A Mind Out of Time
The next day Daniel joined Charles and Erik in Gabrielle Haller’s hospital room. Daniel gave Charles more of the medical details of her case, but that hardly gained him any clarity. He would just have to use his ability to enter her mind and see things no machine could detect. Not to say the machines did no good, but if information from technology was like a photograph of a tiger, his psychic ability was the feel of its hot breath and its saliva dripping on your neck as you’re lying on the jungle floor.
He entered her mind subtly, gently. Daniel was busy talking to someone in the hallway, but Erik was standing right there, watching. It was often easier to do this if he put his fingers to his temples but he couldn’t look like he was doing anything out of the ordinary now. The swift glimpse into the young woman’s mind showed her trapped inside. She looked impossibly small, and much younger. The only thing she wore was a striped prisoner’s uniform. Her head was shaved. Charles would not have connected this child to the beautiful woman she was today. He hoped she would soon get to see herself as she was now. He thought she might appreciate a more womanly figure and her hair grown back. Especially the hair, though many young girls he had met anxiously waited to look more grown-up and less child-like. Then again, many girls enjoyed the genderlessness of childhood and loathed to give that up for feminine ways they had no interest in. Who knew which type of girl Gabrielle Haller had been? The childhood she had, it wouldn’t have surprised Charles to find out the young woman never gave much thought to her identity. Fighting for your life every single moment will override almost anything else about you.
There was no way he could do this with Erik watching him so closely. It would be a tough task, pulling her out. He thought he could do it, felt fairly confident about it, but it would take time. Erik would definitely notice if he spent the next hour sitting by Gabrielle’s bed with his eyes closed, seeming like he also went into a catatonic state like hers. Of course, in a way, it would exactly be as it appeared. He’d join her in her troubled mind, for a little time, at least.
Once he made his leave and both Daniel and Erik went on their ways, Charles went back to Gabrielle. Being used to needing to be careful, he closed the little curtain over the small window in her door that gave anyone who walked the hallway a good view.
Bracing himself for the terror of her memories, he entered her mind.
The little girl looked around as though she heard something and ran to a corner and cowered there. Making herself as small as possible, she pulled her knees up and pressed her face against them. Charles heard a weak sob. More alarming was the shadow on the wall that moved as a person might. Then the sound came too, first the rustling of clothes, followed by boots. Boots. Everyone knew those black boots, the way they looked, the way they sounded when young men marched in them. A “heil” couldn’t have been too far behind. So this was what Gabrielle Haller’s mind provided her in lieu of sanctuary. A nightmare that was a slightly off-kilter version of the hell she had lived through. Charles couldn’t let himself be too distracted by the horrors she lived through. It had been real and it hurt her in ways that would never heal, far beyond the body, but it wasn’t real now. It couldn’t hurt him. If she survived it in the real world like others, though too few, did, he could damn well handle a few moments of seeing it.
“Gabrielle,” he said to the little girl cowering in the corner. “I’m here to help.” No response. She stopped sobbing, at least. “They can’t hurt you anymore. None of them will ever hurt you again. They’re gone.”
A weak breath. “They’re not,” she said.
And, sure enough, Charles saw the soldiers from the corner of his eyes that her mind supplied. Rather unhelpfully, he might have added. One was right next to the girl now, bending down to touch her. The hands reaching for her were skeletal. And so was the head. Charles looked around at the others that were visible now, and all the soldiers were the same. Charles focused on the one reaching for Gabrielle, and made him disappear. Then he did the same thing with them all, one by one. He told her to look. She lifted her head and he saw her clever blue eyes in her thin, pale little face.
“You can wake up now,” he said. “It’s all right.”She shook her head. “I can’t. They’ll find it. They’ll find me and then they’ll find it.”
“Find what, dear?” he asked. Her mind was so fractured at this juncture that searching for what she might have meant wasn’t a good use of his time. The best thing he could do was convince her to want to wake up. A tall order, when her experience of the world had given her no cause to want to join it.
“They won’t come here. It’s over. You are somewhere safe. There are good people here, where you really are, in the physical world. They want to meet you. Don’t deprive them of this victory.”
“Victory?” the little girl asked.