by Page Turner
Penny frowned. “Have any intact ones?”
“These are from the shop downstairs,” Amarynth says. “I tried each one out of fairness, but they were so gross, Penny.”
“Then why are you offering them to me?” Penny asked.
“It’s all I have,” Amarynth admitted. “And you look like a person who needs something.”
“Amarynth, you know… sometimes you are awfully sweet,” Penny said.
Amarynth ignored that. Instead, she said, “I’m sorry by the way, about how this whole thing shook out.”
“You of course knew the whole time,” Penny said, feeling irritated.
“Like always, yes,” Amarynth said. “As much as I ever really know anything. I knew it had to do with Viv. I’ve always known.”
“Which probably put you in a bad situation, seeing as you’re not Viv’s favorite person or anything,” Penny said.
“No, Viv’s favorite person would be you. Or Karen. Depending on the day and what kind of mood she’s in,” Amarynth said. “I’m near the bottom of the list. And it’s a very long list.”
“Detective Dreadful?” said a voice from behind Penny. She turned around. It was one of the interns, a normal majoring in Intuitive Behavior. A shorter man with dirty blond hair and ears that looked far too large for him, he was pushing a mail cart.
“Yes,” Penny replied. “That’s me.”
The intern handed her a beautifully wrapped package. “For you.” Noting the surprised look on her face, he added, “Don’t worry. It’s been properly screened. I wouldn’t put you at risk.” He blushed, before pushing the cart away at an increased clip.
“I think he likes you,” Amarynth said.
“Thanks, Captain Obvious,” Penny replied.
“More like Captain Can’t State the Obvious,” Amarynth said.
“Hey,” Penny said. “It’s not so bad.”
“Aren’t you going to open it?” Amarynth asked. “Or do you not want an audience?”
Penny laughed. “Oh, I don’t care.” She untied the ribbon and slid the top of the box off. A whiff of perfume hit her nostrils. The scent reminded her powerfully of the Warrens of Persephone.
In the box was a pomegranate and a slip of paper that just read “COME HOME.”
Penny froze in place, holding the paper. Half of her knew that it was important. The other half was afraid to acknowledge that it was. Both halves warred, leaving Penny in a state of mind that defied logic.
“I’m not going to ask,” Amarynth reassured her, soothing a fear she hadn’t even voiced aloud.
But that was Amarynth for you, for better or worse.
The Devil Was Beating His Wife
It was raining a few hours later when a PsyOps force visited Tender Lee’s house. It wasn’t a normal rain storm, however, but a sunshower. The team of arresting PsyOps officers assembled in the kind of watery sunlight that Penny noted usually set off Viv’s migraines. Another reason I’m glad she’s not here, Penny thought.
“Oh, look, the devil’s beating his wife,” one of the other agents remarked. Penny stifled a groan. She hated that expression. But now wasn’t the time to make trouble. There was serious work to do.
Penny realized as she waited that this was one of the few arrests that she’d ever made during the daylight hours. Usually, they took suspects in at night when they were sleeping, but when she’d told Martin, he’d wanted to act more quickly. No waiting until nightfall once they had the go-ahead.
Besides, Tenny often napped in the afternoons. Penny remembered Viv saying that one time, that her mother was a creature of the night. Maybe they’d get lucky, and she’d be sound asleep when it all went down.
Penny didn’t know the other officers, but she was glad Martin had made room for her at all. Besides, it was arguably easier to make the arrest surrounded by relative strangers and not people who were in her inner professional circle.
People who would otherwise be tempted to gossip.
Before setting out, she’d been properly introduced to each of the other five members tasked with bringing in Tender Lee. She’d been told their name, their rank, their intuitive specialty.
But as they came upon Tender’s house, all of that information rushed out of her mind. And all she could think of was the gravity of what they were about to do. And how it would upset everything in her home life.
She also noted that she hadn’t encountered a single spirit since Karen had broken the bad news.
Penny couldn’t remember a day that she hadn’t run into at least two or three, even old familiar undead faces. Ones that she had run into dozens of times.
It seemed like the spirit world was giving her a berth, for whatever reason.
Is it an omen? Penny wondered. Am I on the wrong track?
Or, she thought suddenly, is my bias finally getting the best of me?
Everyone knew that bias was a threat to psychic vitality. And this case couldn’t hit any closer to home if it tried to.
Had her job finally broken her?
Was there any coming back from this?
Penny was so lost in her thoughts that she missed her name being called. “Detective Dreadful,” one of the team members said. By the tone, Penny knew that it wasn’t the first time.
“Yes. Yes. Sorry,” Penny said.
“Glad to have you back on Earth,” the agent replied.
Penny flushed with embarrassment.
“Any reservations?” the agent asked.
“No, none at all,” Penny replied. “As my superior, Martin Meek, indicated in the filing papers, I’m part of the original investigative team but not here in any operational capacity. I’m simply here to observe. This is your show. However you want to tackle this, it’s fine by me.”
“Understood.”
Penny lagged behind the group as they approached the residence. Knocked on the door. Asked for Tender.
As Tender was informed she was under arrest for the murder of three people and the assault of three others. As she was read her rights and handcuffed.
As Love screamed like a person possessed and struck one of the officers. As Love was taken in for assaulting an officer, with more cursory rights spat at her like curses.
Penny stood back on the lawn and watched it all unfold.
“Bunch of inbred weirdos in that family,” one of the agents said to her as they climbed into the squad car after the deed was done. “Except for Detective Lee, of course,” he added.
It was too little, too late, Penny decided. The kind of thing you say because you realize how offensive your actual beliefs are and want to do a half-ass cover-up.
This case was going to affect their reputations. In the short term, yes, and perhaps for the foreseeable futures. It could very well make an already difficult job even harder. There was nothing for it. No taking any of it back.
Penny glared out the window as they drove through the watery sunlight back to the station, wondering how in the world she’d explain any of this to Viv when she got home.
Emotional Vampires
Tenny had noticed that time changed first. It moved so much more quickly than she was accustomed to. She found herself bored less as well.
And then her energy waned. She had to stop more often, at points that would have been unthinkable before.
Then her libido. Her passion.
Her drive.
She woke up one morning realizing she had become a senile old dog, like the one that was always on her grandfather’s porch. Smiling. Mouth open wide. But with the emptiest expression. Staring out into the fields. Never unsettled or barking.
It must have been easy for the men who robbed her grandfather’s homestead to sneak past a dog like that. Which was why it was so curious when the dog was found dead later.
Some days Tenny worried she would end up just li
ke that dog.
“It’s a fine thing for all these legends to talk about drinking the blood of virgins,” Tenny told the inspector assigned to oversee the case in Viv’s stead. “But they’re all wrong, you know? What you really need isn’t blood. It’s a fresh brain. That’s what keeps you young.”
“Their brains?” the inspector said. “What do you mean by that?”
“You really don’t know, do you?” Tenny said. “Well, I suppose there’s no blaming you for that. We’ve existed for decades, you know.”
“When you say ‘we’, you mean…?”
“The psychics,” Tenny said frowning impatiently. “The first precogs, my ass.” She laughed in the low part of her throat. “Oh, excuse me. That’s hardly a way for a lady to act. Where are my manners? Tell me, inspector, are you married?”
“No,” he replied. “Not anymore. So when you say –”
“I’ve been married a lot of times. I forget how many,” Tenny said. “That’s the problem. I keep forgetting important things. Things I should remember.”
“So you say you’re a tuey,” the inspector said. “But that doesn’t explain the bit about brains.”
“Ah,” she said. “Well, there are many kinds of us, I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
He nodded. “I have.”
“I forget the word for what we are. The original one that was used anyway. I keep forgetting things, you see. That’s part of my condition. That’s part of who I am,” Tenny said.
“What condition is that?” the inspector said.
“I believe they’re calling us derangers now,” Tenny replied.
A deranger? The inspector’s blood ran cold. “I thought that was something mothers made up to frighten their kids into behaving.”
“Oh you poor dear,” Tenny said, “don’t you know that the real world is scary enough that mothers don’t have to make up anything to scare their kids into behaving? You’d think with your job you’d get that.”
Complications of Taxonomy
While much that has been unearthed since the emergence of the Psychic Phenomenon has largely benefitted society as a whole – and the Psychic State in particular – like any new discovery, it has come with attendant dangers.
Society of course has been well aware of these potential dangers; they are the root of anti-intuitive prejudice. Like most prejudices, these sentiments are tragically overgeneralized and misapplied. However, also like most prejudices, they originate from a basis of truth, however limited and specific.
Taxonomists are now grappling with the task of identifying and classifying psychic powers that so gravely violate social norms and mores, that their practitioners would be classified as monsters, abominations who wouldn’t be out of place in a horror film.
A few complicating factors makes this task very difficult and daunting.
First of all, these monstrous intuitives are understandably secretive about their powers. With general anti-intuitive sentiment and psychophobia as widespread as they are, intuitives of all stripes have been known to hide their powers due to stigma. However, those who possess more dangerous or destructive powers are especially prone to hiding them, as the stigma involved with having those abilities – whether or not they are actually ever employed or used – would typically immediately result in Black Square status and permanent imprisonment.
The very existence of destructive intuitives is treated by the government as a crime against nature, regardless of what they do (or don’t do) with those talents.
Secondly, a number of false reports have been made about destructive intuitive powers. They are particularly popular in Internet forums known for propagating urban legends and in some instances even creating them whole cloth for “entertainment purposes.” Readers may remember the Slender Man incident, in which an urban legend inspired adolescent normals to attempt the murder of their close friend.
Unfortunately, as these urban legends are shared well beyond their original source, the citation and critical thinking ability of lay people becomes quite unreliable, and the relevant scientific agencies frequently receive anecdotal reports of certain psychic powers which in fact do not exist. Unfortunately, these are often mixed in with credible reports of destructive intuitive events, leaving the agencies evaluating them unable to meaningfully distinguish between urban legend and truthful accounts.
Or, in other words, we have trouble knowing from civilian reports whether we’re hearing about a fiction like Slender Man or the true monsters in our midst.
Thirdly, these destructive intuitives are potentially quite dangerous, making proactive discovery and classification a much more daredevil task than it is at default. Few taxonomers want to risk exposure to various psychic assaults simply to add to the collective knowledge of intuition. The qualification few is key here, however, as there do exist brave taxonomers working on this field of endeavor, who make it their business to proactively investigate reported phenomena, no matter what the risks. But they are the exception and not the norm.
As a result, many of psychic taxonomy’s reports about the dark side of intuition have filtered into the scientific community by way of the Department of Psychic Operations, a government agency devoted to employing intuitives in the investigation of crime, as well as other law enforcement agencies who make incidental reports when they encounter irregularities in the line of duty.
Their assistance helps us to solidify our working theories about reported destructive intuitive powers and meaningfully sort through what we suspect to be true and what we suspect to be the product of urban legend.
However, there are a number of intuitive types that are beyond rumored to exist by the frequency and credibility of the reports and at the date of this writing are simply waiting to be confirmed by empirical study before they are added to official taxonomic classification.
The author of this book would caution the reader at this point to understand that the following example, while likely, is offered as an uncertain one. The reader is cautioned that while taxonomists believe that this type is likely to exist, they still lack outside confirmation meeting the standards of the scientific community. Time may very well contradict the existence of this example and show the reader that either the intuitive type in question does not exist or does exist in a different form, one that has been misinterpreted due to insufficient or misleading information.
As mentioned in previous chapters, while many intuitives manipulate mental forces in general, there do exist a number of intuitive specialists who are attuned to certain psychic energies to the exclusion of others. Ostensibly this could be very limiting; however, it does seem that a counterbalance does exist. The most narrowly specialized intuitives do indeed seem to achieve a greater intensity with their admittedly quite specific powers. Even though intuitive specialists are limited in the scope, they are often quite powerful in what they can do.
One notable example of this is a theoretical/rumored intuitive type known as a deranger. Believed to be limited to the manipulation of sanity, one could possibly expect that a deranger’s impact would be far more limited than an empath, precog, or telepath.
Instead, even a single deranger could be quite devastating. While to date there have been isolated reports, a picture is now beginning to emerge of what this intuitive type – or prototype – could entail.
Derangers are reported to possess the ability to essentially siphon off the sanity of their targets, draining wellbeing and coherence from them and absorbing it into themselves. This process would leave a mess of empty emotional and mental husks in their wake but leave the deranger quite high functioning and thriving, despite a mass of victims.
If a deranger were mentally healthy themselves, these victims would be only slightly harmed, mostly miffed, perturbed. Perhaps some of the less resilient victims would develop dysthymia or limited bouts of depression and need talk therapy or pharmaceutical intervent
ion. However, a deranger who is generally mentally healthy would likely pass unnoticed, blending in easily with the kind of difficult personalities frequently found among the normal population.
However, if a deranger were they themselves quite mentally ill at baseline, it would theoretically become necessary for them to draw upon larger quantities of sanity in their targets, as a result leaving their victims psychotic or perhaps even dead.
It is rumored that certain deaths that have been formerly declared suicides may very well be the work of errant derangers.
Empirical confirmation is needed.
Our agency continues to work in concert with law enforcement and the media in order to obtain this.
from Insecta Psychica: Towards an Intuitive Taxonomy by Cloche Macomber
“You don’t have to watch this, you know,” Penny said to Viv.
“Just shut up and start the tape,” Viv replied.
“Viv,” Karen said.
Viv swiveled around to glare at her. Karen didn’t say anything else. They’d managed to make up but only just. Karen didn’t want to do anything to upset the fragile alliance.
“Viv, I don’t think this is a good idea,” Penny said. “I don’t think you should watch her confession. Nothing good can come from it. It’s only going to damage you.”
“And why’s that?” Viv challenged her.
“You’re not like other people, Viv,” Penny said gently.
“No, I’m not,” Viv agreed. “I’m stronger.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Penny said.
“You’re very strong, Viv,” Karen said.
“What I meant,” Penny continued, “is that if you watch this tape, it’s going to be with you forever. Stored in your visual memory. For a normal person, it fades. You’re different. If you watch this tape, you’ll never be rid of it. You’ve told me it yourself so many times. You can’t un-see what you’ve seen. Forgetting’s a luxury you don’t have.”
