The Fate of Droplets (x, and final)

It was some time later, about three weeks, that I saw George again. As no body had yet been found, the case had become a missing persons rather than a homicide and George had been released from custody, though she was expected to stay in town. She had not yet continued work, though with the expectation that she would cover all the ground once she returned. She had called, uncharacteristically quiet and timid, and we had set up a rendezvous at a coffeeshop near her apartment. It was a familiar place in which we both felt at ease despite the bizarre circumstances.
“I have had difficulty assembling the pieces,” she stated plainly, humbly.
“Do you think that they can be?”
She looked up at me, holding her mug tightly despite its heat. I caught myself staring at her partially amputated digit. Something crossed my mind and vanished again, leaving an emptiness in my head where it had been.
“I have always lived and worked under the pretense that experience is explicable. If I lose that, what do I have left?”
I was quiet, stewing over the words, of George's axiomatic principle. According to all accounts, I had apparently lost Henry, but I had no deeply rooted suppositions about the world as George had. Now, she was losing that well out of which she had always functioned, from which she was nurtured.
“Henry amazed me,” she said. “I couldn't help but envy him, envy his contact with something outside of his own questions, outside of their answers. I wanted it, whatever he had found. He touched, he tasted something I have yearned for my entire life. One day, he comes back with it and doesn't know what to do with it.” George spoke calmly, quietly, and I shied from her tone which was neither passionate nor angry, but analytic and uncompromising.
“Can you say anymore about that night?”
“No,” she said into her mug, and then looked up at me, her eyes oddly soft. “By then,” she stared at me, then past me, “by then whatever was happening was happening through me, not by me. My God, Lex, all I could do was squirm as it played me. I would never believe it if it weren't for the feeling it gave me. It felt like something had reached up inside me, something ancient and viscous, the way...” and she whispered such that I couldn't hear. Her conviction, her sentiment shook me. I had continued to wonder if she had been at least somehow part of the action, that she might have stopped it somehow. Then, and I still maintain, that she had made some decision before all these events that sided with that malevolent curiosity, that drive that had led to Henry's death or disappearance; but all the same she was mute to its control, left unable to combat or complain until after.
“I have heard something else,” I eventually added. “Brother James, Henry's spiritual tutor, he seems to have vanished as well. He packed up odds and ends, but his suitcase was found in a ditch outside of town. Do you know anything else?”
“No, but I have heard that, too. What do you think it means?”
“Well, he would have been the most knowledgeable person of Henry's state of mind. If anything, it points to a higher order, that what happened involved more agents than just you, or whatever was coming through you.”
Each of us meditated on this. The space was at first uncomfortable, then smoothed again and we sipped the last of our drinks. We parted, unclear of all that was around us. I sensed a sort of frequency, a vibration in the air as if cracks were forming. Late autumn was upon us, and a gust of chill air can do that with or without the bizarre circumstances. That evening, I met with Mona and she shared something she had heard from others that had slipped her mind up until then. It seems that Thomas, my party-time interlocutor, had been seized by something like an epileptic fit and hospitalized. He woke the next day and could recall nothing of the past two or three weeks. His doctors call it temporary amnesia, with some minor neurological damage showing up in this scan or that. This tidbit struck me silent as I thought of how he had acted on the porch of Jessica's, and I did not enjoy the weight of knowing only I could recall the words spoken there.