After James by Michael Helm Read Free Book Online Page B

recording, as if someone in another room had secretly recorded Denise leaving her message for Ali. The theory made no sense. No, the time code told the story. The file was just an earlier attempt in which something had gone wrong with the recording, and Denise had forgotten to delete it. The voice broke off suddenly and the needle went dead.
    In the new silence Ali had a sudden, sharp memory of sitting by the woodstove yesterday with Crooner at her feet. She could see the page she’d been reading in
The Turn of the Screw
, the very words on it. It was the scene in which the young governess is herself reading a novel—“I recollect in short that, though I was deeply interested in my author, I found myself, at the turn of a page and with his spell all scattered, looking straight up from him and hard at the door of my room”—and then, though this hadn’t happened at the time, Ali was presented an inward vision that dropped before her, obscuring the remembered page, a vision of what she came to understand was Alph itself crossing the blood-brain barrier. The chemical appeared as small attenuating swirlings in the blood, like tornadoes whose tails bent toward the tissues and elongated into thin vessels that slipped into the cortex. The image lasted only a few seconds, but it was as certain as the remembered lines of text or the fur bunched into furrows on Crooner’s curved neck. The vision was even more vivid than her present moment as she stood at the desk, the remembered words from the novel returning with more force than they’d had when she first read them.
    She was two places at once, in two times at once. When the sensation abated she walked back to the kitchen and looked into the living area, half-expecting to see herself there. In this stage of the drug’s effect she was able to distinguish between an extreme vision and reality, but was the border between these states eroding? And was her present reality itself already compromised? She had no way of knowing.
    Certainly she was experiencing slight jump cuts in time. Without seeming to have returned to it, she was at the desk,trying to record her thoughts. Her awareness of the missing transition complicated her notes. The possibilities for memory enhancement alone should have brought on an elated focus of concentration, but as she looked through what she’d written, it seemed disordered, random. There were lines on mRNA synthesis and transcription factors, others on interactions between brain substrates, circuit-specific regulation of discrete memories, the possibility of accelerated networks and dynamic methylation changes. Whatever knowledge she should have been able to access had been lost in a jumble of half-recalled data she’d studied on unrelated aspects of memory and waking visions. How could she explain the drug producing a vision of itself and its progress through her system?
    She dropped her hands from the keyboard and let them fall to her sides. They had never felt so empty. She wanted to run them over Crooner’s back and neck and for a second she could feel him beside her, breathing fast, afraid.
    —
    All connection to the outer world had disappeared by 3:11. The internet was dead. The landline was out. When the power died at 3:34 she put on her boots and went outside, behind the house to the ravine. Before seeing it, through the sound of the rain, she could hear that the stream was something greater now, and then there it was, the black surface turning dozens of catbacks and fluted shapes, seemingly hand-formed, breaking and overrunning the bend, flooding the small field on the east side of the property with mud and branches. The house was on low ground and if the water rosemuch farther or the new lake grew in her direction, she would be in trouble.
    It was now possible that the day, the landscape, had changed enough to fool Crooner. He wasn’t that bright to begin with. And neither was she, apparently—it had been stupid of her not to have gone