“What do you want me to do?”
“You are already doing it,” Eli said, and Derek realized that he had been staring Eli in the eyes, unblinking, since the moment he’d raised his head.
Eli said, “I see you in a field, among hills.”
“What do you mean, you see me?”
This was too much like hypnosis. He had lost track of himself, and it frightened him. He wasn’t supposed to lose control like this. He hadn’t yet been sucked into Eli’s web; he’d always managed to stay detached with his tape recorder spinning. It was not spinning now.
“You are very young, Derek.”
“A young soul, you mean?” That was it: Break the spell.
“No, a young man.” Eli smiled, as if to say that what he was doing couldn’t be so easily interrupted. This was like nothing in Derek’s experience; he hadn’t the resources to defend himself against it. No… it was like his first overwhelming memory, his first day in this house, when he’d remembered the fever-dream of the evil chimes. But instead of fading, instead of his taking control of it, it was strengthening now and taking control of him.
“You are standing in a field of thorns, crying very hard. You are in the shadow of something huge.”
“This is all very ominous,” Derek said, “but what do you mean, really?” If this was part of Eli’s purification, it was all nonsense. Yes, that was the way to see it. He struggled to free himself from seeing what Eli described, but it was not easy.
“I see what it is now. It’s a freeway.”
Derek grew very still. No, he can’t be…. But he also saw it. Remembered it.
“It ends here, Derek. Right where you are, in midair over you. That is your shadow, my boy. The shadow over your soul.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“This thing must be faced. You must approach it with courage and nobility. I see now why otherwise you seem to be so fearless. There is only one thing you fear: facing this. Anything else is easy by comparison; but anything else will be futile and meaningless to you, until you have done this. You must be pure in order to receive initiation….”
“You’ve lost me, Elias,” he tried to say, but Eli was gone. He had been staring at him, but now it was hot yellow sky he saw, burning out from beyond the shade of the unfinished freeway.
He crouched in the dried weeds, plucking golden foxtails from his socks. Somewhere near was the hum of bees, rising and falling as they made their way through the sagebrush hills. The land was so hot it seemed to crackle like fire all around him. But here in the shade it was cool, with his back to the cement columns towering so high and still above him, where the freeway broke off in midair.
He finally saw May, a small figure in a plain blue dress, coming up the hill toward him, picking her way over rocks and avoiding the sprawling growths of cactus. Behind her, the trailer park blurred in the heat, its smallest details vanishing, except for sharp glints of reflected sunlight. Beyond the trailer rows, the sun flashed on crawling cars, the old two-lane highway clogged six hours a day. Someday the new freeway would carry all the cars at top speed, but it had languished uncompleted since before Mrs. Crowe had moved them here to Glenrock, a developing community southeast of L.A., where tracts were springing up in the fertile flats that had once been orange groves, and where Derek could still smell blossoms from the few remaining orchards on warm nights when the wind was right. The huge concrete snake hugged the hillside to the north, but here it rose high into the air as if anticipating some obstacle yet to come—and sheared off abruptly. Sometimes Derek dreamed that it reared up higher still, swaying toward the trailer park, dipping its head like Tyrannosaurus Rex, coming down to root him out of the thin aluminum shell, to feed….
May spotted him now and paused to wave. He waved back, made sure she was still coming, then went around to the far side of the column where he had dropped his backpack and canteen. He had already spread a beach towel in the shade; now he got out his hypnosis handbook and opened it to his favorite induction, the one that started with the subject floating like a cloud in a wide blue sky. Eventually they got so you could pinch them and they wouldn’t feel a thing. Derek had never tried putting pins in the hypnotized subject’s flesh, but some books said you could do that too. He was afraid to try.
May stepped around the cement leg of the freeway, her freckled face brown from the sun. She saw him kneeling in the shade and came running forward. “Did you bring everything you need?” she asked.
“This is it,” he said, slapping the book against his thigh, then holding it up for her to see. She put out her hands and touched it lightly, almost reverently. The cover was dark, washed-out blue, and showed a pair of gaping eyes floating in mist. Hypnosis in an Instant!—by Quinn Selkirk, the author of Quick Clairvoyance! and ESP—1,2,3! She started to look into the book, but she must have sensed that she was encroaching on Derek’s territory. The secrets were his alone to impart; he had the knowledge, and she dare not try to take it for herself. Besides, he knew that the whole idea of being hypnotized frightened her—she didn’t really want to get too close to the book. Closing it squeamishly, she delivered it back into his tense and waiting fingers.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
May bit her lip ferociously, squinting at him, half scowling and half smiling. As always when he was alone with her, his mind seemed to run slightly out of sync with his body. Part of him was adrift in a delirium, blissfully drinking in every detail of her face, her round cheeks, her long dark hair brushed back from her even darker eyes. Everything about May was perfect; she had seemed to him the embodiment of perfection from the moment she moved into the trailer park. The better he’d gotten to know her, the more his love for her had intensified, and the more perfect she seemed. Now she looked up at him hesitantly and his heart felt as if it were going to burst. She put out her hand and locked fingers with him, pulling close, gazing up at him so soulfully that he couldn’t think of anything but her eyes, the sweet smell of her, the dusty warmth of her hair.
“You—you’re sure it’s all right?” she said.
“Yes.” He put his hands on her bare tanned arms, squeezed. “You talked to Mike and Dinah didn’t you? They said it’s safe, didn’t they?”
She nodded, pressing up against him, shivering. “Mike said it was really fun. He said you made him think he was shrinking down like a bug, and he could crawl around between the grass blades and explore. Dinah said you made her see flying saucers come down from the sky and land right in the middle of the highway!” She laughed, clapping her hands to her mouth. “Did you really do that?”
“Yes. I can make you see anything.”
“But you can’t make me… do anything? Nothing I don’t want, I mean?”
“Oh, May….” He caught her hands again and put his arm around her. “May, that’s totally wrong, everything they told you in church. The subconscious is nothing to be scared of. No one can make you do something you don’t want to do. All I do when I hypnotize you is guide you—I show you how to hypnotize yourself. Maybe if there’s something you want to do but you’ve always been afraid to try, then under hypnosis maybe you’ll be able to do it. But you’d never do anything you don’t want.”
“Well…” He’d seen the battle in her eyes; they’d talked about all this before. But she needed extra reassurance the other kids in the trailer park didn’t. She’d been brainwashed from an early age by her church.