by Farris, John
“Mr. Flynn, you are an epileptic, isn’t that so?”
“Yes.”
“Subject to fits.”
“Seizures,” Hero amended.
“Have you been treated for any other form of nervous or mental disorder?”
“I was—neurasthenic as a child. The debility was made worse by recurring nightmares. You see, in my most recent lifetime prior to—”
“Say again, please, sir?”
Hero licked his sunburned lips. “In a previous lifetime, in late eighteenth-century France, I was also falsely accused of criminal activity, and guillotined. As a child in England I recalled—too vividly—this experience.” Hero paused, looking at each man in turn. He shrugged at their skepticism and expressions of bitter amusement. “But this wouldn’t be relevant to my present circumstances.”
“Because you were nervous, and had these nightmares, you reckon they caused your seizures? What kind of treatment did you have?”
“I was eventually subjected to electroconvulsive therapy.”
“Calm you down some?” Stone asked.
“To an extent. But the treatment also opened certain pathemic channels, to both the past and the future, that had significant influence on my spiritual development.”
“Are you a God-fearing man, Mr. Flynn?”
“I fear no gods. I enjoy the serenity that reverence for all life has given me.”
“I’d like it if we could get back to the matter at hand,” the Sheriff grumbled.
“By all means.” Hero tried to smile. “That is the important thing.”
“What precisely was your relationship with Taryn Melwood? Was she your girlfriend?”
“Oh, no, no, it was a platonic friendship. Taryn had—well, she was obviously a crude little person, but she was not unintelligent despite a limited education. She was always curious, open to ideas. I think she was fascinated by the fact that I had traveled to so many countries. She yearned to travel herself, to be more than just a waitress. I felt—rather protective of her, actually. My sun was well-placed on Taryn’s Ascendant, you see, and my Saturn was posited in the Tenth House of her ill-fated nativity, which gave me a powerful but benign influence over her.”
“What do you mean, ‘ill-fated’?” Stone said.
“She had given me her birth date and time. Then—quite early this morning, I was warned in a vision that serious harm had come, or was about to come to Taryn.”
“Maybe that was a self-fulfilling prophecy,” Tucker suggested.
“I must say, this is all a dreadful waste of time when I could be meditating on the circumstances of her death.”
Stone said, “We don’t intend to loan you any of Taryn’s personal effects. The Sheriff’s department of Carver County doesn’t set much store by mysticism.”
“Hasn’t the evidence for the existence of psychic phenomena been compelling for many years? Very well, then, I shall simply have to carry on through my own resources. Needless to say, I don’t wish to spend any more time in a cell than is absolutely necessary.”
“Mr. Flynn, we intend to have you examined by physicians familiar with your type of illness first thing Monday morning. Am I correct in assuming you take medicine to control your seizures?”
“I’ve explained why I do not take medication of any kind. It interferes with mental processes I’ve spent many years developing. Drugs would be quite harmful to me, really. The seizures have become less frequent as I grow older, and are usually—”
“While you’re in our custody you will be required to take medication for your epilepsy, for your protection as well as ours.”
“Against my will?” Hero said incredulously.
“Yes, sir, that is a fact.”
“But—you have no conception of how damaging even a small dose of phenobarbital or Dilantin could be! My body is not accustomed to drugs!”
Stone reached out and turned off the tape recorder. “Tuck, you and Boodleaux want to go out for some coffee a couple minutes, I’d just like to talk to Mr. Flynn for a spell off the record.”
Beauregard the jailhouse dog got up from his rug and crept stiffly behind the men to the door.
When Stone and Hero were alone, the Sheriff reached for his corncob pipe and a humidor on his desk.
“Son, I do recommend that you avail yourself of the right to call your family over there in England, because here in Carver County you are in a shitload of difficulty.”
“I prefer not to worry them unnecessarily at this point. Sheriff Stone, I—I simply must not be forced to take medication. I’ll need a totally clear mind in order to be effective in finding out—”
Hero stopped suddenly. Stone had loaded his pipe, and his head was down as he put a match to the tobacco. He didn’t look up again until he had the pipe going, blue smoke around his head. He was startled by the expression on Hero’s face.
“Have you always smoked that brand of tobacco?” Hero asked quietly.
“Oh, I reckon for about the last eighteen years. You know, you just about can’t buy it anymore. They keep a little supply on hand for me at the tobacco shop, but when that’s all gone I’ll have to be settling for a different mixture.”
Stone took the pipe from his mouth, chuckling. “Changing your brand of pipe tobacco, it’s almost as bad as getting a divorce. Now, look here, Flynn—”
“You were at Shoulderblade State Park this morning, weren’t you?”
“From about five o’clock on. I fish there every Saturday A.M. when the weather allows.”
“Then you visited my campsite, while I was at the public area.”
“Beg pardon?” Stone said, and tapped the stem of his old pipe against his teeth.
“I have a very keen sense of smell, Sheriff. And your tobacco is not an odor I would likely soon forget. Since, as you say, it’s so scarce, the odds are very much against another man using that same brand. Therefore you—but why, why should you wish to incriminate me, someone you’ve never seen before, by hiding her panties and that bloody knife where I—oh, God! How terrible! You!”
Stone settled back, perplexed, in his chair, pipe in one corner of his mouth. His hands were folded over his breastbone. An index finger slowly traced the outline of the badge on his shirt. He had the catlike ability to stare interminably without blinking.
“You’re raving, son,” he said softly.
The rank smoke drifting his way caused Hero’s already dry throat to clog. Tears rolled down his cheeks, tears of pity for Taryn Melwood.
“I gave her a real chance once,” Stone said, musing. “The chance to come and live with us and get her life straightened out. Roberta, she was in the first stage of Parkinson’s then, and Taryn could’ve been such a boon to the both of us. But no, she was already beyond redemption, nothing but a little hellcat. Barely past the age of ten. I done my best to love her, but she didn’t want my love. Boy, that hurt! It hurt deep, but I’m a forgiving man. Up to a point.”
Stone aimed the stem of his pipe at Hero. “I’m not interested in you. Don’t even want to think about you. And don’t you believe for one second that you can mumbo-jumbo your way into some kind of mental incompetency plea. We have got you dead to rights, and you’ll go to prison for the rest of your life for butchering that poor girl.”
“But I didn’t do it. You did!”
Stone got up slowly from behind his desk. He unstrapped his wristwatch and laid it down. Then he took his .357 Magnum revolver from a shoulder holster and placed it on the desk beside the watch. He came around to where Hero was sitting and slapped him twice, right hand/left hand, the second blow almost a chop to Hero’s temple. It knocked Hero sideways out of the chair and he landed heavily on one shoulder.
“What you need is a good dose of that Thorazine to calm you down, maybe some more shock treatment, which I’ll certainly recommend. Then nobody’ll be inclined to pay attention to your crap! Not that they listen to long-hair religious freaks around here anyway. You’re poor, you’re foreign, and you’ve go
t mental problems. There’s three strikes again’ you already: you’re dead to rights in Carver County, mister, and that’s all there is to it!”
He picked the groggy Hero off the floor. Hero’s eyes were back in his head; he was shaking, a powerful internal vibration, as if Stone had jarred to life some potent but seldom-used machinery. Hero slumped in the chair with a little blood leaking from his nose. It looked to Stone like he was in a fit, all the more reason to sedate him pronto. Stone wiped the dribble of blood away with his pocket handkerchief, then stepped back in shock and consternation. Hero had spoken, in a language the Sheriff had never heard before, and he’d been with the Air Police in six different countries when he was a younger man.
“Gargle as much of that shit as you please,” Stone muttered. “But you’re headed for the dumpster.”
He sat down behind his desk again to wait, thumbing through a pocket New Testament. When Hero ceased his incantation in the strange tongue and his head sagged, Stone reached for the intercom button on the telephone console. Maybe, he thought, they should just get out a straitjacket and run the prisoner on over to the County Medical Center tonight. But the hospital had no facilities for the potentially dangerous, and Stone didn’t care to risk losing his prime suspect. Also they wouldn’t have a specialist around this time of night who could diagnose and prescribe for Hero’s ailment. He looked harmless enough for now, slumped in the chair, his expression dazed. No trouble he could get into in a holding cell.
Boodleaux came in with the two jail deputies.
“Had him a temporary breakdown, nothing serious. Take him on downstairs.”
“Did he have anything else to say?” Boodleaux asked. “Yeah. He confessed to me that Mork from Ork told him the Queen of England killed Taryn with a Boy Scout hatchet.”
Except for Sheriff John Stone, they roared with laughter. Hero raised his head slightly but it lolled like an infant’s as he was lifted out of the chair and led, shuffling, from the Sheriff’s office.
“Good night, Mr. Flynn,” Stone said. “Pleasant dreams, you hear?”
• 8 •
The Bus to Georgia Avenue
One of the drunks in the cellblock was awake and throwing up violently in the toilet when the jailers put the nearly insensible Hero back in his cell. In a sitting position he teetered on the edge of the lower bunk. One of the jailers said, “Looks like he’s fixing to fall.”
The other said, “Let him fall and crack his skull for all I care.” Then he yelled at the drunk with the heaves, “Jesus Christ, Bucky, try to get some of that in the hole, will you?”
The steel door slammed and Hero continued to waver unsteadily before folding up on his side on the thin mattress. His eyes fluttered open, closed, opened again with a look of dismay.
They were going to medicate him, and soon.
He must do something before he was chemically lobotomized, or he would surely be confined to an earthly prison for the rest of his life; and the karmic sentence he was already serving would be extended, through how many more, futile lifetimes?
As a slavemaster in Babylonia during the reign of the Kassite king Olur-Eshnu, Hero had garroted hundreds of slaves. He repeatedly cut off the flow of blood to the brain for short periods of time until, no matter how physically strong the slave was, he became, like so many latter-day punch-drunk boxers, docile and zombielike, no more than a dray animal incapable of coherent speech or intelligent thought, easily handled without chains, needing just the touch of a lash from time to time.
Perhaps one of the slaves on whom he had perfected this submission technique—a slave so thoroughly forgotten that Hero could not hope, even with the aid of hypnosis, to recall a face or name—was here, now, reincarnated in the person of Sheriff John Stone—
But it was unproductive to dwell on the possibility, although Hero well knew there were no coincidences in life—or death. He was not concerned with the karmic debt the Sheriff had incurred by murdering his niece. An ordeal had been arranged for Hero, perhaps long before his most recent birth. He would need all of his wits and skill to survive and, somehow, reveal John Stone for the maniac he was.
Hero looked around at steel and concrete, smelled and heard the drunk moaning across the way. The brain-energy coming at him from that miserable individual was, texturally, like gritty, obnoxious smoke. He had to make an effort not to be contaminated, and he almost missed the slow clicking of toenails on concrete as Beauregard the jailhouse dog passed in front of his cell.
Hero roused himself and concentrated on the German shepherd, willing Beauregard to stop.
The old dog’s brain waves were like soft, yellowing grass winnowed by the breeze of a mild season. Beau shivered and whined, but his eyes brightened as he turned his head to look at Hero on the bunk.
The Englishman had, since early childhood, enjoyed a gift: an ease of communication with all types of animals, including carnivores. He could also delve into the minds of humans, but never so easily, and seldom without suffering for it. Human brain energy was more difficult to assimilate. Frequently it was like a cyclone, with velocity but no coherence. At other times it could be a firestorm sweeping through his own mind, a psychological Armageddon. The horrors beneath the skulls of men were not lightly explored. What came to him randomly he was usually able to deflect.
And metal—such as the bars of his cell—was always an effective barrier to clear channeling. The steel around him now somewhat impeded his efforts to slip deeply into the dog’s subconscious, but there were no psychic barriers in the way. Beau, so close to the end of his earthly life, was not on his guard, wary and cunning; Beau had only his memories.
Hero sifted through these memories like a caressing wind while Beauregard’s head dropped and his legs shook.
Easy, easy ...
These days Beau slept on a rag rug in the Sheriff's office, probably because there was always someone around the station to look after him. But, Hero reckoned, he might have lived with—
Yes, there it was.
He saw, as if through Beau’s eyes, a three-story frame house with a deep front porch and two chain-hung gliders. The house was painted a soft shade of yellow, with white shutters. On the left side was a driveway: two parallel strips of concrete with grass growing in the center. To one side of the walk a white concrete birdbath sat beneath a wide-spreading mimosa tree. A large glossy magnolia shaded one corner of the porch and the house.
But where was the house?
Beau moaned as Hero continued his reconnaissance through the dog’s eyes. He felt a sympathetic pain—the dog’s liver was diseased, failing. He wouldn’t live more than another—ah!
The numbers on the mailbox by the curb were 322.
322 what?
Hero took Beauregard for a short walk down the block (how strong he was in memory, so alert and eager) to an often-visited fireplug. Hero received impressions of other dogs, a male, a female, no particular breeds. The sensation was voluptuous, electric.
No, Beauregard, forget about those other dogs. Where the hell are we?
Georgia Avenue, Southwest. According to the signpost across the street.
Okay, there’s a good fellow. You've done your bit. Rest.
Hero withdrew from Beauregard’s mind just as one of the jailers whistled and clanged a metal dish against the bars. Beau, though infirm, apparently still had his appetite. Or maybe he was operating on instinct. But he turned and did his best imitation of a scamper, almost tripping over himself as his back legs were slow to cooperate.
Hero settled back on the bunk.
It had been a simple matter to find out where Sheriff John Stone lived; getting there wouldn’t be a problem. But what could he hope to learn at the house that might be crucial to his own defense in a court of law? If he did learn something, how could he present it?
Yes, Your Honor, I have traveled out of my body since I was a small child. We all do, of course, but few of us remember the experience; or else we choose to recast it as a dream ...
It took him only a few minutes to prepare to leave his body. There was always the potential of danger: his body might be moved in his absence, so that he would not be able to find it when he returned. He dismissed the possibility. Carverstown was a small place, with a population of not more than fifteen thousand. Obviously he would not have to travel far in order to find the Sheriff’s residence. In his absence from jail, if the sphere around his body was disturbed he could return in a fraction of a second. He would risk a seizure from the speed of re-entry, or a few hours of acute discomfort should he slide back into his body at a bad angle.
Hero, lying on his back, closed his eyes, slowed his breathing, and meditated on the address, 322 Georgia Avenue, SW. It was always best to know exactly where he wanted to go. Wandering about once he was free of the body could mean trouble. Violation of the ethereal envelope around this world would instantly plunge him into netherworlds, dimensions frightening for the creatures they contained, and frequently incomprehensible to the human mind. But Hero was a skilled out-of-the-body traveler, always careful.
Tonight extra precautions had to be observed, so that he wouldn’t be seen by someone—Sheriff Stone, for instance—who could recognize him. The döppelganger, although it was not composed of flesh, was never invisible and appeared quite real to the untutored eye.
With a slight tickling sensation, then a little pop in the region of his breastbone, Hero separated from the flesh-and-blood body and hovered momentarily, radiant, above the still form on the bunk, connected to it by a thin bluish cord of pure energy, like a laser beam but flexible. Although he would be on the street in a few moments, only animals and those rare individuals with clairvoyant powers would realize that he was a wraith; they would be able to distinguish the light-cord that connected him to his body in the basement cell at the Sheriff’s station.
In the next instant he had left the building and was standing on the corner opposite the courthouse. Traffic was slow. Next to Hero there was a glass-sided bus shelter with a route map on it. He looked up the street and saw a sooty bus coming toward him. On the side of the bus there was a placard advertising a local mortuary: Daimler Brothers.
