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He laughed as if I’d said something funny.
“Do you want to see God?”
“I want to see what’s there. I may fail, but what we saw today makes me believe that success is possible. The floor of her dream was too heavy for her. I have eleven more test subjects. One of them may be stronger.”
I should have left then.
We had two more subjects in July. One was a female carpenter named Melissa Grant. She dreamed of the house but couldn’t get inside. The door was locked against her, she said. One was the owner of a bookstore in New Gloucester. He said his shop was probably going to go under but he wasn’t ready to give up and eight hundred dollars would pay for another month’s rent and a shipment of books few people would buy. He slept for two hours while Debussy played and said he didn’t dream of the house at all but of his father, dead for twenty years. He said he dreamed they went fishing. Elgin gave him his check and sent him on his way. There was one more July appointment on our schedule, a man named Norman Bilson, but he never showed up.
On the 1st of August a man named Hiram Gaskill came to the house at the end of Lake Road. He was a construction worker who had been laid off. He kicked away his boots and took the couch. He said “Let’s get to it” and drank down the contents of the beaker with no questions. He looked at the picture and at first I didn’t think the drug was going to work on him, he was a big fellow, probably close on to two-seventy, but eventually he dropped off and began to snore. Elgin stood in his usual position beside me, bent forward vulturelike so his nose almost touched the glass and his breath fogged it. Nothing happened for almost an hour. Then the snoring stopped and still sleeping Gaskill groped for the pen resting on the open pad of Blue Horse paper. He wrote something on it without opening his eyes.
“Note that,” Elgin said, but I already had, not in Gregg but in plain: At 3:17 PM Gaskill writes for approx. 15 secs. Drops pen. Sleeping again now & snoring again.
At 3:33 Gaskill awoke on his own and sat up and swung his legs off the couch. We went in and Elgin asked him what he had dreamed.
“Nothing. Sorry, Mr. Elgin. Do I still get the money?”
“Yes. That’s all right. Are you sure you remember nothing?”
“No, but it was a good nap.”
I was looking at the pad of paper and asked him if he’d served.
“No, sir, I did not. Went to the physical and they said I had high blood. Take pills for it now.”
Elgin looked at the pad and what was written there. When Gaskill was gone in his old pickup truck, leaving a blue cloud of exhaust for the wind to fritter away, Elgin tapped the single line which had been neatly printed even though the man running the pen had his eyes closed. That look of excitement, of triumph, was in his face.
“This isn’t his writing. Nothing like it.”
He laid down Gaskill’s release form beside the tablet. The name and address on the form were in the hand of someone who wrote seldom and found it laborious. Although we had background on Elgin’s subjects no more than Elgin had actual scientific equipment to test his subjects with, Gaskill’s laborious printing suggested to me a man who had only completed as much schooling as the state of Maine required, and that unwillingly except perhaps for the shop courses. The printing on the pad was neat and precise, although there were no diacritical marks over the words where they should have been and the spelling was not correct. It was as if Gaskill had been writing what he heard. Taking dictation like any steno would do. Which raised the question of who had been giving it.
“Vietnamese? It is, isn’t it. It’s why you asked if he served.”
“Yes.”
Of course it was. Mat trang da day cua ma guy.
“What does it say?”
“It says the moon is full of demons.”
That evening when I went down to the water, Elgin was on the bench, again smoking. The water was gray as slate. There were no boats on it. The sky was crowded with thunderheads coming in from the west. I sat down. Without looking at me, Elgin said, “That message was meant for you.”
Of course it was.
“He knew you were in Vietnam. More. He knew you knew the language.”
“Something knew.”
Lightning hit the water a mile out, electrocuting whatever fish happened to be near the surface. They would float in and feed the gulls. The rain would come soon. The hills on the far side of Dark Score had disappeared behind a gray membrane that would soon descend on our side.
“It could be time to stop. Something on the other side of your barrier is saying don’t fuck with me.”
He shook his head without looking away from the coming rain. “Not at all. We’re on the verge. I feel it. I know it.” Now he turned. “Please don’t leave me, William. I need your skills more than ever. If I publish, I will need your raw notes, not just the photos and the transcriptions. And you are a witness.”
Not just a witness. It had been me that Gaskill, or whatever came into Gaskill, had singled out. Not Elgin. The Gentleman Scientist was fooling with something dangerous and knew it but either wasn’t willing to stop or couldn’t and in the end those things come to the same. I could stop which made me a fool to go on, but there was another factor. Something had happened to me. I had grown curious. It was welcome and dreadful in equal measure. It was a feeling and in my world those had been in short supply. You see a man with his legs gone and his face sliding off even as he screams in agony, you see his teeth on his shirt like a barbaric necklace and know you were standing where he got it only seconds before and it stuns your feelings the way hitting a rabbit with a junk of firewood will stun it and lay it out flat on the ground, sides heaving but eyes far away, and when those feelings start to return you see the possibility that your humanity isn’t as gone as you thought it was.
“I’ll stay.”
