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  He spread his hands, as if bestowing a benediction. ‘He called me himself, person to person, on that phone, I swear to God. I just talked, Sare, to Messiah Wilde in the living, breathing flesh!’

  ‘I don’t believe it, Bill,’ Sarah said, heart pounding. ‘I can’t…’

  ‘True as I sit here. An’ lissen, if you find that part of it hard to believe, girl, there’s no way you’re gonna believe the next part. He says to me, “Bill, please be sure and pass on my respects and thanks to Sarah Cawdor. That show of hers is terrific, so please tell her so from me.” He didn’t actually say “terrific”, as I recall; I think what he said was “superlative” or some such phrase. How ‘bout that, Sare?’ Bill Benedict punched the air. ‘A ringing endorsement from the main man hisself!’

  Sarah was sitting weakly in the chair. She licked her dry lips. ‘I find it incredible that he even knows about the programme, way down there in Florida. Our outreach doesn’t extend that far, does it?’

  ‘Not into Florida itself, but all through the midwest, and a station in Memphis covers a swathe south to New Orleans. You saw the figures, Sare; I showed you the charts. We got an umbrella that throws its shadow over twenty-five million people. The Beamers must’ve gotten feedback from scores, hundreds, hell, thousands of listeners to the show. An’ they love it – the Beamers, I mean – they think you’re doin’ a swell job.’

  Bill Benedict was as tickled pink as his shirt.

  Sarah was shaking her head in wonderment, smiling as if privately, inwardly, purely for herself. ‘And he took the time to call you to say how much he liked the programme. You talked to Messiah Wilde in person.’

  ‘Yeah, sure did,’ Bill Benedict said, wearing a broad grin. ‘And now he wants to talk to you.’

  That was the moment when Sarah thought she was about to faint. She gripped her knees through her jeans to hold on to some semblance of reality. Deep inside, in the very core of her, she felt her uterus contract. Juices started seeping out of her, and a warm tingling spread upward from her thighs and bathed her in tropical heat.

  ‘You’re blushing, Sare.’ Bill Benedict’s eyes narrowed to slits, a mischievous twinkle in their depths. ‘You got the hots for that guy, huh? Huh?’ He wagged his head and tutted. ‘An’ you a respectable married lady with a family.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Bill.’ Sarah recovered her breath. ‘I’m just very flattered. Did he say why? I mean, did he give a reason?’

  ‘Didn’t ask him. Maybe he wants to thank you hisself, in person. Told him you’d be through just after eleven, so he’s gonna call you then.’

  ‘You mean here? Tonight?’

  ‘Right.’ Bill Benedict clapped his hands. ‘Don’t just sit there like a moonstruck calf, girl: go get the show on the road!’

  He watched, grinning, hands laced behind his head, as Sarah left the office in a daze. She went along the corridor to the studio, her hand dipping in her purse. Just as she arrived at the heavy door with the small square window, a white sign with red lettering on it saying STUDIO PERSONNEL ONLY, she glanced both ways and, seeing there was no one about, slipped the round candy-sized lozenge into her mouth. She wadded the wrapper with the red ‘M’ in a black circle and shoved it to the bottom of her purse, opened the door and went in.

  Some of it Gribble had heard already. Before, though, when Cawdor had visited the apartment, his account had been so rambling and disjointed that Gribble couldn’t make head nor tail of it.

  Under Doctor Khuman’s gentle prompting and guidance, he now recounted a mysterious tale about a sailing ship in the middle of the ocean under a moonless sky. And a very high tower block in a blighted futuristic cityscape of desolation and poisoned urban sprawl. Then a complete switch to something quite normal and everyday: Jeff at the airport, heading off on vacation to Europe with his family. There was also the dream – if that’s what it was – that remained most vivid to Gribble, of the man strapped in the electric chair, a hazy blue halo hovering over him.

  Oddly enough, the one incident Cawdor didn’t once refer to was Phyllis Keets’s accusation of sexual harassment. Gribble was perplexed by its omission, because Cawdor, he recalled, seemed to have been more shocked and dismayed by it than anything else.

  Each of the other episodes he described with exact clarity, embellished with specific details. He mentioned names too – the Shouters, Kershalton, Salamander, Cobb, Elder Graye – some of them several times over. How much of this Cawdor was consciously aware of, Gribble wasn’t sure. Maybe not too much at all; it was locked inside his brain and could only be released during this trancelike state. And afterward? Would he retain it? Or would these images sink back into the swamp of his fevered unconscious?

  Gribble’s attention continually flicked between Cawdor, sitting there with his hands resting in his lap, speaking in a low, unemotional voice, and Doctor Khuman, head slightly bowed, listening intently as he examined his pale, elongated fingernails. He never at any point interrupted Cawdor, or led him along a particular path, and only asked a question when there was a natural pause in the flow of monologue.

  After about half an hour, when a couple of times Cawdor had closed his eyes as if growing weary, Doctor Khuman brought him out of it. Again there was no dramatic clapping of hands or snapping of fingers, none of the stage hocus-pocus Gribble had expected. The Indian merely leant forward and took Cawdor’s wrist, holding it in the palm of his hand, and murmured in his ear, ‘Thank you, Mr Cawdor. That is all. Come back, come back.’

  At that, Cawdor straightened up and worked his shoulders as if to relieve some stiffness from having sat immobile for such a long period of time. He eased his neck from side to side. He smiled at Gribble. ‘I’ll have that beer now, Gil.’

  Gribble went to the kitchen to get the beer he’d offered when Cawdor had first arrived, and which he had refused, and returned with four cans of Coors in case anyone else was thirsty. To his surprise, Doctor Khuman accepted the beer, opened it, and tilted his head back to take a good long drink, not even asking for a glass. Gribble realigned the desk lamp and switched on a table lamp in the corner. There was a couple of hours of daylight remaining, but the sky was low and overcast, the light outside the window a drab steel grey.

  The four of them drank in silence, Cawdor sitting on the kitchen chair, Doctor Khuman leaning against the workbench, Annie Lorentz perched on the arm of the sofa; Gribble stayed standing, moving his weight from foot to foot. He was watching Cawdor’s face, and Cawdor in turn was looking at Doctor Khuman with such intensity that Gribble found it rather unnerving, though the Indian was apparently oblivious.

  ‘Satish?’ Annie Lorentz said, and, when Doctor Khuman glanced at her, one eyebrow raised in inquiry, she burst out impatiently, ‘Well, come on, for Pete’s sake, what’s the verdict? Does all this stuff mean something? Or nothing? Or don’t you know?’

  The long lean planes of Doctor Khuman’s face relaxed in a smile. ‘I was just wondering…’

  ‘Yeah, what?’

  Doctor Khuman turned to Cawdor, the cone of light from the desk lamp winking on the thin silver frames of his spectacles. ‘Are you a religious man, Mr Cawdor?’

  ‘By that you mean, do I believe in God?’

  ‘Not necessarily… God. Have you read the novel Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse? In it he speaks of the unity of the world, how all events, large and small, form a single unified whole. He expresses it as belonging to the same stream, obeying the eternal laws of cause and effect – or karma, as Buddhists would say. But the hero of the novel, Siddhartha, is disturbed by the notion that this perfect, embracing wholeness is broken in one place. There is a gap through which strange disruptive forces can enter. Or –’ Doctor Khuman held up a finger ‘one can use the gap oneself to enter into a strange, different world. Another level of existence.’

  Cawdor shook his head. ‘I’ve never read it.’ He was sitting upright in the chair, and Gribble could see the tension in his body, the way he was gripping the beer can so tightly that his knuck
les showed white.

  ‘You don’t really believe that to be true, Satish,’ Annie Lorentz said. ‘I mean, it’s a metaphor, isn’t it, for some form of spiritual experience? Not something that could actually “happen” in the literal sense of the word.’

  ‘I’m not at all sure it couldn’t,’ Doctor Khuman said.

  ‘So what’s the deal? These dreams, visions – whatever they are – they’re a snapshot of some other level of existence? Is that what you’re saying?’ Annie Lorentz said.

  ‘Snapshot!’ Doctor Khuman was nodding and smiling with genuine pleasure. ‘That’s an excellent way of putting it, Annie. It’s a single glimpse of an underlying reality. In some way we don’t yet understand, Mr Cawdor has been afforded the opportunity to –’

  ‘Doctor Khuman.’

  Cawdor’s voice was hushed, yet charged with such trembling emotion that it seemed to Gribble as if he was in the grip of fever. His chest rose and fell and there were bubbles of sweat on his forehead.

  Now it was Doctor Khuman’s turn to stare at Cawdor. A shadow passed over the large, liquid brown eyes behind their magnifying lenses. ‘What’s wrong, Mr Cawdor? Are you unwell?’

  ‘You don’t remember…’

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘Meeting me… before today.’

  ‘Have we met before?’ Doctor Khuman asked, so quietly that the words barely escaped his lips. Two vertical lines cut deep furrows through his forehead.

  ‘You really don’t remember the day you came to my office? There was a thunderstorm that day, lit up the whole sky.’ Cawdor blinked up at him. ‘You came to warn me that some kind of disruption was about to happen.’

  A subtle yet startling transformation had come over Doctor Khuman. His face had gone taut, a pulse beating in his temple. In a soft, hoarse voice he said, ‘But that is quite impossible, Mr Cawdor. I don’t know where you work. I don’t even know what you do for a living. Annie gave me your name, nothing more.’ He glanced towards Annie Lorentz, as if seeking confirmation.

  ‘When was this, Jeff?’ Gribble asked.

  ‘Ten days… two weeks ago.’

  Doctor Khuman was shaking his head. ‘It can’t have been. My last visit to New York was last fall. Could it be that you met someone who resembled me, a case of mistaken identity perhaps?’

  ‘Possibly,’ Cawdor was prepared to concede. ‘But one hell of a coincidence that his name also happened to be the same as yours. Are there two Doctor Khumans?’

  ‘Good God,’ Doctor Khuman murmured. His brown face had turned ashen.

  ‘Maybe you dreamt that too,’ Gribble suggested, before he realised that to dream of someone you’d never met, and then to meet that person in real life, was just as incomprehensible.

  Annie Lorentz hugged her knees, her pale-blue eyes wide as saucers. ‘I can’t get my head around this, Satish. Jeff remembers and yet you don’t? How in hell’s that possible?’

  ‘Read Siddhartha and you will understand,’ Doctor Khuman said, though it was a distant response, as if his thoughts were circling far and away beyond this cluttered apartment on 116th Street.

  Cawdor finished off his beer and wiped his mouth. When he took his hand away there was a wry, bitter smile lurking there. ‘I came here looking for answers, Doctor Khuman. I assumed you remembered me from before, that you could help me figure out what’s been happening. And what you’ve done is dump another mystery on me.’ The smile vanished as his face darkened. ‘The dreams are only part of it. My relationship with my wife, with my daughter, a woman I work with – everything’s falling to pieces for no reason, and it’s got me scared. I know – that is, I feel – all this stuff is connected somehow, even the dreams, but I just can’t make sense of it. I don’t know how.’

  He looked up, and there was no mistaking the naked appeal for help in his eyes.

  Doctor Khuman said, ‘Let me put this proposition to you. Come and spend a few days at my research institute, the Troth Foundation. It’s located near Griffin, which is thirty miles west of Glens Falls in upstate New York. Annie’s been many times; she knows the place well.’ Doctor Khuman slid off the workbench and straightened up, a lean dark form with pointed shoulders. ‘Please give my proposal serious consideration. I will not be so rash as to promise I can help you, Mr Cawdor, but I shall do my utmost. That I do promise.’

  ‘Thanks. I don’t ask for anything more.’ For the first time Cawdor was able to conjure up the ghost of a real smile. ‘And who knows, Doctor Khuman … maybe I can help you too.’

  ‘Oh? In what respect?’

  ‘To remember the last time we met.’

  The Indian’s magnified brown eyes, large and unblinking, were fixed on Cawdor. ‘I am by no means certain,’ he said in his precise, modulated tones, ‘that I do wish to remember it.’

  Bill Benedict had let Sarah use his office and left her alone to take the call. She sat in his chair staring at the phone, continually glancing at her wristwatch in between working her hands nervously in her lap. Her breathing was rapid and shallow, and she hoped to God she could articulate a few simple sentences without the sounds getting strangled in her throat.

  She didn’t jump when the phone rang. Her reactions were dulled by the second melibrium, sucked like a sweet during the programme, and her head felt to be floating away from her body; only the restless, fidgeting hands betrayed the turmoil of emotion buried under the layers of her drifting dreamlike state.

  Sarah picked up the phone. She held it to her ear and took a deep breath. ‘Hello?’

  ‘Is this Mrs Cawdor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘May I call you Sarah?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How good it is to speak with you, Sarah. This is Messiah Wilde speaking.’ The rich, bass voice that she knew so well flowed over her like golden syrup. She could see his lean dark face and the burning soulful eyes that seemed, even on the TV screen, to penetrate right down to the innermost secret recesses of her soul. And now, in this actual moment in time, he was speaking to her and her alone in all the world. Her very own name on his lips!

  ‘Mr Benedict has conveyed to you, I trust, how much we admire your wonderful programme, Take Five, and how truly grateful we are to you for spreading the Message to your radio audience. But I wanted to say it to you, personally, Sarah, and to thank you, on behalf of the Beamers, for the magnificent work you’re doing. Thank you.’

  Sarah’s body was melting into the chair. Beyond the bright circle of light, it seemed to her, the darkened room was whirling around, faster and faster, and she gripped the edge of the desk to keep from whirling with it.

  ‘It’s what I believe in… to be right… give people inner peace they seek … hope for the future …’

  Her halting speech was almost incoherent, but she couldn’t help it. She felt herself trapped and suffocating in some primeval heat. Her loins were on fire. She said huskily, ‘I must tell you, Messiah Wilde, it’s your presence on The Lovebeams Show … when you appear it’s as if a golden aura surrounds you… I confess I get excited as a schoolgirl, that’s what you do to me …’

  From 1,200 miles away a low chuckle came down the line, as intimate as if he were close beside her. ‘Thank you most kindly, Sarah. How very nice of you to say so. And, since you’re so brave and honest in confessing it, let me make a confession too. Your voice on the radio has a beautiful, calm – no, a – how shall I say? – a serene quality. It moves me deeply when I listen to you.’ There was a pause, and she could hear him breathing. ‘If you understand my meaning.’

  ‘Yes,’ Sarah said, suddenly feeling calm and serene, ‘I think I do.’

  ‘There is another reason for my calling, Sarah, in addition to thanking you most sincerely. As a mark of our appreciation, I’d like to invite you down here in order to participate in The Lovebeams Show. I wonder if you would be willing to do us that honour. As our guest, of course. Flight, hotel, all expenses paid.’

  Sarah clutched the desk tightly as the room spun out of c
ontrol.

  There was a long pause filled with his measured breathing.

  ‘Is that possible, do you suppose?’ Messiah Wilde said, his deep voice softly cajoling. ‘Bring your daughter along as well, if you like. Daniella. You would both be most welcome.’

  ‘I’m – I’m –’

  ‘Lost for words?’ A low rumbling chuckle vibrated the receiver against her ear. ‘May I take that to mean you accept?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’m so pleased. Tomorrow I shall e-mail the travel arrangements for the two of you. Thank you, Sarah. I look forward to meeting and getting to know you. Sleep peacefully. Good night.’

  ‘Good night,’ Sarah said reverently, her head floating up towards the ceiling. ‘And –’ the line clicked and went dead ‘– thank you, Messiah Wilde. Thank you so very much.’

  5

  Jeff,

  We don’t and never will see eye to eye about this, but I have a right to my opinions and beliefs, whether you agree with them or not. Believe me, I’ve thought about and considered this seriously – very seriously. It isn’t just a frivolous fad or fancy that will pass with time. When you found out about the radio prog I knew how you’d react, and it convinced me I was right not to discuss it with you before I made my decision.

  Well, I’ve made another decision without consulting you – and for the same reason – because I know you’d raise objections and we’d have a fight over it, so when you read this it’ll be too late for you to do anything about it. I feel very privileged to have been asked to take part in The Lovebeams TV show and they very kindly invited Daniella to come along with me. She was so thrilled, especially when I told her we’ll be in the presence of Messiah Wilde Himself.

  We’re taking the eleven-thirty morning flight to Fort Lauderdale, and they’re sending a limo to take us to the studio. We may be gone a couple of days. I’m not sure of the final arrangements.

  Sarah

  PS Please don’t, I beg you, do anything to spoil this for Daniella and me. I’ll never forgive you. I hope and pray that one day you’ll receive the Message, and with it will come true understanding.