by Page Turner
Psychic City
Copyright © 2020 Page Turner
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, write to the publisher via the website below.
Published By: Braided Studios, LLC
https://braided.studio
ISBN: 978-1-947296-07-7
A special thanks to my Patreons
Elan
Andrea
Alex
Heidi
Jason
Jennifer
Kit
Nada
Reino
William
Allyson
Andrew
Anna
Beverly
Brendan
Endre
Gregg
Jason
Jenny
Kaizen
Larissa
Marion
Maureen
Milagros
Pour
Tom
For my father, who knew more about tomorrow than most people know about yesterday
Projective Tests
“Pull over,” Viv said.
“…and so I said to him,” Penny continued, not even taking a breath, “don’t you know that color does nothing for your complexion? You look like an untoasted bagel, you really do.”
“Penny,” Viv said again.
“An untoasted bagel? That’s great,” Karen mused. “I wonder what flavor he’d be. Martin thinks he’s an everything bagel, that’s for damn sure.”
They both laughed.
As Penny launched into a story about the first time she ever ate bagels, Viv gritted her teeth together. When the two of them really got to talking, you couldn’t count on conversational lulls. Instead Karen and Penny had a way of stretching a thick fence of words between them. A wall of energy. Forget about getting a word in edgewise. If you were lucky, you could peer between the slats. And you weren’t always lucky.
Normally Viv just let them talk, especially on long car rides. Eventually, they’d tire, and the fence would fall naturally. But there was no time for that now. Viv knew she’d have to be more insistent to pierce the barrier.
“Penny!” Viv snapped.
“Yes, darling?” Penny replied.
“Pull. The. Car. Over.”
“Is it your stomach again?” Karen asked from the backseat.
“It’s always your stomach,” Penny said. “I told you that you shouldn’t have such a big breakfast. Not with your new medicine anyway.”
“It’s not my stomach,” Viv said. “Something happened here.”
Penny pulled the car to the shoulder.
Viv didn’t wait for her two companions. As soon as the car stopped, she opened her door and started walking off into the knee-high grass.
“What do you think?” Karen asked Penny.
“I think she’s going to get Lyme disease that way,” Penny replied.
“Well, when she does, you get to be the one who says, ‘I told you so,’” Karen said.
Penny laughed.
“Don’t you think we should go after her?” Karen asked. “There’s no telling what’s out there.”
Penny shrugged.
Viv was walking at a such a brisk pace that she had already become a small dot in the distance. At any moment, she would vanish into the tree line.
Karen suddenly felt a huge wave of anxiety. The hairs on her arm stood on end. Karen looked at Penny and raised an eyebrow. “So you’re worried. You can’t hide it from me, you know.”
“I hate that empathic power of yours.” Penny replied. “Absolutely no privacy.”
“Not when Viv leaves, no.”
Karen could feel Penny’s annoyance swell up in response to what she had just said. They stood next to the car staring at each other for a few moments. Finally, Penny sighed. “If I get ticks, I’m blaming you.”
“That’s fair,” Karen said.
Together, they set off to follow Viv.
“Oh Great and Powerful Empath,” Penny teased, “Time to make an official report. How are the ticks feeling today?”
“I dunno,” Karen joked back. “I’m having trouble sensing anything over the extreme levels of sassiness that are emanating off you.”
“Sass, class, whatever,” Penny said, flippantly tossing her long blond hair.
Her dramatic hair flip was a gesture that Penny often affected in order to look unfazed by whatever was going on. Most people bought it. But Karen knew the truth. When Penny was frazzled, she usually looked very composed. It was a secret Karen could have shared with everyone, but as with most of her insights she kept it to herself, rarely even telling Penny that she knew, let alone anyone else.
Karen had learned that lesson when she was young. People weren’t always aware of their own feelings. Even when they were, they didn’t want others to know. And they certainly didn’t want to talk about it. It was usually better to keep her empathic revelations to herself.
Suddenly, the wall of Penny’s feelings fell away. Karen couldn’t feel them anymore. We must be catching up to Viv, Karen realized.
For some reason, and Karen had never figured out why, if Penny and Viv were both within 100 yards of her (give or take a few), her powers went away completely. No constant intrusions from other people’s emotions. But only if they were both there, Penny and Viv. One or the other wouldn’t work.
It was what had first drawn Karen to them in the first place, the fact that she felt like a normal person when they were both around. It was the first time in her life she could remember it ever being that way. And that sense of calm was worth putting up with a lot for. It was the most precious thing she’d ever found.
That sense of calm stayed as she and Penny reached the tree line and started to work their way slowly through the thinner spots in the forest. A mix of white birches, pines, and – what the Hell kind of tree was that? Karen remembered seeing it when she grew up in the Maine woods, but she could never remember the name of it.
“Penny,” Karen said.
“What, sweetie?” Penny asked.
“What kind of trees are those?”
Penny laughed. “Seriously, Maine girl, we have to get you into a course or something. Botany for Fourth Graders. Hooked on Tree Phonics.”
“I know, I know, I’m hopeless.”
“The worst, really,” Penny joked. Before adding, “But you’re the best kind of worst. Those are cedars.”
It was hard for Karen to explain to Penny, how easy it was to take the woods for granted having grown up right next to them. To know the feel and shapes of trees and leaves. To recognize them like you’d recognize your own feet in the shower. But not have the right words to name them.
Emotions were the same way. Her entire life, Karen had been drowning in other people’s emotions but couldn’t begin to explain what that felt like. You would think being so close to something would make it easier to describe it. But being familiar with something and describing it were entirely different things. Sure, Inuit tribes had 50-some-odd words for snow. But fish weren’t exactly guest lecturers on water, despite being surrounded by it.
Most days Karen felt like she had more in common with the fish than the Inuits.
But Karen knew all too wel
l the particular thwack of cedar leaves as they hit against her skin.
“Cedar leaves are funny,” she said to Penny. “Rough, yet plasticized.”
“Hey, I resemble that remark,” Penny joked back. And she had a point. Her curls were still in place, even though both of them had been smacked in the head by several tree branches already.
“If the leaf fits – “ Karen began, before stopping dead in her tracks.
In the clearing was a horrific scene. Penny, Karen, and Viv had been working together as a team for PsyOps for three years now. And if pressed, none of them would have been able to give you an accurate count offhand of exactly how many crime scenes they’d dealt with. Although Viv would likely have been the closest, on account of her photographic memory – which posed an unfair advantage in most guessing games and in Trivial Pursuit, the cause of much consternation.
But all three of them knew one thing for sure: The crime scene they were standing in was one of the worst they’d ever seen.
As usual, Karen didn’t want to look at the scene directly. She stood at the edge of the clearing sneaking peeks in her peripheral vision, challenging the nausea rising in her chest bit by bit, slowly taking the whole scene in, one piece at a time.
Viv was focused on performing her usual duty, surveying the scene from a variety of different angles. Memorizing the positions of anything that seemed even remotely relevant. While trying not to touch anything, on the off chance a fingerprinting crew would come in later and start dusting things.
Viv had made enough mistakes in the past to know the headache that would result if her prints were found on anything important. And of course, because the three of them made the foolish decision to take the day off for a change to visit Viv’s mother in the countryside (instead of yet another insidious seven-day work week), none of them had packed gloves in the car before setting out.
“Well, you have to be careful with that sort of thing,” Penny had joked when Viv had suggested maybe keeping a box of gloves in the car would be a good idea. “Wouldn’t want to give people the idea that we’re kinky lesbians or anything.”
That had gotten a rare laugh out of Viv. “Oh, let ‘em talk,” Viv had said, cracking a smile.
But then Karen had said something else even more funny and distracting, upping Penny’s ante and changing the subject, and no one had packed the gloves.
To the casual observer, Viv would look a bit like she was vogueing at crime scenes. Striking odd poses and freezing. At least on the first pass when she memorized a scene with her mind. Her movements always looked a little more natural on the second or third sweep, when she’d capture the images with the camera that hung around her neck, a way of documenting things for non-psychics, or “normals” as they called themselves, the back-formation emphasizing that psychics were viewed as abnormal by society.
Penny had pointed out Viv’s vogueing thing the first time they’d worked a case together but had quickly learned her lesson. Viv might have a freakish memory, but she was often lacking in the patience department. And like most people, Viv could dish out criticism to others, but rarely ever enjoyed jokes at her expense.
No matter. Penny knew how to work around it. Usually humor was a helpful exploratory tool. A safe way of testing to see where Viv was at any given time without sincerely committing to a position.
There were two corpses in the clearing. The closest one had so much damage to its face that what was left over was barely recognizable as human. As Karen stole progressively longer glances at the remains, she thought that the blood on the victim’s chest reminded her of a Rorschach ink blot she’d seen when she was inpatient on a locked ward some years ago.
It looked like a demon with its wings outstretched. Or perhaps two women sitting back to back.
If Karen were asked by a psychological examiner about what she saw in the pattern, she’d know to tell them it was two women and not the demon. In general, seeing living things in ink blots is considered the “correct” result. Animals are good. But people are even better. Especially if you can come up with a story where there’s some kind of relationship between them. Ideally, a positive one.
Projective tests are all about getting an honest glimpse into a subject’s psyche, and a healthy person, theoretically speaking, is a social animal and will see people when presented with ambiguity.
In any event, the women in the bloody splotch on the victim’s chest seemed much more alive than the person sporting it. And Karen found her eyes oddly transfixed on the pattern.
A handbag lay a few feet from the corpse. It looked as though it had been overturned, rummaged through. Could this have been a robbery?
Penny’s walked over to the handbag and crouched down on the ground next to it.
“Is that right?” Penny said.
For a second, Karen thought Penny was talking to her, like she always did when Penny saw one of her “friends.” But Penny was using that tone. The tone. The one that Penny used whenever she talked to those who she had known the longest: The dead.
To Karen and anyone else who would have been watching (including Viv, if she weren’t busy documenting the scene), it would have looked like Penny were talking to a purse. To the living, mediums looked like they were talking to themselves or inanimate objects.
But Penny saw something else altogether. She saw a woman standing next to the purse with her hand on her hip, shaking her head in disgust as she watched Viv taking photos. Penny thought the woman was probably a spirit – although she never really knew for sure. The living and the dead looked quite similar to Penny. The only difference was that other living people couldn’t see the dead.
“You won’t find what you’re looking for,” the spirit said.
“Is that right?” Penny said.
“I don’t know. Is it?” the spirit said mockingly.
Penny sighed. Definitely a spirit. She was used to them playing games. The dead were rarely cooperative. Evasive at best, they frequently lied. If she were lucky, they’d speak in riddles.
“I know you are, but what am I?” Penny said.
“What?” the spirit said.
Penny stared and blinked, trying not to laugh.
“Don’t you want to know my secrets?” the spirit teased.
“How do you know I don’t already?” Penny replied.
The spirit frowned.
Penny had found this to be the best tactic over her decades of dealing with the dead. The usual motivations that work on the living rarely made a dent. Flattery was often useless. You couldn’t exactly trade favors, that didn’t work. Neither did bribery. What do you buy the ghost who has everything?
That left confusion. Or at least a powerful cognitive interrupt. Baffle the riddler. Flip the script.
“You’re an odd one,” the spirit said at last.
“I’ll take that as a compliment,” Penny said.
“It wasn’t meant that way.”
Penny ignored that. “So, hot stuff,” she said.
“Hot stuff, I’m d—”
“Right. Dead. Whatever. You might be dead, but I’m not. I’m a woman. A woman with needs.”
The spirit blushed. “Um, thanks, but you’re not my typ—”
“Honey, I’m everyone’s type,” Penny continued.
The spirit looked even more confused. This conversation wasn’t going to plan.
“So hot stuff, seen anything interesting lately?”
The spirit sighed. “Alright, you win. I’ll spill it.”
“Penny,” Viv said suddenly.
“Not now, Viv,” Penny said. “I’m channeling.”
“Channeling which one?” Viv said.
“What do you mean which one?” Penny said.
“Which spirit, Penny? Which spirit?” Viv said impatiently.
“Viv, what is wrong with you? There’s only one s
pirit here,” Penny replied.
The spirit glared at her, clearly irritated that their conversation had been interrupted by a third party.
“Really?” Viv said to Penny. “One spirit? That’s odd. Because there are two bodies.”
“Your friend is dumb,” the spirit told Penny. “That other person isn’t dead.”
“What?!” Penny said.
“What is it?” Viv said.
“Are you deaf or something?” the spirit said to Penny. “There’s only one corpse here. Mine. And I was thinking… could you do me a favor? I’m thinking I’d like to be cremated. Have my ashes spread somewhere real nice. As you can see, an open casket is out of the question.”
“Well, that really depends on what the police want to do. They might need to hold your remains for a while until the investigation is over,” Penny replied.
“Penny,” Viv said sternly, laying a hand on her shoulders.
Penny stood up. “Sorry,” she said to Viv. “The spirit says that you’re dumb.”
“Penny!” Viv said, clearly getting irritated.
“Well, that you’re dumb, and that they want to be cremated. Oh, and that the other victim is alive,” Penny said.
“Alive?” Viv said. “But that’s not what I saw in the car. Are you sure that spirit isn’t lying to you?”
“I’m not lying to you,” the spirit said to Penny.
“Well, she says she’s not lying to me,” Penny said to Viv.
“She could be lying about lying,” Viv said.
“Oh my God, why would I lie about lying? What would be the point of that?” the spirit said.
“Well, to be fair, other spirits have lied to me about lying. It’s not unheard of,” Penny said to the spirit.
The spirit rolled her spectral eyes.
“I don’t think she’s lying, Viv,” Penny said.
“But the woman I saw in the car in my vision… she was so still. She looked like Snow White did in the old cartoon. When she ate the poison apple.“