He sounded terribly rational, which should have alarmed me, because the more logical Jacob was acting, the more likely I was to be cornered into a situation I wanted no part in. But I hurt all over—particularly the one leg that hurt from my ass to my knee—and I didn’t have any good ideas of my own.
I sat on the side of the bed, and Jacob sat at the foot. The corner of the GhosTV console jutted there between my knees and his, segment-ing us each into the tiny slots of space we occupied. Jacob unwrapped the recycled TP, then took my bloody hand in his lap. He swabbed off my hand and wrapped it loosely, enough to stop me from bleeding on the mountain of furniture crammed into the puny room without melding with the wound.
“We need to find Lisa,” he said, “and nobody here knows what happened. Right?”
“Right.”
“As far as we know, this building’s clean of spirit activity, but you’ve got this GhosTV that might help you locate a spirit that’s harder to see. You with me so far?”
“I guess.”
“While I focus on interviewing the residents, you see if you can find a surprise star witness.”
That’s the thing about Jacob. He always makes so much damn sense.
At least someone or something did. As plans went, it was the best one either of us could come up with, and so we planted ourselves in front of that TV set, and we played with those dials until my brain went numb. Jacob created a grid of combinations we could try, but even with the “volume” knob at a constant, there were a thousand possible combinations. I let him worry about the numbers, and I sat beside the GhosTV, and I looked.
I didn’t see anything.
The frustrating thing is, a lack of ghosts didn’t necessarily mean the GhosTV wasn’t functioning. It could’ve just as easily meant there were no ghosts there to be seen.
In an ideal world, I’d find myself a place where there was subtle spirit activity, maybe a disembodied voice, or a cold spot—yeah, sometimes they only feel like cold spots, even to me—and I’d make a quick call and have the GhosTV set up on site. Then the knobs might mean something. Temperature. Transparency. Time.
But testing the GhosTV in a spirit-free room was like learning to swim in your car. If your car wasn’t currently at the bottom of Lake Michigan, at any rate.
I was really sick of playing, “See anything?” “No,” by the time a tap on the hallway door broke the monotony. Despite all my creaky aches and pains, I was itching to do something, anything, that was different from the profound nothing I’d been doing for the past few hours, and so I slipped around Jacob, climbed the bed and opened the door.
It was Lyle. He had a rolling cart with him, suitcases on the bottom, and a couple of cafeteria trays on top. “The airline dropped off your luggage. And I thought you might want…” he pointed toward the trays, then spoke over whatever he’d been trying to say as if he was having trouble finding words. “It’s lentil soup. That’s all that was left, but….”
“Great.” I realized I was ready to keel over from hunger. “That’s great.” I opened the door wider, then wondered where we’d manage to fit the soup, let alone our suitcases.
Lyle actually staggered back a step when he got a load of our room.
“How…why…?” He gestured at the displaced dresser, the big plastic crate, and of course, the GhosTV. “This is ridiculous. I’ll get you another room.”
“No, it’s okay,” I said quickly, because I didn’t think I could handle being alone with the GhosTV. “It’s late. We’ll figure something out in the morning.”
As I took the tray from him, and then the suitcases one at a time to hand off to Jacob, I couldn’t help but wonder: wouldn’t it be a hell of a lot easier if that extra bed were in the hallway? True, it would be a challenge to sleep with Jacob on anything smaller than a king-sized mattress, but I was accustomed enough to having his elbows in my ribs. Lyle was obviously gay—either that, or he was in serious denial—so it seemed like I should be able to lay it all out on the table with him.
Except I couldn’t. Not yet. Because once something’s been said, you can’t exactly unsay it.
“You saw the land line,” Lyle said, once we’d crammed the final suitcase in. “I couldn’t take it any more and I pulled the plug. We’ve had our new number all of two days, and those freaks found it already and started crank-calling us again. So if you need anything, here’s my cell number.”
I took his business card and set it on the corner of the dresser with my bloody toilet paper hand. “Actually, we could use some gauze and Band-Aids, and some first-aid cream.”
Lyle gasped—he’d just now noticed it?—but he didn’t ask what had happened to me. That was good. I wasn’t sure whether to blame the crate, the carpet, or the GhosTV. “I’ll be right back—two minutes.” I closed the door after him and sagged against the closet door. “Hand me a soup?”
Jacob passed a warm takeout container across the crate lid. I took it from him, peeled off the lid, and drank it without even chewing the lentils.
Better.
Jacob decided to forego the spoon himself, though I do think he chewed. “Needs salt.”
Another Lyle-tap on the door, and there he was, pink-cheeked and breathless, holding out a white plastic first-aid kit. “I think this should work. Unless you wanted the homeopathic—”
“It’s fine.” I wished I’d asked him for a Coke, but it seemed cruel to make him run back downstairs again. He looked like he was waiting for some other exchange of pleasantries, but I was so worn out, I felt anything but pleasant. I took the first-aid kit, handed him the empty containers, said, “Thanks,” and shut the door.
In no time flat, I had my bag splayed out atop the carton lid on my bed, and I was rifling through for the pill bottles I’d wrapped in my spare socks. It was eleven thirty—holy shit, one thirty Chicago time—and I was so wiped out I’d probably sleep like a baby even without a Valium. I told myself I was in an unfamiliar place, so I should make sure I could wake up quickly if I needed to…but I wasn’t buying it. I touched the orange plastic bottles to reassure myself that they were there, but it wasn’t enough.
Half a tab wouldn’t hurt, I figured. Though when I dumped them into my palm and looked for a halfsie, I couldn’t find one, and ended up taking a whole dose.
While I re-wrapped my hand, Jacob checked that his stuff was all intact, then changed into a T-shirt and sweatpants. “We should call it a night,” he said. “We’ll be fresher in the morning.” He climbed over the foot of his bed and worked his way under the garish blankets.
The full-sized mattress was barely big enough to hold him—I knew as much from my old bed, which had also been a full. The second bed held the crate lid, and now, my torn-apart suitcase. We probably didn’t want to put anything on top of the console, lightweight or not.
But maybe if I pulled my bed away from the wall a couple of inches I could sneak the crate lid over the far side….
“Can you reach the overhead light?” Jacob asked.
I looked at the train wreck on my mattress. “I need to figure out where to—”
“Don’t even think about it.” He held up his own blanket in invitation.
“Cut the light and come to bed.”
I wasn’t even going to risk draping a suit over the GhosTV. Heck, if we’d been able to re-crate the clumsy piece of furniture without smashing through the window, I would’ve voted for putting it completely away to ensure nothing happened to it while I slept. I hung my suit over the growing mountain of stuff on the spare bed, put my sidearm on the floor near the nightstand where I wouldn’t fall over it and accidentally shoot myself, then I turned off the light and climbed into bed in my underwear.
“You’re not worried about getting cold?”
I was facing Jacob with my head pillowed on his biceps. Our legs were woven together. Every exposed inch of me seemed to be pressed up against somewhere warm on him. “I’ll be fine,” I said into his neck.
His hand roamed my shoulder blades, s
kin gliding over skin. The back of my leg was still on fire, but the rest of the aches and pains I’d gathered over the course of the day settled into an annoying throb that Valium and exhaustion would erase soon enough.
First the drug dog at the airport, then trusting my life to Dreyfuss as he flew us here, and now the GhosTV that didn’t do anything—all the while Lisa’s trail grew colder. The day had been an emotional roller coaster—or maybe an emotional scrambler. Even an emotional people-flinger. One of those rides I would have been better off sitting out.
Chapter 14
My head bumped against something hard, and it came back to me that I wasn’t in my own bed—heck, I wasn’t even in my own state— and I was currently mashed into a room that was way too small, and a bed where two “big and tall” guys could hardly squeeze into with a shoehorn.
Jacob would need to move over, simple as that. I gave a push, in hopes of prying him away from some of the mattress real estate, but couldn’t get a good sense of what was where, or which way I was even facing. Talk about disorientation. I usually had a sense of my headboard and my nightstand, but here everything seemed topsy-turvy, as if I was attempting to sleep in an entirely new hemisphere.
Whenever I can, I avoid opening my eyes if I wake up in the middle of the night. I feel like it helps me get back to sleep faster. In this case, though, the cop in me wasn’t going to rest if I didn’t get the lay of the land. I snuck one eye open and saw the wall an inch from my nose.
The wall? That was some fancy sleep choreography on Jacob’s part.
I’d finally fallen asleep facing the narrow lane between the beds with him curled against my back. I felt behind me for Jacob.
He was gone.
That’s how I’d ended up against the wall—I was alone. Huh? Where was Jacob? What was he thinking, going somewhere without letting me know? He wouldn’t do that, would he? That was totally not like him. He was probably just taking a leak, and the feel of him getting out of bed was the thing that woke me up. Nothing to worry about. I rolled to face the tiny aisle between the beds and attempted to make room for Jacob when he came back, but couldn’t quite figure out where the edge of the bed was. The more I skootched forward, the more space I seemed to have.
What the…?
I looked, really looked, at the opposite wall—what I could see of it in the murky dark, anyway—and tried to figure out where the crate lid and the luggage and all the other crap on the spare bed had gone.
Nothing. The room was an expanse of nothing, all the way to the opposite wall.
Oh, hell. I was the one who’d been abducted, not Jacob. I looked around in panic, and got a lentil-churning look at a mirror on the ceiling—me and Jacob, spooned together and swaddled in an ugly print sheet. Mirror? Where had the mirror come from? Wouldn’t I have noticed a mirrored ceiling within the first nanosecond of entering the room? Wouldn’t Jacob have at least made a passing attempt to get me to do something X-rated beneath it?
Even though I’d taken the classes, heard all the theories, and drank the Kool-Aid, it took me an extra few seconds to actually understand what was happening. I moved, but the mirror image didn’t move. I moved some more. I tried to get a feel for the bed I was laying on, except it wasn’t a bed. And I wasn’t on my back. And then I finally put it all together.
I was having an out-of-body experience.
At this point, most astral projection newbies usually get so freaked out that they snap right back into their physical shells. I, personally, was plenty freaked. But no snap.
At Camp Hell, they’d said on more than one occasion that our astral bodies are connected to our physical bodies with a silver cord that sprouts from the solar plexus. I looked down at my stomach. No cord.
Did that mean I was dead? Crap.
I tried to swim down to myself, but I felt too buoyant. I made it back to the wall to use it to climb down to my physical body, which did work, briefly. But then my hand sank into the wall. That might seem freaky, but strangely enough, my lack of substance didn’t bother me nearly as much as my missing silver cord. I could feel the difference between the open air and the wall. It was like having my arm in the sleeve of a snug sweater. I pushed a little bit more, and felt the freedom of the opposite side of the wall, like my fingertips had just emerged from the sleeve.
I threaded my arm back and forth through the wall a few times, and once that seemed okay, I took a chance and shoved my head through.
There it was. The bathroom.
A small plastic nightlight glowed from the outlet near the medicine cabinet, so I could somewhat see. Luckily, you-know-who wasn’t taking a late-night dump or anything. I tried to make out a few details so I could verify later that I wasn’t simply having some kind of elaborate sleeping fantasy, but it was too dark to get a really good look—incredibly, palpably dark, like I was wearing a pair of dirty sunglasses.
I pushed myself forward, feeling the strange glide of the wall all around my astral body as I passed through it. And then, there I was, fully, on the other side of the wall. Out of visual range of my physical body. I checked to see if that thought panicked me. It didn’t.
Strangely enough, it seemed easier to move around if my physical shell wasn’t in the room. I scooted around the perimeter of the ceiling, then experimented with controlling my descent. I was able to get down to about six feet.
Maybe if I was farther still from my physical body, I’d have even more leeway.
I could have just gone out into the hallway, I’m sure. But I’d been presented with a chance to peep at Con Dreyfuss, see if he was doing anything incriminating, and I couldn’t pass it up.
I pushed my hand through the far wall of the bathroom and it met with some resistance. I was probably ranging too far from my physical body. All I wanted was a tiny peek, though, so I pushed a little harder and felt a flex, and then a give, as my fingers broke through.
I followed with my head.
Dreyfuss’ room was even darker than the bathroom, but a sliver of streetlight shone in through the side of the curtain. He was in bed, presumably asleep, wrapped tight in his sheets and curled up in a fetal position. A few corkscrews of hair stuck out the top of the blanket roll.
Okay, I told myself. I’ve had my fun. Time to go back. Except I didn’t feel like going back to that cramped room with its small bed and disappointing TV. As long as I stayed in the building, I decided, I wouldn’t accidentally float away, so it couldn’t hurt to do a little more exploring. With no one to get in my way, a quick peek around might save Jacob and me a whole lot of time in our investigation.
I pulled my head back into the bathroom and floated to the wall that separated the bath from the hallway, which I tested with my hand.
That wall was easy. My hand slipped right through. I followed with my head. There it was—the hall. A row of identical doors on each side, an elevator at the end, slightly worn carpet and stucco walls.
I floated to the room across the hall and pushed my head through the door. A sleeping person. Same in the next room, and the next.
The rooms held the same basic pieces of furniture, but they had different personal stuff in them, at varying levels of tidiness. I couldn’t say for sure what color anything was, though whether the reason was because it was so dark, or because my astral vision was naturally desaturated, I didn’t know.
Not only did it quickly get boring to look at sleeping person after sleeping person, but I felt slimy about invading the residents’ privacy, too. I told myself it was no worse than any other psychic search, and that I was well within my rights to pry all I wanted. My paper PsyCop license said so. But a look at a guy who’d fallen asleep with his TV on, muted, his dentures on the nightstand beside him, his hand down the front of his boxers, and his toothless mouth snoring wide—that sent me backpedaling into the hall wishing I could take an astral shower.
What did I think I’d find in the residents’ rooms, anyway? The chance that any of them were involved was pretty slim. It wasn’t as i
f any of them were effective, practicing Psychs. Or if they were, they wouldn’t know as much, since no one had ever really ranked them.
The thought of getting farther away from my body didn’t make me quite as anxious anymore, so I figured I could take advantage of my situation to get a look at Lisa’s room with my astral eyes and see if I’d missed anything. Good thinking on Dreyfuss’ part to score us the room above hers…unless it was all just part of his nefarious master plan. Which it probably was. Still, I couldn’t let his motives stop me from finding Lisa, so I floated back to my door to get my bearings, then I imagined myself sinking down, down, down.
The floor felt permeable, but more solid somehow than the walls.
Like pushing through one of those ball pits at a kiddie restaurant. Not that I’d ever played in a ball pit as a child. But a few years before, I’d scoured one for body parts in the investigation of a particularly inventive crime.
My feet popped free, then my legs, my ass, my shoulders and head.
I opened my eyes. The first floor was much more shadowy than the second, though the layout was the same. I floated myself down to eye-level with the doorway to try to get a look at the room number, just to be sure I’d been traveling in the right direction.
The number on the door wasn’t a number. It was…a shape. A glyph.
Some weird combination of loops and sticks I had no way to interpret. My astral head hurt just looking at it.
Maybe it had always been that way, and I simply hadn’t noticed when Chekotah had shown me the room. No problem. I’d just poke my head in and look for the bag of Cheetos to make sure I was in the right spot. I mashed my forehead into the door and felt significant resistance. It flexed and held, springy, like a mattress. Distance from my physical body seemed to be making my astral body wimpier. But since I’d made my way through some resistance on Dreyfuss’ wall, I decided to suck some white light, gather my will, and give that door a big, hard push.
PsyCop 6: GhosTV Page 11