Thirty

Epilogue

Almost as if on cue, we heard a car pull up outside. The engine shut off, doors slammed and footsteps tracked around the side of the house toward us. Tommy's voice called out, "Helo-o-o the house!"

He smiled and waved to us as he and Burnett came around the corner of the house into view. He was wearing jet-black wraparound sunglasses, even though the day was a bit overcast. A Golden Retriever bounded past them and hurled himself into my lap, all wagging tail and slobbering tongue and affection.

Tommy put on a stern face and tone and commanded, "Illya! Down!"

Illya hunkered down remorsefully and jumped down, looking as if he expected to be soundly scolded for his breach of etiquette.

Tommy smiled apologetically. "Sorry, man---some days his obedience-school trainin' slips."

I chuckled and ruffled Illya's ears affectionately.

"Hey---you know I love this big mutt! But I'll bet he wants to play with Daisy a lot more than with me. C'mon and sit; no point in standing on ceremony---or in standing at all, for that matter."

As they settled into chairs on either side of the Professor, I turned to Burnett and asked, "How are things going with you and Gregory?"

He chuckled ruefully and responded, "Well, I've finally stopped walking like Walter Brennan, if that's what you mean. Fortunately, injuries to astral bodies heal a lot faster than injuries to physical bodies. Greg's doing pretty well, too. He's back on his farm, milking cows and living the life of a gentleman farmer---or as close to that as he'll allow himself to get. He's such a workhorse that he'll probably be out mending fences or plowing the back forty the day he finally drops over for good. He can afford to hire farmhands, and dress decently, but he's spent so much of his life dirt-poor that he really doesn't know how to live any other way. That lottery win set him up for a pleasant retirement, but the man just doesn't know how to kick back and relax!"

By way of example, he leaned back, propped his feet up on the table and laced his fingers behind his head.

I glanced around at the Professor and chuckled, "That sounds like what I've heard of him, all right. Some people just can't be happy unless they're busy all the time."

The Professor nodded, eyes twinkling. "That's Greg, right enough. I tried to get him to take a vacation a few years ago; he lasted less than a day before the inactivity drove him starkers. I found him out in the resort pool house, repairing the filter pump and as happy as a chimney sweep dancing in Mary Poppins."

We all chuckled at that one. I looked around at our guests and asked, "Anybody want a drink? We have everything but hard liquor and some of the more exotic teas, if you're interested."

Burnett grinned boyishly and told me, "A cold beer would go good right now. Any kind except that 'lite' stuff; I prefer something with a little body to it."

Tommy grinned in turn and added, "Same here. Got any long-necks?"

I shrugged and got up. "I dunno; I'll check."

As I turned toward the back door, Tommy held out a hand and asked, "What? After lobbin' a bulldozer into the Vortex, you can't get a measly coupla beers from out here?"

I shook my head. "Nope. I'm getting better at both telekinesis and remote viewing, but I still have some trouble handling things out of direct physical line-of-sight. If I tried, I'd probably end up dragging the whole refrigerator out here by mistake…and Wish would have a fit if I scratched up these oak parquet floors."

Tommy winced at the thought and waved me toward the back door with both hands. "Please! Do it by hand! We don't want her honked at us!"

I raised an eyebrow in the Professor's direction; he gave me a surprised/sardonic look back. Ever since the battle in the Vortex, Tommy had been cleaning up his act - and his language - noticeably.

While I was in the kitchen getting the beers, I called out, "C'mon, Daisy! Your boyfriend's here!"

Daisy came bounding in from the living room, tail all a-wag and tongue lolling out eagerly. She followed me out to the porch, romping around me happily until she caught sight of Illya---then she lost all interest in playing with me, barked at Illya joyously---and the two of them took off across the field out behind the house, bounding along like a couple of kids on the loose.

I passed the beers around to our guests and settled into my seat again. I turned to Tommy. "How's Razor adjusting to life in the Twilight Zone?"

He actually managed a laugh, although it sounded as if it hurt, coming out. "He's comin' along, slow but sure. And believe it or not, he's actually startin' to clean up his act. He's been playin' it so straight lately that nobody's called him 'Damn' in weeks, he's been behavin' that squeaky-clean. Of course, he's still havin' some trouble handlin' some of the concepts involved in the paranormal, but at least he's learnin'. He's actually startin' to turn into a human bein'."

I murmured, "Well, will wonders never cease? I didn't think he had it in him. I always thought his brain had gotten stuck in the punk-rock-mentality mode, and there was no hope left for him."

Sam chuckled dryly and pointed out, "You never know. There's an old maxim that states that the only thing that never changes is that nothing ever stays the same."

I saluted the gem of wisdom wordlessly with upraised Coke bottle and then took another swig.

The Professor cast a pointed look at the dark glasses Tommy was sporting and inquired, "How are your eyes coming along?"

Tommy twisted the cap off his beer, took a pull at it and sighed, "They're still pretty bad. Whatever Nicodemus did to me, it just about wrecked me in a lotta ways. Even after a month of recuperatin', daylight still just about kills me. I can handle a moonless night without my shades, but not much else. Somethin' tells me I'm gonna be sportin' the blind-man look for a long time to come. The pain pills help, but they leave me feelin' a little too spaced-out for comfort."

He shrugged. "But, it's the only way I can get along, so I put up with it---for now. I'm beginnin' to understand just what the expression 'Vampire out on a day pass' really means."

He grunted sourly and added, "I can't even drive any more until my eyes heal. Sam's been playin' chauffeur for me ever since we left Abime."

I snorted. "No wonder daisy didn't come running out of the house when you drove up! She knows the sound of your pickup."

Tommy smiled sourly. "Yeah; these days we're toolin' around in Sam's little fartmobile."

Burnett looked and sounded absolutely indignant. "Hey! It's a good car! I've had that baby ten, twelve years, now, and---"

Tommy butted in with, "---and it looks an' feels an' runs like it!"

The Professor laughed. "Tommy, stop! It's obvious that the trauma you've been through hasn't dampened your annoying sense of humor!"

Tommy waved aside the comment as inconsequential. "Aw, hell. I'll be okay. I'm just glad I don't remember any of what happened while Nicodemus had control of me; that would've been trauma! Just hope I don't end up havin' nightmares about it, somewheres down the line."

The Professor shook his head, expression sympathetic. "I second that emotion, son. For all practical purposes, your conscious mind was shut down while Nicodemus had you under control, but your brain still recorded everything that happened to you, down deep on the subconscious level. That information may begin leaking back up to your conscious mind one day. If it ever does, contact me immediately. I should be able to help you deal with it properly."

I took another swig of my Coke and sighed, "I'm just thankful you're going to be okay. We were afraid we were going to lose you, for a while, there."

The Professor leaned back and sighed heavily. "Amen to that! It was torture, knowing what was happening to you and yet not daring to act until the time was right. Doing anything to rescue you from Nicodemus's possession and subsequent abandonment inside the cavern would have drained my strength to the point where I would not have been able to deal with Nicodemus effectively."

Burnett smiled and raised his beer to the Professor in salute. "As it was, it was a good choice. If you had rescued Tommy, somehow, he wouldn't have been down there in the cave at the right time---and he probably wouldn't have been able to haul our backsides out of the fire, the way he did."

He raised his beer to Tommy in turn and declared, "Here's to aces in the hole playing themselves at the right time!"

We all saluted to that one.

Tommy smiled, a little bashfully, and murmured, "Thanks, guys. But I still have trouble believin' it was li'l ol' me who turned the tide, back there. I think it was more luck than anythin' else."

The Professor shook his head soberly. "On the contrary, son; it was less luck and more the cooperation of a considerable number of people---both physical and noncorporeal. If everyone hadn't done their parts, things would have turned out far differently."

I shuddered at the thought and added, "And far worse."

I turned to Burnett and commented, "By the way---you made a pretty good bear, back there in the Vortex. Very convincing, except for the talking and flying parts."

He laughed and made fingernail-polishing motions on his shirt. "Gee, thanks. I thought I did pretty well, myself."

Another thought came to me; I looked back and forth between him and the Professor and inquired, "How come I came out as a lion, back there in the Vortex, anyway?"

Burnett looked around at the Professor and shrugged. "Beats me. I've never understood the shape-change part of that, myself."

The Professor shrugged a little uncertainly. "I'm not certain myself what determines the nature of the change in a person's astral form when they shift to battle mode. Normally, the astral body looks essentially identical to the physical body---but when a person prepares to do battle in astral form, the astral form almost invariably shifts to a more animalistic shape. Precisely what determines the animal-form the astral body takes, I don't think anyone living knows…and even the non-corporeal may not know. It may have something to do with the individual's animal totem."

I looked question marks at him. "'Animal totem'?"

He shrugged. "You'd need to ask Greg about that part of things. He's much more conversant on the subject than I. As best I understand things, everyone has an animal totem---an alternate form to their astral bodies that comes to the fore under specific circumstances. No matter how civilized humans become, there's always some animal in their nature---and animals are usually far deadlier fighters than humans, so it makes a sense of sorts that the astral body would revert to an animal form for battle situations."

I thought that over. "Um…okay, I guess that holds together. But why was my lion-form the size of an elephant, and Tommy's dragon-form no bigger than Illya, out there?"

I nodded toward the center of the field behind the house, where the dogs were bounding in the tall grass, yapping their heads off and having a high old time.

Burnett took a swig of his beer and chuckled, "Simple; the more power you have, the bigger your astral form. You noticed how big David's griffin-form was?"

I nodded. "It was as big as my lion-form."

Burnett nodded and pointed a finger at me in emphasis.

"Bingo. You two are about on a par, power-wise. It only makes sense that your astral battle forms would be huge. Tommy's a really happenin' dude, and all that, but his power levels don't come anywhere near yours or David's. His dragon coming out about the size of a Golden Retriever makes sense, considering. And remember how Nicodemus's basilisk-form kept shifting sizes on us?"

I nodded dourly. "All too well. When he was down to twenty feet long, we could almost handle him---but when he was up to fifty feet, he batted us around like handballs. And we never knew when he was going to change sizes. The funny thing was, he didn't seem to know when the size-change was going to happen, either. He kept doing things that were consistent with being at the smaller size, and then he'd suddenly pop up to some larger size, where the tactic he was using wasn't even necessary. Never did understand that part of things."

Burnett took a pull at his beer, chuckled and explained, "It was the Vortex. I'm no expert like David, but I'll tell you what I've doped out, and he can tell me how close I've gotten. Fair enough?"

The Professor nodded wordlessly. Burnett took a deep breath and plunged into his explanation: "Vortices act like transformers and amplifiers of Psi energy. Any Psi who enters one can tap into the energy there, and use it at tremendously higher levels than they normally can. But staying inside a major Vortex for too long can overload a person and literally burn him out. Nicodemus was locked into the Vortex's energies, but a Psi - human or nonhuman, physical or nonphysical - inside a Vortex can have trouble handling the power because there's too much of it. Like everything else, handling these things takes practice, and even someone as long-lived as Nicodemus may not be able to get in enough practice with them to be able to handle them safely. Vortices are so unpredictable that there's never any way to second-guess what the power levels inside them are going to do from one minute to the next, so his size and strength tended to fluctuate with the Vortex's minute-to-minute fluctuations, and while it made things harder for us, it made things even harder for Nicodemus."

He looked around at the Professor, eyebrow raised in inquiry. "How'd I do?"

The Professor nodded approval. "I couldn't have said it better myself."

He turned back to me. "And what about you? Have you had any more dreams of Abime?"

I shook my head. "No, and neither has Wish, according to what she tells me. Now that the confrontation with Castevet is over and done with, there's apparently no longer any need for dreams about the place. It looks like they were just there to warn us about the place, and maybe lead us to it. Nowadays I just have really unpleasant dreams about big, black basilisks with seriously lousy attitudes!"

The Professor chuckled dryly. "Perfectly understandable. After what you've been through, it will probably take some time to shake the bad memories off. However, you can rest assured that you're safe, now."

Tommy assumed this B-movie-ish, cadaverous expression and leaned over toward me. In a sepulchrous tone, he muttered, "At least, until the next time!"

Good old Tommy; just couldn't keep from being a bit of a butthead, even now. I favored him with a snooty stare that would have done justice to a British butler, and in an utterly stuffy, upper-class British accent, replied, "I believe that, at this point, my lovely wife would say something classy and particularly appropriate to you, like, 'Shut up, you little spaz!'"

His expression fell apart into blank astonishment, and then he leaned back in his chair and cracked up, royally. When he could speak coherently again, he leaned over, slapped me on the shoulder and told the others, "I'll be damned! There's some hope for him after all!"

The Professor burst into laughter himself. "Bravo, Rain! Finally, someone else in the family who can put Tommy in his place!"

Tommy beamed, "Hot damn! I got me a new sparrin' partner!"

I groaned to myself; a lifetime of trading barbs with my "brother"-in-law was not my idea of fun.

We spent the rest of the afternoon sorting through the events surrounding our experiences at Abime, trying to get everything into its proper perspective. There was still a lot we hadn't managed to sort out.

One of the things that had been bugging me all that time came out: "Does anyone have any idea what that acid goop Razor put his hand into back there on the cave wall was? I've never understood how it came to be there."

Tommy nodded and grunted, "I've been wonderin' about that too. Anyone got any ideas?"

Burnett shrugged. "No clue, myself. David?"

The Professor shook his head slowly. "I've heard of this. There are types of moss and fungi native to deep caves; they don't seem to need light…in fact, some are even bioluminescent. But they aren't acidic by nature, as a general rule. However, things tend to go awry in odd ways inside negative Vortices. Plants die, or become twisted and stunted---mutated into almost unrecognizable forms. If there were some variety of deep-cave moss or fungus growing down there, the Vortex could have mutated it into something that generated an acidic slime to protect itself from cave-dwelling insects and other such dark-adapted herbivores and omnivores."

Tommy and Burnett and I all traded uncertain looks.

Burnett shrugged and took another swig of his beer. "It could be, I suppose. Negative Vortices have a way of distorting everything that enters their influence---gravity, radio waves, living creatures. I participated in some research being done on the Oregon Vortex, back in 1990: One researcher placed a small cage with a laboratory rat inside it at the center of the Vortex. The rat started getting restless immediately, and looking for some way out of the cage. The longer it was in there, the more frantic it got, until it went completely ballistic and then went into what looked like an epileptic seizure, and died. It took hours, but it died just as surely as if someone had put a bullet through its head."

I winced. "Ouch. Good thing Wish wasn't there; people mistreating animals is a real sore point with her. She probably would've done something unpleasant to the researcher for what he was doing."

Tommy snorted sourly. "Get real, man; she woulda cold-cocked the guy, released the rat and then stuffed the researcher into the cage and left him there!"

The Professor nodded grim agreement. "And she probably would have left the cage at the heart of the Vortex, just for good measure. My daughter can get quite fractious when it comes to the subject of animal abuse."

I chuckled. "Tell me about it. A hawk made a try for one of the birds we released yesterday. I don't know what kind of mental image she hit it with, but it screamed like a little girl, turned around and left a trail of feathers behind it on the wind. I get the feeling it's not going to be doing any hunting in this area for a while."

Burnett winced at the thought. "I don't think I want to know; Wish has always been a creative little thing. Anyone stupid enough to try to mug her would probably find themselves running for their lives in from a Komodo dragon, or a fully armed Ninja, or something equally unpleasant. Anyhow, getting back to the Oregon Vortex: Plants placed inside it withered, and became yellowed and stunted. A lot of them died. The few that survived didn't look much the way they used to, and so them didn't look anything like the original plants at all. All but one of the surviving plants were sterile; the seeds from the one that wasn't sterile sprouted things that looked like they'd come from some other planet. So, it stands to reason that anything capable of growing inside a negative Vortex of the magnitude of the one at Abime probably wouldn't have any choice but to be mutated into something dangerous."

I checked my Coke; it was running low. "Well, at least that song Wish's unconscious mind was singing, that one night, didn't turn out to be prophetic."

Of course, I had to explain to Burnett about Wish's sleep talking; Tommy and the Professor already knew all about it. When I told them what song Wish had been singing, that night, they all agreed that it did sound kind of ominous, but they also agreed that nothing that had happened since then seemed to have anything to do with the subject matter in the old Styx song.

Of course, Tommy just had to the throw a monkey wrench into the feeling of relief we were beginning to work up by asking, "Uh, tell me somethin'; anyone know how far ahead of the fact these pre-cognitive incidents usually happened?"

I shrugged uncertainly. "With me, anywhere from a week to a year and more. Anyone else have any figures?"

Burnett shook his head. "Nope a precognition doesn't seem to number among my Gifts, in any way, shape for form. I wouldn't have any input for you."

We all turned to the Professor; he looked a little uncomfortable. "Ah, I hate to have to say this, but Wish has had precognitive incidents before; they just happened so early in her life that she doesn't remember them, these days. When she was six years old, she began singing in her sleep one night. The old song about Casey Jones, the engineer who crashed his runaway freight train into a passenger train. When she woke up, she told the she had a bad dream about a train crash over on the other side of town; one train carrying people, one carrying trees and 'some smelly black gunk', as she put it. And she said it had something about a birthday party in it, and the number four."

He emptied his cup looking very unhappy. "We both forgot about it fairly quickly, but four years later, Wish's tenth birthday party was interrupted by a loud boom that shook the entire house. We all went outside to see what had made the sound, and saw a mushroom cloud of fire and smoke rearing up into the sky over on the far side of town. According to the subsequent wireless reports, the switching system had failed, and routed a passenger train into a head-on collision with a freight train; the freight had been carrying cut timber and refined petroleum distillates. The collision had occurred at the Jones Street rail crossing, and the street that ran alongside the railroad tracks at that point was Casen Avenue."

The rest of us gulped. Another case of coincidences being a little too coincidental to be coincidence. Even if they'd recognized the incident as being precognitive in nature, the references to the future event had been so obscure that the probability of someone being able to figure them all out accurately enough to sound any kind of warning were somewhere between slim and none. And even if someone had managed to figure out, how would they have gotten the authorities to pay enough attention to the warning to forestall the accident.

The Professor concluded, "That was the only time anything of this sort has occurred in her life, that I know of. She may have had more such experiences, but if she has, she hasn't reported them to me; she has no trouble with others precognating, but the very notion of doing so herself seems to unsettle her, and badly. I suspect it's the fact that most precognitions involved bad news: pain, death, destruction; that makes her feel that way about experiencing premonitions herself. She's far too strong an Empath to be able to handle the pain of others under such circumstances. She can shield herself from the pain of others while she's awake, but she can't maintain her mental shields while she's asleep. The pain of disaster related precognition may simply be more than she can safely bear."

I sighed in misery. "Poor kid; and so many people think being psychic will make their lives oh-so-wonderful. If only they knew the truth."

Burnett growled, "Oh, great! You mean, there's a chance that somewhere during the next four years some or all of us could find ourselves in a situation where we're on the wrong side of the law, with the police - or worse - after us, and in danger of having some renegade inside our own ranks turning on us and selling us out to whoever we're up against?"

The Professor shrugged uncertainly. "Possibly. Or, assuming the incident really is a precognition, it might have been presented from someone else's viewpoint. We might be the 'long arm of law', and some Psi we're looking for might be sold out to us by someone close to him or her. Or it might be something else entirely that I haven't thought of, and can imagine as yet; the possibilities are just too numerous to calculate from a strictly waking-logical viewpoint."

Tommy's expression was almost indescribable: a mixture of disdain, discomfort and unhappiness. "Oh, man! Now there's a cheerful thought to hafta live with for the next four years!"

I polished off the last of my Coke and put the bottle down slowly. "Tell me something, guys… are there times when you find yourself wishing you were Normals, and living dull, drab, boring, humdrum, mundane, everyday, safe lives?"

All three of them nodded, almost in unison. I sighed; I'd been afraid of that.

* * *

All this happened years ago, of course. Despite the passage of time, and all the strangeness that's happened to me since then, I still find myself remembering that battle with Castevet, as a basilisk, and all the strangeness that led up to the confrontation in the Abime Vortex.

I know it was all real; I have the physical and emotional scars to prove it; I can do things no normal human being can do more than dream of doing---and I've become so good at some of it that I have to be on constant guard not to do something spectacularly paranormal by mistake that could set off a panic---or fortune hunting.

Still there are times when I find myself wondering: Was I really there, battling that basilisk alongside a three-eyed white fox, a big red bear, a blue-and-gold griffin and a little green dragon that breathed flames that could fry person's mind? Or was it just another of those crazy dreams I kept having?

Who knows? Maybe it has all been nothing but crazy dream. Maybe I'll wake up on the tour bus with Ill Noise, still single, with no waking world knowledge of Wish or any of these other amazing psychic people. Maybe the only real part of all this is that old song by Sugarloaf: Green-Eyed Lady.

Yeah---right.

And maybe I'm the Supreme Ruler of the planet Zarfablon, too.

See you next time.