But I just don't see how its angle could have seen that cat. Maybe there is a hidden one that I couldn't see.
For reasons I don't elaborate on here I make this observation because I think it is relevant to something that is happening around me.
So before I went outside again and conveniently looked closer for the presence of surveillance cameras I was thinking over the possibilities that someone had trained that cat, very improbably, to do what I saw it do. I mean, sure, a telephone call can be made a hell of a lot faster than I walk and the reason someone would stage something around me could have been arranged as I walked along outside and back to my apartment.
But then I think of something that seemed extraordinary in that same place a few days ago and I find it hard to imagine that someone staged it. The reason I find it so hard to believe that it was staged was because I remember my thoughts as a result. The cause of my thoughts was something I briefly glimpsed and then I kept on walking. I didn't really think about the significance of that until the next day. And that seemed extraordinary to me because of that line of thought that was going through my mind and that was a result of something I glimpsed for maybe a half-second. I wondered later about the possibility that I had hallucinated that sighting because it was so consistent with something that I had absolutely no control over.
And I think too again about my so-called time-traveler effect. I am creating variables in my journal that the recipient of my journal, when it becomes time-traveled, could use to shape my environment in these days before I actually time-travel that - this - information to the past.
And then the big question is: why? Why would they feel they have to shape my environment so that it is consistent with my time-travel journal.
So sure, some of it is to communicate with me. But they aren't doing it all.
And no one could guess that something I would see briefly as I was walking by, especially considering it was really just something trivial, could cause me to have such prescient thoughts. Thoughts in my mind. No one knows what I think. No one can control specifically what I thought. That incident only proves that notion to me.
So then I saw something else extraordinary at that same place and I wonder why.
My guess is that there is some kind of force that is going to start mass mind-control of the people around here. I don't think there is even some kind of sentient being sitting around somewhere thinking about all this and creating strategies and all that but instead is just some kind of force of nature. My guess is that people are just going to start freaking out and that is actually going on right now but it is so infrequent that it seems random enough to be, well, normal. At some point, the violence will escalate and that will be the result of some kind of force that is mind-controlling people and those people will be just doing what seems normal to them, their brains will seem to be functioning normally but they will be fully under the control of some kind of evil force that is going to cause them to tear this place apart piece by piece. And there is nothing anyone can do to stop them.
http://www.e-reading.org.ua/bookreader.php/80261/King_-_The_Stand.html
Stephen King
The Stand - The Complete & Uncut Edition [ RACKETEER INFLUENCED AND CORRUPT ORGANIZATIONS US Title 18 ]
The elevator door had shut and the car was already moving downward when it occurred to Stu that it might be booby-trapped. That would be just their speed. Poison gas, maybe, or a cutout circuit that would disengage the cables and send the elevator careering down the shaft to crash at the bottom. He stepped into the middle of the car and looked around nervously for hidden vents or loopholes. Claustrophobia caressed him with a rubber hand and suddenly the elevator seemed no more than telephone-booth-size, then coffin-size. Premature burial, anyone?
He reached out a finger to push the STOP button, and then wondered what good that would do if he was between floors. Before he could answer the question, the elevator slid to a smooth, normal stop.
What if there are men with guns out there?
But the only sentinel when the door slid back was a dead woman in a nurse’s uniform. She was curled up in a fetal position by a door marked LADIES.
Stu stared at her so long that the door began to slide shut again. He put his arm out and the door bounced obediently back. He stepped out. The hallway led down to a T-junction and he walked toward it, giving the dead nurse a wide berth.
There was a noise behind him and he whirled, bringing the gun up, but it was only the elevator door sliding shut for the second time. He looked at it for a moment, swallowed hard, then walked on. The rubber hand was back, playing tunes on the base of his spine, telling him to hell with this walk-don’t-run bit, let’s get out quick before someone… something … can get us. The echoes of his footfalls in this semidark corridor of the administration wing were too much like macabre company—Coming to play, Stuart? Very good. Doors with frosted glass panels marched past him, each with its own tale to tell: DR. SLOANE. RECORDS AND TRANSCRIPTS. MR. BALLINGER. MICROFILM. COPYFILE. MRS. WIGGS. Perhaps of the cabbage patch, Stu thought.
There was a drinking fountain at the T-junction, but the warm, chlorinated taste of the water made his stomach turn. There was no exit to his left; a sign on the tile wall with an orange arrow beneath read LIBRARY WING. The corridor seemed to stretch away for miles that way. Some fifty yards down was the body of a man in a white-suit, like some strange animal cast up on a sterile beach.
His control was getting bad. This place was much, much bigger than he had first assumed. Not that he’d had a right to assume much of anything from what he’d seen when he was admitted—which had been two halls, one elevator, and one room. Now he guessed it to be the size of a largish metropolitan hospital. He could stumble around in here for hours, his footfalls echoing and rebounding, coming across a corpse every now and then. They were strewn about like prizes in some ghastly treasure hunt. He remembered taking Norma, his wife, to a big hospital in Houston when they diagnosed the cancer. Everyplace you went in there they had little maps on the walls with little arrows pointing at a dot. The words written on each arrow said: YOU ARE HERE. They put those up so people wouldn’t get lost. Like he was now. Lost. Oh baby, this was bad. This was so bad.
“Don’t go tharn now, you’re almost home free,” he said, and his words echoed back, flat and strange. He hadn’t meant to speak aloud, and that made it worse.
He turned to the right, setting his back to the library wing, walked past more offices, came to another corridor, and turned down that. He began to look behind himself frequently, assuring himself that no one—Elder, maybe—was following him, but unable to believe it. The hallway ended in a closed door that said RADIOLOGY. A hand-lettered sign hung on the knob: CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE RANDALL.
Stu went back and peered around the corner and back where he had come from. The dead body in the white-suit was tiny with distance now, hardly more than a speck, but seeing it there so changeless and eternal made him want to run away as fast as he could.
He turned right, setting his back to it again. Twenty yards farther up, the corridor branched into another T-junction. Stu turned right and went past more offices. The corridor ended at the microbiology lab. In one of the lab carrels a young man clad in jockey shorts lay sprawled over his desk. He was comatose, bleeding from the nose and mouth. His breath rattled in and out with a sound like October wind in dead cornhusks.
And then Stu did begin to run, turning from one corridor to another, becoming more and more convinced that there was no way out, at least not from this level. The echo of his footfalls chased him, as if either Elder or Vic had lived just long enough to put a squad of ghostly MPs on his trail. Then another fancy crowded that out, one he somehow associated with the queer dreams he had been having the last few nights. The idea grew so strong that he became afraid to turn around, afraid that if he did he would see a white-suited figure striding after him, a white-suited figure with no face but only blackness behind a Plexiglas plate. Some dreadful apparition, a hit-man from beyond sane time and space.
Panting, Stu rounded a corner, sprinted ten feet before he realized the corridor was a dead end, and crashed into a door with a sign over it. The sign read EXIT.
- posted by H.V.O.M - Kerry Wayne Burgess 3:49 PM Pacific Time USA Monday 09 April 2012
