Proof of Life

by Sheila Lowe

  Jessica would have torn herself away from the cruelty of the scene, but her feet seemed to be nailed to the floor. What unseen force had compelled her to create this monstrosity? And why? Forcing the bitter bile back down, she looked up at Zach, then away.

  “I don’t understand. What—this isn’t—I didn’t do this.”

  “You didn’t? Has someone else been here?”

  “No.” She said it as if she knew it to be true. But the fact was, she did not know for sure. Something, or someone, had driven her outside into the dark and the rain. Something, or someone had destroyed her work.

  Zach raised his palms in a question. “So, if you didn’t do it, who did?”

  “I—I don’t—”

  “You said you have a client who wanted this?”

  “What? No! Not this. Are you crazy? You think I would take a client who wanted something like this?”

  Zach’s expression was as deadly serious as she had ever seen it. “Jessica, I don’t know what’s going on here. You need to tell me how you knew about this crime scene. We just got the case yesterday. How the hell did you—”

  “I didn’t. I don’t know what this means. What case?”

  “Stop it, Jess. No one outside the homicide team knew about that symbol on the victim’s back. How did you know?”

  “What symbol?”

  Zach jabbed his forefinger at the figure, not touching it. In her shock, Jessica had overlooked the tattoo-like image a mere millimeter or so below the knife. A five-pointed star.

  “It’s an upside-down pentagram,” Zach said. “Look, the two points on top symbolize the horns of a goat, the two on the side are the ears, the beard is the point on the bottom. Don’t tell me you can’t see it.” He paused, either to catch his breath or to give her a chance to respond.

  When she had no answer, he went back to railing at her. “C’mon Jess, you had another Hailey Martin ‘visitation,’ or whatever it is you call it. Didn’t you?” He grabbed her upper arms in a tight grip and shook her. “Snap out of it, Jessica. Tell me the goddamn truth.”

  She pulled away from him, shaking her head. Shaking it until she was dizzy. But whether or not she was willing to admit it, as unpalatable as it was, the indisputable evidence made a fool of her denial. The truth Zach demanded was staring her in the face.

  She forced the words out. “You’re telling me this actually happened? It’s a real crime scene?”

  “That’s exactly what I’m telling you. This is my crime scene. We don’t even have an ID on the vic yet. The evidence—the upside-down pentagram—points toward a satanic cult killing. That’s why we got called in. It’s tied to some other cases we’re working. So, you gotta tell me, Jess, how did you know about this scene?”

  “I didn’t, Zach, I truly didn’t. Don’t.” An inkling began working at her brain, a worm burrowing deep into a hole. A flash of memory.

  “I heard someone screaming, ‘help me.’ I heard it. Not out loud—in my head. That’s all I remember. The next thing I knew, it was hours later. It must have been your victim I heard. Maybe she didn’t know she was dead.”

  “Do you know how weird that sounds?”

  “Of course I do, but you asked.”

  “Can you get hold of her again? Ask her name? Who killed her?”

  “No, Zach, I can’t. That’s not how it works.” She struggled for a way to explain a phenomenon that must be impossible to comprehend for someone who had not encountered it themselves. “They come to me when they want to. I can’t pick up the phone and ‘dial the dead.’ One thing I have learned, though, if I did hear your victim and she caused me to make this horrible thing while I was having an episode, she’ll be back.”

  Zach got out his phone and started tapping on the screen.

  “What are you doing?” Jessica asked.

  “I’m gonna take some photos.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I want a record of it, that’s why. Don’t worry, I won’t show anyone else.” He snapped pictures from every angle. Then, having gotten what he wanted, Zach collected his jacket and jammed his hat on. “This is getting to be a bad habit, Jess.”

  The look of displeasure he turned on her made her blood boil. “I suppose you think spontaneously going into a trance and destroying my own work is my idea of a fun time? What the hell, Zach?”

  He shrugged. “If you get anything, call me, okay?”

  “What’s that supposed to mean, ‘get anything’?”

  “If you get another ‘Hailey Martin’ out of this. That’s what I’m saying.”

  “Oh, so first you’re pissed that I made your frigging crime scene, and now you want me to ‘get another Hailey Martin’? What’s wrong with that picture?”

  “Like I said, we don’t have an ID on the victim yet. I’ll take any leads I can get.”

  “Help me.”

  The memory of that terrified scream made Jessica painfully aware that a woman had been brutally murdered. Her anger deflated. “I would anyway, Zach. But listen, don’t tell Jenna, okay? She already thinks something’s wrong with me.”

  “Lucky she thought so this morning, chickie, or we wouldn’t have known about this—thing you made. That twin connection you’ve got—also pretty weird.”

  “Yeah,” Jessica said. “Weird.”

  She saw him out to his car, then went back inside and locked the door. As if deadbolts offered any real protection. They had not protected her from the shock of finding herself outside and unconscious, for what may have been hours. Nor from unwittingly turning an innocuous piece of art into a bloody crime scene. Questions poured into her brain:

  How could I have made that thing while I was unconscious?

  How long was I outside?

  When did I—

  “Stop.” Jessica gave herself the command out loud.

  For five years, her will to rebuff the voices and deny their existence had been stronger than the need to investigate what she was experiencing. This new episode made it crystal clear that there had been a major shift in her universe. If these events were going to be a regular occurrence, the best protection was to arm herself with information—anything that would help her learn to manage them better—assuming that was possible. She intended to find out.

  Formulating the biggest question was easy, one she could answer right now: where to start?

  When Jessica told her sister that her auditory and visual hallucinations were not symptoms of schizophrenia, she had said it with absolute certainty. That was the one thing she had researched. Her investigation into mental illness showed that there were important differences between the auditory hallucinations of schizophrenic patients and what Jessica was hearing.

  Booting up the laptop, she opened a browser and searched on the phrase “spirit voices.” Google produced a long list of sites for a Paul Simon song of that name, which was of no use. She tried again, using the search term “spirit communications,” and turned up a number of companies by that name, none related to the unseen spirit world.

  “Spirits talking to me” improved the results. One of the top hits was “10 signs a spirit is trying to communicate.” The list included phenomena like lights flickering, seeing butterflies or feathers; finding pennies everywhere.

  Jessica was experiencing far more in-your-face contacts than butterflies or pennies. She clicked from one site to the next, taken aback by the number of people who reported contact with someone who had passed on from this life. She was not alone, there were thousands of them. The difference was, most were writing about dead relatives who visited them in dreams.

  The websites cheered her up, but on their own, they were not enough. What she needed was to find someone who could appreciate what it was like to be at the mercy of dozens of voices not shackled to a human body, lining up to ask for help.

  If Claudia had not mentioned to Jessica that a friend from Ojai would pick up the sculpture on Saturday, she would have overlooked a less-than-impressive website. But the town’s name was
in her mind. When the Ojai Valley Spiritualist Association came up, she followed the link.

  It was pronounced “oh-hi,” a name the Chumash Indians had given the moon. Jessica lived twenty-five miles south of the artsy town, whose population hovered around seven thousand. The Little Mermaid Gallery displayed her mermaid paintings. She sometimes strolled the small strip of shops on the main drag, known as The Arcade. Rain’s department store was a favorite browse. Sometimes she ate at Hip Vegan, known for California Cuisine—a euphemism for dishes that included ingredients like sun-dried tomatoes and avocados—or at Azu when she had a yen for Mediterranean.

  Before the birth of Jenna’s girls, the twins had given themselves pampering weekends at their favorite Ojai spa. They shopped at the quirky open-air bookshop, Bart’s Books, later treating themselves to a healthy lunch at Agave Maria Mexican Restaurant.

  Yet, for everything she knew about the place, Jessica had never contemplated seeking help there for her “dead people problem,” as she thought of it.

  Whoever had thrown together The Ojai Valley Spiritualist Association’s website was not a web design pro. She liked that it was not slick and commercial. The plain-wrap site offered a ton of material. A lengthy list of events and services had been uploaded into an old-fashioned template. Links to members who performed crystal healing, Reiki, chakra meditations, energy cord cutting, Akashic records readings, past life regression, soul retrieval. It all sounded exciting, exotic and foreign to Jessica. When she got to the “mediumship” link, her brain was ready to explode.

  She had never guessed there were so many ways for spirit to contact people still in human form. Under the general heading of Mediumship were sub-categories: spiritual mediums, physical mediums, evidential mediums, mental mediums, channeling mediums, each one claiming to be in contact with people who had crossed into the next world.

  That’s what’s happening to me. Is that what I am—a medium?

  She was ready to test whether she would receive an answer to that question. Despite what she had said to Zach about waiting for the murder victim to return to her, she intended to do some proactive work and attempt to make contact.

  After some of the reading she had done on the Ojai website, she knew that she needed to slow down her thoughts. She already knew how to do that. Following what Dr. Gold had taught her, she began a purposeful breathing exercise. Listening to her heartbeat, she focused on the breaths.

  Once her mind was relaxed, she reached out, silently speaking to the murder victim. Come back, please. I want to help you. Tell me who you are. I’ll do anything I can.

  Now that she wanted the voices to speak to her, they had turned down the volume. Jessica listened, hearing nothing, seeing nothing. Keeping her mind focused was hard when other questions were eating at her.

  How did I know what the crime scene looked like?

  The answer was obvious. Jessica did not know, but the victim did.

  Starting over, she relaxed her mind again and visualized the mayhem on her worktable: the pieces of miniature furniture destroyed, the bloody-looking paint saturating every surface. The clay figurine, the knife plunged into its back. The pentagram tattoo.

  Her thoughts skidded to a halt.

  The pentagram.

  What was it about the five-pointed star that her subconscious was trying to tell her? It nagged like a splinter just under the skin, so close but can’t grab hold of it.

  Jessica jumped up and threw a dishrag over the ruined shadowbox. The smart thing would have been to ask Zach to take it with him and trash it somewhere far away. Maybe if she couldn’t see the abomination she had evidently made, she could convince herself that it had never existed. She started to walk away from the worktable, weighing whether it would be too wimpy to ask him to do the deed for her.

  The splinter worked its way into her awareness.

  Moving on autopilot, Jessica turned back. Moving on autopilot, she gathered up her tools in a bundle and set them aside. Shoved pieces of fabric out of the way, picked around the modeling clay and the bag of cotton swabs she’d used to stuff the pillow.

  And there it was, half-hidden under a square of denim cloth, the something she had failed to perceive with her eyes, but which her subconscious had spotted.

  A something that did not belong there. A something she had not laid eyes on in more than ten years.

  A memory came slamming back as intense and powerful as the reality.

  In her sophomore year of high school, Jessica went through a Goth phase. She dyed her blonde hair jet black. Wore black lipstick, and enough black eyeliner for her mother to complain in disgust that she looked like a raccoon. Her jeans and tees were stylishly torn. Even in the heat of midsummer, she wore boots. And invariably, pentagram pendant—the pendant that had been hiding on her worktable. Even after the Goth phase passed, the pendant had remained a constant throughout high school.

  She had come by it one summer vacation. With nothing better to do, the sixteen-year-old twins took the bus to Venice. Jessica in her standard black gear, intended to check out the dudes working out at the Muscle Beach, the open-air gym. Jenna, already the more conservative twin, in a gauzy handkerchief hem dress and boots à la Taylor Swift.

  It did not take long for the narcissism of near-naked men showing off their oiled-up muscles to bore them both. They soon left the gym and strolled the boardwalk, stopping at T-shirt shops and poster shops. Eating ice cream cones, they strolled on, coming to a blackboard-style sandwich board outside a store called The Black Mirror.

  Written in chalk on the board were the words “palm reading, tarot cards, jewelry.”

  Jessica, excited at the prospect of prowling through an occult store, urged Jenna to go inside. Her twin’s answer was a self-righteous sniff. “No way am I going in there. The whole place is probably full of demons.”

  Jessica rolled her eyes. “Omigod, Jen, you’ve been listening to Lorraine too long.”

  “If you ever went within a mile of a church you’d know the Bible says you’re not supposed to look into the future or do witchcraft or talk to dead people. Father Steadman said so. It’s wrong.”

  “You’d better learn to think for yourself,” said Jessica, wrinkling her nose in scorn. “How’s some moldy old priest gonna tell you what you should be interested in? How do you know if he’s telling the truth?”

  Jenna might as well have said “Harrumph.” She marched toward a bench across the boardwalk on the beach side, speaking over her shoulder. “I’m not going in that place. I’ll wait out here. Just don’t bring back any demons.”

  Jessica gave her a one-shoulder shrug. No way was she about to miss the chance to find a cool gothic piece of jewelry for her secret stash; maybe some black candles. Tossing the squishy end of her ice cream into a trash can, she wiped her sticky fingers on a napkin and entered the store.

  After the vivid sunshine, it was dark and deliciously creepy inside. Shelves and cabinets jammed with candles and incense, Egyptian figurines and mermaids, crystal balls, skulls, dragons.

  Drawn by a life-size painting that hung on the back wall, Jessica wandered over. Her hands were already itching to get to her paints and create her own version. Against the black velvet background, the painfully thin girl was as pale as death, dressed in a virginal white dress. Garlands of wilting gardenias wove through her long hair. The flesh around her smoky eyes was smudged. She seemed to gaze back at the viewer with an expression of such suffering that Jessica decided it had been caused by the death of her one true love. The painted girl would never get over the loss, and like Ophelia, would drown herself.

  Satisfied with her solution to the painting’s imagined troubles, she moved around the store, lingering at display cases filled with rings and earrings. Some were plain but most of the jewelry was embellished with cool symbols—moons and ravens and skulls. She wanted to scoop them all up and take them home.

  Of course, anything she purchased would have to be hidden from Jen, who would be smugly disapproving. An
d that would be nothing compared to their mother’s reaction if she knew Jessica had brought home anything from a place like this. It was a sure thing that if she did, Lorraine would drag her to a lecture with Father Steadman, who would accuse her of consorting with the devil. Luckily, she could count on Jen not to rat her out, disapproving or not.

  A chill touched the back of Jessica’s neck, the feeling of someone staring at her. She swung around. One other customer was visible, on the other side of the store and faced away from her. She shivered. Damn Jenna and her stupid dire warning. Despite her best efforts, it had gotten under her skin.

  She pushed the feeling away and made her way to a rack of pendants atop a display case. The pendants were made of silver, gold, other metals—Jessica had no idea what some of them were—and stone. Each one had the same basic design of a star, some within a circle. Some bore a semi-precious gem at the center, yet each appeared to be unique.

  On some of the pendants, the tips of each of the five points of the star glittered with a different color stone. On others, the circle that enclosed the star was etched with mystical-looking designs.

  Jessica reached out and took one of the pendants off the rack. It was larger than the others—about the size of a silver dollar. At the center of a burnished alloy background was the horned head of a goat. She gazed at it, fascinated by the brilliant citrine yellow eyes, and the flaming torch that sprang from the goat’s forehead. The unusual orange stone from which it was fashioned was one she had never seen.

  “That one is not for you,” said a soft voice behind her.

  Turning around, Jessica came face-to-face with a woman whose long, wavy, gray hair and full-length, flowing, plum-colored dress gave her the look of a Renaissance crone. No taller than Jessica herself—which was to say, petite—her arresting green eyes seemed to pierce her soul.

  “Why isn’t it for me?” asked Jessica, thinking it was kind of weird for someone to try and talk a customer out of making a purchase. The woman took the pendant from her hand and rehung it on the rack. “The goat is Baphomet, Satan’s symbol.”