It was the most fucked-up thing that ever happened to me, dude. I was in two places at once, like past and present. Yet I wasn’t anywhere. I could see everything that was going on in Virginia’s living room. Blood and my sister coming in from two directions, everyone yelling at eachother waving guns and asking about me and there I was, sitting on the floor yelling back, “You fucking idiots, here I am! Can’t you see or hear me?” I felt solid to myself but it was if I didn’t exist.
It was my greatest fear, being a ghost, not seen or heard, like I never existed. For years I always thought it was such an irrational reason for freaking out that I never told anyone else about it except for Clarissa and even then I waited until the night she died to tell her. Now I was realizing to my horror that maybe it wasn’t so irrational, after all.
Then almost like I had another head, this one tuned to the past, I was just getting out of Coffey’s car and Virginia ran up to another me and wrapped me up in a hug just like the day we met. Except nothing like it seemed real. Then back to the screaming, my sister putting Virginia in handcuffs, Blood doing the same thing to Coffey. Laura picked up my skateboard, took something out of one of my trucks and hugged it. Then everyone drove off and leaving the dogs alone outside. They were still whimpering and I wondered if even they could see and hear me or were scared shitless by that Nazi asshole that tried to snatch me.
I got off the floor and looked up to where he was and saw nothing but the bullet holes that Coffey put in the ceiling. Then he and Virginia were back. They were on the back deck while I or some other version of me was playing with the dogs. I walked to the back yard until I realized my feet weren’t touching the grass and that I was levitating. Being able to fly almost made up for my not being seen or heard.
I flew above my other self and tried to get my own attention. The dogs could see me or had seen me, whatever. Then Virginia was getting something, spinach maybe, out of the freezer and soon she started making the dinner I already ate while I set the table again. I didn’t know if I was hallucinating or time-traveling but I wanted to check something out. If I was just a spirit somehow and if this was where my body somehow had gone, I wondered what would happen if I tried to merge with myself. I concentrated while someone with an Australian or English accent was whispering to me, “You got the right idea, mate. No worries. Keep concentrating.”
(Sydney, Australia, May 2000)
Even after she got recruited by ADEPT shortly after killing a man, Mathilda Hogan never told them about her most potent, and dangerous, ability. In her out of body experiences, when she’d travel the world in her astral projected form, she wasn’t merely restricted to the present time frame. Somehow, she was able to channel that energy backwards so that she could go back to the past. It was almost like being a ghost and reliving a never-ending residual haunting except she’d discovered in the past year that she wasn’t confined to doing the same things infinitum ad nauseum. Then she realized as she developed this ability with manic singlemindedness that she could actually inhabit living hosts. In her astral form, she couldn’t interact with people in any way but if she took over a person’s mind and body, she was able to actually influence past events.
Like most ten year-olds who would discover this ability, she wasted her newly-found and rapidly developing powers by changing things that related solely to her. That math test she’d flunked last month was now, whether or not she earned it, an A+ when she inhabited Mrs. Macdonald’s corporeal being. Her cousin Bennie who’d once sat on her head last summer was forced to walk into a drainage ditch, spraining his arm. Thinking in such a small, solipsistic manner, she wasn’t in danger of influencing world events. No matter how much this butterfly flapped her wings, it wouldn’t result in a hurricane on the other side of the world.
Today it almost all changed and the implications scared the shit out of her.
Despite how rapidly her powers were developing, she still wasn’t close to using them maturely. What should have been a primary consideration was to her a secondary one, namely the security of her corporeal being during her OBE’s. Most ten year-olds take their safety for granted and naturally assume no one will do their bodies any harm. Yet that didn’t mean it wasn’t disturbed. While hop-scotching from one body to another in Sydney during her out of body experiences she’d never sensed anything wrong or untoward happening to her body. Mathilda’s assumption was that it had remained undisturbed, especially since she’d generally go into her trance in areas more secluded than her bedroom. Pop was gone but her Mum wouldn’t understand and would probably freak out if she walked in and found her only child in a catatonic state.
There was a favorite spot from which she loved to project, an abandoned building in the brush on the outskirts of Sydney. She wasn’t sure what it used to be but it didn’t matter. She was foolhardy and adventurous by nature and could never recall feeling fear or any real sense of trepidation that children typically fear when confronting the unknown. It was empty, it never seemed to be inhabited and that was good enough for her.
Slipping into a body was a sensuous feeling. There was never any sense of invasion, especially since her temporary possessions never seemed to result in any ill effects worse than profound confusion to her hosts. It was almost like putting on a really thick but warm coat. She could inhabit their minds and know their innermost thoughts and while she couldn’t understand some of the thoughts of the grownups in whose minds and bodies she’d inhabited these past few months, some of them did disturb her.
On this day, Mathilda had walked into this abandoned building made of cinderblocks, her rucksack of schoolbooks still on her back. She walked into her usual room, an abandoned office that had a desk and a beat-up black leather couch. She decided she’d like to see the famous opera house in Sydney that she’d seen countless times from a distance but had never actually seen up close. So Mathilda lowered her breathing, concentrated and began to lift from her body, free-floating toward the famous piece of architecture. It was weirdly beautiful, its clamshell-like structure reminding her of the shell of a Texas armadillo. Yet it was another thing entirely to be actually able to walk inside it like a normal human being. So she chose the body of a stout, middle-aged woman. As usual, her host shuddered as Mathilda began her benevolent possession and was completely unmindful of the dark man who’d just entered the cinderblock building and came upon her lifeless form.
All of Sydney had, of course, been on alert for what the press had dubbed The Bushman. He was a child predator of the worst sort in much the same manner as his American counterpart Edd Corn, the infamous child rapist-murderer who terrorized New England for years.
Unlike Corn, however, the half white/half aboriginal Bushman didn’t make any distinction between genders. Those 13 and under were fair game. And the ponytailed little girl sitting in a lotus position in his usual crime scene was the perfect age.
Oh, she was lovely and he guessed that if her eyes were open they’d be just as lovely, too, and he wondered what color they were. Amazingly, she hadn’t heard him enter the building even though the metal door creaked and his feet dryly shuffled on the sandy floor. He knelt before her, looking at her lithe, supple form, the skin on her perfect thighs a light caramel color. Her fine, glistening dark blonde hair was flawlessly pulled back in a sort of half ponytail, exposing and framing her gorgeous, oval face.
He snapped his fingers before her closed eyes and got no reaction. He had no idea why she was so insensible or what she was doing here but he wasn’t about to question the gods whether they were crazy. Instead, he’d gratefully accept this present from them and the Bushman got up and locked the door from inside.
The woman whose body she’d inhabited walked far more slowly than she would’ve liked. She wasn’t from Down Under at all but another American tourist there to see whatever few noteworthy sites Australia had to offer. She complained to her husband that her body didn’t feel right and admitted to feeling a sense of anxiety and urgency. That, of course, was Mathilda trying to get her to walk toward the famous building more quickly but it and the heat only seemed to tax the heavyset woman’s cardiovascular system. The girl shuddered with disgust as the woman began to sweat profusely. While occupying a host body, she could feel everything from the workings of the endocrine system to the cardiovascular to the neurological. She felt sexual desire for the first time while occupying adult bodies and she found she liked it if not necessarily the thoughts that came with it.
Mathilda realized she’d chosen too hastily and scouted about for a younger and more mobile body when she felt a tugging on her own. She couldn’t imagine why she was feeling that since she was not really here but back in the derelict building kilometers away. Then she had the sensation of being laid flat and pinned in place even though this host body and her astral self were perpendicular to the ground. What legs she would’ve had experienced a sense of being gently but forcibly spread. Then a sharp phantom pain between her thighs. What the bloody hell…?
She decided to abandon her sightseeing tour and abruptly left the corpulent woman’s body in favor of her own. She passed over the city of Sydney as quickly as the weird laws of paranormal physics allowed as she sped over the city, the brush, toward the building, through the building, down the hall. Mathilda saw a large man’s silhouette hunched over the couch and, beneath his naked body, her own, her flowered print dress lying in a crumpled heap on the floor next to the leather futon.
Imagine their mutual shock when Mathilda’s green/hazel eyes suddenly flew open like a doll’s and predator and prey looked at eachother.
Mathilda Hogan soon became a household name, albeit briefly, after her attacker was found dead. It was quickly established by Sydney police that her assailant and rapist was none other than The Bushman. His real name was Roland Davies and he’d been terrorizing parents across Australia for just over two years. The official body count of his exploits stood at 13 but Sydney police had every reason to fear it was actually much higher.
Of course, despite the fact that this little ten year-old girl was somehow able to do on her own what the police couldn’t, despite the relief that swept over the nation from Prime Minister Howard on down, some questions had to be answered. For starters, what was she doing in that building to begin with? She could have just said that Davies had abducted her on her way back from school but it wouldn’t have explained why she never took the bus that dropped her off a few doors from home. Mathilda wasn’t a liar by habit, anyway, and she frankly told the authorities at the hospital that she walked into the building.
It also didn’t explain how or why Davies would then suspend his rape of the girl to take out of its leather scabbard a buck knife with a blade ten inches long and two inches wide and violently jab it into his right eye or why Mathilda Hogan was also complaining of pain in her own undamaged right eye. She frankly told them how that had happened, too.
Also unexplained was why a certain Yank intelligence agency developed the liveliest interest in Mathilda. After speaking with her single mother, who was all too glad to pass off responsibility of her headstrong and adventurous daughter to people with the resources to give her structure and the education she needed, they’d secured unlimited guardianship of Mathilda. They brought her back to the States and, when she was old enough, even subsidized her pursuit of a four year degree at Georgetown University.
Mathilda always had the ability to go back to past events and she knew that she could change her personal history by simply avoiding that building or tracking down her rapist and killing him before he’d manage to lay a filthy hand on her body. But that would’ve meant never meeting Oliver Blood, ADEPT, powers developing to the point they had and never “meeting” Adam, that smoking hot, wickedly sexy boy.
If she’d changed all that, if she’d never caught the attention of Oliver Blood with her frank and open description of her psychic powers, she wouldn’t be who she was. And Mathilda Hogan liked very much who and what she was. Certainly, she would never be nearly as powerful as Adam Moss would one day be. Yet she was still perhaps the most dangerous of the adepts currently employed by the agency. However, sometimes, in her dorm room or at headquarters in unguarded moments, 19 year-old Mathilda Hogan wondered if her reluctance to go back and change history was just simply fear of seeing her dead assailant once again.
Hopefully, Adam would be braver than that since he’d absorbed her power to go back to the past and had suddenly demonstrated a latent ability of teleporting his body elsewhere.
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