PsyCop Briefs: Volume 1
Page 12
I’ve got a pretty good long-legged stride, so I was right behind him in the hallway when the punch he’d been holding back finally landed. I didn’t feel the physical impact, but it jarred me nonetheless. It was only my mundane sympathy at work, though, nothing physical, and nothing psychic either. No one actually felt the blow but Jacob…not unless the shabby wall had developed some kind of consciousness.
I grabbed for Jacob’s hand, but he angled away from me and shook it out. “I’m fine.”
Uh-huh. “We should put some ice on it.”
“It’s fine.”
I thanked our lucky stars he’d whomped paneling and not cinderblock. Otherwise our night could’ve ended in the emergency room. “At least run it under cold water.” As I suggested it, my shoddy memory offered up a glimpse of a bathroom that should be close by. We’d delved pretty deep into the bowels of the building tracking down management. But if I recalled my exits correctly, there was a side door not far from us, and beside that, restrooms.
Jacob’s knuckles must’ve been smarting pretty good, because he let me herd him down another hallway instead of charging out toward the car. I was rifling through my mental rolodex, trying to figure out who I could call about these Men 4 Men assholes, when we strode under a bank of black lights and I lit up like someone had just trod on my motion sensor.
“What the hell?”
My entire front was glowing. And glittering. Glowing and glittering.
Fucking pumpkin.
5
Jacob turned and got a load of me, then glanced down at himself. There was a single smear of glowing glitter on his leather jacket, which he buffed off neatly with the heel of his palm.
I swallowed back a groan.
“I have some napkins,” he offered.
“Don’t bother. You’ll just grind in the glitter.”
“Not if we’re careful.”
“But, your hand….”
“It’ll just take a second. C’mere.”
I rolled my eyes and eased into the alcove beneath the UV bulb, where a poster proclaimed in luminescent letters, Men’s Rights Are Human Rights! Maybe it was best for him to take a stab at cleaning me up in case there’d be black lights at the party. After all, he couldn’t make it much worse—plus, if he was focused on my peacoat, he wouldn’t need to dwell on his throbbing knuckles—or the poster’s stupidity.
Jacob pulled out a napkin, hunkered down in front of me, and dabbed.
My heart skipped a beat, and my field of vision went white.
There was no big boom, no smell of ozone and crisped hair, no dancing afterimages, but it seemed like there sure as hell should have been. At least Jacob felt it too, the energetic smack when the white light I forgot I’d been hoarding arced from me to him, and he lit up brighter than a well-positioned strobe light. He gasped and staggered back, and then he gave a long and heartfelt shiver.
Well…that was one way of distracting him from his shitty evening.
He resettled his jacket with a shrug and rubbed the back of his neck. “I can’t believe I…I’m so sorry.” He shifted around as if he was suddenly uncomfortable in his own clothes—or, heck, maybe even his own skin.
There weren’t really words for this energy swap phenomenon—not yet, anyhow, since the field of Psych is so new. The give-and-take routine is uncharted territory. Whatever Jacob does, he’s strong. But even so, I worry that someday I’ll channel more juice than he can absorb. Maybe the overflow would just go back wherever it came from—maybe not. I haven’t overloaded Jacob’s mojo-receptors yet, but I wasn’t keen on testing our limits when we had no idea what the consequences might be.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
Jacob took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “It tingles.”
I’m visual, he’s somatic. The energy I label as white light feels effervescent to him. “C’mere.” I opened my arms. “Pass some of it back.”
It was as good a time as any to experiment. I’d generated a bunch of protective energy, and the only scary thing in that old theater was the fact that the people in it actually believed their own idiotic hatespeech. He reached toward me, just one hand, and we pressed our fingertips together. And waited. The sixth sense can be elusive. Unless I’ve got a visitor from the spirit world chatting with me, everything feels subjective, and frankly, somewhat made-up. It seemed as if I could feel the energy teeming beneath Jacob’s skin, but it also felt like a figment of my own imagination. He scowled at our point of contact, and he tensed. But all the physical straining in the world wouldn’t channel energy. I watched, less invested in the outcome. I’d been dealing with my “gift” for a good hunk of my life and was nowhere near as motivated to prove anything.
It was when I acknowledged my relaxation that everything shifted. It’s like looking in through a window on a sunny day, that moment where you stop seeing your own reflection and get an elusive glimpse at whatever lies beyond the glass. My barrier shifted, and some of that energy Jacob had grabbed flowed back in. Not through my crown chakra, but through my fingers. I saw it glow—and I felt it. Kind of.
Or maybe I just imagined that I did.
Jacob gazed deep into my eyes with a look so tender, I suspected he felt it too. Especially when he redoubled his efforts at transferring the charge back to me. “Hey, c’mon.” I enfolded his punching-hand in both of mine, drew it up to my chest and blew on his knuckles. We both shuddered. “Keep some for yourself. I’ll find more.”
Here’s the thing with energy—it can make you a little loopy. When I pulled Jacob up against me, our bodies sparked together. Maybe I was just imagining the fireworks…but I don’t think so. Suddenly we were grappling together, and he crushed his mouth to mine so decisively it was as if he was trying to replenish not only my energy, but my oxygen. As if all the air had gone out of the world, and the only thing left to do was pass the last breath back and forth between us. No, we didn’t need to worry about wasting the energy. Most folks go their whole lives without even feeling this psychic current. Jacob and I, we had plenty.
“Do you feel it too?” he murmured against my lips. I nodded. “Is it always like this?”
“Only with you.”
Jacob wedged a hand between my legs and stroked me. Aggressively. Like everything he’d held back when he was talking to the manager was now straining at the seams. Me, I was a goner even before we’d started snowballing the white light. His intensity does that to me, creates a feedback loop of need. Now I ached to be touched, humping myself into his hand like a horny teenager getting his rocks off in the second-last row of a crappy afternoon matinee.
Theaters are full of oddball passageways, places for actors to make their surprise entrances, or ushers to skulk through in search of rule-breakers to terrorize. I tore my mouth from Jacob’s and picked out a door painted to match the wall with a yellowed STAFF ONLY sign hanging crookedly at eye level. Lucky for us, whatever staff currently used it was too lazy to lock up behind themselves. We spilled through it into a darkness that felt so still, so vast, it could only be the auditorium itself, with three-story ceilings and an utter absence of light. The rest of the building felt as if it was cycling through a revolving state of decay and repair, but in the auditorium, time stood still.
Maybe I was still sixteen after all, and maybe the guy cramming his hand down my pants was some stranger from a fast food joint across the street. Maybe the last twenty-five years were a wacked-out scenario I’d invented to kill some time during a tedious study hall.
And maybe somewhere over my right shoulder, there was a ghost clown taking the whole thing in.
“Wait,” I whispered.
Jacob paused, and whispered back, “What?”
I listened. Or looked. Or whatever it was I did with that elusive piece of my brain that connected with the dead.
Nothing.
My caution threatened to kill the mood—and me with a raging hard-on that really needed some attention. Telling ghost stories from the safety of the car
was one thing. But barging into a haunted theater on Halloween? “Just making sure we’re…alone.”
Lucky for me Jacob’s got some majorly screwed up turn-ons. My back slammed up against God knows what, and his tongue subdued my mouth. He worked at my fly, groping hard, while I fumbled with his belt buckle. The huff of our breaths attempted to punctuate the dark, but they were no match for the smothering acoustics. We grappled together in the suspension of time and place, sight and sound, and my awareness filled with the wet slide of Jacob’s mouth against mine, his lips and his tongue, and the insistence of his urgent stroking. That would’ve been enough to bring me off—not only the feel of his mouth and his hand, but the force of his arousal. But Jacob doesn’t do anything halfway. Before I could think too hard about the mundane horrors lurking on the theater floor, he knelt.
If the kisses and strokes were intense in the muffled darkness, his mouth was capable of short-circuiting my brain. The sensory deprivation knocked my perceptions out of balance. I’d been reduced to a single neural pathway—and Jacob was working it for all he was worth. I tend to waffle about whether to murmur words of encouragement or simply keep my trap shut, but in that rare and strangely condensed moment, I felt free to simply lean back and enjoy the sensation while he gave me head. Vaguely, I noticed the soft friction of his hand pumping his own dick, and the occasional grunt where he throated me especially deep. And maybe I uttered some sounds, but mostly I was caught up in the climb. The teetering brink. The delirious release.
I grasped ineffectively at his short hair when I came, and he squeezed my ass hard enough to leave a pattern of fingermarks behind. Jacob doesn’t just get off on ghost stories, he gets off on getting me off. I’d even go so far as to call him an overachiever, not that I’m complaining. I cradled his face against my groin and shuddered while the last few twitches played out, and I counted my blessings. I’m lucky to have him. I’m fully aware of it, too.
I sighed, and said, “I’ll finish you.”
“I’m good,” he assured me—and not like he needed to wait ’til later, either. Oh well. The auditorium floor was no stranger to a little DNA. I knew that for a fact.
Only once we’d gotten ourselves tucked away and straightened out did I start feeling all turned around, wondering where we actually were in relationship to the rest of the room, and what I’d been propped up against while he gave me my jollies. “Lemme see your flashlight,” I said, and Jacob pressed it into my palm.
When I hit the light, I saw shapes. Not ghostly forms—but not anything I’d been expecting, either. Like the rest of the building, the auditorium had been repurposed. Currently, from one end to the other, it warehoused towering stacks of carpeting rolls. No wonder sound wasn’t carrying right. The entire room had been drinking up the acoustics. And now that I had a visual on our surroundings, I registered the peculiar odor of man-made fibers and glue. I wouldn’t say I was saddened—after all, when I knew the place it was already well into its decline—but I did feel kinda melancholy. At least back then it was still entertaining people other than a group of sorry men with self-esteem issues.
I sought out the second-last row, but with the seating gone, I couldn’t quite place my reserved spot. I scanned the far wall, the ceiling. Murals, too dark to make out, and some fancy plasterwork more or less intact. “Carpet storage?” I said. “That sucks.”
“You’d think someone could do more with it in a location like this.”
Who’s to say why some things thrive while others decay? At least the theater was still standing, I supposed. Maybe someday, a new owner would revive it and do it justice.
On Jacob’s request, I aimed the beam toward the floor. No spilled drinks or popcorn were there to camouflage our evidence, so he swabbed up after himself with the napkin he’d used to clean up my peacoat. He wasn’t being all that thorough. But if anyone did a walkthrough with a UV light, maybe they’d see some transferred glitter and presume the fluorescing smears on the floor were just craft paint. He tucked the napkin into his pocket and said, “Let’s get out of here.”
With pleasure. I slipped back into the hallway, already calculating the quickest route to the party, when Jacob snagged me by the sleeve and stopped me from storming out through the lobby. “Line of fire.” He pointed toward my feet. By the black light, my jeans showed a telling splatter mark glowing purple across the hem. “Sorry.”
It really looked nothing like craft paint.
6
“There.” Jacob pointed out the old restroom I’d half-remembered. It looked as disused as the rest of this far corner of the theater, but as long as the plumbing still worked, it would do. We ducked in. It was dark, and the overhead lights took another second to flicker to life. The room must’ve last seen regular use in the discount cinema heyday. It had a vaguely 80’s feel, but with everything more scuffed, chipped and discolored than I remembered. I paused at the sink, briefly considered taking off my jeans entirely, then decided that plan held way too much potential to take a mortifying turn. I hauled my foot up to sink level instead, belatedly hoping I wouldn’t pull a groin muscle.
At least the tap worked. And if I didn’t manage to get my pant leg entirely clean, I could at least disguise the evidence well enough to blame the painted pumpkin if anyone noticed me fluorescing inappropriately. Beside me, Jacob ran his knuckles under a stream of cool water. They didn’t look too bad. Guess he’d experienced a last-moment whiff of common sense and pulled his punch.
“You’ll live?” I asked. He nodded ruefully. “Don’t worry. Maybe we don’t personally have the resources to target their knucklehead group. But one of us is bound to know someone who does. First thing in the morning, we’ll make some calls.”
Jacob’s shoulders slumped. “I guess that’s the downside of digging around, looking for trouble. You might not like what you find.”
“It’s a shame, though. This place. It wasn’t all that stellar back in high school, but at least it wasn’t full of carpet rolls and misogynists.”
“Especially with the location,” he agreed. “I could see a place like this going to pot in an iffier neighborhood. But here?”
I was still scrubbing off his spooge when Jacob shook the water off his hand and went looking for somewhere to dispose of the sticky napkin in his pocket. He tried one door, then another, then another. Of the dozen stalls, only one wasn’t locked from the inside. Easier for the cleaning crew, I supposed. While he rattled a toilet handle, he started making those grumbling noises he makes when he’s trying to park the car. I reached for a paper towel to blot my shin dry. The dispenser was empty. Of course. And I was too soaked to just shake it off.
I joined Jacob by the stalls and said, “Pass me some toilet paper.”
“Hand some over here too, while you’re at it.”
I jumped at the sound of the stranger’s voice. Jacob didn’t. Good thing. Otherwise I would’ve probably stuck my hand over the top of the stall without verifying whether I was dealing with a corporeal being…which, judging by the fact that it was locked, not to mention the pair of big transparent shoes visible beneath the toilet door, I was not.
I took the wad Jacob handed me, set it on the floor, and edged it under the door with the toe of my shoe. A transparent hand reached down and grasped for it, then passed right through. And then, a heavy sigh.
As calmly as possible, I murmured, “We’re not alone.”
Jacob stopped rattling the toilet and turned around with exaggerated care. I opened my internal spigot wide and called down as much white light as I could picture. I also edged away from Jacob so he didn’t brush up against me and siphon it all off.
“If you want to talk,” I told the bathroom ghost, “we can talk.” With a curt hand gesture, I motioned for Jacob to fall back to the row of basins so we’d have more room to maneuver. I followed, crouched, walking backward with my eyes fixed on those ghostly shoes. “But don’t try anything funny.”
“What the heck is that supposed to mean?”
“Oh.” The ghost stepped through the stall door and into the aisle—in costume. And makeup. “Here I figured you were being a weisenheimer.”
I backtracked as fast as I could.
As he squared up with me, I noted his shoes were at least a couple sizes too large. He wore gigantic trousers with bright patches sewn on the knees, wide suspenders, and a penciled in five o’clock shadow that followed the curve of a painted frown. He was bald on top, but what hair he had left stuck out sideways, and a tiny bowler was perched at a jaunty angle on the curve of his smooth pate. Now that I got a good look at him, I could see his makeup looked more like the pre-painted pumpkins than a circus clown’s. He wasn’t a clown per se, more like a vaudevillian hobo. I wouldn’t have known the difference when I was sixteen, but even if I had, I would’ve figured that no matter how you slice it, a clown’s a clown.
“What’s it doing?” Jacob asked.
“He, it’s a he. Just talking.”
“So if the both of you are lit up like a night game at Comiskey Park,” the hobo said, “why is it that you can see me, but the other one can’t?”
“Different skill sets.”
“Huh. Whaddaya know? Mesmerists, table rappers, mind readers—I’ve seen every kind of mentalist you can imagine. Figured it was all some kind of schtick.”
“Probably not all of it.”
“I guess not. So, you got some history with this dump?”
“Not as much as you, I’ll bet.”
Jacob said, “Does he know he’s…?”
“Dead?” The hobo pulled an exaggerated, wide-eyed look of shock. He patted down the front of his costume and said, “So that’s why I’ve been walking through walls.”
“He knows—and he can hear you just fine.”