Passage. Part 43

Because that was how it felt, even though Joanna knew intellectually that it was a hallucination and that she hadn't gone anywhere, that she had really been lying on an examining table in her stocking feet while Tish monitored her blood pressure and flirted with Richard. But it felt as real, as three-dimensional, as her office with its Swedish ivy and shoe box full of interviews she hadn't transcribed yet.

Joanna went over Ms. Burton's separate accounts, and they did in fact seem to have been exactly the same, but Mr. Rutledge's varied slightly from NDE to NDE, even though he said his were the same, too.

She found Mrs. Woollam's two interviews. Joanna had told Richard she'd been in the tunneltwice, but Mrs. Woollam had said she didn't think it was the same one, that the second time the tunnel had been narrower and the floor more uneven. Apparently the "dark, open place" she'd been in the remaining four times had been the same place, but, looking at Mrs. Woollam's account, Joanna wondered. She had said it was too dark to see anything. The same went for Maisie's fog. And several people who'd been completely blinded by the light.

Joanna worked till after seven, compiling a partial list, and then put on her coat and took the list to the lab. Richard was still there, staring at the scans, his chin in his hands. When she gave him the list, he barely grunted an acknowledgment.

"We're having Dish Night tomorrow night. Can you come?"

"Sure," he said, and turned back to the scans.

Well, it's not exactly wild enthusiasm, Joanna thought, going out into the hall, but at least he didn't turn me down. Down the hall, the elevator dinged, and Joanna ran to catch it. It opened, and Mr. Mandrake stepped out. "Oh, good, Dr. Lander," he said. "I'm glad you're still here. I've been trying to reach you for two days." He pursed his lips.

"Mr. Mandrake, I'm afraid this isn't a good time to talk," she said, knowing it was hopeless. She was obviously on her way home, so she couldn't claim she had an appointment. A date? No, he'd simply say, "This will only take a few minutes."

"This will only take a few minutes," he said. "I wanted to ask you about these NDEs of yours."

He knew she'd been under! How had he found out? Tish? She'd been upset that Richard wouldn't go out with her. Had she told another nurse about the scene and accidentally revealed that Joanna was the subject, and then the nurse had spread it through the rest of Gossip General? Or had Heidi seen her and Vielle talking and somehow figured it out, and he knew about the t.i.tanic, too?

"NDEs of mine?" she said, glancing anxiously toward the door of the lab.

"And of Dr. Wright, of course," Mr. Mandrake said. "That is, a.s.suming that you have succeeded in producing these so-called NDE simulations with your subjects. Have you?"

"Yes," Joanna said in her relief that he didn't know, and was instantly sorry.

"And the subjects have experienced the tunnel, the light, and the dead waiting for them?"

Yes, Joanna thought, and the Boat Deck and a Morse lamp and a red tennis shoe. "The NDEs have varied," she said.

"Which means they haven't experienced those things. As I expected. Have they experienced the Life Review and the Revelation of the Mysteries of the Cosmos?"

"No."

"And the Bestowing of Powers?"

"Bestowing of Powers?" Joanna said. That was a new one."Yes, many of my subjects display enhanced paranormal abilities after their return: clairvoyance, telepathy, communications from the dead. I don't suppose any of your subjects have evidenced such abilities?"

No, Joanna thought, because if I had, I'd be using them to send a telepathic message to Richard to come and save me.

"I take it your silence means they haven't, which is not surprising. No laboratory stimulation of the brain could do any more than create physical sensations and the NDE is not physical, it is spiritual.

It shows us the world that lies beyond death, the Reality beyond reality, and a number of my subjects have been in touch with that reality. Mrs. Davenport..."

Maybe I do have telepathic powers, Joanna thought. I knew we'd get around to Mrs.

Davenport sooner or later.

"...received a message from her great-grandmother last night, a message she knew to be authentic. Do you know what that message was?"

" 'Rosabelle, believe?' " Joanna said.

Mr. Mandrake glared at her.

"She said, 'There is no fear here,' " Mr. Mandrake intoned, " 'and no regret.' Have any of your subjects spoken to the dead? Of course not, because these so-called simulations of the NDE are just that, mere physical imitations. Mrs. Davenport has also received messages from a number of..."

Joanna looked longingly at the door, and Richard, impossibly, emerged with an armful of scan printouts and file folders. "Oh, Dr. Lander, there you are," he said, bending to lock the lab door. "I was afraid you'd forgotten."

"Forgotten?" Joanna said.

"Our meeting."

"Oh, our meeting," Joanna said, clapping her hand over her mouth, "with Dr. Tabb. I did forget.

You're lucky you caught me. I was just on my way home. I'm sorry, Mr. Mandrake. Dr. Wright and I have a meeting-"

"Ten minutes ago," Richard said, looking pointedly at his watch. "And you know how Dr. Tabb is about punctuality." He took Joanna's arm.

Mr. Mandrake pursed his lips. "This is extremely-"

"We're late. If you'll excuse us," Richard said to Mandrake. He led Joanna rapidly toward the stairs and through the door.

"Thank you," Joanna said, racketing down the stairs beside him. "In another minute he'd have had me going down to see Mrs. Davenport, who is now receiving messages from the dead. How did you know we were out there?""Telepathy," he said, grinning. "And Mandrake's piercing voice. Who's Dr. Tabb?"

"Mr. Tabb is a patient I interviewed two years ago. I didn't want to name a real doctor for fear he'd go try to get information out of him."

"Well, hopefully he'll spend the next few days searching for Dr. Tabb instead of paging us."

They'd reached the bottom of the stairs. "Which way are we least likely to run into him?"

"This way," Joanna said, leading him through the oncology ward to a service elevator. "I can get out to the parking lot from here," she said, "oh, but you can't go back to the lab, can you? Not if we're supposed to be in a meeting."

"That's okay. I wanted to talk to you anyway. Shall we go get something to eat?"

"That'd be great," Joanna said, feeling inordinately pleased, "but I'd imagine the cafeteria's closed."

It was. "Is it ever open?" Richard asked as they stared through the locked gla.s.s doors.

"No," Joanna said. "What now? You don't have any food in your lab coat, do you?"

He made a search and came up with a Mountain Dew and half a Hostess cupcake. "I need to restock," he said. "How does Taco Pierre's sound? Oh, wait," he rummaged through his pockets again, "I don't have my keys."

"I've got mine," Joanna said, "but you don't have a coat."

"Taco Pierre's has hot sauce, and your car does have a heater, doesn't it?"

"It does," Joanna said.

She cranked it all the way up to high as soon as they got in and handed him her mittens, but he was shivering by the time they got to Taco Pierre's, and he ordered two coffees with his tacos. "One for each hand," he explained, and picked up six packets of extra hot sauce on the way to the table.

The dining area was littered with taco wrappings and straw papers. Joanna had to wipe off their table with a napkin before they sat down. "Somebody has got to open a restaurant closer to the hospital," Richard said.

"A nice restaurant," Joanna whispered, smiling at him. The place was a mess, the blond, tattooed kid behind the counter looked like the mug shot of the nail gunnee, and it wasn't exactly a romantic setting, but it was warm, and deserted. And it's a date of sorts, Joanna thought, Vielle will be so pleased, and felt pleased herself, taking a bite of a Tater Torro that had been fried at least a week ago. "At least it's warm in here," she said.

"And the coffee's cold. So what did Mandrake have to say? I missed the first part."

She told him while they ate. "And now Mrs. Davenport's receiving messages from the dead."

She sipped thoughtfully at her c.o.ke. "I wonder if they're in code.""In code?" Richard asked, drinking his cold coffee. "Yes, like the message Houdini promised to try and send his wife after he died," Joanna said, taking a bite of taco.

" 'Rosabelle, believe,' he told her, but the message was really 'Rosabelle answer, tell, pray-answer, look, tell, answer-answer, tell.' The words stood for the letters in 'believe.' It was the code they'd used in their old mind-reading act."

"Did he succeed?"

"No, and if anybody could have gotten a message through, it was Houdini," Joanna said, taking a drink of her c.o.ke, "though doubtless in a couple of days Mrs. Davenport will announce that she's spoken to him personally and he's told her," she affected a sepulchral voice, " 'There is no fear here, and no regret.' "

" 'And no daring underwater escapes,' " Richard said in the same ghostly tone. "Why does the afterlife always sound like the most boring place imaginable?"

"Boring might be good," Joanna said, thinking of the empty darkness beyond the bridge, of the officer saying, "There's water on D Deck."

"You mean as opposed to the t.i.tanic," Richard said, as if he were telepathic. He crumpled up the papers his burrito had been wrapped in. He took the tray over to the trash. "Actually, that's what I wanted to talk to you about." He rummaged through the file folders on the seat next to him and pulled out the transcript of her NDE. "You keep saying it's the t.i.tanic," he said. "How do you know it is?"

So much for this being a date, Joanna thought. "I'm not claiming it's the actual t.i.tanic," she said patiently. "I explained that before. It isn't the historical ship that went down in 1912. It's-I don't know-some sort of t.i.tanic of the mind."

"I know," Richard said. "That's not what I'm asking. How do you know what you're seeing is the t.i.tanic?"

"How do I know it is?" she said. "I heard the engines stop and saw the pa.s.sengers out on deck.

I saw them signaling the Californian."

"Correction," Richard said, looking through her stapled account, "you saw them signaling something. No mention was made of the Californian. You a.s.sumed that." He took a sip of coffee.

"There's no mention by any of these people you saw of an iceberg or a collision. In fact, the steward says he thinks it was a mechanical problem."

"But the young woman in the nightgown heard it," Joanna said.

Richard shook his head. "She heard a sound like a cloth tearing. That could be any number of things."

"Like what?"

"A collision, an explosion, the mechanical problem the steward described. Did you see anything that identified the t.i.tanic by name? Something with SS t.i.tanic written on it?""RMS," Joanna corrected. "She was a royal mail ship."

"All right, with RMS t.i.tanic on it." He flipped through the stapled pages of her account. She could see that a number of lines had been marked with yellow highlighter. "You said you saw the lifeboats. Was there a name on the side of them?"

"They had canvas covers over them," Joanna said, trying to remember if she'd seen the t.i.tanic's name anywhere. Had the steward's white jacket had an insignia on it? Or the officer's cap? She couldn't remember. What else would have had an insignia on it, or the t.i.tanic's name?

The life preservers, she thought, trying to remember if she'd seen one on the Boat Deck. No, but it seemed like one had been on the inside wall of the deck just outside the pa.s.sage next to the deck light, with RMS t.i.tanic stenciled on it in red.

You're confabulating, she told herself sharply. That's an image from the movie, and if it was next to the deck light, you wouldn't have been able to see it for the glare. "No," she said, "I didn't see anything with t.i.tanic on it."

"I didn't think so," he said. "I'm not sure it is the t.i.tanic. I've been going over your transcript."

He turned to a page halfway through, heavily marked in yellow, and read, " 'Isn't anyone coming?'

'The Baltic, but she's over two hundred miles away.' 'What about the Frankfurt?' " He looked at her. "It was the Carpathia who came to her aid. And, as you say yourself in your account," he said, looking back through the pages, "the Californian was the ship that didn't answer, not the Frankfurt."

"But they would have radioed more than one ship," Joanna said. "They said both ships were too far away to help. They might have been two out of a dozen they tried to reach."

"There's also the staircase. I know," he said, putting up his hands defensively, "you said the memory didn't come from the movie, but one thing the movie did show was the staircase outside the dining room, with the fancy winding stairs and the big skylight-"

"The Grand Staircase," Joanna murmured. He was right. The stairs leading down to the First-Cla.s.s Dining Saloon had been marble, with filigreed gold and wrought-iron bal.u.s.trades and a bronze cherub on the newel post, holding an electric torch, and at the head of the stairs a huge clock, with two bronze figures placing a laurel wreath atop the clock face. Honour and Glory Crowning Time.

I must have been on another staircase, she thought, but there wouldn't have been two stairways next to the First-Cla.s.s Dining Saloon, would there? And there was the empty deck and the deserted bridge. "So, what do you think?" Joanna asked. "That I'm seeing some other ship?"

"I think it's possible. Nothing you've described would eliminate it from being the Lusitania, for instance."

"Except that the Lusitania sank in broad daylight. And n.o.body stands around calmly asking what's happened when a torpedo hits them."

"Or some other ship you've heard about from Maisie," he continued imperturbably. "Or fromMr. Wojakowski."

"The Yorktown was an aircraft carrier," Joanna said. "This was an ocean liner. I saw the funnels."

"Correction," he said, consulting the account again. "You saw a large black looming shape. The central island of an aircraft carrier would be a large black looming shape, wouldn't-" and looked up at the kid from behind the counter, who was standing over them.

"We're closin'," he said and continued to stand there, his tattooed arms folded across his chest while Richard disposed of his coffee cup, and Joanna put on her coat.

They went out into the freezing darkness. It had started to snow while they were inside, a wet, sleety snow. "How long did Vielle say the pa.s.sengers could survive before they got hypothermia?"

Richard asked, blowing on his hands.

"It wasn't an aircraft carrier," Joanna said, starting the car and heading back to the hospital.

"Aircraft carriers have flat decks, and they don't have dining saloons with crystal chandeliers and grand pianos."

"And this ship doesn't have a Grand Staircase," he said, "which makes me think it's an amalgam of ships and ship imagery stored in your long-term memory. You said yourself it might be the Mary Celeste."

"The Mary Celeste was a sailing ship," she said, but he was right. There were discrepancies.

The deck had been empty and deserted, and there had been no one on the bridge.

She pulled into the parking lot. "Where's your car parked? Oh, wait, you've got to go get your coat."

"Yeah, and I want to look at your scans again."

Joanna pulled around by the north entrance and stopped. "Thanks for rescuing me from the clutches of the Evil One," she said.

"I hope he isn't still crouched outside the lab, waiting."

"I hope Mrs. Davenport isn't really telepathic."