PsyCop 6: GhosTV

by Jordan Castillo Price

  “Do you want me to read the guided meditation again?” he asked me.

  “I guess it couldn’t hurt.”

  “Take a deep breath, and hold it. Imagine your diaphragm stretching….” The totally unwelcome thought occurred to me that Stefan, with his velvet voice, would’ve probably had me floating already, and it got me so agitated that I sat straight up and snapped, “Fuck this, I hate it. There’s gotta be some other way.”

  “Breathe in two counts…one, two…and out one count.” Talk about persistent. That was my first notion, until I whipped around and saw my own head back there on the pillow. Jacob wasn’t ignoring me. He couldn’t hear me. I looked at Jacob, and then back at myself again. My hair really did look pretty spiffy—but I thought my face looked a little rough around the edges, in the smattering of sparkly gray stubble amid the black, and the creases at the corners of my eyes and across my forehead that announced to the world that forty wasn’t all that far off.

  “Focus on your toes….”

  I glanced down at my solar plexus in search of a silver cord, but there wasn’t one. I felt my forehead, and again, no luck. Not with anything cord-shaped. But it did feel taut, kind of like my sunburned scalp. I looked back at my body again. As much as I didn’t care for the fact that it was aging, I preferred that to the alternative. When all was said and done, that body was still mine. I’d prefer some guarantee that if I roamed, I’d eventually find my way back to it.

  But some things in life don’t come with guarantees.

  I swung out of the bed and stood, and the floor felt firm beneath my astral feet. Was Jacob’s red energy shielding me, or was I shit outta luck because he was awake? I took a good look at him and searched for the red energy. For the veins. “Notice your thighs.” He smirked.

  “Your buttocks. Your lower back.”

  No veins. And he couldn’t even say the word buttocks with a straight face. Still, I had faith that he would keep my shell of a body safe while I was out. “Okay, mister,” I told him. “I’m trusting you not to let anything nasty happen to me while I go put the thumbscrews to Chekotah.”

  And with that, I pictured the instructors’ wing of the building, steeled my astral body, and hurtled through the wall.

  Chapter 27

  Either the other two times I’d already projected had been good practice for me, or we now had the GhosTV at just the right setting…or maybe a little bit of both. Morning classes were in session. The only other person in the hallway was a fifty-something lady in a flowered smock with a housekeeping cart, an iPod and a vacuum cleaner. I considered calling to her, waving, trying to see if I could make her see me. She looked physical, but I wasn’t really experienced enough to attest to her physical state with a hundred percent certainty. Besides, if she was astral, she probably had her astral iPod turned up good and loud, so she wouldn’t hear me either way.

  I thrust my head through the first door. Empty room. Moved on to the next door. The same. It occurred to me that I should have told Jacob to ask Lyle which room was Chekotah’s “sacred space.” I might not be able to read the number on the front of it, but I’d at least know which floor I should start on. Some rooms had plants and pretty curtains and natural light. Some were sleek and Asian-inspired. None of them had personality like Debbie March’s room had—and that thought just made me all the more determined to wring an answer out of Chekotah.

  Frilly room. Plain room. Room with pentagrams on the walls and candle wax on the dressers. Room stuffed with books. I challenged myself to a little game of guess-what’s-next as I moved on to the next room, decided it was time for another frilly room, stuck my head through the doorway to have a look—and found myself sprawled in the hallway with my feet sticking through the opposite wall and my head half-sunk through the floor. Damn. I half expected to find little astral birdies tweeting in circles above my ringing head.

  I definitely needed to start being more careful about where I stuck my body parts.

  More cautiously, now, I reached out with my astral fingertips and touched the door. It felt as solid as a physical door. No reason I needed to use the door to get into that room, right? I touched the wall to the side of the door. It felt equally as solid. I worked my way down the wall until I felt the flex-and-give I was accustomed to, and I carefully put my hand through. When the wall didn’t complain about it, I followed with my head to take a look.

  The room was frilly. The bedspread was lacy and the walls were covered in pressed flowers with fancy frames. While I wasn’t entirely sure I’d find a whole bison hide on the wall of the room Bert Chekotah shared with Faun Windsong, I suspected there’d at least be a dream catcher or two. I’d overshot.

  No problem. I’d approach Chekotah’s room from the side. I felt my way around the flower room. Every wall was permeable, except for the one it shared with Chekotah’s room. Damn. All right. How about the ceiling? I rose up easy as you please, patting myself on the back all the while for my fine control of my subtle bodies, pushed my head through the ceiling, and found myself face to face with a dried up raccoon carcass. I jittered back a yard or two and told myself to stop being a smug jackass and start paying attention.

  I scanned the attic. No ghosts. Nothing glowing. Nothing hinky, other than the long-gone critter.

  Good.

  And, hey, at least the body marked the spot where I’d come up through the rafters so I could get my bearings.

  I felt my way along the ball pit of the floor, pushing my fingers through every few feet as I worked my way toward Chekotah’s room.

  I knew when I’d found it, all right. My fingers bonked against the ceiling like it was made of cement. I could trace the whole perimeter of the room, it turned out, all by poking around and seeing where my hand didn’t break through.

  I routed myself back through the frilly room and then down another floor in an attempt to come at Chekotah from below. There was an empty classroom down there, unused, judging by the way the furniture was stacked inside as if it had only been put there for storage and not for actual use, and the sheen of dust covering everything.

  There were rows of books lining the wall, the types of texts you’d find at Sticks and Stones. Someone had drawn a sun with a smiley face in it on the whiteboard. How fucking optimistic.

  The ceiling was rock solid. Great. Now what?

  I floated there with my astral hands on my astral hips and glared down at the classroom as if it could help me figure out what to do. I couldn’t read the books, since sticking my head between the closed pages would no doubt be confusing. I couldn’t pick up the whiteboard stand and drive it through the ceiling…could I? I floated down and tried to grab it, but my hand passed right through. Besides, I’d hardly sneak up on Chekotah if I came crashing up through the floor.

  The physical floor.

  I looked up at the ceiling again and tried to help the thought that was attempting to form in my head. I didn’t need to get through a physical barrier. I needed to get through a psychic barrier. And if I needed to get through a psychic barrier, I’d need a psychic tool, like…what was that band name? Astral knife.

  I grabbed toward my pocket, the one that had filled itself with fairy dust when I’d been trying to summon salt, even though I had no pocket there since I was wearing an astral T-shirt and jeans rather than a suit. Even so, my hand brushed against something, though whatever it was, once I overthought it, it slipped out of my grasp.

  Remember the fairy dust, I told myself, and I imagined a big, heavy blade, something substantial enough to cut through the protection keeping me out of Chekotah’s room. I made a grab for it, then, doing my very best to ignore the niggling of doubt that insisted this was all some kind of stupid dream and I was making it all up. No. It wasn’t just a dream. It was real, all real. And damn it, I was good at it.

  My hand closed around something hard. Big, and hard, and weighty. I gathered my courage and looked down. I’d summoned an astral axe.

  You’d think I would be pleased, but most
ly I was disconcerted. I hadn’t been picturing an axe. In fact, if I were to be honest, I think I’d been picturing the cleaver from the last Ginsu Knife infomercial I saw. But I’d summoned an axe.

  Did that mean my subconscious was forming it when I’d been busy focusing conscious thoughts on something else, or that the axe had an astral existence totally separate from my imagination? I didn’t know. I wasn’t sure anyone even knew. If projecting was anything like dreaming, Debbie might have a theory. But Debbie couldn’t exactly explain it to me in nice, simple words if she’d been kidnapped by Five Faith, driven out of town by Faun Windsong, or spirited away by an Internet demon.

  Or killed and dumped in the ocean.

  No. I gripped my astral axe tighter and gave it a swing. Because Debbie wasn’t dead. She couldn’t be dead, because if she’d been murdered, she would have stuck around long enough to tell me.

  Because if Debbie was dead, chances were, so was Lisa.

  The axe bit into the ceiling, shuddered, stuck there for a moment, then came free when I gave it a yank. I swung again, grunting with the effort, and felt something split. I pulled the axe free and stared up at the ceiling, panting. My breathlessness was more from panic than exertion, I think, given that I wasn’t currently physical and didn’t actually need to breathe. Also, I realized I’d probably just given myself away big-time with all my chopping and grunting. So much for sneaking up on Bert Chekotah.

  The ceiling looked exactly the same, but I knew what I’d felt. I reached my hand up into the split I’d made with my astral axe.

  It pushed through.

  I snatched it back, just in case Chekotah was waiting up there for me with an astral axe of his own, and I sucked some white light to gather my courage. He’d be on to me by now. But I needed to face him, to see what the hell was going on. What had happened to all those women. I sucked harder, and my vision went sparkly. Now or never. I tensed all over, and I shot myself up through the rift.

  I erupted from the ball pit and into Chekotah’s room in a cascade of astral sparks. I had the axe raised over my head and I was ready to swing it around to show I meant business. I took in the room with one sweep. Only one thing was moving, barely—a figure in the corner, sitting cross-legged on the floor with its back to me. It trembled.

  Nothing glowed. Nothing shimmered. Nothing sparkled, once the backlash of my appearance died down and fizzled out.

  Nothing else was astral. Nothing besides me.

  Focusing on the figure in the corner made me shoot up closer to it before I could second-guess myself. I craned my neck to get a look at its profile and ended up flickering into existence perpendicular to it—Chekotah. No problem, though. He didn’t seem to see me.

  A shrine area was set up in the corner, with wall hangings and feathers and carvings defining the perimeter of the space. No dream-catchers.

  The walls were painted in earth tones and the floor was tiled in pale orange terra cotta.

  I must’ve been expecting to find Chekotah wearing a Village People getup, so I was surprised to see him in a red hat that was a cross between a pillbox and a turban, and a blouse of patchwork squares that looked like it was sponsored by the local quilt shop. He sat on a woven mat with a drum cradled in the crook of his crossed legs and a smudge stick billowing smoke at his elbow. An MP3 player docked in a speaker system on his other side played the sounds of Native American drumming and chant. Chekotah’s hand fluttered as if maybe he’d begin to drum along, but then it collapsed, defeated, and left him there to sit and squint against the smoke.

  Maybe Faun Windsong had been wrong about that whole peyote thing—’cos I could tell he wasn’t astral. He’d be glowing blue, or at least sort of transparent, if he was. He could have been high, staring into the smoke like that. Unless “spirit walking” wasn’t a form of astral projection at all, and it was more of a trance, an inner journey, and Chekotah was actually more of a clairvoyant than a medium.

  Although, if that were the case, if he wasn’t a medium, how had he managed to exorcise the Criss Cross Killer? Maybe “spirit walking” was just his name for meditation. After all, I was a high-level medium, and before I’d started watching the projection channel, I’d never experienced a lucid astral journey of my own.

  I tossed the axe aside in disgust, and it made a couple of wobbly loops in the air before it disappeared into the wall beside Chekotah’s bed. “You were supposed to be astral,” I snapped at him. He stared straight ahead, while the Indians on the tape continued their atonal chanting and drumming.

  “You know something more than you’re telling us,” I said. “I know you do. Damn it. There you are, with your stupid sage stick, and your stupid drum—and what the fuck is happening to these women?

  Women who trusted you. You ought to be ashamed.” The chant droned on.

  I glared at him for a few minutes, which he didn’t notice, and I considered whether or not it might be possible for me to make Chekotah’s astral body come out and play. His astral body existed—it was just lined up with his physical body at the moment. He was already in some kind of trance. Maybe if I focused, I could pull it out of there and make it give me a straight answer.

  Where I should grab him, though? That was the question. I don’t really like touching other people. Not people I don’t intend to sleep with, anyway—and he might be some new age, ethnic prettyboy, but given what I’d learned about his reputation, I’d sooner head over to Lyle’s room for a “quickie” than do the nasty with him.

  His arm seemed impersonal enough. I made a grab for it, and my hand passed right through. Damn. I squatted next to him, and I glared some more. “I went through all this trouble to talk to you,” I said, “you’d damn well better come out here and say something.” I sucked white light again and grabbed for his arm.

  I might as well have tried to grab the sage smoke. In fact, that would’ve probably been more effective. At least in the physical, when you pass your hand through smoke, it moves. Grabbing Chekotah’s arm? Nothing.

  So he couldn’t hear me, wasn’t going to talk to me, didn’t feel it when I grabbed him, and didn’t look like he was going to do anything but sit there and look miserable. Talk about a bust.

  The floor where I stood felt too solid to sink through, as if Chekotah’s protections still held. I turned around to head back the way I came, and froze to the spot.

  There was a door next to Chekotah’s bed that hadn’t been there before, and framed in that doorway, a blood-covered woman stood, holding the astral axe.

  Chapter 28

  “Are you okay? Ma’am? Ma’am?” Thank God for cop-mode or I swear I’d just shut down like an unplugged blender. I’d never injured a civilian in the line of duty, and frankly, given that I almost never need to draw my weapon, I thought I’d retire free from that particular privilege. Leave it to me to nail someone with a careless toss of an astral axe.

  If she even was astral.

  She had the bluish, whitish, transparent and glowy look that Faun Windsong had when I’d first discovered Faun in the astral. The blood…well, that was different. It looked like the axe had cracked her sternum right in half. The blood looked black. It spread over the front of her flowing white dress in a rapidly-spreading stain, with sparks playing over the edges of it as she moved. It was hard to take my eyes off that bleeding, sparking wreck of a wound, but for just a second, I did. Long enough to determine she had no silver cord.

  She flickered like a ghost from a B-movie and appeared beside Chekotah. The axe stayed there beside the ghost door, dropping first on the top of the blade, like it had actual weight and heft, and then dissolving into the floor as it tipped over sideways, gone by the time the handle would have hit the floor. Flicker—her, staring down at him with a grief-stricken look on her face. Flicker—her hand reaching toward his hair to stroke it.

  “Ma’am?”

  No reaction. If she was a ghost and I was astral, she probably couldn’t hear me. Different planes, right? Er…maybe. Then she wound h
er hand in Chekotah’s hair and tugged—and his hair moved.

  She could touch him.

  Her face contorted, and at first I thought it was just the facial acrobat-ics people do when they’re gonna start bawling, but then I realized that she wasn’t exactly sad. It was more like she was…triumphant.

  She pulled harder, and Chekotah’s hair starting glowing where it was wrapped around her hand.

  “Step away,” I barked, because her body language told me she’d be happy to tear the astral hair right out of his head.

  She ignored me and yanked.

  Chekotah’s head blurred. Or maybe it stretched. His physical body was just sitting there, like it didn’t feel anything at all—but the top of his head was stretching like a piece of Silly Putty.

  “Police, step back.” Useless, I know, since it carried zero weight in the astral—and besides, she couldn’t even hear me. But that’s the thing about training. You repeat it enough times, and when push comes to shove, your body goes through the motions for you while your mind is busy looping on the words holy shit.

  Since I now knew how to do a wristlock from every conceivable angle, I grabbed for her wrist. I must not have thought I’d actually make contact, because it shocked the hell out of me when I grabbed, pulled and twisted, and ended up with a bloody ghost in restraint.

  Chekotah’s head snapped back to normal. Maybe he felt it—I think he sagged forward a little. Or maybe he was just getting tired of sitting there staring into his smoke.

  The ghost cried out, or maybe she roared. It wasn’t a human sound from a human throat. It was like feedback and static channeled through a disembodied voicebox. Vinyl tie. I reached in my pocket to grab it, but right as my hand closed around the spot where it would be, I realized that I was in civilian clothes, so of course I wouldn’t have the vinyl tie with me.