PsyCop 6: GhosTV

by Jordan Castillo Price

  “I can take care of myself.”

  “You can’t just go around thinking that—not without knowing whatever it is we’re up against. Promise me we stick together, and you won’t hear one more word out of me about Dreyfuss. For as long as we’re here, he’s part of the team…and I’ll deal with the fallout later.” Jacob narrowed his eyes as if he thought I’d add a few more condi-tions on to my little lecture, but that was all I’d had to say. He nodded, and said, “All right. I can live with that.” Something clicked into place, as if I’d been trying to do one of those peg-and-hole psychiatric ward puzzles, and just realized that if I gave something a quarter-turn, it fit right in. Being able to stop struggling…that was a relief.

  “The redhead?” he asked.

  “Debbie.”

  “Did she have anything to say?”

  A whole lot of nothing—I’d have to drill her later. With Jacob present.

  It wouldn’t be as effective as talking to her alone, but at least he could be pretty damn charming when he wanted to be. “She’s looking into the automatic writing.”

  He handed me the paper Dreyfuss had been looking at, a fax. “Dreyfuss sent in a telepath to pick the instruction manual out of the mind of your buddy at the MCC.”

  I looked at the fax. Handwritten words: amplitude, frequency, phase—numbered, so we knew which was which. A bunch of meaningful-looking arrows, like some kind of fancy football play. Cripes. I hoped Jacob would be able to make sense of it, because I sure couldn’t. I handed it back to him. “You seriously think Dreyfuss telepathed the guy? Just now? How do we know he didn’t have this piece of paper in reserve already so he could look like a big hero when we asked for it?

  Why have a lab team trying to figure out what makes the GhosTV tick if it was so easy to scrape the answers out of Scott’s mind?”

  “I guess it’s possible.” Jacob considered the diagram. “I don’t get the impression that it was easy. I think it cost him.” Good. I didn’t say it…then again, I probably didn’t need to.

  “But I thought you were done harping on Dreyfuss,” he said.

  Old habits die hard. “What does this mean, amplitude—ability—maximum 3?”

  Jacob turned on the set and spun the innermost knob to three. “Let’s find out.”

  Great. I could look forward to a full afternoon of Can you see anything now? and then a dinner of organic, free-range compost. I sighed, sat on the bed and leaned back against the headboard. “Okay,” I said, hoping to move things along. “If amplitude has something to do with ability, what are frequency and phase? On the other GhosTV, one of the knobs made an old ghost fainter and a new ghost clearer.” If only we had a handy old ghost and new ghost standing conveniently side by side, it would be a snap to figure out which was which.

  “And what does it have to do with astral projection?” Jacob said. He looked at me expectantly, but luckily spared me from the Can you see anything?

  I shook my head.

  “You can see astral things.”

  “Yeah, if I’ve been drinking.” And a stiff shot sounded really good just then. “But only because the booze lowers my shields. Last night when I projected, though, your shields didn’t stop me.” Jacob stopped fiddling with the set and pivoted in his crouch to look at me. I was picking at a bit of toilet paper fluff stuck in the dried blood on my knuckle, so it took me a second to realize he wasn’t going to pick up his side of the conversation again.

  “What?” I said.

  “What does that mean—my shields didn’t stop you?” I actually had no idea what it meant, just that my mouth seemed to be drawing conclusions on its own. Plus, I hadn’t mentioned I’d seen his red energy all wound around me like the toilet paper around my mashed-up hand. And now that I’d stupidly let it slip…fat chance I’d be able to stuff that genie back in the bottle. “You know. Your shields.”

  He blinked slowly. I think he was counting to ten. “No, I don’t know.

  What shields?”

  “I mean, I think that’s what I was seeing.” I kept it as casual as I could so I didn’t look like I was totally backpedaling. “This kind of, uh, energy. From you.”

  “Tell me.”

  I shifted under his laser beam focus. “It looked like my silver cord was a candy cane, and your energy was the red stripe swirling through it.” Since the cat was out of the bag about his visible psychic energy, he might as well know it all. “It was totally different from mine, but the energies were interconnected. I might’ve even been, I dunno…feeding off your power—whatever it is that makes you a Stiff, a real Stiff and not just an NP. It was so bright and strong it almost looked physical.” He thought about it. Hard. His eyes searched mine as if he was trying to see if there was anything else I’d “forgotten” to tell him.

  “And speaking of physical,” I said, “your physical body had mine covered like you were trying to shield me from a grenade.” He stood from his crouch, slowly, without letting me drop my gaze.

  “I guess that’s why I figured it was some kind of shield. From the way it looked like you were trying to protect me, even though we were asleep.”

  When he sat on the bed, I thought he was going to grab me and shake me. But instead he pulled me against him, pressed our foreheads together, and said, “That’s amazing.” His voice was so full of awe it brought a lump to my throat.

  “I thought you’d be ticked off.”

  “Why?”

  “Because…well, because you couldn’t see it yourself. You were asleep—regular-asleep, dreaming regular dreams.”

  “Of course I’d rather be conscious. But you saw it, so I know it’s real. If you say I’m there with you, that’s good enough for me.” He kissed me then, slow and easy—and he’d probably meant to keep it brief, but somehow he managed to coax my tongue into his mouth, and both of us gave a small groan of pleasure. I slipped my arm around his neck and reveled in his closeness. Everything around us felt wrong, smelled wrong, tasted wrong. Every sensory detail I experienced reminded me I was no longer home, and I’d been ripped out of my comfort zone. Jacob, though…Jacob felt right.

  Turning my head to break the kiss was brutal. “Not now. We don’t have time.”

  “I know.” He pressed his forehead into my temple, breathing faster than normal, like he could barely keep it in his pants. “I know.” He pushed away from me, sat up, and adjusted his tie. I reached down and adjusted something else.

  He ran a hand through his hair, stood up, and paced the aisle between the beds as much as the overstuffed room would allow. Two steps forward, turn, two steps back. He crouched in front of the console again. “So. A plan. We get the GhosTV working while Dreyfuss accesses the email.”

  I got to my knees so I could shift my shoulder holster where it had crept over to dig into my collarbone, then resettled my suit coat where it had pulled out of place during our impromptu make-out session.

  Jacob was right, I decided. There’d be an advantage to going astral.

  I’d just stretch out on the gaudy sheets and try to pop out of my body to take a look around. Not only would I be able to see what the dynamics at PsyTrain were really like, but maybe I’d notice a sixth-sense detail or two that I wouldn’t have spotted with my physical eyes.

  Like the big glowing hotspot on our floor.

  I walked forward on my knees to the foot of the bed.

  “So with the amplitude at three, if I turn up the frequency….”

  “Jacob. Stop.” I looked up to make sure there wasn’t some kind of bright light shining down from the ceiling. There wasn’t—not that I’d really expected it. Some part of me knew that the glowing I’d just seen wasn’t physical. “Can you back it down half a notch?”

  “The frequency?”

  “Whatever it was you just turned.”

  As I watched the floor, the beams appeared again. It looked as if holes had opened up in the carpet to reveal a searingly bright light below.

  “Um….”

  “What is it? D
o you see something?”

  “Light.” I knew I sounded like a moron, but I was still trying to figure out what, exactly, that light meant.

  “How’s this? Better?”

  The light brightened, then softened again. “Back a smidge. There. That’s it. That’s as bright as it gets.”

  “Okay. I’m going to turn up the phase. How is it now?” The light didn’t exactly fade; more like it went translucent. “Not good.” I glanced over at Jacob. “I don’t think it does anyth—” The bed behind him was moving. Or something in the big pile of suitcases and crap. Or something beyond it. “Wait.”

  Jacob stopped turning the knob, got a look at my expression, and pivoted to face the spare bed.

  An arm shot out from the pile of stuff—a skinny, wasted arm—hand swinging as if it was grasping for something just out of reach. “What did you say this place used to be?”

  “A hospital.”

  Actually, I believe he’d said “TB hospital.” Which meant before the days of antibiotics, its patients never had any chance of going home.

  I climbed over the corner of the bed to approach the ghostly arm so I could determine what I was dealing with, a sentient spirit or a repeater. Repeaters didn’t really scare me much more than, say, ear-wigs; they might be ugly, but they were fairly harmless. They were more like psychic film loops that kept re-playing their moment of death than actual ghosts. But sentient spirits usually had some kind of unfinished business, and when they saw me coming, all wound up in freaky psychic energy, they weren’t above trying to carjack me out of my physical shell to go for a spin.

  Ghosts never snuck under Jacob’s skin, though. They couldn’t. His talent was the equivalent of a permanent white balloon. “You wanna move those suitcases,” I said, “so I can get a better look?” He hauled both heavy suitcases off, one in each hand. The ghost in the bed didn’t seem to notice.

  I crept up beside Jacob and looked at the bed. The patient lying in it was a wasted, skinny guy, and what I saw of his haircut was worse than the hack job I’d been given at the twelve-dollar place.

  He grasped at a long-gone cord and pulled, pulled, pulled—trying to summon the help that wouldn’t come soon enough, or if it did, it wasn’t enough to stave off the inevitable. His body was sunk a good couple of inches into the mattress, and the plump, modern-day pillow surrounded a majority of his head—all but his forehead, temples, nose and chin, which peeked up above the cotton pillowcase like a backstroke swimmer breaking the surface of a swimming pool.

  “Sir? Can you hear me?”

  He kept on groping, grasping at that long-gone bell pull.

  “What’s he doing?” Jacob whispered. I gave him a quick imitation of the bell pull gesture without taking my eyes off the ghost.

  “You can stop,” I said. It had become the stock line I gave every repeater I stumbled across…not that it did them any good. It was mostly for my own comfort. “You can rest now.” My hand went to my pocket, where I normally kept a few fast food packets of salt—but my pocket was empty. I’d made sure of it before I headed off to O’Hare, fat lot of good it’d done me. It wouldn’t have taken much with this repeater…old and faint, so weak it had been invisible even to my hypersensitive talent without the GhosTV bending its electromagnetic waves.

  “You think they have any salt in the kitchen,” I asked Jacob, “or do they season the rations with something like kelp, instead?” As I turned toward him and pulled my hand out of my pocket, a cascade of faint sparkles fell from my fingertips and bounced to the floor, shimmered, and disappeared.

  Jacob saw the look I was giving my own hand. “What is it?”

  “There must’ve been some kind of residue in my pocket.” Perfect setup for a bad joke about where last week’s tuna salad went, but neither of us followed up with a punch line. I stuck my hand back in and felt the seam of the pocket to see if a few grains of salt had been lodged in there. My fingertips closed around a surprising amount of gritty powder. Salt, or something else? Because maybe the drug dog at the airport would’ve pegged me even without help from the animal communicator.

  I pulled out a pinch of grit to get a better look at it, but it was shining so bright in whatever wavelength I was viewing it that I couldn’t tell what it actually was. It felt like salt, kind of, but it wasn’t sticking to my fingertips the way salt would have. I parted my fingers and it cascaded from my grasp, leaving dozens of white tracers trailing through the air like itty-bitty comets.

  The jacket was maybe three months old. I’d put it in the front of my rotation because the sleeves fit surprisingly well. Twenty guesses what I might have stuck in my pocket over the last three months.

  Auracel? Likely. Valium—definitely. Aspirin too. While I wouldn’t have put it past myself to have crushed a pill in my pocket, I couldn’t fathom why any of the pills that were likely to have been there would light up so brightly I couldn’t even tell what they’d once been.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s…I…” I pinched out another sample and it sifted out from between my fingers in a bunch of silvery-white sparkles. “Whatever it is, it’s glowing so hard I can’t actually see it. It’s like staring at the top of a lit bulb and trying to read the wattage printed on the glass.”

  “So let me look.”

  Oh. Good plan. I reached in for more glowing grit, pulled out another pinch, held my fingers up right in front of Jacob’s eyes, and gently released. A tiny shower of sparkles cascaded down. A couple bounced off my suitcoat sleeve, but I kept my eyes trained on my fingertips to try to see what was glowing.

  “See anything?” I asked.

  “There’s some lint on your thumb.”

  I looked. Yep. Lint. “But nothing granular? Salty? Sandy? Chalky?

  Anything like that?”

  I reached in for another pinch, and I’ll be damned. It felt like there was even more there now then there had been before. I gathered as much as I could and pulled it out. It looked like I was holding the lit tip of a Fourth of July sparkler.

  “There’s nothing there,” Jacob said. “Nothing physical.” A twinge of unease played over my molars—nothing too pronounced, like the heebie-jeebies I got when I saw dead things, really gross dead things. Just my body’s acknowledgement that it would never really be numb to all the weird.

  “What were you thinking about when you put your hand in your pocket?”

  “Just looking for some salt.”

  “Because…?”

  I nodded toward the bed. “To help this poor guy move along.”

  “Well…what’s it going to hurt to try it? Use it like it’s salt.” I reached in again. There was definitely more grit inside. “You think I’m summoning this stuff?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it yet.” Jacob shot me a wry smile. “But apparently that’s what you think.”

  I stifled the urge to flick some fairy dust at him, not only because he couldn’t see it so it wouldn’t really look very impressive—but also because I didn’t know what it actually was. Proving how annoyed I felt wasn’t worth the risk of smiting him with spirit crud.

  The moves of an exorcism came to me quickly now, like the lyrics to the theme song of a syndicated TV show. Suck some white light through my third eye, strengthen my protective bubble—aha…my vision got a bit milkier when I did that with the GhosTV playing in the same room. Interesting. “It’s time to move along,” I said, not in a cop-voice, but not like a pushover, either. “Your business here is done.”

  I pinched some fairy dust out of my pocket and treated it exactly like I would have treated salt—which is to say, I imagined cleansing white light pouring into it just before I scattered it.

  The resultant shower of sparks was so bright, my field of vision went white. But afterward, when I should have seen dancing afterimages of red and green, all I saw was an empty bed. My retinas hadn’t been involved. I’d been watching it all with my inner sight.

  So when tears sprang to my eyes, I couldn’t really blame th
e light show. I knuckled them away before they had a chance to spill. Why the waterworks? I’m not sure. I’d had proof, time and time again, that the boogie man and the monsters under the bed were really real.

  Maybe what I’d never seen with my own eyes was the evidence that my own mojo was real, too.

  Chapter 20

  I stared at the empty bed for a few seconds while I composed myself, and finally, when Jacob couldn’t take the not-knowing anymore, he asked, “You okay?”

  I nodded. “Yeah. I’m good.”

  “So…it worked.”

  Another nod. My throat felt funny, and if I spoke, it would come out thick and emotional. If I were to guess, I’d say Jacob wanted to scoop me up and crush me against his chest, but he was holding back. The tension of him keeping himself in check reverberated through the room. But he gave me the space I needed to pull myself together.

  When I was finally ready, I eased back on the white balloon I’d been holding, and the colors in the room grew vivid again. My skin prickled, then relaxed, like gooseflesh does when it fades as the furnace kicks in. Lightheadedness washed over me. Psychic fatigue? Nah, probably physical. No doubt my psychic shenanigans did things to my heart rate, blood pressure, and who-knows-what-else.

  My eyes were dry when I finally blinked. I had no idea how long they’d been open. A neck roll released a loud, satisfying crack deep in my spine, and I pictured energy rushing up through the floor this time, rather than down from the ceiling. Grounding energy. Up through the soles of my feet, flowing through my chakras, setting all those rainbow-colored pinwheels to spinning.

  I actually felt pretty darn good, considering I hadn’t slept in my own bed, I’d just exorcised a repeater without any salt, and I’d swallowed something called spelt.