The Fall of Never(95)

Although the movement of physical objects via the human mind is the main focus of the telekinetic conduit, it must be observed that many people having expressed the possession of this ability also show signs of some lesser-known and rather misunderstood capabilities, some of which remain even more remarkable than the telekinesis itself. Such subjects convey mild associations with various forms of telepathy, psychokinesis, spontaneous human combustion, ESP, aesthetokinesis, which is the ability to create physical matter from thought, etc. Though these abilities are exceptionally rare and remain highly undocumented, there have been some reported cases where subjects have displayed some, if not all, of these traits.



Ten minutes later and he was helping his mother up the stairs. She complained that her leg was tender, that it got bad with the cold weather, and he promised he’d take a look at it when he got home.

“You’re going out?” she said.

“I need to stop by the hospital for a while,” he told her. “I won’t be long.”

“Baaah,” she said, exasperated. “Marie is sick?”

“She doesn’t feel well. Let her stay in bed. Don’t disturb her, Mamma.”

Moments later, he stood in the upstairs hallway peeking into his bedroom. His wife had fallen asleep on the bed, one of the children’s books splayed open across her lap. He pushed the door open, mindful not to wake her with its creaking, and crept into the room like a ghost. Saddling up to the bed, he brushed his wife’s hair from her face. His hands were still shaking. His fingers looked pale and felt cold. From being outside, he told himself.

He removed the book from her lap, glanced at its pages (some nursery rhyme about Simple Simon and the Pie Man), and placed it on the night table with the rest of them.

“Soon, we’ll forget all about this,” he promised her. “Soon, it’ll just be you and me and baby makes three and none of this will even matter. It’ll all be like some horrible, horrible dream.”

Downstairs, he dug through his medical case in search of his office address book, thumbed through the pages until he came across Joshua Cavey’s number, and went for the phone. It rang just as his fingers closed around it.

How’s that for psychic powers? he thought dryly.

“Hello?”

“Doc, it’s Josh.”

Psychic powers, indeed. “Jesus,” he muttered, “I was just about to call you.”

“I need to talk with you.”

“We need to talk,” Carlos corrected. “My wife…” He lowered his voice. “My wife hasn’t gotten out of bed for two days. Josh, what the hell happened in that apartment?”

“That’s all part of it.”

“Part of what? What are you talking about?”

Josh sounded out of breath. “Can you meet me?”

“Yes.”

“The diner across from Nellie’s building,” Josh said. “In an hour.”




Carlos brought the library book with him and tossed it on the table as Josh, stepping into the diner and out of the cold, approached.

“Sit down,” Carlos told him. The anger in his voice was quite clear; it was enough to cause Josh to pause while removing his coat. Josh sat down across from the doctor, folding his coat across his lap, his eyes jogging between the library book to Carlos’s eyes as if watching a tennis match.

“Calm down,” Josh said.

“Fuck you and to hell with calming down. It’s been two days and my wife hasn’t said more than five sentences to me, all because of…Christ, I don’t even know, whatever the hell happened up there in that apartment…”

“Take it easy,” Josh insisted. Though the place was empty, his eyes darted around the diner as if embarrassed that someone might overhear. “You’re pissed and you’re scared, all right, fine…but don’t lose sight of the fact that it was your idea to drag your wife into this in the first place.”

“You shit…”

“No,” Josh said, shaking his head, “no, I’m sorry. Stop. Let’s start this over. Nothing happened—this isn’t anyone’s fault.”

“Nothing happened? Where the hell were you?”

“Nothing serious, is what I mean.” Josh rubbed his hands together, cupped them, blew into them to get the feeling back. “It seems bad, but it’s not. It’s okay.”

Carlos studied the kid, as if to mentally extract any knowledge about the situation he possessed that Carlos, himself, did not. He wished he were angrier; instead, his anger was diluted by confusion and frustration and the bitter ineffectiveness of his own ministrations thus far.

“When we spoke at the hospital you said you really didn’t know this woman all that well,” Carlos said. “So what’s the deal? How the hell do you know so much about her now, about what she can do, and about these powers or abilities or whatever the hell you want to call them?”

“Because she told me.”

“She just came out and told you whatever the hell—”

Josh shook his head. “This thing goes pretty f*cking deep. And man, I don’t know how much you’d be willing to believe and…well, Christ, I don’t even know how much I believe…”

“Try me.”