The Doorkeeper's Mind by E. L. Morrow

Author:E. L. Morrow [Morrow, E. L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: BookBaby
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Over the next two days, Marie and Charli get to know each other. Charli is offered and accepts the job. Since her home is a crime scene, she stays with Marie in her apartment at WEEL headquarters.

In addition to Jeffers, Security arrested two assassins waiting for Charli, plus three in the bomb shop. They also confiscated 17 partially completed explosive devices. All those arrested are in the database of thugs found at Bluefoot’s.

Everything Marie had suggested about Charli’s earlier life turns out to be true. When she was 14, Charli’s mother died. She lived with her grandparents in Winnipeg until college, and they reserve a room for her at all times.

Her first flashes of hearing someone else’s thought started when she was 11 years old. Mostly they occurred when the people were angry. Later they began popping up when people were scared.

She told her mother who said, “Don’t dwell on it. Try to occupy your mind with something else—like a complex math problem, or an intricate puzzle. But whatever you do—never tell anyone but your grandparents or me. Others won’t understand.”

Charli says, “It was looking for intricate, complex problems to distract me that lead me to electronics.”

By the age of sixteen, she was being bombarded by others’ thoughts. She found respite in electronics labs. It helped because there were fewer people, and they were focused on similar problems; if their thoughts broke into hers, they either helped or were easily dismissed.

Her grandparents told her “… there are others like you, but we’re not in contact with them so we don’t know who you can trust. Some who are like you are dangerous and will try to make you do cruel things, so be careful who you trust.”

Charli ended up as a library assistant because her electronics job had involved designing targeting systems for handheld smart weapons. As a pacifist, she could not support such outcomes. Some of the establishment blackballed her from obtaining employment with non-defense organizations.

The incident that Charli remembered, causing her paralyzing fear, was at age 22, having shared her secret with a counselor.

Charli said, “Even after weekly sessions for three years it took all my courage to tell her my secret. When the time came for my next appointment I learned that Rita, my counselor, had been transferred—no explanation was given. I felt abandoned, without a word from her. Then I remembered that I had moved a year before to a different apartment. Maybe she sent something to my old address.

“I went to where I used to live. Perhaps an explanation had been sent by delivery. When I arrived, the apartment had Security Tape over the door. I asked a neighbor, and she said, ‘everyone inside died of asphyxiation. They speculate a gas leak, of some sort.’

“I knew in that instant that they had been murdered, but I was the intended victim. I had to get away. From then on, I’ve lived in fear of being discovered. That’s when I started using C. Vandermeer rather than Charli.”

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