The Case of the Toxic Spell Dump

Famous last words, I knew. Well, this time the gal was right; the signs took me straight to 547. I didn't know what to think about Judy's being where she was. Should I have been glad she was so close to intensive prayer in case she needed it, or worried she was there because they were afraid she would need it? Being me, I worried. When I opened the door to 547, I discovered a constable sitting in one of the uncomfortable-looking chairs in there.

He carefully checked my EPA sigil and said, "You're fine, Mr. Fisher, but we have to be sure," before he went back to his book.

By then I'd forgotten all about him. Seeing Judy again took everything else out of my mind. She didn't look bad, but then she always looks good to me, so I wasn't in any real position to judge. Her color was good, her eyes were open, she was breathing normally: to that much I can objectively attest.

But I soon noticed that, even if her eyes were open, they didn't track. I walked across her field of vision a couple of times, but she took no notice of me. She didn't say anything. When she moved on the bed, she didn't adjust the covers afterwards. Her body lay there, but not the rest other. That was off in the Nine Beyonds, the realm of the One Called Night.

Madame Ruth and Nigel Cholmondeley came in just then, accompanied by a fellow in a white lab robe who introduced himself to me as Healer Ah Murad. "I look forward to learning to apply virtuous reality to healing situations," he said. This will be an excellent opportunity for me to enhance my knowledge."

Wonderful. Somebody who saw Judy as a guinea pig, nothing more. I wondered how he'd like enhancing his knowledge of what getting flung out a fifth-floor window felt like. He looked pretty sharp - maybe he could learn to fly before he hit the ground.

I made myself relax. By his lights, Hr. Murad was only doing his job. What he learned from Judy might help him treat somebody else. But that didn't mean I had to like him, and I didn't Nigel Cholmondeley was carrying a case large enough that he had to be stronger than he looked. He set it on the empty bed next to Judy's, flipped open the brass catches, and took out four of the big-eared virtuous reality helmets I'd last seen in the constabulary station.

He looked at the setup in the room, fretfully clucked his tongue between his teeth. "Forming a circle under these circumstances will be rather difficult," he said, making the a m rather so broad I thought he'd never finish pronouncing it.

Madame Ruth was bluntly practical. "We'll just turn her around," she said. "If 11 be easy if her head end's at the foot of the bed." Hr. Murad took care of that, moving Judy with a practiced gentleness that said he might have a bedside manner after all. Madame Ruth rounded on the constable. "Hey, you, be useful - move some chairs around for us." She gestured to show what she wanted.

The constable gave her a dirty look but did as she asked him: he put one chair at the foot of the bed, close by where Judy's head now rested, and one more to either side at that end of the bed. While he was taking care of that, Nigel Cholmondeley set a virtuous reality helmet on Judy. She didn't react at all as it covered her eyes and ears.

When he was done, Cholmondeley turned to me and said,

"You sit here." Here was the seat right across the footboard from Judy. Cholmondeley and Madame Ruth took the other two seats. Grunting, Madame Ruth got up from hers and arranged Judy's arms so her wrists and hands dangled off the sides of the bed. "Oh, capital," Cholmondeley said as she sat back down. "Now we shall be able to maintain the personal contact so essential in this exercise."

He handed me a virtuous reality helmet. I put it on. The world went black and silent. From my earlier experience, I knew I was supposed to take the hands of the people to either side of me. I groped for them. At first, I didn't find them. I wondered what was wrong until I realized Madame Ruth and Cholmondeley needed to put on their helmets, too.

I wished I were holding one of Judy's hands, but that wasn't how the medium and the channeler had set things up, and I had to assume they knew what they were doing. No sooner had that thought crossed my mind than Nigel Cholmondeley's left hand caught my right. A moment later, Madame Ruth's right hand took my left in a warm, damp, fleshy grasp.

And a moment after that, the psychic circle complete, we were on the Other Side. Madame Rudi had warned me we wouldn't be going back to the garden where we'd questioned Erasmus, so I'd been braced for worse. I wasn't braced for what we encountered.

"We're here, sure enough," Nigel Cholmondeley said; as soon as he spoke, I could see his virtuous image.

"But where is Aere?" I asked to help him see me.

"A bad place," Madame Ruth said, springing into apparent being. "Very bad."