He reached into a pocket for his cigarettes and lighter, came out with both items and also the keys to Gormley’s security cabinet. Without thinking, he tossed the keys on to an empty corner of the desk. Then he paused and stared at them lying there, forming a pattern – the pattern from this morning’s glimpse into the future. Very well, let’s go from there.
He tried the drawers of the desk. Locked. He took out Gormley’s notebook from the inside pocket of his overcoat, checked the code. It was OPEN SESAME.
Unable to suppress a chuckle, Kyle punched OPEN SESAME into the desk keyboard and tried again. The top right-hand drawer slid open at a touch. Inside, papers, documents, files . . .
And here comes the funny bit, he thought.
He took out the papers and placed them in front of him on the desk. Leaving the drawer open (his ‘glimpse’ again), he began to check through the documents, placing each one back in the drawer in its turn. He knew that by now his talent shouldn’t really surprise him any more, but it always did – and so he gave a small involuntary start as he arrived at the yellow file. The name on the cover was, of course, Harry Keogh.
Harry Keogh. Apart from Kyle’s dream, that name had only ever come up once before: in an ESP game he had used to play with Keenan Gormley. As for this file: he had never seen it before in his life (his conscious life, anyway) and yet here he sat staring at it, exactly as in his dream. It was a very creepy feeling. And –
In the dream he had held the file up to himself. Now the thought set the act in motion. Feeling foolish – not understanding why he did it, but at the same time feeling his skin charged with alien energy – he held up the file to the empty room, as if to a ghost from his own recent past. And just as a thought had triggered the action, now the action triggered something else – something away and beyond all of Alec Kyle’s previous experience or knowledge.
God almighty! Gadgets and ghosts!
The room had been comfortably warm just a moment ago. Centrally heated, the offices were never cold. Or should not be. But now, in a matter of seconds, the temperature had plunged. Kyle knew it, could feel it, but at the same time he retained enough of instinctive reasoning to wonder if perhaps his own body temperature had also taken a tumble. If so, it wouldn’t be hard to explain. This must be what shock felt like. No wonder people shivered!
‘Jesus Christ!’ he whispered, his breath pluming in the suddenly frigid air. The file fell from his twitching fingers, slapped down on the desk. The sound of its falling – that and what he saw – galvanised Kyle into an almost spastic reaction of motion. He jerked back in his chair, causing its legs to ride through the pile of the carpet, tilting it backwards until it slammed against the window sill and rebounded.
The – apparition? – the thing, where it stood half-way between the door and the desk, hadn’t moved. At first Kyle had thought (and had dreaded the thought) that it could only be himself he saw standing there, somehow projected forward from the dream. But now he saw that it was someone – something – else. Not once did it enter his mind to question the reality of what he was seeing, and not for a moment did he consider it to be anything other than supernatural. How could it be anything else? The scanners where they constantly swept the room, the entire suite of offices, had detected nothing. Entirely independent, if they had picked up anything at all intruder buzzers would be going off right now, and getting louder by the minute until someone sat up and took notice. But the alarms were silent. Ergo, there was nothing here to scan – and yet Kyle saw it.
It, he, was a man – a youth, anyway – naked as a baby, standing there facing Kyle, looking directly at him. But his feet weren’t quite touching the carpeted floor and the bars of green light from the windows penetrated into his flesh as if it had no substance at all. Damn it – it had no substance at all! But the thing stared at him, and Kyle knew that it saw him. And in the back of his mind he asked himself: Is it friendly, or – ?