Page Content (OCR)
The Child - Ten in the light, nobody in the room said a word. Nobody breathed. Ted could hardly move, and when he finally did, he thought he might faint. His stomach lurched and he felt lightheaded. Without a sound, he turned and walked out of the service area, into the employee lavatory, where he promptly threw up. Half an hour later, when he was finally able to return to work, no mention was made of continuing the test with the fourth and fifth objects. In fact, nobody ever mentioned the test again, except Ted, when he described it to Maya. They met on the hillside a few days later, and Ted told her about the professor’s test with the pencil, the safety pin, and the bottle cap. He didn’t tell her about throwing up, however. Maya had very little response, which surprised Ted. He thought that surely she would make a big fuss and say, “I told you so,” but instead she just smiled and nodded. “What do you think about that?” he pressed. “Don’t you think that’s pretty strange?” “T knew it already,” she said quietly, taking his hand. Looking into her eyes, Ted thought once again just how very mysterious the beautiful woman was, how much older she seemed, older in some ways than anyone else he’d known. There was an ageless, perpetual calm about her. She always focused on him and their conversations, yet she seemed lovingly detached from everything. They still met frequently throughout the summer, but Ted was aware of a slight change in their relationship. It seemed that after the photo-album test, Maya’s concentration on him relaxed. It was as if she’d been working hard at a task, and now that it was accomplished, she could ease up a little. Ted and Maya became more physical and less mental with each other. They held hands sometimes, or walked through the beautiful nature trails arm in arm, kissing occa- sionally, easy in one another’s presence. Ted loved her, he realized, but he also knew that it wasn’t the sort of passionate love he had felt for Jill. With Maya, Ted could be utterly himself and feel accept- ed. He loved being with her, and most of all he loved the way Masquerade of Angels 90 The Child - Ten she pushed the limits of his knowledge. She opened up his mind to worlds beyond his imaginings and shared his explo- rations into them as his spiritual sister. Even as they grew more intimate with each other, their conversations always remained exotic, and she discussed at length such things as the body’s ability to heal itself. ‘The body knows exactly when something’s wrong with it,” she once explained. “When we learn how to ask our body for help, when we can have faith in its abilities, a natural healing occurs.” “All I know about natural healing,” Ted commented, “is what my grandmother told me. She gathered lots of wild plants out in the woods and used them for tonics and medi- cines. She could remove warts from people’s hands.” “Plants can be very useful,” Maya agreed, “but the body also works without them. It’s just a matter of the right knowledge.” Ted thought that with Maya, everything seemed to be a matter of knowledge, and he struggled to comprehend the many topics she discussed. He also found another source of information and ideas in the delightful person of a new employee, Samantha. She was the epitome of a ‘little old lady,’ complete with numerous cats, and she and Ted soon became good friends. He discovered that Samantha was an astrologer, something else he knew nothing about, and he was eager to learn. Day after day, Samantha discussed astrology with Ted, branching out into other areas of the metaphysical. She taught him about the configurations of the stars. They were sources of energy, she explained, and this energy has a great effect on humans. He began to learn about the human energy field, too, and he wondered if it had anything to do with his strange ability to know things about other people, as Maya had suggested. By the end of the summer, Ted had been exposed to the rudiments of the metaphysical world, thanks to the two women’s influence. Walking along the nature trail one after- noon while telling Maya about some of Samatha’s ideas, Ted suddenly remembered an unusual article he’d read in the Masquerade of Angels 91