Passage. Part 48

He tossed the medicine ball again. "Heard anything?"

"Yes," she said.

"Like what?" Thud.

"Like engines stopping?" she said. "Or a collision?" Leading, she thought, waiting for his answer.

"A collision? No, thank goodness. Especially since it was one of those Ford Explorers. They're huge." He tossed the medicine ball again. "No, just a b.u.mp on the head, but it must have really knocked me out cold because the paramedics thought I'd had a heart attack. I told them, 'I can't have had a heart attack-' "

"I work out three times a week at my health club," Joanna said and then was sorry because Greg stopped, clutching the heavy medicine ball to his chest, and looked at her fearfully. He went over to the rowing machine, sat down, and began pulling the oars toward him with strong, steady strokes.

"Greg-" Joanna said, and caught a flicker of movement in the corner of her eye. She ran over to the door. The steward. He was walking toward the bridge with a folded note in his hand.

Joanna hurried after him. He walked past the officers' quarters and turned into an unlit corridor.

Joanna followed him, around a corner, down a short, narrow pa.s.sage, around another corner. Like a maze, Joanna thought. Down another pa.s.sage, and out onto the other side of the deck. There were boats on this side, too. Was that where the officer was going, to uncover the boats?

No. He knocked on a door and opened it. Golden light spilled out onto the deck, and she could hear the murmur of voices. "You may never get another chance," the officer said, and reemerged, laughing, and walked down the deck toward the stern, obviously headed for the stairs. Joanna followed him, stopping as she pa.s.sed to look in the still-open door.

A blond man in a white s.h.i.+rt sat with his back to the door, hunched over a table, tapping steadily on a telegraph key. His coat was slung over the back of his chair and he was wearing headphones, old-fas.h.i.+oned ones with a band around the back of his head as well as over the top. Above his head, a blue spark jumped the gap between two metal struts, flickering and snapping as he tapped the key.

This is the wireless room, Joanna thought, forgetting all about the officer. And the man was Jack Phillips, busily sending out messages. Not SOSs yet, Joanna thought, looking at the blue spark, dancing merrily above the wireless operator's head, and remembering the officer's laughter. And Jack wasn't wearing his lifejacket yet.

These must be pa.s.senger messages he was sending, the backlog that had built up over the weekend. Joanna remembered Mr. Briarley telling the cla.s.s that the wireless was such a novelty thepa.s.sengers all wanted to send one, and Jack Phillips had been so busy the night of the collision that, when the Californian had tried to cut in with an ice message, he had cut them off, he had told them to shut up, that he was working the relay station, Cape Race.

And SOSs were simple. Three dots, three dashes, three dots. She remembered Mr. Briarley telling them that was why SOS had been chosen for the distress call, because it was so simple, anyone could send it. These messages weren't simple. "Having wonderful time," Joanna thought, listening to the complicated tapping. "Wish you were here."

She leaned forward, trying to hear the pattern, trying to decipher the message, but he was tapping too fast for her to be able to separate out the dots from the dashes, and the buzzing from the spark overhead interrupted her concentration.

She walked up closer behind him, and as she did, she could hear a low murmur. He's saying the letters as he taps them out, she thought. "C," he said, making a rapid series of taps, "Q... D... C... Q...

D." Not a word. A code? The call letters of the t.i.tanic?

There was a thud from somewhere out on deck. Greg Menotti, Joanna thought, throwing the medicine ball against the wall of the gymnasium, and glanced behind her. Jack Phillips didn't look up or pause in his sending.

He can't hear with his headphones on, Joanna thought, any more than I can hear Richard or Tish with my headphones on, and when the t.i.tanic was sinking, he had been so intent on sending he hadn't even noticed the stoker sneaking up behind him, attempting to steal his lifejacket. Joanna took another step closer, trying to hear his murmurings over the heavy thuds. "Q... D..."

Thud. It was impossible to hear the tapping with this thudding going on. She went outside on deck to tell Greg to stop, but the sound wasn't coming from the gymnasium, it was coming from the stairway.

Joanna opened the door to the stairwell and went in. Thud. The sound was coming from below.

She leaned over the railing and looked down but she couldn't see past the first turning of the stairs.

"Hang on!" a man's voice said. Joanna recognized it as the voice of the officer who had ordered the sailor to use the Morse lamp. "What do you think you're doing?"

There was no answer except a thud and then another one. Joanna went down to the first landing.

A man in a dark blue uniform was dragging something heavy up the stairs. It looked like a body.

The officer was at the bottom of the flight and climbing up toward the man, looking angry. "You can't bring that up here."

"It's the only way up that's not flooded," the man in the uniform said, and dragged the body up one step, then another, till he was only five steps below Joanna. It wasn't a body. It was a big canvas sack with a crest stenciled on it. A mailbag, Joanna thought.

"There's water all over the mail room," the man, who must be a postal clerk, said. He opened the neck of the bag, reached in, and pulled out a handful of sodden letters. "Look at that!" he said, waving them in the face of the officer. "Ruined!" He brandished them at Joanna. She flinched back.

"How'm I supposed to deliver that?" he demanded. He jammed it back in the bag, cinched the neckshut, humped the mailbag up over another step.

"Then you'll have to bring it up some other way," the officer said, stepping in front of him. "You'll ruin the floors." He pointed down at the carpet. Where the bag had rested, the rose carpet was wet.

"Can't be helped," the postal clerk said, heaving the bag up another step. "It's got to get through.

I have to get it into the boats. Give me a hand here," he said to Joanna, but she was looking down at the wet carpet. The water had soaked into it, staining its rose a dark, disturbing red, like blood.

"How bad is it?" the officer asked.

"All the way up to the saloon deck," the postal clerk said. "She doesn't have much longer."

"What does he mean, she doesn't have much longer?" Greg Menotti said from behind her. She turned around. He was on the step above her, watching the postal clerk hoist the mailbag up another step. "Why is he doing that?"

"Because she's sinking," the postal clerk said, and to Joanna, "You'd better get into a boat, miss."

"Which deck is the saloon deck?" Joanna asked him. "Is it C Deck?"

"What does he mean, sinking?" Greg said. "This isn't a s.h.i.+p. It's a health club." He took hold of Joanna's arm. "I thought you wanted to see the rest of the facilities."

"There isn't time," Joanna said, trying to free her arm. "Is the saloon deck C Deck?"

"You have to make time," Greg said, pulling her up the stairs. "Your health is the most important thing there is. We've got a full program of squash, racquetball, tennis-"

He was going too fast. She lost her balance and nearly fell. "Steady, looks like you could use some stair-walking exercise," he said, pulling her to her feet, but she couldn't get her balance. The stair was angled oddly, her foot kept sliding off it- Oh, G.o.d, she thought, it's beginning to list. "I have to go," she said, tugging frantically to free her arm from Greg's hand. "The saloon deck-"

"I work out here three times a week," he said, remorselessly gripping her arm. "A regular exercise regimen is essential to-"

Joanna wrenched free and ran toward the stairs, stumbling, her arms out for balance, and pushed open the door to the stairway. The mail clerk had dragged the mailbag nearly all the way to the top of the stairs. Joanna ran past him down the steps, skirting the dark, wet stain where the mailbag had lain.

"You shouldn't run without warming up first," Greg called after her. "You'll get a charley-" The door closed on his voice and she fled down the stairs, around the landings, her hand skimming the polished oak railings as she ran. Down and down, not counting landings or decks or doors, running blindly, blindly, out the door, down the deck, yanking the door open and plunging into the pa.s.sage,into the dark and the dark- And the dark. I'm still in the pa.s.sage, Joanna thought desperately, and heard Richard say, "You need to remove the sleep mask."

She opened her eyes and blinked in surprise at a total stranger. It took her another panicked minute to remember that Tish was out with the flu and this was the sub nurse. "Just rest. Don't try to talk," Richard said, and began explaining the post-session procedures to the nurse. He doesn't want me to say it's the t.i.tanic in front of her, she thought.

But it wasn't the t.i.tanic. The staircase was all wrong and so was the gymnasium. The t.i.tanic had had one. She remembered Mr. Briarley talking about it, telling them how opulent the s.h.i.+p had been, but it would hardly have been up on the Boat Deck. And, even though the t.i.tanic had been a royal mail s.h.i.+p, they wouldn't have dragged sacks of mail up from the mail room. Fifteen hundred people had drowned that night. They would hardly have been worried about the mail. And Greg Menotti obviously wasn't on the t.i.tanic, Joanna thought, frustrated.

Not half as frustrated as Richard, however. "You saw the t.i.tanic again!" he said when the nurse had finished monitoring her vitals and left, and Joanna had told him. "How could you have? Look at these scans." He'd dragged her over to the console. "The pattern of temporal-lobe activity is completely different, and the acetylcholine level is much higher than before."

"That looks the same," Joanna said, pointing at a red-orange patch in the hippocampus.

"It is, and so's the activity in the amygdala. They're the same in all the NDEs, but they don't have anything to do with producing images."

"Was the pattern in long-term completely different, too?" Joanna asked, looking at the s.h.i.+fting reds and blues and yellows.

"No," he admitted. "The last few scans match, although they don't fit any of the L+R formulas.

Was the ending of your NDE the same as last time?"

"No," she said. She told him about the flight down the stairs and into the pa.s.sage. "It was the same pa.s.sage, but this time the door was shut and I had to run a lot farther before I was back in the lab."

"You say the same pa.s.sage? Do you mean it looked the same?"

"No," Joanna said. "I mean it's the same pa.s.sage. It's in the same place, it always opens onto the same part of the deck," she said. "It's a real place. The doors always open on the same stairways, the Boat Deck's always the same number of flights up, the lifeboats and the officers' quarters and the bridge are always in the same relations.h.i.+p to each other."

"You said this time there was a gymnasium," Richard said skeptically.

"It was always there, but the door was shut before. It's not like a dream where things s.h.i.+ft around and you're in one place and then another with no transition in between. It's a real place.""Real," he said, and all the wariness and skepticism were back in his face. In a minute he'd accuse her of being Bridey Murphy again.

"I don't mean real," she said, defeated. "I mean three-dimensional. I mean linear."

He was shaking his head. "There's no activation of the spatial cortex areas. What about the beginning? Was it the same?"

"No," she said. "I came through a little later this time, after the young man came over to investigate the noise."

"But the people and what they said were the same?"

"Basically."

"Basically," he muttered, staring at the screens. "Even though the temporal-lobe and L+R patterns are completely different. What were you thinking about just before you went into non-REM sleep? Maybe your conscious mind is influencing what you see."

"The t.i.tanic," Joanna admitted, and Richard looked encouraged. "But last time I was thinking about Pompeii, and the first three times I obviously couldn't have been thinking about the t.i.tanic, and it's been the same place every time."

"And you hear the same sound as you go through," Richard said thoughtfully and began to type, absorbed.

Joanna went down to her office to transcribe her account and check on Vielle. There was no answer, but she had seven new messages. Joanna listened to them, fast-forwarding as soon as she'd established it wasn't Vielle. Records. Maisie. Guadalupe.

She must not have gotten the message I left for her, Joanna thought. And she must be back at work, and Tish was right about this flu not lasting long. Maybe Vielle's back, too, and that's why she's not answering. She hit "next message." Mr. Mandrake. She hit "delete." Betty Peterson.

"I found out the t.i.tle," Betty's voice said, and Joanna pulled back the finger she had poised over the "next message" b.u.t.ton and listened to the message.

"You'll never guess how!" Betty said. "Last night I dug out my old high school yearbook to see who else was in that cla.s.s with us, and I was going through the section with our pictures-and, oh, my G.o.d, the hair! the clothes!-and as I'm looking through them, I saw that Nadine Swartheimer-do you remember Nadine? Wild hair that stuck out all over and Birkenstocks, even in the dead of winter?-well, anyway, she'd signed her picture, and there it was! But that's not all. I found out something else. You need to call me. 'Bye."

I don't believe it, Joanna thought. After all that, she didn't tell me the name of the book, and now I'll have to call her back, and we'll probably play telephone tag for a week. How did Betty ever get straight A's?

She'd have to call her, but not until she'd finished checking to see if Vielle had called. She wentrapidly through the rest of the messages. Mr. Mandrake again. Delete. Someone named Leonard Fanshawe.

But not Vielle. Joanna tried her again, but there was still no answer. I think I'd better go down to the ER and see if she's back and, if she's not, go check on her, Joanna thought, and gathered up her coat, keys, and purse, but just as she was starting out the door, the phone rang. Joanna let the answering machine pick up. "Hi," Vielle said, and Joanna s.n.a.t.c.hed up the receiver.

"How are you?" she said.

"Better," Vielle said, and she sounded better. Her voice was stronger and steadier than the day before. "I'm still going to stay at home for a couple of days, and, no, I don't need you to bring me anything. I don't want you getting this."

"Okay," Joanna said, "although I've already been exposed. Tish has it, and so does Guadalupe."

"Well, you're not going to get it from me. I'm locking my door, and I'm not letting you in. So don't even think about coming over."

"All right," Joanna promised, "but you have to promise to call me and tell me how you're doing and if you need anything," and, before Vielle could protest, "I can leave it outside your door."

"I promise I'll check in," Vielle said and started to hang up.

"Oh, wait," Joanna said. "What about the you-know-what?"

"The what?"

"I don't know. That was what you called it. You left a message that I was supposed to call you, that you had a you-know-what for me. Yesterday. Before you went home sick. You paged me."

"Oh," Vielle said finally. "Yes. A patient came in with a gall bladder attack and happened to mention he'd had an NDE a couple of years ago. We admitted him for surgery." Joanna wondered if that was the Leonard Fanshawe who had called her, but Vielle said, "His name's Eduardo Ortiz."

"Who else was there when he mentioned it?" Joanna asked, thinking of Mr. Mandrake.

"Just me," Vielle said. "I thought he was a good bet since he wasn't admitted for anything life-threatening, so he'd be flying below Mr. Mandrake's radar."

Joanna thought so, too. As soon as she got off the phone, she called the switchboard and got his room number, and then called the surgical floor. "He had surgery this morning, and he's still out," the nurse said.

"When does he go home?" Joanna asked.

The nurse checked. "Tomorrow." Which is what's wrong with HMOs, Joanna thought. They're not in the hospital long enough to tell anyone they've even had a near-death experience, let alone describe it. The nurse had thought Mr. Ortiz would probably wake up around noon, which would giveJoanna plenty of time to record and transcribe her NDE.

She did both and then took the transcript to Richard, who was glaring at the screens. "How's it going?" she asked, handing him the transcript.

"Terrible. I thought maybe the initial stimulus was what was determining the unifying image, and that was why you continued to see the t.i.tanic, even though the stimuli were different, but in this last NDE there was no activity in the superior auditory cortex at all." He raked his hand through his hair. "I just don't have enough data. Have you been able to reschedule Mrs. Haighton yet?"

"No."

"And you haven't heard from Mr. Pearsall about when he's coming back?"

She shook her head.

"Then I've got to find out what's aborting Mrs. Troudtheim's NDE-state and fix it. We need her."

"I'll call Mr. Pearsall and Mrs. Haighton," Joanna said. And go find her at the Spring Fling, or wherever she is, and drag her back here myself, she thought, going back to her office to call, but the housekeeper didn't know where she was.

"Some kind of meeting," she said. "She has so many I get them confused." And there was no answer at Mr. Pearsall's number.

Joanna made a note to try them both again and then listened to the messages she'd fast-forwarded through before. Guadalupe wanted Joanna to call her. Maisie had something important to tell her. Leonard Fanshawe said, "I understand you're interested in near-death experiences. I had one six months ago, and since then I have discovered I have unusual powers: telekinesis, clairvoyance, distance-viewing, and teleportation. I would very much like to talk with you about this,"

and gave his number.

Joanna called him and gave him Mr. Mandrake's number. Then she called Mr. Pearsall again.

No answer. She called Betty Peterson. Her line was busy.

She printed out a file copy of the transcript and then sat there staring at the screen, trying to make sense of it. It was the t.i.tanic, she was sure of it, in spite of the staircase and the mailbag and the lack of activity in the auditory cortex.