SEVEN
Paula and Seymour introduce themselves to Professor John Sharp as freelance reporters. Shanti and I are close friends along for the ride. Sharp seems to absorb our lies with a kindly, grandfather-like smile that slightly droops from a long-ago stroke.
He invites us into his house, which is crammed with books and old photographs, and offers us a pitcher of iced tea and a plate of chocolate chip cookies. We gather in his kitchen. I take that as a good sign. Decisions are more often made in the kitchen than any other room in the house.
There’s a feeling of unreality to Sharp’s greeting but I keep my mouth shut and help myself to his refreshments. I figure his motives for letting us into his house so easily will become clear in time. I’m tired of sitting in the car; it’s good to stretch and nibble. We have driven straight through from Denver to San Mateo. Along the way we decided Seymour would take the lead when it came to questioning Sharp. However, we have hardly sipped his iced tea when the professor surprises us with a strange remark.
“I’ve been waiting for you people,” he says.
We exchange puzzled looks, although the eyes of the others come to rest on me. I’m not surprised they want my advice as to how to proceed, even Shanti. Since we were all cooped up in a car for so many hours with Shanti—an extremely intuitive young woman—it got to the point where the truth just spontaneously burst out and I had to admit that I was Sita and not Teri. The news should have blown Shanti’s mind but she seemed to take it in stride. Indeed, she seems relieved that I’m still alive.
“What makes you say that?” Seymour asks.
Sharp is in his eighties and looks it. I’d wager to say his life has been difficult but interesting. On the surface, he appears to have largely mended from the stroke that I assume forced his retirement but he still walks with a limp and the left side of his face lacks a clear expression. He’s a character, though—I can tell he has secrets he’s going to make us work for.
But I’m not worried. I know how to handle his type.
He studies Seymour. “You’re not a reporter,” he says.
“No?”
“You’ve never interviewed anyone in your life.”
“How do you know?”
“I just have to look at you. Experienced reporters have cold eyes. They don’t care what they expose, who they hurt. They rationalize it all away by saying they’re just searching for the truth. You have too much heart to be in that business.”
Seymour stays cool. “You’re right, I’m a novelist. But that doesn’t mean my interest in IIC isn’t genuine.”
“Explain,” Sharp says.
“There’s a mystery behind that company. Its founding, its rapid growth. I think there’s a book there, a book that should start with you.”
“Why me?”
“I Googled IIC to get a list of their board of directors. It can’t be a coincidence that all of them were once graduate students of yours.”
Sharp appears satisfied. “Very good.”
“Your turn,” Seymour says. “Why did you say you were waiting for us?”
Sharp shakes his head. “I haven’t been waiting for you per se. Just for someone to come along and ask about the mystery surrounding IIC.”
“We’re the first?” Seymour says.
“Yes. Odd, don’t you think? I kept expecting someone from the government to at least get suspicious about my old students. But no one has.”
“It’s possible others have begun to wonder about the company,” Seymour says. “But something stopped them from pursuing the matter.”
“Money. Nosy people could have been bought off.”
“Or else killed,” I say.
Sharp turns and looks me over. He could be a dirty old man but I feel his gaze goes deep. A glance from Paula has already told me the man is sensitive, perhaps a psychic in his own right.
“You know something about that,” he says finally.
“I’ve met Cynthia Brutran. It doesn’t take a mind reader to know she’s a killer,” I say.
Sharp hears the bitterness in my voice. “Has she hurt anyone close to you?” he asks.
I think of Jeff Stephens, the boyfriend of Lisa Fetch, a member of our small group who is teaching math back in Truman, Missouri, and waiting for the IIC to make her disappear. Jeff Stephens was the first victim of Brutran that I knew. I also think of my own dead body, out there somewhere, maybe in the hands of Brutran and her monsters. To be frank, I think about it every few minutes.
“Yes,” I say.
Sharp digests the news slowly. “I’m sorry,” he says.
“Do you apologize because you’re to blame?” Seymour asks.
Sharp doesn’t appreciate the question. “You’ve got a lot of nerve, young man.”
Seymour realizes he’s overreached and looks to me for help. I hold up my hand by way of apology. Sharp’s anger is real and I don’t want to lose him before we can begin.
“It was Brutran who stole your life’s work,” I say.
The insight startles Sharp out of his anger. This is how to get the truth out of him. Shake him up, make him realize he doesn’t have all the answers. Like many intellectuals, particularly the elderly kind, he suffers from arrogance. That’s why he invited us so quickly into his home. He wants us to hear his story.
“What makes you say that?” he asks.
“I’ve felt the sting of her Array,” I reply.
Sharp sucks in a breath. For him, just hearing the word is like a slap in the face. My guess is correct. Brutran and pals must have used whatever they learned from their teacher to smash him down.
“I’m sorry,” he repeats.
My tone is sympathetic. “The woman has made us both suffer. Isn’t that enough for you to share your story with us? That’s why we’re here, to listen to what you know. And based on what you said a minute ago, I think you have been waiting for us.”
Each of my remarks is carefully designed to save us an hour and cut right through his armor. It doesn’t matter that Sharp probably knows that. I believe I’ve sized him up correctly. Especially when he sits back in his chair and smiles at me. He’s been waiting to tell his story before he dies.
“Now you could have been a reporter,” he says to me.
I act hurt. “I hope I don’t come across as cold.”
“That’s not what I meant. I was simply acknowledging that you’re shrewd enough to succeed in the business.” He pauses and scans the rest of us. “What do you want to know?”
“Everything,” Seymour says. “Take us back to Berkeley. How did you manage to create a graduate program focused on paranormal abilities?”
Sharp sighs and reaches for a spoon, which he uses to drop a hefty dose of sugar in his iced tea. He stirs it slowly and I can tell his mind is traveling back to another era.
“That was forty years ago,” he begins. “The UC system was much more liberal then. Particularly when it came to Berkeley. The school wasn’t stuck in the free love of the hippie days but at the same time it had never really lost that flavor. And I was the perfect candidate to explore the weird and wonderful. I don’t know how thoroughly you have researched my past. I have a PhD in psychology and I was in fact the head of the psychology department at Berkeley. But I also have an equally prestigious degree in anatomy and physiology. It was an early goal of mine to be a psychiatrist. But the allure of pure research kept me in an academic world.”
“What sparked your interest in ESP?” Seymour asks.
“The need to know. The most basic desire of all. I had read about the research Dr. J. B. Rhine of Duke University had conducted on psychic phenomena, back in the thirties and forties. When I came across his work, I couldn’t understand why other scientists hadn’t followed up on his findings. Of course there was a stigma attached to such research. Many of my colleagues failed to see it as real science—whatever that’s supposed to mean. But to me there was no question Dr. Rhine, with the help of his wife, had established that ESP definitely existed.” Sharp pauses. “Are any of you familiar with his work?”
“I am,” I say. “He developed the standard deck of ESP cards psychic researchers use to this day. They consist of five symbols: a circle, a cross, wavy lines, a square, and a star. He wanted to keep the symbols simple. He felt that would make them easier to transmit from one person’s mind to another. I know he used a large body of statistical analysis to back up his claims that ESP existed. He would go through thousands of people to detect the tiniest statistical variance.”
Sharp nods his head in appreciation of my summary. “You bring up the main strength and the main weakness of his research. With the five different shapes, a test subject should be able to guess what card another person is staring at twenty percent of the time—by chance. But Dr. Rhine showed that certain individuals exceeded that average. They’d guess the correct card thirty percent of the time.”
“That’s not very impressive,” Seymour says. “They were still wrong over two thirds of the time.”
“Yes!” Sharp says, excited enough to pound the kitchen table. “Congratulations, Seymour. You just summed up the problem with the entire parapsychology field. The results of Dr. Rhine’s research were real. No one with an open mind could study it and not acknowledge that ESP does exist in certain people. Statistics don’t lie. However, they don’t get people excited, either. I just made an extraordinary statement. I said a select group of people could telepathically read the cards correctly thirty percent of the time. And you responded exactly as most people do. You said, ‘So what. Big deal.’”
“I’m sorry, it doesn’t sound like a big deal,” Seymour says.
“That’s where you’re wrong. If the deviation was as little as one percent of what it should be—as predicted by chance—then it would be important. Because no matter how weak the ability to read another person’s mind is, it still proves that ESP exists. And that seemingly small truth, if contemplated seriously, and viewed from every branch of science, should force us to rewrite every science book we have on this planet.”
“I’m not sure I agree,” Seymour says carefully.
Sharp waves a hand. “Don’t worry about hurting my feelings. Surely you can see I’ve had this argument a thousand times over the years. But I’m telling you the truth, and it explains why I devoted a large portion of my life to this field. Take for example physics. If ESP exists in human beings, then every law of physics that we have identified so far is suspect.”
“I don’t follow,” Seymour says.
“Our laws of physics cannot account for telepathy. Despite the advances in the field, the wild implications of string theory and black holes, we’ve still only identified four forces in the universe. Electromagnetic forces, gravity, and strong and weak nuclear forces. Ask any physicist and he’ll tell you that there are no other powers at work in this world. Yet ESP, even if it exists to only a slight degree, says that’s not true. There has to be another form of power in this universe that we cannot explain. I’d even go so far as to say that the existence of ESP supports the argument that we have a soul. Do you follow me?”
Seymour hesitates. “I see where you’re coming from.”
“That’s good enough for now. I know I’ve belabored this point but it’s important that you understand that I approached parapsychology from a purely scientific point of view. And I didn’t have to conduct much research to come to the same conclusion Dr. Rhine did. Let me state it in one clear concise sentence: ESP exists in certain people—perhaps in all people, to a degree—but it’s either a very weak force or a very dormant one.”
“I’d imagine such a conclusion would have depressed you,” Seymour says.
Sharp shakes his head. “On the contrary, I was delighted with what I’d discovered. Because it occurred to me that if I could assemble a large enough group of psychics, then I could use them the same way astronomers use groups of radio telescopes to boost the faintest signals given off by the most distant galaxies.”
“Oh God,” I whisper.
Sharp nods in satisfaction. “You see where I’m going. Astronomers call such groups of radio telescopes ‘arrays.’ No one telescope picks up much information. But when their data is fed through a computer and scanned for patterns, they prove to be remarkably accurate.”
“You created a psychic array,” I say, my blood turning cold, never mind that I drank two pints of warm blood this morning.
Sharp beams. “Yes.”
“Wait,” Seymour says. “I don’t get it. I don’t care how large a group you assembled, it should only be as strong as its strongest link. I mean, you must have gotten a bunch of answers that were all over the place. That must have happened when you applied your array to reading the ESP deck, didn’t it?”
“You’re jumping the gun, Seymour. We’re not all as bright as Teri obviously is. Let’s take it step by step. When dealing with a large group, all you need is a one percent deviation by chance to construct a workable array. Let me give you an example. I took a female student who knew nothing about my work and had her focus on the ESP cards one at a time. Usually there are twenty-five cards in a deck, five of each basic shape. I gave her twenty decks to work with. Enough to get a statistically sound average but not enough to exhaust her. At the same time I borrowed four hundred students from the school’s general population. Their job was to try to read the woman’s mind. To see what shape the woman was looking at. I stationed her in an isolated area and put my large group in an auditorium. They could see her via remote camera but she couldn’t see them. They knew when she picked up a fresh card. They knew how long she held it for. They were not allowed to talk to each other. I discouraged them from even looking at each other. I wanted them to focus on the woman and try to guess what shape she was seeing.”
“Guess?” Seymour says. “They were still guessing.”
“Of course. And they were wrong most of the time. But I quickly noticed that there would be a certain shape the group would lean toward with any one card. For example, when the woman was staring at a square, often a hundred people in my array would guess a square.”
“The other three hundred would be wrong?” Seymour asks.
“Yes.”
“That doesn’t seem to prove anything.”
“You’re not thinking this through!” Sharp snaps. “According to the laws of chance, only eighty people should have guessed a square. A hundred people guessing it correctly was very significant. Ninety people guessing it correctly was significant. Eighty-five guessing correctly was also significant.”
“Come on,” Seymour grumbles. “How can you say eighty-five people getting it right meant anything? They could have done that by chance.”
“In any one trial, chance was always a factor. But I performed hundreds of trials with each test subject. And my array of four hundred students would lean toward the correct answer one quarter of the time.”
Seymour struggles to be diplomatic but he is stuck on this point. “By chance they would have gotten the right answer one fifth of the time. I’m sorry, I’m still not impressed.”
“I’m not offended. That was the identical response I received from my colleagues when I showed them my results. But with the help of my grad students—five of whom were close to me—I began to experiment with my array. I soon discovered that kids were accurate more often than adults. I also learned that concentration didn’t improve accuracy. Kids did better when they relaxed and answered with whatever popped into their minds. Finally, and this was a big key, I discovered that the ESP signal was still weak in the most psychic person I could find. The bottom line was, I had to use a giant array to get accurate results. It was only when I began to use three thousand kids that I was able to create a workable array.”
“How accurate was that group?” Seymour asks.
“They would lean toward the correct answer almost every time.”
“The word ‘lean’ is ambiguous. How many of the three thousand kids would get the correct answer?” Seymour persists.
I feel I must interrupt and defend what Sharp is saying.
“It doesn’t matter, Seymour. All that matters is he was able to create a group that had a tendency toward accuracy. That not only proved that ESP existed, it created a situation where it could be tapped for other purposes.”
Sharp nods. “Thank you, Teri.”
Seymour is wary. “What do you mean for other purposes?”
I turn to Sharp. “I assume you began to use your array to see things other than the shapes on the cards.”
“Yes,” Sharp says. “At the urging of my graduate students, I tried to see if my array could predict swings in the stock market.”
“Of all the things the kids could predict.” Paula jumps in suddenly. “Why did you have them focus on the stock market?”
“It wasn’t my idea. It was Cynthia’s. But her reasons must be obvious. She wanted to see if the kids could help make money.”
“Up until this point your research had an innocent quality to it,” Paula says. “You were a scientist seeking the truth. But when you allowed your group of kids to be exploited to make money, didn’t it worry you that such an intent would distort your experiments?”
“We never told the kids what they were predicting. We wanted them to remain innocent, as you say. We just fed them stock symbols and asked if they felt “positive” or “negative” about them. Understand, none of these kids recognized the symbols. I didn’t recognize them. They were from obscure stocks. Cynthia was the only one who knew what companies they belonged to.”
“Professor,” Paula says, “I don’t wish to hurt your feelings but you’re avoiding my question. The intent of your experiments was controlled at the top. It was you and Cynthia and the other grad students who were in charge. All of you knew you were using the kids for personal gain.”
Sharp is offended. “Never in my life have I put money at the top of my list of what’s important in life. Look at the path I chose. I could have made a substantial salary as a practicing psychiatrist. With wealth, I could have purchased a large home and attracted a beautiful wife. But I stayed in an academic environment, and remained single, so I could devote my life to teaching others what I knew, and continue with my research. How dare you accuse me of exploiting my subjects for selfish purposes.”
“I apologize,” Paula says. “The fact you didn’t exploit the kids is admirable. Still, you knew your graduate students weren’t as altruistic. I get the impression you did little to rein this Cynthia in.”
Sharp snorts. “You don’t know the woman. No one told her what to do.”
Paula persists. “You still haven’t answered my question. Weren’t you concerned that the intent to make money on the stock market would distort your results?”
Sharp is a long time answering. The left side of his face, the injured part, seems to tremble. “At that time, I didn’t realize that intention was important in this work.”
“But later?” Paula asks.
Sharp holds up a hand. “I’ll get to that later. For now, the main point is we’d made a major scientific discovery. In my mind the most important discovery of our time. My array was not only able to prove the existence of telepathy, it was able to show that people could actually predict the future.”
“Were you able to publish your research?” I ask.
Sharp’s shoulders sag and the life goes out of his voice. “No. The fools. I had in hand absolute proof of a force of nature that had been under our noses since we first lived in caves, and no one wanted to hear about it. I should say, no one in the scientific community. Sure, there were fringe groups that were willing to publish my work, but you have to understand that given my position with the university, I couldn’t be seen as avoiding the scrutiny of my peers. Yet they wouldn’t even look at what I had discovered! They joked about me behind my back. I was no longer Professor Sharp but Professor Dull.”
“Was Cynthia upset your work wasn’t accepted?” I ask.
He hesitates. “I suppose.”
“I don’t think so. I think once she and the others saw what you had stumbled upon, they were anxious to keep it quiet. Come on, Professor, isn’t that the truth?”
He’s still lost in the past, in his anger over the rejection of his years of research. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he mumbles.
I give the others a look telling them that I want to take control of the questioning. I especially don’t want Shanti to speak up and admit she’s recently been a member of Cynthia’s Array. For all I know it might make the old man clam up with fear.
Seymour nods, indicating he doesn’t have a good feel for the subject matter. Yet Paula frowns. She’s worried about something I’m missing. That’s fine, she can question him when I’m done.
“Professor Sharp, please look at me,” I say and he raises his head. “You’ve done a wonderful job of explaining the theory behind your work and how the original arrays first came to be. But you’ve told us almost nothing about your grad students who went on to found the IIC. They’re the reason we’re here. They’re dangerous. You know that as well as we do. Isn’t that true?”
He blinks as if shaken but his eyes come back into focus.
“They’re more dangerous than you can imagine,” he says.
I smile. “I think you’re going to discover that I have a pretty vivid imagination. Help us take a close look at the players involved here. I get the impression Cynthia was the boss when it came to this group?”
“I was in charge. I taught them everything they knew.”
“That might have been true in an academic sense. But already you’ve admitted it was Cynthia who came up with the idea to use the large group of kids to predict changes in the stock market.”
Sharp nods reluctantly. “Cindy was the smartest of the lot, the most driven. She was the first to grasp the implications of my work. She helped me a lot when it came to tinkering with the arrays, improving how the kids did. In the beginning, we were very close.”
“Did you have a falling out later?” I ask.
He shrugs and lowers his head. “It wasn’t that way. I got a stroke, I got sick. I was in bed for over a year. The university forced me to retire, although I think they used my illness as an excuse. They never appreciated my work.”
“Was Cindy married to Thomas Brutran at the time?” I ask.
“To Tom? No, they got together later. When I met Cindy, she was with Fredrick Wild. You must have seen his name listed online. He was on the original IIC board.” Sharp smiles wistfully as he recalls the good old days. “We used to call him Freddy or Fried Freddy. He was a huge devotee of LSD, mushrooms, and other mind-expanding drugs. He used to worry me, I was scared he would damage his brain. He was the exact opposite of Cindy. They were an odd couple, to be sure. But she loved him. I never saw a girl so much in love. And boy she was jealous! If Freddy so much as looked at another girl she went on the warpath.”
“Did Freddy feel the same about Cindy?” I ask.
Sharp hesitates. “He loved her, sure, intensely. They were very close. Unfortunately, they weren’t compatible. Freddy was a laid-back hippie and Cindy was driven to get ahead. They wanted to be together but it didn’t work out. And so Cindy ended up with Tom, Thomas.”
“Does Cindy love Tom?” I ask, although I already know the answer.
“He loves her but I doubt she ever got over Freddy.”
“Then why did she marry Tom?”
Sharp shook his head. “Tom was rich and handsome. They had more in common than Cindy and Freddy. Tom was clean-cut, well disciplined. He wore a sports coat to campus while most kids his age had on shorts and sandals. I knew that one day he’d be president of a company. And you see, that’s what’s happened.”
“IIC is not a normal company.”
“You’ll get no argument from me on that point.”
“Were Noel Brent and Wendy Brent married when they were your students?” I ask.
“They got married shortly after I came up with the array. They had to. Wendy got pregnant and Noel pretty much did what she told him to.”
“It sounds like the women were the real power when it came to your graduate students.”
“That’s true about Cindy and Wendy. But you couldn’t say that about Freddy. No one told that guy what to do. He was a free thinker. I’ve told you that Cindy helped me refine the early arrays, but Freddy was a big help as well. He was the one who figured out how to get them to talk.”
My heart skips. “Talk?”
Sharp suddenly looks as if he’s been caught with his hand in the cookie jar. “I didn’t mean that literally.”
“How did you mean it?” I ask.
Sharp is distinctly uncomfortable. “Freddy came up with a list of experiments that allowed us to extract information from the kids.”
“What kind of information?”
“Your usual New Age drivel. I didn’t think it was important at the time.”
“But later?” I ask.
Sharp brushes the question away. “Don’t get hung up on that part of our research. There was nothing there we could prove.”
“Professor, I’m afraid you contradict yourself. On one hand you say Freddy was a big help. He had insights into the early arrays and got them to talk. Then you act like the information he came up with wasn’t important.”
“I don’t think it was important.”
“At least tell us how he got the arrays to talk.”
Sharp shrugs. “None of his techniques were scientific. It was more along the lines of spiritualism. The type of people drawn to those cults are always trying to get messages from beyond the grave. They gather people around a table and try to get the table’s legs to tap once for yes and twice for no. Or else they sit with Ouija boards and channel all kinds of bizarre information. Freddy was drawn to that sort of thing. It impressed me that he was able to adapt our arrays so the power of a large group could contribute to what was being channeled. But, once again, the quality of the information was usually poor.”
“Give us an example of the type of information you received.”
“It was no different from the junk you can find in a hundred channeled books at the store. A spirit would arrive with some high-sounding name and profess to have the secrets of the universe. He or she would dictate pages of information on reincarnation or higher dimensions, none of which could be tested. I’m telling you, it was a waste of time.”
“Professor Sharp, do you believe in God?” I ask.
My question catches him off guard. “Why do you ask?”
“With all your experiments, it sounds like you were trying to tap into a kind of collective unconsciousness—if you want to use Carl Jung’s label—or a universal consciousness. Would you say that’s fair?”
“We were trying to tap into a power that had no name. Some people might have called it God. I’m not sure I would have been one of them.”
“Why not?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “How can I answer that question? As a scientist, I could only work with what I could prove.”
I lean forward and take his shriveled hand in mine. “Are you afraid to answer because you think Cindy used the arrays for evil purposes? To give you a stroke?”
“No.”
“When we first arrived, you gave that impression.”
He shakes free of my hand. He acts trapped, restless. “You don’t understand,” he says.
“The arrays were designed to solicit information. To prove we had hidden senses beyond the five obvious ones. I didn’t create them to hurt people. The idea is preposterous.”
“That’s not true,” I say.
“It is true!” he shouts back.
“But you’ve admitted how dangerous the IIC is. You said it was more dangerous than we could imagine.”
Sharp struggles to answer and I fear I might have pressed him too hard. He’s old and frail. His voice cracks as he answers and I worry he’s going to have another stroke.
“That company is dangerous but not because of the big Array Cindy eventually created. That’s not what stung you and that’s not what put me in bed for a year and destroyed my health.”
“If it wasn’t the Array, then what was it?” I ask.
Sharp hesitates. “The Cradle.”
“What’s that?” I demand.
The man lowers his head and trembles as he speaks. “I can’t talk about it, it’s too dangerous. Find Freddy, talk to him. I’ll put you two in touch. He knows more about it than I do.”
I feel frustrated. I have finally managed to steer him to the secret of secrets and now he refuses to tell us what it is. I try pushing him harder but finally have to accept his fear is genuine. It’s not like he is refusing to talk about what happened next, it’s like he can’t.
However, when we’re about to leave, I ask, “At least tell us why it’s called the Cradle?”
He stares at me closely, as if seeing me for the first time, and his face darkens. “You know,” he says. “It touched you. It’s just begun to grow.”
It’s my turn to clam up. I don’t ask what it is. I already know it’s that horrible thing that attacked me in that crummy motel in London.