Deja Blue

by Walker, Robert W.

  DÉJÀ BLUE

  ROBERT W. WALKER

  Copyright © 2010 by Robert W. Walker, www.robertwalkerbooks.com

  Cover copyright © 2010 by Stephen Walker, www.srwalkerdesigns.com

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved. No part of this publication can be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without permission in writing from Robert W. Walker.

  ONE

  Sonja Marie Orman saw the hammer just as an instinct woke her from a deep slumber. She rocked to one side, avoiding the killing blow meant for her skull. In the same fluid motion, she’d grabbed up her iPhone and snapped a photo of the monster standing over her, someone strangely, vaguely familiar. Wasn’t he staring at her earlier when she’d been at the checkout counter at the Drug Emporium on McCorkle Avenue?

  With the second blow glancing off her forehead, Sonja dropped the iPhone with the killer’s image on the screen—a blur of features. Stunned and shaken, confused even as the hammer careened into her skull, Sonja’s mind gave way to a paroxysm of pain and horror. She’d seen the features of a madman and a large green blur when she writhed over the side of the bed.

  Desperate to fight back—even as blood spewed from the wound and into her eyes—desperate for life, she found strength of will. Ignoring the blood painting her face, Sonja realized that the Dream Killer, the maniac who drove three-penny nails into the skull and eyes of sleeping victims she’d heard about from TV newscasts, stood over her—here, now, in her bedroom.

  Moments before, she’d felt a dark presence hovering over her, staring down at her features, studying her every wrinkle, curvature, line, brow, nostrils, lips, hairline. She took it to be an archetypal dream of dread coming from deep within the collective unconsciousness of all womankind, her professor of anthropology mind at work as if she were in her office at the University of Charleston. Generations of inbred fear with a capital F in the very DNA of mankind, fear that lived on in the full complement of genetic information loaded into an individual, fear inherited from parents and ancestors from life’s beginning. But this was no theory, no class lecture; this was real.

  Where now to drive her blind self? Under the bed, she crawled, screaming still, but a pair of hands grabbed her ankles, fingernails digging into her flesh, but no pain as the blow to her head overwhelmed all else. Then she blacked out. Not for long as in her stupor, she felt the pinch of what felt like a huge iron rail pierce deeply through her left eye. The next railroad sized pen slammed into her brain. The monster used her like a wooden doll, driving the nails in, and she’d gone stiff and as lifeless as a wooden image.

  Mercifully, death took command. She no longer felt pain, only a flying away on the back of a winged, dark green dragon. She straddled the green dark behemoth through a strange metamorphosis. It became a brilliant blue creature before turning to a blinding, yet warm white, inviting river of light. Death came quickly, and it came with a welcoming pleasantry that cut loose all human pain, grief, remorse, and earthly concern.

  # # #

  The killer drove a total of eight nails into Sonja’s face and head. Eight, the actual number of people he’d killed to date. To terrify and to set the stage for the world to one day meet the real Dream Killer. He’d chosen to give himself this identity before the press came up with something silly or ill fitting. He’d declared himself in several letters that included the fact he could not stop himself and had no idea how many more slumbering women he’d kill before his spree might end.

  Some damn fool backwoods yokel named Malachi had killed his wife—according to the news—in the same manner, inspired by the Dream Killer. The real serial killer could not be sure if this one ought be counted or not. On the one hand, absolutely not as it was not by his hand on the hammer, Thor that he was; on the other hand, he had inspired this Malachi fellow, so…. So by extension, this eighth death had been as a result of his actions, hadn’t it?

  As he had time to debate it with himself while at the job tomorrow, he let it go for now.

  With bloodied hand, hammer and box of threepenny nails, the killer turned, and taking Sonja Orman’s IPod with him, he left through the door he’d jimmied open. He’d come through the front door, burglary tools jammed in his green jump suit back-pocket still. He’d leave the way he came. Muttering quietly to himself, tired, sated, he said, “Getting too easy. Could do it in my sleep.”

  A final look back at the room showed the Dream Killer a bed once covered in a flowered afghan now showered with blood, a floor covered in red, ceilings like a Jackson Pollock painting done in crimson, and a victim whose face had undergone massive reconstruction. “I’ll get away with it, too, for as long as I want.”

  It was the faces that must take the brunt of his pent up anger, the face and the eyes. He did not know why this was so, except the fact striking a nail into the softer sections of the body would not have the quick, immediate results of striking the skull and penetrating the brain followed by the extension of the brain, the eyes.

  Besides, he didn’t want them staring at him. This way he’d not be in their eternal vision. In a sense, he saw it as a kindness to his victims. Peace not acrimony in the hereafter.

  This night work had been completed in less time than it took to brush down a dog. He was in just before 3AM and out by 3:20, the whole of it completed and the rush of power pumping through him like a drug—better than any drug he’d ever tried on or off the job. This came of timing, yes, but also preparation. Days of prep, in fact. He’d watch and observe his victims, learning their habits, their whereabouts, but most importantly, where they slept. Only then did he strike.

  Outside, in the fog of pre-dawn, a dog barked in the distance; a train rhythmically rolled through the sleeping city of Charleston, and only one man moved about the quiet little neighborhood that had been home to Sonja Orman. This man looked shapeless in jump suit, baggy and without form. From a distance, he looked like a monster alien dropped in from another world.

  TWO

  I’d rather be a hammer than a nail. The tune came unbidden and flit through Rae’s mind now, and she could only imagine the resulting images and the responses from the interpretation team the other side of the isolation chamber. In that other room where her mind’s eye revealed mega-sized metaphors and similes—symbolic language in the form of an anvil and hammer—replaced rapidly with a man in a drunken stupor, hammering away at the anvil. A hulking, sweating green monster of an anvil. An anvil which morphed into a human skull covered and discolored with lichen and moss. A skull that reminded her of dark cemeteries filled with crumbling headstones and overseen by moss-strewn willows and oaks and wandering ghosts made of wispy, unrulely fog. All in a grim, green frame around a grim black night. Helluva painting, she thought. Like something out of Alfred Hitchcock’s vault.

  These images fired first through her brain came up on a wall-sized, color plasma screen for a roomful of geniuses from every conceivable field—her interpretation team. All the brightest minds in the country assembled from Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Duke, Dartmouth, Stanford, Northwestern, and Brown among other institutions, all busily working to understand, translate, and explain Aurelia Murphy Hiyakawa’s scattered visions.

  “God, why can’t I get hold of my thoughts here…concentrate on the task at hand?” she again scolded herself even as the images Rae wished to hold onto dissipated.

  “Calm is needed, Doctor,” said Ashley Phillips, her new handler via the Comlink. Gene Kiley, her former guide had been in the habit of guiding from within the chamber—right alongside Rae—and their relati
onship had been so strong and secure that it’d been right and proper. An extreme opposite to now. Perhaps it’d get better in time, perhaps not. Young Ashley Phillips might never forgive Rae Hiykawa for having gotten Gene Kiley killed while in the field, working the Carnivore Man case in Phoenix, Arizona.

  A few months had passed but time had not taken the sting out of this horrible failure—a tragedy she’d played over in her mind’s eye down to the final detail. She had not seen it coming; she’d had no psychic vibes that might have saved Gene—who in fact had saved her life at the cost of his own. But others could not forgive her, and the PSI Unit had been shattered by the loss of one of their own. The fracture might never be healed.

  To help in the endeavor to truly concentrate, Rae lifted one of the bloody swaths from a sheet or pillowcase the techs had provided from the last crime scene involving the madman they were calling the Dream Killer. Her hand tightened around the brown splotch of blood, presumably that of one of seven actual victims of this same maniac.

  She shook her head, her bluish highlights shining beneath jet-black hair. “This is pig’s blood. Discard.”

  Such testing of her powers was to be expected as part of the PSI Unit controls. The entire unit remained under scrutiny, the watchful eyes of the skeptics, some of whom still called the unit the Twilight Zone. No real surprise that a control mechanism of some sort was felt necessary to call it a scientific endeavor. Although she’d proven it scientific by the very definition of science more than once. Science was defined by process. If a process could be repeated and shown to have the same result, then the experiment was called a success in any field, from medicine to child rearing. They called it scientific observation fulfilled, and how many times now had she disillusioned the skeptics of their arrogant and certain stance? How often for the good of the program had she displayed her powers—demonstrating the same result over time. Scientific process!

  To be sure, Rae Murphy Hiyakawa understood her boss’s constant refrain when he said, “Only if strict guidelines are followed can the unit hope to be refunded and continued.” She’d followed said guidelines and won. They had kept book on her, kept strict records, kept tapes, all requiring a forest in paper and vault stored video. Every detail from readings and tests upon tests they’d documented.

  Even so, and in the face of the evidence of her gift, Rae imagined all the documentation in the world would not change some opinions. Still, it all went into an archive; a lonely place where no one visited.

  Typical of government overkill and waste, she thought now, and next she thought, I shouldn’t be thinking these thoughts. Not here, not now, while hooked up to CRAWL and that giant monitor outside. God…how far off topic will my scattered energies take me? Damn it. Why am I thinking about thinking? It doesn’t work. It can’t work if I’m so self-conscious that I’m thinking about my own damn thoughts, just as I’m doing now. Damn me.

  She also wondered what Dr. Miranda Waldron and the others whose job it was to interpret her mind images must be seeing on the screen at this moment. What symbol might stand for self-indulgence?

  Rae had dropped the bloody cloth with animal blood on it and lifted a hand brush that had also been presented to her for consideration. The brush instantly sent a chill through the medium, and she saw the shadowy form of a young woman before a mirror sensually pulling the brush through her long tresses—silver in the muted light. In the mirror, aside from the reflection of the victim, she saw a window sash rising and lowering with a preternatural wind. The mirror then coalesced into a picture of three sad, defeated-looking children hauling off a wounded animal on a kind of handheld travois made of oaken wood. Three pallbearers. Child pallbearers with disheveled angel’s wings—bloody, ripped, broken wings—at their backs, jutting through heavy, dark woolen coats of another era.

  Gravity bound angels.

  Their procession grew fainter as they moved off into a spectral fog, perhaps toward a distant cemetery. What they carried on the stretcher seemed a wounded, bloated and sad animal, until it sprouted wings and morphed into a bloodied white bird the size of a man or woman. Rae felt she’d some familiarity with the scene, a kind of déjà vu, as if she’d seen it in her mind’s eye before. It recalled the myriad painted images that had come through in the Carnivore Man case.

  “The victim owns the brush…she has many children.”

  Ashley Phillips frowned and said into the Comlink. “You may want to hold this session for another day, Dr. Hiyakawa.” Ashley’s tone said it was not going well.

  “No children?” asked Rae, haltingly adding. “Are you sure?”

  “Single…no children, but the brush is hers.”

  “She is a strong-willed person, a person who people gravitate to because of her energy and bright eyes and wide smile, as large as a lion or tiger…so strong is her energy— even now.”

  “She ahhh…collected ceramic lions and tigers and bears,” said Ashley, nervously clearing her throat after.

  “Stuffed animals, you mean?” Rae lifted a bloodstained stuffed white tiger about the size of a water bottle, another sad souvenir of a deadly crime.

  “No, mostly ceramics, collector’s items.”

  Rae realized the stuffed little tiger was yet another decoy item, useless. She tossed it into a corner. “S-she fought for life. Wasn’t asleep when he killed her. She’d come awake before the hammer blow, and in her eyes…”

  “What, Doctor? Go with that. What?”

  “S-she photographed him.”

  Again Ashley frowned. “Photographed? No camera was among the items found at the scene.”

  “If there had been, he’d’ve taken it with him.”

  “Right.” “Telephone camera, I think. I see it now. She-she kept it next to the bed at all times.”

  “Not found.”

  “But she had one.” “According to family, yes.”

  “Nephews, nieces?”

  “None. No children.”

  “In my head, she’s surrounded by children and the colors of childhood.”

  Ashley saw the images on the plasma screen as the Cerebral Remote Viewing & Language Stratagems or CRVLS, which everyone called The Crawl, scanned all of Aurelia’s mental images whenever she meditated below the brass pyramid she’d fashioned and insisted on using. A construct that Ashley Phillips believed a crutch, an unscientific mental crutch.

  “What did she do…for a living?” asked Rae.

  Isn’t that something you should be telling me , Ashley thought but did not say from her control desk outside the chamber. “Can you see her at her work?”

  “At a desk…at a computer…works in an office at a university. No children.”

  “I suggest, Doctor, you’ve had enough for one day. Suggest we shut down, come back at this tomorrow.”

  “If I can get into her soul, I might have an image of him waiting for me there, an image as sharp as any on an photo.”

  “Not sure what you mean, Doctor.”

  “Ashley, you can call me Rae or Aurelia and dispense with Doctor.”

  “Ahhh…of course, yes. Will do.”

  Don’t know if this is working out between us, Ashley, Rae thought but said nothing. She looked up at the young woman, watched her at the board, the controls, and her heart clamped down. Rae so missed Gene in Ashley’s job. They’d been a team, a winning team in every respect.

  Not so with Ashley…certainly not today. The two of them together was simply not working. Not Ashley’s fault really. Not Rae’s fault either. They were nervous, tentative with one another. Being a psychic handler was no simple task, and how terribly Rae missed Gene and his handling of her during such sessions only made it more difficult for Ashley. There were too many orbiting problems unresolved between them. Too many unspoken words hovering. Too many coils within the spirals that needed untangling.

  On the plasma screen, both at the controls and on the boardroom wall where the think-tank geniuses watched, the image of a massive tangle of electrical cords and wires writh
ed about one another like a handful of snakes thrown together in a pile.

  While many sessions were superficial at best and ended in little result—like today’s—other sessions went foraging deep into the psychic forests, below gnarled roots, down into labyrinthine mines of the seer’s own soul. Places a person could get lost in, places of terror, and places where answers lay buried like pirate treasure on a distant shore in a faraway place with a strange sounding name. A name that no one could pronounce at a place of precipice into which many a good man and woman had fallen, like the deep crevasses of a pitted glacier, a place in which even a psychic could disappear, never to again claw her way out. Every psychic knew of this place sometimes referred to as the Overmind; every psychic avoided it, yet felt its attraction, a powerful pull, at the same time, always there, always threatening. It was both terrifying and fascinating.

  “You’re right, Ashley,” Rae finally said. “Not doing any good here.” Then she gasped and added, “Really, she had no children?”