Chapter 4
Ellen needed a moment to soak in everything she had just heard. On the one hand, it was nice to know that she was not crazy, as she had feared she was. On the other, she still had as little idea of what was going on as she did when she first entered the house. "But what exactly was it that they found?"
"The truth is," Tom replied, "that we don't really know. All we know is that it was some sort of energy source."
Rhiannon, a slightly heavyset girl about Tom's age, spoke up next. "It never had anything to do with oil."
Kyle was the next to speak. "The oil companies never would have taken a gamble like this. There was never any oil seen or even suspected. But they did suspect a very powerful energy source. There's only one organization that would take that kind of risk."
"Are you saying the government is behind this?"
Kyle nodded slowly. "We don't know all the details because it was kept such a close secret. Lucky for us, one of the security guards at the site was one of those who was able to feel the sensations just minutes after the blast. Also lucky was that he wasn't working when the blast occurred or he might have died before he got the chance."
"He had been an Air Force policeman who was assigned to the site," said Tom. "What he was able to find out is that some brand new military weather satellite was launched and detected something centered right on the coast of Sweden that it couldn't account for. At first, they thought that some sort of geothermal energy source was interfering with the readings, but when they studied it further, they realized that whatever was causing their strange readings was far more powerful than anything they had ever seen before.
"So they approached a few oil companies until they found one willing to work with them. The oil company was given money to buy the land in Sweden and build what they needed. Had to pull a ton of strings to get that deal done, I'll tell you. That's what they needed the oil companies for, mostly – to hide the fact that the U.S. military wanted land in Sweden. The deal was so secret, even the name of it was classified. They called it 'Frost Tiger.' A lot of people would be in serious trouble if it got out that we even knew that name."
"Work with them?" Ellen asked. "What did they need to do?"
"Two things, really. One, they needed to pretend that they were drilling for oil and make a darn good show of it. But they weren't drilling for oil. Truth is, they had no idea what it was they were looking for, exactly. They spent months just surveying the land and taking different readings. The only thing they could all agree on was that something seriously weird was below the surface. It was like nothing they had ever heard of before, and whatever it was likely had the capacity to produce even more energy than nuclear power, if such a thing is even possible.
"The only thing they could think to do was the one thing they were really good at. They drilled. Whatever they hit, nobody knows, but a lot of people died when they hit it, and almost instantly several people around the world started seeing the glow we're talking about now."
"So they drilled right into the energy source, then?" asked Ellen. She was answered by a silence accompanied by everyone looking at each other searchingly. It was clear to her that she had asked a very difficult question.
Tom was the one to reply. "Not exactly." He searched for the words to say. "We're still not sure how to put this part, but it seems like this energy source doesn't... exist in our... um... exact... uh... universe."
Ellen's face went utterly blank. She couldn't bring herself out of her stupor enough to ask the obvious question. Fortunately for her, everyone in the room knew the question already.
"You see," Tom continued, "the energy source they thought was there was only... an echo. An echo of the real energy source." He shook his head. "I really wish I could describe it better. But whatever it was, the military saw it and the drilling rig hit it."
"And that's when there was the explosion," Ellen observed.
"Right," replied Tom. "It seems that whatever they hit opened up this... portal... and dumped a ton of energy into the rig. The explosion was the release of all this energy." Tom leaned in closer. "But that was only the tip of the iceberg. You see, the portal seems to have been opened up permanently, and now there are some of us who have access to whatever was in there. You are one of those people."
Jessica chuckled, "and the best part is that the military is still looking into what happened and they still have no idea that there's anything there other than a huge hole in the ground." She grew serious. "But Tom did go there."
Tom nodded. "I saw the area. I didn't get to go inside, of course. I was quite a distance away. But I could see it. Feel it, really. It was a glow so bright it was blinding. And nobody else, except for that security guard I told you about. He's the one who brought me over. This was, oh, a couple of months after it first happened and there were only a few of us who had found each other yet."
After a brief pause, Ellen asked, "so we're all here because we see some glow that was left over from some explosion, what did you say, three years ago?"
Jessica shook her head, but was smiling. "No. That's not why we're here. We're here because of what we can do with that glow."
Ellen saw movement out of the corner of her eye, and when she turned her head toward the coffee table, she gasped. A Coke can was starting to move by itself. Tom was holding his hand out toward the can, a look of intense concentration on his face. After a moment, the can raised from the table and was floating a few inches from it. After it had been hovering there for a moment, Tom's face relaxed and his hand lowered.
"Go ahead," Tom said, "check it out."
Ellen hesitantly reached toward the can, and when she tried to grasp it, her hand stopped about a half an inch away, as though she had come across an invisible barrier. There was nothing there that she could see, but she was simply unable to close her hand on the can. She could see the skin on her fingers flatten as though pressed up against glass, but there was no glass there.
She was too astonished to speak. All she could do was keep looking at what Tom had done. A couple of years before, she had seen a magician perform minor miracles, but each time there was an easy explanation, even if Ellen did not know what it was. If something was levitating, then clearly there must be an unseen string holding the object in the air. But this defied any logical explanation.
"That's impossible," she finally muttered. "How...?"
Tom had been looking at her intently, but his face softened. "Ellen," he said calmly, "you have already done this yourself."
Her eyes shot up to meet his.
"You told us that you woke up to find your bedroom furniture rearranged. You did that yourself. Of course, you didn't know that you were doing it at the time, but you did that exactly the same way I'm holding up this can." He looked back at the can and it fell back to the table with a thud.
"Now watch me," Breanna said. After a few seconds, the can raised off the table again.
Ellen looked at the can intently. Something looked somehow different this time, but Ellen couldn't quite place it. Minutes seemed to go by as she continued staring at the can, silently as nobody in the room said a word, or even seemed to be breathing. All eyes were focused on her as she studied the can.
Finally, she spoke up. "I see something," she said almost breathlessly. "It looks like..." She turned to look at Breanna, who wore an expectant expression, and her eyes shot open. She saw a glow around Breanna this time. It was a bright nimbus of light. It must have been surrounding Jessica earlier when she sat next to Tom. Ellen wondered how on earth she could have missed it before.
"I... I see a glow around you."
Her revelation was greeted with a chorus of smiles and laughter.
