Psychic Warrior

by David Morehouse

  “Do you see any buildings?”

  “From where I’m standing, I don’t see anything but what I’ve described. Should I move?”

  “Yes. I want you to move ahead through the stone wall and describe what you see.”

  “I’m moving now.” The wall pressed against my phantom form with the sound of Velcro tearing open; in the center of the wall it was dark. It was at times like this that I learned that everything indeed has a spirit. The wall had its own history, and it seemed to weep as I passed through it. I left the darkness feeling as though I’d left a painful, clutching memory behind.

  After this training, I never doubted that all things are animate. To hear or feel an object speak had been unfathomable only a few short months ago; now, it was a not so uncommon event. Every viewer experienced it at times; we learned to listen and trust what we heard. Levy had taught me that. A target’s surroundings recorded the history of the place without prejudice and stood ready to bear witness to all who had the ears to hear.

  When I left the wall, I felt it reaching for me; it was a feeling I had had as a child, of the unknown and unseen reaching for me as I left a dark room at the top of the stairs, and hurried down to light, safety, and the company of others. To me, the wall spoke, and it spoke of pain.

  “I sense something wrong here.”

  “Do you see any buildings?”

  I shook off the emotions and surveyed the area again. I had no idea what the target might be. Usually, my targets were things or places, but here I recognized nothing as yet. Nothing but stone and emptiness—and the small buildings in the distance.

  “I see some buildings, maybe a hundred yards away. I’m moving to them.”

  “Good! Focus on the buildings. Go inside and tell me what you see and feel there.” .

  I stood outside the closest building. They were aligned in a neat row, their corners matching perfectly, the pitch of their roofs the same. In all, I could see four, maybe five of them. Tall pillars jutted from them, scratching at the grayness of the sky.

  “I’m standing at the nearest corner. The buildings are constructed mostly of stone, but there are a few walls of red brick. Some of the brickwork looks like repairs, patches. There are tall brick pillars sticking up from the buildings, maybe two or three per building.”

  “David, slowly touch the building.”

  “Okay … It’s a rough granite; the only wood seems to be in the trim and rafters.” In a few seconds I was overcome with grief. My phantom body quivered as I held fast to the building. My heart ached, and a sense of complete despair and depression enveloped me. Spikes of hatred and denial stabbed at me. “I—I have to let go. I can’t touch it any longer. I’m sorry, I just can’t.”

  “Tell me what you feel. Be specific, ask questions, search for answers; you have to work—work hard!”

  “Uh … I feel hopelessness. I feel forgotten and I’ve given up. I don’t fear anything any longer, although there is much to fear here. This place is filled with hatred and evil … . There is no goodness here, no light, only darkness and curses. The spirit here is gone, broken and empty. Everything here feels poisoned. Everything here feels dead. Everything here is horror.”

  “I want you to go inside the building. I want you to search in the same way you’ve been doing. Touch and ask for answers. Go inside now.”

  I passed through an arched stone doorway leading into a vacant chamber. “I don’t see anything but an empty room.”

  “Look harder; touch the floor and the walls. Find the answers to this place.”

  I reached out to the nearest wall and let my hand pierce it. “Oh, my God, this place is sad and empty. The walls feel they are evil, but they aren’t, I can tell they aren’t. No, wait! They don’t feel evil, they have seen evil—yes, that’s it. This room has seen unspeakable evil and the stench will never leave. The spirit of this place is stained; it will never be cleansed.”

  Kathleen was impressed with these results, but I was still missing the most important aspect of the site, and she knew why. “David, you’re doing fine, but you aren’t looking, at the entire target. You are allowing yourself to ignore it. You have to open your eyes; you can’t allow yourself to see selectively. Open your eyes!”

  I struggled to see what she wanted me to see, but I couldn’t. I felt too overwhelmed. “I’m trying, Kathleen, but I can’t see anything else. I hurt from being here. I want to come back now. I feel filthy and I want to come home and wash. I don’t want to be here anymore, do you understand? I want to come back.”

  “Okay, David, break it off and come back.”

  It took me twenty minutes to pull myself together. Kathleen met me at the front door of the viewing building with Paul in tow.

  “Tough session, huh, buddy?” Posner said. “Don’t feel bad, it’s a—” He stopped in mid-sentence. “Well, just don’t feel like the Lone Ranger on this one. Finish your summary and you’ll see soon enough.”

  Kathleen patted me on the back and gently shoved me out the door and into the sunlight. I looked at her, but all she would do was smile back.

  I made several sketches of the wall and the buildings, including the tall brick pillars and the stand of trees on the far side of the wall: I wrote my summary, which amounted to about four pages, and presented the package to Kathleen at her desk.

  She thumbed through the sketches, frowning, read the summary, highlighting various passages and descriptions, then made two photocopies of my work. “Sit down,” she said. “So—what do you think it is?”

  I paused, trying to find the right words. “I think it is a very strange and evil place. I’ve never felt the place itself talk to me like that. I felt very odd being there, as if I was supposed to listen to the place get something off its chest. I felt as if it were grabbing at me, trying to get me to stay and listen to its tale of woe.”

  “‘Tale of woe’—you didn’t include that in your summary .”

  “Well, it just came to me. I think the place has a terrible history, and the image of that history will never leave it. That’s all I can think of; do I get any feedback?”

  Kathleen smiled. “I guess so. You were fairly close.” She pulled out the target folder and tossed it to me. “See what you think.”

  I sighed, pulled open the envelope, and extracted the first of five black-and-white photographs. A Nazi death camp.

  “Dachau,” I whispered. “I completely missed it, didn’t I?”

  “Whatever gives you that idea?.”

  “I missed it! I fucking missed it! I had no idea I was looking at this. And look, the ovens—I didn’t even see the ovens where they burned the bodies. Thousands of bodies.”

  “Oh, no? What do you call these? Kathleen pointed at my sketches, then set them alongside the photographs.”These brick pillars look like the stacks for the ovens to me. And what about the emotion of the place? You damned near drained it all out. You did fine; quit beating yourself up. This is a difficult target; nobody waltzes in and waltzes back out. Every time you go to a place like this you leave something behind. Every time you go here you will experience something more evil, more lost, more godforsaken. You were right when you said the place was stained with evil”

  “Why the hell did you send me there, anyway? What could possibly come from it, besides another nightmare for me?”

  “Everyone gets sent there; it’s part of the training program. Every person in this office has been there, and everyone here has been affected just like you.”

  “Everyone?”

  “Everyone except Judy. She crawled around in the ash and bones of the ovens and never picked up anything out of the ordinary. She came back and described the place as a military post or something like that.”

  “Why is it important for us to go there?”

  “You have to experience the extreme out there in the ether, in order to be able to understand the nuances of some more obscure targets: double agents, test pilots, politicians. In the near future you will learn how to reach the
minds of these men and women and tell us what they are thinking and feeling. If you can’t train yourself to grasp the extreme, overwhelming evil of Dachau, how can you expect to grasp the more subtle nuances of a pilot test-flying the latest Soviet fighter? Learning the extremes is the first step in the process of getting your eyes. You want them, don’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Then you will have to pay a price.” She stood, collected the folders, and shook my hand. “You did very well; I’m proud of you, and you should be proud of yourself. Look, let’s call it a day. This was a tough mission and I don’t want to run you on your afternoon session. I’m going to tell Levy that I think you should hit the road and get some rest. Why don’t you get your files cleaned up and I’ll take care of him, okay?”

  .“I don’t need—”

  “Listen to me; if Mel were here he’d tell you the same thing.”

  “Okay, whatever you say, professor.”

  Kathleen was right: I needed to go home; the mission had really shaken me up. Levy understood completely. As I drove home, images of that place followed me; they lasted throughout the night. I’d never forget.

  The next morning was uneventful except for a blowout between a couple of the remote viewers and the two channelers. There are a lot of arguments among remote viewers as to the effectiveness of channeling. By definition, channeling involves the use of either oral or written data transfer. The channeler invokes a so-called “spirit guide” during the session. Through the guide, the channeler will allegedly talk to the “thing” being contacted. Placed in the, context of the military spy arena, this approach obviously has severe limitations. It appeared that Carol, who was essentially Judy’s protégée, had turned in a poor-quality session summary. She had been working with Lyn on an operational target for about two weeks and had completed about five sessions. Now Lyn wanted a complete summary with sketches, but he was dissatisfied with the results, including almost meaningless conclusions like, “There is blue at the site.” Lyn, who was a remote viewer, had every excuse to present this nonsense to Levy as evidence of the dangers of mixing channeling with remote viewing. Lyn was a consummate trainer of remote viewing and he hated to see potentially good viewers waste their abilities on the channelers’ unproved methods. Whenever something like this happened, and it often did, tempers flared and opinions and accusations flew. I learned to ignore the blowouts, to stay the hell out or suffer the consequences. You couldn’t talk quietly about anyone in the office—after all, in a group of remote viewers, how could you talk about someone without her knowing it? I kept my own counsel and kept my mouth shut.

  Besides, as I saw it, nobody in the unit had any reason to second-guess anyone else about what they did or how. We were government-paid and government-trained psychics, spying on the enemies of the United States; why get riled up about the method used? At this point in my life, I was so overwhelmed by what I was learning that I didn’t draw any lines. If someone had told me that I’d have better viewing results if I ate frogs before a session, I’d have been looking for a supplier. I didn’t want any part of the cancer that was slowly eating away at the cohesion of the unit.

  I was scheduled for a ten o’clock ERV session with a training target and Mel as my monitor. We walked to the viewing building together. Mel carried his coffee in a broken-down chipped-up mug about a hundred and fifty years old. I was surprised it held liquid, but he was never without it.

  “I think you’ll enjoy today’s little journey,” he said.

  “I could use a little entertainment.”

  Once I was set up and ready, I started my countdown; in a few minutes I was entering the ether and on my way to the target.

  “Give me your impressions as soon as possible. I don’t want you wasting any time here.”

  “I’m someplace like a cave. It smells musty and the ground is cold. The air isn’t moving at all, and it’s completely dark. I can’t see anything at all.” I moved forward in the direction the signal line led me. “No, I see a small flicker of light in front of me.”

  Riley leaned. back in his chair and watched the video monitor closely. “Good! See what the light is.”

  I moved toward the light as fast as I could, but it seemed to move away from me, as if I were chasing something in a dream. I chased the light for about ten minutes, but though I was moving in what I thought was a straight line, I just wasn’t gaining any ground. Frustrated, I stopped.

  “I’ve stopped moving toward the light source, Mel. I just couldn’t close on it. I don’t know if I’m not really moving, or if it’s moving away from me. I’m just standing here in the dark now.”

  “Do you sense anything in the darkness? Anyone or anything?”.

  My first thought was, Great! Just what I want to do, grab something in the dark. “All I can say, Mel, is this target better not be a page out of the Odyssey. If I run into a—”

  “Oh, be quiet and look around. You can’t remote-view something that never happened, for crying out loud.”

  Suddenly, the cavern I stood in was flooded with brilliant light that came from within the surrounding stone. The light vanished as quickly as it had come. “What the hell was that?” I shouted.

  “Tell me what you saw.”

  “I saw a light coming from the walls of the cavern. By the way, I am in a cavern; the light just confirmed that. But it’s dark again and I see nothing.”

  Again and again the light pulsed and disappeared, like a strobe. The pulses seemed to pierce my eyes and ears, even my flesh. The temperature of the cavern began to rise rapidly, and it was increasingly difficult to breathe. I told Mel so.

  “You need to move on out of there,” he replied. “Take a look around for another passageway.”

  Sure enough, behind me was a wide arched passage into another room. I hadn’t seen it because I was facing away from it chasing the light; in retrospect, it was as if the light had been trying to lead me away.

  The next room was smaller, a rectangle about twenty feet by ten feet with a ceiling maybe fifteen feet high. Like the larger chamber, it was lit from within the surrounding stone, but something was different, as if the pulsing energy I’d felt in the larger chamber originated here.

  “I’m in the smaller of the two rooms, and there seems to be no way out of this one except the entrance I used. I sense some form of energy here, and I’m having difficulty focusing my vision on the center of the room. There’s something here that I can’t see—but there’s something here, for sure.”

  “An object, a personality, a definitive energy source?”

  I struggled to see. “There’s a low platform in the center of the room. It’s carved out of stone.”

  “What are its dimensions?”

  “About five feet by three feet, and maybe ten inches high. I can’t see … it’s like a mirage in the center of the room.”

  “You can’t focus on it?”

  “Exactly. It’s vibrating too fast. The vibration’s like a camouflage of sorts. Something’s there, but I’m not supposed to be seeing it. Something very unusual and powerful.”

  “Okay, here’s what I want you to do. Try and move to a time when there is less vibration and you might be able to see.”

  I understood; we’d worked on movement exercises like this before. The idea was that if I initiated movement in time the signal line would take me where I could view the target clearly. It had worked on some small training targets, but I hadn’t tried it on anything like this.

  I concentrated on the movement through time and closed my eyes to the events speeding by. I felt vertigo setting in, which indicated the speed of my movement. I’d found it best to keep my eyes closed so as not to vomit. Finally the sensation of movement slowed gradually and stopped. When I opened my eyes, I beheld the most bizarre scene.

  In the center of the room a group of peasants chipped away at the stone of the floor, forming the pedestal I’d already seen. Now time scrolled forward, stopped briefly, then scrolled forward again
: the signal line was moving me at will, allowing me to see the room at various points in time. Finally it stopped completely, at a point it must have “felt” was critical to the mission.

  In amazement, I watched as four men dressed in ancient-seeming clothes carried a golden box into the room. One man at each corner of the object, they reverently positioned it in the center of the stone pedestal and retreated backward from the room, their heads bowed. Now a huge stone covered the room’s entrance, and slowly all outside light was blocked as the men labored to seal the passage. Oddly, the golden box kept the room lighted. And the same strange energy I had felt before, when I could see nothing, filled the cavern. A sense of threat came over me; I felt I was being warned not to approach the box.

  “What’s going on, David?”

  “I’m in the presence of the object and it’s very weird, as though I were standing in the presence of some very powerful deity. The golden box is a symbol of that power, and it’s warning me not to come closer.”

  “I want you to ignore the warning and get as close as you can. Touch it if you can, and describe the sensation to me.”

  I tried to move toward the object. “It’s a golden box with animals on top of it.”

  “Real animals?”

  “No, small statues, and they have wings that sweep backward and up. The box itself is very powerful, or maybe it’s something that protects the box that’s powerful. Whatever it is, I can’t get any closer. I feel I’m in real danger of being hurt; I don’t like this.”

  “Remember, you’re not physically there. But tell me what you think would happen if you were physically there. Describe that sensation to me.”

  “I think that nothing mortal can be in this presence. I couldn’t even be in the same room with it; if I were, I’d perish instantly.”