Mind to Mind: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective

by Don Pendleton

  "I believe we have been here before. What was Jane all about?"

  "The origin," he said, "of action."

  I said, "Thank you, Dr. Grewal."

  He requested, 'Tell me, please, when you have solved the riddle."

  Solve it? I had not yet defined it. But I was getting a sniff of that trembling question...and it was driving me crazy.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight: Door to Beyond

  I dropped Alison at her place and went on to Malibu for needed repairs to the self. Alison needed the downtime, too, that was obvious. It had been a frantic pace of events, almost from the moment we'd first met, and she was coming apart under the strain. Matter of fact, so was I. The day was Friday. It had begun on Tuesday, barely seventy-two hours earlier. Not that the time factor was unusual for me. My cases do show a tendency to explode all over me the moment I encounter them. I should have become accustomed to that. Part of the way I work, I guess, or the way I'm screwed into things. A catalytic effect, I suppose. Whatever, the involvement in this case had simply become too otherworldly in one sense—producing too damned much mystery and bewilderment for the mind to handle—and in the other sense, too personally threatening for a comfortable this-world orientation.

  It had become more and more apparent to me, in fact, that the truth about this case was not to be found in this world. The problems—yeah, the problems, as I understood them—were very much related to this world, so any meaningful resolution needed to be this-world-related also, if I was to come out of it with my head intact. But there were other worries also, beyond the self. Very probably the health and general well-being of a ten-year-old kid were at stake. Count in also the kid's mother and brother.

  As for Jane Doe—well, Jane, you see...Jane herself was no longer a this-world problem. I was not sure that she had ever been; not, that is, since my entry into the case. The little visit with Dr. Grewal tended to confirm a growing suspicion in that direction. This is going to be hard to handle intellectually, but...well, I had been wondering since the experiences at Ojai if the phenomenal aspects of the case had actually begun much earlier than the confrontation with a fleshy ghost in my bedroom at Malibu. My sensing, in fact—or call that my "extra-sensing"—almost from the beginning had been definitely colored toward otherworldly phenomena. This accounts, I believe, for my decision to get involved in the case.

  Understand, please—I am not omniscient or even nearly so. My "sensing" of things is often as vague as anyone's. Even a strong sensing usually comes with no particularly clear understanding of what it is or what it means. I get a "sniff' of something, that's all, and then I have to puzzle it out, the same as anyone else.

  My initial "sniff" of Jane Doe was, I believe, disturbing to that part of me that works within the right brain. I know, in fact, that it was. I just did not understand the disturbance. The message that came over to the left brain told the intellect to stay out of it. I decided to do that; tried to do that. But then Jane's right brain moved against mine, and in that exchange a new sensing was born. Don't ask; I don't know what that new sensing was. I only know that the message to the intellect was more sympathetic to this woman's plight. At that point it would have taken horses to pull me away. I reacted accordingly. The rest is the case as we have experienced it to this point.

  But I believe that I had come to some understanding, at this point in the case, that the whole thing had been cockeyed from the beginning...otherworldly...out of context with the common reality. There was a matrix, an interface, problem. As though, say, a spider in his web suddenly became self-conscious and aware of the larger world in which his web is set, aware of me and all my activities in this larger world. For me, the act of movement from my home in Malibu to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles is a routine event; to the spider in his web in the corner of my living room, my routine event is a mind-blowing spectacle attended by unimaginable magic and godlike powers. I have moved farther in a few minutes than the spider will move in a thousand lifetimes, faster and with less expenditure of my own energy than the spider could possibly conceive of, and for a purpose the spider could never understand. He would be reluctant to tell his spider friends of his discovery; they would think him crazy.

  The same as some of you may think me crazy when I tell you that the only phenomena suggested so far in these pages are phenomenal only because they are outside our common experience. The whole thing could be entirely routine and "common" in the world that exists beyond our sense experience. "Death" to us could be "birth" somewhere else, and vice versa; the impossible could be the ordinary; the bizarre could be the commonplace. Why not? You tell me why not. Like the Indian fakir with the nails in his head. Something either is or is not. If it is, then what the hell—we may as well concede the point and start looking for answers. Which is why, I believe, fakirs do these things.

  That is about where I was on that Friday afternoon as I returned to my beach pad at Malibu. The Pacific was endlessly royal blue and inviting, the sky above surpassingly endless and just a shade less blue with puffy little clouds scudding onshore. Standing there between the two vistas on infinity, I felt very strongly the limitations of my mortality and the apparent insignificance of my place in the universe. Yet I felt also a tug of satisfaction approaching pride in the realization that, for all the apparent isolation and microscopic stature of mankind on the cosmic scale, we do appear to have powers and perceptions far beyond anything we should logically expect. I felt a comfort, too, in that realization—a "sensing," if you will—that the human race has a lot more going for it than any of us might think. We are insects, sure, on that larger scale, but we are much larger than the sum of our parts. I believe that we must be highly important insects.

  Did others, though—other races—share that view of us?

  Or were we merely amusing diversions along some larger trail of cosmic evolution?

  Did Oom-ray-key-too look at me in that same discomfiting sense that I lock gazes with an old ape at the zoo? If so, can I fathom her, and the things that move her, any better than the ape understands me and my world?

  Were the soul-walkers visitors to this planetary zoo?

  If so, could I expect them to toss peanuts or brickbats?

  If soul-walkers indeed, then why the sex games? Is there no sex possible in their common reality? If so, are they then "outlaws" indulging in forbidden alien pleasures? Or is there, perhaps, some sober necessity to their games?

  These were thoughts, just thoughts, as I stood there at the edges of infinity. I share them with you here so that you may understand my state of mind. It is important that you understand this. Because Jane Doe again awaited me just inside my door.

  Chapter Twenty-Nine: Saints Come Marching

  This time she wore white buckskin in the fashion of Oom-ray-key-too. But this was Jane, definitely Jane. Though there was a basic similarity, the finer nuances of personality clearly delineated one from the other, and these were more obvious now. I knew it was Jane, and yet I knew also that it was a Jane somehow different, better integrated, more into herself. She embraced me formally, rather stiffly, kissed me lightly upon the lips, drew back to sweep me with those magnificent eyes, softly enunciated, "Ash-ton."

  What the hell...this was no monster.

  I felt the initial tension of that confrontation with "the living dead" oozing out of me. In its place I knew curiosity and compassion, more an anxiety for her than for myself, genuine concern.

  She'd spoken my name for the first time. Taking this into consideration with the other obvious changes noted, I was instantly curious about this. I told her, "You seem much improved, Jane."

  She smiled, shook her head, touched her breast with both hands, uttered a single word: "May-un-chee-tee."

  The stress was on the third syllable. I repeated it, sort of like in the me-Tarzan, you-Jane routine, but of course, she would never be "Jane" again. She had some power of speech now, however limited, and it was geared to an intellect that knew itself. This was a whole person
, a very lovely whole person, and I frankly did not give a damn where she came from or what her game was. I was not afraid of her. Still a bit awed, sure, but otherwise entirely comfortable.

  I again told her, "You seem much improved."

  She obviously understood me perfectly, smiling and assuming an exaggerated pose, somewhat as a dancer frozen in place, then she performed a little pirouette as she replied, "Much improved, yes."

  Her voice had that same curious quality as Oom's—a breathiness usually associated with sensuality or sexiness, very pleasing but also very suggestive. The enunciation was similar, too, not in the sense of an accent but in a total lack of such; almost as though consciously phoneme-constructed with machine precision. Whatever accent came through was in the modulation itself, the sensual breathiness.

  She cocked her head and angled it downward, as though to display the crown, as she told me, "All healed. A-Okay."

  I smiled at the space-age jargon but inspected that skull carefully through the short hair. A-Okay was an understatement. I could detect no evidence of medical reconstruction there, no scars or seams, and my probing fingers could find no irregularity whatever. Curiosity had replaced awe when I asked her, "How did you do that?"

  She replied, "It is the way," then became very sober and asked me, "Where is James Cochran?"

  I considered the question for a moment, decided to be up front, told her, "Jim is dead."

  She blinked the eyes but otherwise revealed no emotion as she inquired, "How is he dead?"

  I said, "He was shot. With a gun. Murdered."

  She did not ponder that but immediately asked, "Who did this?"

  I replied, "I don't know that yet, Jane."

  She corrected me: "May-un-chee-tee," almost inaudibly, eyes cast down. She was withdrawing. I could feel it, though it was purely feeling; I cannot explain how I knew that. I just knew that I somehow had to command her attention, keep her "fixed" in my space-time matrix. I hurried to add, "Vicky is okay; she's in good hands; she's fine."

  May-un's eyes came back to mine with a solemn smile. She softly intoned, "Vick-toe-ree-uh," and she immediately winked out. I cannot otherwise describe her disappearance. She merely winked out, ceased to be in that time and place. But for a moment, a quick pulse of a moment, I thought I perceived something standing in her place, something not really substantial—that is, nonphysical—but still there, like the vanishing image withdrawing from a TV screen when you turn the set off—collapsing, that is, to a tiny point before disappearing. Within that tiny point I thought I saw the woman I had seen at Ojai, Jane Doe senior.

  It was very disconcerting.

  I stood there motionless for perhaps a minute, then moved myself onto the spot where May-un had stood. I am not at all sheepish to admit that I moved rather gingerly onto that spot. The human intellect, after all, is not conditioned to magic. That which is not understood within the common reality is instinctively viewed with distrust and even fear. I muttered to myself, "Beam me up, Scotty," seeking refuge in humor, I guess, as the better alternative to dread—but the choice of words was probably more a reflection of an attempt by the intellect to decode the inexplicable. In our cause-and-effect universe, a three-dimensional object does not simply "wink out." Not, that is, within the everyday experience of human beings. And I simply had to think of May-un as a human being. She met all the criteria. She had mass, warmth, and consciousness—even self-consciousness.

  In trying to deal with such phenomena, the mind whirls through all the possible explanations, trying to fit the event to an explicable pattern. The only possible explanations my mind could seize upon were the science-fiction special effects in movies and television ("Beam me up, Scotty," from Star Trek) and the so-called bilocation and apportation beliefs of the mystics. Since I am conditioned more toward science than spiritualistic magic, I was reaching instinctively toward a scientific rationalization, even if that involved science fiction instead.

  But I also had to consider the other. Many mystics—St. Paul among them—reported on bilocation, the ability to exist physically in two places at the same time, and apportation (or teleportation), the ability to move physically from one place to another instantly. And I was probably thinking “teleportation" while mouthing science fiction as the explanation, for the two are really the same phenomenon explained in different terms. The mystics believe that a body can dematerialize and instantly rematerialize in a distant location. They do not explain how this happens. The writers of Star Trek conceived a high-tech process by which a body is converted to sheer energy and beamed as energy from one point to another where it is again converted to matter without damage. One is about as far-out as the other. Take your pick. Don't blame me if the pick in either direction is unsatisfactory. It is all I could come up with.

  You could try a scenario using a science-fiction explanation by which May-un has been dazzling me with her special effects. Say, for example, that she is really a member of the crew of a mother ship in earth orbit. She gets a six-hour liberty, beams down to frolic with Earthlings, then beams back up for her next tour of duty. Umpty-million people bought that sort of thing on a week-by-week basis for years, and loved it. Commander Kirk and his starship crew have entered the common folklore of the planet and have probably already influenced a new generation of young scientists who will be disappointed with themselves until they can convert sci fi to science itself.

  But I did not like the starship scenario, so what I was really left with was an apparently alien people who somehow identified themselves as Earthlings or as soul-walking visitors who predate some of our Western mountains and seem to have some sort of an edge on immortality, as we humans think of that. With May-un as my example, they seemed to have the ability to come and go at will, to commune and interact with the people of our common reality but yet bend our conception of natural law including the ability to heal their own wounds and even to "rise from the dead." May-un told me, "It is the way." But they did not seem to be omniscient. May-un had to ask about Jim Cochran.

  So much for scenarios.

  Let's consider religion. In II Corinthians: 12, St. Paul writes:

  "I know a man in Christ who fourteen years ago was caught up to the third heaven—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows. And I know that this man was caught up into Paradise—whether in the body or out of the body I do not know, God knows—and he heard things that cannot be told, which man may not utter.”

  He was referring to himself, I believe, and those things "which man may not utter" are the things that transformed the lives of all the saints. Please note also Paul's reference to "the third heaven." How many "heavens" are there? Could those "things" that may not be uttered have to do with the true reality, the one not normally available to man on Earth?

  I will not presume to answer that. Perhaps, though, you should try a scenario of your own. Do so, please, then hurry back for the next movement of this tale. Because I want to tell you about a voice from the dead, a message from Jim Cochran, which I found on my telephone answering machine and involved both the living and the dead... and little Vicky Vick-toe-ree-uh...and, maybe, both you and me.

  Chapter Thirty: Message

  My answering machine accepts messages up to five minutes long. It also automatically records the date and time of each message, so I get a pretty good record of calls. I had not been home since the morning after this case began for me. So I had about a two-day collection, which normally would mean four to six calls. The machine's memory was showing ten calls recorded, something of a record for me, so I figured I'd better check them out.

  Jim's message was fifth in the lineup, following two insurance salesmen, an aluminum siding salesman, and a wrong number. The memory chip showed the message was received at five minutes past two on Wednesday afternoon, which would have been some eight hours or so before Jim's death, while Alison and I were shaking the morgue for a missing corpse.

  Here's the transcription of that message: "Ash, this is
Jim. I got your package. It ties this thing. I rousted a guy from Ojai about ten years ago. Creep named Campbell. He was manufacturing LSD up there, and it found its way to some kids at UCLA. One of those kids had a bad one and walked off a roof, ten stories up. I took it on my own to roust the guy, off my turf, and blew the whole thing. Found his plant but no hard evidence. Couldn't have made it stick, anyway. Didn't have jurisdiction, and I broke every rule in the book. Guess I was quite the hot dog back then. Make a long story short, I didn't nail Campbell. But there was this scared-looking kid up there who wanted out, so I brought her out with me. She was about five months' pregnant. I brought her down here and checked her into a home for unwed mothers. End of story. Or so I thought. Didn't make the connection with this Jane Doeuntil... Shit, I was with the kid for about three hours all told. I'd forgotten the whole thing. She seemed familiar, yeah, but it was the resemblance to Vicky that threw me off. Anyway, I wanted you to know...case is solved. My thanks, buddy, and you can bill me for two days, but let's watch those expenses. Let's keep in touch. Georgia would like to have you for dinner some night soon."

  Message number six was from Cochran also. It was recorded at twenty minutes past three, same afternoon. This is what he said this time: "Ash, Jim again. Disregard that last. I fucking lied like hell, and it's no time for lies, I guess. I'm afraid that Georgia and the kids may be in extreme danger. I'm into some kind of crazy shit, and it's driving me batty. That's why I called you in. It's your kind of shit. I don't know how to handle it, and it doesn't make much sense to...I mean, what kind of asshole goes to a doctor with cancer and then stonewalls the symptoms? See, I'm apologizing for—well, no, I'm not—I feel dumb for calling you in and then stonewalling you, but I'm not apologizing for...uh, shit, Ash, I'm all screwed up. I'm scared. I'm going to try to set this whole thing down right now, I mean for period and end of paragraph, over, done with. But I'm just a cop, I'm not a magician, and I think maybe a magician is needed for this one. If I fuck it up, I want you to know...Georgia and the kids...safe it for them. I hope you're a magician. Here is God's truth, Ash. This Jane Doe's real identity is Maya Czeti—that's c-z-e-t-i—I think it's Gypsy or something close. She's been coming around all these years. All hours of the day and night. Not really often until the last year or so. I mean, we didn't really see her all that often, maybe two or three times a year. Lately, though, this past year, it's been just constantly in and out. Driving us nuts. We don't know how the hell she gets in the house. Just blam, there she is, right through locked doors and windows. She comes to talk to Vicky. We wake up in the middle of the night and hear them in Vicky's bedroom. Vicky won't talk to us, never has, never a word, but she sits in her room in the middle of the night and talks a blue streak with this woman in some foreign language. They even laugh and play games. Every time I tried to grab this woman, she flat disappeared. I mean, blip and she's gone. For the past couple of years it has been very obvious who this woman is. I mean, God, you saw the resemblance yourself. Part of what I told you before is true. I did meet her in Ojai, and I met her through this Campbell creep. Okay, well, I didn't just meet her. We had a thing going for several months. I don't know, I guess Vicky could really be my kid. But I had no inkling of that when I took her in. Frank Valdiva brought her to our attention. She'd been abandoned on the station's steps. Frank knew we were trying to adopt. We applied for the foster care, and Frank provided the inside track for us. I didn't know—"