Crosstalk (30 page)

“No,” she said, “it was a cat.”

“That's right, it was,” he said, shutting his door. “
Very
modern,” and when she smiled: “I'm afraid I need you to let go of me again for a sec.”

“Why?” she asked, her grip tightening.

“Because I've got to start the car. So you either need to let go or else you have to get my keys out of my jeans for me.”

“Oh!” she said, letting go as if she'd been bitten, and her mortification should have been enough to make her pull herself together, but the moment he had the keys out and the key in the ignition, she grabbed for his arm again. “I'm sorry. I know I'm acting like a baby. They're just so—”

“I know,” he said. “I wrapped myself around my bedpost the first time it happened to me and had to be pried loose.”

“You did?”

“Yup,” he said, putting the car in gear with difficulty and pulling out into the street. “Though putting your hand on my leg instead of my arm might be a better idea till we get out of all this traffic.”

She nodded and grasped his thigh just above the knee, and it took every bit of willpower she had not to wrap both arms around his leg like a demented fan at a rock concert.

“You're doing great,” C.B. said. “I'll have you away from here in just a sec.”

Out of the city,
she thought, glancing fearfully out her window at the passing streetlamps and buildings.
Out of reach of the voices.
“Please hurry,” she murmured. “They're catching up.”

He nodded, glanced at his watch, and stepped on the gas.
Good,
she thought, straining to see ahead to the on-ramp sign.
In another minute, we'll be on the highway.

But even as she thought it, C.B. was slowing down. He turned right onto a dark side street, stopped the car, and shut off the ignition.

“Thankfully the rest of the world assumed that the Irish were crazy, a theory that the Irish themselves did nothing to debunk.”

—E
OIN
C
OLFER
,
Artemis Fowl

“What are you doing?” Briddey said, looking nervously around at the dark street. “Why did you stop the car?”

“I'm buying us some time,” C.B. said, sliding forward in his seat and fishing her phone out of his jeans pocket. “What's your password? And don't think it. Say it out loud.”

“You don't have to do that. I'm not worried about reinforcing our neural pathway anymore. The more reinforced, the better.” She laughed shakily. “I'm just so grateful we had one.”

“Me, too. But that's not why I told you to talk out loud. Speaking helps to screen out the voices. So what's your password?”

She told him. “But shouldn't you do that after we get away from the voices?”

C.B. shook his head. “We need to do this before intermission.”

At which point Trent would come looking for her, and when he couldn't find her, he'd ask the usher, “Have you seen a redhead in a green dress?” and it wouldn't matter that C.B. had called her Lucy and told the usher she'd come to the theater alone.

“Exactly,” C.B. said. “What reason did you give Trent for leaving?”

“Maeve.”

“Maeve?”
he said, looking up, horrified, from the phone. “Why did you do that?”

“Because before in the bar, when the voices started, I'd told Traci Hamilton I was worried about Maeve, that she'd been having problems and I needed to go call Mary Clare. It was the only thing I could think of to get away and—”

“Deal with the voices,” he finished for her. “Did you tell her—or Trent—what those problems were?”

“No. Trent wasn't there. And all I said to Traci Hamilton was that my sister was worried about my niece. So then in the theater I pretended Mary Clare had just called me, and I told Trent something had happened and I had to go find out what.”

“Then we should be okay,” he said, and began rapidly typing a text message.

“What are you telling him?” she asked.

“That Maeve ran away.”

“Ran
away
! She wouldn't do that!”

“And
you
wouldn't have gone tearing out of the theater and over to your sister's because Maeve got a B on her report card. It has to be something serious enough to justify abandoning him and the Hamiltons, which means either Maeve ran away or broke a body part, and running away's easier to fake. There's no cast.”

“But if Trent calls my family—”

“He won't. I'm sending a follow-up that you found her at your Aunt Oona's, and she's fine.”

“But if you tell him that, he'll want me to come back to the theater,” she said, her hand involuntarily tightening on his leg.

“Don't worry. I'm telling him Mary Clare's having a meltdown, and you've got to stay and try to calm her down.”

“But what if Trent calls me during intermission and tells me to forget Mary Clare, that the Hamiltons are more important?”

“He won't be able to. I'm turning off your phone.”

“What if he calls Aunt Oona's house?”

“I've got that covered,” he said, continuing to type.

“What do you mean? You didn't text Maeve, did you?” If he'd asked Maeve to provide an alibi, she'd insist on knowing why, and—

“I didn't text Maeve,” he said, pocketing her phone and starting the car. “And anyway, Trent won't call. He'll be too busy convincing the Hamiltons that your sudden departure wasn't a reflection on them. After intermission I'll send another text saying it looks like calming your family down's going to take longer than you thought, and you'll talk to him tomorrow.”

Trent will be so upset,
she thought.

“Too bad,” C.B. said.

He glanced in the rearview mirror and pulled out onto the street, and she felt a wave of relief that they were moving again and getting away from the voices.

“You didn't hear Trent back there, did you?” C.B. was saying. “His wasn't one of the voices, was it?”

“
No,
of course not,” she said. “The voices I heard were
horrible
!”

“Actually, they were just your average theatergoers. And your average everything else—friends, relatives, co-workers—”

“But they were so—”

“Vulgar? Vindictive? Spiteful? Scheming? I'm afraid that's what people sound like in the privacy of their own heads.” He gave her a wry grin. “I told you it's a cesspool in there.”

He stopped at a red light. “It's not entirely their fault. They can say out loud the nice stuff they think—‘Wow, you look great!' or ‘What a pretty day!' or ‘I'm filled with the milk of human kindness!'—but not ‘Go to hell!' or ‘Man, what great tits!' Inside their heads is the only place the bad stuff can come out, which tends to make their thoughts disproportionately unpleasant. But also, people are brutish, hateful, greedy, mean, manipulative, and cruel.”

“But everyone can't be awful.”

“You haven't listened to them for as long as I have.”

“Are you telling me there's nobody nice?”

“I didn't say that. But that just makes it worse. Nice guys really do finish last. And nice girls. They get lied to and betrayed and stuck on somebody who's in love with somebody else and get their hearts broken. And listening to that's even worse than listening to the creeps and the monsters. Speaking of which, you still haven't answered my question. Did you hear Trent?”

“I told you, Trent couldn't have—”

“Been one of the voices. Yes, he could have. But like I told you this morning, if you'd heard him, you'd have recognized his voice, like you recognized mine.”

And Jill's and Art Sampson's,
she thought.

“Exactly. If you've heard the person before, your brain automatically assigns their speaking voice to the thoughts. If not, sometimes it'll assign gender or age based on the things the voice says, but otherwise it's completely characterless. That's why you couldn't describe the decaf latte's voice.”

And why the blind-date woman's voice had sounded female the second time she'd heard it. “Can they hear me, too?” she asked.

“No.”

“Are you sure?” she asked, her hand tightening convulsively on his leg. If they could hear, they'd know where she was. They'd come after her.

“I'm positive,” C.B. said. “I've been listening to them for fifteen years, remember? They have no idea you can hear them.”

“But it felt like they were shouting at me and—”

“Attacking you? Trying to kill you? Yeah, I know. But they're not. They don't even know you exist. You're just overhearing their thoughts. It's like being in a restaurant and accidentally hearing a stranger talking at the next table.”

No, it's not,
she thought. It was possible to shut out people you overheard but not these—

“That's because the mind's hardwired to make sense of whatever it hears,” C.B. said. “It tries to do that with the voices, but there are too many of them and they're all speaking at the same time. And unlike the voices of the people you hear with your ears, they don't mask one another or merge together into background noise. They remain distinct. So the mind ends up panicking from sensory overload.”

Sensory overload? Is that what you call it?
she thought, feeling again the ominous voices beating relentlessly on her.

“But if they can't hear me, then why does it matter whether I heard Trent?”

“Because of the EED. If you could hear him, it might have suggested he was beginning to be able to sense your emotions, and the last thing we need right now is for him to be picking up a feeling that you're in trouble and deciding he needs to come find out what's going on. We've got too much work to do. But you didn't hear him, so we're good.”

And in a few minutes they'd be safely on the freeway and out of reach of the theater and the voices. She wondered how far they had to go.

Please don't let it be far,
she thought, looking out at the passing darkness and willing C.B. to drive faster.
If he doesn't, they'll catch up, they'll wash over the car…

Stop,
she ordered herself.
Don't think about the voices.

“Nope, bad idea,” C.B. said. “Trying not to only makes you think about them, like when somebody says, ‘Whatever you do, don't think about an elephant,' and then that's all you can think about. No, you want to think about something else altogether. Like elephants. Or Lucky Charms. Or where we should go on our honeymoon. Anything to create some white noise.”

“You mean like those CDs that are supposed to help you sleep? The ones with the sound of rippling streams and soothing waves?” She was immediately sorry she'd said that. It reminded her of the roaring waterfalls.

“Which is why you can't use those,” C.B. said. “Plus they don't work. And neither does blasting loud music or listening to audiobooks. Or wearing noise-canceling headphones. The voices don't have anything to do with sound. They come from inside the brain.”

“But I thought you said I needed to create white noise—”

“Mental white noise. Inhibiting one set of signals by focusing on another, like when you're working on a report and don't hear your phone ringing. By focusing on the report, your brain automatically boosts the signals you want and turns the volume down on all the others.”

“So by trying to list the Lucky Charms marshmallows, I can do the same thing to the voices—”

He nodded. “Or listing Monopoly tokens or movie stars or brands of designer shoes. Or you can recite Monty Python routines or sing songs, especially songs with lots of verses, like the theme from
Gilligan's Island.
You know the theme from
Gilligan's Island,
don't you?”

“Everyone knows the theme from
Gilligan's Island.
”

“Good, then you can sing that. Or the Pokemon theme. Or ‘When Irish Eyes are Smiling.' ”

“And singing those songs will stop the voices?”

“No, nothing can stop them. But singing—”

She gasped. “What do you mean, nothing can stop them?”

“Sorry, I didn't mean to scare you. There are ways to keep them at bay—”

“At
bay
?” she cried, thinking of them always there, coiled and snarling, waiting to pounce.

“Sorry, bad metaphor. I should have said there are ways to control them. It's a lot like tinnitus—you know, that continuous ringing in the ears some people have? There's no way to eliminate it—”

No way to eliminate it? “But Mary Clare said the EED's effects can wear off.”

“Yeah, well, I've had the voices for fifteen years, and they haven't shown any sign of going away yet. I'm afraid they're permanent. But there are ways to control them. I'll teach you—”

She'd stopped listening at the word “permanent.” The voices would always be there, poised to attack, every time she went to a play or a meeting—

That's why C.B. refuses to go to them,
she thought.
Because the voices are there, waiting. And have been since he was thirteen. They'll never go away,
and I can't sing or recite poetry forever—

“No, no, you won't have to,” C.B. said. “Those things are just interim measures till we can get your permanent defenses up.”

“Permanent defenses?”

“Yeah. I'm going to teach you how to build barricades that'll keep the voices out, but I can't do that till I get you someplace safe, and the sooner I do that, the better.”

Someplace safe. That meant that even though there was no way to stop the voices, there were places they couldn't reach. The knowledge that she could get out of range was immediately calming, and with the calmness came the awareness that she had a death grip on C.B.'s leg.