Ascending Read online

  THE ASCENDING

  By T. M. Wright – Writing as F. W. Armstrong

  First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital

  Copyright 2011 by T. M. Wright

  Cover Design by David Dodd – Copy-edited by Kurt Criscione

  Cover image courtesy of: Julia Star - http://night-fate-stock.deviantart.com/

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  http://kuiwi.deviantart.com/

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  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  OTHER CROSSROAD TITLES BY T. M. Wright:

  NOVELS:

  STRANGE SEEDS

  BOUNDARIES

  THE CHANGING

  THE DEVOURING

  NON FICTION:

  THE INTELLIGENT MAN'S GUIDE TO U.F.O.s

  UNABRIDGED AUDIOBOOKS:

  A MANHATTAN GHOST STORY – NARRATED BY DICK HILL

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  For Becky, who, like Ryerson, is out on a limb.

  And for Sheba, a barrel of love.

  RYERSON BIERGARTEN

  When he was fifteen years old and had discovered his psychic abilities, Ryerson Biergarten was positive he'd gone crazy. He knew about people who "heard voices," or saw faces in the wallpaper, or woke night after night from the same awful dream. So when that sort of thing started happening to him, he went to his mother and said, "Mom, if you're a minor and you're crazy, do they put you away with the grown-up crazies?"

  She looked at him silently for a moment. She was very perceptive, and he was positive that she knew at that moment just what was afflicting him. She said, "Are you afraid, Ryerson?"

  The question surprised him. He said, "Yes," paused, and added, "How'd you know?"

  "I can see it in you," she answered. She was at the sink, peeling potatoes. The water was running while they talked, and later Ryerson's memory of their conversation would be colored by the sound of the water running—as if again in his memory, they were talking at the edge of a waterfall. She was wearing a blue flower-print, knee-length dress, and her very long blond hair was tied with a red ribbon to keep it out of the potatoes.

  Ryerson said, "I see things, Mom." He shook his head in confusion. "I see things and they come true." He paused. "Or I find out later that they're true."

  "And you think you're crazy because of it?" she asked.

  It was a rhetorical question, but he answered, "I don't know."

  She nodded. "Tell me what you see, Ryerson."

  Ryerson shoved his hands into his pockets. He was in many ways a typical sixties teenager, growing up in the suburbs just outside Boston. He was something of a slob, a trait he never grew out of completely. He was fascinated by the Beatles, Herman's Hermits, and the Rolling Stones. His schoolwork suffered from his preoccupation with girls, basketball, and acne. So, when his mother looked around at him with a quizzical expression on her face and said, "Tell me what you see, Ryerson," what she saw was an awkward, vaguely-scared-looking young man whose brown corduroy pants were baggy, whose shirttails hung out, and who was beginning to sport what might generously have been called a mustache. At the same time, this archetypal teenage boy was suffering torments that few other teenagers suffered, and she knew it.

  Ryerson said to her, "I see all kinds of things, Mom," and added hastily—because he knew that she despised vagueness—"I saw that Charlie was going to get hit."

  Charlie was their dog. He had been hit by a school bus a week earlier and was recuperating in the garage. He had a broken leg and what would later be revealed to be a cracked pelvis.

  "When?" Ryerson's mother asked and shut the water of

  "The day before it happened."

  She turned around from the sink, folded her arms over her chest, sighed, and sat at the kitchen table. "And what else?" she asked.

  "And what else?" He was confused. "Don't you want to hear about Charlie?"

  "We both know about Charlie."

  He looked at her for a long moment until it became clear what she was saying: they both knew about Charlie, so he could be lying. Ryerson clasped his hands nervously on top of the table. He didn't like being mistrusted by his mother. He said, staring at his hands and pouting a little, "And I know that Dad and you are going to get a divorce."

  Her expression froze.

  After half a minute, Ryerson said, "Mom?" He read pain in her. He felt her pain and her heartache. "Gee, God, I'm sorry," he said.

  His mother stood, stared appraisingly down at him, nodded, and said, "Never let anyone tell you that what you have is a 'gift,' son. It isn't."

  RUNNERS

  In the summer of his sixteenth year, Ryerson saw a camel on a dirt road near his uncle's farm.

  It was his first runner. He didn't have a name for it then. He didn't call it a "runner." In those few seconds after it appeared, he saw it simply, if bafflingly, as a camel. It was facing him from ten feet away, and it was chewing happily with that slight, odd smile that camels seem to have. Its big, heavy-lidded eyes were half-closed, and it moved its front legs forward and back slowly, as if impatient. As its hooves hit the dry dirt, they sent up small clouds of dust. When the dust settled, there were hoofprints in the road.

  Ryerson hadn't expected to see a camel in the Massachusetts countryside. He had been looking for a copy of C.S. Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet that he'd lost somewhere between his uncle's home and Levitt, the closest town. He'd walked to Levitt because his uncle had wanted a six-pack of Rolling Rock beer and had explained wearily, "The day is too awful damned hot to go out driving." So Ryerson had volunteered to walk into Levitt—two miles away—to get the beer. He took the book to read while he walked. He finished it halfway there (he had already read it a number of times) and put it in his pocket. When he got back to his uncle's house with the beer, he found that the book was gone.

  So, when the camel appeared, Ryerson was looking for his lost book and wondering why his "abilities," as his mother called them, were not helping him much.

  The sudden appearance of the camel made him jump. The first thing he thought was that camels spit at people, and he didn't want this one spitting at him. He backed away from it a few feet, put his hands up at chest level, palms out, and pleaded with the camel to stay right where it was. He thought, of course, that it had gotten loose from some traveling circus. What else would a camel be doing on the road to Levitt, Massachusetts?

  It blinked at him. He blinked back, though as a sort of reflex action, not as a way of trying to communicate with it. Ryerson thought that camels were very stubborn and independent and stupid. He was not going to try to communicate with such a creature. It might get the wrong idea and charge at me, he thought.

  He said to the camel, "What the hell are you doing here?"

  It blinked again, then shuffled impatiently. A fat honeybee buzzed over from the open fields nearby, circled the camel, then sped off into the fields on the opposite side of the road.

  This is what Ryerson thought when the honeybee had lost itself among the thousands of honeybees in the fields of clover—he thought that it had buzzed right through that camel's nose.

  As soon as Ryerson though
t this, the camel shook its great, bullet-shaped head furiously, snuffled and snorted, and reared up on its hind legs like a horse.

  Its underside was very much like a horse, in fact, and Ryerson thought that a camel shouldn't look like a horse underneath. He had never before seen the underside of a camel. He had seen the underside of a horse, though—his uncle had two horses that were very old and spent most of their time in a big fenced pasture behind the farmhouse.

  The camel settled down, blinked again, shuffled about. Clearly it was waiting for Ryerson to tell it to do something, but Ryerson still had no intention of trying to communicate with it.

  Before the camel's appearance, Ryerson had been walking in the center of the road with his head down. The road was very narrow, barely wide enough for one car, and he could get a good view of the shallow ditch to either side of the center. It was in the midst of a head-swing from left to right that he became aware of the camel—or at least that there was something very large in front of him.

  That narrow dirt road was quite clean. Lots of people walked it. Ryerson had walked it several dozen times, but it was unusual to see any kind of litter on it—a beer can or discarded gum wrapper. The people who walked the road were country people, and littering was not their habit. So when Ryerson saw the empty pack of cigarettes in the ditch, he had stopped for a moment and stared at it. Fine Turkish Tobaccos, it read. And the word CAMEL arched over the side view of a camel. That was a good five minutes before his encounter with the impatient, snuffling beast on the road.

  It was not until much later in the afternoon that he remembered the empty pack of cigarettes in the shallow ditch. Not until hours after the camel had turned and trotted off down the road and he'd followed it at a fast run, watched it lumber into the fields a good fifty feet, stop, and turn its great head to look at him, that odd smile increasing ever so slightly.

  It had found his treasured copy of Out of the Silent Planet.

  ~ * ~

  He told Uncle George about the camel. They were sitting at the kitchen table, playing rummy.

  Uncle George was tall, stocky, and very strong. He liked to put on an appearance of gruffness, but his eyes were the eyes of a man who cared a lot about people. He cared so much about people, in fact, that he had become something of a recluse at the farmhouse.

  Ryerson said to him, "I saw a camel on the road today."

  Uncle George was in the midst of adjusting his cards. He looked briefly at Ryerson over the top of the cards and said, "Is this a joke you're going to tell me, Ryerson?" He put a card down, picked one up from the pile in the center of the table, and put it into his hand.

  Ryerson answered, "No. I really did see a camel. It helped me find my book."

  "What book?"

  Ryerson told him.

  Uncle George nodded. "That's a good book." He laid his cards facedown on the table and leaned forward. "You know," he said, "we got opossum, raccoons, deer, and foxes, and maybe even some wildcats around here, but we don't have any camels." He nodded sagely, picked up his hand, discarded one of the cards, and settled back in his chair.

  That's when Ryerson remembered the empty Camel cigarette pack in the ditch to the side of the road, because Uncle George smoked Camels. Ryerson said, "I saw an empty pack of Camels in the ditch, and a couple of minutes later, I saw the camel on the road."

  Uncle George smiled. "That's quite a damned coincidence, wouldn't you say?"

  "It wasn't a coincidence, Uncle George. It happened."

  Uncle George nodded. "And the camel turned round and ran, and you went running after him, and the camel found your book?"

  Ryerson nodded. "Yes," he said.

  ~ * ~

  When he was in his early twenties, Ryerson wrote to himself: "The curse of this 'gift' is that I have it. Because who am I? I'm not blessed with the wisdom or brilliance that would allow me to use it properly. More often than not, it is a burden, and it sits heavily on me.

  "Even the dreams I have are . . . schizophrenic—like watching a TV that's tuned to 85 different channels at once. There is sense, and there is nonsense, but no delineation of the two. They are dreams that have the smell of decay and the touch of contentment, and the hard whisper of panic in them—like sleeping in the garbage of the rich.

  "This gift threatens to turn me into an agoraphobic. When I go out into the city"—he was living in a one-room apartment in Durham, North Carolina, while he worked for his doctorate in psychology at Duke University—"I am blitzed by the thoughts of those around me, and it is all I can do to keep from wandering out into the street and being run over by a truck because of it. Some of this psychic material is fascinating, much of it is pornographic—for lack of a better word—but the majority of it is damned disgusting. I got today, for instance, and very loudly, as if the person thinking it was in a panic—My teeth, my teeth, I didn't brush my teeth!

  "Lately, however, I've been learning to shut out much of that sort of thing. At least I've been learning to sort what's important from what isn't, and when I've done that, my mind seems to take over and push the extraneous stuff aside. It's an ability for which I'm thankful, though I don't know the mechanics of it.

  "One benefit of this gift is that I probably know better than most people, through firsthand experience, just how complex the mind really is, how many . . . rooms it has, how many of those rooms are open, how many are closed, and how many of those will probably stay closed forever.

  "Not that I can assign a number to it. I can't say, The mind has 1,000 rooms and five or six of those are open, the rest are closed, and 90 percent of those will remain closed forever. I can't say that, but the numerical relationships are probably right.

  "And the thing is, in all of those closed rooms there are influences that can seep out under the door, like odors, and find their way into the great open room of the mind, and influence it. Shape it. And so, shape us. I think it's something in one of those closed rooms that has made me able, at last, to sort out the useful from the junk and then push the junk aside. Something in another room has given me the gift itself that makes that ability necessary. "Someday I think I'll be able to peer into the particular room where my gift originates.

  "A fantasy comes to me. I see that there's a magician or a sorcerer in that room, and he sits in there and makes this gift work because it is, in reality, his gift and he's only sharing it with me out of perversity. This . . . entity is very amused by the whole thing.

  "And then there's the problem of romance."

  Ryerson stopped writing. It was painful to write about his love life.

  ~ * ~

  He looked very preppy. Tweed sports coats and bulky sweaters, corduroy pants, and loafers were the clothes he found comfortable.

  He had a square face, deep-set hazel eyes, a cupid's-bow mouth, and strong chin. He usually wore a short, badly trimmed beard, though he sometimes shaved it off for a month or two—once because a woman whose attention he desired thought, in so many words, How can you trust a man with a beard? He was told often that his eyes were his most interesting and expressive feature. He liked hearing that, though he wondered what feature other than the eyes were a person's most interesting and expressive. He was a shade over six feet tall and he carried himself with purpose and agility, though his posture was a little too erect, the result of overcompensating for a tendency to slouch.

  ~ * ~

  Before going to Toronto to help the police in a search for a missing thirteen-year-old boy, Ryerson had been doing a lot of thinking about what many referred to as a "group mind." He found the concept fascinating. His version of the "group mind" tied in with his idea that the mind was composed of many rooms, that some of these rooms were open, but that most would remain closed and locked forever.

  He had seen what he referred to as "the fog" more than once. This was a vaguely luminescent and amorphous entity which, he supposed, connected all living things, just as telephone lines connected houses. At first he thought that this fog gave people like himself
their particular psychic gifts, that he, unlike most people, was able to tap into it and pick from it the information he needed. He discarded the idea quickly. He didn't "pick information" out of anything. Information came to him in a flood—only recently had he been able to sort the junk from what was useful, and even that was an ability he had not consciously developed.

  It came to him that the fog did not so much connect minds as it was, itself, a kind of mind, or intelligence, and that the biological entities known as brains tapped into it. He believed, as well, that his gift was not actually the result of some talent he possessed, but pretty much the opposite: that his brain did not have the ability that most other brains did—the ability to discard the psychic junk that came their way so they could concentrate only on what the five temporal senses fed them. Otherwise, with that barrage of psychic information, the brain would have a hell of a time keeping even the physical world straight. Ryerson knew this only too well. It had taken a long time for his brain to automatically ignore much of the telepathic information coming his way so he could even cross a street without consciously sorting the relevant information from the irrelevant, the physical from the nonphysical. It was a task that most other brains, unfettered by a barrage of telepathic information, handled with ease.

  ~ * ~

  Ryerson Biergarten had never smoked, and if he drank more than one or two glasses of scotch and water, or two or three beers, he got sick. He had gambled several times while in college, but there was no great attraction in it for him, so he hadn't done it since. His first wife, Eileen, told him once, "You know what you are, Rye? You're too good. Why don't you acquire some vices, for God's sake?"

  Ryerson had shrugged, a little stunned by the proposal, and explained, "None of the usual vices appeals to me much, Eileen. Otherwise, I would."