that they had no electric light anymore. Every bulb had been shattered.
Was that intentional? she wondered. Will we do something about that? But she was too tired to think clearly about it.
She stood in the middle of the room, feeling like a ghost, but also feeling no desire to speak, to make her presence known. Finally, Brendan glanced up and noticed her. “No manifestations for two hours,” he said.
“No,” she answered. “What do we do?” she asked, like a child herself.
“We wait,” Brendan said, and returned to writing.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
Everything was moving. The wind played hide-and-seek through the trees outside, a constant rushing swirl of motion; bushes scraped their branches across the windows, screeching and scratching, nails on the glass. The draft breathed through the chimneys, and curtains stirred in front of the windows.
She woke and did not know where she was, or who. She was very still in the dark, listening to the moving and scraping.
And something else … the piano. A single note, over and over, then dropping a third, then back to the original note.
She sat up and looked around her.
She was in the indistinct white room that she’d been in with Tyler during their testing. The Zener card table was there, and instead of Tyler, another young man sat in one of the chairs: broad shoulders, round and ruddy face, Carolina blue eyes … only she only sensed their blueness, because he and the whole room were in black and white; it had the faded, grainy quality of a newsreel. She stared at the young man.
I know him.
He reached to the table in front of him and picked up a card, a Zener card, and held it up so she could see: a card with a thick, black circle on it. He looked intently across the white room at her, holding the card …
She stared back at him.
So familiar, those eyes.
And she stared at the card, trying to glean the message …
A circle.
CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE
She bolted up from sleep … to silence and grayness.
Who am I? Where is this? What year is this? What century is this?
Terror pulsed through her, instinctive, immediate.
She was not in the white room, but rather, on a sofa downstairs in the great room. The room was dim and there was no color in it; it had the faded, grainy black and white of a newsreel. There were lumps of sleeping shapes around her, and her skin started to crawl. Who are they? Who am I? Which reality is this?
She forced herself to breathe, forced herself to focus on the objects around her. The computer monitors, with their smashed screens. The sophisticated control board. The black-and-white newsreel quality faded and she saw the room in dim color, in the present.
Brendan, Tyler, and Katrina slept on sofas and mattresses. Now Laurel remembered.
We brought the furniture in last night so we wouldn’t be sleeping alone.
She looked around at the arrangement of furniture and bodies. No sign of the young man from her dream.
God, it was real. So much more real than anything else was feeling right now. She had to ride out another wave of disorientation, of displacement.
Outside the tall windows it was dark, not the dark of night but the deep gray of rain, which was what had leached the color out of the present. As she focused, Laurel focused, waking, she could hear the pounding and splashing of rain on the bricks outside, and the rumble of thunder in the sky.
She sat up and the blanket that was covering her slipped down, and something white fluttered to the floor. She looked down, and down.
It was a card, a white Zener card—with a thick black circle on it. An electric realization shot through her.
The card. He gave me the card.
The others woke, slowly. She watched them—saw their jittery jolts as they came into full consciousness and registered first where they were, and then began to remember what had transpired. Each of them looked up to the ceiling, then to the walls, where the paintings still hung upside down as in a surrealist exhibit.
They all looked around, and no one said a word.
They sat around the dining-room table, with the dark paneling and the tall glass windows around them. They were in a bubble. Laurel knew that there was a garden outside, that there was air and sky and trees and a road, but the thought of going outside didn’t even occur to her, and it had nothing to do with the heavy and dismal pour