He leaned in as Clyde took his eyes away from the microscope to jot down some notes. When Torin pulled his own face away from the eyeglass, he had no doubt his expression was a mask of dread.
***
Kendra followed a couple of her own body lengths behind Notchka, both arms extended and both hands gripping the gun. She fired at the apparition stalking Notchka and swinging at her with an axe. The relatively giant male was bald and tattooed and heavily muscled. Notchka barely had time to turn around and scream, psychically sensing him there, before Kendra’s bullet connected with the specter’s forehead and dispatched him. “Not bad, Kendra, even if you’re not sure if it’s the girl you should be shooting, or her attackers.”
The nine-year-old girl ran screaming away from her assailant. Kendra was only able to track her with the acoustic assistance. Finally the little girl realized she was giving her position away and clamped both hands over her mouth. When she settled down a bit further, she continued to tread softly through the darkened house, freezing every time her foot sent an unwitting creak through one of the loose floorboards.
The old Victorian had to have been built in the 1900s and hadn’t had a single refurbishing since, assuming Kendra’s sense of history held up in this timeline. The builder’s idea of going high-tech was reflected in the electrical wiring running through the house, the first of its kind, evidenced by the push button on and off brass plate panels, a hallmark of early light switches. She knew this because technology minors were required for all detectives majoring in criminal justice, as more often than not the secret to taking down the bad guy involved some amount of technological prowess. And of course that minor included the history of technology, just for nights like tonight.
She wondered why the girl didn’t hammer her fists into the wall to turn the lights on. Then again, if Kendra was facing off a house full of ghosts who glowed ethereally in the darkness, she’d go with a lights-off approach herself. The next apparition to come at Notchka out of the shadows had a scythe in his hand and swung it with the idea of getting her head to roll across the floor. He looked less like the cloaked grim reaper, and more like an angry Amish farmer, beard and all. Once again, despite the nerve-unsettling scream coming from the child, Kendra’s bullet beat him to the punch. One more apparition down. “If I ever get back home I’m going to suggest this as an upgrade to the shooting range qualifiers. If you can keep your hands steady in the middle of this creep show, you’re doing good. Just keep saying that to yourself, Kendra. You’ll start believing it sooner or later.”
The bullets never made contact with the apparitions. They just blew them away like a tuft of air blows smoke away, explaining perhaps why Notchka hadn’t turned each time to scout her out.
The latest apparition to come at Notchka peeled itself off the floor. Kendra thought it was just a bizarrely patterned throw rug until she got a closer look. Even that wouldn’t have jogged her memory if not for the fact that the human salsa spread congealed into the former fitness instructor, one of Notchka’s earlier victims. He managed to pin Notchka to the ground screaming before Kendra could get off a shot. This time the apparition didn’t go anywhere. It took three bullets fired at his heart to banish him back to whatever netherworld he’d crawled out of. “I think I’m getting the picture now,” Kendra mumbled. “This is your own private persecution, Notchka. You feel guilt for those you killed.” And I’m guessing that fitness instructor was a more recent murder, explaining why he was harder to dispatch. He’s still fresher in your memory. So you’ve been at this longer than I knew. Time enough to create your own house of horrors. The other victims suggest you and Clyde spent some time in the country, away from prying eyes, or so you thought, in your early developmental years. Well, you were younger any rate than you are now.
“Why take a psychic to a world that is more reactive to psychic energy than most? All the more likely to lose control of her in this world, Clyde, which tells me you must have a pretty damned important reason for coming to his timeline and this world versus the countless others.” Kendra figured she was muttering to herself to shield her from her own fears with the warmth and familiarity of her own voice.
She must have managed to work herself into a lather with her latest grating thoughts, all the same, as the girl turned in her direction and shouted, “Who’s there?” The extra excitement at making a breakthrough in the case, however small, must have spiked her psychic energy enough to register in the girl’s mind. Probably not for long considering how much more psychically charged these characters were popping in and out of her awareness. The girl still couldn’t see her, still couldn’t be a hundred percent certain someone was there. Which was just as well. She wasn’t sure how she felt about being interrogated by a psychic nine-year-old.
Notchka backed away from Kendra’s perceived presence and right into the arms of the now-dead Kendra and Torin. “Well, well. What do we have here?” Dead Torin said. “It’s not too often we get to run into nine-year-olds who make it into the mass murderers hall of fame.”
Notchka struggled to get free of the hold Dead Kendra and Dead Torin had on her, one grabbing hold of each arm.
“Talk fast, little girl,” Dead Kendra said. “Or you’ll be joining us. Torin here says I have an unconscious desire for a child of my own that fits my psych profile. Personally I think he’s bonkers, but the thought of having an eternity to set you straight is growing on me.”
“I didn’t want to kill you!” the little girl blurted. “He made me. He always makes me. He’s the mass murderer, not me.”
“Why do you go along with it unless you get off on the power trip in some way?” Dead Kendra said.
“I do not! I go along with it because he says for every person we kill we’ll save billions. However much that is.”
“How?” Dead Torin asked.
“I don’t know. When I go inside his head I don’t understand the science. When I try to search the grid for supercomputers that can help me, I never come away with anything I can use. Either…”
“…his science is too advanced or it’s based on principles not currently accepted by the scientific community,” Dead Torin said, his eyes inwardly focused.
“I thought maybe I was blocking understanding somehow. Like maybe I didn’t want to know because deep down I didn’t trust him and I didn’t want to admit I had killed all those people for no reason.”
“If it makes you feel any better,” Dead Torin said, “we’re not sure whether to trust him either. He could be mankind’s savior or the reason we go extinct. Your Clyde Barker is one tough character even for adults to figure out.”
“Let me go!” Notchka shouted. She started in with a renewed burst of writhing. Dead Kendra and Dead Torin regarded one another and released their grips.
Dead Torin kneeled down to her level. “I tell you what,” he said. “We’ll keep digging into this matter in the spirit realm, you keep the pressure up on him to explain himself better and better each time, so some day you can be sure if you’re doing the right thing or not.”
“What can you do? You’re dead.”
“Now that we’re dead, we have access to informants and sources we didn’t have before,” the Dead Kendra explained, “who as it turns out give up the ghost a lot more readily than the living. No pun intended.”
“But what can the dead know?”
“We don’t know yet,” the Dead Torin said. “We’re still learning the rules of this dimension. But it’s just possible the dead are closer to the truth than the living.”
“Well, it’s good to have friends. I don’t like Clyde being my whole world. And I miss my dolls. I’m tired acting all grown up all the time.”
“We’ve been described as a couple of dolls on more than one occasion,” Dead Torin said.
Dead Kendra rolled her eyes the same time the still living Kendra did.
“Okay, it’s a deal,” Notchka said.
“Good, now that that’s settled,” Dead Torin replied, smiling w
armly, “what’s say we raise a blind in this mausoleum? I’m curious to see how you used your psychic abilities to carve out your own world for yourself.”
The little girl tromped over to the pull-down blind and yanked at it, sending it rolling up on its spindle. Dead Torin and Dead Kendra gawked at the sunset-illuminated world beyond the window. They weren’t the only ones with their mouths agape. Kendra took a step closer to confirm what she thought she saw but couldn’t believe.
Outside a dragon flew overhead. As it came around for a second pass, it painted a stripe of flames across the valley below where villagers were farming. But the crops and the people were immune. “Come see my house from the outside,” Notchka said, taking their arms. Kendra grabbed hold of her dead self as Torin had taught her to do and went along for the ride.
A split second later, the foursome was hovering outside the magnificent castle perched on the butte overlooking the valley.
“Much better,” Dead Torin said. “I didn’t much care for that dark, dank Victorian home. Thank goodness you can start feeling a little less guilty for now, at least until we can all determine if this guy is worth enabling or not.”
“Yeah, I like the outside a lot better,” Notchka said.
Dead Kendra shook her head. “What do people do who live in worlds where they can’t build whatever they like out of their imaginations?”
“Surely such places don’t exist except in hell,” Dead Torin mused out loud.
Kendra, sensing she’d just been handed her next clue in the case, rushed back to Torin’s side, her Torin, by visualizing the basement room she’d left him in and materializing beside him. She was getting better at this. Her new reality was shocking and unnerving, perhaps every bit as much as the world she’d left behind. But this one at least, crazy as it sounded, functioned by rules which made more sense to her. Maybe that was because back in her world, chaos reigned. The chaos of everybody creating the future at once by whatever philosophies and credos and twisted imaginations they lived by. So much so that it was anybody’s future and nobody’s future. Any meaning you could pull out of things you could bet you were giving things by reading into the situation and not the other way around. Give her any world, even an unjust world that gave her something to push against. As it was, her timeline was like walking on quicksand, every grain of sand some madman building the future in his basement or garage. This timeline, on the other hand, had the distinct advantage of cocooning the person in their own co-created world with like-minded souls the instant they set out to change anything. A far cry from one shared reality which no one could escape, and only could hope to make more chaotic by introducing one’s own inventions into the mix.
She looked around the Victorian basement she was back inside, and her latest train of thought made her twinge. It certainly didn’t cast a good light on Clyde Barker, who suddenly looked to her like all those other crazed world-makers toiling away in the privacy of their homes determined to eradicate anyone’s take on reality but their own.
“What did you find?” she asked Torin.
“Not sure yet. The science is a little beyond me, I’m ashamed to admit.”
“But if you had to hazard a guess?”
“I’d say he’s modifying his original virus, to make it more communicable, perhaps intending to infect everyone on the planet this time.”
“And in a more psychically impressionable world, he’d have the genetic coding he needed to make more Notchkas far more readily.” Kendra’s eyes went vacant briefly as she pondered the point. “Not sure how that fits with an earlier revelation of mine, that Clyde’s actually old school.”
“Oh, I don’t know, retroviruses are pretty old school by today’s standards.”
“Still, something doesn’t fit. This whole set up reeks of what we have in spades back home, just another scientist working in his basement to remake the world.”
“You’re thinking he’s more old school than that, I got you,” Torin said. “As in he’s trying to turn everyone into Zen masters, tweaking just enough of the biological computers that are we humans so that we don’t seem upgraded at all, just with the one missing ingredient that makes us if not Buddhas, the next best thing, until he can refine the formula further.”
“You’re inside my head again.”
“Sorry. Thought you wanted to put our heads together on this one.”
Clyde continued to be lost in his work, oblivious to the two of them; he might very well have been every bit as oblivious if they were fully incarnate and not actually haunting the room like a pair of ghosts.
“And you? What did you find out?” Torin asked.
“The kind of virtual realities people slip into in our world as best they can, depending on whether or not they can afford the holographic immersion cubes or if they have to settle for flat screen monitors… well, they don’t need VR here. They can do the same with just their imaginations.”
“Oh my. That definitely helps with connecting the dots.”
“How so?”
“Do you know much about astronomy?”
“No, when I’m not busy being a Luddite I’m busy being a Neanderthal.”
“Sorry, though it does make me wonder how you managed to take such a pathetic coping mechanism and parlay it into such successful detective work.”
“That mystery for another time, Torin,” she nudged impatiently.
“Ah, yes, well, according to astronomic theory, some worlds exist in garden spots perfectly suitable for supporting life, not too close to the sun, not too far away. They evolved, furthermore, to have water in abundance.”
“Yes, Torin, even I am familiar with that astronomical chestnut.”
“Well, why can’t the same theory apply to Ley lines?”
“Ley what?”
“Ley lines.”
“Don’t go all New Age on me, or I swear I’ll leave you here to fend for yourself.”
“You believe in Chinese acupuncture, don’t you?”
“Gave up my chiropractor for my acupuncturist, so yes.”
“Same principal acupuncture is based on. We have energy meridians coursing through our bodies that pool and intersect in energy vortices known as nadirs and chakras, depending on how many energy lines intersect, and if we’re talking about the joining of major rivers or just minor rivulets.”
“The abridged version, Torin.”
“A garden spot world relative to Ley lines would be one where psychic powers come far more easily. There’d be that much more chi energy flowing through each of us, empowering telepathy, telekinesis, teleportation. So instead of the rare individuals like me who have mastered some of these things, these features would be quite common.”
She pondered the point as best she could amidst mental circuitry far better at denial than at accepting wild ideas. Possibly explaining why even though everything he said confirmed her own suspicions about Clyde being determined to fashion Zen masters wholesale, she still didn’t want to believe it.
“If I’m right,” Torin continued, “and this is one of those worlds, and Clyde here means to infect the water supply or get his virus into everyone by some other means…”
“…and it’s already a psychically charged world, then he’d have a thought amplifier that could transmit throughout the heavens.”
“The heavens, as in other timelines, other universes?”
“Precisely. Like one big, I mean really big radio satellite antenna.”
“Meaning what exactly?”
“According to the Buddhists, we must be careful to guard our thoughts because every thought lives forever and affects everyone else. Of course, most of us have such weak minds and poor concentration that it’s more like a background static haze that others of clearer, more pointed minds have to think through. Hard enough, but…”
“If this were the new static noise… they mightn’t have to think through it. It could carry them along to whatever nobler destination they’d care to travel to.”
“You’d have a world full of, well, world-makers. And with enough of these worlds online acting as repeaters to magnify the signal further…”
“He hasn’t just liberated one world, he’s liberated all of them from the tyranny of the top one percent, whatever form they take in whatever historical era. You can’t very well rule over gods whose minds cannot be enchained by fear because they know no limits.”
“It’s weird to think in two-part harmony,” he said. “Most of the time it’s more like opposites attract.”
“Yeah, well, that’s because I haven’t given you my reactions to any of this b.s. yet.”
Torin grimaced. “Knew it was too good to be true.”
“You get that the only reason I believe anything coming out of your mouth is that as psychics go you have one of the best track records on the planet, well, our planet, anyway.”
“I’m glad you’ve found a crutch for getting around your own rigid thinking.”
“I also concede that this plan has a diabolical genius fitting of, well, a diabolical genius.”
“But?”
“Even if it’s possible, I’m sorry, but one man’s utopia is another man’s hell. I don’t want to live in a world of gods. What makes you think they’d be any less warring and selfish and malformed psychically than the rest of us? Only now the battles are that much more epic. Think of living in Lebanon during one of their forty year wars where, for most of that time, the cities are nothing but bombed out ruins, and you get the idea of what not being able to contain the madness is like.”
Torin sighed. “Sadly, the Buddhists agree with you. According to them, domains where folks have godlike powers already exist, and to much the same ends as you predict.”
Clyde continued his work, torturing his substance through its latest tests with his equipment. His working on the bigger picture had a certain irony considering he could not take in the bigger picture of Torin and Kendra in the room.
“You remember those news blackouts that started back with the O.J. Simpson trial?” she said. “Where one headline grabs the news broadcasts to the exclusion of all else for months? And suddenly nothing of any import was happening anywhere in the world but that? What’s to stop a bunch of psychics a little too-in touch with one another’s thinking from being prone to similar runaway effects?”
Time Bandits (Age of Abundance Book 1) Page 12