(10)
 "Yes, in time. We will send people through here on missions. You are primarily the gatekeepers. You will be invisible to any but the likes of ghosts, angels, and shamans. And I have another job for you, Ray. I want you to become the chronicler of Compass News. We have all sorts of devices to capture video, audio, holographic records of events we are invovled in, but there is nobody to make sense of it, to write it down in intelligent, organized form."
"How thrilling," Tamsin said. She was genuinely happy for me.
"You can be his helpmate," Rector said with an encouraging wink, using an antique word formulation that seemed to please her. He added: "Would you mind if I have a word alone with Ray?"
She shrugged, and busied herself inspecting the kitchen, the bathrooms, and, above all, the closet space.
Rector took me to the autumn door and we stepped briefly into a growing darkness, where a wind began to howl, and leaves swarmed up in spirals like disturbed spirits. The air smelled pleasantly sour, of burning damp wood and damp leaves. "She is delicate right now," Rector said. "She will need time for her soul to heal. For you, however, I have a job we can't tell her about. You can tell her I have you doing something, but don't let her know it's dangerous. I just don't want to upset her."
"What's that?"
"I think we have a serial killer loose in Upside San Diego."
"How do you know?"
"Because a woman named Emily Thurston came to see me. She has lived here for several years. She is from back East, as they say here. She believes a killer is hunting her, who killed several of her friends about ten years ago."
"You think she's on the up and up?"
Rector put on his reading glasses, looking even more professorial than usual. He pulled a digitablet from his jacket pocket. "I went on the UnderNet," he said, meaning the Internet Plus, which serves both the living and the inbetween, possibly even the dead. "I found news articles online, from her home town, from news services around the country, and dowloaded them. Take a look." He handed the tablet to me. "You can begin your chronicling work with this case. Write the story of what we do, so that we can study what we do right and what we do wrong, and learn to do better."
I finger-scrolled through the articles, anxious to get back to Tamsin.
Ten years ago, outside a small town far away, four high school seniors had gone on a night excursion to a pond on a utility company's property. An unknown killer had stabbed two young men and one young woman to death in their cars. A fourth woman apparently got away, but had a bad fall in the dark. Emily Thurston fell about twenty feet, hitting her head on the way down, and was found wandering around the woods the next morning by sheriff's deputies, who were coincidentally among the many units from various services who had rushed to the scene of a triple murder near the boat slip. She was exhausted, hungry, thirsty, bloodied, and in amnesia. After two weeks in the hospital, during which a great many of her friends and family spent much time visiting her, she began to remember some details but not all. She thought she knew the killer, but wasn't sure who he had been. She went home during the third week, but told her parents she was terrified. The killer had promised to find her, no matter where she went, even if it meant searching to the ends of the earth. Her father bought a gun, and her mother always made sure the doors were locked. That fall, she changed her college plans and left for an undisclosed college, which turned out to be the University of California at San Diego. This was in another upscale, though bigger and more ostentatious seaside city district of La Jolla. In the warren of modern buildings overlooking the Pacific Ocean from sandstone cliffs, she had managed successfully to hide fromher obsessed stalker until very recently. She was now a research assistant in marine ecology, specializing in wildlife preservation, at Scripps Oceanographic Institute in La Jolla. She was married and had two children. And she feared for her life, her husband's life, and for her children. She didn't want to go on the run again. She had begun to build a portfolio of published papers under her mentor's aegis, which were nationally available, and would make it impossible for her to ever hide again, unless she changed her name and abandoned her career.
"Any idea who this stalker is?"
Rector took the tablet from me, finger-shuffled articles across the screen, and handed it back to me. "There is the number one candidate."
" Billy Packward," I read the caption under a shadowy image of a youth sitting next to a sick person in a hospital bed.
Rector said: "Police were smart enough to take pictures of anyone who came to visit, regardless of who they might be. They took note of anyone asking about her or visiting the murder scene. The interesting thing about this guy is that he was in her high school class, and was noticed by one or two girls over the years, consistently pining for Emily Thurston, but in a quiet, tortured kind of way. And he was a loner. It's not that he was disliked. Nobody even noticed him. People thought he was weird and avoided him. He never had any friends. And, about the time Emily went into hiding, he left their home town and never returned. I have a hunch he went looking for her."
"Why?" I asked, about the universe, the ways of mankind, fate in general, acts of random and specific horror and insanity.
"That's the question we always ask," Rector said, putting his tablet in his pocket. "I'll copy you on the pictures. Emily's memory is still blocked, but we know enough to suspect he's the one. She went to the police, and they put a detective on it, but it's not enough."
"Why are you so interested in this Upside case?"
"Because Emily will one day discover a cure for breast cancer, which my grandmother died of, and it means a whole lot to me. Emily will discover breast cancer in whales, and figure out why it strikes, and how to reverse it or avoid it. It will teach vital lessons on how to beat cancer in humans. It will be one of history's greatest medical achievements. We have to make sure she gets the chance to do that in our world."
I could not have agreed more. "Why do you think Packward is stalking her?"
"He's crazy, for one thing. He has nothing. Only his sick dream about having her, like a bandage on the gaping wound that is his existence. In his mind, he is deeply in love with her, and thinks that by possessing her, perhaps in death, he will fulfill the gaping hole in the ground that is his life."
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