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Flights to New York City aren't cheap, but she can afford it. This one's going to have to be out-of-pocket; she can't claim this has anything to do with her work for the Tet Corporation.

Before booking the flight, she ( calls the Dolphin and asks to speak to the manager.... )

The Taos complex
Midmorning, the day after this

The Calvins keep an extensive, if narrow, private library here: the complete works of Stephen King, and an annex of works considered to have influenced him. The books she's looking for are all still there, boxed up in one of the unused offices. Charlie spends maybe half an hour there, kneeling beside the cardboard boxes, dusty winter sunlight and shadow flickering over her hands as she checks off one title after another on her list.

The paperbacks make a heavy armful as she heads back towards Main.

She does take Copeland's advice this far: broad daylight, and a cup of tea, and something soothing on headphones. And her mental blocks, reinforced by Rachel Grey's power twined with her own, firmly in place.

He thinks it's too dangerous to mess with.

What do you think?

I think I'm dangerous too.

First: a book called Everything's Eventual, and a story called "1408."

Date: January 07, 2007
From: "Charlene R. McGee" <charlie.mcgee@tetcorp.com>
To: "Marian O. Carver" <marian.carver@tetcorp.com>
Subject: ( Law of unintended consequences )

The permanent door from Milliways opens onto a hallway that looks like it could be a teacher's area in a primary school. Drawings and photographs are tacked up on the walls; the doors leading off the hallway are painted a calm pale-rose color, and each has a nameplate on it. (The closest one reads IRENE TASSENBAUM. It's locked; Irene's out today.)

Charlie steps aside to let her guest through. "Welcome to Taos."

Presents for forty-two children of various ages, plus gift cards for staff and colleagues both local and in New York; shift rearrangements for the transient staff members so they can spend at least part of the holiday with their families --

(Charlie can remember Christmas at Granther's place on Tashmore Pond, when she was seven-going-on-eight, the winter that she and Daddy spent in hiding. More vividly than any of the bare handful of Christmases when both her parents were still alive.)

-- the tree, and the lights; planning with the staff to let the kids help put up some of the decorations, the safer ones, and to work with the ones who like handicrafts to make some tree ornaments --

(She remembers very little of the one a year after that, at the Manders farm, not quite two months after her father's death and her escape from the Shop. Except that Irv and Norma Manders tried so hard to make it a nice Christmas for her, and that it took all the willpower she had not to burst into tears at the table every time she thought about where she was and who wasn't there with her.)

-- the dinner, and special bonuses for the refectory staff working it --

(Almost a dozen Christmases are missing there, or blurred into each other, distinguishable only by remembering where she was: the ones with the foster family who knew what she was and what had become of her parents, and the ones with the foster family who didn't know, and the ones she spent on the road, and the one she spent at a shelter called Home the year before she met Nancy Deepneau at the age of nineteen.)

-- there's so much to do that there's scarcely any time to think.

(The Christmas between her nineteenth and twentieth birthdays is the one she'll always remember; the memory that she holds to through the darkest times, as she said to Charles Wallace Murry, the times when palpable evil is all too present.)

Until the day itself, and the moment that always comes near the end of a large project: the moment of looking around for the next thing to do and realizing there isn't a next thing to do. Often the accompanying feeling is one of letdown; this time what comes instead is a sudden clear singing peace.

(That Christmas Eve was when she first saw the rose.)

It's true, what she told Malcolm Reynolds once: if you're the person running the show, you often don't get to see most of it.

But every once in a while you do.

The thing about working with troubled psychics is that if you don't learn to put privacy blocks on your own negative emotions, they can upset the people around you even more than they upset you.

The thing about working with a lot of troubled psychics is that if your blocks falter, the negative emotions will spread faster than you can slam them back up.

It takes Ted Brautigan and Fred Towne nearly twenty minutes to establish the good-mind and break up the feedback loop, disperse the memories that have combined and potentiated into waking nightmares, house and Academy and Shop horribly mixed. Charlie's barely more coherent than the kids by that time, hunched in a corner with her arms wrapped around herself and gasping out I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

She sends a written report on the incident to HQ in New York within the hour. They're going to hear about it; they should hear about it first from her. It's brief and terse, and the only thing it says aside from the bare facts of the incident is I'll see to it this doesn't happen again.

A quiet word among the staff: if she has to get away quickly to stop it happening again, Towne's in charge until she gets back.

(The fire didn't get away from her in her panic. Terrified, half-hallucinating, her control held. There's that, at least.)

If you want to find something, look where you lost it.

Charlie heads to Milliways that night.

The fixed door to Milliways is in the Calvins' old building. It's almost right next door to Main; she can go downstairs and take the underground hallways, or exit at ground level and walk outside.

It's cold out. Charlie decides to take the tunnels. And it feels like a rational decision, at the surface of her mind.

But she stands for nearly ten minutes at the top of the switchback stairs, looking down the central shaft, one hand on the banister and one foot poised on the edge of the topmost stair, unable to make herself either turn away or take a step down.

(when is a house not a house?)

It's darker down there than it has any business being -- except it isn't dark, that's nonsense, it's lit as brightly as the rooms up here (but how brightly is that, really?), and --

(when it's unheimlich, of course.)

And it feels cold in here, too.

And dark. Dark in a way that has nothing to do with visible light.

There's a better word for it than either dark or cold. Two words really, and it's laughable, when you think about it, isn't it? -- it's just so damn funny.

It feels todash. It feels nineteen.

Charlie closes her eyes, pulls her hand away from the banister, and turns to head for the ground-level door.

[From here.]

Out the back door, and she's running, and the grass under her feet is damp but that won't save it for long, and there's a large body of water around here somewhere, she can feel it --

Charlie pulls up, panting, at the edge of the lake; she drops to one knee, head bowed, hands clenched, fighting it.

(like having a)

The grass around her is smoldering.

(daughter)

A choked sound, half gasp and half sob, escapes her; her hands dig into the earth.

The surface of the lake near her begins to steam.

It's late at night on August 14th, 2006, and the stars are brilliant in the desert sky outside.

Charlie McGee sits alone at her desk, and writes in blue pen on blank printer paper.

( It's been a year. A year ago today. )

They try to work out, later, which of the children was the first to wake up.

In the boys' dorm, Matthias, Avi, Justin; in the girls', Hana, Tamisan, Mavis, Beth. It's their best guess, since those are the ones who were crying -- and the crying doesn't last long, once the others awaken and the good-mind coalesces.

It's okay, is the pulse through the good-mind (as Leon gathers Avi into a hug and rocks him, as Zillah climbs onto the foot of Beth's bed, as Sarai kneels next to Mavis and strokes her hair); it'll be okay, and Beam says sorry.

Even through the good-mind, there's something chilling about that.

Beam says sorry.

It's hours later before the resident psychics, working slowly and carefully, are able to piece together any concrete images from the kids.

The thinny, and the chasm; the train, the airplane, the wheelchair. Two wheelchairs. The deserted beach, and the sound of wings, and the rose that changes color.

And the wheelchair again, pushed by two scrawny arms, and the door that closes behind them.

So passes America's last gunslinger, O Discordia.

Charlie McGee has a report to write to headquarters in New York.

Apparently the translation of Stephen King's Firestarter into Hebrew?

Is titled Eish Zarah. Which is a Biblical allusion that translates to "Strange Fire."

Aheheheheheh.

The installation maintained by the Tet Corporation in Taos, New Mexico, was once a sprawling ranch used for little more than executive retreats. It's now something else. Just how else is not immediately apparent to the naked eye.

The main building is a converted ranch house, big and sprawling, painted pale grey. Referred to as "the House" or "Main," it houses the installation's main offices and the living quarters of the first four local Talents. Two of them are a young married couple; one is a mentally disabled man in his forties; and one, the installation's Head, is a woman from a world just barely distinguishable from this one.

Main faces onto the winding road that leads to town. There are gates across the road where it intersects the single fence -- made of wood, not wire -- that runs around the entire installation. There are surveillance cameras, but no visible guards.

To one side of Main is a low building containing mostly offices; to the other is a weathered barn, the oldest building on the installation. It currently houses six horses and five cows, all that remains of the original ranch's herds, kept about for appearances (and, in a small way, for therapy). Less formally, it's also home to a thriving population of mice, kept just barely in check by a handful of professional barn cats.

Behind Main are the grounds, also referred to as "the campus": a broad stretch of level land nestled in a valley, punctuated by smoothly paved paths, flowerbeds, low shrubbery, and a few spreading trees. The surrounding mountains provide a picturesque backdrop ... and, at a pinch, a layer of natural defense.

The low cluster of red-roofed buildings at one end of the campus holds the handful of classrooms, the library, the gym, the pool, and the refectory; the many-storied brick building at the other end holds the dormitory. (It is a purely staff joke -- and one that recent staff member Ted Brautigan has never found amusing -- to refer to them, respectively, as "the Rose" and "the Tower.") At the base of the dormitory are the small but well-stocked and well-staffed medical offices, the installation's newest addition.

Beyond the classrooms is the assembly hall: high-ceilinged, many-windowed, skylighted, and familiar. We have seen this building before, from the inside; it was our first glimpse of Taos, seen through the shimmer of a portal that led here from five hundred years and several worlds away.

And strolling from the assembly hall towards the dormitory on this particular autumn afternoon is Charlie McGee, Head of the Taos Installation, casual in jeans and a green cotton blouse, taking a turn about the grounds.

Main holds the living quarters of "the first four local Talents," according to the first Taos thread. Those four are Charlie herself, "a young married couple," and "a mentally disabled man in his forties". I think one of the young marrieds is Fred Towne, mentioned in DT7 as one of the telepaths who works at Taos.

Other named staff working at Taos:
* Ted Brautigan
* Irene Tassenbaum
* Kate Welker and Eric VanAllsburg (last name not given), from The Girl with the Silver Eyes

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