Capes

by Drabble, Matt

  “I’d certainly hope so, but people were ringing in to the show I was listening to. Some were happy about the accusations, but a lot more weren’t.”

  “Trust me, people just need something to moan about. It won’t come to anything. You know, I wasn’t sure if you’d come.”

  “I had to. Marshall… well…, he was important to me – you all were. Are!” Forbes corrected herself quickly.

  “I heard you were teaching? Somewhere cold I think.”

  Forbes nodded. “A small town in Norway. It’s a quiet life, but at least it’s mine.”

  “You didn’t want to go back into a practice again? Open up shop and take on patients?”

  “No,” Forbes replied, a little too quickly and forcibly. “Sorry, but after… after what he did to me… Well, it’s not safe. That part of my life will never be open to me again.”

  “Oh surely you can’t believe that? I know that you feel guilty, but it wasn’t your fault. You’re the therapist here, Helen. Surely I don’t need to be the one to point out the lack of guilt?”

  Forbes sighed heavily. “It doesn’t matter what you or I or anyone says, Jamie-Lyn; it isn’t safe for me to do what I was meant to — not now, not ever again. I always thought that I would be able to go back and treat patients again, but even after all that time, after all that practice and training, it still wasn’t safe.”

  And with that, Jamie-Lyn could see that Dr Helen Forbes’ mind was already taking her somewhere she clearly didn’t want to go.

  chapter 6

  DR QUANTUM

  19 YEARS AGO

  The psychiatrist office was deliberately unremarkable, a safe serene and quiet space where those in need came to reflect inside their own minds.

  Forbes sat nervously but strangely excited on the chair beside the long couch. Of course, it shouldn’t have been the job that made her nervous, but it had been such a long time since she’d held a patient’s mind in her hands. To be truthful, she had been dying to try out her new heightened abilities back in her true field.

  She had always been naturally intuitive. Hers was a mind that felt the world around it, drawing in both the spoken and unspoken, the seen and the unseen alike.

  Ever since she was a little girl, she had been able to process and interpret those around her, sensing discomfort and the reasons behind it. It wasn’t, of course, any kind of supernatural ability. She was no comic book superhero. She was just a talented listener with natural empathy, but of course that had been what had attracted the attentions of God himself.

  For the better part of the last decade, she had been part of the Queen’s Guard, doing important but dwindling work. Back at the start, she had been working with CJ, a visitor from another planet, a being with abilities far beyond those of mere mortals, a being that truly did belong alongside the colourful panels in a comic book.

  From a strictly clinical point of view, she had been fascinated by his promises to enhance her own talents. It had helped matters that she had been a comic book nut growing up, a deep love and interest that had never left her.

  She knew that it didn’t take a psychiatrist of any note to pinpoint her own desire to help those in need. Her father had taken his own life when she’d been aged just 13, leaving a deep wound that still festered inside of her to this day.

  Perhaps if she’d been just a year or two younger, she wouldn’t have felt the guilt, but 13 had always felt old enough to know that she should have seen the signs, his depression, his manic mood swings. 13 was too old to be a child, but not quite old enough to know better — a twilight age trapped in between worlds, and helpless in both.

  The Queen’s Guard had approached her to work with their visitor and she had jumped at the chance. She hadn’t known then that the work would be a two-way street, but by then, she had already been swept along with the excitement and the promise that when they were done, she would be able to help people, help those in desperate need, men without voices, men like her father.

  The door was lightly tapped and Forbes got up from her chair and crossed the room.

  Forrest James was a stooped man who walked like the weight of the world was already forcing him down to the ground. He was a grand prize within the psychiatrist community, a patient as yet immune to treatment. She could already picture her triumphant return to therapy and the paper she would write about it.

  “Hello, Forrest,” Forbes greeted him. “Come on in.”

  “Do I lie on the couch?”

  “Wherever you’re comfortable.”

  Forrest did indeed sit then swing his legs up on the couch. He shuffled about and Forbes waited until he was comfortable.

  “I didn’t think that you saw patients anymore, Doc,” Forrest said as he stared up at the ceiling.

  “Strictly I’m not, Forrest, but for you I’m making a special exception.”

  “I can’t see how you’re going to able to help me, Doc. I’ve seen pretty much every other shrink in the city.”

  Forrest James was a demanding patient; not the man, of course – the man was a quiet and gentle soul. The problem was that there was a deep dark secret locked somewhere inside the man, a festering root that had poisoned his entire life from within, and to date, no one had been able to find it, but she was sure that was all about to change.

  Her work with CJ had opened her mind and senses up to a whole other level, and in their testing sessions, she had been able to probe deeper than ever before, achieving an almost telepathic ability to root out innermost thoughts even through an increasing wall of deliberate blocking. Now she was sure that her one failure was about to be rectified.

  She hadn’t asked for God’s permission for her field trip today – partly because she didn’t feel that it was any of his business, but mainly because she was sure he would have prevented it.

  Her work with the Queen’s Guard had fulfilled every comic book fantasy she’d ever had, but now the menace of SOUL was gone and the terror threat had finally been lowered. She’d enjoyed large parts of their work and she’d grown close to Marshall over the years, a little too close perhaps. But now it was all coming to an end, and she had to think about her future, one that didn’t involve fighting crime in a costume.

  “I don’t see how this is going to be any different, Doc,” Forrest moaned. “I don’t see how anyone is ever going to be able to help me.”

  “Well we’re here now. Why don’t you let me try? With your permission, I’ve read all of your notes with the other therapists and everything tells me that there is something that you are blocking, Forrest, something that wants to come out into the light, something that needs to.”

  “Okay, Doc,” the man finally relented with a heavy sigh. “I… I trust you.”

  His words gave her a warm tingle. She knew that she wasn’t above taking pleasure in her work and the way that people saw her as their saviour.

  “I want you to lie down, Forrest,” she said, motioning to the long leather couch, and he followed.

  She took a seat by his side, close enough for him to feel her presence and be reassured by it.

  “I don’t think I can say anything new today, Doc.”

  “That’s okay, Forrest; today, I don’t want you to say anything at all,” she said soothingly as he raised his eyebrows. “I just want you to close your eyes, Forrest. Close your eyes and listen to my voice.”

  “You’re going to try hypnotherapy?”

  “Not exactly.” She smiled gently.

  Forrest lay his head down and closed his eyes, and once again she felt a tingle run through her body at the power she held. It wasn’t a feeling that she turned away from; it wasn’t a feeling that made her feel guilty. It just simply was.

  “I don’t want you to speak, Forrest. I just want you to hear my voice, listen to my vibrations, my energy. It surrounds you; it holds you firmly and encases you. This is a safe place, Forrest. You are safe here; nothing can harm you.”

  His breathing deepened and slowed, and she felt him slipping i
nto the darkness beyond the light of the here and now.

  “I want you to relax your mind, Forrest. Weaken your defences and allow them to fall away. You don’t need them now, Forrest; you are safe, and nothing can hurt you here. Nothing at all. Don’t push for anything here, Forrest. Listen to my voice and allow your mind to drift, to roam, to explore the corners of your mind.”

  Forbes now closed her own eyes and let herself slip deeper into the moment as she started to follow her patient’s mind into his rabbit hole of a past.

  While her empathy had always been her strongest asset, now, since her work with CJ, her senses had been taken to a whole new heightened level.

  Forbes sat with her own eyes shut. She started to feel the office around them change: the air suddenly began to feel colder, and there was a dampness to the air and a rotting aroma mixed in with it. She felt the hairs on her arms rise and tingle as something entered their joint space.

  Forrest started to twitch and his fear began to radiate from him in painful waves.

  “It’s okay, Forrest,” she soothed. “Everything is fine. Nothing can hurt you here. These are only movies in your mind: moving pictures that need to be aired out into the light. Allow them to play, Forrest — expose them to the light and rob them of their power.”

  She could feel him fighting the sensory memory, and now his own feelings were starting to bleed into her own.

  “Okay, Forrest, just relax. Just try to breathe…” she began.

  The temperature in the room around them had now dropped considerably and she shivered. The rotting smell grew stronger, so much so that she felt she could taste it on her tongue. The walls felt like they had started to constrict around her until the spacious office was little more than a box.

  She had, of course, been here many times over the years, a physical manifestation of a person’s fears, but this was the first time that she was using her enhanced abilities in the name of therapy instead of a military application.

  She tried to open her eyes but something was clamping them shut, and panic began to pick around the edges of her mind. This was not part of the drill. Normally, she was able to incapacitate a subject from a distance of up to twenty metres, to pluck a fear from a sentry’s mind and form it in front of him, or a code from a passing security guard. But suddenly, she was starting to realise that this was different. Now, she was trapped in an enclosed space with a deeply troubled mind, and a patient’s mind was a powerful thing.

  Forrest was thrashing now as though being torn apart from within as his buried memories began clawing their way to the surface.

  “Okay, Forrest… that’s enough for today. Pull it back a little; let’s not push any further.”

  Her words were strong but they seemed to have no effect on her patient, nor, in fact, on her own ability to open her eyes.

  “Forrest? FORREST?”

  A blanket of panic was now sitting oppressively on her shoulders and panic quickly grew into full-blown fear as she suddenly felt another presence in the shrinking room.

  Forbes summoned every ounce of her not-inconsiderable willpower, and her eyes finally snapped open. While her office was still there, it now seemed somehow out of phase with her surroundings, as though the real world was faded like a bad signal.

  Layered over the top of reality was a small rotting wooden shed. Cobwebs hung from the roof, and several shafts of light from broken boards tried to pierce the gloom.

  Forbes could see a small boy of around eight or ten, and she knew instinctively that it was Forrest, cowering in the corner of the shed. A large man in a coach’s outfit towered over the small child. The coach seemed to be larger now as he approached Forrest, swelling and growing until he was a swirling black mass.

  Her manifestations were normally confined to a single organism – a ferocious dog, a large hairy legged spider – but suddenly, she was drawing an entire scene complete with touch and odours.

  She could tell now that this was Forrest’s buried memory, an all-too-common childhood abuse story that he’d hidden to protect himself, only now that memory was back.

  Forrest shrank as his abuser grew as he approached, and the young boy began to sob uncontrollably.

  “Okay, Forrest, hear my voice. Feel the calmness of my essence. You can turn away from this memory now, Forrest; it’s safe to come home.”

  Forrest didn’t respond. Instead, he only cried out harder as his abuser took a physical hold of him, and Forbes felt a stab of her own fear and pain as though linked to her patient.

  “Forrest! Come back, Forrest,” she pleaded. “This isn’t real. This is just your mind. It’s a projection; he’s not here, Forrest. HE’S NOT HERE!”

  The coach had grown so large now that he filled the tiny shed, his core a thick black fog of terror that was threatening to swallow Forrest whole, and then it did.

  “Forrest. FORREST!” she screamed, and mercifully, something broke in the space and her projection of it, shattering the illusion around them.

  She was left sitting in a chair in an ordinary office, but now utterly alone. Whatever she had manifested had taken Forrest and dragged him off to some unimaginable hell.

  PRESENT DAY

  Jamie-Lyn looked at Forbes and saw that the woman was on her way back.

  “You okay, Helen?”

  “I’m… I’m fine. Just a little trip down memory lane and not a good one. I guess that being back here, with all of you… well, it’s a little overwhelming. It’s been a while since I didn’t have complete control over my own mind.”

  “Well, I’m glad to see you. I’m sure the others are too.”

  Forbes looked over at the throng of mourners. “I wish it was under happier circumstances.”

  “I always liked Marshall.” Jamie-Lyn nodded.

  “He was an honourable man – a good man, I suppose. Hoping to walk away from all of that was never really on the cards, especially when he stayed in the life for as long as he did. Does anyone know what happened yet?”

  “No one has told me anything. I’m only here because Jesus is a man like his father and full of tricks. I found a pass on my kitchen table. Far be it for the man to just pick up a phone.”

  “I saw the footage. That… thing, was nothing like we ever fought before. What does CJ say?”

  “I haven’t had the chance to speak to him yet – not alone, at least.”

  “That sounds ominous. I don’t need abilities to know that you’re suspicious.”

  “Honestly, I don’t know anything.”

  “But you suspect.”

  “Maybe.”

  “You miss it,” Forbes stated rather than asked.

  “Don’t you? Not even a little bit?”

  Forbes shook her head strongly. “That life got a lot of people killed. It got Marshall killed; it just took a little longer to land.”

  “He did a lot of good, Helen. You all did.”

  “Not everyone would agree with that.”

  “You mean those SOUL nutcases? Like that bitch Cynthia Arrow?”

  “Maybe she had a point. We were dangerous, more so than I think anyone ever really realised.” Forbes nodded towards CJ. The large green alien stood a good foot taller than the other mourners. “He saw to that.”

  Jamie-Lyn turned to follow her gaze. “CJ only ever wanted to help, Helen, I can assure you of that. His intentions were always pure – maybe a little naive, but always pure of heart.”

  “You were there… we both were.”

  “There?”

  “Havencrest,” Forbes said, and Jamie-Lyn flinched.

  “I know,” Jamie-Lyn replied in a small voice. “I saw what happened that day. That’s the main reason I left. I’m guessing why we both left.”

  Forbes reflected inwardly for a moment, and both of their faces darkened with the memory of a small coastal town called Havencrest.

  It was Forbes who finally spoke first again.

  “Didn’t you ever wonder why not you?”

  “Me? What do yo
u mean?”

  “Why he never…”

  “Enhanced me? I guess I always thought that I didn’t have the base for it, you know? Marshall was an expert marksman, you were a natural empath, Harrison was already abnormally resilient and Langston… well, the man was always a killer.”

  “I have to admit I’m pretty pleased to find that he wasn’t here.”

  “Crimson? To be honest, I thought he would be. He always said that he’d get to dance on Marshall’s grave. I’m surprised that he isn’t here to do just that.”

  “Good afternoon, ladies.” A male voice startled them from behind.

  They both turned to find Jesus standing demurely in a timeless navy three-piece suit, one that wouldn’t have looked out of place on his father.

  “Thanks for the invite,” Jamie-Lyn said, touching the laminated ID hanging around her neck.

  “I’m glad to see that you came… both of you,” he added quickly to Forbes.

  “Well?” Forbes demanded.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Don’t play dumb with me, Jesus. I might have sworn off using my abilities, but for you, I’m thinking I might make an exception, so don’t lie.”

  Jesus looked around behind them towards the deserted graveyard before nodding that they should all take a walk.

  “The truth is that we don’t know. I take it that you’ve seen the footage, doctor?”

  “It’s Helen, and yes I have.”

  “Did it ring any bells for you? Either of you?”

  They both shook their heads.

  “A pity.”

  “Surely you must have analysed the footage by now?” Jamie-Lyn exclaimed. “I’m guessing that the tech nerds are working with vastly more sophisticated equipment than we had back in the day. Surely they must have found something.”

  “Nothing usable.” Jesus shook his head.

  “So why are we here?” Jamie-Lyn asked.

  “Well there’s no way to put this delicately, but if we don’t know who the attacker was or what the motive was, then you might all be in danger. I thought it prudent to bring everyone in for a debrief of sorts.”