Andrew let the phone ring twice and by the third time, his fingers ran into the phone’s ringtone. He grabbed it as if his hands were tweezers and took it right to his ear.
“Hello?” This was his private number and few people had it. Maybe two by then; Sheriff Landon and his shrink: Grayson Lee.
“Hi, Andrew, how are you doing?” It was the hoarse voice of the latter. He sounded loud and clear. The phone, an old white Samsung from 2003 with only two buttons and no Android, was still working.
“Doing well, Grayson. Pretty well,” Andrew lied as he was biting his lips. His eyes were set on Ava’s photo, the first woman on the left. Ava Cox had disappeared in the morning spring March 2014. He had good memory for the time being.
“I don’t know why but I don’t believe you,” Grayson said incisively.
Andrew didn’t give a damn about what Grayson could think, that’s why his neither lips dry nor his forehead started sweating. His eyes were absorbed in the picture of that woman with her hair in blue, yes, it was ridiculous, but that’s the way she disappeared. Her hair would be died again in that absurd color, though he didn’t know that yet.
“Well, that’s your problem, not mine,” Andrew replied quitting his lower lip-biting. The sunlight could barely go through the shutter. They would just slip through the thin window slits while the clock needles were still ticking that morning in March, casually, coinciding with the first woman to disappear.
Fate has a surprise for all of us, he thought.
“Have you been having any episodes, Andrew?
“No.”
“What are you doing now?”
“Scratching my ass,” Andrew replied without even smiling. Not even his lips tightened in a grimace.
“Well, always so convincing Andrew. Do you know why I’m calling?”
“No.” Andrew lied. He knew he had missed his appointment.
For a little while, there was silence. No dog barked in the nearest corner or no rat could be heard scratching the wall.
“Well, you’ve missed your appointment, again. You should have been there the day before yesterday, at 11 a.m. Does that ring a bell?”
“Wow! I must have missed it again.” Now, the tips of his left-hand fingers were caressing the photograph of the woman with blue hair.
“Always so witty.” Grayson’s voice didn’t show any fun. In fact, he looked upset.
Andrew could imagine him in his ridiculous tight suit and sprawling out on his couch behind his black table, a huge table like the bow of an aircraft carrier
“I can’t figure anything else. You know that as we get older, we sometimes forget things. Besides, those fucking pills that you prescribe leave me all day sleeping and, as you know, I have things to do...”
“But you needed help four years ago and I helped you. You were obsessed and delusional about almost everything.” Grayson hanged up on him almost rising his voice. He now sounded upset; at least it was better than listening to Colton who had a high-pitched voice, thought the detective.
“I’ve had that since I was little.” Andrew sighed while the tips of his fingers were still caressing the rough surface of the photograph. His eyes were staring with a deep look, hypnotizing it.
“That’s why you should attend your appointments, Mr. Andrew.” He had called him ‘Mr.’; it was a way of earning the rust of his patients. Always so polite and pausing his voice, though hoarse, to refer to them, the disturbed.
“I know. There’s no need for you to remind me of it. That’s why I have reached almost to my retirement age, don’t you think?” Andrew, as he was talking, felt a strong pain in his head; this time more pinching than the usual ones. He felt that pain inside his head every time his remote vision was activated, a friendly way he used to call it. It’s activated, he thought.
“I want you to do me a favor, Mr. Andrew.”
“What?” Andrew was still with the tips of his fingers on the photograph despite the pain he felt, that kept increasing as time moved on, as if a high voltage converter was getting closer to him.
“I need you to come this afternoon. Around five. I want to have a conversation with you. I believe you’re not doing okay, I can tell by your voice...”
“Fuck you.” Andrew hanged up on him. His head was about to explode. He had detected an object, a person or a place. He received constant psychic information of something situated in a remote zone, right in those very moments. He could almost see it as a new picture. His pain was lacerating, and he had to mute a moan. His face twisted in pain, his forehead was sweating. Something, somewhere, was calling him. Andrew had deeply investigated this gift and could barely find information about it, except for some experiments performed to a group of the Soviet Union’s soldiers back in the ‘70s. They were capable of receiving information from places, objects, and people located far away, no matter how many miles were in the way. Andrew was seeing something. Information flowed at the rampant and throbbing rhythm of his headache.
“Are you okay? I notice your voice as if you were in distress.” Grayson explained from the other side of the line.
“It’s just a non-important headache,” Andrew explained without removing his fingers from Ava Cox. He had never mentioned anything about the headaches when a psychic perception suddenly appeared. Neither had he spoken about his Remote Vision or Precognition. That had been something he could relate to his mother, Karrin: dead for seven years now, at 81 of a painless heart attack.
“Aren’t you becoming delusional with these mental powers you claim to have?”
“What the hell are you saying?” Andrew raised his voice to the roof and the walls replied.
“You know that doesn’t exist,” Grayson said, always keeping the same tone of his voice.
“Let’s leave it like this, shall we?” His headache was more intense with each second and he was hoping his annoying psychiatrist decided to hang up the phone.
“This afternoon. Five o’clock. Don’t forget, Andrew.”
“Shhhfff.” There was a sound like a kind of snorting cat and a choking whistle. Had he mentioned those things to Grayson? He wasn’t really sure about it, but it looked like he had.
All of a sudden, there was a long sound, halfway between deep and sharp that indicated that Mr. Grayson had hanged up. Andrew felt relieved for a moment. He was tired of him but at the same time, he understood him. It wasn’t normal to have certain mental skills as he had. That’s why he didn’t say it out loud. However, he knew that these skills had helped him solve a dozen crimes.
Those skills and his craftiness.
Truth be told, with none of those seven women, he had experienced something like this before. He felt the first pinch when he retrieved the file that always would emerge when he opened the squeaky drawer. He had the urgent need to put them on the wall and to the side, the killer. His heart would tell him “do this and that and soon something will happen.” And it was, indeed, happening. Just like in a fairy tale.
His headache was as if a bomb exploded inside his skull. His fingers, still on the picture. His ear was warm and red by the cellphone that he put away in his pocket. The phone was also hot.
And then he received information.
4
He had taken it to the grave with his mouth shut. Parker Atkinson was lying on a cold steel mortuary bed with his eyelids now white. A kind of smile on his lips appeared to be saying “fuck you all”, but, the truth is that he had been putting up with a terrifying series of pains while cancer would eat him alive. It was in his bones. His body was a perfect mummy. However, if you opened his eyes, you could still see the craziness in his look.
Colton Allen had signed the necessary documents to send to hell that damn murderer. He looked at him with a serious look under his thick glasses and felt like spitting at him, at least once, to bid that monster farewell. In his file he was convicted of murdering seven women, all of them still missing and the son of a bitch had left without leaving a hint of the place he had buried them o
r thrown them away like trash bags. Without leaving a single clue. He just laughed and yelled as cancer ate him inside out. Metastasis told the oncologist. “You will die” and he looked as if he smiled while he was telling him.
“You will rot in hell,” Colton whispered as he left the folder with the signed paper. He signed it with a rigorous pulse that showed the ink on the paper. There was a small rubber band with a scribbled label on Parker’s left foot big toe: it was his name. The signature on the document was just right next to his ankle, on the corner of the bed, almost as if it were about to fall to the floor.
Half an hour later, his greasy hairs went into the crematory tunnel. A tiny blue flame waited for him at the center of the trail, silently dancing. His body was pushed until his stinky feet were gone and the flame grew like a voracious monster eating his body.
5
By the same time when his body was becoming ashes and his bones were getting rid of every muscle, tendon, and ligament, the sicko kept dancing with his sex caught between his legs, pressing hard until he felt pain as the repetitive music of “Life in mono” was exploding through the speakers. It looked as if they would eventually run away from that sticky room, right in front of that sicko’s eyes.
The green wig fell to the floor, spreading like the tentacles of a lifeless octopus.
His eyes... They looked at the mirror and shone again.
Muffled by the music, there was a scream behind the red-painted wall.
6
His fingers were still pressed against Ava Cox’s picture. He saw her lying face up with her eyes closed. Her eyelids with makeup and her lips sealed as if she were sleeping. The headache was pinching and as he received more information, it became harder to bear. However, he was still holding the picture as he blinked.
The sun was warming up the face that, without a doubt, belonged to Ava Cox. It was as if he were seeing her closely, though he was far away. This time, even though different, he had done a Remote Vision exercise. He remembered the series of events that occurred just a few hours ago. He had also seen her lying face up and wrapped in flowers of every color. Previously it had been a painless vision: A Precognition.
It was also the first time that three factors had taken place: his mania, Precognition and Remote Vision. That spring’s first morning, he had woken up needing to look back, after that, everything else happened.
That Wednesday morning all his extrasensory perception sensors had been triggered. That’s how he called them. Sometimes, he would even call it “the machine”. He also realized that the course of his life was about to change in the days to come.
He knew that that morning, everything was awkwardly different.
The pinching pain wanted to leave his skull, but Andrew wouldn’t take his fingers away from that photograph. He received more information: it was a small green picture.
Except for the beating of his heart and the sound that makes the intense headache, though vague, everything else was absolute silence. However, that magic moment got interrupted by a familiar sound: the croaking of a frog.
This was not a minor detail, apart from receiving information and pictures, he could also hear sounds.
“She’s in a river or a lake.” Whispered as he closed his eyes and the pulsing pain became a sound as if a blacksmith were hammering the cast iron of a sword.
The sound increased constantly until he heard that blacksmith snuffling on his neck. Then, while his mind was still concentrated on that angelical face that looked intact, he remembered some of what he had read about the Remote Vision. In one of his many searches about this psychic power or capability, he read it could be learned with a peculiar mind training.
Remote Vision, also known as “RV”, is a learned skill that allows people to decipher images of people, locations, places, and objects; a mental skill that requires no prior knowledge on the matter. The “RV” is labeled as a parapsychological phenomenon and it’s related to other parapsychological skills such as clairvoyance and telepathy. From an isolated place and without a hint, a person with Remote Vision can infer the estimated characteristics of an unknown target.
After remembering the entire text that had caught his attention the most, during 1980, his lips stretched in a grim; a smile and the headache would alleviate a little bit.
He was aware that he hadn’t had the need to learn this technique, but he was born with it. His Remote Vision was special, just like his precognition. He kept on laughing in that hot office while his fingers remained like suction cups on Ava Cox’s face.
The information he received was: She was as beautiful as in the picture, asleep, surrounded by nature and cocooned by the sun. Her eyes didn’t want to open. He then saw something else during a new, sudden headache.
A log cabin at the end of a wooden bridge with nothing fastening it on the sides. It was just floating on the water and it danced with the water movement if any.
It was a lake, there was no doubt about it now.
As he writhed in pain, he saw more things.
A forest that surrounded the lake and the birds flying in that morning’s bright sky. He saw Ava Cox covered in flowers. She was naked in the water and with her head on the waveless shore. There was a gentle water fluctuation, generated by a silent wind that could be barely heard among the trees.
He concentrated as if he were exercising his mind. He saw more flowers. He also saw, in the cabin’s window, a thin and curved silhouette, so thin that you could see through it. He also saw a fishing rod. He didn’t see any signaling of the place, though.
The pain was so intense that he had to remove his fingers from Ava’s photograph. He removed his fingers as if all of a sudden Ava’s mouth had opened to bite him. He took his hand off it and the pain went away, and so did the images he had been seeing.
He thought about the vision he had had in the past and about this one, merging together as one.
He sweated copiously, and his heart started to calm down, just like the sunlight that managed to get inside changed its place drawing thin yellow stripes on the floor and on his face. One of those sun rays centered on Ava’s picture and her blue hair shone like a carnival wig.
His omen had just occurred. He just had to open the drawer and grab that folder
He then sat on his swiveling chair and took the phone out of his pocket to make a call.
Ava Cox appeared in his mind with her blue hair.
7
Castle Lake Hill’s Sheriff, also known as “The Marshall” for being the one with the highest hierarchy in the police corps, was named Landon Miller and he had been in the force for five years. The precinct, located in the town center, had a constant fluctuation in the police corps agents, helpers, and detainees who were accused of disturbing the law and order.
That Wednesday morning was no different than the rest of the days.
They had arrested a man accused of assaulting some hookers who were working, without panties, on the street.
Kevin Smith, the Sheriff’s assistant, was the one who picked up the phone that started ringing in the middle of the precinct’s murmur-filled air.
“Police precinct, hello.” The voice sounded petulant and, at first, Kevin could only hear an abysmal silence through the earpiece. He finally heard the voice.
“Come on, prick, I want to speak to Landon.”
Kevin recognized the voice and his eyebrows went up. Thin and with jet black hair, combed to the side. He didn’t have a mustache, but he did have a scraggly beard.
“Hi Andrew, how are you today?” Now the voice was smarmier. He always addressed Andrew with that forced tone even though deep down he didn’t want to do so. He withdrew the earpiece from his ear for an instant to look contemptuously at it. He thought it might be a good idea to hang up on him, alleging in a second call that the lines were collapsed that morning.
“Fucked up,” Andrew replied when Kevin had put the earpiece back on his ear. “And don’t try to hang up on me because that’s exactly what you wan
t to do.”
Kevin’s eyebrows went higher up.
He remembered the huge annoyance that caused him to arrest the wrong person, after a raid in search of drugs. Landon, his boss, was about to fire him. So, it was no surprise that now he looked at him with a certain disdain.
“No. No, I wasn’t trying to hang up the phone, it would never occur to me to do something like that.” Kevin lied feeling a suffocating heat going up from his cheek to the forehead. Kevin was not aware of Andrew’s psychic skills, that’s why he was both dubious and impressed at the same time.
“Can you put Landon through?” Andrew insisted.
“Yes, yes... of course. I’ll put him through right away. I think he’s available in his office.”
“I don’t care if he’s available or not, or if he’s in his damn office!” Andrew complained from a dark corner of his own office. That morning was getting very busy for him. “I have something urgent to ask him.”
Kevin thought; if it is so urgent, why hasn’t he come here? However, he soon realized, right before pressing with his thumb the button «1» on the phone, that the question that he had asked himself had been rather absurd. A phone call is a lot quicker; he corrected himself and his eyebrows went up again.
In the distance, submerged in the most absolute silence except for the revelry that could be heard through the earpiece, detective Andrew seemed to be in complete darkness despite the lugubrious glow of the light bulb that had been hanging there for over a decade. Now, they were all led lights, but he kept the old ones. It still worked. The languid sun rays were almost gone by then.
There was a series of whistles and tones that indicated that sooner or later the communication could end or, worst case scenario, it seemed as if the phone was being disassembled. Finally, a hoarse voice came up through Andrew’s earpiece.
“Yes?”
“If your assistant, the prick, had told you that it’s Andrew here, you wouldn’t have picked up, right?”
Eyes that do not Open Page 2