Charlie awoke to the sound of tapping.
He opened his eyes and was instantly assaulted by full daylight. The sun hit his brain like a hammer. He shielded his eyes and groaned.
The tapping grew louder.
Charlie dry-scrubbed his face with both hands. He risked a second glance and discovered he was in the front passenger seat of another brand-new Range Rover. Only this one was steel-grey, whereas the one Gabriella had driven earlier was green. The seat had been tilted fully back, which had brought his face square into the rising sun.
The tapping sounded like it was chiseling into his brain. He realized a figure was standing by the side window, tapping on the glass with a coin.
Charlie could not figure out how to make the seat work. His hands fumbled about the door and finally found the lever.
Julio opened the door and said, “You slept here all night?”
Charlie groaned, “Where am I?”
“I guess that’s an affirmative.” Julio gripped Charlie’s weaving arm and helped him rise from the car. “Steady, dude.”
Charlie blinked and staggered and would have gone down except for Julio’s firm grip. The young man was grinning hugely. Charlie asked, “How did I get here?”
“You’re asking me?” Julio clearly liked that a lot. “Man, what tricks did that pretty woman lay on your bones?”
Charlie looked down and saw he was wearing his clothes from the night before. His pockets felt heavy. He reached inside and came up with a set of keys, a cell phone, and a charger. “These aren’t mine.”
“What, the lady drugs you, does the dirty, hands you a brand-new eighty-thousand-dollar car and a phone, then leaves you in the parking lot?” Julio laughed out loud. “I got to get me one of those.”
The previous night swam in and out of mental focus. Then he recalled the slip of paper Gabriella had put in his pocket. He fished around again. The handwritten page read, “100cc purified saline solution.”
Charlie asked the already hot day, “She injected me with salt water?”
Julio laughed again. “GBH, more like.”
Charlie slipped the paper back into his pocket. “Coffee.”
“This way, old man.” Julio slipped a ring of keys from the pocket of his baggy jeans and unlocked the community center’s front doors.
Charlie asked, “Where’d you get those?”
“I been working here a couple of weeks now.” Julio settled Charlie into a chair and propped open the doors. “Minimum wage, no great shakes. But hey, I was coming here for free, right?”
Charlie shut his eyes to questions that could definitely wait. The breeze puffing through the open doorway was laced with salt from an onshore wind. He must have drifted off, because the next thing he knew, Julio set a steaming mug on the table in front of him and asked, “You all right?”
“I have no idea.” As Charlie took his first sip, he noticed the wound on Julio’s cheek. A purpling rose encircled a cut that had only recently stopped bleeding. “What happened to you?”
The kid went from sophisticated surfer to sullen teen. “Everything’s cool.”
“Julio. Tell me what happened.”
“My aunt’s taken up with a new guy. He and I, we don’t get along so good.”
“Can you live with your parents?”
“Not unless I get arrested. Again.” He spoke with the studied calm of a guy who’d learned to tamp everything down deep. “Pop’s doing eight to ten at Raiford. My mom’s been gone a long time.”
The kid moved away. Charlie drifted. Awake, but not really there. Circling around the previous evening like a tongue feeling out a sore tooth. Not certain he wanted to press down hard.
The phone in his pocket rang just as Irma entered through the rear doors. She took one look at Julio’s face and said to Charlie, “I need your help moving this kid somewhere safe.”
“Give me a second.” Charlie pulled out the phone that wasn’t his and said, “This is Hazard.”
Gabriella asked, “Are you all right, Charlie?”
He rose to his feet, then needed a second to stop the world from spinning. “A little unsteady.”
“That is to be expected. You have had a psychic shock. I’m sorry we left you in the car. But you were so deep asleep we couldn’t make you respond.”
“You weren’t concerned about safety?”
“No.”
He drifted through the community center doors and let the salt air wash over him. “Making the trip without backup, leaving me here exposed, that didn’t worry you?”
“Charlie, there are things you will not fully understand at this point. An associate ascended while we were on the road. They saw the attack, but when they called to warn us, my phone did not respond, probably because it had already happened.”
“Ascended,” Charlie repeated.
“That is our word for what you experienced. My associate then witnessed something more, my driving you back and your sleeping in the parking lot. They sensed this was important. Why, we don’t know. But you needed to wake up where you now are.” Her words came in a tighter rush. “Please do not ask questions. My answers will only make sense from inside the process. And fully explaining that will require time we don’t have.”
He thought about the previous evening and decided he had no choice but to extend the trust further still. “Afterward, do all the participants feel like they’re not completely connected to the world?”
“Most do, yes.” Gabriella gave it a beat, then added, “Actually, you are the first person who has entered the experience so unprepared.”
“All you shot in my vein was saline solution?”
“The power of suggestion in such circumstances is well documented. If a person thinks they are receiving a drug, the hypnotic effect is heightened.”
“Why didn’t you tell me what was going on?”
“Two reasons. First, I did not want my hopes to influence your base experience.”
“Your hopes?”
“Why should that surprise you? Of course I hoped your experience would match my expectations. And second, it was part of the boundaries we established before I drove to Satellite Beach and met you. I needed to convince my associates that the threat was real. Your returning with me was vital.”
As she spoke, the night returned to Charlie in vivid clarity. Gabriella had permitted him to remain in the state she called Level Fifteen for less than thirty seconds. Just long enough to open his other eyes and find himself looking down at his own body.
His vision had been vague, like a dream sequence, yet far sharper. Charlie had hovered by the outer windows, up near the ceiling. He had observed himself lying in the narrow hospital bed. He had seen how she had taped the heart monitor so that it rested on normal skin, off his chest scars. Gabriella had been intently focused upon the computer screen. She waited for a long moment, shooting glances at his body and then returning her gaze to the screen.
Then she told him to enter the chamber behind his bed.
She spoke the instructions in the same natural calm that she had said everything else. And he did precisely as she asked.
He had no sensation of passing through walls. One moment he was in the chamber above his bed, then she spoke, and instantly he was next door. The change was so swift it was almost as though he had moved before she spoke. As though he knew what she was going to say. Which, of course, was impossible.
Almost as unachievable as moving through solid walls. Without his body.
Gabriella then spoke into his disembodied brain.
At this point, Charlie had been hovering up near the ceiling of the other chamber. Through the observation window, he saw her lips move. He heard her voice speak to the body now lying in a slightly elevated position, such that all he could see was the top of his head.
His head.
Gabriella said, “Look for a number written on the page beside the computer keyboard.”
She gave him a moment, then told him to return to his body. He heard the words spoken through the earphones even though he was looking through a glass pane at the bed holding his body, hovering above seven people clustered behind the monitor station. The experience seemed almost logical.
Charlie returned to the room and drifted down and in and heard her count him back down through the levels. He actually felt the vibrations gradually shift through the sequence in reverse, drawing him back to Base Level. Her final instructions had been for him to wake up, listen to what she had to say, and then walk to the car, where he would fall into a deep sleep. He would sleep all night, and when he woke up he would remember everything.
Now Charlie walked over and leaned against the Range Rover’s front fender. The breeze and the morning light helped anchor him to reality. “What I saw of the monitoring room was a little unfocused, like a half-finished dream.”
“Your vision clarifies with practice. We need to leave that for later. Do you remember the final point we discussed last night?”
“Yes.” When they left the chamber, Charlie had crossed the foyer under his own steam, but Gabriella had kept a hand on his arm just the same.
The handsome guy’s name was Brett. Charlie remembered that now, how Brett had come forward and ordered Charlie to tell them what the number was. Pushing at him with his voice. Gabriella had called Brett by his name and told him to back off. He had simply demanded again, “Did you read the number?”
Charlie’s tongue had felt too thick for his mouth as he replied, “Nine-one-eight-eight.”
The others had smiled, and the geek had traded a high five with the Brazilian. Only Brett and Byron had not looked pleased.
“Charlie?”
He remembered how Gabriella had then pulled him away from the group. She had asked one of the Tibetan women to follow them in a second vehicle. When they were alone in the elevator Gabriella had spoken to him. She had used a tone he had not heard before, soft and urgent and perhaps a little frightened.
Charlie recalled, “You said the protocols demanded that I proceed through the process knowing nothing at all.”
“Very good, Charlie. Do you understand the term protocol?”
“Probably not the way you mean it.” Charlie’s boss used the term a lot. Before meeting with new clients, Major General Curtis Strang ordered his team to hold to proper protocol. What he meant was, his staff needed to be careful not to offend the power players.
Gabriella said, “In order to have a successful experiment, you must first define the boundaries. A scientist begins her research by establishing a controlled environment. Strict limitations are set on the stimuli you introduce. You develop a method for measuring both the stimuli and the subject’s response. All of these taken together are the experiment’s protocol.”
“Last night you said I wasn’t in an experiment.”
“No, Charlie, I’m sorry, but you’re wrong. What I said was, your experience in the lab was not part of our trials. You were not participating as a test subject. But what brought you to us was indeed a part of our experiment. And for that I had to establish protocols. Otherwise the others would not allow me to introduce an outsider. Especially one with, well . . .”
“My dark side.”
“Are you so very dark, Charlie?”
“My wife thought so.”
“You are married, then.”
“I was. She died. Three years ago.”
“I’m so sorry, Charlie. Very, very sorry.” She hesitated, then said, “Every answer you give me only brings up more questions.”
That was exactly what Charlie was thinking. But all he said was, “So the protocol requires me to be completely out of the loop.”
“For now, yes. It is only temporary.”
“Until when?”
“You have a juncture arriving.”
“Excuse me?”
“Did I use the wrong word? A big choice. We all do. Different choices that may or may not bring us together again. But I hope you decide to join us, Charlie. I think we may need you very soon.”
“Are you in trouble, Gabriella?”
“Your turning comes very soon. Right or left. You must choose between the safety of your current life and the adventure of the complete unknown.”
Charlie almost told her that his life contained more than enough dangers already, then let it drop. “Are you a fortune-teller too?”
“I told you, Charlie. I am an experimental psychologist. How I know is only important if you decide to help us.”
“So what do I do, come back to the hospital?”
“We have left the lab and will never return. That was the objective behind the protocols, Charlie. That was why I had to be so careful about what I said. The others accepted our need to depart, despite all the wonderful elements that surrounded us. But only if last night you came with me and refused payment and then took part in the process and succeeded in reading the number.” She paused, then added, “So far, only about ten percent of all subjects are successful at what you have accomplished, no matter how we prepare them. And none on their first trial run.”
“Why so few?”
“It is a good question, Charlie. You may ask me that if we ever meet again. Right now, what you must understand is that my team faces our own juncture. In order for them to accept the danger I have seen, it was vital that you accomplished the impossible. Everything had to happen precisely as I had laid out to my team, before I drove down and met you and brought you back to our lab. Because you were successful, the others have agreed that the rest of what I said was also true.”
“That you’re in danger.”
“That we had to leave the lab.”
“My doing the impossible was a sign.”
“A vital indicator of direction, yes.” She hesitated a moment, and Charlie had the impression there was much more she wanted to say. Instead, she told him, “If you choose not to join us, that is all you will ever know. One of my team will contact you in thirty-six hours. Do not try to contact me in the meantime. If you decide not to assist us, throw away the phone. It is safer for both of us if you do not use it again.”
“What about the car?”
“You will need it very soon.”
“Say again?”
“Take this as your final bit of evidence that what I say is very real. We are in danger. Soon we will need your protection. Good-bye, Charlie Hazard. I am so very glad we met. And so sorry if this is indeed our farewell.” She was silent a long moment, then whispered, “Unless you choose to become my dark knight.”