Double Visions

by Matt Drabble

  DOUBLE VISIONS

  MATT DRABBLE

  Copyright © 2015 Matt Drabble

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN-13: 978-1511569392

  ISBN-10: 1511569395

  OTHER BOOKS BY MATT DRABBLE

  See end of book for details

  GATED

  GATED II: Ravenhill Academy

  ASYLUM – 13 Tales of Terror

  AFTER DARKNESS FALLS: Volume One

  AFTER DARKNESS FALLS: Volume Two

  ABRA-CADAVER

  THE TRAVELLING MAN

  THE MONTAGUE PORTRAIT

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE - 8 years ago

  CHAPTER 1 - today

  CHAPTER 2 – the dead don’t stay dead

  CHAPTER 3 – up and running

  CHAPTER 4 – better the devil you know

  CHAPTER 5 – time to play the game

  CHAPTER 6 – a growing guest list

  CHAPTER 7 – more questions than answers

  CHAPTER 8 – uneasy alliances

  CHAPTER 9 – stronger

  CHAPTER 10 – the past rises

  CHAPTER 11 – new faces

  CHAPTER 12 – rewriting history

  CHAPTER 13 – overexposed

  CHAPTER 14 – alarms

  CHAPTER 15 - assumptions

  CHAPTER 16 - ashes

  CHAPTER 17 – the other side of the coin

  CHAPTER 18 – four padded walls

  CHAPTER 19 - visitors

  CHAPTER 20 - reunion

  CHAPTER 21 – all the fun of the fair

  EPILOGUE

  OTHER BOOKS & AUTHOR INFORMATION

  PROLOGUE

  8 YEARS AGO

  The Darkness closed in as though it was alive and with evil intent. The floorboards seemed to roar monstrously loud beneath her careful footsteps, no matter how lightly she trod. Her heart was pounding hard enough in her ears to drown out the world and her thin blouse stuck firmly to her back with a cold clammy sweat.

  The man with her offered small comfort. He was a large and powerful man armed with a black revolver and the righteousness of a badge, but still she felt hopelessly outgunned.

  She wore her mother’s silver brooch pin and her hand would often wander to it for strength and focus.

  Together they descended into the bowels of hell, despite all better judgement. The man had called for backup and the wailing sirens and lights would arrive as quickly as possible, but in her gut she knew that it would be too late. There was no choice here if she wanted the nightmare to be finally over and the devil stopped. Against all better judgement, they’d entered the building trying hard to ignore the flagrant sense of doom.

  The cop in front of her raised his hand and she stopped instantly. The staircase was narrow and the bare plaster walls smelled old and stale. There was a world above them that went about its business oblivious to the death that lay below.

  The old cop started to move again and she followed. When he reached the basement floor he paused while she closed her eyes again and sought guidance. The images rushed at her with blinding speed and she had to fight hard to stop them from swallowing her completely. She knew that if she lost her grip here then she would be lost forever. Eventually, she managed to catch the scent as she bit down on her lower lip hard enough to draw blood. In the shadowy light of the basement her throat was clogged with the coppery taste and she couldn’t tell what was real in her mouth and what existed in the gap between her visions and reality.

  She pointed to the left and the cop moved in front of her, his weapon held up in a strong steady grip. The basement level had been renovated to provide long winding corridors with multiple doors hiding God only knew what. The sense of death and torture here was palpable and she had to find a steely core deep within herself to avoid running screaming from this place. Faces of pain reached out from the dark and threatened to drag her down with clenched clawing fingers. Their features were contorted with furious vengeance as they sought to lash out blindly at any target.

  She reached out and grabbed hold of the cop’s belt to steady and ground herself again. She had never felt such an overwhelming sense of the other world before, but still she pressed on. This man, this monster, had held the country in a vice-like grip of terror for months now. He had exploded multiple families in fireballs of grief and she held on to the images of devastation around small graves as she kept on walking.

  She was sure now that the stench of death was real as the cop staggered a little and held a hand up to cover his nose and mouth. She had lived for so long under a cloud of the monster’s carnage that she knew it all had to end one way or the other.

  Her mind was reeling with the projected images from an ocean of death coupled with the real world dangers of their surroundings. The cop stopped as the corridor reached a stop and he looked both ways, his ears craning for sounds to aid him, but the world was silent.

  She could only hear the crawling and scuttling of tiny claws across the dirt floor. Rodents scampered into the darkness, dancing beyond the dim light of the cop’s torch. She knew that she couldn’t trust herself to tell what was real amidst the killing ground and suddenly she felt worse than useless. She wasn’t a warrior, she wasn’t a cop; she was just a woman with a gift, or a curse depending on your point of view, and now her radar was faltering badly.

  She tried once more and closed her eyes, allowing the tidal wave to wash over her. She had been tracking this man for weeks now, delving into his mind and living under his skin. It was a grotesque invasion and one that left her with an indelible stain on her soul that would never wash off. The monster’s thoughts were dark and evil, thick with blood and pain, and his fevered sickness would sometimes take hours to leave her after she had left him.

  She sank into his mind and saw through his eyes. His world was sepia toned with blazing halos of light around his chosen victims. His thoughts were almost always too muddled to decipher and she still didn’t know what drove him. He looked down at the cold steel in his hands and she felt the sharp blade as it cut deeply into his palm as he squeezed his hand around the knife. He suddenly looked up and towards the door, away from his prize which was bound to a bloodstained post, small hands shackled in chains and a reedy chest wracked with sobs.

  She felt the cop shake her… once, twice and then a hard stinging slap across her face. She blinked through the tears brought about by the cop’s hand and pointed down the corridor towards a door at the end. The cop left her and ran for the door, not caring about his loud approach.

  She tried to call after him but her throat was parched dry and she could only squawk. The cop reached the door just as it started to open. She looked on as a pair of eyes emerged from the darkness, eyes that she had looked out through a thousand times but never stared into.

  The cop raised his gun as the man emerged but he was too slow and the knife was impaled in his chest before he could fire. The emerging monster cocked his head to one side with puzzled interest as he stared at her from no more than 20 feet away. His blade dripped blood onto the dirt floor and she could see over his shoulder into his room where a young girl shivered.

  The monster stepped over the cop and started to walk towards her. His face was crinkled, as though he knew her somehow but just couldn’t quite place her face. She wanted to tell him that she knew him, that they knew each other, that she had shared his head space on many occasions. She wanted to tell him that she understood, that she sympathised, that she could help, but she had nothing. Her mind screamed at her to run, to flee from this man, but her feet were rooted to the spot. She wasn’t a cop, she wasn’t a fighter, she wasn’t even armed.

  The world narrowed to a pinpoint as the man reached her. He stroked the side of her face with a surprisingly sof
t hand. His touch was cold and his fingers seemed to leave a trail on her skin. She couldn’t move and trembled before him as the dead circled him like wafts of smoke dancing in and out of sight. His other hand raised the knife and the dim light glinted off the silver blade. She felt the sharp edge press into her chest; the tip drew blood as the man started to carve his symbol into her soft flesh.

  She closed her eyes and waited for death to take her, praying that it wouldn’t hurt too much. Her senses roared in deafening blasts as the dead screamed in frustration that she had failed them. A splash of blood splattered warmly against her face and thankfully there was no pain. It took her a moment to realise that it was not her blood, and when she opened her eyes again the man had slumped to his knees in front of her.

  The old cop had somehow clung to life with enough courage for the both of them. He had fired his gun with an aim surely sent from God. She looked back at the man before her, as he slumped backwards staring up at the ceiling with a large dark stain spreading out across his chest.

  She stepped over the monster and ran to her saviour. The old cop was fading fast and he had barely been able to lift his arm up off the ground to fire the gun. His chest sounded wheezy and frail as he struggled to breathe through the blood that was filling his lungs.

  She knelt beside him and cradled his head in her lap as tears fell from her face. She had led them both down here and the only man that had trusted her had paid for it with his life. She laid the cop’s head gently down onto the ground and stood to try and make the tragedy mean something. She stepped into the room beyond the door and strode quickly to the shackled girl. As she reached the restraints, the girl’s eyes grew large with terror and the woman spun around quickly, fearing the worst.

  The monster staggered towards her, clutching his chest and inexplicably still breathing. The woman frantically searched around the room for a weapon but could see nothing of use. The monster raised the cop’s gun that he had stopped to pick up and the air was suddenly filled with loud blasts. The woman felt every bullet as it tore through fragile flesh and shattered even sturdy bone.

  She fell to the ground just as the monster leapt through the air and landed hard on her chest with the knife held high above his head. The silver blade plunged downwards over and over again as the shadows of the dead leaned in for a closer look.

  CHAPTER ONE

  TODAY

  Jane Parkes woke in a cold sweat, as she always did after the nightmare: bolt upright and with her mouth twisted into a silent scream. Her eyes were wide and wild as her mind fought to calm her raging senses. She didn’t dare look across to the other side of the bed as she knew the slowly fading face would be staring back at her with dead eyes and a black heart. She had made the mistake of rolling over enough times in the past without checking first; no one should have to face the dead this early in the morning.

  She felt his presence drift away like smoke on a soft breeze, a diminishing apparition that she had brought out of her subconscious mind and one who didn’t belong. The walls between her two worlds were often painfully thin and she had to work at maintaining the barrier. But it was when she slept that the dead seemed to sense their opportunity.

  The daylight of her bedroom sparkled and danced through the thin net curtains. The birds flittered and sang out in the garden under the early morning summer sun. Slowly, her heart rate settled and ceased threatening to burst through her ribcage. It took a great effort but she resisted starting another day in a foggy cloud of prescription pills.

  She swung her legs out of the bed and touched her feet down on the cool wooden floor. “This is my room, this is me talking, and this is the here and now, the real and the firm,” she recited as she stood. She had many mantras along with breathing exercises, yoga poses and a drawer full of small plastic bottles.

  That night in the basement had been 8 years ago and yet it still clung to her like a second skin, creeping out of the darkness at night when her defences were down as she slept. The annoying thing was that the real events had been terrifying enough without the added epilogue.

  She and Detective Inspector Karl Meyers had indeed entered the basement lair of the monster, christened somewhat distastefully as the ‘Crucifier’ due to his predilection for displaying his young female victims in a crucified pose and carving a symbol of a crucifix surrounded by a pentagram. Karl had died by the single stab wound to the chest but had managed to save her, as she’d stood frozen, before his final breath. The detective had found enough strength before he’d died to fire a single bullet and slay the beast.

  She had indeed helped to save the Crucifier’s final victim, but the monster had not risen from the grave; his body had stayed in the corridor where he had been shot. She had not been attacked and mortally wounded. Only in her dreams had she chosen to resurrect the man and she could not decipher just why. Part of her wondered if there was some significance to the ending of her recurring dream, but if she was honest with herself it was not a scab that she wanted to pick at.

  The Crucifier had been unmasked, somewhat anticlimactically, as Arthur Durage, and his was the face that she sometimes found waiting for her on the pillow in the mornings. He wasn’t a monster and he wasn’t ripped from the pages of a horror novel; he was just a man with mental health issues and, it turned out, a whole lot of luck in getting away with his crimes for so long. The basement had been stocked full of indisputable forensic evidence that tied Durage to the crimes and the case had been eagerly slammed shut.

  She had put her gift away that very night and had never opened herself up fully again. It was a road that could only ever lead to further disaster, she had decided, and had she not done her part? She had helped to bring down a killer and save his final victim, but the cost had been too great to live with.

  She still lived in her family’s cottage in Windhaven. It was a small coastal village on the far eastern coast of the UK. The Crucifier murders had occurred in Faircliff, some 70 miles away. She could have moved after that night, but the one problem with living in the UK was that everywhere was relatively close to everywhere else and she didn’t think that anywhere on the planet would be far enough away.

  She was an attractive woman, now in her late thirties, but with more lines and wrinkles than a woman of her age should have to suffer. Her hair, which was once such a dark shade of brown that it bordered on black, was now streaked with shards of silver that she refused to dye. She kept it long and it fell in thick waves with a natural curl. Her eyes were a deep emerald green that sparkled into life back in the day. Her figure was still pert enough to attract regular stares of appreciation but her libido had been shut away along with her gift, as though the two were somehow linked.

  The Parkes women had handed the gift down through the generations, with it occasionally skipping a daughter; Jane had not been so lucky. The idea of being psychic was fine in the abstract, but in reality it was far from a workable concept. In the beginning, images would fly at her from all angles at all times of the day and night. Blurred lines between reality and what she called the Shadow World became increasingly difficult to separate. She had walked into the middle of the road on more than one occasion chasing after a vision and had once been very embarrassingly arrested following her stroll out of a supermarket for not paying while following a small girl who wasn’t there.

  It had been her mother who had called it a gift but Jane had never quite found the words to sum up her own thoughts. There were times when she felt a great burden to save the world, and others where she felt like nothing more than a television playing out the dearly departed’s greatest hits.

  Her family had been largely dominated by women. Her father had left when she had just been a young woman in her early teens. But her childhood years had been full of happy memories of her father, and blissfully she remembered little of his leaving. It was as though there was a mental barrier that kept the grief at bay and only provided her with positive thoughts.

  She had originally started out on a path
to study the law. The rigours and certainty of the legal profession had greatly appealed after a childhood full of her mother’s incense sticks, hippy clothing, and lax lifestyle. Her school days had been full of taunts about her mother being a witch. Their home had been a revolving carousel of strange and unusual folks with odd ways and rituals. Jane had been only aware that her mother was slightly eccentric and had never taken her talks about the gift as being serious, but all that had changed when she’d had a long and fruitful talk with her grandmother. It wasn’t so much the talk, it was more the fact that it had turned out that her grandmother had actually died on the other side of the country before she’d sat down beside Jane on the garden swing. She’d known then that this was all real. She had always known her own mind and trusted her own eyes. There had been no gap in logic for her to dismiss the vision; it had been clear, and it had been real.

  After her acceptance of her ability, it soon became impossible to comprehend a career that would require every ounce of her concentration. Even her studies soon proved to be too much and she’d had to drop out. She worked a succession of menial jobs, ones that cared little if she didn’t turn up for work and where she was simply fired in the post. There had been a great-great grandfather who had made some money in textiles back down the line and her family had been frugal with the inheritance. Jane herself had the family cottage handed down after her mother’s passing and she had little in the way of material interests. The interest on her nest egg paid for her meagre existence and she took jobs more for the company than the wages.

  There was never any warning to a vision and they varied greatly in strength and duration. It was a difficult experience to explain to anyone outside of her family and those similarly affected, not least because she didn’t want a one way ticket to the funny farm. She thought of the visions like a slashing scythe that cut through her mind with pendulum swings of reflected bright sunlight. Time slowed as the swinging blade grew blurry and the world turned into sepia tones around her. Sometimes she would see a person standing before her; their faces were usually contorted into either masks of confusion or worse, screaming rage. It was the latter that had passed by after being ripped from life at the hands of another; it was these faces that she dreaded. Usually she had the choice as to whether or not to engage, but sometimes, when the dead were insistent, she had no option but to follow.