That’s when everything went sparkly. And then black.
Chapter 15
“What are you doing?”
I blinked. It was dark, murky-dark, and after a moment of laggy disorientation, I remembered I’d been cruising through an astral projection. I blinked again, knuckled my eyes, but I couldn’t seem to see.
“Can you hear me?”
I looked around for the woman who was talking to me, but it was so damn dark. “Hello?” Stupid thing to say, I know. I could suddenly sympathize with every character in a horror flick who’d never come up with a more logical response.
“It’s very common for beginners to have trouble opening their eyes,” she said.
They were open plenty before, but then I rammed into…whatever that was. It took a few tries, because I’d begun to get confused about opening my astral eyes as opposed to opening my physical eyes, but as I thought back to the way I felt flying around my bathroom, my astral body figured out a way to replicate the sensation and my astral eyes opened. Someone was crouched over me—a woman about my age with spiky hair and glasses (astral glasses?) Her outfit had a shapeless, hand-dyed, third-world seamstress kind of look to it, and it was topped off with a necklace that looked like someone’s jute-and-stones collection had tangled together in their drawer and stuck that way. Her skin was luminous. She was slightly translucent.
“You’re astral,” I said.
“Well, at least you know what’s going on.”
“Why was it so hard to open my eyes?”
“Anxiety’s usually the main reason, although a high-protein Western diet has a tendency to make projecting more difficult. And alcohol.
You don’t drink, do you?”
“No.” I didn’t mention the Valium. “What’s your name?” She crossed her arms and looked at me. “You really are a newbie, aren’t you? We can’t do introductions; my name wouldn’t make any sense to you even if I told you. The right hemisphere of your physical brain isn’t in the loop.”
Good information, but it seemed to me she was awfully know-it-all about it. “Yeah. I am new. It’s my first time out.” Astral Lady nodded gravely. “Good, that’s good. I’d rather you were a wandering newbie than one of those nosy Feds they brought in.” By “one of those nosy Feds,” I presume she meant me. I glanced down at myself to see why that wasn’t readily apparent, and saw I was projecting in an old pair of jeans and my favorite black T-shirt, despite the fact that the physical clothes were in a laundry basket somewhere in Chicago. I decided it was against my best interests to announce I was with Dreyfuss, not that it took much arm-twisting.
“I’m Lisa’s friend. I couldn’t reach her—”
“And you were worried, and so you projected. I’ll bet you were thinking about her as you fell asleep, and that triggered the release of your astral body.” Know-it-alls were pretty easy to lie to. The ones who really liked to hear themselves talk spun out whatever story they wanted to hear, and all you had to do was let ’em ramble. “She was my friend, too.”
“Is this Lisa’s room? How can you tell? What’s with the number on the door?”
“You really are a newbie.” She looked at me with pity, and a hint of smugness. “It’s your brain, your right hemisphere. You haven’t noticed it’s impossible to count in the astral?” That was about the dumbest thing I’d ever heard, so of course I had to try. A few numbers, just to see….
The numbers squirmed away from me like a half-remembered dream.
“No. I guess not. So how come you can’t tell me your name, but you understand when I say Lisa?”
“Have you even had the intro lecture? Do you know anything at all?”
“I know I’m astral,” I said. That should count for something.
“Say we’ve heard of someone—Bono, or Al Gore…or Lisa—then that name lives in our long-term memories. If we’re having a fairly lucid trip, we’ll be able to understand the names of people we already know, and even talk to each other about them, as long as both of us know them. If not? If I try to tell you my mother’s name, for instance?
Here’s what you’ll hear.” She said something else, but I didn’t quite catch it.
“What?”
“Exactly. Other concepts are slippery, too. Numbers get scrambled.
Other memories? You don’t usually know until you try to think them, and you can’t. It all depends on where the information fires in the brain. And even that’s not fully mapped.”
If I were in my physical body, I would have had some kind of reaction to the thought of psychic phenomena being mapped to various parts of the brain—because of course I could always place myself in the guinea pig hotseat and imagine those electrodes sprouting from my own head. Not just glued on, either, but wired through holes that’d been drilled through my skull. Astrally, though, I was able to follow that thought with a certain amount of detachment.
“I tried to get into Lisa’s room, but it felt like I’d stuck a penny in an electrical socket.”
“Of course. That means it’s protected. Our shaman is a very high level.
He sealed the rooms to prevent them from being contaminated.” Contaminated by what? And what was a shaman, anyway? I was sickened by the idea that I’d imprinted on the talent and level system that had been created by a government that wanted to milk my own talent at any cost.
Astral Lady planted her hands on her hips and looked at me funny.
“Have we met before?”
“I doubt it.”
“Are you sure? Something about the way you’re scowling is awfully familiar.”
I shook my head.
“Maybe not in the physical…but it’s possible we’ve had this conversation before and we just don’t remember it. Plenty of people project, but it takes talent and a lot of training to remember the trip.”
“I’ve had all the training I care to have, thank you very much. And I’m sure we haven’t met. I’m not local.”
“You were worried about Lisa and you found yourself outside her room. Distance really isn’t an issue—which you’d know if you just took a basic course.”
“You seem pretty keen on training.”
“Well, I would hope so. It’s my life’s work.”
People tended to get pretty prickly if they thought you were impugning their “life’s work,” but I had to press. Besides, if you’re going to fall out of your body, you could run across a lot worse than a Psych trainer. Even one wearing astral Birkenstocks. “If you’re the pro, then tell me. Where’s my silver cord?” I looked down at her midsection, and now that I was searching for it, there it was. It glowed gently, and it looked less substantial than she did. “You’ve got one. Where’s mine?”
“Don’t worry.” She pointed at my head. “You just can’t see it. Your third eye’s connected to a thick rope of power.” She floated up closer and squinted at it. “Lots of power. Two strands, all wrapped together.
Someone’s looking out for you, someone very strong.” I clapped my hand to my forehead, thinking maybe I could feel this astral power cable. I couldn’t. “Really? You sure?”
“You don’t know? Or you don’t remember. These types of things don’t just happen for no reason. You must have participated in some sort of ritual, or you’re carrying an expensive charm.” Astral Lady took a good look at my silver cord, and followed it upward. Her gaze stopped there as if an image of the Virgin Mary had appeared in one of the water stains in the ceiling. “Would you look at that?” I looked up, too. I still didn’t see any cord.
“The whole ceiling’s lit up,” she said.
It was? It looked awfully dark to me. Maybe the difference in our perception was one of those slippery things she’d mentioned before, something you don’t notice is missing until you need it. Or maybe I should have broken that Valium in half.
She grabbed me by the shoulder. Disturbingly, it felt like a physical hand…except, it kind of didn’t. “Let’s go see what’s up there.”
“No, it’s okay
—”
I might have had a supercharged powercord coming out of my forehead, but Astral Lady was obviously a veteran at controlling her subtle bodies. She pulled me along like Jacob does when I’m daw-dling too long at the grocery store, and he gets in front of the cart and hauls it like a team of oxen.
We flew up through the ball pit of the ceiling and into my room so fast it was as if we were astrally greased. We emerged in the sea of furniture. I stood partially in the spare bed, with one foot in the tiny open aisle. Astral Lady was directly in front of the GhosTV. “Here—here’s what’s glowing.”
Maybe it was glowing a bit around the tube, like the old-fashioned sets used to when you turned them off in the dark.
“It’s beautiful,” she said.
Interesting, maybe. But beautiful? No doubt we were each looking through a different astral lens.
“There’s some heavy energy here. But whose room is—?” She looked around, blinking at the extra bed and all the crap stacked on top of it, and then, finally, she turned toward the bed and paused.
There we were, Jacob and me. We weren’t exactly spooning anymore.
It looked more like he’d taken a sudden header and pinned me to the bed, where I decided it was futile to try to squeeze out from under him, so I might as well surrender and get some shut-eye myself.
Now that I knew to look at my forehead, I finally spotted it: my silver cord. It flickered like a hologram—now you see it, now you don’t—but when I tilted my head just so, I saw even more. A thread of red wound through it, a vibrant streak that was more solid and opaque than my shimmery cord. That thread originated in Jacob’s solar plexus.
I turned to ask Astral Lady about it, but she was staring at the opposite bed, the still-made bed brimming with clutter. Then she looked back at our bodies crammed into one bed. “Who are you? Who is he? Why are you in Bob’s room?” Except she didn’t say “Bob.” I don’t know what she said.
“I can’t very well introduce myself here, can I?”
“What’re you doing?”
“Sleeping?”
She stared for a moment, then said, “Oh, you’re gay.” Well, that might explain the large man on top of me.
“That’s not a value judgment,” she said. “I voted ‘no’ on Proposition Eight.”
That last word was more of a mushy sound, but I assume she’d said Proposition Eight. Unless she thought her stance on wind power mattered to me one way or the other.
“I just thought, the way your silver cords were connected, maybe it was some sort of…ritual.” She seemed really embarrassed.
“Don’t worry about it.”
Still, she was so mortified, she’d gone pale—meaning, more transparent—and I was pretty sure she was about to bail on me...when instead she shot forward to the edge of the bed, flickered there like a jittery spirit, and got her face all up in my physical body.
“Step back,” I said, before she could do anything scary like sneak into my flesh suit while I wasn’t wearing it, and she flinched away like I’d physically slapped her. I hadn’t meant it to come out quite so aggressive. It was just a cop-habit.
She did back off, some, but she was still staring at my physical body as if she’d seen a ghost. “Victor Bayne.”
“Do I know you?” I was still using the I’m-gonna-kick-your-door-in tone of voice, but after the sound of all those non-words where names and numbers should have been, hearing my own name totally freaked me out.
She whirled around to face my astral body and said something very urgent to me. It sounded like…heck, I didn’t know what it sounded like. It didn’t even sound like words. “What?” I snapped.
She repeated herself. Again, nothing. She wailed, “Don’t you recognize me?”
“Look, lady. I don’t know who you are. If I met you at some Psych thing or I worked a case for you or whatever—I’m sorry. I don’t remember.” A jumble of emotions played over her face—excitement, fear, agita-tion—and then, finally, understanding. “Wait a minute—I know why you can’t hear what I’m saying. When you knew me, I went by the name Faun Windsong.”
• • •
There was a sickening lurch. I opened my eyes. My mouth tasted terrible. And my lower back hurt like hell. Maybe I hadn’t appreciated the freedom of being astral during the act itself, but now that I was once again prisoner in my chains of flesh, I recalled my OBE with more than a little longing.
I’d meant to wake Jacob and tell him what just happened, but I was exhausted—jetlagged and backachy and plain old wiped out, and before I knew it I was deeply, profoundly asleep.
After a few hours in the black pit of sleep, I stretched my legs to test the limits of my freedom, and when I found I could go all the way to the footboard, I enjoyed a moment of pure, unfettered relief. But then I realized that if I could stretch out to my full length, Jacob wasn’t in bed with me.
I opened my eyes. Thankfully, I was still in the physical plane. Jacob was in the narrow center aisle with his arms outstretched, doing some kind of dramatic pose. Yoga. Tai Chi. Playgirl. Something like that.
“Hey,” I said. My voice sounded gravelly, and I felt like I’d spent the night flailing around in a ball pit.
Jacob stopped posing and did a couple of neck rolls. “Hey. It’s only five o’clock here. We’re two hours off.”
I sat up, experienced a twinge behind my glutes, and said, “I think I pulled something yesterday.” Given my newfound neurosis about whether or not I was athletic enough for Buff Flexington over there, I was surprised I even admitted it. I was probably just distracted— because the thing that was really on my mind was my unscheduled flight in Astral Land.
Jacob perched on the edge of the too-small bed and rolled me onto my stomach. “Where does it hurt?”
“My back, my ass, all the way down my leg.”
“Sciatic nerve. Which side?”
“Right.”
He ran his thumbs over my lower back, firmly, but not hard, not yet.
It was easier to start talking when I wasn’t looking at him. “So…about the TV.”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” he said. “Maybe we should start with every dial at a baseline of five and go from there. Maybe there’s some sort of tension that’s created when one dial is high and another is low, a tension that’s not there when everything’s the same.”
“Ow…no, don’t stop. It hurts good.” Jacob dragged his thumbs over the meat of my ass and dug them in. I saw stars, semi-good stars.
“There,” I managed, through the pain.
“Uh huh.”
“Did we leave it on?”
The sickening yet sublime thumb pressure let up. “The TV? No.” He realized he’d stopped rubbing and sank his thumbs into the muscle again. “Why?”
“You didn’t have…dreams or anything?”
“Nothing special. Something about being late for a lecture I thought I’d dropped…but I was the age I am now, not nineteen. And Carolyn was there. She was kind of my sister, though.” He trailed off. The massage grew rhythmic, as if his attention had gone back to his dream in search of another detail or two he might recall. Once the massage had become truly excruciating, it stopped, hurt more for a moment, then felt blissful. “Why? What did you dream?”
“I’m not totally sure.”
He rolled me onto my back and pushed my knees to my chest, and I gasped at the pain of the stretch—which gave me a second to figure out how to tell him. Why didn’t I just come right out and say it, anyhow? The GhosTV must have done something to me that made me project. Either it did something permanent to me while we were twisting the knobs, or it worked simply from being plugged in, whether or not we thought it was actually on.
But I knew why I didn’t start getting into any of that. Jacob had been in the room, too. He’d been wrapped right around me, protecting me, while I was the one cavorting in the astral with my old nemesis Faun Windsong, while I was the one playing in the ball pit. Frankly, Jacob was lucky he’d go
ne as long as he had without meeting Camp Hell’s most arrogant medium—and the ball pit left a lot to be desired. Even so, he’d feel gypped. Personally, I wouldn’t—but I’ve always been content to sit out the rides that made me puke.
Jacob took hold of my calf and crossed my right leg over my left. He pushed both legs toward my chest. The leg-crossing aspect of the stretch found the muscle group Jacob had been thumbing like a pain-seeking missile.
It shouldn’t have come as any big surprise to me that Jacob always knew how to massage my hurts away. He was accustomed to putting his body through its paces, and then dealing with the results of it.
How often did his rigorous training—which verged on self-abuse at times, if you asked me—result in soreness, stiffness, knots, or worse?
Probably more often than I realized.
He didn’t show it, though. Never. Jacob, limping around, favoring something that he’d pulled? Not only had I never seen it, I couldn’t even picture it. And yet it didn’t take an empath to know that my man of steel had plenty of soft spots just waiting to be jabbed. In the same way he’d picked up the ability to analyze the micro-expressions of a liar, I’d figured out how to gauge the level of his hurt disappointment by the depth and breadth of the vertical line between his eyebrows. Knowing that I’d been gallivanting through the astral while he’d been benched on the sidelines? It didn’t take a genius to figure out it would sting to hear it.
But knowing that I’d lied to him? That wouldn’t pain him any less.
Damn it all.
I tried to figure out how to tell him, but it was like being ordered to chop off someone’s body parts and trying to gauge the least horrible appendage to start with. Maybe it would help to blame the electronics, or at least it wouldn’t make me look like as much of a jerk. “See, the TV…while we were asleep—”
Footfalls thundered down the hall, and then urgent voices sounded through the door. Jacob was on his feet and climbing over the spare bed in under a second. I scrambled to get my pants on.
PsyCop 6: GhosTV Page 12