounge. The rest I told pretty much like it was, including the fact that I had been working with Jim on the Jane Doe case.

Alison, on the other hand, having no experience in these matters and cautious as hell about being a possible suspect in a murder case, refused to give them anything but her name, rank, and serial number without a lawyer present. While this did not necessarily prejudice her standing with the investigating officers, it would most certainly have insured her a free ride to the police station had it not been for the arrival on the scene of Captain Valdiva some fifty minutes following the first response.

Valdiva and I were not on a first-name basis, but we were not strangers, either. He knew of my past work with the department, and he knew that Jim and I were friends. He also had rank enough to disregard some of the standard procedures of a murder investigation. I took him aside and explained that Alison was distraught over Jim's death; even though she had known him only slightly and professionally, that she had been to Jim's home with me earlier in the day, had met his wife and kids; that she was having a hard time handling the shock of walking into her motel room to find Jim seated in a chair with a bullet hole between the eyes.

Valdiva is an intelligent guy. He also knew that Alison and I were registered together at the motel, so he was probably reading some female sensitivity over that situation. I told him about the "mix-up" at the morgue and the strain of searching for the Jane Doe corpse, about our decision to drive up to Ojai on a possible lead toward Jane Doe's identity, the subsequent decision to check in at Sportsman's to give Alison a needed break, the coincidental spotting of Cochran while we were in the lounge.

Other officers had collected statements from the employees; the bartender, a cocktail waitress, and the entertainers confirmed my statement.

Valdiva thanked me for alerting him directly and told me that his own wife was with Georgia and the kids. The police community tends to come together at a time like this, as well they should; they are all in the same boat; whenever it is one of their number, it could as well have been any of their number.

So he was kindly predisposed toward me at the moment, anyway. We talked a bit about the mystery vis-á-vis Jim's corpse in my motel room; I could offer no sane clue about that. There was nothing from the coroner's man, at that point, to state conclusively that the victim could not have deposited himself in that room before dying, but considering the nature of the wound, it hardly seemed possible. There seemed to be no way to account for the fact that the killer, whoever, could have known that Alison and I were occupying that particular room in that particular motel—not unless someone had us under surveillance—or why the killer would choose to dispose of the corpse in that manner.

In this-world logic, none of it made much sense. But Valdiva did not hold that against me. He politely asked Alison to come to the station within twenty-four hours to give her statement. She sweetly assured him that she and her lawyer would do so.

It was about midnight when we were dismissed. We could not go back to our room—did not wish to do so—could not even collect the few personal items we'd left there. The only thing I really needed, anyway, was the pair of wet shorts I'd left to dry in the bathroom. The management offered us another room; we declined; the desk clerk tore up my credit card slip and we beat it.

I asked Alison, as we headed for the Maserati, "So what do you want to do now?"

She replied, "I want to do whatever you're going to do."

I told her, "I'm going to Ojai."

She said, "Okay. So am I."

I said, "Sure you don't want to talk to your lawyer first?"

"Why is that such an unpopular position?" she replied a bit testily. "Everything I've ever heard says that you should always have a lawyer present when you talk to the police."

I shrugged and said, "It's your right. But it really only applies if you're being charged with a crime. These guys are just trying to do their job."

She told me, "Well, I was sure we were going to be charged. With murder, or accessory, or something. My God, this whole thing is blowing my mind. Ashton. You didn't tell anyone in the lounge that we were registered here, did you?"

I said, "I did not."

"Me, neither. So how did Jim end up in our room'"

I said, "Beats me, kid."

I opened the door, helped her into the car.

As I was settling into my side she said, "Did you tell him we were coming here?"

I told her, “Didn't know it myself until you started coming unglued. No, look, face it, there's no rational— We've got more of the same here, the same phenomena. We just have to...”

As I was starting the engine she told me, almost defiantly, "Well, see, I owe you—there's—I haven't been entirely truthful with you."

"About what?"

"Jim. We had an affair."

Okay. I wasn't exactly stunned by that, but... I asked her, "When?"

"About a month ago. Just lasted a week. Then I found out he was married. That ended that. Sorry. I should have told you. I mean, a while ago, in the lounge, when you asked me—but I figured it was nobody's business and especially not yours. It was, after all, just a—but I don't go out with married men. Your friend Jim was quite an operator."

That did surprise me. I'd always thought... I sighed and told her, "You're right, it's none of my business."

She said, "Well, that's why I did not want to talk to the police. I mean, how much more coincidence can this thing take? But I suppose I will have to tell them about it, won't I? It will probably all come out, anyhow. I guess it's better that I..."

Yes, I guessed that was true, and the sooner the better. But then it was not an especially comforting idea for me, either. The cops had themselves a ready-made triangle here. They loved this kind of stuff. Every cop I ever met is a soap writer at heart.

I said, "An operator, eh?"

She said, "I found out about his wife and kids from a nurse. Anything in a skirt was fair game for him, I guess. He hit on everybody."

I said, "Well, shit," and turned off the engine.

"What?"

"What" was the Walther PPK I keep stashed in a trick floorboard compartment. I have a license. But none of the cops had bothered to ask me about that. I hadn't volunteered it. I was deciding that I should have done that, that I wanted to do that, I wanted to do it right now. And I wanted to hand the damned thing over, right now, get it in the record and get it cleared.

I peeled back the carpet and sprang the lid on the compartment, telling Alison while I was doing that, "We're going back inside. You're giving your statement. And I'm handing over my—"

But then I changed my mind about all that.

The floorboard compartment was empty. The damned Walther was not there.

I kicked the engine again and got the hell away from there. Alison cried, "What's the matter?"

I shivered as I told her what was the matter.

Patsy? Pawn? Try sucker, and then watch this sucker try to wriggle off the hook. I still did not have the cause doped, but the goal of this conspiracy of insanity was becoming all too clear to my fevered mind.

Ojai, I figured, was about the only hope I had.

Chapter Nineteen: Oak People

It was a couple of hours up to Ojai. If you're not from California, you probably have trouble with that name. It is pronounced Oh-hi, emphasis on the oh. I took the back way, via several little two-lane state highways, through Moorpark and Santa Paula. Hardly any traffic at all that time of night. We stopped briefly at an all-night coffee shop in Santa Paula, needed caffeine before starting that wriggly climb along California 150, reached the sleeping village of Ojai at just shortly after two o'clock.

The Ojai Valley snuggles into a lovely little pocket of the southern edge of the Los Padres National Forest, a half-million-acre preserve in the coastal mountains. It's an area of campgrounds, natural hot springs, private resorts, scenic wonders—about fifteen miles from the ocean. Ojai itself is a teeming nucleus of artists and craftsmen, studios, shops, private schools, new-age centers, and what have you. If you've seen the original Hollywood production of Lost Horizon, the one starring Ronald Colman, then you've seen the Ojai Valley as Shangri-La.

Archaeologists date the earliest habitation of the area with the so-called Oak Grove People at about 8000 B.C., replaced around 1000 B.C. by the Chumash Indians, some of whom are still around. Modem settlement began in the region during the late 1800s. Ojai now regards itself as an art and music center with emphasis on tourism, but it is also an area rich in citrus and avocado farming. It has also become a kind of Mecca in the new-age, awareness-raising milieu. Krishnamurti and the theosophists were probably the first, arriving in the 1920s. There are now a dozen or more active and flourishing organizations in the area.

My problem at two o'clock on that Thursday morning was to find a bed. The historic Oaks Hotel is now a health and fitness spa, renowned in the California southland as a "fat farm." The half dozen or so motels were all full. That left only the landmark Ojai Valley Inn and Country Club, a plush resort-style hostelry with riding stables and the works at the edge of town. I gave it a what-the-hell try and came up with a choice room overlooking the golf course. Guess I caught a crease in time there; had to sign an agreement to surrender the room on Friday morning. Which was plenty okay with me; I doubted that I had that much time, anyway. It seemed likely that my Walther PPK would turn up somewhere at Sportsman's within the next few hours, that it would prove to be the murder weapon and Valdiva would be hunting my head by at least Thursday afternoon, which was now just a few hours off.

So we checked in and went straight to bed—separate beds, that is. Neither of us had a lot of energy for carnal pursuits, certainly not the turn of mind for it. I left a request for an eight o'clock wake-up. But then I had a hell of a time getting to sleep, tired as I was. Too many things crowding the mind, too much perplexity, too much regret. Couldn't get Georgia and those kids out of my synapses for more than a few seconds at a time, and when they were not crowding them, all the rest of the stuff was. I felt bad about Jim, and bad about Alison's disclosure about the womanizing, bad about a lot of things.

Guess I finally dropped off into troubled sleep with all of that swirling through because the dreams were terrible. Think I woke up during every REM period, looked to see if Alison was okay. She was sleeping like a baby—every time I checked her, anyway. I may have had an out-of-body, somewhere in there, because I...well, I'll talk about that later.

I came crashing out of a dumb dream at seven-thirty and decided to call it quits, canceled the eight-o'clock wake up, quietly dressed and went over to the lobby area to pick up some toiletries, picked up also some complimentary coffee, and took it back to the room.

Alison was sitting up bug-eyed in the bed when I returned, trying to figure out where she was and what was happening. I sat on the edge of the bed and we drank the coffee while I gentled her fully awake with quiet talk about the beauty of the area. I handed her the sack of toiletries and gave her first crack at the bathroom while I stepped outside and finished my coffee on the veranda. She needed to call the hospital, too, let them know she was not coming in. I cautioned her to not mention Ojai, although I had told Valdiva myself that we were headed that way.

We were having breakfast on the patio by nine o'clock, got into town before ten, bought a change of clothing—a tennis outfit for each of us, 'cause it was hot, and also 'cause we wanted to look like vacationers—then dropped into the Chamber of Commerce for a packet of printed leaflets describing the attractions and general information on the area.

I did not know exactly what I was going for there. It's a small town, yeah, but hell, the only "clue" we had was a highway sign, and even that was more guess than fact. According to the Chamber of Commerce handout, the Ojai Valley itself covered some ninety square miles. They described it as "a deep coastal valley extending from the six-thousand-foot Topa Topa Mountains in Los Padres National Forest to the ocean." Highway 150 skirts the upper edge, running for thirty miles or so from inland Santa Paula to the ocean just south of Santa Barbara. Just about the entire route is through rural countryside, so Ojai seemed the logical place to start.

My normal approach for a search in such an area would be toward service facilities, since these are limited. I was reaching for an identification of "Jane Doe," remember, an adult female, possibly a onetime resident of the area. I would show her photo at service stations, since virtually every adult in Southern California drives a car; at supermarkets and fast-food restaurants, since we all have to eat; at churches, because many of us still pray; at all of these because in a town of seventy-five hundred there simply are not that many service facilities to canvass.

In this particular case, though, I was operating on a hunch or intuition or however you choose to characterize an extrasensory quiver, and my interest was centered on the private institutions in the educational and/or consciousness (new-age) fields. The visitor's guide listed nine private schools or academies, a few of which appeared to be religiously or philosophically (new-age) oriented, and though no metaphysical groups were listed as such, a quick scan of paid ads among the handouts provided direction to that front. Some of these were in town and could be coveted on foot. Others were widely scattered around the outskirting countryside.

Due to the time pressure we carved up the territories between us. I gave Alison the walk-arounds—and not just because I did not want her driving the Maserati but chiefly because I did not want to send her nosing into isolated areas alone.

I tested the mobile phone in the car, was surprised to find good linkage. Alison noted the number, I gave her one of the Polaroid snapshots of Jane I'd taken in my office that first night, and we went our separate ways.

I had covered the Krishnamurti Foundation and the theosophy school, Krotona Institute, and was headed toward something called Meditation Mount when Alison buzzed. Sounded as though she'd scored a direct hit on her second stop. Her voice was shaking with excitement as she told me, "Pick me up quick. Corner of Ojai Avenue and Ventura, by the Oaks."

That was only a block or two from where we'd separated. I was then about two miles east of there. A quick and risky U-turn in the middle of a hairpin curve sent me cruising sedately back toward downtown in a long line of traffic; took me about five minutes to reach the pickup point. I pulled into the curb and punched the door; Alison bounded inside with an excited sparkle in her eyes, told me, "I'm going to knock your socks off."

She sent me along a side street and directed me down a drive through a grove of trees, through an arched gateway. A rather modest white frame house sat at the end of that drive. There was a graveled parking area to accommodate eight or ten cars.

Aside from the directions, Alison had given me not a word. I parked beside a beat-up van camper and asked her, "What is this place?"

"That's right," she said, nurturing her delicious secret with a mysterious smile.

I asked, "What is right?"

"That's what it's called: The Place in the Oaks."

We got out and I cased the joint from ground level. Very pretty. Nicely manicured lawn, bunch of oaks, some fruit trees, flower beds scattered about, couple of flowing fountains. A guy ambling across the far side of the lawn looked like an Indian to me. An Indian brave. Wore something that looked like a loincloth, not another damned thing.

I said, "Okay."

Alison took me by the arm and walked me to the house. The front door was standing open. She rapped on the screen door.

This Indian maiden appeared immediately, materializing from the gloom inside to smile at Alison from behind the screen. "Oh, good," she said in a throaty, seductive voice, "you've come back."

Someone had "come back" for damned sure.

I felt that I had been there myself. I mentioned earlier the feeling that I had been out-of-body during the night. My hackles were raised now with that eerie feeling that it had all happened before. Minnehaha wore a buckskin miniskirt and vest. The vest was laced up the front with about a three-inch gap along the center, revealing shiny mounds in peek-a-boo relief and just the hint of areola to either side. Only one thing marred that lovely display: a ring of little circular tattoo marks barely visible along the breastline.

Whatever, however, whoever; one thing was unmistakably clear.

Except for the long black braided hair and sexy voice, this fetching "Indian maiden" was our Jane Doe.

Chapter Twenty: So-Hay Oh-Hi

She told us that her name was Oom-ray-key-too. That's a phonetic spelling, accent on the second syllable. I made a point to ask her how it is spelled, and she replied that it is "written as it is heard," so you've got it as I got it.

The Chamber of Commerce literature mentioned the Chumash Indians as ancient settlers, circa 1000 b.c., and went on to say that they "still exist in mixed blood to the present, some within the Ojai." But Oom-ray-key-too did not claim descent from the Chumash. She went a bit beyond that, claiming that her people had been "on the land" since "the raising of the sacred mountains." I'm no geologist, but I'd been under the impression that all the mountains of California had "raised" in some geological era predating the first men, so I decided not to take her literally in the matter, assuming that she spoke metaphorically.

She would not let me do that, though, hastening to correct and assure me that the So-hay-bi-hee-jee had been "soul-walkers" on the earth for at least the past "two million earth years."

So I said okay and followed her to a solarium room at the rear where she seated us among towering potted plants and instructed us to "commune with the great earth mother" while she whomped up some herbal tea.

I hate herbal tea, but I have to admit that I was fascinated by those soul-walkers so I just sat there and tried to collect my ricocheting mind. Alison leaned toward me and whispered, "They give readings here. I told her I wanted one, but I had to meet my boy friend first."

"What kind of readings?" I whispered back, though I really did not need to ask.

She shook her head, replied: "The lady who sent me here just said they give spiritual readings. Maybe it's past lives! I hope so!"

I just hoped that Alison would keep her objectivity. After all, we were here to...

I'm going to call her Oom for short; obviously she kept a ready kettle because she was back already with steaming cups of something that smelled like incense. I hate incense, too, but I politely tasted the stuff and quickly resolved not to do so again.

Alison, though, made a big deal of it, umming and aahing and wanting to know what it was. In what I soon learned was her usual mysterious manner, Oom confided: "It is the sacred blend."

I didn't know about that, but I sure wanted to know if Oom had been in Los Angeles recently. I told her, "You look very familiar. Have we met?"

She smiled mysteriously and said, "Perhaps in our dreams."

I said, "No, I think it was more substantial than that. Weren't you in Studio City last night?"

She laughed throatily, cast a sidewise glance at Alison while telling her, "Watch him; your man works fast." She then got right down to brass tacks. "The standard donation is fifty dollars. But if you both desire consultation, you may donate thirty-five each."

I was trying to be funny when I inquired, "Do you accept Visa?"

She replied, "Of course, or any major card."

I handed her a fifty instead, said, “I’ll pass. Just do Alison.”

"Very well," Oom murmured, eyes cast down in a quick inspection of the bill. She could probably spot a phony just by the feel of it in her hand.

I was losing objectivity myself. I was forgetting that this woman was a double for Jane Doe, that the L.A. cops were probably even then filing an APB on me; I was reacting to the old Gypsy fortune-teller routine and dealing with the situation on that level instead of trying to apprehend the real mystery.

But, after all, I admit it, my mind was reeling. I sat there and watched Oom escort Alison beyond a beaded curtain and into an inner sanctum somewhere, inwardly fuming over the bald fakery of this "earth mother," older-than-mankind bullshit.

Oom was no Indian of any breed. Her genes hailed from Europe, not from any sacred mountain in a land first settled by Paleolithic hunters coming across the ancient land bridge of the Bering Strait from Siberia. And it always pissed me to find the fakers and charlatans who always, it seems, infiltrate the serious metaphysical centers, because these are the ones who seem to attract the greatest visibility and who therefore become the standard by which all are publicly judged. I have nothing against fortune-tellers. I won't bother them if they won't bother me. And I'd never contest anyone's right to play with these people, if that's what they want. To each his own, that's my motto. But I do hate to see them moving in on the real stuff. Of course...who am I to say what is real and what is not?

See...that was my state of mind while I was sitting there amidst the potted plants, smelling the nauseating herbal tea, absently watching the "Indian brave" in a loincloth mowing the lawn with an electric mower, eyeing the "Thank You for Not Smoking" obscenity glaring at me from the wall. Mind you, I am not that addicted to nicotine, but the desire always seems the strongest when it is being prohibited. I know it was dumb. Maybe my left brain was rebelling, refusing to process any more of this stuff. I just know that I was sitting there thinking dumb and feeling dumb when another Jane Doe walked into the room.

This was Jane Doe, Senior. About fifty. Still very pretty. Dressed almost the same as Oom except that the buckskins were not quite so revealing. Graceful, even dignified, saintly smile.

She sat down across from me and invaded my head.

It's okay to smoke if you want to, if you feel that you really need to.

That is a rather loose translation. Didn't come in words. But it came before she produced an ashtray and handed it to me.

I said, "Okay," and lit up.

She smiled serenely.

I thought, okay, let's play, and I wished like hell I had something to drink other than the damned herbs.

She went to the kitchen. I heard ice clinking against glass. She came back with a cola. I smiled at her, and she smiled at me as she whisked away the offending tea.

She did not come back. I got up and wandered around. The house was not that large, but I could not find her.

Come back tonight, came from somewhere beyond space-time.

I desperately need to speak with you, I sent back.

Tonight!

So much for my tirade on "fortune-tellers." I want to say this for the record. I had never before experienced such pure communication, as from mind to mind with nothing between.

Alison and Oom reappeared a few minutes later. Alison seemed almost dazed, bemused.

I commented, "That was quick."

“Truth is always quick,” intoned Oom. She was looking at my cola, the ashtray with the stubbed-out cigarette resting in it.

I told her, "Your mother said it was okay."

She said, "My mother says nothing."

I insisted, "She said to me something."

Oom said, "Then you are very special. Come tonight."

I asked her, "What is special about tonight?"

"New moon."

"Yes?"

"Yes. The earth mother smiles when her consort reappears."

I guessed, "We want to catch her smile."

"If we find favor," Oom replied, as though stating the obvious.

I scratched my nose and asked, "How much of a donation does the earth mother require?"

"Five hundred per couple is standard," she replied quietly.

"How much for just one?"

"One is imbalance. It is not allowed. Two must come, male and female must come."

I said, “Okay. What time?”

"Moonrise."

I asked, "What time is that?"

Oom said, "Over the sacred mountain."

"Yeah, but what time is that?"

She replied, with a trace of irritation, "You demand an earth time?"

I admitted, "That would be handy, yeah."

Hiawatha came in from the yard via the kitchen at that moment. He'd apparently snared a bottle of ice water from the refrigerator on his way through; he entered guzzling, head tilted back, paused at that long enough to tell me, "Try ten o'clock, citizen. That'd give you time for the orientation."

I said, "Which orientation is that?"

This guy was about forty but had the body of an eighteen-year-old, hard and bulging all over but from physical culture, not practical exertion. The eyes were blue and steely, that magnificent body bronzed and sleek—glistening now with perspiration—and the voice was pure James Garner. He said, "You gotta have the orientation," and returned to the kitchen.

I told Oom, "Okay, we'll see you at ten. Is a personal check okay?"

She replied, "That will be fine."

I took Alison by the hand and led her away. She had uttered not a word since her "reading." I put her in the car and stood there at the open doorway for a moment, gazing back at the house. "How'd it go?" I asked her.

Her mouth opened and stayed that way for a couple of seconds before the awed words came: "Simply amazing."

I asked her, "How amazing is that?"

"She knew all about me. Where I was born. What my parents were like. All about my schooling, my decision to switch from med school."

"What about your future?"

"She wouldn't tell me."

"Why not? If she told you everything else..."

"She said it's cloaked."

"What's cloaked?"

"My future is cloaked."

I said, "Okay," and went around to my side and got in the car, cranked it, pulled out of there.

As we hit the street I asked Alison, "What'd you think of Hiawatha?"

"Who?"

"The guy in the loincloth."

"He seemed very nice. I—I guess I really didn't notice."

I told her, "You should have noticed. Remember how the nurse described the assailant at the hospital? She said he was very strong."

"Yes, I..."

"Did you notice Hiawatha's moccasins?" I asked her.

"No, I..."

I noticed them. Didn't really go well with the loincloth. Were not moccasins at all. Running shoes, Keds or something. White. With blue trim.

I could hardly wait for "new moon."

While I was waiting for that, though, I decided it might be wise to have a telephonic tête-à-tête with Captain Valdiva.

And that, as it turned out, was the wisest thing I'd done all week.

Chapter Twenty-One: Probable Cause

"Valdiva, hi, this is Ford."

"Where are you, Ford?"

"Trying to run this case down. Have you found the murder weapon yet?"

"Where'd you say you are?"

"Try the water gardens or the swimming pool. I feel it would be somewhere obvious. I believe you'll find that it is a Walther PPK." I rattled off the serial number from memory. "Nine-millimeter short. Mother-of-pearl grips."

"Did you get that in a vision?"

"No, I pulled it straight from memory. It's my gun. And it's missing."

"When did you discover that?"

"Shortly after I left you last night. I went out to my car to get it and turn it over. Wasn't there. It was no casual theft, Valdiva. I kept the piece in a hidden compartment in the floorboard."

"Who knew about that?"

The trick compartment? Damned few...uh, dammit, Captain, Jim knew about it."

"Where was the car parked, Ford?"

"Right outside my room. How's Georgia?"

"Bearing up. I'd like you to come in and talk to me. Say that you will."

"I will. Soon as I run down some leads on the other matter. I'm on a hot trail and I—there's a connection, I think. Something to do with the Jane Doe case is responsible for Jim's death. I'm sure of that. But listen...mainly why I called...I'm concerned about Vicky Victoria. She—"

"Who?"

"Jim's kid, the little girl. This is going to sound screwy, I know, but somehow the kid is involved in all this. I don't mean directly, of course, but... something very strange is going on, and the kid is somehow centered in it. She should have, uh, special protection."

"You think she's in danger?"

"Possibly, yes. I'm working an angle that...well, I don't know how to say it without coming off as a loony tune, but...I believe I may be in contact with—You know that she's adopted?"

"I know that, yeah. I'm her godfather."

"Okay, great, put her under wraps."

“Who's that you said you're in contact...?”

"Her natural family. Possibly."

"This ties to the Jane Doe thing Jim was working?"

"I'm almost sure it does, yes."

"You in Ojai, Ford?"

I sighed, said, "Yeah."

"Okay. Maybe I'm loony, too, but I think I'm going to give you—uh, don't go back to your hotel. Ventura County has police responsibility there. They have a pickup on you. Can't cancel it, uh, I'll try to modify it. But don't give those guys any reason to draw down on you. If you're apprehended, just be cool until my people get there. And, uh, say nothing. You know."

I said, "Yeah, I know. Thanks."

He told me, "It's a murder warrant."

I said, "Okay."

"Daily double."

"What?"

"Jane Doe too. What the hell, Ford, some things just can't proceed by the book, can they? Ten minutes ago I'd have shot you myself, on sight. You look dirty as hell, man."

I swallowed hard and said, "I do?"

"You figure it. A security officer at County General identified you as the man who was trying to molest the patient shortly before she was murdered. Nobody, not even your Miss Saunders, could alibi you for the few minutes before and after the attack, and you were on the premises. You were at Sportsman's Lodge when Cochran was shot, and he was shot with your gun. Also—"

"You did find it, then...the gun."

"Oh, yeah. Crack of dawn. Not where you suggested, though. Ford..."

"Yeah?"

"I can't, uh, withdraw this warrant. Not sure I want to, but if you are on to something...well, I'm not looking for a patsy. I want the killer. If it turns out to be you, you can't run far enough to evade me, guy. Want you to know that."

"I'm not your man, Captain."

"Hope not. For both our sakes. But I want you in my office this time tomorrow—win, lose, or draw. Got me?"

"Got you, yeah."

"Don't go back to the inn. They've made you there. And don't go zipping around in that God-obvious Maserati. The pickup went to Ventura an hour ago. So...be advised."

I told him, "I am so advised. Thanks."

I returned to the car, told Alison, "Good thing I didn't use the mobile. We'd probably be looking down gun barrels right now."

That alarmed her. She gave me a wild look and said dully, "What?"

"Cops are looking for me. Murder charge. Both Jim and Jane. So maybe it's time you bailed out, Doc."

"What do you mean?"

I said grimly, "Get out of this. The game is over. From this point it's sheer survival. It's okay, you're clean. So walk away. Go home and watch it on the six o'clock news."

She said, "Don't be silly. You're not running, are you?"

I told her, "Maybe, if I had somewhere to run to."

"Please stop talking dumb," she moaned.

I lit a cigarette, drummed my fingers on the steering wheel.

Alison giggled, reaching for lightness, said, "Guess that shut you up! You really have not a thing to say now, have you."

I grinned back at her, shared the cigarette with her, told her, "One is forbidden. Two must come, male and female must come. Guess I need you, kid. But I'd understand if you'd rather just check out."

She told me, "I wouldn't miss the new moon for all the tea in China."

"You did notice," I said kiddingly.

"Notice what?"

"Hiawatha's gorgeous body."

"Oh, well, sure, I noticed that. What's that got to do with anything?"

"I suspect," I told her, not exactly kidding, “that the new moon and the earth mother have something to do with a sex orgy.”

"In that case," she replied, "I'm sure not missing it."

In any case, I decided, neither was I. I was anxious to meet one of those soul-walkers.

But then, of course, I probably already had.

Chapter Twenty-Two: Timing It

The problem of the moment was to avoid detection by the local cops. Ojai was policed by the Ventura County Sheriff's Department, under contract from the city and via a local substation. Probably not a very large contingent, but Ventura herself was only fourteen miles down the pike, so possibly the sheriff had dispatched a car or two devoted to my apprehension.

I figured we both looked tourista enough to pass casual scrutiny. The problem was the Maserati, as Valdiva noted. So we hied it away to a residential back street and parked it beneath a majestic oak, installed the canvas cover, and left it there.

The next problem was that the time was just a little past twelve noon and we had to fill in ten hours in Ojai, on foot, before the moonrise event. I was at a sort of dead end. I mean, sure, the thing looked much more promising now, but there seemed to be no place to take it until it was ready to take me again.

Sure, it looked promising. Look at what had been developed. Not only had we stumbled on to a Jane Doe look-alike but an apparent Jane Doe family. A coincidence might be waiting around every comer, okay, but not a whole family of coincidences. A case logic was beginning to fall into focus. And oh boy, I do love logic in my cases. I still did not see it all, of course, but I did have a glimmer—and that was a hell of a lot more than I had coming into this town.

The guy Hiawatha and his blue-and-white running shoes—apparently living under the same roof with a Jane Doe look-alike, with two of them, for God's sake—just had to be the killer in surgical gown and mask at County General. The logic, at the moment, could not extend into any explanation of motive, but I was sure that would come when the final pieces of this puzzle fell into place.

I had given Oom-ray-key-too, or whoever, an opportunity to resolve one of the issues when I insisted that we had met before. She could have admitted that she'd been in Studio City on Wednesday night. She could have told me that she had a dead-ringer twin sister, who I could have met in Los Angeles at some time in the past. 'Course, she was not obligated to tell me a damned thing. But most people, confronted with a mistaken identity mix-up, are quick to resolve it if they can. As for a visit to Studio City, or anywhere else in Los Angeles, it's no big deal. Southern Californians hop from town to town without even thinking about it; Ojai is practically a suburb of L.A. It is not as though I had suggested that I saw her in Paris or London. Of course, she could have been covering for any number of innocent reasons except for the fact that I saw her, or a dead ringer, with Jim Cochran minutes before someone put a bullet between his eyes. The hair was the only thing that did not match.

Both the dead Jane Doe and the ringer at Sportsman's had short blond hair. The original Jane's hair was extremely short, since it had only six weeks' growth after being shaved bald for brain surgery. Minnehaha came with jet-black hair in long braids. But what the hell, you can buy a head of hair like that anywhere.

The shakier part of the logic came via little Vicky Victoria, but a focus was developing there also. One of these two women—and I was already thinking of them as sisters—simply had to be Vicky's natural mother. Was it sheer coincidence that Vicky's adoptive father was the policeman assigned to the Jane Doe case? Or was a deeper story there, somewhere? Why had Jim been killed? Alison characterized him as a womanizer. Was he?—and was he, then, coincidence of all coincidences, actually Vicky's natural father?

So who was Hiawatha? What was his stake in any of this? And who was the saintly lady with the serene smile who invaded my head in pure mind-to-mind contact but who, in Oom's words, "says nothing"?

See, I had something going. Just did not know exactly what, needed time to develop it fully, but did not know just where to touch it without breaking the whole thing into indecipherable pieces. I did not want to blunder in hastily, send everything scurrying back into formless chaos. Wanted to keep the focus developing in a controlled manner so I could grab it all in a single piece and hand it to Captain Valdiva in exchange for my own head.

Meanwhile the town was developing a noticeable police presence. Two cars were prowling constantly, slowly, evidently determined to find that head and turn it over to Valdiva themselves. My only saving grace, as I saw it, were the hordes of tourists so common to the area at this time of year.

So Alison and I tried out best to blend with the others. We window-shopped, had coffee and pie at a sidewalk café, visited a gallery and then a museum where I learned something about the so-called Oak Grove People who predated the Chumash in the area by some seven or eight thousand years.

In trying to deal with time out of hand I usually try to relate prehistoric new-world peoples with the generally better-known contemporaries elsewhere. So these Oak Grove People appear to have had a thriving culture coexistent with the early pyramid builders of Egypt. It helps to get a perspective on time. This nation, the U.S., counts its history in centennials; we just had our second. We think of our pilgrims and pioneers as going way, way back in time, but we are still dealing with time in mere hundreds of years. Even Columbus and the "discovery" of this continent was like yesterday compared with these other blocks of time. The days of Jesus are only a couple thousand years back. The Oak Grove People were a thousand years vanished by that time. And in this little museum in Ojai there are artifacts revealing their presence on the land for many thousands of years before the abrupt disappearance. We're talking thousands of years, back to a time before Troy and Sparta, before Minos and Crete, many thousands of years before Moses and Abraham, before Noah, before anything that any of us really know anything about.

Gives you a bit of a rush to stand before a little glass case and gaze at a stone ax that was held by a living man—one basically just like any of us today—ten thousand years before Valley Forge.

And they called this "the New World."

Well...I was just trying to kill time and avoid the cops, but I found myself gaining a somewhat different perspective on my "fortune-tellers." A man at the museum told me that the mountains of the area were recently formed, as geological time goes. Called them "block mountains"—pointed out that they were aligned east-west, whereas most ranges run generally north-south—said these were formed during the present geological age and were very "young" mountains.

Same guy told me there was quite a mystery surrounding the Oak Grove People. Nobody really knows who they were or where they came from. But recent excavations in the Channel Islands, which lie about twenty-five miles offshore from Ventura at their closest point, reveal ancient traces of the same people. Problem there is the fact that those islands are rooted in the continental shelf; they are mountain peaks that once were contiguous with the continental land mass, which suggests that the Oak Grove People's beautiful Ojai Valley probably stretched all the way from Topa Topa to the outermost islands—an area now covered by the Pacific in depths down to six-thousand feet. The only reason that is a problem is that evolutionary development of unique flora and fauna on the islands suggest a separation from the land mass at a time when living men and women were on the scene. Block mountains are a result of crustal upthrusts, which in turn are associated with fault lines such as the great San Andreas that devastated San Francisco early in the century and threatens to send half the state toppling into the Pacific at just any time it may decide to do so. The geology of the Channel Islands is identical to that of the local onshore mountains.

So maybe I was too quick to criticize Oom's assertion that her soul-walkers had witnessed the rise of the "sacred" mountains.

That would give you a buzz, wouldn't it?—even us twentieth-century sophisticates—to stand witness to the sudden birth of a mountain range? Think you'd ever forget it? I know I wouldn't. And sure, if I'd been a natural man of the land thousands of years ago and saw something like that...why, I guess I'd attach religious significance to it.

I was gaining a new perspective, yes, and growing more and more impatient for the evening event. Time is always relative, I know, and you would think that a few hours would seem a finger snap in contrast to Oak Grove time, but I thought the day would never pass.

Along about five o'clock we bought another change of clothes—evening casual—and found a quiet place for a leisurely dinner. By coincidence, this was just up the street from Oomville, and I met a man in there who knew the people over there. Turns out that Hiawatha's name is really Gordon Campbell, that the place had been his family home and he had grown up there, inherited it when his father died some fifteen years back.

Interesting part is that Campbell had lived there alone until a little over ten years ago when he "brought the women in." My informant knew very little about "the women" except that they seemed entirely reclusive and had "started some kind of cult" immediately upon joining Campbell.

"Strange goings-on over there sometimes," the man told me, shaking his head and terminating the conversation. I considered myself fortunate to get that much out of him. Ojai is an area of diverse cultures, and they all seem to try to accommodate one another in a truly democratic way.

If this guy says that "something strange" was happening in Ojai, then you just have to know that he was referring to something very strange indeed.

None of that helped the early evening to pass any quicker.

We camped in that restaurant until it was simply too embarrassing to remain longer, then we took to the streets again with still an hour and a half to go.

And I had to wonder—without television or radio or movies or books or even newspapers—how the people of the Oak Grove era coped with time on their hands.

I decided that maybe it was no problem at all for them. Time is a left-brain problem. Maybe they were a right-brain people.

Chapter Twenty-Three: Ceremonial

Picture a secluded meadow with sweet-smelling, luxurious grass, about two acres of it, surrounded by ancient oaks and lit by burning torches. A raised grassy mound is at the very center. It is about two feet higher than the surrounding meadow, a perfect circle about twenty feet across. The mound is strewn with cut flowers. One particular area with a diameter of maybe three feet is blood red with a thick layer of rose petals.

Oom-ray-key-too stands in the rose-petal circle. She is facing the sacred mountain. She wears a necklace of rose petals that almost, but not quite, reaches to her breasts. The lustrous black hair is unbraided and falls to the small of her back. It is adorned with oak leaves. Delicate bracelets of woven flowers encircle both wrists and both ankles. She is otherwise unadorned, the strikingly beautiful body glistening in the torchlight and as still as a statue.

Twelve couples stand inside a circle of fire at the edge of the mound—arranged boy-girl, boy-girl, all the way around, a blazing torch behind each—facing Oom in the center, and these people are all totally naked. Yours truly is one of these; Alison is another. We, of course, are beautiful in our nakedness. Matter of fact, everyone looks beautiful. Maybe it is the torchlight. Or maybe it is the herbal tea we were required to drink before the ceremony began.

At any rate, it is a beautiful spectacle. I find myself barely breathing. Oom's eyes are closed. Her hands are outstretched in supplication to the sacred mountain. I wonder how she can stand so still for so long. I am experiencing a touch of vertigo myself. I smile at Alison and she smiles back. I wonder where Hiawatha is. A great-looking woman with thunder thighs at the other side of the circle is looking me over. I am wondering why she is looking at me like that when the thought is interrupted by the distant howling of a coyote.

I don't know, maybe that was Hiawatha providing sound effects because the sliver of new moon has just edged into view, and I know that Oom cannot know that because her eyes are closed until the coyote howls, then they flip open and she has an immediate dead bead on the moon without even having to redirect the focus. Her upraised arms undulate gracefully, hands beckoning the moon like in a Hawaiian hula, and she emits a low, keening cry that is a pretty fair imitation of the coyote we just heard.

I sneak a peek at Alison at about this point, and what I see disturbs me. Her lips are parted and her eyes look funny; her pelvis is thrust slightly forward; she is looking at the moon, too, and summoning it the same as Oom. I am thinking wait a minute, this was not in the orientation, but then my attention is diverted by some sort of phenomenon with the torches: every second one is fluttering, dying out; I notice, too, that it is the torch behind each man that is dying away; the women's torches not only remain lit but each one seems to be brightening as well.

I become aware now that Oom also has thrust her pelvis sharply forward. She undulates and gyrates; she is screwing the moon standing up and both feet flat on the rose petals; it is a beautiful, graceful movement, something like a hula in slow-mo.

Alison is doing this.

All the women are doing this.

I am getting a fantastic erection. I guess all the guys are, but I am not curious enough to check that out; the ones directly across from me are definitely ready for anything. I somehow get the feeling it's going to be a dry run, though; the women are getting off on the man in the moon. The idle thought crosses my mind that it would be a terrible time to get raided; the Ventura County cops would get more than my head.

I really do not have time to appreciate the erotic charm of the moment because the torches are doing things again. They are sputtering and sending off sparks like Fourth of July sparklers. These are raining onto the women. The guy across from me has a scared face; maybe I do, too, because I am worried for Alison: she is bathed in these sparks to the extent that I can barely see her, yet she is an arm's length away. It does not seem to be bothering the women, though. They are like in trance—an ecstatic trance.

I am looking at Oom and wondering why she is not getting the sparkler treatment, but of course she does not have a torch. But while I am staring at her something seems to shoot up from the ground—it's like a flame encased in steam, it shoots up right at her feet and engulfs her. I think, oh, shit, she's bought it! But then the steam or fog or whatever dissipates, the flame is gone, Oom is gone, and in her place is the saintly lady—except that now this lady ain't no saint, this lady is sex unleashed, she is four on the floor and all the stops removed, and I am stunned to find myself moving toward her, yet I am not really moving at all, I am standing still, exactly where I was, but I see myself moving toward her, I see myself from the rear, I am still here but also I am there, and she is leaping upon me, her legs girding my waist, arms about my neck. I am standing back here watching all this, but I am also feeling all this, and it is freaking me out, but I don't give a shit, I just stand and serve.

A tiny corner of sanity is left to observer-me; I peer through it to see if Alison sees, but she is still hung up on the moon.

I sink to my knees while over there that other me sinks to his knees also and bears the ex-saintly lady to the rose- petal ground on her back. Then all the children begin to frolic—or their self-doubles do—doubles in three-dimensional reality rushing together inside the circle while their other selves maintain the integrity of the circle; all but Alison. I shiver as her eyes turn to mine. The sparkle shower has ended, and she seems okay except for little firebrandlike marks circling her breasts and tummy. I shiver again and watch her double run to join the other-me and Jane Doe Senior in the center ring, and I feel her invade our embrace.

I am hoping it is the damned tea.

I just know damned well that it is not a wet dream. I do not have that good an imagination, not even asleep.

If it is not the tea, and not a dream, then I decide that we must have found that favor of which Oom spoke earlier. If so, I guess I know how the Oak Grove People spent their free time. They were not soul-walkers. They were soul- fuckers.

Chapter Twenty-Four: Dimensioned

Did any of that really happen? There was a happening, all right, I was sure of that—but did it happen the way I experienced it? Hell, I didn't know.

Just remember I warned you a while back that we are subjects of the Kingdom of Nonsense. So don't get bent out of shape with me for leading you a bit deeper into it. I'm giving it to you just as I experienced it, as straight as I know how to give it. And if you think about it for a moment, you will realize that the experience at Ojai is of roughly the same order as the experience at Malibu. Just a few more actors, that's all, and gussied up a bit.

The problem for me, at the time, lay not in accepting the reality of the experience but in attempting to understand it, reality or not—and to understand it in terms that would help unravel the perplexing mysteries of this case. Among the first things to fall under my intellectual purview had to do with the mild disorientation effects I'd experienced earlier, they were present, also, during and immediately following the experience in the sacred grove. Something about that was definitely strange, as though my edge on awareness was slightly tipped or skewed. I have never tried mind-altering drugs so cannot directly compare the effects, but I would guess that they are somewhat similar. Something was definitely altered with regard to perceptual awareness. Possibly the "tea" was a factor in this—but please note that I had experienced virtually the same effects before ever being introduced to the tea. Maybe the tea helped set it up, amplified it somehow.

Do you remember the earlier discussion on quantum physics? I quoted Planck, one of our most revered physicists and a father of modern field theory, regarding the "simultaneous existence" of the same particle everywhere within the influence of a guiding field system. Planck was speaking of atomic structures—but then, that is all the hell we are—and he is saying that mass, charge, and the entire field of force accompanying the particle exists simultaneously throughout the space occupied by a particular system. A "field of force," or force field, is that which moves and does; it is the active agent; and Planck is then saying that the active agent is everywhere present in the given system of action.

This could be a little hard to grasp with our linear, cause-effect thinking apparatus—but if you picture a single orange in a large basket, then try to imagine the orange existing everywhere within the interior of that basket at the same time, you get an idea of what Dr. Planck is trying to tell us about the nature of nature. He is saying that the solid, physical reality perceived by our senses in the space-time world is an illusion produced by our senses. Dr. Rhine—a parapsychologist, not a physicist—told us precisely the same thing. The physical reality does not exist, except as a convenience to our sense perceptions as we attempt to orient our own peculiar form of consciousness—and therefore existence, itself—to that dimension of the universe in which we express that existence.

What does all of that mean to me as I grapple with my experience in the sacred grove, an experience in which I was both here and there at the one time, engaged in one activity there while simultaneously engaged in quite a different activity here, though all the while conscious of and fully experiencing both activities at once?

It means, I choose to think, that maybe briefly I expanded beyond the confines of my ordinary sense perceptions; I was given a larger view.

Try to follow this imaginary dialogue with someone like Dr. Planck:

"Is the orange in the basket?"

"Yes."

"Is it resting at the bottom of the basket?"

"Yes and no."

"Then is it hovering at the top of the basket?"

"It is, yes, if that is where you happen to be looking for it."

"But it is actually resting on the bottom?"

"If that is where you are looking, yes."

"Wait a minute! I did not put it there. You put it there. So where did you put it?"

"I merely placed it in the basket."

"Where in the basket?"

"Everywhere in the basket, dummy. Wherever you want it to be, simply look for it there, and there it will be."

Does this sound a bit like one of the old Abbott and Costello routines? Never mind what it might sound like—this is the reality revealed to us by quantum physics. Einstein saw the entire, magnificent universe as a field of activity in which processes produce "continuous functions in space— and he did not mean "outer space" per se, but space itself as a continuum within space-time. All the atoms of the universe, including yours and mine, are participants in these "processes"; we are embedded in the process, you and I, and it is embedded in us. In other words, it is all a single fabric, but it is a fabric woven not of cloth but of fields of energy. Einstein died still trying to hypothesize mathematically the direct inter- relationships of all these fields, big and little, which produce you and me and the universe. Others are carrying on the work, called unified field theory. Perhaps one day soon another Einstein will come up with something as simple yet as powerful as E=mc^2, but having to do with the consciousness equation.

Meanwhile I have to struggle along with my own vague insights to theorize a possible state of consciousness in which we may focus upon two separate points in space at the same time and perceive the orange both resting at the bottom and hovering at the top of the basket in a larger view than that afforded under the common reality. And I take that as the fundamental axiom of a loose, working hypothesis that allows me to maintain a sense of sanity while confronting an obviously insane experience. All I need do now is supply the various terms that might explain the what, the how, and the why of the experience. It will require the rest of the story to do that, so be patient with me.

For now, just understand that I was confused, scared, and exhilarated all at the same time. My sensory probes were somewhat disoriented. I began regaining "this-world" awareness within a pile of naked bodies. This pile was so confused that I could not immediately determine who I was connected to. I figured a fifty-fifty chance for either Alison or Jane Doe Senior, and I definitely recognized Alison’s soft little moans issuing from somewhere in the tangle. Even after I found her head I could not be sure.

Awareness was apparently reorienting through-out that pile. I heard many confused comments and queries, a few groans of dismay.

It is not that I did not remember, I remembered every soaring sensation, the whole mind-blowing range of quivering rapture. But there was the disorientation noted above, a feeling of unreality: you remembered, but you did not necessarily believe that what you remembered actually happened.

I was hoping like hell some of it did not happen.

Evidently some others were having the same problem.

The pile was moving, disentangling. There were moans, sighs, groans. Someone withdrew a leg from the small of my back; someone else was trying to extricate an arm from between my legs. It was a hairy arm; I shivered and let it go.

Alison, yeah, was connected at the hips. The rest of her found its way to me. She clasped her arms behind my back and sighed into my ear. I asked her, "You okay?"

She moaned, "Oh, God."

I persisted. "Does that mean okay?"

She replied, small-voiced, "A thousand orgasms is okay enough, I guess. Is this what you call cosmic sex?"

I told her, "I don't know what the hell to call it."

"Just call me next time you're ready for it." She sighed.

I said, "Hell," and raised to an elbow for a look around.

It was rather dark on the mound. All the torches were extinguished. Looked like a carpet of bodies, stretching out in all directions. Alison and I were at mid-circle, or there. I was able to discern several familiar faces nearby, but I did not see Oom or the senior Jane Doe.

I lay there wishing for a cigarette, too comfortable to go looking for one. I was still joined to Alison, and that was mainly the source of comfort, I guess. She was moving languidly against me—said, with a shy smile, "First time for me in public. How 'bout you?"

I said, "Yeah," and slowly withdrew because it was becoming too damned comfortable, all over again, and there were other things requiring attention. Alison made a sorrowful little sound as I rolled away and got to my knees. I reminded her, "You said a thousand was okay enough. We have business here. Let's go find out what it is."

I helped her to her feet and we carefully struggled off the mound, found and retrieved our clothing, which dangled from hooks conveniently placed on the torch stands.

Two couples were ahead of us. I watched them make their way around the side of the house and disappear in the direction of the parking area out front. I heard Hiawatha greet them—or I guess I should start referring to the guy as Campbell. Anyway, that told me what I needed to know. I led Alison around to the back door and we entered the house through the kitchen. There was no sensing of presence inside that house.

We found the bedrooms and invaded the closets, searching for effects. I found what I was looking for, all draped on the same hanger: the designer jeans and blouse I had seen on Cochran's companion at Sportsman's Lodge. I showed the outfit to Alison, told her, "Remember this. Fix it in the mind so you can describe it later."

She took a clinical approach, examining the manufacturer's labels and sizes, told me, "Got it. But what is it?"

I said, "Just remember it."

"Poor girl has a very bare closet." She sniffed. "I would call this a severely limited wardrobe, if it's all there is."

It was, at that. I probably would not have noticed it, not having that much experience in ladies' closets. A simple dress. Two blouses. Two pairs of jeans. One pair of spike-heel shoes, one pair of moccasin-style sneakers.

There was only one other bedroom, obviously Campbell's domain. In his closet, several pairs of Western boots, couple of blazers, some silk shirts, two pairs of slacks.

"They live simply," Alison observed.

I said, "Well, what the hell, when you've got buckskin..."

I heard movement, felt presence inside the house. I cautioned Alison with a finger to the lips, whispered to her, "How many people would you say live here?"

"Looks like two to me," she whispered back. "What did you have in mind?"

I had a senior Jane Doe in mind, of course, but there was no evidence of her here.

I took Alison's hand and led her into the small hallway. Oom, in buckskins, was standing with arms folded across her chest and staring at the floor in the middle of the garden room. She looked up, startled by our sudden presence, said, "Oh! Yes?"

I told her, "You're in big trouble, honey. Let me help."

She did not ask but told me, "You enjoyed the service."

"That what it was? I enjoyed it, yes, whatever. You're still in trouble. You know who I am, don't you."

"Yes. I know you, who you are."

Campbell, in loincloth, appeared in the doorway from the kitchen. He was pointing a shotgun at me.

"So do I," he told me. "Just stay loose there, citizen. You're kinda confused, aren't you? You're the one in trouble."

I was still in the little open hallway, to my left side, the living room, now dancing with blue lights from an approaching police beacon, to my right side, Hiawatha Campbell and his shotgun. And from upside or downside, some side beyond space-time, another mind directly counseled sensible behavior. Be good. Be patient. It shall be revealed.

I gave Alison the keys to the Maserati and told her, "See you later, kid. Keep the faith."

A few minutes later I was in handcuffs and headed toward the Ventura County jail. The common reality was once again in full sway.

Chapter Twenty-Five: Jigsaw

Incarceration can be a bit numbing to the mind. I found that it produces a sense of loss of the self, like becoming a nonperson. Never mind how gently or even respectfully it may all be accomplished, we are all wild beings beneath a thin layer of sophistication, so the whole gestalt of capture and confinement strikes some deep terror within these animal hearts, a terror not significantly unlike that of any wild thing that has been chased and caught and caged.

So I spent a substantial part of the early going just trying to deal intellectually with the experience. Then, from the numbness I began to fashion a whole new view of the situation and my place within it. And I began to see where I had gone wrong. I had been working the thing from the wrong side of reality.

I had to call back into use my real-world training of the past. There was a saying at the Office of Naval Intelligence: "We do not gather intelligence; we develop intelligence."

The word is much overused and greatly misunderstood. In common, everyday usage it simply means the ability to understand. Spy novelists and newswriters have managed to convey the idea that intelligence work is largely a cloak- and-dagger game of stealing secrets from an enemy. That's a distortion. I have known a lot of "spies" who are not particularly intelligent. I have seen many "secrets" that also have no particular intelligence in and of themselves.

The business of an intelligence agency is to develop intelligence—that is, understanding—of a particular situation or event. We develop that understanding in pretty much the same way that any individual might approach the task of learning something new. We gather all the facts we can and study them. From that study we "develop" certain understandings. Often an understanding of fragments will not provide a coherent whole, so we have to "leap the mind," or synthesize connections between the fragments. As an intellectual exercise, this is the opposite of analysis, which involves breaking up a whole and examining the pieces. The first employs inductive reasoning; the second, deductive.

Synthesis was one of my specialties at ONI. Say, for example, that we want to know when a certain vessel will depart from a certain port. We have several facts at hand. One-fourth of the ship's company have been granted ten-day leaves. An engine is under repairs that should be completed in about ten days. A rush order for provisions must be fulfilled within ten days. This is an over- simplification, of course, but with these few facts at hand we could reasonably surmise that this vessel will not be rejoining the fleet within the next ten days. The actual job of "intelligence gathering" (misuse—should be called "information gathering") may involve such commonplace items as a date for the captain's planned liaison with his mistress or a dental appointment ashore. That is synthesis.

For the other side of the coin, say that it all begins with the fact that our crypto people have broken the enemy codes and they give us a radio message ordering the vessel to rejoin the fleet in ten days. We wish to confirm that this is not a dummy message, planted to deliberately mislead us. So we send people into the field to "develop" the confirming data; i.e., the particulars given above that established our synthesis, only now these particulars are part of a confirming analysis of a picture already formed.

But, see, there is nothing really esoteric about any of this. It is merely an extension of the way the human mind functions, anyway. Every time you solve a problem for yourself you are examining, synthesizing, and analyzing in one combination or another, and this process develops understanding for you.

I had been doing that, too, but I had been working the wrong side of the street. I'd become so fascinated by the otherworldly implications of the experience that I had neglected the this-world basics.

That was my illumination, ensconced there in the Ventura County jail awaiting transport to the Los Angeles jurisdiction. The guys at Ventura treated me okay. I was not pushed around or insulted or otherwise abused in any way. Thank God, most law-enforcement agencies in this country today have distanced themselves from the dark-age practices of the past when any prisoner was fair game for any sadistic tendencies of his jailers. I got no feeling of personalities there, no judgment or condemnation; they were just guys doing their job, and I happened to be part of their job at the moment.

I was deposited in a little holding cell that was comfortable enough, private—as good, I guess, as any cage could be for a free spirit. But it was very sobering, and it did induce me to think rationally about the case.

Say that you have a sackful of facts. They are just tossed into the sack, disparate pieces of information that, in and of themselves, establish only that a certain event occurred at a certain time, each fact covering only a specific event. These are your "facts of the case." Each is undisputed. It happened. You need to know why and how it happened, by whom or through whom it happened, and how it is related to the other facts of the case.

So now visualize your sack of facts as a jigsaw puzzle. You do not have all the pieces to the puzzle in the sack. But you wish to place each piece in its proper place—you need to lay them out in such a way that you might be able to guess at how the missing pieces would complete the picture if they were there. This can be a disheartening exercise, of course. But you do have certain clues to help you begin this exercise in frustration. If a certain piece has a straight edge, you might reasonably see it as a bordering piece. A piece with two straight edges should represent a corner of the picture. So you start pushing the pieces around, arranging and rearranging and trying for some coherence.

That is what I was doing during those hours in Ventura. Valdiva's guys arrived to pick me up at eight o'clock and we were on our way back to L.A. by nine. Great guys—a Sergeant Thompson and a Patrolman Olivas. Olivas was driving. Soon as we pulled away from the jail, Thompson removed my cuffs and gave me a cigarette. We stopped at a Denny's at the edge of town and had coffee and pastries. Thompson told me that Valdiva had "rethought" the charges and was conferring with the D.A. about "reframing." See, these guys play with jigsaws too.

It was a pleasant enough trip to L.A. It's only about thirty-five miles between the city limits of the two, then add another hour into the interior of Los Angeles; we were downtown by eleven. Valdiva was there waiting for us. I'll say this for the guy: He's not weak on follow-through; he commits himself. I could believe his earlier warning about tracking me down. Kind of guy who'd dog you to hell's doorstep. That's okay; he's my kind of guy.

He must be forty-two or so. Big guy, impressive, carefully groomed, handsome. He took me aside and explained that they had to book me to preserve the "legalities" for the prosecutor, but I would be immediately released on my own recognizance. That took about twenty minutes. Thompson and Olivas hung around for the formalities then shook my hand and returned to their own turf in Hollywood.

Valdiva suggested that we have lunch and discussion. I stopped at a public phone and tried to reach Alison. There was no answer at her place; I tried mine and scored. I assured her I was okay; she assured me she was okay; I checked with Valdiva and invited her to join us at Musso Frank's in Hollywood for lunch. She promised to meet us there at twelve-thirty.

It's funny how you can slightly know a person and have no particular feeling one way or the other, then get just a little closer and either love them or hate them. I did not hate Frank Valdiva. One of the sharpest guys I'd been around. Obvious Latino background, streetwise and tough inside, but one who'd come through the fire with all the best metals dominant, scrupulously fair-minded, ethically superior.

He wanted to know my entire sensing of the case. I was damned glad, then, that I'd recently played with my jigsaw puzzle, because this guy could make you feel very foolish very quickly if you came at him with faulty logic.

I laid it all out for him, as I sensed it, during the twenty-minute run into Hollywood. "I believe we have to go back a few years to find the beginning of this case. At least ten years, maybe more. I believe Jim knew Vicky's mother."

"You mean before..."

"Before Vicky was born, yeah. I think there's at least a fifty-fifty chance that—"

"Wait. Are you giving me facts or conjecture?"

I wanted to tell him that a fact was no more than a particle in a field of conjecture, but I was trying to hew a straight narrative out of the jigsaw in my head, so I replied, "You asked for my sensing. Don't confuse me with what is factual and what is not. Just let me give you my sensing."

He said, "Okay. Just don't get too loose."

I told him, "There is at least an even chance, I think, that Jim is Vicky's natural father. If not that, then he was just a nice guy who befriended a girl in trouble and ended up taking her child as his child."

"Just tell me this," Valdiva requested. "Are you basing this on something you know, or think you know, or is it just a wild hunch?"

"Yes to all three of those," I replied. "But let's just leave it there for now and leap forward ten years. Vicky's mother is found beside the Hollywood Freeway with her skull bashed in. This is on Jim's turf. I need to ask: Did he request this case or was he assigned to it?"

"I don't believe I will answer that right now," the captain replied.

"That means I have to take the worst position," I told him. "Jim took the case on himself, even to the point of working it on his own time. He did that because he recognized the girl. Now, I don't know what he was thinking about, or why he chose not to identify the girl himself, but he had to have recognized her as Vicky's mother. He—"

"I don't see how you arrive at that. It's pure conjecture."

"It's educated sensing," I corrected him. "Just remember, it's what you asked for. But I'll go you a step beyond, just to show you how far this could be extended. Maybe he took on the case and jealously kept it to himself, only to cover his own fanny. Jim could have been the assailant. The mother came for her kid. Whether in a panic or in cold situation- management, he beat her to death with a crowbar—or thought he did. Decorated the body for Halloween and dumped it. Must—"

"That's ranging pretty far, isn't it?"

"Maybe. Maybe not. We're looking at missing pieces to a puzzle...blanks. I can fill them in any damned way I want to. When the final picture comes together, we'll know just how distorted it is."

"Okay. I'm not agreeing with any of this, mind you. But go on."

"If he did that, then it must have been scary as hell to see her turn up alive and rapidly recovering. But he did get a break even then, because she was so severely damaged that it seemed highly unlikely that she would ever be able to finger her assailant. But it could also have been comforting from the standpoint that she also never would be able to cause a problem over Vicky. He—"

"That's very weak, Ford. Jim and Georgia legally adopted the child. I would say they were on firm legal ground there."

I said, "Not if the natural mother could show that the child had been illegally obtained from her in the first place. At the least, she could bring a lot of trouble. But let's not get too picky over technical points here. People do not always react rationally when confronted with an emotional issue, not even people like Jim Cochran—maybe especially not people like Jim. Cops live with a lot of stress. I don't have to tell you that. They sometimes come off flaky as hell over simple personal problems, simply because they're already overloaded. But I am not insisting on painting this piece of the jigsaw with Jim's face. It's enough for now to say that, for whatever reason, Jim's conduct in this case has been improper."

"You're overlooking something that destroys your logic."

"What's that?"

"He went to you for help in solving the case. Why would he do that if he was covering it all the while?"

I said, "He came to me for help, yeah, but how do you know what sort of help he was hoping to receive? Suppose he only wanted me to find the girl's family?"

"Why would he want that, if not to identify the girl and hopefully catch her assailant?"

"Maybe," I said, "because he'd already planned to finish the job. He brought me in as a cover. And, additionally, if I could turn something for him, to nail down any loose ends in the girl's own environment. Maybe her people knew him from the old days. So maybe they could endanger him and—"

"So who killed him?"

"Exactly."

"Exactly what?" he inquired warily.

I replied, "Sorry, I thought you were leading me. As it turned out, I did help him. I found a clue to the dead girl's origins. Don't ask about that just now unless you really want to get into something very freaky. But I did point Jim toward Ojai. I believe it went a bit beyond that, even. I believe Jim was tailing me all day Wednesday. I believe he tailed me to Sportsman's Lodge, watched me check in, got my room number, assumed I was there for the night. I believe he took my Walther PPK from the Maserati. I believe he called the dead girl's sister in Ojai and got her to come to Studio City, on one pretext or another. I believe he intended to kill that girl with my gun and dump her on me. I believe he would have killed Dr. Saunders, too, just on the off chance that she could be dangerous to him. She had, after all, been very close to the dead girl for several weeks. But obviously something went wrong with his plan. The bullet went into his head instead of hers. I believe a guy known as Gordon Campbell helped it to happen that way."

"Who is Gordon Campbell?"

"A fringe loony in Ojai. Runs a sweet little fortune-telling and sex-farm scam there. Strictly a small operator, small enough to be scared to death over any involvement in the death of a policeman, whatever the circumstances. He and the dead girl's sister live together."

Captain Valdiva was looking exceptionally tired. "They also steal the body from the morgue?"

I replied, "Jim probably did that. I believe he was going for total destruction of the evidence."

"Shit," Valdiva said quietly. "I couldn't buy you as the killer on a hell of a lot less fanciful scenario than that."

I said, "Don't like it, eh?"

"Not even a little," he said disgustedly.

"Neither do I," I admitted. "But I guess I like it better than the alternative."

"Which alternative is that?"

"Jim did not attack Vicky's natural mother with a crow bar. He was simply trying to move heaven and earth to protect the one who did."

"Aw, no," Valdiva said wearily.

"Aw, yeah," I said. "If Jim didn't start all that, then Georgia did."

"Aw, no."

My feelings exactly. We do not always love the puzzle we solve.

Chapter Twenty-Six: Profile

Valdiva did not feel like eating, after all, by the time we got to the restaurant. He reminded me of my legal obligations and dropped me there. It was exactly twelve o'clock; Alison was not due for another thirty minutes. I left my name with the maitre d' and went to the bar to wait for her. Did not mind waiting; had a lot to think about. Sat at the end of the bar and nursed a Kahlua-coffee until she arrived, early, twenty minutes later.

We embraced and exchanged the usual status examination. She seemed okay, maybe a bit weary around the eyes, very sober and thoughtful, wearing the same casual outfit we'd bought in Ojai the day before but freshly done up.

"Hope you don't mind that I went to your place instead of my own," she said soberly. "I gambled that one of the extra keys would open a door. Oh—the parking valet has them. That's a honey of a car, by the way. Only took me about a half hour to get in here."

I tried to suppress an automatic wince, said, "Yeah, she'll fly if you let her."

She was looking me over, still evincing concern. "You look terrible."

I said, "Thanks. Feel about the same, to tell the truth. It has not been a joyful twelve hours."

She murmured something meant to be comforting, I'm sure, then asked, "Did Frank tell you I talked to him early this morning?"

I lifted an eyebrow to confirm. "Frank?"

"Captain Valdiva."

The bartender came over. She shook her head at him, nodded at me, explained, "I started trying to reach him at four o'clock. Took me that long to get myself together enough to get down to Malibu and—I just couldn't go home, I couldn't. Anyway, Malibu was closer. I took the coast highway down from Oxnard. Hit your place about four. Started trying to—they wouldn't give me Frank's home number. I pestered them until—kept calling back every ten minutes. Finally he returned my call at about five-thirty. He was very sweet, really. Assured me that you were okay and that you would be on the streets again very soon. I was absolutely nutty with worry and fatigue. Anyway, Frank assured me, and—I guess I conked out at about six o'clock—the sleep of the dead, I guess, until about half an hour before you called. I was slowly going crazy again—uh, that?—where is Frank?—I thought—isn't he here?"

I thought it very sweet that she'd be so concerned about me. But I was also a bit puzzled by the seemingly intimate way she referred to Valdiva. I told her, "Something came up. He couldn't stay. Had you met the guy before last night?"

She replied, 'Twice, as a matter of fact. He came to the hospital once to see Jane. And, uh, when I was dating Jim, we ran into him one night at the Old World on Sunset."

The maitre d' interrupted that line of conversation. Our table was ready. The next few minutes were devoted to studying the menus and ordering lunch. It's a nice restaurant, sort of New York-style, wide menu selection. Like Valdiva, I could not become too interested in food, though; finally decided on a brunch-style offering of eggs Benedict. That sounded okay to Alison too; obviously she was in no particular mood for food, either.

That out of the way, I returned immediately to Valdiva. "You said that Frank visited Jane at the hospital. When was that?"

She furrowed her brow to reply, "Gosh, I..."

“I mean, at about what point? Before Jim became...?”

"Oh, no, not before. I guess—it was about a week after I took over. But, see, Jim was on the case before I was."

"What do you think of Valdiva?"

"Interesting man," she replied. "Very intense. I would say probably every inch the police officer."

"Stressed?"

"Oh, yes, definitely, he has the classic profile. Not a lot of humor in his life, I would say. He would see life as a challenge that must be met twenty-four hours a day."

"The guard is up," I suggested.

"It's always up, right."

"But very fair-minded."

"Yes, and that would contribute to the stress. Things can get very difficult for us if we have no refuge in prejudices."

It could be very easy to forget that this highly attractive young woman carried such impressive scientific credentials. Add to that the fact that she rarely volunteered psychological pronouncements on everyday affairs and the transition from pretty girl to clinical psychologist was even more remarkable.

I was asking for a professional point of view when I said to her, "Do you think he is a man who would come into serious conflict if he had to decide between loyalty to a friend and loyalty to his oath as a police officer?"

She replied very quickly to that. "Oh, undoubtedly."

"Which would win?"

She screwed her face into a thoughtful grimace, said, "Gosh, I don't know. It would be tough. I believe be would probably try to find a way to satisfy both."

"Compromise?"

"Not that, exactly. He would not see it as a compromise. He would see it as—"

I suggested, "Giving a friend the benefit of every possible doubt?"

'To some extent, yes."

"To an extreme extent?"

"Maybe. Well... no. It would depend."

"On what?'

"You really want me to walk the thin ice, don't you? How can I possibly? I'm just going on—"

I said, "Educated hunch. Trust it. What is it?"

She sighed, reflected a moment, finally said, "He would not break the law to save a friend. But he might... bend it.. .just a little."

Even though the friend is dead wrong."

"Even then, yes."

It was my turn to sigh and reflect.

She asked me, "What's this all about?"

"It's about me," I told her. "And my big mouth. I broke the first law of self-preservation, a while ago, in tossing Frank Valdiva a very close friend to crucify. You're telling me he won't do it. I believe I told him nothing he had not already guessed—or feared—on his own. And I'm just wondering where that leaves me."

"But he's cleared you," she said quietly.

"No, he's just backed away a couple of steps. I'm still the prime patsy in this case." I sighed again. "I'm going to need your help, Alison."

"What can I do?"

"Introduce me to the surgeon who salvaged what was left of Jane Doe."

"I don't know him personally, but I suppose I could—"

I said, "Sure you could. I'll want to talk to him this afternoon. I want to thoroughly nail down this side of the street before I venture again to the other side."

"What other side? What... ?"

"The insane side. Something is—"

"What?" she asked, with some agitation.

"Haven't you noticed? Jane seems to have..."

"What?"

"Simmered down. Ever since Jim Cochran died. There's been no—"

"What do you—"

"...no further phenomena from her. She disconnected, let go of it. What could that mean?"

“Are you asking me?”

No. I was asking myself. And I felt that I had to have the answer before Frank Valdiva found his.

Chapter Twenty-Seven: The Trembling Question

The surgeon's name was Grewal. He was a native of India, maybe forty-five years old, bright guy with a piercing gaze and a reflective manner, seemed to always pull a brief mental review of every statement before uttering it. I liked him right away because he looked a bit like Zubin Mehta and I am very partial to musical conductors. Grewal, though, had built quite a reputation in medical circles as a brilliant neurosurgeon. He'd done a lot of experimental work and was recognized as a daring innovator of surgical techniques involving the brain.

He remembered my Jane Doe very well. Both hands rose toward the heavens, then dropped into his lap as he asked me, "But what can we do? Living tissue may not be infinitely subdivided." Pause for reflection, then: "Nerve tissue in particular. Each cell is highly specialized." Long pause. "The brain should not be regarded as a single organ, but as many organs working in close concert, very much as the many instruments of a large orchestra."

Okay, Mr. Mehta, lead on.

"The same as each instrument of the orchestra has its particular part to play, the same also you will see within the brain the particular instruments and their individual melodies."

I loved it.

"Remove a single flute or violin from the orchestra at a crucial moment and still the orchestra shall play on, and only the conductor or the trained critic will note the loss. Remove, however, all the violins or all the wind instruments, and note then the consternation of the entire audience."

I nodded agreement with that and asked him, "How much of Jane's orchestra did you remove?"

He reflected on that question for a moment before replying, "I fear that we ended her concert forever."

I asked, "Why would you do that?"

Again the hands imploring the heavens and then falling onto his lap in a gesture of surrender. "What is life, Mr. Ford? We cling to it very tenaciously. This young woman came to us clinging beyond any normal expectation. We did what we could to assist her in that. We may not suture a ruptured brain back together again, you know. We may not re-create individual cells and rebuild cortices. Even if we could do that by some technical means, we could not begin to reconnect all the billions of electrical circuits. When an electric power generating plant blows up, Mr. Ford, one cannot gather up all the spilled electrons and reconnect them in any meaningful way."

I nodded my head in sympathy with that point of view. Then he said something that really put me in his corner: "And, of course, in the final analysis, Mr. Ford, a neurosurgeon is little more than an electrical engineer."

I said, "Really!"

"Of course. The more we study the brain, the more we realize that we are dealing with fields of electrical force localized within biochemical structures. Our task, then, as neurosurgeons, is to attempt to understand how these trillions upon billions of tiny structures are orchestrated to produce the personality we perceive as a living being, how certain orchestral sections respond to what we term the will and how others respond reflexibly to protect the living being. Quite fascinating when one thinks about it, and when one realizes that the entire living structure appears to be no more than a support structure for the maintenance of consciousness. Ah, but ah!—do not ask me to define for you this term consciousness, for therein lies the trembling question."

I smiled and asked him, "Which trembling question is that?"

"What is it all about, my friend?"

I really liked this guy. I asked, "What was it all about for Jane Doe?"

He frowned, ran a finger along the crease of his trousers, pushed back in his chair, swung the feet, reflected. Presently he replied, "For my Jane Doe the question had gone quite beyond any literal meaning. She came to us a dead woman who refused to remain dead."

I asked, "Exactly how do you mean that?"

He shrugged, answered, "There was no discernible pulse or heartbeat. She was dead by every definition save the final determining presence of brain waves. And those brain waves...they were quite remarkable."

"How so?"

"There seemed to be..." He paused, took a deep breath, gave me a rather shy look, reflected a moment, continued: "Understand, please, that the left side of her skull was crushed. The left cerebral cortex was jellied and escaping. Yet there was very little bleeding—very little loss of blood throughout, actually. All of the vital systems were severely depressed. The patient was in a physical state best understood as dormancy, suspended animation—as though somehow, by some will, an heroic personal effort was being made to conserve all possible resources until repairs could be made. Does this sound to you fanciful? Never mind, it sounds so—even to me—but it is the inescapable conclusion. The patient was dead, yet the patient would not accept this fact. And the waves..."

"What about them?"

"Heroic."

"Heroic?"

"Yes. Not the usual calm characteristics of the coma or comalike state but virtual electrical storms more characteristic of epileptic attack. But yet there seemed..."

I waited courteously for him to continue. After about twenty seconds I prompted him. "You were saying that there seemed—"

"... a method to the attack," he resumed. "An organization of...The storm seemed organized, more so than the disorganized flashes characteristic of epilepsy."

I asked him, "What did that suggest to you?"

"Willful activity," he replied. "Ragingly willful activity. Of a degree never before observed in similar circumstances."

"But, of course, that brain was in severe trauma."

"But of course. All the more remarkable, then, are the noted characteristics."

I asked him, "Had you ever experienced anything of this nature before? In any other patient?"

"But once," he replied thoughtfully. "As a young medical student in India. One of the masters exhibited such."

"Masters of what?"

He blinked, smiled, replied, "A holy man. His brain waves were thus in all but the meditative state."

I asked, "Was this holy man particularly remarkable in any..."

The surgeon showed me that shy smile, dropped his gaze, replied, 'This holy man was reputed to be one hundred and thirty years of age."

I said, "Yeah, okay, I guess that's remarkable enough."

"He did not bleed when cut."

"Uh-huh."

"He had fasted forty years. Understand? No food whatever for forty years. Or so he claimed."

"Uh-huh."

"He stood upon blazing coals for twenty minutes but did not burn. This I saw with my own eyes."

"Uh-huh."

"Three steel nails had been driven two inches inside his skull. This had been such, he said, for more than twenty years. He placed them there himself."

"Uh-huh. Why?"

The doctor spread his hands. "Why not?"

"What is it all about, eh?"

"Precisely so. This holy man claimed to be—how would it translate?—-freed from the flesh... a moving spirit."

"Uh-huh. Or a walking soul?"

"Perhaps, yes. A free soul, a free spirit, not bound to the flesh."

"Did he come from another world?"

"In his understanding, but of course. As do each of us, all of us. This was his demonstration."

"Demonstration of what?"

"The thesis that we use the body, the body does not use us."

"Do you buy that?"

He spread the hands again. "There exist two basic aspects, Mr. Ford, as regards the human brain. I believe these may be stated simply as action and reaction. May we say that action stimulates the brain from within the physical structure while reaction is a stimulus emanating from outside the physical structure."

After a moment I prodded with: "Yes?"

"Yes. What is the origin of action?"

I sighed and replied, "There you go. What is it all about."

"Quite so."

"I believe we have been here before. What was Jane all about?"

"The origin," he said, "of action."

I said, "Thank you, Dr. Grewal."

He requested, 'Tell me, please, when you have solved the riddle."

Solve it? I had not yet defined it. But I was getting a sniff of that trembling question...and it was driving me crazy.

Chapter Twenty-Eight: Door to Beyond

I dropped Alison at her place and went on to Malibu for needed repairs to the self. Alison needed the downtime, too, that was obvious. It had been a frantic pace of events, almost from the moment we'd first met, and she was coming apart under the strain. Matter of fact, so was I. The day was Friday. It had begun on Tuesday, barely seventy-two hours earlier. Not that the time factor was unusual for me. My cases do show a tendency to explode all over me the moment I encounter them. I should have become accustomed to that. Part of the way I work, I guess, or the way I'm screwed into things. A catalytic effect, I suppose. Whatever, the involvement in this case had simply become too otherworldly in one sense—producing too damned much mystery and bewilderment for the mind to handle—and in the other sense, too personally threatening for a comfortable this-world orientation.

It had become more and more apparent to me, in fact, that the truth about this case was not to be found in this world. The problems—yeah, the problems, as I understood them—were very much related to this world, so any meaningful resolution needed to be this-world-related also, if I was to come out of it with my head intact. But there were other worries also, beyond the self. Very probably the health and general well-being of a ten-year-old kid were at stake. Count in also the kid's mother and brother.

As for Jane Doe—well, Jane, you see...Jane herself was no longer a this-world problem. I was not sure that she had ever been; not, that is, since my entry into the case. The little visit with Dr. Grewal tended to confirm a growing suspicion in that direction. This is going to be hard to handle intellectually, but...well, I had been wondering since the experiences at Ojai if the phenomenal aspects of the case had actually begun much earlier than the confrontation with a fleshy ghost in my bedroom at Malibu. My sensing, in fact—or call that my "extra-sensing"—almost from the beginning had been definitely colored toward otherworldly phenomena. This accounts, I believe, for my decision to get involved in the case.

Understand, please—I am not omniscient or even nearly so. My "sensing" of things is often as vague as anyone's. Even a strong sensing usually comes with no particularly clear understanding of what it is or what it means. I get a "sniff' of something, that's all, and then I have to puzzle it out, the same as anyone else.

My initial "sniff" of Jane Doe was, I believe, disturbing to that part of me that works within the right brain. I know, in fact, that it was. I just did not understand the disturbance. The message that came over to the left brain told the intellect to stay out of it. I decided to do that; tried to do that. But then Jane's right brain moved against mine, and in that exchange a new sensing was born. Don't ask; I don't know what that new sensing was. I only know that the message to the intellect was more sympathetic to this woman's plight. At that point it would have taken horses to pull me away. I reacted accordingly. The rest is the case as we have experienced it to this point.

But I believe that I had come to some understanding, at this point in the case, that the whole thing had been cockeyed from the beginning...otherworldly...out of context with the common reality. There was a matrix, an interface, problem. As though, say, a spider in his web suddenly became self-conscious and aware of the larger world in which his web is set, aware of me and all my activities in this larger world. For me, the act of movement from my home in Malibu to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles is a routine event; to the spider in his web in the corner of my living room, my routine event is a mind-blowing spectacle attended by unimaginable magic and godlike powers. I have moved farther in a few minutes than the spider will move in a thousand lifetimes, faster and with less expenditure of my own energy than the spider could possibly conceive of, and for a purpose the spider could never understand. He would be reluctant to tell his spider friends of his discovery; they would think him crazy.

The same as some of you may think me crazy when I tell you that the only phenomena suggested so far in these pages are phenomenal only because they are outside our common experience. The whole thing could be entirely routine and "common" in the world that exists beyond our sense experience. "Death" to us could be "birth" somewhere else, and vice versa; the impossible could be the ordinary; the bizarre could be the commonplace. Why not? You tell me why not. Like the Indian fakir with the nails in his head. Something either is or is not. If it is, then what the hell—we may as well concede the point and start looking for answers. Which is why, I believe, fakirs do these things.

That is about where I was on that Friday afternoon as I returned to my beach pad at Malibu. The Pacific was endlessly royal blue and inviting, the sky above surpassingly endless and just a shade less blue with puffy little clouds scudding onshore. Standing there between the two vistas on infinity, I felt very strongly the limitations of my mortality and the apparent insignificance of my place in the universe. Yet I felt also a tug of satisfaction approaching pride in the realization that, for all the apparent isolation and microscopic stature of mankind on the cosmic scale, we do appear to have powers and perceptions far beyond anything we should logically expect. I felt a comfort, too, in that realization—a "sensing," if you will—that the human race has a lot more going for it than any of us might think. We are insects, sure, on that larger scale, but we are much larger than the sum of our parts. I believe that we must be highly important insects.

Did others, though—other races—share that view of us?

Or were we merely amusing diversions along some larger trail of cosmic evolution?

Did Oom-ray-key-too look at me in that same discomfiting sense that I lock gazes with an old ape at the zoo? If so, can I fathom her, and the things that move her, any better than the ape understands me and my world?

Were the soul-walkers visitors to this planetary zoo?

If so, could I expect them to toss peanuts or brickbats?

If soul-walkers indeed, then why the sex games? Is there no sex possible in their common reality? If so, are they then "outlaws" indulging in forbidden alien pleasures? Or is there, perhaps, some sober necessity to their games?

These were thoughts, just thoughts, as I stood there at the edges of infinity. I share them with you here so that you may understand my state of mind. It is important that you understand this. Because Jane Doe again awaited me just inside my door.

Chapter Twenty-Nine: Saints Come Marching

This time she wore white buckskin in the fashion of Oom-ray-key-too. But this was Jane, definitely Jane. Though there was a basic similarity, the finer nuances of personality clearly delineated one from the other, and these were more obvious now. I knew it was Jane, and yet I knew also that it was a Jane somehow different, better integrated, more into herself. She embraced me formally, rather stiffly, kissed me lightly upon the lips, drew back to sweep me with those magnificent eyes, softly enunciated, "Ash-ton."

What the hell...this was no monster.

I felt the initial tension of that confrontation with "the living dead" oozing out of me. In its place I knew curiosity and compassion, more an anxiety for her than for myself, genuine concern.

She'd spoken my name for the first time. Taking this into consideration with the other obvious changes noted, I was instantly curious about this. I told her, "You seem much improved, Jane."

She smiled, shook her head, touched her breast with both hands, uttered a single word: "May-un-chee-tee."

The stress was on the third syllable. I repeated it, sort of like in the me-Tarzan, you-Jane routine, but of course, she would never be "Jane" again. She had some power of speech now, however limited, and it was geared to an intellect that knew itself. This was a whole person, a very lovely whole person, and I frankly did not give a damn where she came from or what her game was. I was not afraid of her. Still a bit awed, sure, but otherwise entirely comfortable.

I again told her, "You seem much improved."

She obviously understood me perfectly, smiling and assuming an exaggerated pose, somewhat as a dancer frozen in place, then she performed a little pirouette as she replied, "Much improved, yes."

Her voice had that same curious quality as Oom's—a breathiness usually associated with sensuality or sexiness, very pleasing but also very suggestive. The enunciation was similar, too, not in the sense of an accent but in a total lack of such; almost as though consciously phoneme-constructed with machine precision. Whatever accent came through was in the modulation itself, the sensual breathiness.

She cocked her head and angled it downward, as though to display the crown, as she told me, "All healed. A-Okay."

I smiled at the space-age jargon but inspected that skull carefully through the short hair. A-Okay was an understatement. I could detect no evidence of medical reconstruction there, no scars or seams, and my probing fingers could find no irregularity whatever. Curiosity had replaced awe when I asked her, "How did you do that?"

She replied, "It is the way," then became very sober and asked me, "Where is James Cochran?"

I considered the question for a moment, decided to be up front, told her, "Jim is dead."

She blinked the eyes but otherwise revealed no emotion as she inquired, "How is he dead?"

I said, "He was shot. With a gun. Murdered."

She did not ponder that but immediately asked, "Who did this?"

I replied, "I don't know that yet, Jane."

She corrected me: "May-un-chee-tee," almost inaudibly, eyes cast down. She was withdrawing. I could feel it, though it was purely feeling; I cannot explain how I knew that. I just knew that I somehow had to command her attention, keep her "fixed" in my space-time matrix. I hurried to add, "Vicky is okay; she's in good hands; she's fine."

May-un's eyes came back to mine with a solemn smile. She softly intoned, "Vick-toe-ree-uh," and she immediately winked out. I cannot otherwise describe her disappearance. She merely winked out, ceased to be in that time and place. But for a moment, a quick pulse of a moment, I thought I perceived something standing in her place, something not really substantial—that is, nonphysical—but still there, like the vanishing image withdrawing from a TV screen when you turn the set off—collapsing, that is, to a tiny point before disappearing. Within that tiny point I thought I saw the woman I had seen at Ojai, Jane Doe senior.

It was very disconcerting.

I stood there motionless for perhaps a minute, then moved myself onto the spot where May-un had stood. I am not at all sheepish to admit that I moved rather gingerly onto that spot. The human intellect, after all, is not conditioned to magic. That which is not understood within the common reality is instinctively viewed with distrust and even fear. I muttered to myself, "Beam me up, Scotty," seeking refuge in humor, I guess, as the better alternative to dread—but the choice of words was probably more a reflection of an attempt by the intellect to decode the inexplicable. In our cause-and-effect universe, a three-dimensional object does not simply "wink out." Not, that is, within the everyday experience of human beings. And I simply had to think of May-un as a human being. She met all the criteria. She had mass, warmth, and consciousness—even self-consciousness.

In trying to deal with such phenomena, the mind whirls through all the possible explanations, trying to fit the event to an explicable pattern. The only possible explanations my mind could seize upon were the science-fiction special effects in movies and television ("Beam me up, Scotty," from Star Trek) and the so-called bilocation and apportation beliefs of the mystics. Since I am conditioned more toward science than spiritualistic magic, I was reaching instinctively toward a scientific rationalization, even if that involved science fiction instead.

But I also had to consider the other. Many mystics—St. Paul among them—reported on bilocation, the ability to exist physically in two places at the same time, and apportation (or teleportation), the ability to move physically from one place to another instantly. And I was probably thinking “teleportation" while mouthing science fiction as the explanation, for the two are really the same phenomenon explained in different terms. The mystics believe that a body can dematerialize and instantly rematerialize in a distant location. They do not explain how this happens. The writers of Star Trek conceived a high-tech process by which a body is converted to sheer energy and beamed as energy from one point to another where it is again converted to matter without damage. One is about as far-out as the other. Take your pick. Don't blame me if the pick in either direction is unsatisfactory. It is all I could come up with.

You could try a scenario using a science-fiction explanation by which May-un has been dazzling me with her special effects. Say, for example, that she is really a member of the crew of a mother ship in earth orbit. She gets a six-hour liberty, beams down to frolic with Earthlings, then beams back up for her next tour of duty. Umpty-million people bought that sort of thing on a week-by-week basis for years, and loved it. Commander Kirk and his starship crew have entered the common folklore of the planet and have probably already influenced a new generation of young scientists who will be disappointed with themselves until they can convert sci fi to science itself.

But I did not like the starship scenario, so what I was really left with was an apparently alien people who somehow identified themselves as Earthlings or as soul-walking visitors who predate some of our Western mountains and seem to have some sort of an edge on immortality, as we humans think of that. With May-un as my example, they seemed to have the ability to come and go at will, to commune and interact with the people of our common reality but yet bend our conception of natural law including the ability to heal their own wounds and even to "rise from the dead." May-un told me, "It is the way." But they did not seem to be omniscient. May-un had to ask about Jim Cochran.

So much for scenarios.

Let's consider religion. In II Corinthians: 12, St. Paul writes:

"I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into Paradise—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows—and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter.”

He was referring to himself, I believe, and those things "which man may not utter" are the things that transformed the lives of all the saints. Please note also Paul's reference to "the third heaven." How many "heavens" are there? Could those "things" that may not be uttered have to do with the true reality, the one not normally available to man on Earth?

I will not presume to answer that. Perhaps, though, you should try a scenario of your own. Do so, please, then hurry back for the next movement of this tale. Because I want to tell you about a voice from the dead, a message from Jim Cochran, which I found on my telephone answering machine and involved both the living and the dead... and little Vicky Vick-toe-ree-uh...and, maybe, both you and me.

Chapter Thirty: Message

My answering machine accepts messages up to five minutes long. It also automatically records the date and time of each message, so I get a pretty good record of calls. I had not been home since the morning after this case began for me. So I had about a two-day collection, which normally would mean four to six calls. The machine's memory was showing ten calls recorded, something of a record for me, so I figured I'd better check them out.

Jim's message was fifth in the lineup, following two insurance salesmen, an aluminum siding salesman, and a wrong number. The memory chip showed the message was received at five minutes past two on Wednesday afternoon, which would have been some eight hours or so before Jim's death, while Alison and I were shaking the morgue for a missing corpse.

Here's the transcription of that message: "Ash, this is Jim. I got your package. It ties this thing. I rousted a guy from Ojai about ten years ago. Creep named Campbell. He was manufacturing LSD up there, and it found its way to some kids at UCLA. One of those kids had a bad one and walked off a roof, ten stories up. I took it on my own to roust the guy, off my turf, and blew the whole thing. Found his plant but no hard evidence. Couldn't have made it stick, anyway. Didn't have jurisdiction, and I broke every rule in the book. Guess I was quite the hot dog back then. Make a long story short, I didn't nail Campbell. But there was this scared-looking kid up there who wanted out, so I brought her out with me. She was about five months' pregnant. I brought her down here and checked her into a home for unwed mothers. End of story. Or so I thought. Didn't make the connection with this Jane Doeuntil... Shit, I was with the kid for about three hours all told. I'd forgotten the whole thing. She seemed familiar, yeah, but it was the resemblance to Vicky that threw me off. Anyway, I wanted you to know...case is solved. My thanks, buddy, and you can bill me for two days, but let's watch those expenses. Let's keep in touch. Georgia would like to have you for dinner some night soon."

Message number six was from Cochran also. It was recorded at twenty minutes past three, same afternoon. This is what he said this time: "Ash, Jim again. Disregard that last. I fucking lied like hell, and it's no time for lies, I guess. I'm afraid that Georgia and the kids may be in extreme danger. I'm into some kind of crazy shit, and it's driving me batty. That's why I called you in. It's your kind of shit. I don't know how to handle it, and it doesn't make much sense to...I mean, what kind of asshole goes to a doctor with cancer and then stonewalls the symptoms? See, I'm apologizing for—well, no, I'm not—I feel dumb for calling you in and then stonewalling you, but I'm not apologizing for...uh, shit, Ash, I'm all screwed up. I'm scared. I'm going to try to set this whole thing down right now, I mean for period and end of paragraph, over, done with. But I'm just a cop, I'm not a magician, and I think maybe a magician is needed for this one. If I fuck it up, I want you to know...Georgia and the kids...safe it for them. I hope you're a magician. Here is God's truth, Ash. This Jane Doe's real identity is Maya Czeti—that's c-z-e-t-i—I think it's Gypsy or something close. She's been coming around all these years. All hours of the day and night. Not really often until the last year or so. I mean, we didn't really see her all that often, maybe two or three times a year. Lately, though, this past year, it's been just constantly in and out. Driving us nuts. We don't know how the hell she gets in the house. Just blam, there she is, right through locked doors and windows. She comes to talk to Vicky. We wake up in the middle of the night and hear them in Vicky's bedroom. Vicky won't talk to us, never has, never a word, but she sits in her room in the middle of the night and talks a blue streak with this woman in some foreign language. They even laugh and play games. Every time I tried to grab this woman, she flat disappeared. I mean, blip and she's gone. For the past couple of years it has been very obvious who this woman is. I mean, God, you saw the resemblance yourself. Part of what I told you before is true. I did meet her in Ojai, and I met her through this Campbell creep. Okay, well, I didn't just meet her. We had a thing going for several months. I don't know, I guess Vicky could really be my kid. But I had no inkling of that when I took her in. Frank Valdiva brought her to our attention. She'd been abandoned on the station's steps. Frank knew we were trying to adopt. We applied for the foster care, and Frank provided the inside track for us. I didn't know—"

He'd used his full five minutes for that one. The tone sounded and the recording stopped. He was right back again, though, in message number seven. Also eight, nine, and ten. I won't take you through that entire emotional outpouring. Much of it was confused and almost incoherent, anyway. The poor guy had been in a hell of a state, and it seemed to worsen as he went along with the story. The gist of it, as I distilled the emotional recordings, was that Cochran somehow had been personally involved with Gordon Campbell and his place in Ojai. He hinted at a sex cult with satanic overtones. Maya Czeti—whom we now know as May-un-chee-tee—was but one of a constantly revolving "stable" of highly sexed women who were, from time to time, available for frolic in elaborately staged rituals. The details of this particular part of the story sounded very close to my own experience at Ojai, except that in Jim's version he acted as a "procurer" for well-heeled playboys from L.A. who were delighted to shell out heavily for such offbeat delights.

After several months of that Cochran discovered that Campbell was also into mind-altering drugs, and apparently there actually had been an incident in which a college student was killed while under the influence of Campbell's stuff. Jim's affair with Maya Czeti—despite a language barrier—had meanwhile ripened to the point that he was seriously considering leaving Georgia to set up housekeeping with Maya. Apparently the only thing that saved the marriage was Maya's refusal to leave Ojai. Jim thought that she was afraid of Campbell, that she was thoroughly under his influence. But he left her there when he discovered the LSD connection, and tried to put her out of his mind. Apparently he did that rather well, because he says he did not see her again until Vicky was nearly a year old, and then Maya was no more than a wraith who invaded the Cochran home occasionally to visit her child, and he did not actually get a good look at her until during the repeated visits of the past year.

He was strongly concerned by this time and went to Ojai for a showdown. Gordon Campbell was still doing business at the same stand, but Maya was not. This was nine years after Vicky was born. Campbell insisted he had not seen Maya during all those years and denied any knowledge of a child. It appears that Cochran had a talk with Oom-ray-key- too, whom he first confused with Maya, but he did not tell me what they discussed.

He ended the emotional recital with the confession: "I killed her, Ash. I know damned well I killed her. It wasn't premeditated. She just made the mistake of barging in one night while I was retiling Vicky's bathroom. I was standing there with a crowbar in my hands. Suddenly there she was. God, I feel...ashamed...but it was like swatting a fly you've been trying to nail all day. There she was and there I was. I swung at her, guess I figured the bar would just pass right through her. I'd already decided she had to be a ghost. But she was flesh and bone. Flesh and bone, pal, and I was a killer. I know damned well she was dead. I've seen enough of that to know it when I see it. She was totally wasted. I panicked. You know the rest, and you know that she came back. I don't know how the hell she did that. I'm wondering now if Campbell is not the jerk I always thought he was. I thought all the mumbo jumbo was just part of the shtick, but now I don't know. She is still not dead, Ash. Even though somebody wasted her again yesterday—Campbell, I think—but God knows why. Anyway, I told you I need a magician. Maybe what I need is a priest. Because she is not dead.

I saw her, not thirty minutes ago, with Vicky. Now I'm scared as hell for Vicky. You said something—you said— you tumbled to something, I forget what you said, I just want you to know it's for real. I'm going to try to put a cap on this thing. If I can't, Ash...if I can't do that, I'm relying on you to finish it properly. And I'll haunt your ass all the way through hell if you don't. But no fee, asshole. You owe me this one."

I owed him this one, yes. He was reminding me of a time several years earlier when he casually mentioned to me something about kids and their "made-up friends." He had not been specific, nor had he seemed particularly worried at the time, and I had forgotten the incident entirely until this reminder. I had assured him that it was entirely natural for children to invent nonexistent companions, to converse with them and play games with them, have tea parties with them. I even told him it was a natural part of their creative development: "Don't worry about it."

He should have worried about it.

And, yes, I owed him this one.

Chapter Thirty-One: In the Eyes of a Child

I spent the next hour and twenty minutes playing with my computer, this time with a telephone modem and an illicit hacker's directory listing access codes to various official and unofficial data pools. I don't really believe in invading private records, and I try to avoid that, but I figure that government data banks belong to the people, and I am one of those people, so I use them when it is really important that I do so.

I figured this time was important. I hit the California Department of Motor Vehicles, the Bureau of Vital Statistics, and the Franchise Tax Board for information on the various principals of this case. Then I figured what the hell and went into some credit-reporting services and a large escrow house, plus some local government files.

I developed some interesting information in that search, then I took another hour trying to synthesize the more promising elements toward a coherent sensing of certain interrelationships.

And the thing got curiouser and curiouser.

For one thing, Alison Saunders appeared to have sprung from nowhere about the moment she became May-un's therapist.

For another, both Jim Cochran and Frank Valdiva were living far beyond their means, had been for years.

Gordon Campbell, on the other hand, showed an entirely pedestrian profile. Middle-class, conservative, scrupulously paid his taxes and his bills, lived simply.

Georgia Cochran still belonged to the Screen Actors Guild and apparently spent a lot of time in fitness salons and acting classes, served on several charities. She also paid a lot of medical bills, above and beyond the family's medical insurance coverage.

Vicky-Victoria and Manuel-Manuel Cochran both attended special-education classes in public school. Both were "good" students. Vicky had a behavior problem. Manuel was considered brilliant in "reading comprehension and reasoning with words."

To no surprise whatever, Maya Czeti did not officially exist.

I dug out a backup pistol, an old World War II Luger, and loaded two extra clips for it, then made a few phone calls. One to Alison, a dinner date for eight o'clock. Another to Georgia Cochran, an appointment at her home for seven. Then I called Gordon Campbell's place in Ojai, spoke to Oom, arranged a midnight meeting. Finally I called Captain Valdiva at his office. He was not in. I left a message. Then I hit the shower, stood in it until the water ran cold, lay down naked on my bed, and encouraged alpha rhythms for thirty minutes, got up refreshed, shaved and dressed for the evening, and was on my way by six.

It was not the best time to be making one's way crosstown in Los Angeles. The coast highway was a mess, Santa Monica was a mess, Brentwood and Beverly Hills were purely crazy, Hollywood was beginning to idle back a bit by the time I reached that point. I arrived at the Cochran home ten minutes late. I hate that. In Los Angeles, though, you learn that punctuality is not a virtue; it is a mere stroke of luck. No matter how you may plan a crosstown drive, at whatever time of day or night, the chances are equal that you will arrive a half hour early or a half hour late. And yet the highway system here is unequaled anywhere in the world. But so is the automobile density.

So I figured ten minutes late was pretty good, but I still hated it. Someone else did too. Manuel-Manuel was impatiently awaiting my arrival. Game little kid. He was at my door and opening it for me even before I could kill the engine.

"I was getting worried," he told me.

I said, "Sorry, pal, the traffic was intense."

He said, "Yes, I know. I figured that was the problem."

A uniformed cop got out of a patrol car that was parked at the curb in front of the house, came over to check my ID. Manuel vouched for me. The cop grinned and returned to his post.

I picked up Manuel and held him in one arm while securing the Maserati. He was surprisingly light. I've held heavier babies. I told him gruffly, "Don't bitch. You're not too old to be carried."

He replied, "Well, I really am, but we'll probably get inside a lot faster this way. It's okay, I don't mind. I've learned to accept my limitations."

I said, "They're all purely physical, kid," and meant it. This guy was eight years old going on thirty. "How's your mom doing?" I asked as we approached the house.

"I guess she's doing very well," he replied soberly. "They say it sometimes takes a while for tragedy to soak in. I think she's in the numb stage."

Indeed. Eight years old. I told him, remembering what he'd told me about the meaning of his name, "God is here, Manuel."

He said, "Yes, I know. I'm glad I'm here too. Death is harder on women, they say, because they are biologically closer to life. I can handle this better than they can."

This could have been a dialogue with a fifty-year-old enlightened one. And maybe it was. I rang the door bell as I told him, "Just don't try to handle too much, pal. We all need to vent the emotions now and then."

"I'll remember that," he replied soberly. "Meanwhile I'll just do what I can."

"Great," I said, for lack of any better response. This kid was actually making me feel inferior. "Your dad would like that," I added lamely.

"He probably wouldn't notice," Manuel said.

"Sure he would. Well, if he was in a position to..."

"I didn't mean that way. I just meant he never noticed anything much."

I said, "Hey! That's pretty harsh, isn't it?"

He said, "No."

I said, "Your dad had a mean job. Cops live with a lot of tension. Lot on the mind, most of the time."

"You don't have to make excuses for him," Manuel told me. "I still love him. Mom does too. Even if he never..."

"Never what?"

The door was opening. Manuel was glaring at it. I told him, sotto voce, "Be careful you're not substituting, pal."

He whispered back, "Substituting what?"

I replied, "Anger for grief."

He said, "Oh. I see what you mean."

Eight years old.

A ten-year-old who looked six was standing in the open doorway. She tilted the head and angled a doleful gaze at me, moved aside, slammed the door after we entered.

Manuel said irritably, "For Pete's sake, Vicky!" He whispered to me, "She's been this way ever since we heard about Dad."

I set him down and picked her up, stroked her hair, told her, "It's okay to be sad, honey. There's a time for laughter and a time for tears. This happens to be a time for tears. So go with it, feel it, then get rid of it, make a time for laughter. Your dad would tell you that. I'm saying it for him."

She squeezed me very tightly about the neck, and I thought she said something to me—I thought she whispered in my ear with that same husky breathiness of Oom and May-un—but, hell, her face was turned away from my ear. Whatever, however, the words that hit my auditory centers were: 'To hell with him!"

I gingerly set her down, searched her face for a clue but found none, unconsciously reached for a cigarette and lit it, followed the kids to the breakfast room. Georgia sat slumped in a chair with a cup of coffee in front of her. She showed me a wan smile, said, "Hello, Ashton. Thanks for coming. Please sit down."

I took a chair across from her. Vicky was already pouring coffee for me.

Manuel announced, "I'll be in the den if anyone needs me." He touched my hand as though to say "Thanks," and shuffled laboriously out of the room.

I told Georgia, "That is some hell of a kid you've got there."

She smiled, musingly replied, "Yes, he is definitely one of a kind. I believe that he has now assumed the duties of the man of the house." She looked at Vicky, told her, "Go with Manuel, sweetie."

Vicky's gaze swept from her mother to me, twice, with a look that could have been defiance, but then she shrugged and obeyed.

I commented, 'Tough time for kids, eh?"

She replied, "Yes, I'm sure it is."

"And for moms."

She said, "Ashton, I—it's so—I feel...abandoned. And helpless. It's—I don't—Jim took care of all the business. The finances. Everything. I hate to admit it, but I don't even know about insurance. I don't know where to make the house payments. This is... it's stupid, I know, and maybe it sounds like I'm focusing on the wrong thing, but this is where I'm at right now. I feel...six years old, and...lost...at Disneyland."

I took her hand and squeezed it, told her, "What you're feeling is perfectly natural. Don't be reluctant to lean on people until you get your bearings. Lean on the Department, on Frank, on everyone you trust."

She wiped an eye and said, "Yes, I—thank God for Frank, all the men. And their families. I just turned everything over...he's having a Department burial. Thank God. I wouldn't know...my God, Ashton, I don't even know how to bury my own husband."

Maybe Manuel had an insight, but his mother was not numb now. That had passed; maybe it had already started to pass before my arrival, but it had definitely passed now. She was now weeping as though her heart were breaking, and I was sure that it was. I went to her side of the table and knelt beside her, took her in my arms, and just held on. It was not a time for words.

But I thought I heard some. Something tickled my auditory centers. It was softly husky but not an altogether pleasant sound. And I am not even sure that words were involved.

I just know that I turned my head toward the doorway and there encountered the cold stare of little Vicky Victoria.

And that shivered me clear to the bottom of my soul. A kid of ten who looked six—okay, maybe so, but those eyes, at that moment, those eyes were infinitely old.

Chapter Thirty-Two: Synthesizing

Georgia had her emotions pretty well under control by the time I departed. She even walked me to my car and waved smilingly to the cop on duty at the curb. Both kids stood in the open doorway of the house, two little waifs too old for their years, yet far too young, I presumed, to fully appreciate what was happening to them. Manuel raised his good arm for a forlorn little wave, then disappeared inside. Vicky just stared. I stared back for perhaps five seconds, then broke that disturbing eye contact and got in the car. Georgia leaned in to kiss me lightly on the cheek.

"Thanks again," she said, the eyes brimming just a bit.

I said, "Let me know if there's anything I can do."

"I will."

"Does Vicky ever talk to you?"

"No. Vicky has never talked."

"Not to anyone?"

"Not to anyone, no."

"You've never heard her talk to herself or to imaginary friends?"

"No."

"That's odd. Jim told me just the opposite."

"What do you mean?"

"He said she's been talking to Jane Doe for years."

Georgia stiffened, withdrew, carefully closed the car door, muttered, "You misunderstood."

I leaned across the windowsill, studying her body language, told her, "No, I understood him perfectly. Her real name is May-un-chee-tee. Jim said she visited often. He seemed to think that she was Vicky's natural mother."

Silence reigned for about fifteen seconds, during which Georgia was studying the open doorway of her home. Finally she said, without looking at me, "Why are you doing this, Ashton?"

I replied, "I am obliged to do this, Georgia. Jim told me the full story before he died. Or, at least, as he understood it. He was trying to end that story. He knew that he was jeopardizing his own life in that attempt. He asked me to follow through if he could not. I'm following through. And I need your help."

She said, "Whatever are you talking about?" and walked stiffly into the house without a backward look.

Vicky slammed the door.

So call me an insensitive bastard. I felt like one. But I also felt something very ominous in the atmosphere surrounding that little family. And I was resolved to by God get to the bottom of it.

I arrived at Alison's place ten minutes early, called in from the security door, she buzzed me inside. It was a nice building, U-shaped with a tastefully decorated lobby opening onto a large interior court with swimming pool and gardens. Each ground-floor apartment opened onto that courtyard. Alison had one of those. Took me a couple of minutes to locate and get to it.

I have to say that this young lady lived well. The apartment was spacious, stylish, beautifully put together with lots of blooming plants and miniature potted trees—also very sensuous, with soft colors and softer fabrics that seemed to invite tactile involvement. I really hated to step onto the carpet with shoes on; it was white, ankle-deep pile, built for bare feet and maybe bare bodies. Alison was close to that. She answered the door chimes wearing nothing but bra and panties, greeted me with a soft kiss on the lips, apologized that she was "running late," bade me make myself comfortable, then quickly retreated to the interior.

I found chips and dip and a small pitcher of vodka gimlets on the bar, cocktail glasses chilling in crushed ice, so I filled a couple of glasses and went looking for my hostess, found her in a queenly boudoir putting finishing touches to her makeup. She accepted the gimlet, sampled it, made an approving face, commanded me to amuse myself elsewhere.

Which was what I had in mind, anyway. But first I satisfied my curiosity about the bedroom, took careful mental note of the decor, browsed on through the rest of the apartment. Soft music filled every room from concealed speakers. There was one other bedroom, a study or library in which was set up an artist's easel and a blank canvas, a guest bathroom, breakfast room, dining room. Kitchen, bar, and living room were combined in a flowing pattern that recognized the essential unity of functions there.

Charming, yeah—beautifully sensuous while entirely functional—but something was missing. Identity was missing. This could be anyone's home—or no one's. It looked like something you might see in a magazine on interior design, an artist's conception. Nothing of a personal nature was evident anywhere—no memorabilia or family photographs, nothing to really tag or define the resident personality.

I was not surprised by this. I had more or less expected it.

I returned to the bedroom doorway. Alison had poured that lush form into a clinging black sheath and was fussing with her hosiery. I leaned against the doorjamb, took a sip of my gimlet, quietly observed, "Nice place. Fits you as well as that sheath.''

She said dryly, "Thanks. Beat it, please. I want to dazzle you with the transformation, not with the process itself."

I told her, "Consider me dazzled to the max. Lived here long?"

She replied, "Just long enough to get everything the way I like it."

"How long is that?"

Our eyes met in her mirror. She said, "I came out a few months ago."

"From where?"

"Back East."

"Uh-huh. Is that where you went to school?"

She went to her closet, began searching for shoes.

I repeated, "Did you go to school in the East?"

"Yes."

"Me too. Ivy league?"

"Nope."

"Where?"

"None of your darned business. Or when, thank you."

I told her, "I have to make it my business, Alison. Where did you go to school?"

She turned to face me, a shoe in each hand. "I went to several schools. Do you want undergraduate or postgraduate?"

"I just want to know who you are," I replied quietly.

She made it a joke, showed me her tongue, said, "I'm happy to be whoever you want me to be, Professor Ford. Do you really want to go out for dinner? Or would you just as soon hang out here and explore my person?"

I said, "No dice, Dr. Saunders. You're too pretty and warm to have hatched from an egg. So where did you come from six weeks ago?"

She said, "You know, I resent the hell out of this."

I said, "Don't blame you. But I still need to know. Where were you born? When? What is your father's name? What does he do? Where did you get your education?"

"What the hell are you talking about?" she inquired lightly.

I told her, "I'm talking about the application for employment you filed with the County of Los Angeles. Good thing for you they haven't gotten around to checking it out. Because I did. And it does not check out, kid. All of your qualifications are false. Even your name is false."

She laughed, sat on the edge of the bed, angled a sharply oblique gaze at me, put on a shoe, said, "Maybe you'd better explain the rules of this game to me. I don't understand it. What am I supposed to say now?"

I replied, "You're supposed to tell me who you are and why you're posing as someone else."

She put on the other shoe, stood up, went to look at herself in the mirror, adjusted the dress. Only then did she respond. "Does this mean you're not taking me to dinner?"

"No."

"Then let's go. I'm starved."

I said, "You're not going to tell me about it, are you?"

She said, "No."

I sighed, said, "Then I have to think the worst."

She smiled, said, "Tough."

Tough, yeah. Take it or leave it. Like it or lump it. I did not want to take it or like it—but I could not leave it, so I had to lump it. For a while. Just for a while.

Chapter Thirty-Three: Mindtap

I took Alison to a swank restaurant in Beverly Hills where the food was great, the service immaculate, and the prices unbelievable. This place is so "in" that it does not show its name and they accept neither cash nor plastic; you must be precleared for credit and you get your check in the mail. I do not frequent such places, but now and then is okay when the occasion is right. This occasion seemed right. Not that I was trying to impress the pretty psychologist. Actually I was hoping to divert her. This place is frequented by movie and television personalities. I have found that an "open mind is a diverted or mildly distracted one; open, that is, for my purposes. The willful penetration of an unwilling or guarded mind is a bit like sexual seduction; you may not simply overpower, as in rape, but you must woo and win; you seduce it.

I was never especially comfortable with sexual seduction, as it is commonly practiced. It implies a basic deceit: on the man's part if he is trying to overcome moral resistance; on the woman's part if she looks to seduction as a moral loop hole; on both parts as the game is usually played. I believe that it belittles both as well as the act itself, so I usually do not play that game.

As a general rule I also diligently avoid any deliberate invasion of another mind. People sometimes unwittingly "give" me knowledge. At such times I have no alternative but to accept it, but I usually also try my best to lose it as soon as received, unless there is some commanding reason to retain it. Usually such gifts have no value whatever. In a crowded room I will sometimes receive messages like God, look at those tits! and Oh, shit, either I've started my period or I just wet my pants!

See, this kind of stuff is floating around everywhere. The reason we are not normally wired to receive it must be obvious. We could not function in that sea of thoughts from other minds, especially the static thoughts like Did I pay the phone bill? and I probably blew the promotion. The problem, you see, is that every mind is always at work. A mind at work means thinking, and thinking is an electromagnetic process that sends vibrations into the cosmic mind—what Jung termed the "collective unconscious." People like me with loose wiring in the belfry can suck those vibrations right through.

Strange thing... Wait, I am not going to give you a seminar here on mental telepathy, but this bears mentioning. All the product of a given mind has a distinctive stamp that identifies it with its source. If we have ever known a person well enough to recognize the face or sound of the voice, then we will also recognize the purely mental product. And sometimes we can pair a thought with its producer, even though he or she is a total stranger but in view at the moment. Thus, in a crowded room I usually know from whom the random thought is emanating.

But I do not like to invade. I emphasize that now because I certainly did intend to invade Alison's mind if I could. I had reason to believe, by then, that she was consciously on guard against that—because she had something to hide from me and because I had very early demonstrated an ability to tap her thoughts.

How does one "guard" against mind-tapping? The parapsychology labs work like hell to open the channels. I am not aware of any particular technique under study for closing them, lb understand what I was about with Alison, you need to know that there is more than one class of mind-to-mind transfer. There is the type I have been telling you about—the random collection—and another class most usual in labs, the target-concentration, send-and-receive type of transfer, used simply to prove empirically that it can be done. There is another large class that is much more common, almost ordinary—the so-called clairvoyant reception, by which the receiver suddenly "knows" something or gets a hunch; in this class are those people who always seem to know who is calling the moment the telephone rings or sometimes before it rings.

My problem with Alison involved an entirely different class of transfer. This type of mind-to-mind does not rely on passive reception or clairvoyant knowingness. It relies literally on invasion. It involves the deliberate stimulation of another's memory—an actual linkage between the minds by which I search her memory the same as I would search my own.

So back to the question: How does one guard against mind-tapping? If the only worry involved the reading of thoughts, then obviously the best defense would be simply to keep the mind busy with junk thoughts; do not think about the information to be guarded. That can be very difficult, even self-defeating. In order to suppress a particular thought or idea one must conceptualize, at least, that which is to be suppressed. Try it; decide that you will not think of an orange, then note how often the orange bobs into the mind. Anyone who has ever dieted has known mental experiences of this nature. I once knew a paranoid CIA agent who had developed the habit of mentally reciting the alphabet continuously to avoid "inadvertent thinking" when his mind was not purposefully directed into a specific task.

But what if you are a trained psychologist with an expert understanding of brain wiring and you therefore know enough to also be worried about manipulative invasion? You would want to think junk and also remain alert to a mind-touch from outside. And, yes, if you are sensitive, you definitely can feel another mind touching yours. Ever been in a restaurant or other public place and turned your head before you realized it to stare across the crowd into another's eyes? If so, then you have felt another's mind.

My task, then, was to seduce and penetrate Alison Saunders. I knew that she was alert and wary. I did not know why she was therefore so willing to expose herself to my presence. I had given her ample justification for telling me to get lost. She had not done so. I had to believe, then, that she was in this for more than dinner and dancing herself. It occurred to me, of course, that I could be misreading the whole thing and that she had nothing of any particular importance to hide. But she had set this thing up herself through her own mystery. I had no alternative but to presume the worst.

"Tough" for tit is also "tough" for tat.

I was going straight for her head.

"Pssst. Who is that? Isn't that.. .7'

"Morgan Fairchild. Very pretty."

"Yes. Who's the gorgeous hunk with her?"

"Beats me. Next table over, though, to...your left..."

"Oh! The Dereks!"

"Yeh. Would you share an artichoke with me?"

"I suppose it would be very gauche to ask for autographs in here."

"Best way to find the sidewalk in a hurry. The artichokes here are very special. Would you like to... as an appetizer?"

"Oh. Sure. Sorry. I guess, uh...would you recommend the lobster?"

"Only if you're willing to look him in the eye first. They'll take you over there and make you pick one out of the tank."

"Brrrrrr. Well, maybe I'll try..."

One and one are two. Two and two are four. Three and...

"Isn't that the guy—straight ahead of you—plays the doctor on—"

"Yes! MacDonald Carey! He looks great! Doesn't he?"

"Handsome mm, yes."

"Well, let's see..."

Twelve and twelve are twenty-four. Twenty-four and twenty-four are forty-eight. Forty-eight and forty-eight—beautiful eyes—ninety-six. Ninety—wonder if he's still— sixteen and sixteen are thirty-two—bet he is—sixty-four and sixty-four—maybe the sirloin tips—no prices on this menu —twelve, twelve, the twelve—oops, one and one are two— the twelve—two and two are tips, sirloin tips, the twelve—

"Guess I'll have the sirloin tips."

Three and three are twelve. Four and four are twelve. Stop that. Five and five are ten. Ten and ten...

"Do you watch Miami Vice? Recognize the guy over there?"

Oh, my God! It is him!

"No, I... what do you think of the tips?"

"Good choice. I'll go with that too. Nice guy. Played tennis with him once, pro-am."

"Do you mingle a lot with the Hollywood crowd?"

"Not exactly a crowd anymore. I've done some work in the community. Generally a nice bunch. Of course, there's always the asshole, in any group."

"Yes, I suppose..."

Twelve and twelve are twelve, the twelve, the ten and ten are the twelve and twelve, assholes everywhere, twelve assholes everywhere, pricks and pricks are twelve, pricks everywhere, lurking under tables everywhere, ha ha, how many pricks are under cover here? Six and six are twelve, eight and eight are twelve, oh, dear; one and one are two...

"Ashton, what are you doing?"

"I said the beef tips too."

"No, I—you know what—get the hell out of my head—that is despicable, that is..."

So what the hell. I'd gotten enough, anyway, for the moment. Twelve and twelve are not twelve.

Chapter Thirty-Four: The Twelve

There is an old and persistent legend or myth dating from man's antiquity to the effect that a certain small and secret group of individuals are entrusted with a body of esoteric knowledge and incredible power. The legend takes many forms and is repeated in one form or another throughout all earthly cultures.

I first heard of The Twelve at a naval war college, in a lecture by a visiting professor from Switzerland. This was, believe it or not, a lecture on Strategic Studies—or, more correctly, dealing with the history of military strategy. The professor brought up the Emperor Asoka, circa 275 b.c., grandson of the unifier of India. A devout convert to Buddhism, Asoka was sickened by the bloodiness of military conquest. It was his conviction that, anyway, the only worthwhile conquest was that of the heart. He launched a campaign to spread Buddhism throughout his empire and to end forever the horrors of warfare. He also decreed total secrecy in all areas of natural science, convinced that this was the only way to prevent mankind from inflicting evil via scientific achievement. This was, please note, more than two thousand years before atomic weaponry. And who knows?—maybe Asoka was one factor in the slow pace of technological development for all those centuries—incredibly slow-paced, actually, relative to the explosion of technology during this century.

According to this story, Asoka founded the powerful secret society known as The Nine Unknown Men. These men were scientists, the most gifted and enlightened of their day. They were charged by Asoka with the responsibility of developing scientific understanding, to guard that knowledge, and to use it only for the greater benefit of mankind. Apparently there was a built-in mechanism for succession, each charged also with the responsibility to choose and train his own replacement. It has been suggested that the lamas of Tibet today represent this tradition, their science masked by religious forms as has been the custom since Asoka.

But the professor from Switzerland had a scenario of his own. It was his thesis that the Nine have become Twelve as of the early Christian era, and that these Twelve (and their successors in each age) managed to keep a tight rein on turbulent humankind for nineteen centuries. The Twelve, according to my professor, were responsible for the decline of the wicked Roman Empire; they brought on the Dark Ages as a cool-down mechanism, then the closely controlled scientific pragmatism and creative flowering that ushered in the industrial age. They founded the United States of America. They are not responsible for the atomic age; this was a screwup; it was not supposed to happen; The Twelve lost control.

But their influence remains very strong. They possess incredible wealth and fantastic power. They live scattered about, among us, like us. One may be an academician, another an industrialist, still another a head of state. Some may be female. All have surpassing knowledge in a particular field. It is possible that one or all have by now mastered the secrets of perfect health and immortality. In the tradition established by Asoka, however, all knowledge is carefully guarded and delicately meted out.

So much for the professor from Switzerland. He was not really buying all of that himself but using it to illustrate his thesis on the history of strategic deterrence.

But the story kept popping up after that, a bit different in several of its parts now and then but basically the same story, and usually related by persons who do not normally deal in nonsense. I heard it lately at Big Sur, and a few days later at Virginia Beach.

And now it had reared its head inside the guarded mind of Alison Saunders, kept popping out of her stream of protective junk. It is impossible to transcribe coloration of an unuttered thought. As I was experiencing this, the lurking Twelve came into the stream in a totally different hue than the other numbers. Mathematical concepts and formulations are typically mentalized in negative color. That is, the number six, representing no more than an unrelated quantity of something, is an emotionless formulation, while six times, denoting, say, that many continuous orgasms, comes with vivid color.

Alison's Twelve was riotiously commanding, a power concept of about the same magnitude as God to the devout or ground zero at the Pentagon, possessing much more significance than the literal transcription.

I knew I was on to something.

I just did not know exactly what that was.

We dined separately at the same table. I presume that Alison was continuing to concentrate on her mental junk. I simply allowed my own mind to roam free, going back over and over again the events of the past few days, trying to pull the pieces together and trying also to develop some plan of attack upon the mystery.

Alison would help in that, whether she wanted to or not. I was sure of that. Her head was apple pie to me. I could go in whenever I damn well pleased. I knew that now. But I was still very reluctant to do so. And I was resolved to give her every chance to come forward on her own.

I just did not know how long I could wait for that.

We set off for Ojai at a few minutes past ten. I had a date at midnight, remember, with Oom-ray-key-too.

I took the coast highway up, through Malibu and Oxnard. Alison kept far to her side of the car all the way. While easing through Malibu I asked her, "Still playing with your numbers?"

She replied softly, "Bastard."

It was our first verbal exchange since the invasion.

I said, "You're right, of course. I apologize. But I won't alibi it. I did it deliberately. I might do it again, too, if I have to. I am not playing parlor games here, kid. People have lost their lives in this game already. You or I could be next. So you sit there and mix that in with your numbers. When you decide that perhaps it's best to pool the resources here, I'm ready to listen to you."

She asked, grim-voiced, "What did you get from me?"

I showed her a sober smile. "I calculate there were roughly seventy-five to eighty pricks under the tables back there."

She flared: "Jesus, Ashton! That's that's just—"

I said, "Yeah, right, it's despicable."

She turned toward her window, chin on fist, sat silent for perhaps ten seconds, then laughed softly, said, "It's so hard to stay mad at you."

I shrugged, replied, "So you may as well quit trying. I also picked up on your Twelve."

She said disgustedly, "Shit!"

I said, "Yeah. I'm ready to listen to you, kid."

“I'm not ready to talk to you, Ashton.”

"Let me talk to you, then. You can tell me how far off I am. Either you are one of The Twelve or you work for them."

"I said I'm not talking to you, Ashton."

"Close, though?"

She fidgeted. "I won't say how close."

"You folks have had Jim Cochran and Frank Valdiva on your payroll all these many years. I'd say about ten years."

"Jesus Christ, Ashton."

"You're sponsoring Vicky and Manuel, aren't you."

"Wait! Just wait right there! I told you I am not talking to you! So just cut it out!"

"You were dispatched when the thing turned violent. Wasn't supposed to work that way. Terrible glitch. And there lay poor May-un-chee-tee, Vicky's natural mother, with her head bashed in. Your own damned agent did it to her. So what are you? The Wizard of Womanland? You can put it all back together again, like Humpty Dumpty?"

"Shut up! Just shut up!"

"The hell I will! Damn you! Damn you, Alison, and all your wonderful Twelve! Who the hell gave you guys the God franchise around here? Those poor little kids don't know who they are or where they are right now! And their mother—yes, dammit, their mother, the only one they've ever known, is totally abandoned and left to bleed in the trenches. What's worse than being a widow is to be the widow of a disgraced cop—and that's the way this is going to come out, isn't it. Beaudfid, beautiful job you guys did here!"

Alison was crying.

And, shit, I cannot handle female tears.

I reached over and touched her, said, "Hey. If the shoe binds, don't wear it. It isn't yours. I'm sorry. But if you're not going to talk to me, kid, I am just naturally going to assume the worst. So tell me the way it is. So we can both feel better."

She dabbed at her eyes with a tissue, leaned her head against the window, said, very quietly, “The fucking shoe fits very well, Ashton. But it was built for binding. And I cannot get it off. So we'll both just have to go on feeling...”

I sighed, said, "Well, maybe it's a Cinderella slipper."

"How so?"

"Maybe it will slip right off come midnight."

She shivered, touched me lightly on the cheek with her fingers, replied, "It is not a Cinderella slipper, Ashton. It's a ten-league boot. And I would not take it off if I could."

And that, I supposed, was about as much voluntary honesty as I was going to get all night.

I asked her, "How much is twelve and one?"

She brightened, smiled, told me, "It's the thirteen original colonies, isn't it? Judge and jury. Jesus and the apostles. Quite a sum of things, I'd say."

"A holy number, would you say?"

"Could be. Why not?"

I sighed, said, "Okay. Sign me on. But just for the mission. I do not wear shoes that bind."

She said, "Silly man. You were born in shoes that bind."

That surprised the hell out of me. I said, "I was?"

She nodded, angled the gaze away from me, said, "They were fitted to you on the backseat of a Fairlane Ford."

I had not told her about that! Had she seduced the seducer? God, I hoped so!

Chapter Thirty-Five: Saints and Devils

There is an old saying: "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread." Believe it came from Alexander Pope, eighteenth century. Shakespeare conveyed the same idea with different words in Richard III:

The world is grown so bad, that wrens make prey where eagles dare not perch.

He went on to say, later in the play:

And thus I clothe my naked villainy

With odd old ends stol'n forth of holy writ,

And seem a saint when most I play the devil.

I was heading into a hell of a night—whether to enact the role of Pope's fool or Shakespeare's wren, I could not say— perhaps both or neither—but I did have the strongest feeling that I was pursuing something probably better left alone, because saints and devils are often indistinguishable one from the other. I have even heard it argued that they indeed are the same: They merely take the form in mortal eyes of the effect experienced; good effect to you, saint; bad effect, devil.

I do not claim to know the truth of that. I do feel most strongly that there are agencies at work in this world that utilize a set of moral rules that are different than the common set, you might say a "higher order"—or even a "transcendent morality." There are transcending laws in the natural sense. The law of gravity, for example, keeps you and me attached to the planet. The aerodynamic principle allows us to transcend gravity to a certain degree, and we escape it entirely via motive velocity.

In the moral sense, does a just and loving God smile at the doe in the jaws of the hungry predator, or does he rebuke the lion who is faithful to his own wiring in eating the doe? The doe might cry out, "My god has forsaken me!" while the lion is sending up "Thanks for food." Do not they both address the one god? Is the god of the lion not also the god of the doe? But how account for justice in this scenario unless we admit to a higher sense, a "transcendent morality" that views the same act in an entirely different way than you and I?

If there are rules to this game called life, they should apply to one and all alike, shouldn't they? Sauce for the saints should be sauce for the sinners; right for me is right for you; wrong for me is wrong for God. Right?

Well...maybe not. Two apples and two pears do not make four nectarines. Some of the most successful con men make their bucks by mixing terms on us. If the car salesman gives you a thousand-dollar "overallowance" for your trade- in while overcharging you two thousand for the new one, who's coming out ahead in the deal?

There is this "math puzzle" concerning three traveling salesmen who arrive at the one hotel in town at the same time. There is only one room available. The three decide to share the room. The rate is twenty-five dollars. The clerk is bad at math, so takes ten bucks from each. The bellman overbears the men grumbling about the overcharge, reports it to the clerk. So the clerk gives the bellman five dollars to divide among the three men. The bellman is no better at math than the clerk, so he refunds one dollar to each of the three guests and pockets two for himself as a tip. The puzzle: Each man ended up paying nine dollars as his share. Three men times nine dollars equals twenty-seven dollars. Twenty-seven dollars for the room and two dollars for the bellman equal a total of twenty-nine dollars. What happened to the other dollar?

If you have trouble following that, pity the retail clerk unwittingly playing a "change game" with a good con man.

But, see, we are all of us retail clerks handling the currency of life. Saints and devils look alike—and where we usually go astray is in the mistaken belief that saints wear halos and devils horns. It ain't necessarily so. The doe in the jaws of the lion will see God with horns; the lion sees a halo. This is subjective reality. Is there, somewhere, a truly objective reality, from our point of view, wherein the horn and the halo merge into one?

All our mystics say so.

They even seem to be telling us that the lion and the doe are one.

If that is true, then it must be true also that the subjective reality is a fool's game in which saints are sinners and lions are does; we're all going to wake up one day to discover that "life," as Shakespeare assured us, is a stage, and we an itinerant repertory company, endlessly exchanging roles and repeating our little plays until finally we get it all right.

It also necessarily follows, then, that we have immortality now. Not later. Now. The doe does not die in the jaws of the lion. He is transformed into another role. Perhaps the lion eats so many does that he is transformed into one himself, someday, somewhere.

Maybe so. But then, also, maybe not.

I just want you to be thinking about it.

And I lay it on you not in an idle way but because you will need it later, as you advance with me into a hell of a night.

Chapter Thirty-Six: Into the Night

We hit Ojai at about twenty minutes before the midnight hour. My appointment with Oom-ray-key-too was for twelve sharp. She set the time herself. I purposely arrived a bit early to afford a bit of scout time. But an event was under way when we arrived. The drive was full of parked cars. I found a place just up the street for the Maserati; Alison and I walked in. I was wearing the Luger in a shoulder holster beneath the left arm, Campbell's shotgun very much in mind.

I counted twenty-two cars parked on the property, so it was a large group. Of course, it was a Friday night. The moon was high and bright in a cloudless sky, the panoply of stars seemingly close enough to inhale. We could hear the sounds of revelry traveling from the "sacred grove" in the backyard by the time we reached the house. We were headed around and toward the rear when Campbell, in loincloth and toting his shotgun, stepped from behind a large oak. He sneered, "Well, I'll be, if it isn't the jailbird. I guess it's no crime to shoot an escapee, is it."

I shoved Alison aside and kept right toward him. He was raising the shotgun to his shoulder when I took it away from him and slapped his face with the stock. Muscles and all, he went down like a steer in the slaughter pen, unconscious before he hit the ground.

Alison squealed, "Oh, my God!" and stood over him while I unloaded the magazine of the semiauto shotgun. I threw the shells as far as I could and dropped the gun beside the still figure. Alison had a finger at the pulse point in his throat. She told me, "He's alive, but I don't know why. You really hit him a lick there, Professor."

I growled, "So maybe he'll sleep awhile. Come on, let's check out this party."

She asked me, "Sure you want to do that?"

I replied, "No, but I think we'd better."

She said, "Just don't lose your head this time."

I said, "My head! You're the one was screwing the moon, not me."

"Gosh, you get nasty, don't you."

"You started it, kid."

"Just don't take it out on me, Ashton."

I told her, "Hate violence, that's all. Pisses me when someone forces me into it. Sorry if I..."

She said, "It's okay. Was that a lovers' quarrel?"

I gave her a surprised look. "I don't know. Maybe so."

She squeezed my hand, said, "Put it on hold. We'll get back to it."

"Will we?'

We were about halfway between the house and the grove. Alison whispered, "Maybe we should take care of first things first."

I growled, "Alison, you have a very evasive way about you. Would you please work on that? Otherwise you are a very lovely person."

She shushed me and pulled me to a halt, moved very close. We were at the edge of the grove. The sacred mound was no more than twenty feet away. The torches were extinguished and the folks were cavorting. Quite a pile of bodies, probably fifty or more, granting and wriggling all over that mound—now and then a little shriek or an hysterical giggle, ohs and ahs in sharp exclamation.

I could not recognize Oom, or anyone else for that matter, could not even pick out a whole body, they were all so interlaced.

Alison's eyes were sparkling. She gave me a quick squeeze and whispered, "Is that what we were like?"

I told her, "No need to whisper. You couldn't disturb that group with gunfire." I was reminded of something, then. I told her, "I want to check one of those torches."

"For heaven's sake, why?"

"They do tricks. I'd like to know how."

"What kind of tricks?"

"On and off, sparkling fountains, like a fireworks display. The other night I thought I saw burns on your body the same as Jane's—as May-un's."

"You did."

"What?"

"They're fading, but I came out of that with marks."

"Bums?"

"Not exactly. Not painful, anyway. But little red marks. Same pattern. Satanic symbols, I'd say."

"Who put them there?"

"Gosh, I don't know, Ashton. You said you saw them. When did you first see them?"

I said, "When you were standing in the sparklers. Maybe they are not satanic symbols. I mean, maybe the so-called satanists stole the idea. I get the feeling all this stuff began before anyone ever heard of Satan."

She said, "Yes, I think you're right. I researched these designs a while back."

"And...?"

"And I think you're right."

God, she could be a pain in the ass!

I left her standing in the grove and went forward to examine a torch. I even removed one from its standard and smelled it, picked at the wrappings, denuded it. The shaft was steel. Just a solid bar of steel, nothing more. I replaced the shaft in the standard and returned to the grove. If anyone on the mound had noticed my presence, they were ignoring it. I reported to Alison, "Kerosene pack on steel. How the hell do they get the effects?'

She did not reply to that, said instead, "It's nearly midnight. Did you see Oom-ray-key-too?"

"All I saw was daisy chains."

"Let's go to the house. I don't believe she attends these parties."

I said, "She sure as hell attended ours."

"Only to start it, I think. She left before we did. And we were among the first to leave. Ah-ree-pat-muh... damn!"

"What?"

"You know...we were...first to leave."

"Bullshit! You said 'Ah-ree-pat-muh.' Who is that?"

"Let's go to the house."

She was walking away from me. I grabbed her hand and jerked her back. "God damn it, Alison, you owe me!"

"Earth mother," she gritted.

I said, "Oh, ho."

She said, "Can we go now?"

I told her, "Fuck it! You go to the house! I'm going back to Malibu!"

She was furious. "Ashton, don't be a jerk! This is no time for twenty questions! I'll tell you all about it when the time is right!"

"No dice, kiddo. You tell me all about it right here and now!"

God, how it hurt her to be straight. "Ah-ree-pat-muh is the channel," she groaned between clenched teeth.

"The channel for what?"

"From the other side."

"The other side of what?"

"Ashton..."

"Fuck it, Alison! Just fuck it!"

"She anchors them over here, damn you!"

"For what?"

"For their babies. Satisfied? For their babies, damn you."

"They have to come here to get babies?"

"Oh, Ashton. Please..."

"Don't give me an Amazonian bullshit legend!"

"It's not Amazonian. It's So-hay-bi-hee-jee."

Yeah, sure. The soul-walkers, from umpty-million B.C.

Well, I warned you a way back that we were into the Kingdom of Nonsense. You don't have to believe any of this, if you'd rather not. I'd rather not, myself, but I was stuck with it. I'd traveled into the fucking satanic night with it. Now I had to see it through, if only to rescue my sanity.

I patiently asked Alison, "Are you telling me that Vicky and Manuel are soul-walkers?"

She replied, grim-lipped, "No."

"But their mothers are?"

She said, "Damn you, Ashton. You are really compromising me, you know."

"So what's new?" I growled. "You've been compromising me, all week—all the way into a cell, at one point."

"I had nothing to do with that!" she protested. "I got you out, dammit!"

"How'd you do that?"

"I called Frank and told him to by God get you out."

"Oh, you called 'Frank,' eh?"

"Yes, I did. I don't know why now. But I did."

"Were you worried about me?"

"Worried half to death," she admitted, swaying toward me.

It was a lovers' quarrel, yeah. But a bit more important than that too. We both, you know, were committed to the night. And scared to death we would not see the dawn.

Chapter Thirty-Seven: Crossover

Oom was in the garden room. We'd let ourselves in, using the back door. She looked up as we entered, smiled uncertainly at Alison, said to me, "Did you destroy Gordon?"

I replied, "No. He'll probably wake up with a headache, though. How did you know?"

"I saw. Gordon is not evil. Please do not blame him. I sent him to May-un-chee-tee. Gordon does my bidding."

I told her, "Maybe so, but the shotgun does his bidding. I could take no chances with that. Thank you for seeing us. We really must put this problem to rest."

She said, "Yes. I understand. Earth Mother understands." She looked again at Alison, said to her, "Are you the one?"

Alison sighed, replied, "Yes."

"Does he understand?"

Another sigh. "Not really."

I gave them both a dirty look and said, "I'm still here, you know. Please speak to me, not about me."

Oom told me, "Earth Mother would give you understanding. But you must be pure."

"I can't guarantee that," I replied. "For what it might be worth, though, I'd like to help."

"You must be pure or you will not survive."

"What do you mean by pure?"

"If there is evil in your heart, it shall burst."

I asked Alison, "Exactly what are we talking about here?"

"Don't do it," Alison replied, hardly breathing.

"Don't do what?"

"Whatever she wants you to do. Don't do it."

Oom said, "Earth Mother would give you understanding.

I looked from one to the other, said to Oom, "How will she do that?"

"She will take you." 'Take me where?" 'To our land." "Where is that?"

Oom made a delicate little gesture with both hands. "It is here. But across." "Across what?" "Ashton, don't go." "Think I'm not pure enough?"

"Please. Don't do it. I don't know what she's talking about, but...well, I know what she's talking about, but I'm not sure it's possible. For us, I mean."

"What is she talking about?"

"Another place, another time."

"Come on now!"

"No, honestly. The So-hay-bi-hee-jee are a very ancient people. And they're niched."

"They're what?"

"They are in a cosmic niche, a mini-dimension." "A what?"

"You just can't go there, dammit!"

I looked at Oom. She was regarding me with a very sober, reflective frown. I asked her, "How do we get there?"

She replied, "Earth Mother will guide you."

“How long will it take?”

She showed me a puzzled smile. "But it is here." She did another of those delicate gestures. "It is now."

“Here and now?”

"Yes."

I snapped my fingers, asked, "Like that?"

She smiled. "Yes."

I looked at Alison. "Convince me," I pleaded.

"Ashton, they are isolated in time and space. Their time does not move. Their space does not evolve. There is no change. Think of a snapshot. A still picture. Forever held in place. We believe that is what they have, what they are."

“We believe?”

"You know who I mean, dammit! Our group has been in touch with the So-hays since early in this century. They are a marvelously gifted people, and they have much to share with us. But they cannot function in our dimension without creating havoc. You've been exposed to some of the myths and legends, I'm sure—the wizardry and witchcraft, demonology, all that—much of it is based on contact with these people. They cannot remain in our dimension except for brief visits, and those visits create havoc."

I was thinking of my own experiences of the past few days when I said, "Amen to that."

"Earth Mother will take you now," Oom said softly. "Please remove all clothing."

Alison cried, "No, Ashton, please! Don't risk it! This is not necessary!"

I was coming out of my jacket, removing the shoulder holster. I said to Alison, "If they can cross, why can't I cross?"

She slumped into a chair with an exasperated grunt, scratched at her face, blew out her breath, said, "Okay. Go be the big hero. I don't give a damn, Ashton. Go get yourself stuck in an ancient snapshot."

I was removing my shoes. I requested, "Give me all you've got, please. I'd like to go smart, not dumb."

Oom said, "You must hurry."

Alison said, "I don't know much more than I've already told you. They can materialize here only very briefly. Their women, though, can hang on if they conceive from one of our men—or so it seems. Once they've given birth, they lose that hold, but the child cannot return with them. My group has been encouraging this interbreeding process."

I had a quick vision of Vicky and Manuel. "And you take responsibility for the foundlings."

"Yes."

"Are they always damaged like that?"

"Not all. We've been working on the problem. Even with the birth defects, though, they are truly superior children."

I said, "Yeah," and took off my pants. I glanced at Oom, asked Alison, "Is she pregnant?"

"I don't know. Ashton, must you really do this?"

I said, "Yes, Alison, I really must do this."

I was already "seeing" the Earth Mother. She stood at the wall, smiling at me. May-un-chee-tee stood beside her. Both were naked. But they had very little substance. I asked Alison, "Can you see them?"

She glanced all around, replied, "No, I..."

It happened, then, even as Alison was speaking. Like at the grove that night. I saw myself walking toward the misty women, and I guess maybe I was a bit misty myself, but it was me, viewed from the rear, walking away from myself. Both women held out their arms in welcome, embraced me, and instantly my viewpoint shifted, I was looking back at myself, at the front of myself as that self stood gawking at me; there was a split of some kind, a partitioning; I don't know how to describe it, but I could see Alison and Oom, both of whom were staring at my other self, but all three figures were frozen like, as Alison had said earlier, a snapshot, a still.

I had no sensation of moving, not from the new point of view, but the frozen scene was receding, blipping out, and suddenly I was in what I can only describe as Paradise.

The colors were absolutely magnificent. I had never seen a sky so clear and star-spangled, a valley so beautifully glistening in the moonlight. The air was sweetly scented, and the grass beneath my bare feet was soft and moist and cool. We were walking, yet it was a floating sensation, as though my body were just barely heavier than the air itself; I knew that if I were to crouch and spring upward, I would just float away and soar through the air like a bird. May-un had me by one arm, Ah-ree by the other, and they were clinging tightly to me. There was no conversation—nothing spoken, anyway—but they were telling me things, pointing out things, and suddenly I realized where I was. I was still in the Ojai Valley, but it was a somewhat different Ojai, primal, pristine. The trees were much larger and the distant mountains a bit foreboding—alive, somehow; active. Now and then I got a whiff of sulfur in the air. I saw large herds of some kind of animals, but they seemed to be sort of static, no movement within the herds. Now and then I saw people—but again, static, just there, not really doing anything. I asked Ah-ree why everyone was just standing around, and she replied that it only appeared so.

I couldn't accept that answer, pressed her for a better explanation. She said something to the effect that we moved only between them, not with them, and I knew it was the only answer I would get.

You can call this experience whatever you'd like. I do not know what to call it myself. But I came away from the So-hays with a greatly uplifted spirit and a totally different sensing of the self. I can do no better with this than to quote again St. Paul from II Corinthians 12:3-4:

"... and I know that this man, was caught up into Paradise—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows—and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter."

I could now sympathize with Paul. Some experiences are simply beyond the reach of mere words. But I knew one thing for sure: The Twelve, or whoever, were right. An "interbreeding process" with these people had to be the greatest idea since sex.

But I also "knew" that it was an idea whose time had come and gone. There would be no more Vicky Victorias or Manuel-Manuels, no more "Jane Does" or parties in the sacred grove.

Somewhere a door had closed, a "niche" sealed over and consigned to its proper place in space-time gone by.

This was the "understanding" that Ah-ree-pat-muh wished to convey.

But this "Earth Mother" had left us a precious gift. We had some new little angels on earth. That could not be all bad.

Chapter Thirty-Eight: Wrapped

Alison said, "I don't see anyone."

I told her, 'Too late. They're gone," and began hurrying into my clothes.

Alison cried, "My gosh!"

"What?"

"Oom-ray-key-too! Where'd she go?"

Yeah, she was gone too. Alison was not aware of any passage of time. I suppose there had been none, from this frame of reference. Her opening statement to me was actually a continuation of a remark begun before I hit the crossover. My head was spinning a bit, I'll admit, but I was thinking of that frozen photograph I'd left behind me here. Could I have slipped out through a small crack in time? Could all that have happened—actually happened—in a finger snap? Evidently so, if happened it had. And I believed that it had.

Alison was helping me into my clothes. "Thank God you've come to your senses," she muttered.

"I didn't," I muttered back. "I went."

"What do you mean?"

"I mean, I was caught up into the third heaven, or some such. I went with Ah-ree-pat-muh and May-un-chee-tee. I went to their Ojai Valley. Let me tell you, Shangri-La never saw it so good."

Alison was confusedly checking her watch. She commented, "You haven't had time to leave the room. Are you okay?

She meant was I sane...not healthy. I asked her, "Did Oom not have time to leave the room, either?"

I could see it dawning in her eyes then, if not acceptance then at least wonderment and a predisposition to accept.

I said, "I bring you bad tidings, kid. It's over. They've killed the project. Or I think you called it 'the process.' Whatever, they've decided it wasn't such a great idea, after all. Maybe they figure this place is not worth colonizing. So if that was your mission, to save the show, then I'm afraid you have a failure to report. It's over. Sorry. I had nothing to do with that. Once I've had time to think it through, I'll probably feel as bad about this as you."

She bit a lip and said, "Damn it, Ashton, if you're making this up..."

"I'm sure I'm not," I told her.

I became even more sure of it a moment later when Frank Valdiva and a Ventura sheriff's posse came through the door.

"We got your boy," Valdiva told me. "He's got a hell of a mouse on the jaw, though. What'd you hit him with?"

"Moral contempt, maybe." I sniffed. "Did you find the evidence?"

"Yeah, and it's nice and legal, fully warranted. In the van, as you suggested." He smiled at Alison. "What's your problem, young lady?"

She replied in a dazed voice. "I'm okay. Just trying to come to grips with...all this."

He said, "Well, you're the psychologist. So maybe you can tell me about those guys outside here."

She asked, "Which guys?'

He replied, "Those guys out on the lawn. Couple dozen of them, apparently having a homosexual romp through all this. Keep insisting they were with women, but there's not a woman among them." He tossed me a wink, asked Alison, "Know anything about that?"

I did, and it was the convincer for me. I knew where their women had gone. I pulled Valdiva aside, quietly suggested that he allow "those guys" to discreetly withdraw, assured him they had no direct role in the case.

Gordon Campbell, though...yeah, a very direct role. This guy was a classic. You could find his kind anywhere and everywhere—the world model of the eminently practical, small-minded man. He was the Barnum-style showman who found King Kong in a crack in time and brought him to civilization not for scientific enlightenment but as a sideshow exhibit; the weekend hunter who shot and skinned and cooked a Sasquatch because it had been a bad day at the hunt and he was cold and hungry; the petty thief who found himself in possession of a priceless vase from the Ming Dynasty but tossed it away because it was cracked; the Siberian tribesmen who...well, you get the idea.

This guy had stumbled on to something in his own backyard that conceivably could astound mankind and lead to a new world vision—or maybe even a whole new world—but he was content to sit on it and milk it for the few bucks it could bring into his petty little life. Apparently he never made an attempt to understand, never really questioned or even wondered about the truly magical qualities of his "sacred mound," a temporary gateway in time and space to what many would regard as Paradise.

Alison's "group" could not—would not—work with such a man. But they used him. And fed his carnival instincts. I feel no particular respect for them in that. They allowed him to convert a world-shaking "experiment" into a pornographic sideshow because that served their secrecy as well, and beautifully covered their own involvement in the "process."

I feel that it was a combination of that manipulative secrecy and crass pornography that set the stage for Jim Cochran's murder. I believe that Jim was indeed giving me "God's truth" in the telephone message he left for me just shortly before his death. How could he possibly have known or even guessed at the incredible truth about Jane Doe? He was an unwitting accomplice, drawn into the thing by lust, but then converted to a cause he really knew nothing about through an appeal with a winning combination: money and wish-fulfillment.

Alison's "group" recruited Valdiva as well, with pretty much the same appeal. I learned that Valdiva had been orphaned himself at a tender age. He had a soft spot there. And a guy can always use a few extra bucks. He was in a great position for official influence in the placement of foundlings, and it was a job he loved to do. He could bend his moral sense to an acceptance of the quasi-legal position this placed him in.

I tried to blame "the group" for the way the whole thing soured, but there again we should not leap to harsh judgment. If they are who I believe they are, then "secrecy" is their charter and service to mankind their pledge. Their motives were good. And it just goes to show that no wisdom is ultimate—not on this plane of existence, anyway.

They did not tell Valdiva or Cochran or any of the foster parents the true story about these kids. How could they? Or why should they? The kids would tell their own stories one day, simply through their accomplishments in a world sorely in need of finer influences.

And how could "the group" have known that one of these "alien mothers" simply could not totally let go of the fruit of her womb? May-un-chee-tee could not do so. So try to put yourself into the Cochrans' shoes. How would you deal, or try to deal, with such strange intrusions into the life of your child? I believe Cochran's story. I believe Georgia knew about it too. But what the hell could either do about the situation? They had two sweet kids to worry about.

Jim was wrong, yes. He was wrong first in swinging a crowbar, he was wrong secondly in trying to cover up the crime, he was wrong finally in the continued deceit when the thing came back to haunt him. I believe Valdiva had some wrongness here too. I believe that he suspected or guessed or wondered but held his peace. But try to put this all in the context of incredible events and perhaps the judgment will not be too harsh.

Gordon Campbell somehow got the drop on Jim Cochran and put a bullet between his eyes. He did that not from anger, nor in the defense of his own life or any other's. He did it because he is what he is, a petty asshole, and because he feared that Jim Cochran was about to blow the whistle on his sweet little carny. Oom had tried to assure me that Campbell was "not an evil man." I believe what she meant was that he simply was not intelligent enough to be truly evil. And, yes, she sent Campbell to the L.A. hospital to release May-un from the bonds of this earth. I do not fully understand the process here, but apparently the violence done to her on this side of the cross somehow impeded her ability to cross back.

The "group" knew this. Alison was sent to assist. I think possibly I was "sent," too, but I'm still trying to find the vehicle for that. At any rate, the best solution had apparently come from the other side. They slew the body on this side and raised it up again on the other side. Please don't ask me how they did that. How did Jesus "raise" Lazarus, and how did he appear before Paul on the road to Damascus? You tell me, I will listen.

I will listen to most anything these days.

I have not seen Alison in the flesh since that night. I dropped her off at her place and she walked back into nowhere. She has called me a couple of times, just to say hi, and I believe I may have caught a glimpse of her on television just the other day, in coverage of a United Nations "save the children" event. I don't know who the hell she is, really, or what her name is or anything else about her. Last time she called, I tried to pin her down on those "shoes that bind" that she mentioned in connection with my birth. It's sort of a shivery thing when you really think about it. But you know Alison well enough by now to know how evasive she is. Even if she knew for sure that my mother is not really my mother, she would not tell me so.

I guess Georgia is doing just fine. She's back into acting, has a small part in a new sitcom scheduled for next season. I drop by now and then to see the kids. Manuel-Manuel told me, last time out, that Vicky Victoria has "settled down" quite a bit. He also told me that she is psychic. I advised him to therefore treat her kindly. He rolled his eyes at that and assured me that he always knocked before he entered her mind. I can't wait to see these kids grown up. And I have no idea whatever how many other little "angels" are scattered about this side of the cross.

Also talked to Valdiva just the other day. They've got Campbell nailed on the Cochran murder. Dug the lethal bullet out of the floorboards of his van, found some bloody rags. The guy is a jerk. Good thing too. He could have built a circus defense from the facts of this case, but he has been predictably practical. He has agreed to cop a plea in exchange for twenty at San Quentin.

That about wraps it, I guess. If I have not given you sufficient cause to buy this story, or to at least admit to its possibility, let's still try to be friends. I won't hold it against you if you won't hold it against me.

Uh, if you are ever up near the Ojai Valley, stop in and give a look. Even today it is an enchanted place. The sacred grove is gone already, bulldozed for a new shopping cluster. But if you stand at the "Shangri-La overlook" and look out over that valley, as I did just yesterday, you can smell the sweetness in the air and feel eternity tugging at the brain- lobes. You might even catch a glimpse of the great herds, frozen forever in place, or the sad-sweet smile of Ah-ree-pat-muh as she awaits the monthly return of her Consort, the Moon.

I think I'll be going back, time to time. Yeah. I think so.

###

About the Author

Don Pendleton (1927-1995) is creator of The Executioner: Mack Bolan Action/Adventure series and the Joe Copp, Private Eye Mystery Thrillers.

He also co-wrote, with his wife, Linda Pendleton, the nonfiction books To Dance With Angels and Whispers From the Soul: The Divine Dance of Consciousness, and the crime novel, Roulette.

Don Pendleton, (1927-1995)

Official Don Pendleton website: www.donpendleton.com

Visit the Don Pendleton Smashwords Profile Page for available books of Don Pendleton

The Ashton Ford Psychic Detective Series of six novels is available in print at Amazon.

Table of Contents

Mind to Mind: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective

Midpoint