The town of Wellsburg, Iowa, would under normal circumstances be only a fifty-minute to an hour drive from Waterloo, but with the streets congested with Passers and pedestrians, it took longer. Progress was maddeningly slow, and everyone in the rented car remained for the most part silent.
Dreamer wanted to take Aidriel’s hand again to reassure him, but he kept his tight grip on the door. St. Cross was remarkably calm, reading and making notes in his file.
They passed the sign welcoming them to Wellsburg at a snail’s pace, and Todd made a stressed comment about every gawker in Iowa coming to see what was happening. There were police officers corralling walkers and directing traffic, turning away anyone coming to watch or just passing through.
Todd rolled down the window and told the police that they were going to the AGWSR Middle School, which was only partially true.
“That’s where the action is,” commented the officer distrustfully.
“Chester Williams sent for us,” St. Cross lied, leaning over to see out the driver’s side window and offering his I.D. The cop hesitated before taking it, stepping away to talk into his radio, his eyes on the card in his hand. Once the answer came, he asked for the names of the other three. It felt like an eternity that he spoke into his walkie and received answers back. Aidriel nervously tilted away from the window, watching the spirits drifting by.
When the policeman finally allowed them to pass and moved on to the next vehicle, St. Cross told Todd to find somewhere secluded to pull over, as close to the dead zone as possible.
“I think it best that you and I get out and try to find Williams to see if there’s any way we can get Aidriel into the zone with little trouble.”
“Yeah, I’m doubting that,” said Todd, but he did as he was asked and pulled into the parking lot behind the middle school.
Unloading the folded-up wheelchair from the trunk, Todd helped St. Cross into it. The shrink made sure he had the plastic case that he had brought from the nightstand at home resting on his lap with the file, Aidriel’s file. Taking a deep breath, Todd grasped the handles of the chair and pushed it into the crowd of Passers.
Waiting tensely, Dreamer glanced over at Aidriel and saw how composed he was. He watched the ghosts with a detached neutrality that comforted her a little. If he wasn’t worried, why should she be?
“Do you think Williams can help?” she asked.
“Nope.”
“What do you think will happen?”
Aidriel’s hand moved down to grip the latch on the door, gazing steadily out through the window in the direction St. Cross and Todd had gone.
“Where exactly is this dead zone?” he asked in lieu of responding.
“It’s an intersection,” Dreamer said. “Straight ahead, where West Jackson and West Fifth meet.”
Aidriel continued to watch and wait, his keen gray eyes darting from face to face, his adrenaline rising. If he wasn’t mistaken, the intersection she was talking about was at least six hundred feet away. Behind the parking lot was a vast field that ended in a baseball diamond at the intersection. The whole of the field and diamond was swarming with milling Passers, all of them facing the dead zone, waiting as if in a trance. Waiting for him.
“You okay?” asked Dreamer.
“No…” Aidriel appeared to be realizing it as he said it. The familiar signals were there to warn him. The Passers walking by the car were beginning to slow. Some of them were turning their heads, looking at him, though they showed no sign of rage yet.
“I have to get out now,” Aidriel said urgently. “Before the attack begins.”
He swiftly unstrapped his seatbelt and threw open the door, Dreamer doing the same on her side. They couldn’t spare the precious millisecond it would take to close the hatches again, and began to run instantly, following the direction of the street.
Dreamer had a little difficulty keeping up with Aidriel, but with effort, she caught his hand, falling into step beside him. They burst through the chilling clouds of spirits in their bid to reach the intersection, their shoes pounding the pavement. There was a stiff wind blowing against them, making it hard to hear or breathe.
As he passed through them, Aidriel awakened the raw emotions that had driven the Passers to come here in the first place. They became animated, their faces contorting, their fingers becoming long, deadly claws. Shouts of wordless hatred went up, spreading through the midst of them in a wave. Once they were aware of him, they began to attack.
It all happened in a blur, but vividly and painfully. Aidriel’s senses told him he was wading through a writhing mass of thorns, pulling Dreamer along beside him when she began to slow. She didn’t appear to be harmed by the Passers themselves, but the fear and suffocating danger was driving her to panic. Her hand released his, and she fell behind; he was forced to run on without her. Of the two of them, she would be alright.
Ahead, Aidriel thought he could see where the wall of Passers ended and where the safe zone began. He had to keep his head down and his eyes mostly closed in defense against the flying ghost nails. They were digging into him and passing through him, snatching the air right out of his lungs. Everything burned and bled and he couldn’t breathe or think, only run. A hundred, a thousand voices rose against him, drowning out calls from Dreamer or others to guide him. His cut, aching arms reached out ahead to force his path, to block his face, but there was no way to defend himself besides keeping on the move.
Aidriel tried to jump forward to gain ground but instead lost momentum, falling into the waiting grip of the Passers. He struggled until he could touch the street again and ran on, his head pounding with the blows that were caused by dashing through the spirits. The end was just ahead; he could see it, almost touch it. He reached out for it, and saw a glimpse of Rubin in the nearest circle, waiting for him. His Passer groped at the right moment, catching Aidriel’s head in its long-fingered hands. It could have stopped his flight entirely if Dreamer had not been just steps behind him, slamming into him with enough force to drive him loose.
Falling into the dead zone, Aidriel and Dreamer regained their balance and continued to run, adrenaline coursing through their throbbing veins like electricity. Someone was loudly yelling words among the meaningless shrieks of the Passers, telling them to stop. Aidriel couldn’t stop; there was too much fear and urgency to stop. He pressed onward, his speed increasing now that the Passers had fallen behind. There was still several feet of open space ahead; a wide circle of visible street.
Dreamer was dropping back, shouting for him to slow down. His body wouldn’t listen; his mind was no longer commanding his actions. He continued to run full bore until a sound louder than the raised voices forcibly stopped him. His leg was yanked out from under him, and Aidriel fell flat on the pavement, skidding and half rolling, streaking blood, the reverberation of the gunshot echoing in his already ringing ears.
The Passers quieted to disappointed murmurings as Dreamer fell down beside him. Aidriel was in shock, and couldn’t feel his leg. He looked down and saw a small crimson wound in his shin. He was bleeding everywhere.
Dreamer was a picture of terror, looking up and forward, slightly to their right; he followed her gaze. St. Cross was sitting just inside the dead zone, his plastic case open on his lap, a smoking pistol still in his hand.
“We told you to stop!” he called out. “The Passers were tricking you; the dead zone doesn’t extend as far as they make it look, and if you’d gone too far, you would have run right out the other side.”
“Drop the weapon!” shouted a police officer, drawing his own on St. Cross. Leaning precariously forward, the psychiatrist gently laid said gun on the pavement, raising his hands in surrender.
Aidriel rolled to his back in shock. His vision was blurring and he was shivering. It wasn’t until now that he realized he and Dreamer were not alone inside the dead zone. There had to be at least half a dozen journalists with cameramen surveying the area, not to mention the police, St. Cross, deTarlo, Williams and his assistant, and Todd.
“You’re a lousy damn shot!” Chester Williams yelled in anger, aggressively approaching St. Cross as several cops did. “Lotta good you did, blowing a hole in him!”
“Sir, stay back!” one of the officers ordered, physically forcing Williams to do so. St. Cross put his hands on the back of his head and the lawmen roughly felt him for other weapons. He spoke too quietly for Aidriel or Dreamer to hear, but the cops became calmer and allowed him to lower his arms.
One of the other officers lifted his radio to his mouth and began to call for an ambulance, but deTarlo caught him by the wrist and shook her head.
Aidriel felt he must be falling into delirium, because nothing was making sense. Why weren’t the cops arresting St. Cross for shooting him? Why was deTarlo telling them not to summon help?
“The Passers said not to interfere,” she reminded the officer.
Dreamer bunched up her jacket and put it under Aidriel’s head, moving out of his range of hazy vision briefly. He felt his leg move and figured she must be attempting to stop the blood loss. She was talking to him in a strained voice, trying to sound brave. It crossed his mind to say something to reassure her, but he didn’t see the point. She was not the one bleeding in the middle of the street.
“It’s fine,” he mumbled thickly. “This has happened before.”
Dreamer was no expert, but she was pretty sure he was going into shock. The shot was a clear-through that had probably hit one of the nearby houses, but she couldn’t get the hemorrhaging to stop on both sides. It was pooling around her knees. She looked around desperately. Everyone was just standing there, watching!
“Why won’t someone help him?” she cried out, feeling herself come unglued.
“I’m calling for an ambulance, lady,” the police officer with the radio told deTarlo definitively. She shrugged and shifted her balance from one heel to the other.
“It’ll take too long to get here now, with the traffic,” she said. “Besides, he has a DNR.”
“What?” asked St. Cross, shocked.
“He signed it days ago,” deTarlo said nonchalantly. “It’s on his tag if you don’t believe me. Said he wanted some control over when the study would end.”
“Why did you let him do that?” demanded Chester. DeTarlo raised her eyebrows as if it were outside of her control, adjusting her glasses on the bridge of her nose.
“Somebody get me something to use as a tourniquet!” Dreamer called out, gripping Aidriel’s leg with both hands. She looked around to see if any of the people watching helplessly from a distance were going to move. They were all staring, enthralled, but keeping their distance; even the police officers. What in the world was wrong with them?
Aidriel laid still and listened to the goings-on around him. His hands were getting tingly, and the spottiness of his vision was worsening. He felt as if he were falling asleep, and could think only that he didn’t want that. Sitting up swiftly caused temporary dizziness, but Aidriel could see well enough to realize Rubin was inside the dead zone.
Dreamer saw his eyes focus and he became still. Glancing over her shoulder, she looked swiftly back to Aidriel, the fear apparent on her face.
“How did he…?” she whispered. “He broke the rule.”
It was not the first time Rubin had done so, neither was it the first time Dreamer saw a Passer that did. There was an unwritten rule among the spirits, it seemed, that they could not get directly involved in the world. They often threw things, slammed doors, shook beds, made the floors groan, supplied their companions with information all the time, but they were not supposed to attack with their hands as they had been doing, and they were never allowed to directly change something.
When Dreamer was ten, she and her Girl Scout troop went into the woods at a national park on a camping trip. A few of them had wandered off in search of firewood and to explore, and she’d intentionally lost sight of all others. She’d liked the solitude, and felt that perhaps she was visiting the borderlands of heaven until the bear appeared.
But Tracy was there. The Passer had always been young-looking and cynical. It tried to steer Dreamer’s decision-making, but the girl was too frightened to follow directions. So Tracy broke the rule and took a heavy stick to the bear’s face, startling it and driving it away. It might have saved Dreamer’s life, and though the incident left a lasting impression, she had never thought too much about what her Passer had actually done. But now as Tracy stepped through the invisible barrier to stand beside Rubin, Dreamer realized the long-term ramifications of breaking the rules.
Aidriel began to have difficulty maintaining focus. His awareness of his situation was fading, his anxiety with it. His blood was still seeping around Dreamer’s fingers with no sign of stopping. It was hot and thin; the aspirin he had been taking nearly constantly for the last several days was probably contributing to his continuous hemorrhaging. He lay back down on the street, his head on her jacket, and relaxed, breathing easier.
“Hang in there,” Dreamer encouraged. There was that phrase again, and that word: hang. And here he was once more on the threshold of death.
Neither of them noticed the silent approach of the Passers. Before Dreamer could react, Rubin flung her aside with enough force to dislodge her grip on Aidriel’s leg. She wiped the blood from her hands on her jeans and stood up, turning and watching briefly in shock. Tracy put its hands around Aidriel’s throat and placed its feet on either side of him, holding him up and strangling him. He tried to grip the ghost’s arms, tried to pull free, but he was too tired. Rubin put one hand under Aidriel’s head, and placed the other over his nose and mouth.
“Let it go, my friend,” the Passer said almost soothingly. “Release it and the pain will fade away.”
“Tracy, please!” Dreamer pleaded, her eyes glassy. She was horrified and grieved to watch a Passer she had known and trusted for years turn against her. Tracy acted as if it didn’t hear Dreamer.
Aidriel’s body went into convulsions as he was asphyxiated. His head fell back, despite Rubin’s hand, and in his vision, the smoky forms of the watching crowd of ghosts faded into a featureless pale cloud that emitted a lightless haze. He felt as if his very spirit were rising up out of him, gathering into a tight wad in his windpipe. The arch in his back became more exaggerated; his arms bent in close to his body, his hands involuntarily gripping at nothing on either side of his chest. All the life and energy in him was gathering in his windpipe, at the base of his neck, and the force of the spirit’s struggle to escape was pulling him up so the rest of him hung limply around his levitating throat.
If he had been able to see anything past the gathering of Passers, he would have realized the horizon was literally upside down, as it appeared in the hallucinations during his earlier deaths. His leg continued to bleed, draining him of all heat, so he began to tremble with cold.
“Release it,” Rubin urged him, “and the pain will fade away.”
Tracy tightened its grip so Aidriel could not take in another breath. They were surprised, however, when Dreamer swiped a blood-streaked hand through her Passer.
“Let go of him!” the phlebotomist demanded.
Instantly, to the shock of everyone watching, Tracy obeyed and inched away from Aidriel. Rubin continued to support Aidriel’s upper back, its free hand hovering over him, prepared to snatch away his spirit when it broke free. Dreamer was moments away from demanding that Rubin stand down also, but she never got the chance. Tracy launched at her, choking her into silence.
The stunned watchers around the dead zone gasped but could not interfere as Tracy strangled the breath right out of Dreamer without a hint of hesitation or remorse. Aidriel was too dead himself to know what was happening, but Dreamer kept her eyes on him through her tears. Even as she collapsed and suffocated, she saw the hazy form expanding from Aidriel’s throat and into Rubin’s grasp.
Aidriel could not resist death any longer; as his spirit rose and escaped, Rubin released his body and let it fall back to the street. The mist took on a visibly human form, and Aidriel the Passer looked around him, his face a picture of loss.
“Finally,” he murmured, as if admitting to something he knew would eventually come. Tracy became distracted to see him, and released Dreamer, so she also dropped lifelessly to the pavement. Though hasty, the strangulation had been effective, and Dreamer’s Passer found it easier to exit her mortal shell than Aidriel had been able to. She threw herself upon his ghost, gripping him around the chest, but Tracy and Rubin were already starting to drag Aidriel into them, devouring and absorbing him.
“No, don’t let them!” Dreamer screamed. “Now you can’t let them have control!”
The last word echoed through Aidriel’s thoughts like a bell’s peal, and suddenly it all made sense. From the very start, it had all been about the control. He had never taken charge of anything after he was first attacked, and over time, he had less and less control over his life. During the last several weeks in particular, he had had no say whatsoever in what was happening to him, and that was exactly how the Passers wanted it in leading up to this moment. Control was what they had stolen away from him at all cost, and was of the greatest import now, even outside of his body.
Aidriel looked to the sky, and there was a flash of lightning in his psyche, illuminating his vision from the corners inward, so he could no longer see the natural world. The change inside him was instantaneous. He could resolutely determine his path, and could witness it open before him like a complex passageway, the surface of which told the future and the past in intersecting designs that he created at will with unrealized skill. In his revelation he saw the faces and immediately knew the names and stories of every one of the by-now thousands of Passers encircling the intersection. If he desired, his range of view and knowledge of the ghosts could extend across the whole surface of the Earth. Their combined being was vast and complex in his mind’s eye; a conscious glittering cloud of spectral nebulae, the smallest detail of which was a world within a world and could reveal everything. He could sense how many of them were rule breakers on a lesser level; hangers-on to existence in the world when they had fulfilled their purpose and should pass on to the next.
The ghosts knew the spiritual world would change, and every Passer on the planet had wanted to see the spectacle, even if there was no role for them to play in bringing about the result. The fate of their passive invasion hung in the balance but their presence at the dead zone was no last-ditch effort. It had never been their intention to beat Aidriel to death; they’d come to see his awakening and share, if only briefly while he connected with them, in his all-encompassing power. Dreamer had been right in her assumption that the existence of the Passers was an upset to the balance; an accidental tipping of the scales that the spirits had chosen to exploit for their own insatiable thirst for control. But the Passers had mistakenly thought that the weblike union of power that Aidriel would initiate could be shared. He was not their equal; the rules they broke did not apply to him.
Shedding the defenselessness like an unwanted cloak, Aidriel felt the world opening up to him. His sense of being smothered evaporated. He slipped out of the grasp of Rubin, Tracy, even Dreamer, and stood upright and vibrant as if he were still in mortal form. With just a turn of his ghostly head, an electromagnetic disturbance poured out from him like an earthquake of sound, and he commanded complete control of every Passer, everywhere. The ghosts’ underlying current of hatred and greed for power vanished. On every continent, the Passers stopped in their tracks, their instinct to come find him vanishing. They blinked and turned and went back to where they had been. The shifting clouds of smoky spirits thinned before the eyes of those that saw them as many of the Passers vanished from existence. For too long the “guidance” of the ghosts had overwhelmed the wills of their charges and with the control of the dead in his hands, Aidriel could restore the balance again in favor of the living.
A simultaneous sigh arose from the Passers in Wellsburg that was nearly deafening. They raised their voices in a wordless plea for mercy—to have their hopes at greater power fulfilled, but Aidriel could see through them and into their intentions; he cast them out and across the divide into eternity. The journalists, cameramen and police wheeled about in surprise, their eyes and lenses surveying the mob as it began to vanish; Aidriel spared nearly none of them in his undoing of their Sentience coup. Soon all that remained of the nonliving were Rubin and Tracy within the dead zone, and Rod, Kara and Andrei on the outside.
Rod turned to Chester, its mood immensely sad.
“Can you understand what this means?” it asked. Williams was watching with a stare a bit less awestruck and confused than the others, and he nodded faintly.
“There’s a hierarchy among the Passers,” he whispered. It meant that the Passers had seen the future, and did not want to be controlled. There was an order of their actions that had been laid out, and they knew they had to fulfill it. If driving Aidriel to madness would strip from him the truth of his power when he died, and attacking him until he had no control was the only way to do so, they would do it. All the others they had tormented had forfeited their rights to mastership when they killed themselves; even their spirits did not realize the truth of what they had given up, and if they did, they chose to do nothing about it. But Aidriel had not taken kindly to the Passers’ methods for mass rule and had punished them.
St. Cross looked up as if startled out of a trance when Chester spoke, and became animated with his hands.
“I was right!” he exclaimed. “There is truth in the hidden meaning of the Paradox!”
“Meaning what?” asked deTarlo. She was scribbling as fast as she could on her clipboard, teetering dangerously on her heels as if she might fall over. Her quick eyes gauged the agitated law officers around, and she cocked her ear to catch the sound of an ambulance siren in the distance.
“Meaning Aidriel was tried by fire to take his place as…” St. Cross’s voice trailed off when a bloodcurdling howl rose in Rubin’s mouth.
Sometimes the Passers resisted when it was time to pass on into the afterlife, the next step of their three-plane journey. They were usually harmless while it was happening, but it was frightening to see and hear this take place all the same. With Aidriel’s change and the submission of the ghosts, the time of the afflicters had abruptly ended. Tracy hid its face in grief at the realization, but rose and faded without a struggle at Aidriel’s silent command. Rubin, however, was a breaker of rules; it could still save the remaining Passers from their newly crowned master’s control if it removed the master. It seized Aidriel and tried to drag him up into the air as it evaporated.
“Don’t let it happen!” cried out Kara, starting forward. There were only moments to prevent it, and had Dreamer not been a Passer also, she would have been forced to watch helplessly. But there was a reason that Tracy had strangled her to death, even if the Passer had acted merely in hatred. She leapt and embraced Aidriel from behind, ordering with strong authority, “Rubin, pass on alone!”
This moment was the reason St. Cross had felt Dreamer needed to meet Aidriel. It was not only that Tracy broke the rules when it attacked the bear; it broke the rules to obey Dreamer’s order to do so. There was something about the girl’s words that demanded obedience from the spirits. Somehow, the shrink seemed to know she was the one to help Aidriel save himself.
In the twinkling of an eye, Rubin was gone, though Aidriel continued to drift upward. Dreamer did not have to struggle to pull him back to earth. Falling down as if to her knees, she guided him onto his back over his body, ensuring he returned to it. Though his mortal shell was damaged, the bleeding in his leg had stopped when his heart did.
No pain of leaving his body or nearly doing so the many times before compared to the white-hot agony that bathed him to return to life. He sucked in a breath and convulsed as he