She went spinning, all things around her blurring, she groped for the veil, the way out …

Clunk! She fell out on the other side, standing in a featureless hallway lit by can lights in the ceiling. There was that deep, electric hum again, so often a part of her other visions and journeys. She heard no voices, saw no one.

The fear would not go away. She sequestered it in a pocket of her mind, drew a deep breath, and took the first step. Other steps followed the first. She moved down the hall.

A steel door on her left taunted her with a big cold handle and red letters that shouted with authority, AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY—just like Don’t go out on the casino floor, you’re underage!“Oh, shush!” The latch clacked open for her and she ventured a peek inside.

She’d seen this place. It was a furnace room, a maze of water and steam pipes, aluminum ducts, catwalks and stairs all built around a furnace the size of a mobile home, and alongside the furnace, an iron box like a woodstove on a brick pedestal with a control panel and a heavy front door. She descended a flight of steel stairs and approached it, gripped the big handle, and creaked the door open. Inside was a gas-fired combustion chamber lined with ashes. An incinerator. This was where the monkeys burned.

One more proof I’m not crazy,she thought. A new boldness pushed the fear farther back inside her.

Double doors on the other side of the hallway looked like hospital doors that could lead to a ward or operating rooms. They didn’t appear to be bolted shut; they were unmarked. She crossed the hall, pressed against the door on the right … it swung open. She stepped through.

In the first few seconds she was overwhelmed. It could have been a television studio with a stage built in the center, or a space flight control room with the launch pad in the middle. The room was about forty by forty with a high ceiling, windowless, all concrete, lit by fixtures suspended from an overhead grid like a soundstage. Rows of control consoles with dials, switches, keyboards, and monitors were arranged on three sides of the room, all facing the center, where a hexagonal enclosure of steel and glass about twelve feet across stood like a space-age gazebo, steel pillars at each corner, a flat canopy rigged with lights over the top. Electrical cables snaked from the platform across the floor, some taped down, some not, connecting the platform with every console, every steel cabinet marked DANGER HIGH VOLTAGE, every blinking panel.

For the next few seconds, she was stunned speechless and immobile.

On the right side of the room was a large console raised higher than the others, apparently the command control center. Behind that console, face illumined with blue light from a monitor, sat the man who’d come into McCaffee’s with a computer and egged her into doing the levitation. Sitting next to him was the younger, Tom Hanks–looking guy she’d seen superimposed in her apartment.

In front of the console, rising to his feet as she came in, his eyes meeting hers unabashedly, was Dane Collins.

At the sight of him the fear left her, carried away in a sigh as her body eased, even teetered from relief. She couldn’t imagine the story to explain why he was here, and where could she begin to tell hers? She could only find strength in the fact that he was here at all.

So in that long, face-reading, eye-meeting stretch of time, the electrons hummed through the cables and consoles, the panel lights blinked but drew no attention, the ventilation system rushed quietly … and no one said a word.

Dane looked up at the steel and glass enclosure, then back at her, his cue for her to take a look.

She walked, her sneakers making little squeaks that carried through the room, then climbed the seven steps to the enclosure for a closer look through the glass. The enclosure contained a bench the size of a hospital bed. The bench was draped with a sheet that hung crookedly over either side, as if arranged in haste. The sheet was soiled, stained brown … with blood?

The smell. It turned her nose, stung her spirit. Like singed hair, rotting flesh, something burning. She’d smelled it in her visions and interdims; she’d smelled it in the scorched car.

The two men exchanged a glance. Dane Collins propped an elbow in the opposite hand, his fingers over his lips, his gaze strong and reassuring.

She descended the steps and walked toward the raised console, reaching into her pocket. Dane turned, and they stood facing the two strangers together. She drew out her hand.

In her palm was the half-melted, ash-encrusted anklet with one dove still intact.

She asked, “What have you done to me?”

chapter

46

Parmenter introduced himself and Moss, but Mandy did not feel cordial and did not offer her hand. He pulled up a chair for her behind the console and offered her some coffee. She requested a bottle of water and sat with Parmenter, Moss, and Dane to hear the other side of her story.

“You have unknowingly been involved in a government-funded experiment …” Parmenter began, and the story unfolded part by part.

“… we’d never tested the process on burn injuries, so your case was an irresistible opportunity …”

“… the bloodstains on the sheet are all that remained. Where you went and how far back your reversion was, we hadn’t a clue …”

“… the massive gravitational influence you have on the Machine is aberrant, totally unexpected …”

“… what you’re experiencing is alternate, parallel timelines woven through space, and what’s astounding is how you’ve learned to create them at will …”

The audacity of these people was incomprehensible, enraging, tempered only by the fact that Mandy was still alive. Her anger made her bold, her questions and comebacks sharp-edged. Parmenter and Moss accepted and endured it, explaining, never defending. The meeting became a bilateral debriefing, the scientists as earnest to hear her side of it as she was to hear theirs. Mandy felt they could get along, but she wasn’t ready to be friends.

They showed her the Machine.

“We haven’t opened it, haven’t touched or tampered with anything, including the soiled sheet … yes, I guess you could call it a crime scene: we didn’t dare disturb anything until we had the uh, crime, solved.

“The bench contains the Machine’s interdimensional core; it resembles a big black domino, about six feet long, ten inches thick, accelerated to ninety-five percent of the speed of light … oh, it’s traveling that fast, all right, but in relation to an alternate dimension of time and space while maintaining a motionless foothold in ours. You could say it has its foot in the interdimensional door, holding it open so people and objects can pass through, which you’ve been doing on a regular basis. Every bouncing tennis ball, every levitation, every vanish passes through that core. Oh, and every journey through time and space, such as your encounter with Moss …”

They showed her the makeshift sleeping quarters where she surprised Moss during the night. It was just as she remembered it.

She remembered parts of the lab as well, in fragmented images of consoles, lights, shadowy faces, muffled conversations, like a continuous volley of déjà vu. She could remember and describe some of the rooms before they showed them to her.

Near midnight, they were seated around a table where the day crew took their breaks—three doughnuts left over from that day rested in a white box next to dirty coffee cups that never made it back to the kitchen. There was silence. In slow, awkward phrases and apologetic tones, Parmenter and Moss had described the final outcome, the bottom line of Mandy’s future as they saw it.

She looked across the room at the Machine, looked again at them, tried to believe but couldn’t. Hope as in, This is just a bad dream and I’ll wake up, wasn’t working so well for her anymore. She tried denial, expecting they would now tell her the next thing, the one bit of good news they hadn’t told her yet, the way out. Maybe there would be a second opinion that it didn’t have to be this way.