Act III: Nous
Scene 1: “irresistible impulse”
Part One
With a startled jolt, Quatre awoke, shivering and sweat-soaked in his darkened bedroom. He glanced around, searching the shadows for invisible enemies, but his scrutiny yielded nothing atypical in the nondescript room.
He looked down at his hands, their blurred outlines shaking in the darkness, and buried his face in them. He panted, waiting for his heartbeat to calm, and when it had, he pulled back the hot covers and stumbled out of bed.
Inside the bathroom, he jumped at the sight of his own darkened reflection in the vanity mirror, his exploited nerves still hypersensitive from the sensory-hell of his nightmare. His hand found the light switch and Quatre flinched away from the unforgiving fluorescent lights. When his eyes had adjusted, his gaze drifted over his surroundings. Some of his former humor returned to him as he mused on the exorcizing benefits of fluorescent lights. They quite effectively banished all shadows.
And on this night, the shadows held demons, and nightmares, and people crying out for help. Help he could not give, help whose need he did not understand, help whose need he feared. Someone was looking for him. Someone was reaching out to his mind.
But whoever’s fingers they were, grating on his consciousness, they reeked of desperation, loneliness, and – most frightening to him – insanity. All of these things they carried with them and forced upon him in stark and utter clarity.
He stared at his now sharp, pale reflection, wondering how he ended up on the other side of the looking-glass – how he of all people was on the other side of reality and physicality. Why his psychic body was so much bigger and stronger and more adept than his physical body. Why he was the inverted being. Why he was so sensitive to these things, to these people, to these fingers, to these feelings.
Whoever was asking for his help was either unknowingly, unwittingly, or maliciously bringing their pain and fear and whatever else on him. He was left with an ultimatum.
He could ignore the dreams and the fingers in his mind, but in all likelihood they would not stop. They would persist until their problem was solved or they were rendered incapable of reaching out any longer. Or he could try to seek out this person and help them, but that would be a near-impossible undertaking. Of the ten billion people in the Earth Sphere, how could he find one among so many? How could this person expect this of him?
He suddenly grew angry at this person who was gnawing at his brain. He felt mad at them for asking this impossible task of him. Why should he have to do it? Why couldn’t they fix their own problems? Why couldn’t they ask someone else?
But he knew. He always knew that these people rarely had any idea of what they were doing to him, or others, or themselves. These people hardly ever knew what they were – that they had this ability, or that they were hurting anyone else. And of those who did, few would confess to it. Newtype had become such an ugly word since the first government experiments.
His breathing had slowed, as had his heartbeat. The horrible images, the colors, the feelings had retreated in his wakefulness. He sighed and wiped away the lingering sweat.
It saddened him. He wasn’t sure what “it” was, but it saddened him. Maybe it was an aftertaste of whoever’s mind had tickled his, or maybe it was his own guilt, regret at this burden. But for some reason he did not make it to the sink, to the cold tap water, or to the waiting washcloth where he was going to wash his face. Instead he crumpled to the floor. To the cold, tiled floor, in the cold, tiled, shadowless room with the unforgiving fluorescent light, and cried.
He cried for his own heartache, he cried for the heartache of others that permeated his mind, he cried for the memories of others that he had seen unwillingly, unknowingly at times. Everyone else’s pain just seemed to filter past his skin into his mind, and now it crept up in him in his weakness and he cried.
*
“This is getting me nowhere,” Quatre snapped in frustration at the computer screen. With a melodramatic sigh, he pushed back in his chair and stared at the screen from a distance, glaring furiously at the blinking white cursor on the blue screen.
“Damn cursor.” It was just too happy to await his typing digits, and it did wait expectantly for his resumption of the task at hand. He could write volumes about the dreams and the emotions he felt from her, but her location was never clear during or after the dream. Usually, he could either get a feel for the person’s location or their identity, but the emotions he felt from her were very confusing; they were blurry, but sharp at the same time – somehow loud and muted simultaneously.
Quatre had heard of devices implanted in Newtypes to suppress their abilities and now he began to suspect that some such device might be responsible for the interference between himself and the Crier. He’d never before encountered someone with a suppressive implant, but he supposed that was because the implants worked. Which meant that if this person indeed had the implant and still was able to reach out to him and overwhelm his defenses, then she was extremely powerful and in desperate need of help.
Leaning back in his chair, Quatre sighed with resignation. With what he knew about suppressive implants, Quatre realized that it would take an active effort on his part to reach out to her to discover her identity. As far as he was aware, suppressive devices, though extremely adept at suppressing a Newtype’s own abilities, could not defend that person’s mind from the intrusion of another Newtype.
That decided, Quatre got up from his seat at the computer and left the room to find his secretary and tell him to put on a pot of coffee. Strong coffee.
*
Quatre sat motionless on top of the coverlet of his bed in the traditional lotus position with his legs crossed on top of each other and his hands resting palm-up on the tops of his knees. He’d been sitting like that for several hours already, waiting for the Crier to seek him out in the safety of her dream-state oblivion, but the passage of time seemed inconsequential to him in his heightened state of meditation. He spent his wait visualizing and focusing his energy, picturing it as a glowing, shifting sphere at the center of his being. He stretched it this way and that, testingly sending out tendrils of energy through the walls around him and sampling the dreamscapes of those who slept nearby. His efforts returned to him a multitude of colors and muted emotions from the unconscious minds around him – all completely uninterpretable to him. The only minds accessible to him in unconsciousness were those of empathic Newtypes, and there were none in this particular hotel, or indeed in a several block radius of it.
None that he could find at least. Quatre’s thoughts drifted back to the suppressive devices he suspected were responsible for rendering the Crier’s message unintelligible, and he realized how little he really knew about them. He wondered briefly if he would even be able to detect the devices if she indeed was under their influence.
Quatre was in the process of contemplating their design when the first threads of the Crier’s mind tickled the edge of his senses. He was given precious little time to prepare before her mind collided with his full force.
He pulled his energy back into its tight little ball before hastily reinforcing his mental barriers in preparation for the wash of jumbled thought and an emotion he knew could easily overwhelm him if he wasn’t careful. Suddenly he felt the white-hot emotions surround him and envelope him his mind, but he expertly repressed the panic rising in his consciousness. She raged against his walls and slowly he began to ease his barriers in an effort to control her access to his thoughts. Her mind seared his as she trickled past his barriers, eliciting a shudder from Quatre’s physical body. So much anger and hatred and fear coursed shapeless and undefined through his nerves, but Quatre was undeterred and continued the lowering of his defenses with agonizing slowness.
Finally he was able to remove all of his energy from the barriers and refocus them to trace the Crier. Quatre concentrated on following the stream of raw emotion to its source, feeling more and more distant from his body. Gradually his physical senses grew duller and his psychic senses sharper as he let his mind wander away from his body, an act that added to his empathic strength while simultaneously rendering him more vulnerable and frail.
The emotions became stronger as Quatre drifted further from physicality and soon he had traced the torrent back to its source. He was completely surrounded by the white, incoherent emotions, and Quatre felt her mind for barriers. Finding none, he began the tedious process of dividing the white light into the innumerable colors of the equally innumerable individual emotions.
~
A scream tore itself from her lungs as she fought to wrest her mind from the icy claws of her nightmare. Panic and terror filled her as her head swam – not quite accepting her awakened state, and rendering her unable to recognize her own hands as her nails raked over the clammy skin of her arms and shoulders. Her eyes refused to focus, instead showing her only blurry images obscured by shadows while her head continued to spin, completely unable to differentiate between up and down.
Despite such physical handicaps, her intent remained to drive the grotesque and horrifying images of her nightmare from her eyes. She bit her lip, clawed at her skin, but the feeling of anarchy in her mind dominated and she was unable to force her subconscious into wakeful submission.
She threw herself from the bed, falling to the floor when her legs refused to obey her chaotic mind. Waves of nausea swept her and she fought to pull herself up, desperate to end her suffering. She crawled the short distance from the bed to her dresser and pulled herself up upon it, shoving several articles from its surface as her body lurched forward, collapsing atop the bureau. Her hands drunkenly groped for the wall and the mirror she knew hung there. The back of her hand brushed the frame and with what little motor control she could muster, she flung the mirror from its hanger, hearing it shatter with a satisfying crash. She allowed herself to collapse back to the floor, the room still swimming in her vision. Another wave of nausea wracked her and she panted desperately on the floor, not even waiting for it to pass before dragging herself to the shards of mirrored glass she knew were lying on the floor just out of her grasp. She reached out across the floor with a shaky hand, hearing the clink of glass on glass before feeling the fragments under her fingertips. With as much concentration as she could muster, she closed her clammy hand around the largest piece she could reach and squeezed.
~
Quatre lost his concentration as an outside power began to violently force him from her mind. The once clear images swirled and blurred as Quatre lost his grip on the Crier and was flung from the confines of intelligible thought. He reeled, floundering in an unnavigable sea of emotion, but was able to summon enough coherent thought to realize that he had to slow his expulsion. Quatre rallied his strength and carefully disentangled himself from her psyche while trying to subdue her conscious mind.
~
A gasp escaped her as the pain exploded from her hand, forcefully burning away the mental haze like the sun burning away morning fog. Her hand jerked open instinctively and she tried to fling the glass from her palm, but it was imbedded too deeply in her skin to be removed so easily. As the pain cleared her mind, she exerted mastery over her instincts and managed to close the trembling hand once again around the shard, driving it deeper into her flesh.
She was rewarded with a surge of lucidity as the pain shot up from her hand, racing like lightning up her arm to her shoulder. Finally she felt in control again, and a comfortable numbness was restored in her mind as the fear and panic subsided.
~
Quatre lay staring up at the canopy of his bed, unsure of where he was or what he was doing. Then slowly the memories trickled back and he became aware of his sweat-soaked clothing, labored breathing, and trembling limbs. He squeezed his eyes shut against the images burning in his memory, but succeeded only in enlivening the visions and forcing himself to relive the entire ordeal.
The Crier had shown him an image more horrible, more hate-filled, more utterly, utterly red than he had seen in all the nights of the nightmares previously.
It was also a familiar image. He had seen it before – from someone else . . . in someone else’s mind and heart.
He was more scared now than ever. He had never thought – never could have imagined. . . .
Quatre’s own voice sounded foreign and obtuse as it filled his ears and brought him back to the outer world from the depths of his own mind. The sound he had made had been only an incoherent utterance, so Quatre cleared his throat and his mind, attempting again to say the name that had formed in his mouth, given shape by the images he had seen.
“Dorothy Catalonia.”
~
“Quatre Raberba Winner,” she whispered hoarsely into the silence of the darkened bedroom before succumbing to the encroaching oblivion.
*