INTERVENTION (35 page)

Now.

The big diesel engine of the new feller-buncher coughed into life. Its shear, mounted on a twenty-six-foot knuckle boom, lifted into the air with a hiss of hydraulics. Then the whole rig came lumbering toward him on caterpillar treads, the grab-arms and the blades that could sever a two-foot tree trunk in a single bite held open at the height of a man's chest. The machine's cab was empty. Before Don turned to flee, screaming, he saw the control levers moving by themselves and heard silent laughter.

FROM THE MEMOIRS OF ROGATIEN REMILLARD

S
INCE THAT SUNDAY
promised to be a hectic one, with two convention banquets and a fund-raiser dinner-dance scheduled at the hotel, I went to the 6:30
A.M.
Mass at the little church in Bretton Woods. It was a rustic place, dimmed by stained glass windows in abstract patterns. Hikers, golfers, and other resort employees like myself made up most of the somnolent, thinly scattered congregation. I arrived a few minutes late, so I slipped into a rear pew back in a dark corner. For this reason it was not immediately noticed when I died with my brother.

It happened during the sermon. My mind was wandering and I had become aware of an increasing sense of unease, only partly dulled by my semiwakeful state. The foreboding may have been an aspect of precognition; but I had no real intimation of catastrophe until I abruptly lost my hearing. I saw Father Ingram's lips move but no longer heard his voice. In place of the background noises of shifting bodies, coughs, and rustling prayer booklets there was a great hush, hollow and portentous. I snapped into alertness.

Then came an appalling noise, a deep grinding rumble laced with a more shrill, undulating sound, like brasses wailing in dissonance or howls from a chorus of lacerated throats. It built to a thunderous crescendo as though the earth itself were being rent open beneath me. I was immobilized by shock. I remember wondering why the priest was oblivious to the tumult, why the other worshipers kept their seats instead of leaping up in panic, why the church roof remained firm when by rights it should have been tumbling down around my ears.

Any notion I had of being caught in an earthquake was disabused when I went blind. At the same time it seemed that a band of red-hot metal clamped about my breast and squeezed, stopping my heart and breath in an explosion of agony. I thought: a coronary! But I was only forty-four, in perfect health—and hadn't the Family Ghost told me that I had a long life ahead of me? Lord, it's a
mistake...

The shattering racket and the pain cut off simultaneously. My body seemed immersed in a thick and swirling medium. All around me was darkness, a liquefied void that was neither air nor water. Then I realized that the black wasn't empty at all; pictures were flashing in it, appearing and disappearing with subliminal rapidity almost like single-frame cinema projections displayed on dozens of small screens encircling me. I recognized early childhood scenes with Tante Lorraine and the young cousins, school days, Don and I blowing out candles on a joint birthday cake, One' Louie walloping the pair of us for some transgression, Christmas caroling in deep snow, fishing in the river, an embarrassing freshman high school dance. The vignettes whirled faster and faster and I realized at last that they were memories, the accelerating replay of a life.

But not my life. Don's.

For the first time I experienced real fear in place of stunned astonishment. The riot of images was acquiring a full sensory and emotional input and I seemed caught in an insane mélange of sights, sounds, tastes, smells, visceral and tactile sensations. My mental voice cried Don's name and I heard him babbling an incoherent, furious reply. All of the remembered scenes were showing
me.
And the emotional transfer revealed that my twin brother despised and hated me to the very depths of his being.

Why, Donnie, why!

The only reply was rage. The visions were drenched in it. I seemed to be at the center of a psychic tornado with Don's mind flailing at me from every scene, hurt and degraded. His wife, his children, his friends flickered past, all wounded by his soul-sickness, all diminished, their attempts to help him rejected until it was too late. And he blamed it all on me.

But I don't understand why!

I felt myself standing firm in the center of the vortex while he whirled, helpless, remembering the very worst of it: his rejection of Denis, his corruption of Victor, the torment he had heaped on Sunny and the other children during the years of alcoholism, his seduction of Elaine in a calculated desire to hurt and humiliate me. To my amazement I saw that he was desperately sorry for all those things, and had been for years. What lingered was the source of the sins, his abiding hatred of me. In the final scene of his life he punished himself for it, but the action was one of severance and not remorse.

Donnie, I don't know why you hate me. But it's all right. I've never hated you.

He said: You should have.

He controlled the machine with his own psychokinesis. I screamed, begging him not to do it, but of course it had already happened. The blades that cut him in half cut him free of me at last.

***

I opened my eyes. Bill Saladino, the limping old church usher, was nudging me with the collection basket and grinning. I fished inside my jacket for the envelope and dropped it in. Bill winked at me tolerantly and stumped away, carrying the little basket of offerings up to the altar to be blessed.

***

Don's funeral was a big one, attended by scores of Remillards together with nearly two hundred others who had grown up or worked with him. He looked fit and handsome in his casket after the local croque-mort performed his duty; and the eulogy delivered at his burial Mass proclaimed God's unsearchable ways as well as his compassion for the brokenhearted, to which category Don indubitably belonged. There was a good deal of sotto voce reference to "blessed release," and the pious aunts reassured one another that alcoholism was a disease one simply couldn't help. Sunny, supported by husky Victor at her left elbow and the slight but commanding Denis at her right, bore up well. Her eight younger children stood about her dry-eyed at the gravesight while the cousins and aunts and female neighbors wept.

The official verdict on Don was death by misadventure. Denis and Victor had driven their cars simultaneously into the logging site just as the runaway feller-buncher, with Don's severed body still held in its grab-arms, struck a large stump with one of its tracks and tipped over into a ravine. The resulting mangle, and a double dose of coercion aimed at the green-faced investigating deputies, made plausible to anyone but an experienced logger the final report on Don's demise. One of the witnesses, at least, was of unimpeachable reputation.

***

Denis and I were at the same motel, and the morning after the funeral we breakfasted together. He would be staying to help Sunny wind up Don's affairs while I was heading back to the White Mountain Resort and the pre-Memorial Day rush. The coffee shop was crowded and noisy, but noise is immaterial when the conversation is largely mind-to-mind. The pair of us might have been father and son: a gaunt older man in a good summer worsted three-piece, thumbing through the
Wall Street Journal,
and a vaguely undergraduate-looking youth in a navy-blue jogging outfit whose extraordinary eyes were blanked out by dark glasses.

Denis lifted the plastic pot. "More coffee?" I think I've solved the mystery of my young siblings' nonoperancy.

I said, "Half a cup, maybe." Victor's certainly at the bottom of it—and maybe Don, too. It's impossible that not a single one should have inherited telepathic ability, given the fact that your mother has occasionally shown flashes of the talent. Jeanette and Laurette were telepathic as infants but then seemed to lose it. I'm not sure about the others—

"Sugar?" It was the same with the other six. They were born with higher faculties but had them deliberately suppressed by aversion-conditioning: mental punishment. I got hold of the youngest, Pauline, who's seven. She was vulnerable through grief and shock and it was easy for me to—to—I suppose you'd call it hypnotize—render her receptive to my command that she regress to babyhood and describe her impressions of Victor and Papa. It was clear what had been done. Poor little Paulie! But Papa had nothing to do with it, thank God. It was all Victor.

The ruthless young bastard! ... But how was it possible? He would have had to suppress the babies when he was still just a kid himself! How old was he when the girl twins were born? Four? And then Jackie and Yvonne and the boy twins coming bang-bang-bang and George just after you bachelored at Dartmouth in '80 that'd make Vic ten—and he would've been twelve when Paulie arrived my God my God no innocent kid could do such an evil thing—

[Detachment.] I'll have to show you some of my juvenile psychiatric case histories. He could do it, all right. Nothing is more self-centered than a toddler. Why do you think some of them have tantrums? They want the world to turn around them. Most children outgrow that mind-set and discover altruism. It's useful for survival, actually. But there are exceptions: sociopaths. Vic certainly seems to fit the profile. At first he acted to secure his position as Papa's favorite. Later, his motives would have become more complex. Power-oriented. You see the way he's going. He's an uneducated man, just as Papa was. A shallow thinker with a stunted conscience and tremendous drive and overweening conceit. Papa had those attributes, too, but he lacked self-confidence because he was afraid of his psychic powers. Also, he'd been inculcated with moral values from earliest childhood, which Vic hadn't, and guilt warred with egoism, leading to ultimate destruction. Vic is a much tougher nut than poor Papa. Even without higher faculties he'd be something to reckon with. I have a feeling that being a pulpwood tycoon is only the beginning of his ambition...

"Want to pass me a little more strawberry jam? Thanks." What the devil are we going to do?

He mind-screens like the Chase Manhattan Bank vault. I can't see into him and I can't budge him a millimeter with coercion. I'm virtually certain he's used his powers in shady ways for self-aggrandizement. Those logging contracts, for instance, and the big bank loan for capitalization of the company. Pure coercion. And there are rumors that at least two pieces of his equipment were acquired via moonlight requisition. Watchmen and guard dogs are no problem for an operator like Vic. (They wouldn't be to me! ) And God knows enough logging gear gets stolen by purely
normal
thieves...

"Interesting article here in the
fournal.
Want a look? Seems Senator Piccolomini's narcotics bill has a good chance of passing."

Do you mean to say there's nothing we can do to stop that young freebooter?

"Let's see. Hey—bad news for the pot smugglers!" Getting legal proof of his wrongdoing would be very difficult. And what's to prevent him from coercing a jury even if we did get the goods on him? A Homo superior criminal has the odds in his favor. And if one tries to counter him using his own weapons ... well, you saw what happened to Papa.

I exclaimed out loud, "Doux Jésus—you can't be serious! I told you the way it was. I shared it!"

But I was
there.
With Victor. He's a terrific screener, but he let the triumph leak. I was standing there spewing my guts out and he was crowing! ... Papa was a morbid and self-hating man, like most alcoholics, but that night he'd been scared into asking for help for the first time. He wasn't sunk in despair, he was reaching for a way out. Taking a first step onto a very shaky bridge across a black canyon. And somebody cut that bridge somebody sabotaged his newborn hope somebody planted a powerful coercive incitement to suicide that reinforced his own underlying tendency toward death:
Victor!
He knows I know. He knows I can't do a thing about it.

Can Victor ... hurt you?

No more than Papa could. [Concern.] But I'm not so sure about you, Uncle Rogi. Your mind is pretty transparent, especially about emotion-charged matters. Your sharing of Papa's death ... if Victor found out, he might think you were a threat. I've been considering ways to protect you.

I pushed away my plate. "I don't think I'll finish these hot cakes after all. Waitress! Will you give us our check, please?" Christ Denis what a crock of shit maybe Don was right after all powers cursed—

A long time ago you said that what you'd really like to do is open a bookstore in a quiet college town.

... You're right. I'd almost forgotten.

You're a topflight convention manager. You could probably get a job in hotel management somewhere else in the country. But Hanover really needs an antiquarian bookshop, and if you were there you wouldn't be
alone.
There are nearly forty of us working at Dartmouth now, research assistants and subjects in my lab. You could help us. And I'm certain we could protect you.

"Somehow," I said, smiling, "I don't think I'd be in serious danger here. I have a strong belief in guardian ... angels."

"Don't be a fool!" Even through the dark glasses I could see Denis's eyes blaze and feel the searing force of his mind that took hold of me like a puppy. He released me instantly as I reacted with fear and astonishment. His mental speech was anguished:

I should have been able to save Papa from Vic! I ran away from the situation at home shut out what I knew was happening did it to survive and because I believed my work more important than my biological father's life but I
should
have saved him
should
have loved him and didn't and I'll always blame myself always feel him dying dying lost in despair and I won't lose
you
the same way damn you Rogi can't you understand?...One day I'll find a way to checkmate Vic. Until then the powers
are
cursed and perhaps we are too but I'll find a way to redeem us and if that isn't megalomania I don't know what it is maybe I'm crazier than Vic and more futile than Papa but I must go ahead. I must! Please help please understand please know who you are to me why I need you...