World of Darkness - Second Sight.pdf
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By Alan Alexander, Will Hindmarch, Conrad Hubbard, Brand Robins and John Snead
Prologue:
Boogeyman
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I got my powers from my father, but I wasn’t born with them. Powers. He’d call them
that, but I don’t. I try not to talk about them at all. I remember the conversation I had with
my mother, in the hospital as a kid, with me in a paper dress and wired up with sticky
electrodes. She said we — the family — that we called them “powers” because we didn’t
have any other words yet for that kind of stuff.
“It’s like when people say ‘powers of speech,’ John,” she told me. “It’s just the word
we have for it. Don’t get hung up on it.” Right, ma.
My folks insisted that people would take me more seriously later on, when we were
published, when the proof came. What I learned later on was that the only people who
would take my parents’ work seriously were nut jobs and conspiracy types. The kind of
people whom I didn’t want to be counted with. So I eventually stopped taking me seriously,
too. That lasted until my mother died.
She was the rational one, the one interested in bridging the gap between the work and
the people whose attention my parents wanted. She went out of her way to put us in touch
with real scientists, real academics and real backers. She understood that if we wanted
respectable, trustworthy people to get through the lunatics, we’d have to clear a path for
them. My father just fi gured that his important and remarkable work — meaning me — would
draw the right people through the hordes of sham mystics and wannabe psychics.
I remember him saying to me, “The kind of person we’re waiting for, Johnny, is the one
who wants it bad enough that he’ll come shopping.” He said that lots of times, but the time
I’m thinking of was when he said it in the dark over my mother’s corpse. We were sitting
on either side of her bed under the striped shadows of the hospital blinds, listening to the
dull droning of electrical equipment. We sat there for maybe 15 minutes after that, and I
thought he felt bad. That he was sitting there quiet, feeling guilty.
Then he got up with a kind of “break’s over” sigh and left the room with a momentum
that says, “Back to work.”
I’m not psychic and never have been.
÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷
My father’s
work
was the research and development of my powers. He insisted that I
had “multiple capabilities,” in his words, but it never seemed that way to me. Maybe I’d
have lent his assessment more weight if he hadn’t fi rst made it while reading directly out
of a book he’d bought in the mail.
He came into our fake-wood paneled kitchen from his half-buried den (which was also
our garage). He had his fi nger holding a spot in a red, featureless hardcover. My mom was
doing dishes with the window open. I remember trying to do my math homework, but being
distracted by moths batting against the ceiling light. We had this hideous, peeling orange
Prologue:
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table and yellow countertop. That was the mid-70s. The place felt like the kind of half-assed
cottage a horror-movie professor retreats to so he can translate his scrolls in peace. In hindsight,
with us out in the pines of unincorporated Millsport Highlands, it was more like the squeaky,
spider-infested shack a nut holes up in to write his manifesto. My father was a bit of both.
He came in with an epiphany, going, “Honey! Honey, listen to this!” He threw the
book open on the counter and read aloud, guiding himself along the page with his finger.
“‘Though there is no apparent linear causality in the meta-psychic breakthroughs from one
magnitude of capability to another,’ blah blah blah — are you listening? — ‘there does
seem to be a kind of observable domino effect in the development of multiply-capable
extraordinary performers.’” He waggled a finger at me, without looking up from his book,
as if he’d just identified the bird he’d trapped in the house.
“‘Therefore, with extensive’ blah blah blah,” he yanked the page over, “‘it might be
possible,’ blah blah, ‘to prompt a multiply-capable subject to jump the gap to a new pla-
teau of power by maintaining a high level of psychic momentum through the rep — ’ uh,
‘repetitious performance of extra-normal exercises.’” He straightened up and threw open
his arms to us both. “You hear that? That’s amazing!”
I looked at my mother. I prayed that this would be one of those nights when she pulled
back on his reins. Instead, she cautiously asked, “Have we decided that John is actually
multiply capable?” That could have sent him either way.
“I know you’re not convinced yet, honey, but what I’m getting at is he doesn’t have to be
multiply capable yet. I think he is, but even if he’s not, he can be. We’ve just got to get him revved
up enough to bust down that door.” He went to the fridge and peeled the tab off a beer.
She looked at me and I looked at her. I tried to plead with her, to shake my head with
my eyes. I tried to beg. “Psychic momentum,” she said.
My father pointed his beer at her. “Damn straight.” He slurped off the can.
“It doesn’t sound easy,” she said. She tussled my hair like mothers do on television.
“It’ll take a lot of work. A lot of exercise. But think what he could be capable of. The
sooner we get him started — ” my father stopped and looked out the window. “He could
be more than we thought.”
She smiled at me. That’s when I knew I’d lost her.
÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷÷
Only sick people live in hospitals. Spend enough time in a hospital, you must be sick.
Instead of Boy Scouts, I spent the summer in the garage going through exercises with flash
cards. Instead of swimming lessons, I was thrown into a sensory-deprivation tank for four days.
My father built it himself using rubber from old tires and chicken wire from a ruined coop. He had
me performing mental exercises, meditating and enduring what he called “trauma exposure.” I
had to learn to endure and then rise above physical stimuli such as heat and cold, hunger and
thirst, loud noises, loneliness, nausea and something vaguely akin to acupuncture.
The idea was that my sensory perception was too loud — I couldn’t hear my extrasen-
sory perception over it. That philosophy lasted into about the fifth or sixth grade. By then
I was home-schooled by mom, so it didn’t amount to much.
Eventually, my mother’s input into the process became a greater influence over my father’s
methods. They turned to science and medicine in addition to their psychological and parapsycho-
logical approaches. I remember seeing
E.T.
in the theater and thinking Elliot was kind of weird
— until they put him in the paper room with the wires stuck all over him. That I understood.
Let me put it in perspective: between the ages of six and 16, I didn’t see a dentist
once, but I spent at least a week in more than two dozen different hospitals in nine
states. I don’t remember if this is really true, but I tell people that I didn’t eat anything
but hospital food in 1981. Sometimes we moved to get me looked at by curious doctors
in other states — whom my mother called specialists. Other times we moved so that she
could take on new nursing jobs. She and my father ate and slept in hospitals, too, off
the books and unofficially. My mom got politely fired a lot.
What maybe bothers me most about the hospital years is how little I remember. Not
only have the hospitals and highways and vending machines and doctors and nurses
blurred together, but so have the stories I was told about where I was going and why.
For a lot of the tests, they kept me awake for a solid day beforehand, so I’d sleep longer
and give them the kind of testing window they needed. Plus, it was hard to get a kid to
sleep on a paper-covered bed while doctors stared through a window from a control
room. The sound of scanners’ needles scratching brainwaves kept me awake, too.
More than anything, I remember sweating in our station wagon, sleeping in back
as we drove from Cedar Rapids to Billings. I remember the awful, viscous red medi-
cine I had to drink out of a weird plastic scoop to keep my seizures down. I remember
overhearing an argument my father had with a doctor outside my hospital room. It was
about whether or not I was clinically retarded.
Hearing the doctor, compared to the way my father talked, I realized that my father
wasn’t an independent scientist in a fringe field. He was ignorant. He was out of his
depth. He wasn’t a researcher or even a parapsychologist as much as a would-be inven-
tor. He wanted the patent on me. But listening to him argue with the doctor, it became
clear: this stranger knew what he was talking about, and my father didn’t.
I was alone in my room, in the dark, pretending to sleep, sure that my father would
come in before light, tell me to get dressed and take me out of there. Aside from that, he
didn’t have a plan. He was just going to keep testing theories until he got what he wanted,
if he even knew what that was. That night, thinking about the only two people I really knew
in the whole world and realizing that I wasn’t really sure which hospital I was in or what
was outside if I tried to run away, that was the most scared I’ve ever been.
His arguments turning to insults and accusations, my father sounded scared, too.
He seemed small and stupid. It seemed as if he could feel himself withering away, his
importance evaporating in the mind of the doctor. In my father’s frustration, he stumbled
out of the costume of the dedicated parent and well-read researcher, and had been
caught in the fluorescent white of the hospital hallway. He tried desperately to use more
quasi-medical terms to get back into character, but it was like a bald man trying to put his
toupee back on. My father could say the words, but he’d still be a fool underneath.
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