A man dressed in a European style blue suit with narrow white stripes stood at the base of my stairwell. A blue cravate with double ends sat atop his formal white shirt, instead of a normal necktie. A frown on his dusky face, he was rubbing his butt. The man looked up at me. Brown-orange eyes caught me in a gaze that felt like a mouse trap.
“Well?” the man said verbally and in my mind. “We need to talk. It would be better to visit inside your residence. Fewer witnesses.”
There was a sense about this man, who had slick black hair, a thick black mustache and hand-sewn leather shoes that complimented his expensive suit. His voice tone had an accent. A French accent, I realized, recalling my time spent in Paris years and years ago. But the sense I got from his brief mind touch was a sense of duplicity. As if he intended more than a talk.
“Ansgar!” I mind-called as strongly as I could. “Who is this Transcendent?” I sent him my mind image of this wannabe visitor.
The amiable warmness of Ansgar’s mind touched mine, then shifted suddenly into worry and anger.
“Jack! That is Armand de Barthélemy of Paris! He is dangerous. He challenges every new Transcendent to a game of mind pain, to see who can stand up to him and who must bow to him,” Ansgar said, his feeling of disgust for the man coming through loud and clear.
“He wants to come into my home. But he can’t. It seems he bounced off the protective barrier I placed on my garage apartment.”
“Good that you installed such a barrier!” A mental sigh came. “Jack, sooner or later you must deal with him. I suspect he arrived today because yesterday I sent out a mind note to all Transcendents about you controlling your territory in the western U.S.”
The French man showed me an impatient look. “Ansgar Knutson is a too polite plebian. Finish your chat with him so we can talk.”
I blinked. Clearly this Transcendent was aware of my mind chat with my mentor. And he had earlier flown in, or teleported in, while I was away at church. “Ansgar, thank you for the warning. And confronting danger sooner is . . . is my habit since I was very young.” A memory of facing down a bully in sixth grade, and pummeling him with my fists until he held up his hands and surrendered, flashed through my mind. “Thank you for the warning.”
“Of course, young Jack. Be careful.”
And with that my mentor’s mind was gone. Only to be replaced by the brooding mind of a French man who was impatient, both visually and mentally.
“Well?!”
I opened a hole in my home’s barrier field large enough for this Arman to walk through. I also mentally unlocked the gate to the stairwell. “Come up,” I said aloud.
“I will!” His voice was loud to my highly sensitive ears.
This Transcendent was a walking white Sun who glowed with many different colors. Aside from the white of psychic powers, he also seethed with arrogance, impatience, duplicity, curiosity and a scheming element that exceeded the scheming mind of any politician or corporate type I had ever met. Though my exposure to such since last Tuesday had been minimal, and mostly at the Denver airport. His dark brown shoes thudded on the wood planks of my stairwell, as if making a statement. I stepped back inside my living room and waited for him to enter. With a thought I closed the outer barrier entry hole. At least now this person was locked between my personal body barrier field and the one that enclosed the garage. So he could not leave even by teleportation. Since he had clearly tried to teleport into my place before bouncing off the outer barrier.
“Did you break into my place yesterday? While I was gone?”
Armand de Barthélemy stopped just inside my apartment. One hand closed my door. The other hand gestured at the living room. “Of course I did. I had hoped to teleport directly here, to save you embarrassment from neighbors seeing a man bounce off your stairwell gate.” He put tanned hands on his hips, his expression impatient. “I put a program into your computer to alert me to your return home. However, since it is late night in Paris, it took me some time to be properly accoutered.”
Fancy language did not match the man’s scheming mind. And using ‘accoutered’ to mean ‘dressed’ was as false as his surface irritation at bouncing off my barrier field. “You look well-dressed to me.” I kept my face to him as he moved into the living room and stood at the other end of my coffee table. About five feet separated us.
One side of his lips lifted slightly. It was not a snarl. More of a super to inferior reaction. “You would, living in a high desert wasteland like this Santa Fe. Why ever would you wish to control this Southwest desert of America?”
I told my inner self to stop reacting to his verbal put-down speech. While put-downs were clearly authentic to him, I felt the need to be clear-minded. And alert. “It is my home territory. I’ve lived in the West and Southwest most of my life.”
Arman frowned. “And yet, you visited Paris, the heart of true civilization, many years in the past.” Brief humor filled his darkly tanned face. “Ah! You met your future, now former, wife in my city. She is a looker,” he said, his tone sly. “Good thing you were not then Transcendent. I would have taken her from you. As I have laid claim to many women.”
The man’s misogyny mixed with lust fairly simmered on the surface of his mind. And once more he was trying to make me angry. Or upset. “What did you wish to talk about?”
Armand lifted both hands, brushed off imaginary dust from both white sleeves, and fixed me with his gaze. That gaze felt like the look of a hunting falcon. Combined with a snake.
“Pain.”
Agony filled my mind. On the surface of my mind and deeper inside, I felt pure agony.
The pain of when I had smashed my left thumb as a ten year-old helping out my Dad as he repaired our home’s wooden fence hit me. The pain of hearing Sally tell me she was going to divorce me. The pain of my two grown children refusing my calls over the last ten years. The pain I felt during an appendectomy, before the anesthesia kicked in. Even the tiny pain of my umbilical cord being cut as I was birthed from my mother’s womb, that pain joined all the other physical and mental pains I had ever suffered in my life.
Holding up both hands I mind-pushed against the imposed mind pain.
It receded to merely a memory.
I struck back.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
The surface thoughts and memories of Armand had given me some sense of his persona and his inner self. It was clear he pretended to be born to high society, when in truth he’d been born the fifth child of a pig farmer in the south of France. His mind memory of that home told me it happened centuries ago, perhaps in the A.D. 1600s. Which meant he was older than Ansgar. A fact I ignored.
Instead, I recalled his memory of the time when a mama pig had knocked him down, then had chewed on his right toe. It had been terribly painful for a snoopy four year-old. He’d been rescued by his mother, who then yelled at him to not be so ‘stupide’ as to crawl into the pig pen. Years later a teacher in grammar school had called him stupide when he got a plu-perfect conjugation wrong in formal French. He’d hired himself out as shoe maker apprentice when he was just fourteen, leaving his parents to take care of two more new children. Two of his older siblings had died from cholera. As had a third of his village. Being a shoe maker apprentice was safer than raising pigs. And he learned to make decent leather shoes, versus the canvas shoes worn by most country folks. Eventually he’d been brought into the estate of the provincial governor, there to make shoes with heels for all who worked there. His one day of pleasure had been when the governor looked at the shoes Armand had made for him, gave a nod and said ‘c’est correct’. The overweight man had even worn those shoes for most of a year, before gout forced him out of normal footwear. Then Armand had felt massive pain as a provincial soldier fighting against local Huguenots after the A.D. 1685 revocation of the 1598 Edict of Nantes that had earlier guaranteed civil safety for French Protestants. Armand had taken a crossbow bolt through his side. A bolt that had missed both his left kidney and most of his intesti
nes as the metal bolt passed into and through him.
Armand gasped a bit, then gave me a shrug. “Ancient history, mon ami.”
His projection of pain into my mind returned with strong force.
“C’est pas de tout,” I mind-sent him, asserting his pain projection meant nothing to me.
I fought back. But I felt like I was being sucked under by a tide of pain. An overwhelming tsunami of pain flooded through my mind. My heart beat faster than it had ever beat before. My nerves tensed. I rocked on my heels. Every pain I had ever experienced as a baby, a child, an adult and a geezer flashed through my mind, again and again. In living color and true pain recalled. Briefly I felt hopeless. Then I realized Armand’s fancy suit was a key to pain for him. In a flash I sent him the mental image of his ritzy suit ripped from shoulder to waist, covered in brown pig shit from knees to torn open shoes, his manicured hands filled with dark brown pig shit as he struggled to rip off his suit and return to the simple trousers and overshirt usually worn by young French boys in the 1600s. Of course his black hair spiked out in all directions, accreted as it was with mud and pebbles from his roll down a muddy hillside, ending up in the middle of a pig sty.
“Non!” he cried harshly in his own mind, releasing his forcing of pain memories into my mind.
I gasped briefly as the image of my children dead in a car crash receded.
“Oui!” I said, hitting his mind with the image of a high status woman, undressed and naked as she stood before her wall mirror, turning to look at him, then vomiting pink bile as she caught sight of his pig shit strewn country clothing.
Grim anger filled Armand’s brown-orange eyes. His gaze shifted past me. To the terrarium.
“Ah, what an ugly pet. And uglier owner. Time to put the lizard out of its misery.”
I felt the Death Thought pass by my inner barrier field and hit Pancho. His death throes filled my mind as he sought to bite his own tail in order to prevent being eaten by a snake. But his enemy was not physical. It was simple thoughts of death from Armand that now killed the pet who had been a companion to me for most of the last ten years.
His death did it.
Fury rose up in me. Fury stronger than when I had faced down the four muggers on Tuesday. Fury greater than when I had incinerated the Greyhound station mugger on Wednesday. Fury broader than what I had felt when the chief robber had slapped Mabel on Thursday lunch time. This fury needed an outlet.
Peering into Armand’s mind deeply, far past the cultured layers of his command of formal French, Serbo-Croatian, Romansch, German and Dutch I went. Past his first failure at inserting his erection into a poor French country girl who had agreed to let him dick her in return for half a loaf of bread. Past his failure to save his parents and siblings from starvation as all the pigs on his father’s ranch fell ill and died. Past the woman who took care of him during his recovery from the bolt wound, and later married him in a solemn Roman Catholic ceremony. Past her death and the death of their four children as half their kids died before the age of five, and the other half died as robbers killed them and their mother as the three tried to reach him in Paris, riding on a country coach that had only a single armed man with a sword. That guardian had jumped off the coach and run into the nearby woods when confronted by four masked and sword-armed men on horses. The screams his mother, his younger siblings and two other women traveling with his family filled his mind. He had not been present during the robbery and murders. Nor had he become Transcendent until he was 53 years old. So his mind image was only imaginary. And therefore quite powerful. I grabbed his image of his mother’s face as a sword pierced her heart. She was fixed on Armand and yelling “Stupide!”
That did it. His tightly controlled mind flinched back from my mind assault.
“Finis! Je suis finis avec vous!”
I smiled in my mind. “But I am not finished with you!”
Terror now replaced the memory pain and memory guilt he’d felt as I had thrown his mother’s disapproval at him. “Please. I will not again intrude on your territory. S’il vous plait?”
Saying please in French got to me. It was one of the first phrases I had learned in France while studying at the College Americain de Paris. I stopped forcing the dead wife image into his mind. Then I opened a hole in my outer barrier field.
“Go! Port back to Paris. And if you ever again harm my pet, a friend of mine, or anyone within my domain, your stupide failure will last forever!”
He glanced past me at my terrarium. Where Pancho lay dead. But not cold. Not yet.
“I depart.”
“Whoosh” went the air that rushed into the space where he had stood.
I turned to the terrarium. Reaching down past the heat lamp I grabbed Pancho and held him in my hands. I sent my Healing energies into his lifeless body. They filled him, then stopped.
Nothing happened. I felt no spark of his red inner core. Even though his body was still warm. What to do?
Well, if I could slow down the advance of time, perhaps I could make time go backward? Back to the past! I leaned forward, preparing for the blast when I let go.
Dust particles in the air stopped dropping. They stopped shifting from side to side in response to my breathing. Noise from outside stopped. The life energies of people, trees, pets and plants in proximity to my garage, they all stopped. Not going dead. Just going into slumber until I released time. With a focus deeper than any I had ever felt before, I forced time backward. Backward one minute. Two minutes. Three minutes. And twelve seconds. Past the point where Armand’s Death Thought had hit Pancho. My perky little guy was watching me and Armand. I reached out with my right hand, grabbed the past-time Pancho and laid him atop the dead Pancho. The two fused. Became one. Alive. The inner spirit, a tiny red soul, now flowed through Pancho as my buddy felt the warmth of my hands. I let go of time.
I nearly fell over.
Letting go of past time hit me in the back like a freight train.
I gasped.
My mind cried out.
“Jack!” called Ansgar, his mind voice concerned. “Are you okay? I sense that Armand is back in Paris.”
“Okay?” My stomach clenched with a hunger like I had never felt. Clearly the mind pain battle I had fought, combined with the Healing energy I sent into Pancho and the impact from time returning to the past, it had all sucked me dry of energy. I lived. Pancho lived. But I wanted to immerse myself in a giant vat of liquid chocolate and suck it in to feed my body’s need for organic energy. “Well, I’m very hungry. I defeated Armand’s mind pain assault. But he killed my pet lizard, Pancho. Healing energy did not bring him back. So I reversed the flow of time and found him alive. I joined his living self with his dead self. Pancho lives again.”
“Amazing,” came Ansgar’s voice. It carried many feelings and emotions. Respect was there. Surprise was present. Brief worry was there also. “Jack, it has been 110 years since the last Transcendent reversed time’s flow. He died later, by his own hand. Do not try that again, if you value your future life.”
Did that mean forcing time backward would kill me? I thought my question to my mentor.
“No, it will not kill you. But you will be tempted to reverse the death of a loved one. That will fail. Humans are far more complex than lizards. And there is a . . . a boundary between human life and death that no Transcendent may trespass. I do not know why the boundary is there. I only know it is present. You and every other Transcendent can kill, hopefully to remove evil from our plane of existence. But none of us can restore life to a normal human whose soul has passed on. So, be very careful in your future use of present and new powers.”
That sounded like good advice. Pancho yawned. I put him back into his terrarium. Then I let hunger hit me.
“Ansgar, I’m heading out for a big dinner. I’m low on inner energy.”
He chuckled in my mind. “A very reasonable result of what you have done, both to Armand and to your Pancho. Alicia has been the only other Transcendent to
resuscitate a pet. But her border collie was only mauled by a Costa Rican bobcat. Its wounds were fatal. Its heart stopped as it lost blood. But the life soul was still there when Alicia reached her Whiskey. Her healing energies were enough to repair her dog’s wounds and replace its lost blood. She did not reverse the flow of time. But she did battle with Death and succeeded.”
So the woman whose domain was Central America had brought back to life a pet? Maybe I should visit her home in Costa Rica. By plane. And with her mind permission.
“Thanks for the info, Ansgar. Hope you enjoy your time with Melody tonight.”
“I will,” he said, bemusement in his mind voice. “Jack, be patient with your powers. It is not yet a week since they arrived within you. And do let me know what your scientist Claudia has discovered. If anything.”
“I will.” Calling her tomorrow, on Monday, would work. As would having breakfast with my buddies at 6 a.m., before the stock market opened. “Thank you for your warning. And for your guidance in all this. I owe you more than . . . than I have ever owed anyone else.”
A sense of happy satisfaction came to my mind from Ansgar’s mind. “Glad to be of help. Armand is the only one of us who is so envious of the powers of others that he mounts these mind pain challenges. He always fails. But he never learns. You are a quick learner. That ability will lead you into a bright future.”
I hoped so. “Bye, Ansgar.”
“Au revoir, mon ami.”
My mentor’s mind sense vanished.
My stomach rumbled.
Time to eat. And have a carb rich desert! The Outback steakhouse at the Santa Fe Place Mall would be perfect. I reached into my pocket, grabbed my cell phone and put in a call to Uber.
After my feast at Outback I returned home. Since it was still daylight thanks to it being early Spring, despite the clock hour of 8 p.m., I left my stairwell gate unlocked, as one of my buddies might come calling. But I made sure the outer field barrier still covered the entire garage. That left the stairwell outside the barrier but my place totally within it. The barrier was as I had left it when I took Uber to eat dinner. Now, I climbed the stairs with too many thoughts on my mind. Lovely Pancho was the same as always. He’d been happy to get a live cricket before I left for my meal. But the pain memories imposed on me by Armand were still there. Would Sally convince my kids to talk with me? They were both married, with small kiddies, but I had never seen my grandkids. Nor visited either kid’s home. Why they had severed contact with me after our divorce I did not know. Let alone understand. But it was an open emotional wound that would not heal until I saw and spoke with them. While I was rich enough to fly anywhere, I knew I needed their consent to visit. I sat in my recliner, gave a nod to Pancho and focused on the reproduction of Van Gogh’s Sunflowers on the far wall. Next to it was his Starry Night, which portrayed the night sky in southern France much like the night sky I saw from Santa Fe. Clear of clouds, blue-black and scintillating with stars around a crescent white moon and very bright Venus. The approach of another persona, a woman coming up my stairs, interrupted my effort to sink into beauty.
Killer Geezer Page 21
