Born with a mysterious gift he never wanted… a gift that could mean his death.
When Jack Evens’s name appears in blood at the scene of a grotesque ritualistic murder, the private investigator is drawn into a conflict that extends beyond reality, into the realm of dreams...and nightmares.
A serial killer is after him, but this is no ordinary psychopath. This killer is controlled by mysterious creatures from another realm. If he hopes to survive, Jack must finally come to terms with his psychic ability, a gift that has haunted him since he was a child.
At stake are the women the killer has targeted, Jack’s own life, and something much more...something of cosmic proportions.
The Dream Beings
Aaron J. French
Dedication
To Veronica, who knows about endings.
Prologue
He stood in the dark bedroom, in a house he’d chosen because all signs pointed to the residence of a single female. The madness pounded in his veins. He shivered and his stomach turned. The pressure was unbearable.
He had to do it.
Now.
He reached behind his back and withdrew the serrated blade. The tip gleamed in the glow of moonlight coming through the window. He stepped forward, leaned down and placed his knee on the bed. His weight pressed upon the mattress.
She stirred, tilting her head.
He froze. Waited.
When she got settled, he inched forward.
Then he was on her.
Stabbing. Stabbing and slicing with the blade all along her thrashing body. She kicked and fought and screamed, but he restrained her with his body weight and plunged gloved fingers down her throat. Her wide eyes—awake now—beamed with pure, holy terror as his stabbing motions intensified, blood sailing across the walls and ceiling.
He moved to her head. The knife bit through her skin, sawing into her neck. Abruptly he reached the spinal column and her limbs contorted as she gurgled black blood. Eyes bulged out, body began to convulse. He pinned her flailing form with his knees, pressing with all his strength, cutting through the spine.
The head came off.
Silence.
He took a long, satisfying breath.
It was all over.
The mattress flooded with blood as he got to his feet. He watched as her body jerked with nerves until it went horizontal. The headless body gushed, never seeming to run out of blood.
He licked the blade, relishing the sickly-sweet taste, and deposited the weapon back in his belt. He fished the Polaroid camera out of the pocket of his trousers, took a couple of shots.
For memory’s sake.
His heart fluttered with excitement as the Dream Beings flickered to life inside his head. Yes, they were pleased. He grinned, and they transparently grinned back. He returned the camera to his pocket.
Time for our real work to begin.
Chapter One
Stephanie walked into my office and said, “Looking at Internet porn again?”
I chuckled. “Only what your husband uploaded to YouTube last night.”
I was smoking, with my feet on the desk, searching through online periodicals as the police scanner blared. We hadn’t had a job in two weeks. Stress was eating me—chain-smoking, too many vodkas before bed. Something had to crack, or else I’d have to get a straight job.
“Frank is computer illiterate,” Stephanie said, pressing a yellow Post-it to the side of my computer screen.
Call Detective Patterson
I ripped it off. “What’s this? When did he call?”
“Five minutes ago.”
“I didn’t hear the phone.”
“I was on the other line with Carla.”
I groaned. “You don’t look like you work in a beauty salon.”
Not true. Stephanie Gains, my secretary and onetime girlfriend (albeit briefly) back in high school, certainly did look the part for working in a beauty salon: painted-up face, buxom, with frilly brown hair, and lashes long enough to take down a Boeing 747.
I thought my comment witty, but she responded with a scowl.
“What’d he say?” I asked.
“That if you don’t call him right away and let him hire you to work on this new case, you and I are out of a job. And how will I get any excitement if I can’t tell people that I work for the Ghostbusters anymore? Excuse me—Ghostbuster.” She left the room.
I sighed and stamped out my cigarette. Then I punched Detective Patterson’s number. His phone rang and he answered.
“This is Patterson.”
Considerable noise hung in the background.
“Oscar? Jack Evens.”
“Jack! Just the person I want. Give me a sec.” I heard rustling and then the noise died out. “All right,” he said, “I’m back.”
“Steph told me you called.”
“Had something come through last night. I got out here about an hour ago. It ain’t pretty.”
“Homicide?” I masked my enthusiasm, but a homicide case could mean a month’s worth of work.
He grunted. “And a bad one. Middle-aged white female stabbed to death while she slept. One of her neighbors reported seeing a strange van parked outside the house several days ago. A possible suspect exiting during the night too. We’ve also got tire tracks. And, Jack?”
“Yeah?”
“The woman’s head was hacked off.”
“Yeeesh.” I felt the morning’s coffee burble in my stomach.
“That’s not all. There’s…something else.”
I paused, eager to hear, but he made me wait for it. Finally I cleared my throat and said, “You gonna tell me?”
“Sure I’m gonna tell you. It’s the reason I need your help. That special gift of yours and all.”
“Are you referring to my mastery over Texas Hold’em?”
“You know what I’m referring to, Jack.”
I knew. He was talking about my ability to see into higher worlds, into other dimensions, and my knack for intuiting seemingly unsolvable murder cases. Long story. Few detectives in the department used PIs anymore. They mostly just got in the way of the real investigations. Unless you demonstrated some particular skill, as a PI you were more than likely relegated to following significant others around.
But my gift made me special, made me in demand, although few detectives were ballsy enough to employ my services. But I had connections. A lot of the time, if I was lucky, I could get a gig as an extra pair of hands or another set of eyes, carrying out Internet and library research, or completing tasks for overburdened lawyers. There was always that sort of work to be done.
Oscar Patterson was one of the ballsy ones.
“Let’s have it,” I said.
He took a deep breath. “They found the head in the bathroom sink, just set in there like a basketball or something, with the blood drained out of it.”
“Jesus. Where was the body?”
“Left on the bed. Strange stars and symbols were written on both bathroom mirrors, sort of drawn on there with bloody fingerprints.”
“Anything you recognize?”
“The symbols? Not really. I thought I recognized a crucifix. But you’ll have to be the eyes on that. There were a couple of words. Something about a river…something else about the center of the Earth. Also…”
“What?”
“A name, Jack. Your name. First and last. Jack Evens. Written in blood.”
A long, deeply internalized silence as I opened the desk drawer to retrieve my antique .38 revolver nestled among empty cigarette packs and McDon
ald’s wrappers. Then I said, “Give me the address, Oscar. I’ll be right over.”
Chapter Two
The house was on Hansen Street, northeast side of town, where the richies, yuppies and closet drug dealers lived. I parked my Chevy pickup behind a row of police cruisers, some with their visibar lights flashing. The neighbors stood on front lawns that mirrored each other, right down to the SUVs in the driveways.
After flashing my PI credentials to the two baby-faced officers manning the barricade tape, I entered a slightly chaotic crime scene. A detective was arguing with a man in a business suit and earpiece, whom I fearfully suspected to be FBI, although I had no proof to back that up. Several officers in traditional blues were interviewing neighbors on one side of the house, while a team of young hotshots in lab coats moved in and out the front entrance. I saw a few guys from Forensics and even a newswoman and her cameraman lackey, attempting to shoulder in past the cordon.
I let this fall away from my focus, not wanting to waste energy trying to make sense of it, and moved up the stone pathway to the house. A blonde in a lab coat, carrying a black baggie, told me where I could find Detective Patterson.
I passed through a modest-sized living room decorated with leather sofas, bookshelves, tacky art prints and glass lamps. A plasma-screen TV hung on the wall, an expensive-looking stereo unit underneath it. I recognized several cops and waved to them. They waved back distractedly. I found Oscar standing by the open bedroom door in the hallway.
“Yello,” I said, going for cheery. A second later the reek of blood and death hit me, and my bowels turned.
Oscar wheeled, a bit jumpy. His wide, pale face seemed, well, wider and paler than usual. Beads of sweat jeweled his brow beneath his bald head. He was short and squat and wore a baggy black suit. Looked an awful lot like Alfred Hitchcock, standing there in the hallway with his shadow silhouetted on the wall.
“Jack, you’re here,” he said. “You gave me a spook.”
“Stealth is my other gift.”
“Yeah, right. Glad you made it. Getting anything yet?”
He meant my supernatural perceptive extra sense, my psychic power. I hated when people out of the blue asked me questions like that. I shook my head, but that wasn’t entirely true.
Oscar ordered the people in the bedroom to give us a few minutes. And after they cleared out, we stepped in.
I felt the vibes go down into me. The fear and horror, frozen in the air, left in space and time like an old photograph. Invisible to most; unspeakably perceptible to me. I shivered but did my best to ignore it.
Oscar perched at the foot of the bed. “Those are two of his boot stains there. He stood here, watching her sleep, doin’ God knows what—I don’t know, jerking off, maybe—and then he moved in for the kill. I assume it’s a him, although there are actually no signs of rape.”
“Where’s the body?”
“Coroner’s got it.”
“And?”
“And…we know she was stabbed through the stomach, chest and legs over a dozen times. And her head was cut off.”
“Head’s location now?”
“Same as body.”
“I hope you got photographs.”
He nodded, then moved slowly toward the edge of the bed. The mattress, which up to this point I’d avoided looking at, was a crumpled mess of blankets and sheets, with one of the pillows cast to the floor. An ocean of blood, on its way to becoming dry, lay across everything, and a long arc of the stuff trailed up the wall from the headboard, up to the ceiling.
I was trying to recall the last crime scene I’d been to that was this grisly, when Oscar said, “Are you getting anything?”
I quelled my irritation and shook my head. “Not yet. Need to have a full, clear picture of the events; then I should have something. Let’s see the bathroom.”
He led me into an oblong room with black and white tiles and a large walk-in shower. The curtain was ripped from its small metal loops and lay bunched beside the toilet. Splashes of blood painted it.
Immediately upon entering I had a darkening of my soul, like a light being dimmed continuously until flickering out. Dread, horror, pain were not sufficient words to describe the sinking feeling. I had stepped into, and through, the dead woman’s suffering.
“Do we know her name?” I asked.
“Page,” Oscar said. “Page Johnson.”
I studied the porcelain sink with fresh cement concretizing in my veins—the dark smears of blood, the pool of it clogging the drain, the finger-painted smears of it across the brass knobs and spout. Squiggles, wavy lines, tiny- to large-size dots, patterns of circles and squares, a whole galaxy of crudely rendered stars covering the surface of the mirror, and even a pentagram or two.
“Back here,” Oscar said, indicating the shower.
I moved beside him and saw blood-scrawled words—like writing on the walls of a prison cell—meandering along the tiles, surrounded by stars, shapes and circles, enclosed within something like a bloody cartouche. Several minutes of scrutiny were required before I could decipher the message. Three or four fragmented sentences, none relating to the others, with my name announced at the bottom.
My name.
Jack Evens.
The message ran:
The river of suffering flows through me…
I am lost…Christ in the center of the Earth…
They come in dreams…The world of dreams…
Crucified at night will be you…Crucified in dreams…
…is you…Jack Evens
I stared at this for several minutes. Oscar stayed silent, knowing that, for the moment, I was incommunicado. Or maybe he was just as frightened as I. Still, it wasn’t his goddamn name scribbled in the blood of some poor dead woman.
Finally, reluctantly, he said, “Does any of this ring any bells? I mean, don’t get me wrong, none of us think you have anything to do with this. But I have heard your name whispered around quite a bit today.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“Sadly, no. But the chief wants me to question you. If you can tell us where you were last night, and perhaps provide an alibi, there should be no problem.”
“Fine.”
“And, Jack?”
“Yes?”
“Are you getting any of your…feelings? I mean, for Christ’s sake, this person knows who you are.”
I sighed hard. “Yeah, I got something,” I said. “But I can’t talk about it here. In fact I can’t stay in here for another second.”
“All right. Let’s go to Shakey’s and I’ll buy you a beer and we can talk there.”
“Bring the case photos,” I said.
“Gene’s got ’em. He’s around here somewhere. But I doubt he’s printed them out yet—”
I left the room without waiting to see if he would follow.
Chapter Three
At Shakey’s I drank beer and stared straight ahead at the glaring bottles behind the counter. A Pete Seeger song was playing on the jukebox. Oscar had just gotten through with his line of questioning, and even though I didn’t have a tight alibi—other than Stephanie, who was the last one to see me at the office around seven in the evening, with a bottle of bourbon and my feet on the desk—he seemed satisfied to let the matter rest.
But I knew the routine. Hell, I was an investigator myself. When he said he was going to “let the matter rest”, he really meant he was going to keep an eye on me. Meanwhile we pretended everything was normal.
Oscar had arrived twenty minutes after me, giving me ample time to get a buzz before he showed up. For that, I was thankful. It helped me through his questions, and helped to numb the terrible feelings and images I’d acquired at the crime scene.
He was late because he had attempted to gather up the crime scene photos. But, as feared, they’d not been printed, so Oscar was forced
to show them to me on the camera. He hit a little metal button and the black LCD screen blipped to life, trapping the wooden bar top in its rectangular window, more blurry and jerky than my worst drunk nights. He hit another button and the image of Page’s bedroom appeared.
Oscar cycled through the pictures. The song on the jukebox switched to Johnny Cash’s version of “Hurt”. I only half registered how fitting that was. The photographer had captured the body from every possible angle, and the pics were such high-resolution that I could almost smell the blood. Even the minutest details were visible, such as the wrinkles in the mattress as it sagged under the weight, and the trail of red droplets spiraling up to the ceiling.
“Those are from when the killer yanked the knife out and then brought it down again,” Oscar said, pointing to the droplets. “The velocity and angle flings the blood up along the wall.” He pointed to another arc traveling in the opposite direction. “We can actually tell a lot from this. Once we get the murder weapon back, we can even run a test to help prove our case in court.”
“I’m familiar with the procedure,” I said. I wasn’t meaning to sound touchy, but it came out defensive.
The whole thing had put me off. Maybe it was because it’d been a while since I’d worked a homicide. Private investigators don’t usually work those, contrary to what Hollywood would have people think. Really, I knew the reason for my touchiness was the writing on the wall in Page’s shower. The goddamned writing…with my name attached to it like a fucking signature.
I ordered another beer and swallowed half in a gulp.
He lay in darkness. Cold—like sharp ice seeping into his bones. He could retrieve the blanket from the floor. But no. He could get up and switch on the little space heater he bought at Walmart. But no. Better to suffer. Better in pain. He liked it that way.
He had smashed his alarm clock a month ago during a fit of rage, and had yet to buy a new one. But it was probably somewhere around eight o’clock. Not too late.
As he lay there—reflecting might be one way to put it, although it felt more like compulsive paranoia—the images of the night before entered his mind. The woman and how sweet her death had been, the fury of her fear and desperate emotions. That was what he lived for—pure visceral feeling.
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