"Which is why I said what I said in the Standing Order. I am worried that the murder I am dreaming of now, is a real murder. And that I was there..I mean, I wasn't there, but the guy...it was a guy, it had to be, …he was there and he did it, and now I am reliving what he saw and what he did then!"
"Yes..."
"And that's how I saw the visions in Switzerland. He killed the girl in room 326 in the Hotel Matterhorn Superior, and then I was drawn to that room because I knew what had happened there! I had been there...he had been there..."
Susie took her hands out of Peter's and started to make some notes.
"What are you doing, Susie?" Peter asked.
"We're journalists, Peter. I'm taking notes. From the translations that Dieter gave to us, it seems that the guy who killed the girl in room 326 got away with it. He escaped scot-free. Free to kill again. We've got to track him down..."
"Susie, don't be silly. He's dead. He died. Bits of him are inside me now. He won't be killing anyone anymore."
"Sorry, I didn't mean that. I meant, if he killed the woman in room 326, he probably killed others. Who? And how many? Is the girl you are dreaming of now..., the one who gets her throat cut in the bedroom in suspenders and lingerie..., was she killed before or after the woman in Switzerland?"
"Susie..."
"Peter, think about this. You have to find out. You have to face what is inside you, to come to terms with it and beat it. Ironically, thanks to his kidneys, the 'murderer' has saved your life...whoever he was! And the fact that he died a free man means that no one caught him for killing those women. But people have gone missing and someone somewhere is looking for the murderer and it's our job to help them find him. To name him. And most importantly to help any detectives or policemen solve the murders that he committed."
Peter was silent. He took another drink.
"I'll be back in a moment...I need a breath of fresh air..."
He got up and walked out of the door into the street. Susie knew that it was best not to follow him, so she let him go. He would come back when he was ready, and when he had answered the question that was in his mind. Whatever that question was.
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--------------------
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"Okay," Peter said, coming back into the restaurant, laying a hand on her shoulder as he moved past her and sat down opposite. "Let's do it!. Let's find the bastard that saved my life but killed everyone else...Let's find out who he was and find and identify all the people that he killed. And then hopefully, hopefully I will get some peace."
Chapter Forty One
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StemPharma Corp.
The Bunker
Delaware
April 17th
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Nic White was alone in his room, lying on his bed in his rather luxurious underground rabbit hole.
It was only 6 p.m. but he was tired. So tired. He had come off his shift early, because he could not concentrate properly, and he could not get away from the fact that he was going to have to make a decision soon. Very soon.
He had always been able to sense when things were going to happen, and he knew things were coming to a climax.
Cases were multiplying.
There had been another ten reported cases in the past two days alone.
But it wasn't just that. He was worried about the case that he had read about in Scotland. The man was a journalist. The bell that had started to ring in his mind a few weeks ago had started ringing again. And it was getting louder.
.
He got up from his bed, walked into his marble walled shower-room, took off his clothes and stepped into the wall of water. He let the warm water rain down upon his head, the steam building up in the room and creating his very own private steam bath.
This was how Nic liked to think. The water washed away the stresses of the day, and helped him relax. Helped his brain to assemble together pieces of whichever jigsaw that needed putting together.
Before any of this had started happening, Nic had never ever heard of the phenomenon that was now being popularly classified as 'cellular memory' syndrome. There were also other explanations, but they were all less scientific, and therefore less likely.
The thing was, Nic was a scientist. He believed in the tangible, not in anything that could not be seen or measured. But the more he learned about the individual experiences of patients who had taken SP-X4, the more confused he was becoming. His beliefs were being challenged.
The problem was that the 'cellular memory' theorem was, at least in Nic's opinion, a desperate attempt to describe something that was far from rational or normal. 'Cellular memory' ideas were trying to describe something that Nic wondered if there would actually ever be a proper scientific explanation for. Which caused a problem for Nic, because he believed in the tangible... not in anything that could not be seen or measured...
That afternoon Nic had gone over the notes that he had made 'topside' while recently visiting patients who claimed to experience the phenomena, and who had reported detailed case histories for which at first pass there seemed to be no natural, plausible explanation.
He had compared them to the reports he had read on the internet, which Nic knew that everyone could access if they wanted to, and they all told similar tales. Basically they all alluded to the same thing: when an organ was transplanted from a donor to a recipient, the recipient began to adopt or exhibit personality traits of the donor. Some cases actually also went way beyond that: the recipient began to report 'seeing' or experiencing emotions or events, which when investigated, would seem to be memories that previously belonged to the donor.
Nic was no longer a religious man. As a child he had gone to Sunday School...sent by parents who loved him and thought that all good parents should send their children to such an institution; perhaps hoping for help in implanting some useful moral and religious belief structures into his mind.
Yes, Nic had dutifully attended school every Sunday, after Church. He had learned lots of interesting stories. Lots of facts. But as of yet, in all his years, he had not sensed, or felt the presence of God, or any other god.
Until now.
There was something going on here that he did not understand...a common thread which seemed to run between all the cases that were being reported by patients of SP-X4. It went way beyond any research that dealt with the human body. A living human body. Or a dead human body. This was not science as he knew or understood it.
There was only one way to describe the phenomena that did actually make any sense. It was a simple explanation that came to him now from his days at Sunday School. It would seem that apart from stories of Joseph, and Samson and Delilah, and Jesus and fishes and loaves, he had remembered one other, small, important fact.
And it was, that within every human body, there was a human soul. A spirit. A being, a form, a life force that somehow transcended the human body, its creation and its death.
Nic would of course search for the other, rational, scientific explanation. If need be, he would perhaps spend millions of dollars and a lifetime searching for an alternative scientific answer. However, having just visited twelve families topside, he was inclined to believe that the solution that seemed the most obvious just now, may prove to be the same answer that they conclude in years to come.
Namely that when you transplant an organ from one person to another, that some element of, or all of the donor's 'soul', accompanies the organ.
Nic knew that he was dealing with something here that was perhaps way beyond his understanding.
The problem that Nic was facing, however, was that whereas cases exhibiting 'cellular memory' phenomena had occurred before, they had been relatively rare. There were probably less than a hundred such cases that had been documented over the past fifty years. Yet, suddenly, patients who were receiving organ transplants and were being treated with SP-X4 were reporting such experiences at a rate of almost 80%.
In othe
r words, it had become the norm, rather than the exception.
There was not enough scientific data...yet. But Nic was very worried. Very worried indeed.
It seemed that SP-X4 was doing something very unexpected. Something that was either very wonderful, or very, very bad.
For it would seem that when a patient received a donor organ, -a heart, a lung, a kidney, a cornea of an eye-, that the patient was receiving far more than they had bargained for.
Not only were they receiving a new lease of life.
It would seem that they were also receiving part of the life of the donor. Some just a little, some a lot more.
The question was, where would it stop.
Nic was scared.
He switched the shower off, towelled himself down, dressed and returned to his office.
He wanted to read the case histories just one more time.
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Nic had rated each of the case histories according to the degree in which the cellular memory phenomena had been exhibited in each case: a one star indicated that there had been some small degree of personality change, which may or may not be down to the organ which the patient had received, but could be due to the SP-X4 treatment, part of which included immunosuppressants. In contrast, a five star rating meant that events which the patient had described to Nic went way beyond anything that Nic could explain rationally...at this stage. For now, they may seem supernatural, but in the next few weeks or months Nic would try to find a rational explanation. An answer would be forthcoming. It had to be.
Pouring himself a glass of red wine and sitting back on his favourite reclining armchair, he flicked on his iPad and opened up Case 69, one of his favourites. It was a four star rating.
Dianne Grieves lived in upstate New York. Came from a decent background, had loving parents, both in good jobs, and the family in general seemed to enjoy good health.
Dianne Grieves was blind. Had been since birth. She had never seen anything in her life before. She was a happy 11 year old child. Both her kidneys had suffered acute renal failure as a result of sepsis,... her little body's immune system was overwhelmed from an infection which caused inflammation and shutdown of her kidneys. Dianne had an elder sister. Unfortunately, whilst Dianne was waiting for a kidney transplant, her sister was killed in a car accident. Both kidneys were immediately harvested and transplanted into her sister. Dianne had subsequently recovered rapidly. It was not clear if her speedy recovery was due to SP-X4 or down to the fact that her sister was a good match. What was astounding however, was that about a month after the transplant, Dianne started to claim that she could see lights and shapes in her head. Over a few weeks, these became 'pictures' that Dianne started to describe. Dianne had never seen her parents before. Or any other member of her family. However, in the coming months, when Dianne heard the voice of a relative, a picture or pictures of that relative would pop up in her mind. In effect, she could 'see' the relative, and the picture would be auto-triggered by the voice. Nic had been concerned that obviously over the years she would have had the relatives potentially described to her by her family, or she may even have felt the contours of their faces with her fingers. Could that be the explanation? Maybe her mind had suddenly developed a new way to represent such descriptions more visually? Perhaps the drugs had somehow in some way stimulated a part of the visual cortex, that previously had been dormant?
That could have been a partial explanation. Were it not for the fact that apparently Dianne was soon describing pictures of other people who she had never met before, and in some cases she was also able to associate a 'name' which seemed to 'just come to her' at the same time as she visualised the picture. One of these was a boyfriend of her sister from the university that she attended, and who Dianne had known nothing about. Her parents had recognised the name and when they looked him up on Facebook, the description that Dianne provided of him was exactly the person they saw.
There were other faces and other descriptions too. Some later turned out to be college professors, or work colleagues from her sister's part-time jobs.
A month later, Dianne also started to see pictures of places: her sister's college room; a street in their town; a mountain view...which sounded just like a view of Yosemite that her sister would have seen during her vacation on the West Coast, two years before.
After a while Dianne had begun to tire of constantly seeing images that she did not understand. One day she had gone to her church with her parents. She had prayed to God that the images should stop. That night she had seen a picture of a girl in her mind. An attractive girl. Young. Probably around 11 years old. The name 'Dianne' had 'come' at the same time. Almost involuntarily her own lips and face had formed into a smile at the same time as the image had appeared, and she had felt a warm feeling in her chest.
She knew she had just seen her own image as seen by her sister, and it felt as if her sister had given her a hug from within.
After that the images had ceased. They had not returned.
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Five stars, Case 28, a single middle-aged man in Philadelphia. A lung transplant. A lover of jazz music all his life, after he received the transplant, he began to find jazz annoying and 'childish'. At the same time he developed an incredible urge to learn to play the violin. He bought one, got some 'Learn Violin' books, and within six months had mastered some Grade 4 pieces. Whilst following the course he had started to dream of a piece of music which he heard play over and over again in his head. After several weeks he began to try to pick out the notes from the song on the violin. Soon he could play the music from start to finish. Through perseverance with their doctor and some good luck, a letter he wrote to the family of the donor of the lungs made it to the wife of the man who had been the donor. The wife agreed to meet the man who had received her husband's lungs. Upon meeting, the man had fallen almost instantly in love with the wife. Incredibly, even though she was in mourning for the deceased husband whom she had loved deeply, she felt incredibly attracted to the man she had just met. They became good friends. Later lovers. It turns out that the deceased man was a violinist in an orchestra. The lung recipient explained that he had begun to teach himself how to play the violin, and volunteered to show her. A few days later, whilst in her house, the lung recipient had walked to a cupboard in the den, taken out a violin and started to play it. He claimed later that he had no idea that the violin was kept there, but had felt a strange compulsion to open the door and take the violin out. The lady had asked him to play something and he had obliged by playing the piece of music that had been repeating in his head, and which he had taught himself to play. Upon hearing the music, the woman had cried her eyes out. It transpired that the piece of music had been written by her husband for her, for their 15th wedding anniversary. Her husband had not played it to anyone else...it was their special song.
It was not possible that the man could have heard it anywhere. There was no rational explanation as to how he knew that piece of music.
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A month later the strange new couple were engaged. Nic had been invited to their wedding.
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Case 12, one of the first visits he had made, was a five star. It was one of his favourites, but also one of the strangest. It bore a remarkable similarity to another case that had been publicly reported and was easily found on the internet, in which a young girl had received a heart transplant from another young girl and in which the surviving child had talked of her new special friend and demonstrated knowledge that could only have come from an intimate acquaintance with the life of the donor, whom she had never met. That was why Nic had made a special point of visiting and investigating Case 12 himself. He wanted to make sure that the family who reported it had not just made it up, or been inspired by the famous internet story to embellish their own experience. After having visited them, Nic was convinced that they were sincere and honest people who were simply trying to come to terms with what had happened. They had not lied.
In Case 12, a yo
ung boy of five, David, had received a heart from a six year old boy. A condition had been placed upon the donation of the heart by the parents of the child that had died. They had requested that they should be allowed to observe the recipient, David, once he had recovered. It was not a stipulation that they should meet him, just to see him, and to see how their son's heart had given life to another person. Perhaps they had hoped that they could in some way witness for themselves that a part of their son had survived death.
David had made a rapid recovery (-rapid recoveries were very common in patients who had received SP-X4 treatment-), and he was soon running around and playing soccer.
His parents had written to the mother and father of the boy from whom the donor heart had been taken, who was called Paul, and suggested that they might want to come to the local park on a Saturday morning and watch from a park bench as David played with his friends and ran around and kicked a ball in a junior soccer match. As suggested, they had come along, and mingling with the many other parents in the park that day, they had watched as the children had played junior soccer together. David's parents had met them earlier, greeted them, and given them a photograph of David, so that they could identify him and keep the photograph as a thank you present.
After the match had finished, instead of immediately running over to his own parents and greeting them, the little boy David had run over to the park bench where Paul's parents had been sitting. He jumped up onto the their laps and starting hugging them.
He told them he loved them. That he was happy, and that they should not be sad. David had jumped off Paul's father's lap, and started to run away, but then come back. "Tell Zoggy that I love him too, and remember to feed him for me, please." Then he had run back across the park to his real mother and father.
David's parents had watched the whole exchange from the other side of the soccer pitch. When David had come back, they had asked him, "Why did you go to those people over there and give them a hug?"
David had replied. "Paul wanted to go, and I just went with him."
BOX SET of THREE TOP 10 MEDICAL THRILLERS Page 18