Colour of Death, The

by Cordy, Michael

  “Try me.”

  “OK.” He began entering numbers into the phone. “Multiply eighty-seven by twenty-two, add sixty-one, divide by eleven…” As he pressed the buttons he noticed her finger stabbing the space in front of her, as though manipulating a virtual abacus. “…multiply by fourteen, subtract twenty-three, add six and divide by five point five.”

  As the phone revealed the solution he heard her say it, exactly as it appeared on his display: “Four hundred and fifty-three point nine three three eight eight seven.”

  “Impressive. When you do your calculations, can you see the numbers in front of you?”

  “Of course. They’re laid out in color-coded rows and columns, which I move around to do my calculations.” Like a spreadsheet, he thought, ticking the final entry off his list: ‘number-form’. His head buzzed with possibilities. She frowned. “Can’t everyone do this?”

  “No, they can’t.” He looked back over his list. “Ever heard of something called synaesthesia?”

  She shook her head. Like most synaesthetes she didn’t appear to think her crossed senses were unusual but, incredibly, no one else had picked up on her condition. No mention of it appeared in her file. “What’s synaesthesia?” she asked, anxiously.

  “Don’t worry, it’s not an illness. It’s not classified as a neurological medical condition and rarely causes problems or disability. Some even regard it as a gift. If you want to get technical, synaesthesia is defined as a neurologically based phenomenon in which stimulation of one sensory or cognitive pathway leads to automatic, involuntary experiences in a secondary sensory or cognitive pathway. Put more simply, it involves two or more sense becoming cross-wired. For example: sight and touch, sound and taste, sound and color, symbols and color.”

  “Is it unusual?”

  “Pretty unusual. About one person in every twenty-one has some form of the condition. One of the rarer forms is mirror-touch synaesthesia, in which a subject sees someone else experience touch or pain and then feels it himself. I happen to know a bit about this because I’ve got it.” He smiled at her. “I’m pretty sure you’ve got it, too. I noticed the way you rubbed your wrist when I fell.” She nodded. “But you don’t just have my type, you also seem to have lexical-gustatory synaesthesia, in which individual words and sounds of spoken language evoke the sensations of taste in the mouth. This tasting of words is also very rare. What makes it rarer still is that synaesthetes — as we’re known — usually have only one form of the phenomenon, one pairing of cross-wired senses, but you appear—”

  “To have two,” she said. She was sitting forward now, forehead creased in concentration, hungry for answers.

  “Not just two,” he said. “Even your ability to see colored auras around people is typical of emotion-color synaesthesia.” He showed her his list. “What’s truly remarkable is you appear to have not only the rarest forms of the phenomenon but every form I know of.” He read through the rest of the list. “Grapheme-color synaesthesia; you see letters and numbers as colors. Ordinal linguistic personification; you associate ordered sequences such as numbers, letters and days of the week with personalities. Sound-color synaesthesia, both narrowband and broadband; you see musical notes and other environmental sounds as colors. And, finally, number-form synaesthesia; you see numbers in a three-dimensional, color-coded virtual matrix that allows you to perform mental calculations at amazing speeds.” Fox paused to process what he was saying. Jane Doe appeared to be some king of super-synaesthete, each and every sense feeding off and into the others. At one level she experienced the world as everyone else did but at another sensory level she interpreted it completely differently. Suddenly his own mirror-touch variety seemed very pedestrian. “Basically, you have every form of synaesthesia I can think of, without going back to my reference books, and probably many others I can’t. There are at least sixty recognized variants, involving differing permutations of the five major senses. You might even have forms that haven’t been diagnosed yet. I’ve never come across this before. This is unprecedented. You may be unique.”

  “What does it mean, though? What’s it got to do with my memory loss and the hallucinations?”

  He opened her file again and focused on her head injuries. “Synaesthesia is usually something you’re born with and often runs in families. You can get it from head trauma and exposure to drugs but your injuries from the night of the fire weren’t that acute and drugs don’t seem to be a factor. I’m guessing you probably had synaesthesia before you lost your memory and that it’s linked to your hallucinations.”

  “You don’t think my hallucinations and memory loss are connected?”

  “Not directly, no. But now I know about your synaesthesia I’d like to focus on the hallucinations. You appear to have total synaesthesia.” He paused, uncomfortably aware he was entering uncharted waters of speculation. “Perhaps it also breathes full sensory life into your thoughts and fears, which would explain why you smell, see, hear and feel your hallucinations in such acute detail. Your unique sensory perception could act like an in-built special effects department: synaesthesia-generated. Don’t forget, a hallucination is basically a perception in a conscious or awake state in the absence of external stimuli. You might not need external stimuli, though, to project your thoughts and emotions into the sensory realm and experience them as the real thing.”

  “But where do these images come from? My imagination? My fears? Memories?”

  “That’s the million-dollar question.” For a moment he considered telling her about the suicides and asking her whether she had overheard anything about them on or before her arrival at Tranquil Waters. If she had heard something, even on an unconscious level, her synaesthesia might somehow have allowed her to recreate the event. But he wanted to check one thing first. “I did think they might be repressed memories, at first,” he said, pointing to her file. “But then I read the reports on your hallucinations at Oregon State. They were so varied and prolific I don’t see how they could possibly all be memories. Certainly not your memories. What’s strange though…” He stopped himself. The irrational notion that had been growing in his mind was too bizarre to say aloud. He reached for his briefcase and rechecked his notes. There was definitely a pattern and her synaesthesia made the insight — if that was what it was — only more credible. The implications defied every rational instinct but the notion was too compelling to dismiss. And it could easily be verified or, as he expected, debunked. “I need to make a couple of calls and arrange a few things. Then I want to try something.”

  “What?”

  “I want to run a little experiment.” He got up and moved to the door. “I’ll be back in a few minutes. I’ll explain everything then.”

  Chapter 12

  As Jane Doe waited anxiously for Fox’s return, a second victim was waking up to his fate in Old Town. Sometime last night, in the back alleys near Burnside, Josh Kovacs had collapsed on the pile of discarded cardboard and newspapers that served as a bed, unconscious from cheap bourbon and every downer he could get his hands on. When he had fallen asleep Kovacs had been wearing torn trainers, a scuffed leather jacket and stained sweats. When he awoke, head pounding and throat sandpaper-dry, he discovered that his lips had been sealed with duct tape and everything had changed.

  Opening his eyes, he realized he was no longer in the alley but inside a disused warehouse. The windows had been blacked out and there was a naked bulb hanging overhead so he had no idea what time of day or night it was. As he slowly grasped his predicament, panic seeped through his addled mind. He tried to stand but his wrists and ankles had been bound. Then he noticed his clothes piled neatly on the dusty floor beside him. Looking down he saw he had been dressed in a woman’s blue gown.

  What the hell…?

  He heard footsteps then a figure loomed over him, silhouetted against the light bulb. The figure bent down and Kovacs detected a faint cloying smell. When he saw his captor’s pale, unblinking eyes, Kovacs found no pity or humanity ther
e. They looked down on him as coldly as if Kovacs were prey to be devoured, or a bug to be crushed. The man had a cell phone strapped to his forehead with duct tape, its video lens staring at him like another eye. Suddenly sober and rigid with fear, Kovacs needed to urinate but some last vestige of pride stopped him emptying his bladder. Two strong arms reached down and moved his body and limbs into a pre-arranged design, then the man pulled out a large knife, knelt over Kovacs and began prodding his chest, feeling for his ribs: a butcher determining the best place to make the first cut. He looked into Kovacs’ eyes. “How old are you now?” he demanded in a low growl. “Fifty-five? Sixty? You look so old and wasted I almost didn’t recognize you.” He scraped the knife against Kovacs’ bedraggled gray beard and pulled at his thinning silver hair. “But your age can’t hid you. I know who you are. I know what you did. Can you still remember?”

  Remember what? Kovacs strained against the duct tape, blinking back sweat, trying to speak. What the hell are you talking about?

  “Look around you and cast your mind back a few years. Perhaps the blue gown will help remind you.” Suddenly Kovacs realized what the madman was talking about. But that had been ages ago, decades ago. Why now? The recognition must have shown in his eyes because his tormentor smiled. “You remember.” He raised the knife and Kovacs could see the muscles twitching in the man’s arm as he prepared to plunge the blade into his chest.

  A sudden shrill ringing made his attacker freeze, the knife inches above Kovacs’ heart. It took Kovacs’ terrified mind a beat to realize it was coming from the cell phone attached to the killer’s forehead. For what seemed an eternity the knife hovered above him, then the man groaned, stood up and walked out of view. The relief was too much for Kovacs. He relaxed his bladder and the flow of warm urine down his thigh was momentarily comforting. He twisted his head to see his tormentor walk to a black tote bag, which had spilled open, revealing a carton of marker pens and a newspaper picture of the Jane Doe he had seen all over the news. The man used the knife to cut the ringing phone from his forehead, then stared at it as if unsure what to do. Answer it, Kovacs prayed, hoping to buy more time. Answer the fucking phone. Eventually the man pressed a button and held the phone to his ear. “Yes?”

  Kovacs could hear a harsh guttural voice, thick with anger, shouting orders down the phone like some foul-mouthed Mafia don. As the man listened his body language changed. His shoulders stooped, his head bowed and his breathing became more ragged like an asthmatic child. “No, not yet,” he said, glancing at the woman in the newspaper. “As soon as I discover anything I’ll call you. Yes, yes, I understand.” He began shaking his head. “No, I won’t fail you again. I’m close. I’ll finish it soon.” Kovacs began thrashing around on the floor, trying to make the caller hear him. Perhaps he would make the man stop. His tormentor walked back and kicked him hard in the stomach. “What noise?” he said into the phone. “Just a dog. Yes, of course I’m exercising discipline and being discreet. No, I’ve done nothing to attract the attentions of the children of men. I’m totally focused on finishing the job. I’ll call you as soon as I know more.” He hung up and retaped the phone to his forehead.

  Seconds later, he was kneeling over Kovacs again. “Stop moving,” he said, as he tied the bonds tighter and repositioned Kovacs’ head. “I need to get this just right.” He raised the knife again, this time pausing for only a second before bringing it down so hard that the blade went clean through Kovacs’ ribcage, missing bone and driving out the breath from his lungs. As he arched his spine in agony he felt the tip of the long blade exit his back and jar against the concrete floor beneath his body. His killer pulled out the knife and raised it for another strike. In that instant, struggling for breath, Kovacs focused on the glistening blade, mesmerized by its ruby-red sheen, slick with his own blood. Then the knife descended again.

  Kovacs was dead before the fourth stab shredded his pumping heart.

  Chapter 13

  Back at Tranquil Waters, Jane Doe paced her room, brought to life by Nathan Fox’s diagnosis. In one session he had discovered more about her than her previous psychiatrist had in over a week, but she was unsure of the implications of Fox’s discovery and anxious about what to expect next. When Fox eventually returned, he had been away for only half an hour but it felt more like two. He carried his briefcase in his right hand and a clutch of sealed envelopes in the other. She glimpsed something scrawled on the top envelope. He stopped in the doorway, reached into the briefcase and pulled out some sandwiches and a small bottle of Evian. “I got you some lunch. Come, let’s take a walk.”

  She took the sandwiches but felt too excited to eat. “Where are we going?” She stiffened. “We’re not going back to the other room?”

  He smiled. “No. But we are going to visit some of the other rooms in the original building.” He took her hand. “Come. Trust me. It’s going to be OK.” Reluctantly, she let him lead her down the corridor and along the enclosed glass walkway that linked the new wing to the original Victorian building. “OK, this is how the experiment goes. I’m going to take you to four empty rooms and I want you to tell me what you experience in each of them.”

  “Why?”

  He led her to the elevator and pressed for the second floor. “To test a theory.”

  “What theory?”

  “I can't tell you yet because it might affect the experiment.”

  “What’s in the envelopes?”

  “Predictions.”

  “Of what?”

  The elevator opened on the second floor. He led her down another long corridor and stopped outside a room. ‘In each of these four envelopes I’ve written messages that apply to the four rooms we’re going to visit. The messages are effectively predictions, descriptions of what you’re going to hallucinate in each room.”

  She didn’t feel comfortable about this. “Is this some kind of test? Do you think I’m making this up?”

  “On the contrary. This is simply a controlled experiment to check out a theory of why you hallucinate, and this building is an ideal place to conduct it. Also, for what it’s worth, the only way you’re going to conquer your fear of these hallucinations and gain some distance is to expose yourself to them, again and again.” He peeled off one of the sealed envelopes and held it up. The number 207 was scrawled on it. “The number on each envelope tallies with the number assigned to each room. This contains my prediction of what, if anything, you’re going to hallucinate in room 207.” He took a key from his case and unlocked the door. “The normal occupant is at lunch. Step inside and tell me what you experience, if anything.”

  “But what if—”

  “Don’t worry. Just humor me and step inside for a moment.” His blue eyes locked on hers. “If you do feel anything, remember what I told you yesterday. Try to be as objective as possible and distance yourself from whatever it is you’re experiencing. Imagine you’re standing on a bridge, looking down on your stream of consciousness. Let whatever you think, feel or experience drift past you, under the bridge. Observe everything but don’t accept responsibility for it. After all, you can’t control it. You’re an innocent bystander. And remember, nothing in the stream can hurt you. If it gets too much, just step out of the room.” He smiled and his intense features softened, became almost boyish. “Please trust me, Jane. I’m not doing this to make you feel uncomfortable. I’m trying to diagnose what’s happening.”

  He opened the door, stood back and gestured for her to go in. Aside from a few personal touches — a photograph by the bed and some books on the desk — the room was like her own. She hovered in the doorway then took three tentative steps inside. Fragmented images, smells and sounds intruded on her senses, but nothing other than the normal white noise she was accustomed to.

  “Anything?”

  “No. Not really.”

  “Walk around a bit. Get a feel for the place.” She did as he asked. “Anything now?”

  She shook her head. “Nothing specific.” She wasn’t sure whethe
r to feel relieved or disappointed. “What did you predict for this room?”

  Fox kept his face impassive, folded the envelope in half and placed it in his jacket pocket. “Come, let’s go to the second room.”

  The second room was down the corridor. He unlocked and opened the door then peeled off another envelope, which had the number 222 written on it. He stood back. “In you go.”

  She took a deep breath and took three steps inside. Nothing. She shook her head.

  He frowned. “You always move to the center of a room — you even moved your bed away from the walls because you said it made you feel more comfortable. Walk to the side of the room. Touch one of the walls.” She walked slowly toward the window and found that her hand was shaking as she tentatively touched the wall, as if it might burn her or deliver an electric shock. It felt normal. “Keep it there,” he instructed. The ‘white noise’ became slightly more intrusive, but still nothing concrete or cohesive. “Anything?” he asked.

  “Nope. Some low-level stuff but nothing much. In fact it’s quite calming. If I had to choose, I’d say this was actually more peaceful than the first room.” He remained expressionless but, for a fleeting moment, she thought she saw relief on his face. He had predicted she would see something in here, she was sure of it. So why was he relieved? What was so frightening about his theory that he wanted to disprove it? “What was I supposed to have seen in here?”

  He folded the envelope, still sealed, and placed it back in his jacket pocket with the first one. “I told you, I’ll show you everything after the experiment. Let’s try the third room.” By now she was impatient for the experiment to be over so she could hear his theory. When he unlocked and opened the door to room 302 on the third floor she didn’t wait to be coaxed. She stepped straight into the room and casually reached out her arm to touch one of the walls, convinced it would be three strikeouts.