CHAPTER 9 — THE PRESENCE
They reached the road and walked past farmland with a thin layer of grass covered in frost. Mist lay across the ground in hazy sheets. Jane wrapped her coat around her tightly as the icy chill prickled every inch of her skin. She kept her mouth closed to keep her teeth from chattering. Less than an hour later, after walking over sand dunes and across country roads only distantly familiar to her, they reached the village.
It was early in the morning and the village was empty. It was just a crossroads with two pubs, several shops, a guesthouse and a small hotel. Jane reached the centre and thought about where to go. It had been a long time since she had actually been in the village. She turned and looked at the four roads she was presented with, weighing her options.
The one she had come down led directly back to the beach. The one to the left led back to the site where she had left Jack and her mother, but that was at least a four-mile walk. The one to the right led to the beach again, but in a different direction. She had a memory of, as a child, walking through fields of hay in beautiful sunlit gardens. Endless fields of yellow had stretched before her then. She recalled now that this land was part of a plot belonging to a guest house. She started walking in that direction instinctively, then noticed that Max was no longer walking beside her. She looked around for him.
“Max? Are you still there?” she asked, turning her head.
Yes, I’ve just moved my presence elsewhere for a moment, Jane.
“Okay,” she replied hesitantly. It was disconcerting to have her only companion on this journey disappear. It felt worse that it was he who was disappearing. She was very aware of the fact that she was growing accustomed to his presence at an alarmingly fast rate.
Jane walked up the road that led to the field she remembered from her youth. She thought she had been with her father at the time. For some reason, thinking of her father made her think of Max. She thought this was odd and pushed the thought aside. She walked past stone walls and the bare trees of winter, keeping her hands in her pockets to stay warm. No cars passed her. The road was empty, and the area itself was completely desolate. After a few hundred yards, she reached the red iron gate and the stone road that led to the guest house.
Jane walked through the gate and stopped. Straight ahead was a small road filled with gravel. It sported patches of grass and looked like it hadn’t been used in a long time. She could see only a corner of the yellow house peering from behind a tree at the end of the road, perhaps two hundred feet away. To her right was a green area about fifty feet wide. It was filled with trees and stretched all the way to the guest house, where it stopped and gave way to a large, circular gravel driveway. In the summer, it would be beautiful here; she had a brief recollection of standing under a canopy of swaying green leaves. She began to descend the gravel road.
To her left Jane saw the fields she remembered from when she was young. They were barren now, though, and would be until summer. Beyond that, the fields sloped down, then upward again. Even farther beyond was the dark sea. The now-orange sun glared from behind greyish-white clouds that partially obscured it; the sun did not provide much illumination for the fields below it.
She walked down the gravel pathway and noticed that Max was walking alongside her once again. “Where did you go?” she asked.
“I didn’t think it would be wise to walk with you through the village,” he replied.
“I didn’t think other people could see you.”
“Most of them can’t, but some people can, and it could raise alarm bells that we don’t want right now. The last thing we want is to draw attention to ourselves. I don’t exactly…fit in.”
“Right,” she replied with a half-smile. They approached the house. Jane could see that it was abandoned, at least partly. It was certainly no longer a guest house. The yellow paint on the front of the house was chipped and filthy. There was a very old rusted car, beyond use or repair, parked in one corner of the driveway. There were planks of wood nailed over the door, and some of the windows upstairs had been boarded up. Jane looked at these and quivered. She wrapped her thin denim jacket around her more tightly.
“Maybe we should go somewhere else, Max.”
“No. This is better, Jane. They’ll search any official places in the area first. They’d find you without any difficulty.” He looked over at the door as they approached it.
The gravel crunched beneath Jane’s feet, but she could not detect the same sound from beneath his.
“Can you break off those wooden planks?” he asked.
“I think so,” she said hesitantly and began to walk towards them.
“Not with your mind, Jane. You’ll have to use your hands for this.”
“Why?” she asked, looking back at him. The relief in her voice was clear. She had no desire to use those abilities again anytime soon.
“Because they’re too close to us. They could detect it. We can pass under their awareness if we keep a low profile for a while, but they have sophisticated tracking equipment. A psionic force like that would register for certain. They may even be able to track me, I’m not sure.”
“You mean, you’re emitting this energy? Whatever it is—whatever the pattern registers as?”
“Yes. My presence here will register on their devices as a spike—although quite small—and they might recognize a pattern after a while, so we need to be careful.”
Jane sighed, turned around and walked up to the house. She reached her fingers behind one of the planks of wood and pulled. It snapped in two with just a little pressure. The remaining pieces pulled away quite easily as well. She tried the doorknob, which had been obscured by the rotting wood. She pushed, but it wouldn’t budge. She threw her weight against the door, but, despite the years of decay, it was solid beneath her body.
She looked back to Max and dusted off her hands. He was standing a few feet away with his hands crossed behind his back. He looked to the side in the direction of the sea and walked towards the back of the house, his footsteps still soundless on the gravel below. She followed him. At the back of the house, the windows were not boarded up.
“Here, use these,” he said, pointing towards the ground. There were large stones among the overgrown flower beds below.
She reached down and picked up one of the stones. “You want me to break the window?” she asked.
“Yes. But don’t throw it. Use it to impact the glass until it’s completely removed. Whatever you do, Jane, don’t injure yourself. That’s the last thing we need right now.”
She did as he said and wrapped her hand in the sleeve of her denim jacket. She approached the window and began to break through the glass with the rock. It shattered into pieces with the initial force. Eighty percent of it fell either to the ground outside or on the floor inside. Jane leapt backward at the crashing sound and listened as it echoed across the freezing countryside. She noticed Max was smiling at her.
“Yes Max, that’s very funny, isn’t it?” she said in an ironic tone.
“Shall we proceed with the breaking of the glass?” he said, smiling even more.
Now she couldn’t help but smile back at him. He’s got a sense of humour, she thought. Good. She thrashed the remainder of the glass with the stone until only a few small splinters jutted above the border. These were small and impossible to remove, so she cast the stone to the ground.
She looked inside now and saw a large room divided into two sections by a square arch that framed the centre. It stretched all the way from the back to the front of the house. There was an old-fashioned chandelier on the ceiling and a stained, old white sofa in the front section of the room.
“Should I go inside?”
“Yes, we can light a fire in there. It’s too cold out here for you. Take off your coat first and put it over the border of the window.”
She did so, shivering as she removed her coat. She had only a thin sweatshirt underneath. They hadn’t, in their planning, thought of getting warmer clothes; they hadn’t th
ought far enough ahead to consider something like this. The cold felt like a freezing, wet blanket had been wrapped around her body, so she hurriedly placed her hands over her coat and jumped over as quickly as she could.
On the other side, the wood creaked beneath her. She lifted her coat and turned around. She jumped a little as she saw that Max was already inside, standing in front of her with his back turned towards her, looking at the top of the walls of the arch that bordered the ceiling in the centre.
“We’ll need a fire, Jane,” he said, walking to the front of the large double room.
“I didn’t bring anything to light a fire, Max.”
“It’s okay, I’ll show you how. We just need some wood.”
Her brow furrowed at the inexplicability of this, but she accepted it because it was coming from him.
“We need an incendiary liquid of some kind.”
“Okay,” she said. “You mean something flammable, like petrol, right?”
“Yes, exactly,” he replied.
“I think there’s a garage through the trees farther over. Should I check there?”
“No need,” he said. There was a swishing sound; as he disappeared from the space in front of her, the same shroud of dark, smoke-like substance appeared. It felt like a tiny gust of wind had been created by his sudden absence, but she thought she may have imagined this. Jane stared at the now-vacant space in front of her in disbelief. A moment later, he reappeared in the exact same place.
“Yes, there are some substances in there that should work,” he said.
Her brow furrowed at his lack of understanding about how funny his disappearances seemed to her. She retrieved the petrol without further question.
Back inside, she broke up some old wooden chairs and crumpled up old newspapers she had found around the ground floor of the house. She had absolutely no interest in going upstairs, as the staircase wound upward and around into darkness above. It was also covered with mould and decaying wood, so she stayed on the ground floor. She opened the bottle and carefully poured a generous amount of liquid on the wood and paper in the fireplace.
She put the lid back on the bottle and placed it on the ground outside the broken window as Max had instructed. She braced herself for the thing he had talked to her about, but she didn’t feel that she was ready, nor did she feel it wise to try something so unusual. She had never done anything like it before.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
“No,” she replied honestly. “Can’t they detect things like this? I mean, you said…”
“You’re just going to create a very small spark; they won’t be able to detect that.”
What they had discussed as Jane gathered firewood scared her. Max wanted her to spark the liquid herself, with her thoughts. She felt that literally playing with fire was a bad idea.
“You can’t sit here in the cold Jane,” he said.
“Okay, okay, how do I do it?”
“Focus on the fuel first,” he said.
She gazed at the fireplace.
“You need to reach out with your mind and feel the basic substance first, then go further to the atomic level.”
She did as he asked and found that, with concentration, she could feel the liquid as it dripped over the wood. It was enmeshed within the paper. As she stared at it, her thoughts draped over it like a veil of gossamer. Then she found that she was going right through it, into the substances that composed it.
“Do you have it?”
“Yes,” she replied. It was unknown to her that her brainwave pattern had already altered significantly.
“It’s easy now, just…”
But Jane didn’t need any more instruction. She could see the molecules, and she knew how to create an incendiary reaction in them. She willed them to move, just a small push, and they began to vibrate. Then she pushed harder, and the molecules moved faster with her will. After a moment, she could see the eternal mass swirl in front of her vision. She watched as the flame burst into the room around her.
Max was cut off as the fireplace exploded into light and heat. Dramatic shadows were cast all over the room, throwing light on every corner and every dark crevice, showing just how dilapidated the house really was.
“Jane, that’s enough—pull your thoughts back in,” he said in a warning tone.
To Jane, though, it sounded as though he were far away, shouting from across a field in the distance. She gazed into the fire and suddenly had the urge to test herself. The thought of the power electrified her; that was the thing that caused her to pull her gaze away from the fireplace. She was fearful of herself.
Max stared at her, his concerned eyes revealing that he was just a little perturbed by her quickness. “Just be careful when it’s fire. You’re psionic ability doesn’t really lean in that direction, but still, you’ll have to be careful.”
She nodded. “Okay.” She was sitting on the floor now, with the stained white sofa against her back. She pulled her legs up underneath her and enjoyed the warmth of the flames. She had forgotten how good it felt to be warm. It was also good to not be as concerned about who might be pursuing her for a while. Plus, she had Max now. She looked over at him.
He was standing next to the large glass window at the side of the room. The window was framed with crosses of wood; circles of dirt and ice had formed around each section of glass. The winter light fell across his face, giving his skin a light, almost translucent appearance. He seemed to change sometimes when she looked at him. Sometimes it appeared as though he was carrying a small cane or staff of some sort. “Sceptre” was probably a better word for it. But Jane questioned her own perceptions of this when she saw it, for it seemed to be there only sometimes.
Sometimes he appeared older. At other times, his face seemed to be that of a twenty-five year old. Most of the time, he wore a long black coat that didn’t appear to belong to her time, or any time in the past that she knew anything about. It sometimes wrapped right across the front of his body and attached to his far right side with golden clasps. The clasps had an ornamental design, like four swirling arms of a galaxy rotating towards the centre. They looked to Jane as though they were made of pure gold. The coat reminded Jane of some kind of strange ceremonial outfit—stunningly beautiful and, at the same time, totally out of place. At other times, the coat was more simple—just a regular long black coat, open at the front. Beneath it, Max would be wearing a very ordinary white shirt with a black tie. It occurred to her how little she really knew about this…man.
She had been staring at him for a few minutes when she finally asked, “What are you thinking about?”
He looked over at her and his body seemed to shimmer for a brief second. She wasn’t even quite sure that it had happened.
He smiled and said, “Just scanning the area. Looking for your mother. She doesn’t know where you are.”
“Can you find Lucas?”
“No. They have something with them, some kind of device. It’s generating a field of some sort that I can’t see through…like a blanket.”
“That doesn’t sound good—I mean, if you can’t see through it.”
“No,” he said and cast his eyes to the floor as a concerned look came over his face. “It seems they may have an advantage that I wasn’t aware of.” He looked out the window again and squinted. He appeared to be concentrating tremendously. Jane noticed that his face was contorted just slightly, as though he was holding some other burden.
“Max, is something wrong?” she asked, concerned.
He opened his eyes and turned back to her. He walked away from the window and sat slowly in front of the only other chair in the room. He pulled his legs into a cross-legged position and placed his head back against the armchair. He appeared older once again as his body language and mood changed, as though in the intervening moments he had lived out twenty or thirty years that had greyed his hair and lined his face.
“I shouldn’t really be here. I mean, I shouldn’t be interfering lik
e this,” he said in a weary voice.
“What do you mean?”
He looked at her and hesitated before continuing with his explanation. “I mean, I shouldn’t be taking this kind of action in the affairs of your world…by being here with you.” He looked to the corner of the room and, in an instant, teleported across the fifteen-foot distance to survey something on the ceiling. “It’s not the way things are done. I’m supposed to keep a distance from you, from the affairs of mortals. We—I mean, my kind—we generally interfere only during moments in the historical process that desperately require such interference.”
“This isn’t one of those moments?”
“No, not quite. But I fear that it’s getting to that point. I feel that I have to begin taking action now. There are forces gathering on your world that are dangerous,” he said before hesitating again. Then he continued. “The Others will know about my interference soon. I’ve disguised my efforts here as best I can, but they’ll find out eventually.”
Jane wasn’t quite sure what he meant. “The Others?” She sighed then as she quickly grasped his meaning, and her understanding of the situation expanded. “You mean, the others of your kind?”
“Yes. Do you remember when you were young, I appeared to you while you were dreaming?”
“Yes.”
‘Such interference is allowed. Because it can pass for a dream. It can pass for a remnant of the unconscious. It can pass as anything, really. But this…” He gestured to his own body, as though it were an alien vehicle. “This is going to draw a lot of attention.”
A number of questions swirled in Jane’s mind. She surveyed the room as she thought about what to ask him first. “What are they like, the…Others? Why aren’t you allowed to interfere?”
“A lot of them don’t have too much concern for the existence of individual mortals. That’s not to say they don’t care; they do, of course. But their work is beyond that.”
“What is their work?”
“Assisting entire cultures. Taking part in the historical process of worlds at critical moments. Once, also, astral engineering—of a sort.”
“Astral engineering? she asked.
“Yes. Reshaping the physical universe. Sometimes to make certain sections more amenable to the emergence of life. Sometimes for other reasons.”
“Do you do this?”
“No. There are those of us who take a much greater interest in the affairs of mortals. I and some others hold the belief that reality is composed of events, and the smallest decisions and interactions can have cosmic consequences.” He turned around and looked at her again; the solemn, elderly face of a wise man was once again facing her.
“You see, we are very old, Jane. I am not as old as the others, but some of them are truly ancient by your standards. They have existed for millennia. They have watched the historical process unfold on other worlds and they have watched some tumble into ruin. A lot of them are tired.” He regarded her in silence for a moment. “I really shouldn’t be telling you this…should I?”
She recoiled at his question. Why would he be questioning her? She watched as he turned away from her, and she was briefly reminded of the moment in that long-ago dream when she had caught him off guard.
“I want to know. I like knowing about where you come from,” she said firmly.
He walked before the fireplace and stood in front of the mirror there. At first there was no reflection at all, but then as he appeared to concentrate, a ghostly image of his form was reflected back from the darkened, stained glass.
“Why did they leave?” she asked. “Some of the others—you said they left.”
He turned around and looked down at the floor when she asked this. He seemed to struggle, then looked back up at her and continued.
“The Presence…it stopped communicating with us.”
A shiver went through Jane’s body. Despite the warmth from the fire, her teeth rattled against each other for just a second.
“The Presence?”
“Yes. The Great Mind.”
She stared at him in awe. “Why did it stop communicating?”
“We don’t know. Some suspect it lost faith. Some of my kind began to doubt its existence.”
“Do you doubt its existence?”
“No, because it communicated with me just barely—almost imperceptibly. I believe it wanted me to come here—to intervene. It indicated that Earth is important.”
Then he was silent again. Jane was troubled. She felt as though he had left something out. It took her time to find the courage to ask him. She lifted her gaze from the fireplace at the same time he did. Their eyes met.
“Max…when you said you were worried about other people on my world…that’s not the only thing that’s bothering you, is it? There’s something that you haven’t told me about, isn’t there?”
She watched as he gasped just slightly and his body shimmered a little. Miniscule ripples cascaded over the surface of his appearance, like the effect one creates by dropping a pebble into a pond. She was surprised to see this; she knew then that she had caught him off guard.
“There is something. An object…of tremendous importance…” He was about to continue his answer when he seemed to hesitate. Then he disappeared, and Jane heard that same small swish of air around the vacant space he had been occupying. She glanced around to find him standing on the other side of the room, looking outward with his back turned to her.
“They’re getting closer,” he said in a flat, serious tone.
Jane stood up. “Lucas?’ she asked, her tone revealing her desperation at the thought of another round with those men.
“Yes.”
“I thought you couldn’t see them?”
“I can’t. I saw them through the mind of another person. She was walking her dog, and she saw them driving fast on a small road. She had to jump to avoid them.” His head turned slowly as he spoke, and Jane’s breathing quickened as she listened to the growing sound of alarm in his voice. “I could sense her shock.” He turned back around to Jane. Then he looked upward and closed his eyes, appearing to concentrate fiercely. “We can’t stay here much longer.”
“Will they find us?”
“Yes. In fact, I think they may already have.”
“How long do we have?”
“Less than an hour.” He looked around again, seeming to drift once more.
He was standing in front of the fireplace. The glow from the fire had diminished somewhat but the room had brightened with new daylight. Still, something had changed in the room: it was Max. His face betrayed yet another, deeper concern.
“No. I believe I’m mistaken; they’re coming down the road now,” he said.
And indeed, above the crackling from the fireplace, Jane could hear the faint sound of cars driving across gravel.