“Unless I stop it.”
***
“Scotty, are you all right?”
“I’m fine, Grace,” he said. “When you get a moment, come talk with me.” Gumby lay on the floor beside him in his easy chair. The only light came from the hallway.
Grace came straight into the living room and sat on the sofa. “What’s going on? Why are you sitting in the dark?” Wrinkles furrowed her brow. She smelled of antiseptic.
“I told you I had to get inside Blackwell’s head, right?”
“Yes, you did,” she said. “Did you?”
“I did.”
“What did you see?” Grace asked as if she really didn’t want to know. “I know he is a horrible man.”
“No. Nothing like that,” Scott said, looking at his wife. “I’ve been trying to figure this whole thing out. Help me, here. Okay?”
“Okay.” She moved to a hassock opposite him.
“For starters, it seems like my visions are real, right?”
“Well, most of them have actually happened,” she said.
“And we know that the drug serves as some sort of a catalyst. It makes it easier for me to see the visions clearly.”
“Add to that the fact that we know Dr. Blackwell has been giving you Alprazolam. Dalman confirmed that.”
“Right. He’s not feeding me a hallucinogen.”
“I still wouldn’t put it past him. He’s an evil man,” Grace said.
“The other night when Blackwell and I attended the Gary Ross dinner, I saw a vision in which Grabel stock had a huge jump in value. I’m sure Blackwell is using the information I gave him for investment purposes.”
“Wow,” Grace said. “Insider information…”
“I’ll give him this. He’s a crafty son of a bitch.”
“That crafty son of a bitch may kill you.”
“Well, since I know what to expect, I’ll guard against that. That’s one vision that is destined to be a false one.”
“It had better be,” Grace declared. Grace was a determined woman. She could be very stubborn about a lot of things, but never as much as her relationship to Scott.
“Speaking of false visions, we know some of the visions aren’t real, at least they aren’t real, yet.” Scott took another swig of the beer in his hands. “You might want one of these yourself,” he said.
“Go ahead,” Grace said.
“We had an easy day today,” Scott said. “Blackwell let me off early. I came home and did my own session. I read him, right here in this chair.”
“Was it as accurate? After all, you weren’t right there with him.”
“Yeah, it was accurate. I recorded the vision as I saw it. You can listen to it later.”
Gumby got up, sidled over to Grace, and let her rub his ears. “Tell me about it, yourself,” Grace said.
“I saw some of what I’d seen before. I saw Blackwell receive his doctorate. I saw the horrible scene where he killed me. I also saw an episode in which he received an award. In it he was an old man.”
“Well, that could happen in the future,” she said.
“I also saw him blackmail Mayor Hill,” Scott said. “I read the mayor a week or so ago and I saw an episode where he molested a kid. Dr. Blackwell used that against the mayor for a couple of hundred grand.”
“I told you he was slimy,” Grace said. She leaned forward as if to sense more was to come.
“But then I saw a scene and I confirmed the date by looking at a restaurant receipt. It was five days from now. We were having tea at the shop near his office. I saw him starting to cross the street when a Jeep turned the corner, ran over him, and he died.” Scott felt odd describing it so objectively. He could tell Grace was assimilating this.
“Oh, my God. How do you know he died.”
“I saw the accident. I felt pain. And, it ended different than the others. It all sort of faded away.”
“You’re certain of the date.”
“Yeah. Next Tuesday. And, I was there. I saw myself watching the vehicle turn the corner before hitting him.”
Both sat silently for a long while. Gumby broke the silence by shaking his head violently from side to side, something he did when he woke up and after his ears were scratched sufficiently.
“The question is…” Scott breathed. “Do I try to stop it?”
Grace took a deep breath. “Can you tell him you read him and saw him die?”
“He’d be pissed that I read him. I’ve seen him when he’s pissed. Not a pretty sight.”
Grace stood up. “Let it happen. We don’t need anything else from him. Let him walk right in front of that car and send his miserable soul to Hell. Remember, you saw him take your life.”
“If I kept silent, wouldn’t it be the same as killing him myself?” Scott asked.
“He deserves it.”
“I’m not a killer. If I do that, am I any better than he is?”
“You’re not Paul Blackwell,” Grace said, pulling her husband closer to her. She moved to the arm of the lounger and poured herself onto him. “You never could be.”
“But shouldn’t I try to prevent it?”
“Why?”
“Because he has a life. A soul.”
“That’s questionable,” she said. After a moment of thought she added, “Then, don’t stop it, but make sure you don’t allow it either. You said you were there in the vision, right?”
“Yeah.”
“Well, next week take him somewhere else. Stay in the office. Call in sick. Tell him you’re going to stay home. If you’re not there, you can’t blame yourself if he lives or dies, right?”
“Maybe.” He stared at the floor and shook his head slowly.
“Well?”
“What if I want him to die?”
CHAPTER TEN
On Tuesday Scott called the office early and feigned sickness. He even sniffed out loud once or twice and faked a cough to add reality to his phone call. The receptionist took his message and promised to pass it along to Dr. Blackwell.
Concerned that the doctor might call to check on him, Scott took Gumby for a morning walk. The sidewalk was fairly busy with soccer moms and would-be athletes exercising their way to healthier lives. As he passed each person, Scott felt completely disconnected from the world around him. They moved about their lives, exercising, going to work, going shopping, oblivious to the devastating event that would occur later that day. He, on the other hand, knew that a man may very well be run over by a Jeep in just a matter of hours and he chose to do nothing about it. He surprised himself when he said aloud, “Murder by omission? Is that possible? Is that sin?”
It was enough to make a monk lose his faith. His head hurt. Nerves bounced on his fingertips.
Despite Gumby’s resistance, Scott turned around half-way through their usual walk and headed home.
Grace was at the hospital, too busy, no doubt, to offer advice. Scott stripped off his sweats and climbed in the shower hoping the hot, sudsy water might wash his guilt down the drain. It didn’t work.
He ate a late breakfast and thumbed through the newspaper. As usually, nothing inside interested him. He looked at his watch. Nine thirty. He went outside, gathered his leaf blower, and blew some leaves into tiny piles. At nine fifty, he went back inside and tried to read a book. Ten minutes later he poured another cup of coffee.
Finally, he determined to find out if the vision would come true. He pulled on a jacket and drove downtown. Leaves were whirling about the parking places surrounding the public garden that lay across the street from the used clothing store. He chose one of the leaf-strewn spaces. From here, he could see the fatal corner where his vision had sentenced Dr. Blackwell to his death. The window of the coffee shop gave off a glare and Scott couldn’t tell if Dr. Blackwell was inside or not. He wished, prayed, hoped the doctor had chosen not to come out for tea by himself this morning.
As if to disconfirm his thoughts, the wooden door to the coffee shop swung open with a ring of a
bell and the doctor stepped outside. Scott’s heart fell to his gut. It was going to happen. He had to stop it.
He opened the driver’s door just as a truck sped by, horn honking. He pulled the door shut quickly, narrowly missing the truck. The near-accident left him shaking like one of the leaves on the trees around the park. He checked for traffic, opened the door again, and looked for the doctor. He stood outside the coffee shop, smoking a cigarette. Scott watched in horror as he seemed to take note of something across the street and began walking toward it.
Scott sprinted in his direction, convinced he would walk into the path of the oncoming Jeep. A driver in a sport car yelled at Scott to get out of the street. “Dr. Blackwell,” he called.
The man kept walking.
“Hey! Dr. Blackwell,” he yelled again.
The doctor didn’t stop, but looked over his shoulder to see who called as he stepped into the street. Just then, a Jeep, driver talking on her cell phone, swerved around the corner. Blackwell turned to face the Jeep and Scott watched in horror as the vehicle knocked him to the street and then bounced over his body.
Scott ran to the injured doctor and knelt down beside him. Blood pooled on the brick street beneath his body. Half of his face was left somewhere up the road, scraped away like earth moved by a bulldozer. Chunks of his goatee hung from his chin. His left eye hung half-out of its socket.
“Dr. Blackwell,” Scott said. “Can you hear me?”
Blackwell opened his right eye and looked into Scott’s. After a moment, a knowing look crossed his face. “You knew,” he whispered. “You knew.”
Scott looked up. The woman driving the Jeep had pulled over and continued to talk on her cell phone, although much more hysterically. Others ran out of the coffee shop. “Call the police,” someone yelled.
Scott turned back to the doctor, who began to spit great globs of blood out of his ravaged mouth. Instinctively, Scott reached down into his jacket pocket and retrieved the bottle of Alprazolam. He unscrewed the top and discretely popped one of the pills.
Within moments, he had entered the doctor’s thoughts and was exploring his stories. He tapped into the one in which the doctor crossed the street in the path of the oncoming Jeep. Again he saw the accident. Nothing had changed. The image began to blur, to fade. Compelled, he stayed with the doctor. He wanted, had to see the final vision.
In a flash, all of the visions came at him, one by one, until the last one passed. Missing was the vision of Dr. Blackwell receiving the prize as an old man, as if it had never happened, for it never had. Also missing was the episode in which Blackwell killed Scott.
The ambulance arrived and paramedics moved Scott away so they could attend to the body.
Scott looked into the doctor’s face and saw he was dead. He pocketed the pill bottle and walked away, toward the park, to a green bench where he slumped down to rest, exhausted. Somehow he had just experienced death and lived. Not any death, but one he played a part in. His gut felt weak, his stomach churning. He knew he would throw up.
An old lady, perhaps in her eighties walked up the sidewalk leaning heavily on her cane. She looked up toward the crowd gathering around the accident. Paramedics loaded the body into the back of the ambulance and left police to disperse the crowd.
“May I join you?” the old lady asked.
Scott nodded.
She sat down beside him. “Oh, my,” she said. “That doesn’t look good.”
“No, it doesn’t,” Scott said.
“Did you know the man?”
Scott nodded.
“Was he a good man?” she asked.
Scott paused. As many hours as he had spent with Dr. Blackwell over the last few weeks, he couldn’t honestly answer the question without some consideration. He thought long and hard, searching for the answer. He thought about the blackmail effort with the mayor. He thought about how he manipulated the stock market. He thought about the image of Dr. Blackwell hitting him with a vase. Finally, he shook his head. “No, he wasn’t.”
The lady seemed to take in what Scott said and process it. Then, she leaned forward on her cane and pulled herself into a standing position. “That’s too bad,” she said and resumed her walk up the sidewalk. “Such a waste.”
Scott remained in his place, sitting on the park bench and watching the police as they worked with the crowd, asking questions and taking notes. He had failed. He had not prevented the doctor from dying, although he wasn’t sure that he should have tried. The facts crept into his consciousness. Dr. Blackwell had died. He would never again offer anything to the world. His presence, his essence, his influence, was gone, forever.
***
He had finished off a bottle of Jack when Grace parked in the garage and hustled through the back door.
“Hi, Gracie,” Scott called through slurred speech. He knew she hated seeing him in this condition, but there was no way in Hell he would care.
“What happened?” she demanded.
“Blackwell died,” he announced.
“How do you know?”
“I saw it happen.” He heard his voice slur the “S” and made no attempt to speak clearly.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” he said. “Me and Gumby.” he reached for the dog lying beside him, but Gumby lay too far away. He looked like he was swatting at imaginary flies.
“Did you give Gumby whisky again, tonight?”
“He took it from me,” Scott announced.
“Well, I’ll have to talk with Gumby about that,” Grace said.
“He’s a bad dog.”
“Scott,” Grace said.
“Yep?”
“How did Dr. Blackwell die?”
Scott paused a moment and then looked down at the floor. Her question made him deal with the reality of the incident, something the whiskey kept him from doing. “Just like I saw it in the dream,” he said. “He stepped in front of a Jeep.”
Then he held up a bottle of pills. “I’ve got the magic seeds.”
“What?”
“Took them out of his pocket,” Scott said.
Grace took the pills.
“Well,” she said. “I think you need to stay here with Gumby and sleep it off.” She pulled a blanket from the sofa and covered his legs with it. “When you’re ready, come to bed.”
“Otay,” he said and waved goodbye.
***
Scott slept in as long as he could. Eventually, he had no more sleep in him and he just lay in bed trying not to think about visions, the doctor, or the future. But try as he might, he couldn’t stop the thoughts. Stressful times did that to Scott. Grace had warned him about dwelling on frightening events.
Dr. Blackwell was dead. Scott didn’t hear anything about the funeral. He assumed it was held somewhere else, far away. Eventually he rolled out of bed, stepped over his sleeping dog and wandered into the kitchen to find something to consume for breakfast. Grace had left a note saying she had gone grocery shopping to pick up some miscellaneous items.
After slapping some peanut butter onto burned toast, he leaned back against the kitchen counter and savored his brunch creation. A stack of mail Grace had brought in earlier lay near the sink. He thumbed through the letters and came upon an envelope addressed personally to him, in plain print. There was no return address. The postmark was smudged, but looked like it came from Pennsylvania. Scott tore the envelope open and pulled a couple of sheets of paper from inside. Three photographs slipped through his fingers and fell to the floor. He knelt down and retrieved the pictures and thumbed through them as he stood back up. He froze.
The pictures were of him. Try as he might, he couldn’t recognize the location of the first one. In it he was dressed in ski gear, cap with goggles on the top, bibs, and scarf. He held ski poles in each hand. A magnificent mountain view of a ski run cascaded behind him. The photo confused him. He had never visited that ski slope. As a poor skier, the moguls behind his photo would have killed him.
The
second photo showed Scott posing in front of the Eifel Tower. It couldn’t have been long ago—maybe a year or two. Crowds wearing current fashions milled along the streets in the background.
The third photograph could have been taken yesterday. He was dressed casually in a t-shirt and jeans. He stood in someone else’s kitchen, washing dishes next to an attractive lady about the same age. Scott had never seen the appliances on the kitchen counter behind the couple or the lady in the photo. It was as if he had a second life. Strange.
He picked up the sheet of paper and read the printed words.
Hello.
My name is Martha. I am sending this letter to you with profound sadness and a strong request that you do not contact me. My life has been threatened by a man named Paul Blackwell. If he finds out that I have contacted you, I am sure he will kill me.
For forty-three years I was mother to the young man in the photographs. His name is Kevin. He was a salesman, a husband and a wonderful, compassionate American. That is, until Paul Blackwell found him and brainwashed him into believing he had extraordinary powers. Dr. Blackwell confused him, drugged him, and used him to con others to pay him large amounts of money. Kevin died just over a year ago. The authorities said he committed suicide.
I should mention that we adopted Kevin when he was an infant. After his death, I did a great deal of personal research. My adoption agency said he was born in Latvia and that he had a twin brother—you.
I believe that Paul Blackwell may have reached out to you and am writing to warn you that he will lie, cheat, and manipulate you in every way imaginable. He is a despicable man. Do not trust him. Do not believe his lies. Stay away from him.
Again, I urge you not to contact me. I know Dr. Blackwell will kill me if you contact me.
-Martha
The second page consisted of a photocopy of a newspaper clip, heavily marked with a black pen. It was an obituary from a local newspaper.
2nd Sight: Capturing Insight Page 10