For a few seconds North stopped breathing. He was so stunned that he neglected to put on the glasses until the visions at the edge of his awareness began to seethe and roil.
“Damn,” he whispered.
He grabbed the glasses and put them on. The hallucinations faded. Sierra watched him, not speaking, silently challenging him.
He took a determined breath, braced himself for the hallucinations and removed the glasses. Deliberately he opened his senses. For a few seconds everything seemed normal. He could access his talent, whatever was left of it.
But in the next moment the apparitions began to coalesce at the edges of his vision. The ghosts whispered to him of the madness that awaited. His nightmares rose up in waves.
He could not afford to be running dangerous experiments on himself, he thought. He had to stay focused on saving his father. With a groan that was part disgust and part despair he started to put on the glasses.
“Wait,” Sierra said. “Please. What do you see?”
“What I always see when I take off the glasses for more than a minute or two. Nightmares. Ghosts.”
“Tell me about the ghosts.”
“They are vague, foggy images for the most part, but I can hear them. They are telling me the glasses are the only way to save my sanity.”
“Hypnotic suggestion,” Sierra said. “Not the first time we’ve run into it in this case. The man Matt Harper met at the Vault, the one we assume is Delbridge Loring, gave Matt a hypnotic suggestion meant to keep him from remembering any details of what happened that night.”
“You don’t understand,” North said. He looked at the glasses. “I was having visions and hallucinations before I got the glasses. They started soon after my team closed a case. That night I went to a club to celebrate with the others, went home to bed—and woke up the next morning to the nightmares and hallucinations. I thought I had gone insane overnight. Eventually the doctors concluded that I was going psi-blind. They gave me the glasses.”
“I don’t know how the first dose of poison was delivered, but I’m sure the crystals in those glasses are continuing to administer a low-level dose,” Sierra said quietly.
He stared at the mirrored glasses in his hands.
“Even if you’re right, there’s nothing I can do about it now. I’ve got a job to finish, and I can’t work with these hallucinations constantly clouding my vision. Hell, I can’t even drive this way, let alone try to control my talent. At least the glasses allow me to function.”
“Here’s the thing, North. There’s no way to know how much of that hypnotic radiation you can absorb before it destroys your talent and maybe does make you go insane. The more you wear those lenses, the worse things are going to get. I’ll do the driving from now on.”
“While I have visions and nightmares? I’ll be useless, maybe even dangerous.”
“You’ve been receiving a very low dose of the radiation through those glasses. Whoever infused the energy into the crystals was probably afraid to use too much heat, because it would have been detectable to a lot of people with talent. Sooner or later someone would have noticed and started asking questions.”
“So?”
“So the good news is that it is a low dose. It might not take long for the worst of the effects to wear off. In the meantime, you can practice trying to control the visions.”
“How do you control a vision?” North demanded.
“You know when you’re hallucinating, right? You’re aware that what you’re seeing and hearing is not real.”
“Yes, but that doesn’t make them any less disturbing. The voices . . . whisper.”
“Tell me about the hallucinations you’re having right now,” Sierra said. “What do you see?”
He concentrated on a foggy figure. Gradually it coalesced into a recognizable image.
“This one is different,” he said. “It’s Garraway, the director of Riverview.”
“Why is this vision different?”
North shrugged. “He’s not whispering.”
“Focus on him,” Sierra said.
“Why?”
“If my father were here, I think he would say that your intuition is trying to tell you something. Describe Garraway to me. Is he lying dead on the floor the way we found him?”
“No. He materialized out of the abyss. He’s sitting behind his desk. Just sort of floating there.”
“The abyss is probably a manifestation of your anxiety about the possibility of losing control of your talent,” Sierra said.
“No shit. I’m not a doctor, but even I could figure that out.”
“Sorry. Let’s keep going here. Why did Garraway appear?”
“How should I know? He’s a hallucination.”
“Think of him as a manifestation of your intuition,” Sierra said patiently. “We spent some time with him in his office. You found those financial papers in his cabin. We were in a hurry but you must have collected a lot of impressions at the scene of the murder. Maybe we missed something important? Try asking Garraway why you’re seeing him.”
North studied the dead man and tried to ignore the ghostly whispers telling him that he was risking his sanity by talking to a vision.
“Why am I seeing you?” he asked half under his breath.
Isn’t it obvious? I was just the money guy.
North stilled.
“What is it?” Sierra asked. “Did you get an answer?”
“He was the money guy. He financed Riverview. That was clear from the records we found in his house. But I figured that out already, so why would he repeat the information?”
“Keep going with questions,” Sierra said.
North made himself concentrate on the vision. “Why did the Puppets murder you?”
I knew too much about what went on in Loring’s lab. Things were coming apart because you showed up. Couldn’t take the risk that I’d talk.
“Now you’re dead, so you can’t talk,” North said, feeling his way through the crazy conversation.
True, but I’m the money guy, and money always talks.
“Damn, you’re right,” North said.
Garraway vanished back into the abyss.
North realized that Sierra was still watching him.
“Well?” she said.
North tried to blink away a few more ghostly images while he concentrated on what had just happened. “If we’re right about Garraway, he provided the financial backing for the whole Riverview setup, including Loring’s lab.”
“So?”
“So the ghost of Garraway reminded me of one of the most basic rules of crime solving. Follow the money.”
“Okay, that sounds like a great idea.”
“Victor is probably already tearing into the Riverview finances. He’s got a whole team of forensic accountants. But I’ll call him just to make sure he’s pushing in that direction. We need to know how and why Loring got involved with Garraway.”
“You and I should get a couple of hours’ sleep before we head for Fogg Lake.”
North scrubbed his face with the heels of his hands. “You get some sleep. I won’t be able to sleep, not unless I put on the glasses.”
“I honestly don’t think that would be a good idea. You need to let the poison wear off.”
“Assuming you’re right, that could take days.”
“No, I don’t think so. I think we’re talking hours, not days, for this stuff to wear off. We know you still have your talent, because you used it to douse that light grenade. You can try accessing it. Maybe that will help suppress the hallucinations.”
“It’s going to be a long night,” North said.
With no guarantee that, come morning, he would still be sane. But Sierra’s certainty gave him the first real shot of hope he’d had since the hallucinations had set in. If she turned out to be right, he would deal with the implications later.
“Forget sleep.” Sierra got to her feet. “I’ll make some coffee.”
“You’re going to stay awake with me?”
“I might be able to use my locket to help you concentrate on suppressing some of the effects of the poison, especially the whispers. I think they are the real problem.”
“You’re going to use your talent the way you did to help me sleep last night and the way you used it to help Matt Harper recover his memories?”
“I’m pretty strong.” She paused, tilted her head slightly and gave him an unreadable look. “Some people would say that my talent makes me one of the monsters, the kind the Foundation cleaners hunt.”
“No,” he said. “I’ve met monsters. You’re not one of them. What you are is amazing.”