PsyCop 6: GhosTV

by Jordan Castillo Price

  Jacob unlocked the door and pulled it open, not as dramatically as he would have if his own body wasn’t blocking its swing, but still fast.

  “Is there a problem?”

  “Sir? Oh, I…I’m sorry to wake you so early. I just had the strongest impression that there was something really important in this room.” Faun Windsong. Oh joy.

  Chapter 16

  I stepped over the corner of the spare bed, still buttoning the waistband of my pants, and said, “Hey, Faun.”

  “How do you know that name?” Faun Windsong looked pretty much like she had in the astral—maybe ten pounds heavier and a few generations more Caucasian, but I could have picked her out of a lineup, no problem. What about me, though? Did I look that different?

  It had been my physical body she’d recognized from the astral, though. So Miss I’m-The-Trainer must not have remembered.

  “It’s me. Victor Bayne.”

  “Victor…Bayne?” She slipped past Jacob, drawn to me like I was a ghost she’d spotted on a Psych aptitude test. “Wow…it is you. My name is Katrina Wojtowicz now.”

  “You don’t remember…?” I glanced sideways at Jacob to see if he’d intuited “astral projection” from whatever I wasn’t saying. He cocked an eyebrow. Damn it all. I’d really wanted to tell him alone.

  She clasped both of my hands with both of hers and jerked them up and down, and I wondered if that’s the way hippies were greeting one another these days. “Victor Bayne. Wow. It’s been such a long time. When did you get here?”

  “Yesterday. We’re, ah…we’re looking for Lisa. She’s my friend.”

  “She’s my friend, too.” She sounded exactly like she had in the astral.

  Exactly. Only it wasn’t as if the conversation was a continuation of the one we’d had outside our bodies. It was totally new to her.

  “But how are you in the room that those…wait a minute. Are you still in the PsyCop program?”

  “That’s what the license says.”

  She looked me up and down, and I felt profoundly shirtless. “It hasn’t changed you much. You don’t look much older than you did when we were at Heliotrope Station.”

  Yeah, well, I wore my damage on the inside. “Thanks. You look great, too.” She’d changed as much as Richie and Stefan, which was to say, if I didn’t know any better, I wouldn’t have recognized her.

  “So you walk through murder scenes and look for cold spots?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “And you thought you might find something here—what, some kind of clue?”

  She said the word clue as if she was humoring me. What the fuck did she know? While she was busy traipsing around PsyTrain in her organic cotton yoga pants, I’d been putting three dozen wristlocks on a jerk named Sando so a criminal couldn’t sue me for hurting him with my handcuffs. So she had no business taking that tone with me. “If you don’t mind,” I said, “I need to get dressed.” Jacob nudged her back across the threshold, shut the door and turned toward me. I reached across the corner of the mattress that separated us, and ran my hand along his forearm. “Last night, I went out of my body: you know, astral projection, like. I think it was the GhosTV’s fault. I ran into her—Faun Windsong, I guess she’s Katrina Somebody now, but remember, I told you when I knew her back at Camp Hell.

  She’s a medium. And she came up here through the floor with me and said the GhosTV was glowing.”

  It wasn’t exactly the “you lied to me” look that Jacob gave me…but it was still pained. “Don’t you think you could have told me this fifteen minutes ago?”

  “I was going to.”

  “You’ve been awake for how long? We could have put together a game plan. What were you waiting for?”

  For the right words to miraculously occur to me—but I couldn’t tell him that, so instead I said, “I was in the middle of starting to tell you about it.”

  He cut his eyes to the doorway. Through the gap at the bottom I could see two points of shadow, like she was standing there with her face pressed against the door just waiting for us to finish our conversation so she could rejoin it and have the final say on everything. I pulled a fresh shirt out of the garment bag and put it on. “I have a feeling,” I said. Quiet. So someone with their nose against the door would have trouble hearing it.

  Jacob gave me a tiny “go on” nod.

  “They’re not telling us something.”

  Jacob smiled—and he’s not one for rolling his eyes, but he almost did.

  He was no stranger to questioning subjects who were hiding something from him.

  I indicated the GhosTV with my eyes. “If that thing makes me project, and if I can figure out how to use it, I can poke through this place all I want and no one’ll be any the wiser.”

  Jacob eased forward so that when he spoke, his voice was out of range of the door. “Won’t someone astral see you?”

  “If they do, they won’t remember. I saw Faun Windsong last night and she has no idea—and she’s the teacher.”

  Jacob eyed me. “Okay.”

  “The hard part of getting astral is staying that way without snapping back into your body—and thanks to the GhosTV, I can stay astral for a long stretch of time, no problem. Faun’s so full of herself she underestimates everyone. I could probably do some research on OBE basics, get up to speed on projecting, and sneak under the wire—and if she does catch me, I’ll play dumb.”

  “Is that…safe? What about that scumbag Barnhardt at Rosewood—

  what if you run into someone like him, someone who’s up to no good?”

  I doubted someone like him would have their very own psychic body-guard curled around them like I did, though I couldn’t quite figure out how to tell Jacob about that red ribbon of power snaking through my silver cord without sounding like some kind of parasite. “I’ll be astral, too. And I’ve been sucking white light, huge amounts of it, since the Clinton administration. I think I could handle anything any astral sonofabitch could throw at me.”

  He wanted to say no. Not because he didn’t think I was psychically strong. We both knew that while I might not be able to pick up the barbell he bench-pressed without the aid of a forklift—in the non-physical realms, if anyone could hold their own, it was me. He was scared because if I did it, I’d have to do it alone.

  I leaned over the mattress, took his face in both of my hands, and pressed a kiss to his mouth. Believe me, I’m under no illusion that I can sway someone as determined as Jacob with something as fleeting as a kiss. I just wanted to feel his solidity, his presence, and let him know that I damn well appreciated him—besides, it was the only way I could figure out to tell him, in that half a second we had to ourselves, that I wasn’t alone. He was with me.

  His mustache and beard brushed over my lips, and beneath the whis-kers, his mouth. Full. Warm. Gentle, since I’d caught him by surprise.

  “We’ll work out the details later,” I said with our mouths still touching. “Right now, I want to keep my edge. That means keeping her away from the GhosTV.”

  Jacob caught my arms by the wrists and pulled my hands from his face. He placed a kiss on the backs of my fingers—firmly on my good hand, and gentle as a butterfly’s wing on the hand that had been scraped to hamburger. He nodded, once, then turned and opened our door.

  When Faun Windsong tried to elbow in again, he blocked her like a defensive lineman. “Ms. Wojtowicz?” He offered his hand in lieu of entrance to our room. “Jacob Marks, Chicago P.D. You’ll have to excuse me, my badge is on the nightstand—and the nightstand is behind an impassable wall of furniture.”

  “I don’t need to see your badge. Bert told me who you are.” Her eyes darted from Jacob to the negative space in the doorway—but unless she could spew her astral body out as she was speaking to him, there’d be no way for her to get past him. “If we could just—”

  “We have a lot to discuss. Over coffee? Somewhere we can all sit down?”

  “But I was hoping Mister Bayne could tell me—�
��

  “Detective Bayne,” Jacob corrected.

  I did my best not to smirk. It blows my “Don’t mind me, I never notice anything,” smokescreen when I give in to smirkiness.

  “Give us ten minutes to get dressed,” Jacob said, and then, to drive home the fact that he was telling and not asking, closed the door before Faun acquiesced.

  • • •

  I resisted an urge to draw an anarchy symbol in the margin of my shiny new green notebook. Barely.

  See, when I’d suggested during our crack-of-dawn coffee meeting that in my line of work I might benefit from a few sessions of Astral Projection 101, I hadn’t anticipated that PsyTrain actually offered that specific class. Nor that they would take me seriously and invite us to join in.

  “It’s the curse of having such a deadpan delivery,” Jacob murmured to me. He, by the way, was not beyond smirking.

  The classroom wasn’t like any kind of classroom I’d ever seen before.

  No chalkboards, no desks. But talk about chairs—any kind of ergo-nomic chair you might want to sit in, they had one. And even still, most of the students were sitting on the floor, on mats and cushions, in their bare feet.

  I didn’t want to sit on the floor. You couldn’t stand up fast from the floor. Not with a bitchy sciatic nerve. Plus it’d be the surest way to make my holster dig into my ribs.

  “Don’t you just have a regular chair?” I said.

  Faun Blowhard Katrina Windsong Wojtowicz looked around the room and pointed out something that didn’t seem terribly comfortable, but at least didn’t look like some updated Medieval torture device. “You might be more relaxed if you took off your shoes.” I made no move to take off my shoes, and she added, “Euro-Americans carry so much tension at the backs of their knees.”

  What?

  “Take a deep breath, and relax.”

  I breathed pointedly in and out in hopes of getting her to pick on someone other than me, but she was as persistent as Sando.

  “Your problem is, you’re breathing in your chest.”

  Someone needed an anatomy lesson.

  Jacob and I sat, then—in chairs—and Faun Windsong said, “Let’s all start with some breathing. In twice through the nose, hold two counts, out twice through the nose and mouth.” She and the class did a sniff-sniff-pause-huff-huff thing, and since Jacob was playing along, so did I. Once we were done breathing, Faun said to me, “When you exhale, it’s not a ha sound. It’s more of a huh sound.” Huh was pretty much summing up my experience.

  Sitting down seemed to divert Faun Windsong’s attention from me, and she started her lecture. Finally, something I could use, something other than stupid chairs and huh-breathing through my knees.

  Faun Windsong turned to a small whiteboard on a tripod and wrote the words physical - astral - ethereal, and Jacob and me—we cracked open our notebooks. Jacob’s not a doodler. He’s a pen-fiddler. He twirled it, he tapped it against his chin, and he even mouthed the end a few times—like it wasn’t hard enough for me to focus. Jacob got into what she was droning on about—something to do with the body/mind connection, and the silver cord. I got it. But I was busy thinking that now Lisa was four days gone, and it failed to hold my attention.

  The rest of the class, eight other purported psychics, many of whom I’d spied on while they were asleep in their beds, listened with rapt attention. Really? I mean, what was there to say about the silver cord? It might or might not be visible. It might connect to your solar plexus, or your third eye—or maybe even your big toe, depending on your own particular psychic makeup. It did exist. I knew that much.

  I’d seen it in action, back when Jacob fed the rapist Barnhardt an antipsyactive and it reeled him back to his own stroke-riddled physical body like a gigantic fishing line.

  Interesting stuff? I guess. But Faun had been talking about it for over half an hour, no lie, and she hadn’t yet said a single thing I didn’t already know. In fact, I’d experienced it all myself, and I understood it on a gut level, minus all the blah-blah-blah.

  My pen tip clacked against the spiral notebook spine and I looked down, unaware that I’d even been doodling. Loopy-looking squiggles, repetitive, random. No anarchy symbols. I drew one, very small, to see how it felt. It didn’t resonate with me. I wasn’t a twenty-something tough guy with a mohawk anymore.

  I missed it more on principle than in practice, this old me. It felt good to be able to fade into the background now, if I needed to. My badge and my gun were also pretty good consolation prizes. And I suppose we all need to grow up, sooner or later.

  “Any questions?” Faun/Katrina asked. She looked around the room, hands on hips, and settled her gaze right on me.

  I pressed into the chair and tried to seem not quite so tall.

  One of the other psychics, an Asian guy around thirty, said, “In Friedmann’s primer, it states that astral matter is bound to its physical counterpart by fine-particle vibrations. If the silver cord is a manifestation of those particles, does that mean if you damage the cord, you’ll die?”

  “It hasn’t been proven. Marie Saint Savon mentions a cordon in one of her later interviews that she sees dissolve at the moment of death, but since that could also translate into ‘ties,’ she might be speaking metaphorically.”

  Her overly-French pronunciation of cordon made me want to slap her.

  “A researcher in Glasgow seeking to disprove the cut-cord theory attempted to sever his own cord, but he only achieved lucid projection four times over the year-long experiment—and in those four successful projections, he tried pulling it, biting it, and even cutting it with an astral knife.”

  Astral knife. Cool band name.

  “Each time, the substance of the cord flowed around the obstacle and reassembled itself. Something like mercury.” Faun turned toward a whiteboard and wrote with her stinky blue marker: mercury – quick-silver – silver cord.

  “Quicksilver,” she said in a voice so patronizing it made me wince,

  “was the alchemical name for the element mercury, so theoreticians now believe this was how the silver cord got its name.” I was dying to close my eyes and think of anything other than Faun Windsong, but the group was too small, and if I was too obvious about zoning out, everyone would know.

  “Most practitioners agree that the silver cord itself can’t be cut. It is, as you say, a manifestation of the connection—but it isn’t the connection itself.”

  I glanced at Jacob. Completely and utterly absorbed. Laser focus.

  Cripes, what I wouldn’t give to be able to force myself to pay attention on command. At least if he was drinking it all in, I wouldn’t have to. And it wasn’t as if I wasn’t attempting to listen—I was. Really.

  “The first stage of an OBE is often the point at which a projection fails. Subjects in this transitional stage often report hearing clanging bells or feeling strong vibrations.”

  She went on to describe a dozen other things an unsuccessful astral traveler might experience fighting to free themselves, and more importantly their consciousness, from the prison of their flesh. “Many practitioners, when they do finally achieve projection, find they can’t see—ironic, isn’t it, since the astral body is known as the body of light. Either they experience their vision as if they’re looking through a semi-opaque blindfold, or their eyes won’t open at all.” Her gaze swept the room and landed on me again. I wondered if some part of her remembered that I’d had trouble opening my astral eyes my first time out.

  “Why were you quoting Marie Saint Savon?” I blurted out instead, before it even occurred to me I had a question, let alone that I was verbalizing it.

  Faun scowled. “Why wouldn’t I?”

  “She was a medium. Since when does that make her an authority on astral projection?” I sounded pissy, and I knew it, but I just couldn’t hold back. The other students shifted uncomfortably. A few of them might’ve even held their breath.

  “Detective Bayne,” she announced to the class, “is understa
ndably busy doing his police work, so he’s not quite up to speed on the details of academia like we are here at PsyTrain.” She turned and wrote something on the board, and then turned back around, blocking it with her body, to gloat.

  “In January, the Center for Psychic Studies recommended the medium ability be reclassified to include not only psychics who could sense spirit activity, but shamans, remote viewers, and soul travelers, as well. Our ability has a new title.” She stepped aside and revealed the words light workers.

  “You’re shitting me.”

  Her eyes went flinty at my failure to bow to her authority on All Things Psychic. “No doubt even the Midwest will get up to speed…one of these days.”

  The class began to snigger in response, but the amusement died fast when they looked at Jacob and me, cop-faced in our suits, and couldn’t figure out which authorities they should be trying to toady up to: the teacher or the law.

  “That wraps up the morning session. We’ll meet back at one thirty in the floatation tank room for two shifts of focused breathing exercises. Bring your journals and your colored pen sets for your out-of-the-tank time.”

  Floatation tank? As in, sensory deprivation? My throat closed, and sweat prickled my low back where it curved away from the back of the chair.

  Faun looked at me, smiling, as if she could hear my adrenal glands pouring fight-or-flight juice into my veins. “You’re welcome to join us for a float, detectives.”

  Jacob looked at me and raised his eyebrows as if he was perfectly game to try it. Maybe he really was fearless. “No thanks,” I muttered, barely restraining myself from telling her to shove her sensory deprivation tanks up her ass sideways. “We’ve got work to do.”

  Chapter 17