by Rob Thurman
“It’s possible to read a very unique energy signal after the OOB is initiated. Plus, we wrote a word on a piece of paper on a desk five offices down when Charlie was already in the machine. When Charlie came back, he knew the word. He’d traveled down there and read it. Only five rooms, but we thought we’d start small.”
I could see movement in his lab-coat pocket. He was running a thumb over the bracelet.
“The second time we read the same signal as Charlie went out, but when he died, it dissipated. We thought he was gone, but …” Hector paused. “It turned out we were wrong. Unfortunately, it was weeks before we realized this, and during that time … people died.”
People were dying. That was the justification he’d used for the blackmail. People were dying. Now I was apparently about to find out why.
“What does one have to do with the other?” I asked with wariness. I had the sudden feeling that maybe I didn’t really want to know the connection. Considering the blackmail, my seizure on a cold lab floor, and Charlie’s murder, I couldn’t see any way the information could be classified as good, hopeful, or even remotely entertaining.
“People died,” I echoed. “Why?”
“There is no why,” he countered immediately. “Charlie wouldn’t be part of what was happening if he could stop it. He wouldn’t be able to stand it if he knew what he’d caused. Charlie …” His throat worked. “Charlie was a good man.”
At that, Thackery obviously made the decision that if the story was going to be told, he’d have to tell it. “Charles is trying to get back, but he has no place to return to. His body is no longer viable. But more than not having a destination, he also has no road, no pathway. There is no door, which was his body, for him to enter our layer of time and space, so he’s trying to make one. And that … that is not working out well for anyone.” He pursed his lips. “To say the least. We’re up to seven dead now. I hesitate to guess where the body count might eventually top out. It doesn’t bode well for the experiment or our careers.”
“Yes, our careers should always be foremost in our minds,” Hector said acidly. “You son of a bitch.”
“If the government pulls our plug along with our futures, Dr. Allgood, then there will be no way to stop, or help, Charles. Is that what you want?”
“No,” Hector shot back harshly. “That’s not what I want, Thackery. So just shut the hell up and get on with it.”
Dissension in the ranks. Ordinarily, I might have exploited it. But now, with all I knew and Charlie’s memories, memories of a better man than I was, lurking in the back of my mind, I couldn’t force myself to do it.
“Wait, just how is Charlie causing people to die?” I aimed the question at Hector, but it was Thackery who answered.
“It’s complicated.” He frowned. “It seems that the normal ether that forms the backdrop to our existence functions as a mirror. Energy, events, nearly everything bounces off of it … is reflected. However, in incidences of extreme violence, mental or physical, the ether can be frayed. Raveled like old cloth. If it frays enough, instead of mirroring an image, it imprints one. Records it, basically. This is what gives you your stereotypical ‘ghost.’ It’s simply a recording.”
“Yeah, that’s fucking fascinating,” I interjected, “but I’m still waiting to hear what it has to do with Charlie.”
The skin next to Thackery’s mouth whitened, but he deigned to explain. “The reason is twofold. First, these areas are weakened. Apparently, Charles senses this, and these are the places through which he’s trying to find his way back. Second, when this happens, the ether begins to rip. And when it does, those so-called recordings go from passive to active.”
Confused, I turned to Hector. “Plain talk, Hector. Tell me.”
Expression weary, he sighed and folded his arms. “Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her father forty whacks, right?”
Okay. Simple enough. “Gotcha.”
“Suppose you went to her house and saw something. Maybe she was in the bedroom doing away with her mother or in the parlor with her father. You might actually see that if the place fit all the requirements of a true recording, but you would only see it. But if Charlie tries to come through …” He shifted his shoulders in discomfort but went on. “That recording goes from television to virtual reality. You wouldn’t be watching Lizzie. You would be the violence trigger. You would be Lizzie, or someone else in the house would. Charlie rips the ether, twists it. Your normal rules of physics and metaphysics go tumbling out the window, and the recording shifts to not-so-glorious three-D.”
“Normal and metaphysics, not sure I’ve heard those two in the same sentence before.” The floor was cold, even through the socks considerately left on my feet. Now it seemed even colder. “You’re saying that Charlie has tried to come home via a few haunted houses and caused past murders to be reenacted? That’s … hell, that’s crazy.”
“I know,” he said simply. “Here.” He lifted his lab coat and pulled a rolled-up folder out of an inner pocket.
And what he gave me made for interesting reading, if you were into slasher gore, which I wasn’t. Three houses, the sites of past brutal murders, were hit with copycat killings all within the past eight months. Two cases had been murder-suicides, and in the third, the poor bastard responsible for the new killings was rotting in a mental institute, claiming he’d been possessed. I wondered if the “almighty project” had any plans to help him out in the same fashion as Glory. Why did I have my doubts?
All three of the original murders had taken place before 1950 and had been brutal as hell. Their encores weren’t any less bloody. There were pictures. I closed the folder, dropped it onto the bed, and restrained the desire to rub my hand on my scrub pants. Gloves or not, those glossy papers had felt dirty to the touch.
“And you want me to find Charlie before he causes something like this again?” I shook my head, noticing that Thackery had disappeared while I had been looking at the files. “I can’t do that. Charlie’s not here. Wherever he is … whatever he is, I’m all about reality, okay? I know that sounds pretty fucking ridiculous, considering what I do, but hell …” I rubbed my forehead. The headache had subsided minutely, but it remained. “There it is.”
“He might not be here now.” Going by the brackets of pain beside his mouth, Hector’s own headache wasn’t much better than mine. “But he will be trying again, and soon. When he comes through, you should know. We can pinpoint the time extrapolated from his past visits to predict future ones to nearly the hour. You could take something of his then, read it, and get a lock on his location.” He must have seen my automatic shudder of revulsion at the statement. “Something old,” he hastily revised. “Not the transplanar-interlink cuff. Something older wouldn’t have Charlie’s death imprinted on it, would it?”
As much as I wanted to lie, I didn’t. Why? Because Charlie would’ve thought less of me. And while up to yesterday that wouldn’t have affected me in the slightest, it did now. It was as if he stood at my shoulder, his pale eyes bright and expectant, thinking only the best of me, thinking I was still a scared kid who’d do anything to prove that I wasn’t. He would fade; the Charlie presence/feeling would slowly melt away. I’d come across this in the past. Not often, thank God. But it had happened, and the odd sensation of knowing someone, of sharing their memories along with your own, didn’t last. A silent Charlie wouldn’t judge me forever. He wouldn’t try to make me a better person for too much longer. And I wouldn’t have to see his brother or his lover Meleah through his eyes anymore, either.
That was one reason not to lie. The other reason was Glory. I was still her ticket to ride. Lastly, the one that really tipped the scales? It wouldn’t have done me any good. Hector wouldn’t have believed it. An easy out like that for me—he wouldn’t have bought it for a second. I gave a silent noncommittal shrug.
Hector took it for what it was. The tight stretch of his mouth relaxed slightly. “You can also help us map which places could be genuine target
s for Charlie to try to come through. Most locations we can verify ourselves through old police reports and newspapers, but there are older houses where the information is sketchy. We were hoping you could perform readings on those to see if they had violent histories that might have imprinted on the ether.”
He was right. Georgia was full of them. Supposedly haunted plantations restored to their former glory, others that were no more than tumbled stones and bones. “What about battlefields?” I asked. Georgia was full of them, too. I knew the location of every major one and avoided them like the plague if possible. You would think Atlanta itself would be unbearable, what with the burning and sacking and all, but so many people had lived there since then, it was like thousands upon thousands of woolen blankets muffling the long-ago terror. If you kept your gloves on, cities were fine. A stretch of field soaked by blood—that was a different story. If I tripped and fell out there, if I touched bare skin to the ground, I’d never get back up again.
“No. A battlefield is too large. For Charlie to come through, he needs a smaller, hence very concentrated area of violence. One as massive as the Battle of Chickamauga or Kennesaw Mountain would likely splinter him into multiple threads of energy. Virtually destroy him. On an instinctual level, he must know that. He hasn’t tried a single one of them.”
I folded my hands across my stomach. I was stuck. Well and truly stuck. But the sooner this whole Charlie fuckup was resolved, the sooner I could get on with my life. And I really wanted it back, my life. As for Charlie’s murder, Christ, I had to think about that. Getting involved in that could get me killed just as quickly as Charlie had died. And justice, that was only a word … wasn’t it?
“So.” I exhaled. “How do we get started?”
I can’t say the tired face of Hector brightened; there wasn’t much in his own life that was too goddamn bright at the moment. But he did look relieved.
“We take a field trip,” he answered, standing. “I’ll grab you some clothes.”
Field trips. They hadn’t been all that much fun in school.
I was betting the same held true now.
10
“If we do find Charlie, or wherever Charlie’s trying to get through …” Could this be more bizarre? And if I, the resident psychic, thought it was bizarre, then bizarre wasn’t even the word. “What do you plan on doing? I mean, seriously, Hector, that movie wasn’t real, you know. No such thing as proton packs. So who you gonna call?”
Behind the wheel of the generic Ford, Hector snorted, and it was despite himself, I knew. Dead brother aside, the guy was one serious and somber son of a bitch. I’d have labeled him responsible and deadly dull if it weren’t for the occasional flicker of wry humor I saw behind the stoicism. And if not for pieces of Charlie whispering in the back of my thoughts, telling me what Hector had gotten up to in his younger days. Taking out the entire back of their parents’ house with a microwave jury-rigged for a moon flight? Hell, that was truly inspired, if unintentional, destruction right there.
“I don’t think it’ll come to that,” he said dryly. “The team has been working on a way to pull Charlie entirely back to this plane. It’s what he’s attempting now but can’t accomplish. He needs more power. If we can feed it to him on his precise personal energy signature, if we can do that for him, he’ll come through and …” His mouth flattened, and the glint of amusement was gone. “Dissipate,” he finished abruptly. “This level of physical existence can’t support him.”
I propped an elbow on the window frame and watched as a blur of black, white, and green passed by. Cows and fields. Wouldn’t life be easier if that’s all there was to it? Cows and fields. “And then he’ll go on to a better place.”
“I thought you didn’t believe in anything like that.” He turned the wheel, and we jounced down a rutted dirt road. “That you thought we simply stopped existing.”
“Who’s to say not being isn’t better than all this?” I could see a house through the trees, flashes of faded rose brick. “One long nap. Maybe you haven’t taken a really great nap, Allgood, but I have. I’ll take that over fluffy clouds and annoying harp music anytime, thanks.”
He didn’t call me on a philosophy that wasn’t precisely dripping with sunshine and roses. After all, he had a file on my past—on Tess, my mother, that nightmare bastard Boyd. What I’d done. He knew I came by my beliefs honestly. He knew what had made me.
Or unmade me, depending on your point of view.
“This it?” I went on. I rolled down the window, and the cloying smell of honeysuckle drenched the hot air that flooded the car.
“The first,” Hector confirmed. “File’s on top.”
I fished the folder up off the floorboards and paged through it. I was sure I looked ludicrous, thumbing the pages with black gloves that didn’t exactly go with the jeans and green long-sleeved T-shirt I’d packed. That was the thing about the gloves; they went with the whole All Seeing Eye gig but not so much with the casual look of a good old Southern boy. Forgetting about my ego for a moment, I scanned the pages. The house was dated back to the late seventeen hundreds. A man, Jeremiah Farrell, had built it for his wife, Felicity. They’d lived there and multiplied. Damn, and had they multiplied. Thirteen kids in thirteen years. Apparently, they’d also been a robust family, and infant mortality just passed them by. By year fourteen, Mrs. Farrell had either had enough or had flat-out lost her mind. There wasn’t any postpartum depression back in those days; there was only crazy. And sometimes there was pure homicidal mania.
Felicity killed them all. Every last one. But unlike Lizzie, she didn’t stick to an axe. Her husband was a hunting man, as all men were back in the day. She hacked and shot and bludgeoned until the wooden floors coursed with blood, a blood that never came clean. To this day, the floors shone ruby in the light.
Or so the story went.
It was a legend that had lived for hundreds of years. Trouble was, it couldn’t be backed up by any records. There had been a Jeremiah and Felicity Farrell, and they had had several children. That had been confirmed by an old church registry. There could’ve been a murder … or seven or ten. Or they could’ve moved back to the Old Country or out West. It was all lost in the mists of time. Until me.
Great.
We pulled up to the house … or what was left of it. The porch was a sagging disaster area, and the windows and front door were boarded up. I climbed out of the car and glanced askance at the moldering ruin. “Not exactly on the tour of historic houses, I take it.”
“Not quite. They’re working on it, I hear.” As Hector strode through the knee-high weeds, I heard the rustle of a snake heading for the high ground. “Preserving history is an admirable goal.”
“Yeah? I don’t see any historical society lining up to support my ass, and I’m all about history.” I looked up at the second story, which was covered by a creeping wall of poison ivy. “And I’m much better-looking than this heap.”
“A great opportunity missed on their part, I’m sure.” He went to the trunk and pulled out a crowbar. “Give me a few minutes, and I’ll have us inside.”
Ah, that would be hell no.
“I am not going in there, Hector. No way, no how.” I made my way through the weeds to the porch and pulled off a glove. “If fourteen murders actually took place here, I’ll just have to touch a wall to know. I don’t need to be feeling around for phantom blood on the floor. Jesus. You want to see another seizure?”
“I stand corrected.” After leaning the crowbar against the car, he followed me. I’d started to climb up onto the porch, but after a good look at the gaping holes and the warped wood, I headed for the side of the house. It was doubtful the wooden front structure was original to the home, anyway.
Clenching my bare hand into a fist for a moment, I sucked in a deep breath. “Okay. If I look like I’m swallowing my tongue, do me a favor and shove me away from the wall. You know, if you’re not too busy taking notes.”
“I have a near-photographic me
mory,” he countered impassively. “I’ll transcribe them later.”
“Smart-ass,” I muttered. Then, giving up on stalling any further, I stretched out my hand hesitantly, Charlie’s excruciating death still firmly in mind, and touched warm brick.
I saw it.
I saw it all.
Every year. Every day. Every moment.
Love. Hate. Hunger. Warmth. Laughter. Tears. Loss. Abandonment.
Blood.
Death.
But no more so than usual in a house that had lived so long. I dropped my hand and pulled my glove back on. “The only thing Felicity Farrell killed was her husband’s sex drive when she threatened to treat his dick like a chicken neck and give it the chop. And after thirteen kids, who could blame the woman?”
“No violence, then?”
“Not the kind you’re talking about. A few fights. Someone’s granny fell down the stairs and broke her neck, but no murders. Although Lily Ann’s dog ate her sister’s rabbit. I guess the rabbit might call that murder.” I swatted at a deerfly buzzing about my head. “So, one down, how many to go?”
“Too many.” Hector grunted and wiped the sweat from his forehead. Sweat. The man was actually human after all. Someone write that down. Oh, wait, Hector had a near-photographic memory. He could simply remind me later. I ducked the fly again and headed back to the car.
“When do we stop for lunch?” I called over my shoulder. “I’m starving. Not that the yogurt wasn’t a filling breakfast—you really know how to keep your psychics happy.”
“I believe I liked it better when you were sullen and silent.” Hector moved past me and got behind the wheel.
“As opposed to?” I drawled, slamming the car door shut after I slid into the passenger seat.
“Sullen and sarcastic.”
• • •
Lunch was a long time coming. We went through two more ancient houses and a feed store and finally ended up at a cave. The houses had come up dry, and the feed store had been host to one murder, though not the massacre legend had painted. And apparently, that was not enough violence to make it a target for Charlie. The cave, Hector promised, was the last one before we ate, and I was holding him to it. No food, no mojo.
