"Me? I don't think so. You're s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g a patient. Another patient is AWOL and probably in danger if he's not already dead. And now this third-I can't even begin to imagine what's happened to her. But I do know one thing. You're not competent."

"I can't quit. Where would I go?"

"David, I think last night was wonderful and I think we can be important to each other, and maybe this is the only chance for either of us to taste real love. But not if you screw the patients."

He looked over at Caroline, who was painting steadily. Katie saw this, and drew away from him.

"Go play with your toy, then." She stalked out.

"Katie!"

"I'll be in the infirmary with the injuries."

When she was gone, Caroline said, " 'Also when they shall be afraid of that which is high, and fears shall be in the way, and a man goeth to his long home-' Do you know it?"

"Of course I know it. It's from Ecclesiastes."

"Did you know that the Bible is a scientific doc.u.ment?"

"I don't see that at all."

"You're soul blind, therefore blind to soul science. You're afraid of yourself, David. The long home of Ecclesiastes is the shadow of the soul reaching back across time, looking at its life and its previous lives. You need to open to yourself, David."

"I am, I'm remembering an enormous amount. I can even use Herbert Acton's lamp."

She put down her brush, leaned closer and whispered to him, "We need to try a very serious dose of the gold. Take an injection."

"It's a heavy metal. You can't inject that."

"What we make isn't a metal anymore at all, or even really connected to the physical world like other elements."

"Gold is gold."

"No, this starts with some of the ancient substance, so it becomes a hyperelement. In its pure form, it's so light that it levitates."

"It's hardly ancient. You just made it."

"We made it correctly, starting with a little of the ancient material, to light the path for the new gold."

Her hands came like a fluid, and framed his face, and the love in her eyes was so intense and so naked that he felt embarra.s.sed for her and looked away.

"David, you have to face our love. You need its energy."

Furious, he pulled away from her.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n it, shut up shut up! What fatuous nonsense."

Lowering her eyes, she quietly returned to her easel.

He looked around the room at the milling patients. He had to control this situation first, but he had to get out of here, he could not bear another moment with this woman. He felt nothing and she felt a lot and it was just extremely disturbing.

"Patients are to go to their quarters now and remain in their rooms until the breakfast bell at seven," he announced.

"Excuse me, Doctor, you're needed." Ray Weller had come up to him.

He stood there in a dirty ap.r.o.n, Glen and Doctor Hunt with him.

"We need an emergency meeting," Ray said. Then, more softly, "We're in trouble. Big trouble."

That was obvious, but why say it in the hearing of patients, even in a whisper?

"In my office in five minutes," he said. Then he went to Claire, who was talking softly with a group of patients. "Time to shut it down for the night," he told her. "We're going to have an administrative staff meeting. We'll all be in my office."

Claire raised her voice. "Okay, boys and girls, beddie bye."

There were none of the usual groans and protests, David noted. People simply got up and began moving toward the door into the patient wing.

"This is a danger sign," he said to Claire. "They're in shock."

"Yeah," she replied.

"I want two people on the monitors tonight."

"Doctor," Glen said, "the system's down, and it's not coming back until we can get a new motherboard."

Without its computer system, this place was in its death throes, especially when it came to security.

He waited until the last patient had gone, leaving just Caroline. The only sound in the room now was the faint rustle of movement when she dipped a brush.

"You need to go," he said.

"I can't stop and you know it."

"You can't work in the middle of the night, alone."

"Especially in the middle of the night, alone."

Glen stood in the doorway. He nodded sharply, urging David to come. Obviously, there was an immediate problem and he could not stay here longer.

"Someone will take you to your room," he told Caroline. He would send one of the orderlies down immediately. She must not be left alone, not ever.

He followed Glen up what had once been the servants' stairway at the back of the original house. They rose into the magnificence of the upstairs hallway, its elegance speaking of an orderly world that had entirely gone.

They arrived at his office to an uneasy murmur of voices. When he entered, silence fell.

Glen's eyes went to the sitting area in front of the large fireplace. In one of David's wing chairs sat a filthy, bedraggled man, his clothes torn, a badly skinned elbow protruding.

"How did he get in here?"

Katie's response said it all: "How did he get out?"

Mack the Cat had come back.

DAVID FORD'S JOURNAL: SIX Caroline says that I have to face our love, but what can love possibly mean in a situation like this? How many people die in, say, sixty seconds right now? Millions, no doubt, in a world that is disintegrating this fast.

Apparently, she wants me to remember her in a way that I do not remember her. I want her physically. Of course I do, who wouldn't? But this love of which she speaks seems to be some sort of a bridge, and I don't understand why that would be true.

It's quite clear how the gold is supposed to work, but I am not finding any change after ingesting it. Perhaps she's right and I'm not taking enough, but there is no way I'm going to eat a heavy metal. Supposedly their preparation no longer contains any elemental gold in metal form, but how can that be? It's an element, it's going to be there.

I've remembered a lot and understood a lot, but the situation that's unfolding now really eclipses more or less everything. It is true that Herbert Acton antic.i.p.ated this, but his vision did not penetrate into the actual event or surely he would have left us more clear instructions. My best guess is that this is because things are now so chaotic that looking into this era would have been like looking into dirty water or dense fog.

So we're on our own, and I think that it is very clear what we're going to have to face. That doc.u.ment of Mrs. Denman's was right, I think. The solar system is going through a very dirty and dangerous area of s.p.a.ce, and the sun and all her planets are taking a terrible pounding.

I think that it will be too much for mankind. Certainly, civilization is finished. If this lasts much longer the way it is, our population is going to plummet ma.s.sively. If it should intensify, then I think we are going to go the way of the dinosaurs-unless, of course, Caroline's wonderful painting can somehow save a few of us. But it will be a very few, won't it, just a tiny elite? In itself, that troubles me. Why should it be us and not, say, the great scientists of the world or the great saints, or simply the children?

So where does love come into this? Why does it matter anymore? I want to spend time with Katie and Caroline. I want to take every bit of pleasure from life that I can, while I can.

I have made a decision. If we cannot take the world with us, then I am not going myself. It isn't right for just the carefully chosen to live while the rest, equally deserving, do not.

And yet, I am talking about my own death, here, and, in the end, if I have a choice, I know that I will try to save myself. It isn't a moral choice, but an instinctive one. I am not a hero, and I don't fully understand this business of calling me a leader.

When I was a boy, Charles Light tried to drill my specialness into me, my brilliance, my natural ability to take control of situations-all qualities that he saw but that I did not.

And yet, and yet ... it's true that I understand a great deal of this. I understand why the gold works, but not, perhaps, why it doesn't for me.

I think that the best thing for me to do is to keep striving to save my patients, and give Caroline the s.p.a.ce she needs to accomplish her work.

So far, there has been no further sign of the presence of our enemies. Does that mean that they've been swept away in the chaos? Perhaps, but somehow I doubt it. It has crossed my mind that Mack, the former CIA agent, might be one of them. He takes an inordinate interest in Caroline and her work.

He's among the patients who display genuine symptoms. Paranoia, among other things. I can see the violence in the man, and I know that he has the skills necessary to enable him to enter and leave this place, and to infuriate Sam by neutralizing him the way he did, a professional handler like him.

In any case, he bears watching, I suppose, but the reality is this: events are going to overtake our enemies just as they are going to overtake us and, very shortly now, the whole world.

15.

THE RED STAR.

Mack selected from the tools he'd stolen over time and brought into his room a screwdriver and a small knife. They'd given him a meal of canned corned beef hash and potatoes washed down with tepid water, but it sure as h.e.l.l beat gnawing on raw potatoes and drinking toilets in abandoned farmhouses.

What was important here were two things. First, he'd seen from the snow on the screens in the nurses' station that the surveillance system was down. Second, he'd had a close look at that painting of Caroline Light's, and n.o.body-no ordinary person-could create a work of art so detailed. As incredible it seemed, he could most safely conclude that she was somehow creating another reality in the medium of oil on canvas, and that had to mean something, and he intended to find out what in holy h.e.l.l it was.

He got up on his desk and stood, using the screwdriver to open his air-conditioning vent. It would take a real mastery of the human body to get around some of the turns, but he intended to try.

Out the top of his window, he could see auroras spinning complex madness tinted blood red. This was a change even from last night, and it unsettled him and made him work faster.

Then he noticed something very odd indeed, that made him look out into the grounds.

It was light out there, even brighter than the auroras and a full moon would make it. But this was not the moon or the tinge of auroral light. This was the glow of something else, something that he could not quite see around the corner of the building.

There had been reports of strange ships in the sky, and he'd overheard mention that Linda Fairbrother had been taken up in one. Absently, he ran his finger along the shiny dark spot that he'd noticed just below his neck in the shower the other morning. Was it tingling? Perhaps. He feared that it might be a melanoma, but they were supposed to be irregular and this thing was perfectly round. Growing, though, no question there. It had an odd texture, not like skin, but slicker and more featureless, almost as if it was covered by a film of some kind. Also, at the center, where it was darkest, it wasn't like color at all, but more an absence of color. It was really the strangest thing he'd ever seen on a human body and he needed to get it cut out, no question.

Faint voices drew him back to his window. Now there were people down there. Guards and staff were out on the lawn, their forms lit by an eerie violet glare coming from a source that was blocked to his vision by the corner of the building.

Normally, his ability to concentrate on his work was prodigious, but this unsettled him. He'd witnessed a woman burned at the stake by the Taliban in Afghanistan, and the wild, abandoned agony of her screams had left him, already claustrophobic, with a creeping horror of suffering death by fire.

He hammered on his door. Hammered again. Finally, he started kicking the h.e.l.l out of it. His relationship with Nurse Fleigler was not pleasant, and it had not been improved by his recent excursion.

"What do you want?"

"What the h.e.l.l's going on? What's that light out there?"

"Nothing."

"Come on, Fleigler, I'm a paying customer here."

"n.o.body cares. We don't like you. You're a creep."

"Please, Fleigler, gimme a break. What's everybody looking at?"

"You haven't earned any breaks. Sam's still got a headache because of you."

"Fairbrother did it!"

"Sam says you used some kind of a hold on him. Paralytic."

"All right, I will kick this door"-he gave it three wall-shaking wallops-"until you tell me what in f.u.c.k's happening out there!" He started in again, and, frankly, he could probably pop it off with a few more body blows.

"All right already! If you must know, it's this really bright speck in the sky. Deep violet-red speck. It's weird and I'm reading my Bible, so good night."

Jesus G.o.d, what was it? The townspeople were supposed to be coming up, but who knew how they'd react to this? They were hungry, that was for sure, but this could frighten them into hiding.

It could be emitting energy, too. What if it totally killed his radio?

He had to face something here: this situation was deteriorating too fast, and changes in tempo were dangerous to missions like his. Unless some luck came his way, he was not going to succeed.

He went back to the desk and started sc.r.a.ping the paint away from the screws that held on the vent above it.

"I know you by your name," he muttered as he worked. "You are Wormwood, come to collect the blood of man."