A Vision of Fire

Caitlin felt her hands tighten helplessly. She knew the young man was in agony. She could only think of one way to communicate that might work, but both his hands were bandaged. She reached out with her left hand — the madame in Haiti had directed her to use her left hand with the snake; Jacob had sensed the ocean with his left — and lightly touched one of the only bare areas of Atash’s skin, his throat.

Something exploded inside Caitlin’s head. It was fast and heavy and pressed the sides of her skull outward, like the throb of a headache frozen painfully in place. Then it pushed through and was outside her body — pressure rolling around her, forcing her eyelids shut. She could not open her mouth to scream but she felt the cry in her throat.

She forced herself to open her eyes. The white of the walls, of the bandages, had been transformed into dark rock and ice — jagged towers of it coming into focus far behind the dark, rectangular columns that were in front of her. And a man, a pale young man, was communicating with hands and arms and strange but familiar words — leaning forward with urgency, begging, almost bowing with his pleading.

Caitlin couldn’t understand. Her eardrums were throbbing from pressure that wrapped around her head, pressure that was closing her throat, blocking sound and breath.

The recent past, the present, her world and life were all out of focus. Wherever she was, whoever she was, whatever she was seeing, was rising before her with razor-edged clarity.

And suddenly the words became familiar. The columned structure, vast and high, was known to her. The buildings beyond, dark among patches of lavender and green foliage, were places she had seen. And farther away, those peaks that looked less like mountains than like explosions of ice—

She was looking through eyes that were not her own at a world that was not her own. The pale young man pleaded with her from the floor.

“Save my brother, save me! Please! Show us how!”

“I am no longer Guardian to him or to you,” she said in the voice of an old man, unable to control the words coming from her own throat. “You put your faith in things that have no true power. You have crafted your own fate.”

“We will repent, we will speak the cazh!”

“No,” she replied sadly. “You will die.”

The speaker turned away and the young man propelled himself up from the floor and ran away into the street. Her body hurried to join the other robed figures near the columns a dozen or so yards away, their arms raised toward the dark skies. Her sleeves heavy with oil, she lifted her hands to complete the prayer of cazh and let out a howling scream. Her hands were suddenly on fire, her fingers whirling to pieces in the air even as she signed a word, the only word she could manage, a superlative for “transform.”

There was another scream and suddenly Caitlin was on the floor. Not a stone floor but a hospital floor.

“Dr. O’Hara!”

Caitlin opened her eyes to see Maryam’s face hovering over her. Her head felt exceedingly light, her hands excessively warm, her brain extraordinarily confused. For a moment it was as if she had forgotten how to speak.

“You screamed,” Maryam said.

“I — no. No.”

There was no point in even attempting to explain. She wasn’t sure she could explain, since she didn’t entirely understand it herself. Caitlin pulled away from Maryam and shoved herself up from the floor, grabbing the railing of Atash’s bed. She was reeling.

“It was Atash,” Caitlin gasped.

“What are you saying?”

Caitlin fell silent. As with the snake in Haiti, she had been through something Atash was experiencing. She looked down at the young man. His fixed, red-rimmed eyes were staring at a corner of the ceiling. A tear was sliding down his cheek, and a line of blood trailed from his mouth down over his chin. She reached for his throat with her right hand, searching for a pulse…

“You’d better call for the doctor,” Caitlin said sadly.

“What is it?”

“He’s dead,” she replied.

CHAPTER 27

Caitlin sat in reception again, a spartan room with religious symbols on the walls. Maryam was on her cell phone, sitting under a brass scimitar suspended point-up. An overhead light effected a glow.

Her hands and forearms heavy, Caitlin opened her tablet but stared at the dark screen. She knew she should Skype her father or Barbara, even Ben, but what she had witnessed — no, what she had experienced—had knocked her numb.

A part of her didn’t want to stop the numbness. Atash’s pain had joined Maanik and Gaelle’s with a ferocious intensity and she felt guilty for not having come here days earlier when she might have been able to… do something. Maybe she could have worked with him in stages, used hypnosis, something to mediate between him and the vision. Now he was dead, and he had died in torment.