Deja Blue

by Walker, Robert W.

  Eyes closed, still her undivided attention went to the night of the murder here at or around 3AM. She sensed the dead woman’s presence here with her…hovering, restless, pacing over ethereal ground…pacing without feet, without body…corporeal and yet not corporeal, rather like a photographic negative of a flesh and blood creature. A black shadow. Yet, while this form represented Marci Cottrill, it was not her; not even her spirit, but rather the residue of her shape, her form left indelibly imprinted on this deathbed where she’d met so traumatic an end.

  On the one hand, Rae felt relief for the victim’s soul. Relieved that the woman’s actual spirit had apparently escaped from here—this plane, this material world, and the scene of her anguish—while on the other hand, Rae knew the peace Marci had found meant tonight’s experiment would prove less fruitful as a result.

  Still, of the two choices, she’d much prefer knowing that the victim’s soul had moved on, choosing in the end the freedom of soul to the enslavement of flesh and any heightened sense of emotion as in vengeance, hatred, and anger. Such poor souls lived in a kind of counterfeit world. A life of perdition. The freedom that came with understanding and being honest to one’s self even if it meant accepting death’s hand extended into the netherworld.

  This meant she was not trapped in a continuous loop of suffering. For Marci it meant a wondrous future. For Rae it meant much harder work tonight.

  Determining exactly what had happened from moment to moment here where Marci Cottrill’s blood had pooled meant large gaps would have to be filled in by Rae’s own imagination, as the residue of her was as insubstantial as a shadow. Rae saw it out the side of her mind’s eye. The dark, empty creature wandered the room as if confused, in a state of chaos. It wondered who it was, wondered who Rae was, and on some level, it may have wondered what it was doing here. Most certainly this itthing-shadow must wonder why Rae was lying here now in its place, invading its space.

  Momentarily and with a flash of rebellion, the shadow reclaimed its place on the bed, moving through Rae, until it lay beneath her, impossibly attempting to push her away and having no luck whatsoever. Rae could almost hear the words struggling from the formless, shadow mouth. “Get out! Get out!”

  It was an unhappy, lonely, frightened shadow to say the least, but Rae’s first impression held. It wasn’t the sum total of Marci at all, but rather an empty, formless, negative that’d remained behind. Not the sort of spirit one could speak to or reason with or have any sort of normal telepathic connection to, as it had no thought beyond the moment.

  It most certainly would give Rae nothing of use in her search for Marci’s killer.

  Rae stood her ground, or rather laid her ground. She continued to focus, putting the struggling black shape beneath her out of her consideration for the time being, and in so doing the thing disappeared altogether. It was replaced with an object, a cell phone floating in midair just out of Rae’s reach; even so, she tried to grab hold of the mind induced hovering hologram. No more real than the shadow woman earlier, this phone. Still, something about it spoke of its importance.

  She stretched her fingertips as far as she might, but it remained like a humming bird just out of reach. Rae pushed up from the bed and grabbed the phone, and it flashed, taking a picture, but the cellular structure crumbled into thin air the moment she grasped it. The phone screen became an exploding hologram. Presumably, this was the phone Orvison had spoken of, had kept out of the news and reports. If she’d paid more attention, she’d’ve had Orvison bring that particular piece of psi-charged evidence to the trailer tonight. It might’ve helped. As things were going, she needed all the help she could get.

  Yes, it was at this location that the victim photographed her killer, she realized. The woman’s killer had been sloppy, disorganized if not downright disorientated; certainly, out of control. So much so that he’d forgotten to take the phone—used to capture his image. He might’ve looked at the image and left it on purpose simply to flaunt it in the best tradition of Jack the Ripper. But it was foolish and risky if so, and simply dumb if he just forgot it. Photos could be enhanced today as never before. The killer likely had no idea how useful or useless the captured image might be to authorities. Simply odd that he did not take it away with him.

  Instead, the killer spent a lot of time smashing the mirror. A looking glass that would have reflected all his deeds that night.

  Rae leaned back against the mattress, giving up on seeing the floating phone again to return to her original position. Here she returned her attention to focusing on that moment in time when the killer attacked.

  3AM…3AM…3AM, she mentally chanted. Nothing.

  Give it time, she thought. Her mind wandered. How many popular songs had been written about time. She gave it time.

  Gave it more focus.

  Nothing. Nada. Zippo.

  Then a typical actors’ studio with a spotlight at center stage presented itself. Small, cramped space, empty and bare, except for a floating female figure rising from the floor, levitating as in some magician’s act.

  Rae kept watch.

  Something was about to happen to the floating woman.

  She watched more corporeal images come onto the little stage now, images of waifs and wastrels, sloths and gluttons, greedy looking gremlins and lustful leeches and letches, revenants and vampire bats, all on wings the size of bees that must be incapable of keeping them on the air, and yet they all fluttered about the floating woman, admiring and slavering over her until a dark form scattered them to the depths from which they’d come. This commanding, dominant figure was that of a man, a man with a hammer in one hand, a fistful of huge nails in another. His form, featureless, now floated above the levitating woman, but then he began looking around as if feeling Rae’s intrusion here, as if feeling her eyes boring into him, studying him, trying to understand him.

  The shape of the man kept changing, formless in a green blob, but now he stared straight at her from his position over the floating woman and down from the stage to the audience of one—Rae.. It was a stage which felt at once close enough to touch and yet far, far away. The halfhuman green Grendel-like creature that represented a maniac with a hammer now stared straight into Rae’s mind, here where she lay in place of Marci Hatfied-Cottrill.

  Rae couldn’t take it; the pain too unbearable, searing her brain and her eyes. Rae’s eyes blinked in autonomous response to all she saw, felt, smelled, touched, and tasted of this experiment in the dark trailer. Her third eye—within the mind—flew open at this, and she came to see that his eyes were blue fire alternating with blue ice.

  He sent the hammer flying down at the floating woman’s skull, and this was followed by a flash of light that seared through Rae’s mind with something worse than pain, a kind of Twilight Zone imported acid rain of stinging agony, making Rae uncontrollably scream out at the torture as now it went to her left eye like a dart being driven into the soft tissue, and this followed by her right eye feeling the same pain, Marci Cottrill’s pain, and yet Marci’s essence was not present, both her shadow and her floating form on the stage as empty and without feeling as a pair of manikin. No, these images were not coming from Marci, but from the killer himself.

  The monster reminisces. A shiver went through Rae with this thought. He is reliving the moment right now in real time wherever he is. Else, God forbid, he is acting out his lust-killing again in real time with another real victim at another location.

  She hoped to God it was all replay in his head, and not a new attack.

  She feared permanent blindness, the pain was so insufferable. One small part of her brain knew what Gene Kiley would insist on right now, and so she pulled back and back and back, as if escaping a closing trap. A labyrinth closing in around her. She felt instinctively that she must race away from the sights and sounds and odors of the murder being played out on a stage in her mind. She must block it before it harmed her any further. Before any permanent damage might be done.

  Every psych
ic knew the risks of such visions. Some had paid dearly, going far too deeply into the mind of a killer. Some had lifetime scars as a result, psychic scars, certainly but also physical scars in some cases. Rae knew of one psychic named Lenore who’d wound up in a hospital being treated for ‘psychically induced wounds’—the wounds identical to those inflicted on a victim that Lenore had hoped to be a voice for. Instead, Lenore became another of this particular fiend’s victims. No longer an incisive psychic investigator, Lenore spent her days now knitting and playing ping pong badly in a private asylum.

  Might the “sleepwalking killer” do the same to me, she wondered. I really, honestly don’t know who I’m dealing with, or how powerful he is, now do I?

  Like a plane being pulled from a deadly nosedive, she snatched her mind back to its rightful owner. Aside from the weak and useless shadow of the victim that had shown itself, there remained another presence here, the presence of evil. She felt a certain overwhelming sense that she had just danced with the devil.

  The pain in her head and eyes remained like the worst migraine she’d ever experienced, and Aurelia Murphy Hiyakawa found herself on the floor beside the bed, not knowing how she’d gotten there. Then she heard the pounding of nearby booted footsteps, heavy and rushing—rushing away or rushing toward her? This question terrified her, as her gun’d been left with her clothes on a nearby hamper.

  Rushing away or rushing toward her? She could not tell, but somehow she envisioned a beast that had leapt from her conjuring straight into this world—one of sight and sound. Had she somehow created a duplicate of the killer? Was he coming in at the door now, as the sound of the door being flung open reached her here in the bedroom. Or was it as Kunati had predicted? That the killer might be watching, stalking her as he’d done his victims.

  She imagined the shapeless green brute coming straight for her, hammer in hand.

  What else might it be?

  Whatever it was…whoever it was, it was indeed coming for her.

  # # #

  Rae had wrapped and tied herself into the sheet and reached for her firearm cradled in its holster where she’d lain it on the hamper, and with no time to dress, she wheeled and faced the intruder, be it an ephemeral demon or corporeal, prepared to fire when she saw Carl Orvison in the bedroom entryway, his gun pulled. The man was in search of someone or something to blow away.

  “Damn it, Chief!” she shouted. “I could’ve shot you!”

  “What happened?” he asked, putting his Glock away and rushing to help her to her feet. She took the offer, pulling from the seated position on the floor.

  “Get me outta this room, will you, Chief?” She tore away the monitors affixed to her temples and head and cast them onto the mattress alongside the CRAWL mechanism that she’d retrieve later. A millisecond of thought went into whether she’d caught all the images and weirdness on the remote unit or not. She also wondered whether any images had been beamed to Quantico in real time.

  Carl had kept up a litany of assurances that he was actually here. “Sure…sure thing, yes, let’s get you outta here.”

  She whisked up her clothes, and as they entered the living room where she could have sworn she heard something scurrying up the chimney, she kicked closed the bedroom door. Just the wind, she supposed, whistling down the chimney, but who could tell over Orvison’s nonstop repeated phrase: “You OK? You All right? Doctor? You OK? You all right?”

  “I got into a little trouble in there, but yeah, I’m OK now. Not to worry, but where the hell’d you come from?”

  She came to rest on the natty old sofa, and he rushed the kitchen for a glass of water, finding out anew that there was nothing in the pipes save air. The screech it caused made her jump again as she attempted to dress, shouting for him to stay in the kitchen while she did so. After a decent interval, Carl fluttered back like a man on a mission, insisting she drink from a silver flask he’d pulled from his coat pocket, still asking, “What precisely happened?”

  Then she realized he must have been staked out nearby, must’ve heard her screams. How damned embarrassing. “Hey, hold on,” she began between gulps of Jack Daniels, “what’re you doing back here?”

  “I hate being late,” he lied. “So you come to fetch me before dawn? You never left in the first place, did you? Tell me, is Kunati out there in the woods somewhere, too?”

  “No, least, I don’t think so. No, we left when we left. He’s home abed, which is where I was when something nagging at me wouldn’t let me sleep until I figured it out.”

  She drank down what little remained in the flask, breathing easier now. “Figured what out?”

  “Figured out what you planned to do here tonight.” “Oh, really? You figured it out, heh?”

  “I did.”

  “Do tell, Chief.” He so reminded her of Andy Griffith in the role of the small town sheriff.

  “You went into that room and that bed in there at or around 3AM.”

  She wriggled her nose at this. “Go on.” “And you placed yourself in…ahhh, on that bloody mattress.”

  “You figured that out all by yourself? No help from Kunati?”

  “It came to me, yes. Kept wondering what your plan was.”

  “Now you know my secret.”

  “I said to myself, “That lady lies in that bed at three in the morning, hell, anything could happen.”

  She realized for the first time the depth of Carl’s belief in her gift, in psi powers, and perhaps even the supernatural. He was indeed a believer, else he would not be here now, unless he had some ulterior motive, and a motive to lie, none of which was coming through. “Agreed, anything could happen,” she confided, packing still, “and it did happen, big time.”

  “Care to share?”

  “A lot came through but none of it makes a whole lot of sense.”

  “Try me.”

  She attempted to explain in words what she’d psychically sensed. He kept trying to decipher what precisely she was saying, knowing he wasn’t

  understanding, at least not fully. “Tell you what. I’ll play it back for you on the CRAWL, which I left in there on the bed, if you’d be kind enough to go back in there and get it.”

  “Sure…sure, but don’t tell me you’re ahhh…I mean, you’re not afraid to go back in there, are you?”

  “You ever been tortured to death, Chief?”

  “Not in this life, no.” “Well I have.”

  “To death?”

  “Close enough I’d’ve chosen death over its continuing.”

  Carl nodded and silently went for the CRAWL, which was still switched to the on position—she’d rushed out in such a hurry. She now took the device from Carl and pushed the button for rewind at high speed. Rewind complete, she handed it, playing from the beginning now, to Orvison. She was in no rush to reminisce about this night just yet.

  Orvison had seen the main screen at Quantico, so he understood the concept—that what she psychically saw played out on the screen. His teeth would drop here, watching her ‘nightmare’ unfold. No one had come up with a truly good term for what Aurelia did: envisioning, image-play, mind-play, mind-notes, brain-scatter, screen gems, vista-vision, and any number of other euphemisms, but often it was a trance induced nightmare as she placed herself in the skin of the victim.

  Whatever the images might be called, Orvison was glued to them. He saw most of what she’d seen. But it was unlikely every image was captured as they came too fast even for the CRAWL to detect them all. The human mind remained the most reliable and fastest mechanism for catching and categorizing images on the planet, despite what Microscoft, Macintosh, Kodak or Nikon might say on the subject. The brain of man, like the human hand, remained the most remarkable mechanism in the world and the most versatile tool on Earth—when put to use.

  “So…so what’s it all mean?” he asked when the images ended, and what was that dark shadow at the end there?”

  “What dark shadow?”

  “At the very end.”


  She ran it back to have a look. Orvison was right. The crawler, after she’d taken off the electrodes, had somehow detected a shadowy thing rise from off the bed and out of camera lens, and it was unmistakably the dark form that had struggled to make Rae leave, the residual essence of Marci Cottrill’s earthly form. “Just the light and shadow in the room, a trick of the camera,” she muttered.

  “Some damn trick, Agent. Some damn trick.”

  “Yes, well, ahhh, I have no other explanation as the device isn’t supposed to be operating without being attached to…to my head, and apparently it picked up something without me being in the room…else it’s looped itself somehow, doing a repeat of something earlier. Something I missed.”

  “And all the other images?”

  “Require close examination and interpretation by my backup people in Quantico.”

  “ Ah-ha…that think tank group I briefly met. And how’s that working for you?” He sounded like the TV shrink Dr. Phill now.