PsyCop 6: GhosTV

by Jordan Castillo Price

  At that moment, the moment I doubted myself, I lost my grip on the bloody ghost. She flickered and disappeared.

  I’d touched her? Maybe she’d been able to hear me after all, and she’d just been ignoring me—at least until I subjected her to the ol’ snap-and-pop. A chill ran through my astral body. I hadn’t realized it was possible to be astrally cold. I scanned the room. The door? Gone.

  The axe? Gone. Chekotah? Useless excuse for a man. Some big-time shaman he was, if he didn’t realize blood ghost and me were having a wrestling match right behind his head.

  Unless she’d done something to him. Messed him up, emotionally, mentally. As the thought occurred to me that I needed to get a better look at Chekotah and make sure he was all right, the room changed, and I was right up against him. “Can you hear me?” I hollered in his ear. Either he was paralyzed, or he couldn’t. I took a look at his hair.

  It seemed to still be there. Not even messed up. Whatever had just happened, it must have left his physical intact and instead affected his subtle bodies. It had sure as hell looked like his physical body was stretching, but physical molecules and cells and atoms couldn’t actually do that.

  At least I hoped not.

  I circled around him to try to get a good look at his eyes. Thanks to my time in the nuthouse, I knew crazy eyes when I saw ’em, and it looked to me like there was someone home upstairs in Bert Chekotah’s head…someone who wasn’t doing anything particularly useful at the moment, but at least the attic apartment was occupied.

  I was itching to get back, but I figured I should do a final check for injuries—astral injuries—if there even was such a thing. I checked him out the best I could. Face, hands, body, all normal. As I was getting ready to fly back to the relatively safe confines of my own skin, I noticed the light catch on something that had been camouflaged by the checkerboard pattern on the yoke of Chekotah’s traditional native smock.

  I squared myself up to it and looked harder. It was glistening.

  He’d been slimed.

  By the blood ghost? Or by me? The goo glistened just below the spot where I’d grabbed her in a wristlock. Since Chekotah was in the same position, I attempted a reenactment to see if I could tell where the ectoplasm had originated. It had all happened so fast it was hard to tell, even if I hovered my hand around the back of Chekotah’s head and tried to imagine that eerie stretching effect. Which I had totally seen…hadn’t I?

  I checked out my hand. It was dry. So it couldn’t be my hand-juice on Chekotah’s shirt—evaporating, growing smaller even as I tried to figure out where it had come from. In fact, I didn’t even think I was capable of producing ectoplasm while I was astral, because it was a physical manifestation of my power. That’s what Dreyfuss had said.

  And he wasn’t being a smartass at the time, either.

  Could I, though? If I tried? Both times I’d slimed myself, I’d been wound up tight with anxiety and siphoning white light for all I was worth. I currently had anxiety in spades—so I opened up the flood-gates, and I pulled.

  My astral body glowed, and a wave of disorientation washed over me. But my hand stayed dry.

  While I was busy sucking light, someone managed to approach the room in the physical just as I was too dazzled by white light to notice.

  I flinched at the sound of a door opening, and Faun Windsong slipped into the room. “Bert?” she loud-whispered, in a voice that conveyed I know I’m interrupting you so I’ll do a funny voice to make up for it. “Did you want me to chant with you? Maybe it’d help you focus.”

  Seriously—they talked like that in the privacy of their own room? Do you want me to chant with you? Although I guess I shouldn’t throw stones, given the fact that Jacob was probably telling me to focus on my forehead or my collarbone or my elbow at that very moment.

  Chekotah’s shoulders sagged. “It’s not going to help. The problem is me. The ancestors won’t talk to me because…my heart is closed to them.”

  Maybe so…but the top of his head seemed pretty accessible.

  Faun approached and knelt beside him just beyond the fringe of his mat. “How can you say that, after everything you do for us—all of us—here?” She took his hand and wove their fingers together. “Taking over for Dr. Park when he was too much of a coward to deal with Five Faith. That took courage. Your heart isn’t closed. It’s stress that’s bothering you, pure and simple. That’s all it is.” She moved behind him and began to rub his shoulders, and I backpedaled until I was flat against the wall from my sheer horror at the thought that I might be about to witness Faun Windsong’s seduction technique.

  “Did you ever think that maybe the missing women brought it on themselves?” she said. “They never fit in here. None of them. The students were always complaining about Debbie….” Brought it on themselves? I’d had myself convinced that Faun Windsong was an innocent bystander in this whole mess…but hearing her talk when she thought no one was listening but Chekotah made me wonder. I was straining forward to make sure I caught every bit of their “private” conversation when a sudden lurch knocked me on my astral ass. Blood ghost, back for more? I tried to rally, to whip around and face her, but before I knew it I was flying through the ball pit so fast I thought I’d end up with skidmarks on my forehead.

  My flight ended with a bodyslam into the physical that left me gasping for air. Blood ghost hadn’t dragged me down; my own silver cord had.

  “Vic?” Jacob shook me by the shoulder. “Are you with me?” My head spun. Not like Auracel-spins, and not even like sucking-too-much-white-light spins. It was the feeling, I suppose, of having my astral and my physical lined up so suddenly, and so violently, that my subtle bodies were reverberating like a big Tibetan gong.

  “Lyle called. He said Katrina was heading for their room.”

  “No kidding—and she was saying some pretty fucking incriminating shit.” I pushed myself up into a sitting position and my hand landed in something wet. Actually, no. My hand was wet. Ectoplasm.

  “Sonofa—why’d you pull me back now, right when they were getting to the good stuff?”

  “What was I supposed to do? Leave you standing there so Katrina could see you questioning Bert in the astral?”

  “See me? She couldn’t see me in the astral if I poked her in the eye.”

  “I figured you’d rather play it cautious.”

  Right…like I always do. “Chekotah wasn’t astral. And Faun couldn’t see me.”

  Jacob took my hand by the wrist—gently, for all that we were currently none too thrilled with each other—and turned it palm up so he could see the psychic jelly cupped in my hand. I sighed hard and gestured for him to go ahead and touch it. He dragged his finger over my palm, and I shivered.

  “Why did this happen again?” he asked. “Is this how I’ll know that you’re really astral and not just asleep?”

  I almost said, “How should I know?” in a fit of snippiness, but I had to admit, it was a legitimate question—and if I didn’t know, who else would? “I don’t think there’s any way for you to tell if I’m projecting or not. I didn’t slime myself on either of my other trips…so this must’ve happened here in the physical while I was trying to see if I could summon ectoplasm there in the astral.” I explained the whole thing to him—the astral axe, the blood ghost, the slime on the back of Chekotah’s blouse, and even the stretched head. I felt a little crazy talking about that last part. But you never know which piece is going to make the whole puzzle come together.

  Jacob didn’t say anything when I finished. He just sat there cradling my hand, which was long-dry but still a little bit cold, and he stared at me.

  “What?” I said finally.

  “Do you realize how big this is?”

  “I dunno. What, specifically?”

  “The ability to travel anywhere, to see a location without being physically present, to hear a private conversation?” He made it sound awfully empowering. What it had felt like to me was that I was flailing around, making up
the rules as I went along.

  Like usual. In Jacob’s assessment, I was some kind of superspy. And that was exciting for maybe two seconds, until a few more realiza-tions sank in. The CIA had been trying to crack remote viewing since 1972, and I had no desire for the government to be any more interested in me than it already was. Even the remote viewer the FPMP supposedly had was only spoken of in whispers. “We gotta be careful who we tell,” I said.

  Jacob squeezed my fingers. It hurt the tight scabs, but even so, the feel of his hand surrounding mine was a comfort. He sat that way for a moment, and then when he spoke, it was quiet, and very measured.

  “You know how, when we figured out that I actually had something other than a big psychic void inside me, right away we told Carolyn and Crash so we could get their take on it?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Let’s just keep this to ourselves.”

  Being on the same page with Jacob, especially right after we’d been snarling at each other over him pulling me out of the projection, should have been a relief. Instead, the fact that he’d agreed with me sent an icy finger of dread sneaking down my spine. Not only would federal recruitment efforts step up if I made this new facet of my talent known. If the wrong people found out I could sneak around at will and return to my body with a full understanding of what I’d just heard and seen, I might as well paint a big ol’ target on my forehead and kiss my ass goodbye.

  Chapter 29

  Thanks to my enviable new method of gathering evidence, Jacob and I could agree that we had more direction in figuring out what was going on with all the disappearing girls. Agreeing on which direction that might be was another story.

  “Faun Windsong actually said they deserved it,” I repeated for the umpteenth time. “If that’s not a big red flag, I don’t know what is.”

  “True, but you can’t ignore the bloody ghost. She was gruesome, right? And she was trying to touch Bert.”

  I wasn’t sure exactly what she’d been trying to do to him—slime him, possess him or lobotomize him—but whatever it was, it didn’t look too savory.

  “I think we need to find out who she is.” He pulled out his notebook and poised his pen over it. “Give me a description.”

  “Other than the gaping black wound in her chest that was throwing off sparks?” I sighed. “Caucasian. Twenty-five to thirty. Five foot five, average weight, dark hair, pale skin.” I thought back to her features in search of anything that might help me pick her out, though unfortunately she hadn’t had any astral tattoos or name tags. “Maybe a little long in the chin.”

  “And if you saw her here, she died here. Right?”

  “Either that, or she blames Chekotah for her death and she’s following him around. Not that I see him as a murderer—he doesn’t strike me as the type—but maybe someone who convinced her to do a hippy-dippy herbal cure that stopped her heart and landed her in the hospital with her sternum cracked open.” Figuring out who’d died on the property in the last ten, twenty years shouldn’t be hard if the local PD was willing to pull some records. Figuring out who Chekotah knew that had died a sudden or violent death, one in which he was somehow culpable, without letting him know we were sniffing around him? Nearly fucking impossible. “Look, never mind the ghost.

  I need to get back there and see what Faun was saying.”

  “Never mind the ghost? Listen to yourself. You’re carrying such a grudge against Katrina that you’re writing off the most important witness.”

  “There’s no grudge.”

  “Are you sure? Because she seemed to come through Camp Hell pretty much unscathed—in fact, she doesn’t even call it that. It’s Heliotrope Station when she’s referring to it.”

  I yanked my hand out of his lap and balled my fist a few times to bring the feeling back into my frigid fingers. “You keep on talking to me like this, I’ll be too ramped up to fly back over there anytime today.”

  He kept gnawing at that same old bone as if I’d consented to be part of the conversation. “She might not be as strong as you, but she’s still a decent medium, isn’t she? It’s more than just cold spots for her, right?”

  “So?”

  “So…it would stand to reason that she would have been just as in-demand as you. Or at least nearly as much.”

  “If you try to tell me I brought whatever happened at Camp Hell on myself…you’d better get used to sleeping in the decoy bed.”

  He grabbed me and pulled me against his chest before I had a chance to flinch away. “You’re putting words in my mouth. What I am saying is that you might be pissed off at her for not deflecting some of the attention off you. That’s all.”

  Seeing as how Jacob typically makes so much sense, even though my brain was trying to spin into a heated panic, I had to admit that being pissed off about something like that did sound an awful lot like me.

  Why hadn’t she taken some of the heat? Maybe she had…and she’d just processed it differently than me. Taken those sleep-deprived exercises in futility and re-framed them as exciting, multi-day cram sessions in search of a brave new world of Psych.

  Or maybe the powers-that-be had played catch and release, and allowed her to swim back to her non-traumatic Heliotrope Station experience since she was just a minnow, while they had a great, big catch they could be feasting on instead.

  Maybe it was only the big fish who’d been trawled in the nightmare net. Movie Mike. Stefan. Me.

  “I’m not saying we don’t look at Katrina.” Jacob’s voice was gentle and low, and he spoke into my hair. “I’m just saying that a bloody spirit in a building that’s supposedly clean—that’s important, too.”

  “Even if the locals were on board, which I’m thinking they’re not, it’ll take us forever. Back home, we’ve got people we know who can dig through records for us, people willing to cut us a little slack. Here, I don’t even know how to figure out who we’re supposed to call.”

  “Then let Dreyfuss do it.” Although I gave pulling away a pretty good try, Jacob had me in a bear hug, and he just crushed me to his chest harder. “He’s got the contacts. He’s got the resources. Let him dig up the records, and in the meanwhile, you see if you can get back to Chekotah’s room.”

  I suppose it could’ve been worse. At least Jacob was on board for the astral eavesdropping portion of the program. He could have told me to physically go and question Chekotah and Faun, after all. He was too accustomed to getting a psychic edge on his statements, I guess, to go back to needing to dissect a witness’ actual statement to pick out the truth.

  It was a good enough plan, one we could both live with. And while I was tempted to tell myself that giving Dreyfuss some paperwork to pull would keep him out of our hair, I did have to admit—we really hadn’t seen much of him. Only those couple of times he was in our room giving us electronics.

  I went through the bathroom and gave the door to Dreyfuss’ room an ungentle bang. Shuffling, footsteps. He opened the door. “Any news?” Although my goal had been to get him working on the photo lineup and get back to what I’d been doing, my curiosity spiked. What, exactly, did he do all day? He didn’t interview anyone. And, other than his walk through Debbie’s bedroom, he hadn’t been combing for physical evidence. I glanced over his shoulder. He had a laptop on his desk, but it was off. That didn’t mean anything, though. Maybe he had it set up to power down the second he shut the cover. “Another ghost,” I said as I tried to get a better idea of what he’d been up to.

  “In the hall outside Chekotah’s room.”

  “Sloppy cleanup work. They should ask for their money back.”

  “She wasn’t talking. I thought you could dig up some info and help me figure out who she was.”

  I wasn’t entirely truthful about my location and astral state, but when it came down to the blood ghost herself, I gave him the same description I’d given Jacob—minus the touching Chekotah and the ectoplasm parts. He didn’t write anything down. “And how does she fit in?”

  “I w
on’t know until I figure out who she is.”

  “A theory. A guess. Is she victim number one? A witness? A fluke you’re trying to rule out? A little something would help me know which rocks to start turning over first.”

  “Maybe she lived here? Maybe she was someone Chekotah knew, since she was near his room?” I shrugged, and did another visual sweep of Dreyfuss’ desk, what I could see of it beyond his head and his half-closed door, via the space he was mostly blocking. No clue what he’d been up to all this time. I had myself convinced he’d been busy spying—it takes time to monitor all those bugs and little cameras, after all—when he turned his head and I noticed a ridge on his cheek. The GhosTV had me seeing things again, veins and bulges that didn’t exist. Or so I thought. Until it didn’t shift or move or do anything supernatural at all, and I realized it was a pillow mark.

  That asshole’d been sleeping.

  “I do think you’re on to something,” he said. “But your vagueness needs work.”

  “What’re you trying to say?”

  “You were just standing there in the hall outside Chekotah’s room when this ghost appeared, didn’t say anything to you, and didn’t do anything in particular?”

  “That’s not what I—”

  “Stories have beginnings, middles and ends. Why were you hovering around Chekotah’s doorway? What did you say to the ghost that she didn’t answer? Why did she disappear, when it was all said and done?

  If she even did. Maybe she’s still standing there in the hallway, waiting for you to bring a photo lineup and see if you can put a name to the face.”

  “I wasn’t being vague—I was trying to get to the point. I went to Chekotah’s room to ask him a question, I saw the blood ghost in the hall, I asked her if she was okay and she didn’t answer me, and when I touched her wrist to get her attention she disappeared.”