Ashley Bell (Ashley Bell #1)(139)

How strange the mind is, she thought now. How it shrouds from itself some of its darker capacities.

In the dream, one of the transporters of the dead became aware of her and turned its hooded head toward her bedroom window. Just then the night always brightened, and she could see the countenance of Death for a moment before he turned away. That glimpse frightened her to such an extent, she did not—could not, would not—carry the image with her when she woke. But now she remembered: Within the hood had been not a stripped-bare skull, not a rotting countenance acrawl with worms and beetles, but only her face, pale and set in a look of grim determination. Hooded Death hadn’t brought the captain home from the grave. Ten-year-old Bibi, his loving granddaughter—she wanted so badly to resurrect him. Dreaming, she’d intuited the formidable power of her imagination, of which she’d no recollection when awake, the knowledge having been burned away.

For all his doubts, Captain had been right to use the memory trick. In spite of the hideous experience with the gingerbread man, she would not have been able to resist the compulsion to bring the captain back. In fact, she understood now that in the weeks following his death, while visiting his apartment, she had unwittingly brought him out of the grave more than once, in the condition of an animated corpse, had brought him back and sent him away without any conscious awareness of what she was doing. The footsteps in other rooms. The wet blood dripping off his bedroom doorknob. The ominous presence in the apartment attic, which stepped out of shadow into light. Those had been brief, half-realized resurrections. Had she been aware that she could effect his return with her imagination, she would have brought him back in full, and the horror of what she’d done would have destroyed her.

When the golden retriever, Olaf, had died six years after her grandfather’s passing, the memory trick must have begun to fail. Captain had been wrong to believe that traumatic experiences were burned away forever. They were instead flushed into a deep memory hole, there to fester until some stressful circumstance drew them toward the surface. Bibi had wanted to witness the dog’s cremation, to be sure that he had been reduced to ashes, and she had not kept a twist of his fur, as she had kept the lock of hair and scrap of scalp from the captain’s body. Whether consciously or unconsciously, she had been afraid that she would bring him back, imagine him with her again. Inevitably, he would have been a strange and menacing version of the dog she had loved. In spite of Olaf being only an urn full of ashes, she had yearned for reanimation. After spending three days locked in her room alone, struggling against the reckless love that would have led to resurrection, she had in desperation used the memory trick once more.



As Pax switched off the recorder and picked it up from the bed, Bibi opened her eyes.

He breathed her name, but she did not look directly at him.

Her gaze traveled right to left, left to right, alighting on no one, taking in everyone and everything—or nothing. She closed her eyes and remained unresponsive.



When Bibi turned from the red circle and the black bolts of lightning, the immense white reception hall and another white room had for a moment been integrated. Ten feet away stood a hospital bed, an array of associated monitors, an IV drip. Nancy, Murphy, Pogo, and beautiful Paxton were gathered around the bed, their attention focused on the patient, who was Bibi herself.

She understood at once what this vision meant, that it was not in fact a vision in the paranormal sense, that it was the truth of her condition, a revelation made by herself to herself, inspired by the captain speaking from beyond the grave. She was not surprised that she existed in two worlds simultaneously, and in two conditions. In the deepest recesses of mind and heart, she had known all along, but she had required this second narrative in order to rescue herself in the first. She had needed to break the hold of the memory trick, discover again the extraordinary power of her imagination, and use it to restore herself to health.

The one medicine that had always relieved her pain and healed her sorrow had been stories, reading them and writing them. She knew no other effective therapy.

The hospital vignette faded into the other world, other life.

A fleeting image rose in memory: herself at six, with Captain in the bungalow kitchen, holding an index card in steel tongs, the white cardstock suddenly on fire, a butterfly of flame flexing its wings, butterflies bright and beautiful in the captain’s eyes….

If the past could ever truly be past, she had at last put it behind her. The future was now where all threats lay, and she had no option but to meet them in the world where she was lying in a hospital room, watched and monitored, as well as in this world of her own making.

As she had recognized earlier in the night, when she’d yearned for Pax to find her, she was not dreaming. The shapen world of her extraordinary imagination was as solid as the quartz under her feet, as real as the hot pain that coruscated through the turnings of her damaged ear and throbbed in her bruised face.

This place lay between Heaven and Earth, and where she would wind up at the conclusion of her quest could not be imagined. It had to be achieved.

In spite of all her power, here in a world of her creation, she was not immortal any more than in the first world. She was not a god, merely a gifted imaginer. A shot to the head would put an end to her and all that she had imagined. If she died here, she died also in the world where she’d been born. And she was not confident about her chances.

From her shoulder holster, she drew the pistol. Considered it for a moment. Then put it down on the black-granite reception desk.