A few times lights came toward him, so he quick got off the road. “Hide me, hide me,” he said, and no one saw him.
Jimmy talked to the wind and the rain and the dark, talked himself toward the willows and the girl, asking that he please still have words when he got there, asking that the Thing not move into him and use him ever again.
74
With his phone, Wyatt searched for the essays of Asher Optime, the most recent having been posted almost a year earlier. He read selected passages aloud. At first Joanna sat on the edge of an armchair to listen. Soon she was up and pacing, in a state of increasing agitation and alarm, drawn to the large windows and the storm-flare shadows that quickened through the night with seemingly sinister intentions.
In her childhood, when the thing had dressed in Jimmy Alvarez and called itself Joanna’s secret friend, whatever its intentions had been, it hadn’t been insane. Now, based on the confrontation she’d had with it a short while ago in the Alvarez house, it was psychopathic, its mind poisoned by the genocidal passion of Optime.
In the past few days, when it reached out to Joanna by phone, the thing had said it was in a dark place, a mental darkness. Only you can help me, Jojo. Maybe it was four thousand years old, just as it claimed, a nearly immortal life-form from another world. Having been here and monitoring events for centuries, perhaps it began with an antipathy for human beings, an instinctive dislike more emotional than reasoned. Antipathy could have evolved into detestation as it came to understand why it disliked humanity. Then if it had chanced upon the demented philosophy of Asher Optime and been propagandized by it, detestation might have sickened into homicidal hatred.
As the sky thrashed the land with light, and willows whipped it with shadows, Joanna turned from the window with sudden insight and interrupted Wyatt as he read another passage. “Do you think just reading Optime’s essays could convert someone into a radical advocate of human extinction by whatever means necessary?”
Wyatt looked up from his phone. “Not a normal person, no. A seriously unbalanced person. Or some lost soul with a weak will, looking for purpose, some reason to be.”
“There’s no shortage of the unbalanced and the lost. Never has been. But no normal person, weak or not, would be turned into a mass murderer just by reading essays. Neither would an extraterrestrial, a higher intelligence that could travel across the galaxy.”
“No argument,” Wyatt said.
“It would require a more . . . intimate and intense connection.”
“What do you mean?”
“Asher Optime must be within the radius.”
“What radius?”
“The thing can control animals and read minds only within a certain radius of its location. That’s what it said.”
Uneasy as long as her back was to the window, Joanna turned to face the night. Her faint reflection loomed in the glass, as if she were already dead and her spirit had come now to haunt the place where she’d been murdered.
She said, “Xanthus Toller is absurd. He’s ignorant. But he’s also charismatic.”
Wyatt agreed. “Otherwise there wouldn’t be any Restoration Movement.”
“So maybe this Optime guy is equally charismatic. This thing, this alien, can read his mind, enter his twisted inner world. If Optime’s madness is unique and compelling, if his mind is a dark carnival, grotesque but fascinating and perversely appealing . . .”
“With enough charisma,” Wyatt said, “a murderous psychopath can convince people he’s a righteous visionary, even without them being drawn deep into his weird inner world. Hitler, Stalin, Mao, so many others. When people think their lives are without meaning, they’ll seek meaning even from the creepiest of charlatans.”
“But could an extraterrestrial of superhuman intelligence be swept away by charisma, by the romance of hate and violence?”
Having gotten to his feet, Wyatt appeared as another spirit in the window glass. “On this world, high intelligence doesn’t always come with common sense.”
“True enough. But—”
“Too often it’s twined with arrogance, with narcissism. How often in the past century and a half have we seen the ruling class, many highly intelligent, lead their people in a foolish pursuit of one utopia or another, only to bring them to ruin and despair?”
“Too often.”
“So why should it be any different on another world, with another intelligent species? As alien as this thing might be, it could have a lot in common with our kind. Like fallibility. Like the ability to deceive—and be deceived. What little I’ve just read by Optime suggests he’s got the power to make genocide sound like a noble quest. At least to some empty seekers.”