19. Olly #3
This session, she had asked—ordered, more like—that I bring my sketchpad for her perusal.
After our little unspoken psychic war, of which she was the clear winner, she didn’t attempt to hide her smug expression as she extended a bony hand to me.
I put the book into her hands, and as I was doing so, I noticed something on the desk that I definitely would have seen the last time I had been in the evil old spider’s lair.
It was a book. A large one, with purple pages and a silver cover, immediately reminding me of the Codex Argenteus, a rare book belonging to the Carolina Rediviva in Sweden.
This was obviously not that book, but it was a book of great power.
When I looked at it, I could feel it, almost like a vibration in my chest and a warmth in the air around it.
I had a Lord of the Rings moment when I thought of power being found in rings, but in our world, perhaps power was in books.
I yearned to touch that book, to hold it, look through it, and uncover its secrets.
She saw me gazing upon it, picked the heavy-looking book up, and with a small laugh, she put it in her bottom desk drawer.
I heard the click of a lock. So no mysterious Codex checking out today.
“Keep your mind where it belongs, Olive,” Dr. Bell chastised me, jarring me a bit as she had spoken out loud after our long silence.
“Now, do we have any pictures in here to discuss?” I stayed still as she opened the sketchbook, hoping her ire wouldn’t rise and be directed at me.
The first page was a strange portrait of me, one that gave me chills.
I was hugely pregnant and lying prone in a road at night, trees in the background, wearing nothing but a hospital nightgown, not even socks or shoes.
My eyes were empty, and I was convinced I had finally drawn my own death.
I still had to sit with this and decompress a bit—I was going to die toward the end of this pregnancy, and even beat Shepard in getting my ticket punched.
For all that I could see the future, this one took me exceedingly more than a little by surprise.
It made me want to reach across the table and rip Dr. Bell’s heart out because there would soon be a world where my child would be unprotected from her with my absence.
However, what kept me sane and able to do anything but lay in my bed and cry was the life and hope to be found in the next two pictures.
One was of a small girl of about three with red hair and light brown skin, hugging an unmistakable Clark Evans, a content-looking Shepard watching.
My heart had soared when I saw that picture, because I knew even if they had to do an emergency C-section to remove her from my dead body, my Bea and Clark and Shepard would be together, and Clark was real, goddammit.
I did not invent him! I learned back when I was a kid that I only drew the truth—well, the truth as filtered through wherever the visions came from.
And Bea would know her biological father.
The third picture was of the same girl looking about five years old, presumably an older Beatrice, reading a large book with a silver cover.
It was unmistakably the book that was currently in the possession of Dr. Bell.
I knew these drawings would piss her off because I couldn’t see the footprint of The Organization in any of them.
My own absence was troublesome, but the smiles on Bea’s face in each picture gave me hope for a future of freedom for my daughter.
But Dr. Bell smiled, genuinely smiled, when she saw the picture of the car accident.
I should have known that would get her motor running.
Hell, maybe she was planning this “accident” and was pleased to see it come to fruition.
After a silence that seemed to last a decade, Dr. Bell pointed at the third picture, where my daughter had the book.
“Explain this, or there will be consequences,” she said, and I knew that she knew I couldn’t.
She just wanted to punish me, but her screwed-up set of ethics needed an excuse.
Grabbing around for that red folder again, she laid it on top of the papers on her desk and ripped the four pictures out of my sketchpad.
Into the folder they went, but not until she had seized upon the picture of me pregnant on the pavement, waving it almost triumphantly in my face.
“You look like you are at what, eight or even nine months in this? You’re running out of time, Oliver.
Your daughter’s fathers don’t have the power to protect her.
Don’t look so shocked. The Organization For The Advanced Mind knows everything there is to know about you.
You can still be an Asset and work with us, or you can be a pebble in my shoe.
Which one would you like to be? Think carefully on this, for it is not an offer which will be repeated for some time. ”
I didn’t need time. The answer dripped off my tongue like honey. I looked down at the picture of me presumably dead on the road and said, “I will never be your willing Asset again.”