Nina wanted to change the subject, before he could remember the encounter. “Kyle, I think we should talk about something—”
“It was a tail! He had a tail and he was hitting me in the head with it.”
Kyle sat up straight in the bed, nearly tumbling Nina to the floor. His fingers dug into his hair, searching. He gasped when he found what he was looking for.
“Feel this, Baby. I have knots on my head.” He grabbed her hand and moved it to the spot.
“You are a knot head,” she teased.
“How can I have lumps on my skull from a dream?”
“Well, maybe you did it to yourself and just didn’t realize it,” she ventured.
“What the hell? Was that thing real?” Kyle started to panic.
Nina wasn’t yet ready to give explanations. “Calm down, lover. Maybe you just banged your head on the headboard while you were sleeping.”
“You calm down,” he huffed. “You’re not the one who was attacked by a monster.”
“I am calm,” she assured him. “Will you listen to yourself? You aren’t making any sense. Monsters? Kyle, do you really believe you were visited by a monster in your sleep?”
Kyle jumped from the bed. “Hell, yes!”
He stood in the middle of the room, trembling. His eyes darted around him, searching for signs that his assailant had returned.
“The pain,” Kyle murmured. “He set me on fire. I felt it. I could smell it.”
“Where are your burns?” Nina tried to reason with him.
“I am sure they…” his voice trailed off as he patted down his naked body.
“You said it yourself, dreams can seem so real.”
“No, you said that. What’s going on, Nina? Why are you doing this to me?”
“Doing what to you?”
He dropped to his knees on the carpet. “Making me think I’m crazy.”
Nina sighed as she moved to stand behind him, massaging his shoulders. “You’re not crazy, lover.”
“And that smell…” Kyle continued as if he hadn’t heard her. “It was so putrid, so— Rotten egg doesn’t even describe it.”
“Like sulfur?” Nina hoped that if she could put a name to it, she might ease his mind.
“Maybe.” Kyle lifted his head, before resting it on her forearm.
“Did you know it used to be referred to as the product of the riverside?”
“What did?”
“Sulfur. People would occasionally come across deposits of it on the shores. The smell evoked images of evil. It didn’t take long for early scholars to latch on to it. They used it to give a tangible aspect to hell. ‘That’s the smell of brimstone. Hell is all fire and brimstone. The brimstone along the river is where demons have entered our world. It is part of hell that came with them.’ They used to preach all sorts of nonsense.”
“Why would they do that?”
“Fear,” Nina said with a snort. “Fear controls the masses. Some say religion was born so the learned could tame the world. The problem is the powers that be couldn’t decide on one religion. So, rather than tame it, the world is now enslaved by its factions. They make war, they kill, they do everything that civilized man should be repulsed by, and they do it all in the name of their own idea of God.”
Kyle turned so he could face her. “But you said there is no God.”
“You’re not listening to me,” she admonished gently. “The presence of religion does not prove that there is a God, it only proves that people want to believe in something. Religion is a tool, a set of laws, a—”
“A way to fill the void,” Kyle added.
“Look, whether or not there is a God, religion will always reign over the world of man.”
“Then what’s your point?” He asked, obviously more confused than ever.
“That if you really want me to help you, I need you to trust me. Every time you get rattled, I find myself arguing with you about God or monsters or whatever else you can latch on to.”
“I just want to understand.”
“Let me fill your void. You are so close to understanding now, I can taste it. Just give in. Give yourself to me and I will protect you from your dreams. I will protect you from yourself.”
“I love you, Nina.” Kyle buried his face in her chest, seeking comfort in her warmth.
“Then release your fears. Believe in me and together… together we shall show the world just how brilliant you truly are.”
Kyle nuzzled closer. “What would I do without you? You are my rock.”
Nina kissed the top of his head. “I think it’s time for you to get dressed.”
“It might be more fun if I stayed undressed. Perhaps, you could use a little less clothing yourself.”
“There will be time for that later.” She pulled his face up to hers by the chin. “But first, we have some unfinished business that needs to be addressed.”
“Well, what are we waiting for?” Kyle laughed, allowing her to pull him to his feet.
“Now, let’s see if you can do it properly this time.” Nina waved an object in front of Kyle’s face.
It was a familiar picture; the one she showed him on that night he was shot, which now felt like a lifetime ago. He grunted as his eyes spotted the painting on the wall behind the couch. He could practically smell the salt in the air as he gazed at the picture. Yeah, I definitely don’t want to go back to that beach.
She held the photo just below her smile. “Are you ready?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be.” He shrugged.
“Good.” She stepped closer to him. “You know the routine. I want you to picture yourself in the room.”
Kyle listened for the sound of his heartbeat. He was mindful of his breathing, keeping it at a steady pace. As he stared at the picture, the room melted away. His vision narrowed until the only thing in his line of sight was the photograph. The air around him began to shimmer once again. His shape lost its edge and his body blurred. The sound of rushing water roared in his ears.
I hope this doesn’t mean I’m about to get wet.
He barely stifled a gasp when he felt carpet beneath his bare feet. He looked around the darkened room. Holy shit, I did it!
“I knew that you could,” Nina whispered in his ear, causing him to jump in surprise.
“This is a nice house,” Kyle observed. The photograph had only captured a small portion of the room.
“Wait until you see the rest of it.”
“Who lives here?” Kyle wasn’t accustomed to performing in such lavish surroundings. Nothing gets the police in an uproar quicker than killing rich people.
“It belongs to Sheila McCrae.” Nina raised her left eyebrow as she looked at him. “And just for the record, the police are already in an uproar.”
Did I say that out loud?
“What does Mr. McCrae do?”
“There is no Mr. McCrae,” Nina whispered.
“What?” Kyle asked, louder than he should. “There has to be two of them. There are always two for the Dance. Everybody knows it takes two to tango.”
“Keep your voice down,” Nina warned. “I didn’t say she was alone, I just said she wasn’t married.”
Kyle nodded, wondering why she was being evasive. Must I pry every bit of information out of her?
“Tina Garza is her lover and I am sure they are just waiting with baited breath to take their place in history.”
“Where are the guests of honor for tonight’s festivities?”
“They’re upstairs, sleeping soundly.”
“How do you know that?”
“After the night they’ve had, I don’t see how they couldn’t be exhausted.”
Kyle thought back to the first Dance he had ever performed. His partners were a lesbian couple. It was the one and only time his partners weren’t man and woman. He had hid in their home early in afternoon. He was resting patiently under the bed when he heard their car pull up. It seemed like it took them forever to finally fall asleep. Th
e sounds of movement and pleasure he heard above him made him want to crawl out of his hiding space to watch. It was all he could do to contain his curiosity until silence reigned long enough to tell him it was time. He had been clumsy and it didn’t go at all as he envisioned it.
It was your first time. Don’t be so hard on yourself. You’ve obviously gotten better with practice, he thought and went in search of the stairs.
“Go get ‘em, tiger.” Nina followed a few paces behind him.
“Which room are they in?”
“You tell me,” she returned with a smile.
“And just how do you expect me to do that?”
“Use your mind.” She placed a finger to her temple as she spoke. “Listen for heartbeats. Picture a beating heart in your mind and tell it to find the source.”
Kyle wondered if she had lost her mind.
“Just try it,” she urged. “Close your eyes and push.”
“Push?”
“I don’t know how else to explain it,” she confessed. “I just need you to concentrate. Picture the heart, know it is real and reach out with your mind. Push the thoughts beyond your skull.”
He gave her a final look of doubt before doing as she bade. He felt like an ass, standing on the stairs with his eyes closed. Despite his favorite pastime, the only place he had actually seen a beating heart was on The Discovery Channel. He grasped the image and tried to concentrate on the details. Once he was sure the image was clear, he held his breath and used his abs to press up on his diaphragm. He immediately felt the pressure building around his brain.
He nearly faltered when the sound of rushing water met his ears. I’m not about to jump next to someone’s heart am I? His mind raced with the possibilities. Then, just as quickly as it began, the sensation ceased.
“It’s not working,” he said, letting out his breath in a rush.
“You need to concentrate.” She stepped closer, reaching for his hand. “You can do this.”
“No, I can’t. I did what you said, but I must have done something wrong.”
“It will never work if you don’t learn to focus. You need to apply yourself.”
“Look, I think this lesson would be better learned some other time.”
“Why put off today—”
“Because I want tonight to perfect,” he said. “If I mess this up before we get started, it is liable to be as sloppy as the first one we did together.”
“You lack faith, lover.”
“That may be, but it is nothing we can change standing on these stairs.”
“I beg to differ.” She squeezed his hand. “If not now, then when? If not here, then where?”
Kyle barely suppressed his laugh. “Throwing cheesy quotes at me isn’t going to help, but it does make me smile.”
“What can I do to help make this easier for you to do?”
“Lead the way.” Kyle motioned ahead of them.
“I said help, not do it for you.”
“There will be plenty of time to teach me later.” Kyle sighed. “If you will do it for me this one final time, I promise to practice as long as it takes to get it right.”
Nina stared at him as she considered the proposal.
“We can start the minute we get home,” he added, sensing her waning resolve.
“Fine,” she said. “Try the third door on the left.”
Kyle glided up the remaining stairs, barely touching the steps. His heart pounded and it took everything he could do not to pant with excitement as he reached for the door. Wait until she sees what I am going to do for her tonight.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
“You’re here awfully early,” Tom quipped, popping his head into Anna’s office.
His voice startled her and she shot him a quick glance before checking her watch.
Early? It’s nearly seven. I wonder what he would say if he knew that I’ve been here since five. Aloud she said, “I had a thought that wouldn’t let me sleep so, I decided to come in and follow up on it.”
“What happened to not making this personal?” He took the empty seat across from her desk. “If you’re losing sleep, then I think that qualifies as taking your work home with you.”
“That doesn’t mean I don’t take this case seriously. I didn’t go to bed thinking about how we can crack the case. The thought just hit me out of the blue.”
“So what were you thinking about when you went to bed?” Tom winked at her.
She glared at him.
He threw his hands up in surrender. “Hey, take it easy. I’m just having a little fun with you.”
“You can keep those sorts of comments to yourself.”
“Okay, okay…” He put his elbows on her desk and leaned up to peek at the manila folder she held.
“You don’t have to be sneaky. If you want to know what I’m working on, just ask.”
“Okay, what was your big epiphany?”
“Nice word, have you recently started reading?”
“And you can keep those sort of derogatory remarks to yourself.” He twisted her words before feeding them back to her.
She grunted her amusement and spread the folder on the desk. “I have been going over the files they pulled from Dr. Pearlman’s house.”
“Everyone on his client list has been questioned. None of them, with the exception your lead, knew anything about him outside of his practice.”
“I’ve been reading through the notes he made on various sessions—”
“Anna, stop right there. You know that anything we find in his files won’t be admissible in court.”
“No, but I have found something odd.”
“I bet you did.” He laughed. “I wonder how anything revealed to a shrink wouldn’t be odd.”
“He has a stack of sessions with this one individual that are particularly disturbing.”
“A stack? I was under the impression that we only pulled out a few of the files before the house went up.”
“Yes, everything he had archived down in his basement was lost. They did, however, manage to pull out two full filing cabinets from his office.”
“This doesn’t look like enough folders to fill two cabinets.” Tom motioned to the short stacks on her desk.
“No, the rest are still booked in downstairs. These are just the files from the first drawer.”
“How long have you been at this?”
“That’s not important. Listen, I cross referenced the names on his client list to the files, and I found one patient in the cabinet who wasn’t listed in the Rolodex.”
“Maybe Pearlman dropped him as a patient. You said yourself that you found some disturbing stuff in the file. He could have decided he had bit off more than he could chew.”
“Well, I thought of that, but none of the files in the cabinet are more than a year old and the last entry is dated within a week of the latest one I found.”
“When was the last entry?”
“A little more than six months ago.”
“Six Months? How?” Tom paused. “Why didn’t that piece of information come up when we interviewed the other patients?”
“Yeah, it struck me as strange too.”
“So, who was the last person to see him?”
“That’s not important,” she said, shaking her head emphatically. “If they would have been among the missing, we would have flagged them during the initial—”
“I know that,” Tom interrupted. “I was just thinking we could ask the patients if they noticed anything different about Pearlman the last time they saw him.”
“I want you to read this.” She pulled a piece of paper from the bottom of one of the stacks and handed it to him.
Taking the paper from her hand, Tom began reading the report…
He seems to be slipping again. I wonder if he is still taking his medications. He is living proof that God is a masochist, giving a man that big such a nasty affliction. His imagination is as strong as his body. The images he describes are so vivid
they leave me nauseous. I pray that they are only hallucinations. If they weren’t, I am sure it would have made the papers by now.
He wrote a poem which he read to me today. He told me he didn’t remember writing it but knew it was his handwriting.
Tom stopped there to look for the poem. When he looked up, Anna was holding it up between her thumb and forefinger. He grabbed the paper and began to read.
“Confessions of True Love”
Murder held dear is like death so sweet
The aroma of flesh, of rotting meat
The moldy skin and puss filled sores
Eyes the texture of a sandy shore
Your death is marked by an oozing third eye
A telltale sign of how you died
The eye stares blankly out into space
None will know the last horror it faced
You looked at my pistol and begged for your life
You told me you had children, a home and a wife
My response was a quick "Then tonight’s not your night."
When my words faded away, so did your life.
Tom took note of the neat, deliberate handwriting. Each letter was the exact same height and width as the one before it. “Your guy has a way with words,” he said, before returning it to the file. He went back to reading the doctor’s report.
He said the poem frightened him. When I asked him to elaborate, he said he was afraid of anyone who could have written about such a horrible act.
There are times that I admire his duality. It seems like it would be an incredible freedom to entertain our darkest thoughts without fear of the memories following us into our waking life. Now matter how bloody his dreams, he wakes each morning with a clear conscious.
Tom looked up from the report. “So, you think the sessions with this Schizo are what sent the doctor over the edge?”
“No, I am beginning to think we’re after the wrong perp.”
“What? And how did you come to that conclusion?”
“If you read through the rest of the sessions, you’ll find he fits the profile a lot better than Brian Pearlman ever did.”
The Dance Page 16