Clairvoyant Girlfriend

by Koby E Hill

Emmett reached for his ankle to assess the damage. He tried to move his pant leg, but it had infused itself into his skin. He grimaced and gripped himself tightly. “Her? Who? The other psy?”

  “I think so.” Craig was panting hard, watching a red-dressed silhouette in an unidentifiable mask hover toward Alice, who was just as captivated as Craig.

  Craig was not a psy, but made up for it in intuition and empathy. His affection toward Alice had evolved over the ten years of their working relationship, in a fashion that his career choices could never have predicted. He’d grown up in small town, raised by a single mother, who took the time out of her hectic schedule caring for Craig to care for the homeless, without pay. Craig did not observe a single moment of selfishness or anger for as long as he’d known his mother, and had thus developed a keen sense of caring and the value of kindness. Craig himself was rarely angry. He chose to transfer his energy of frustration into efficacy, and had built himself a successful career. He’d begun as a quiet rookie on a small police force, and rose through a series of promotions, eventually landing a position as a profiler in the FBI. During his 20-year career there, he captured 3 high-profile offenders. The final offender was Xavier Rant, a farmer who kidnapped young tourists and held them in a basement below his barn. Rant was a particularly difficult criminal to catch, because Craig found himself abruptly losing his memory, but only regarding specifics of the case. He’d consulted the FBI psychiatrist, who connected him with Alice and Crowden. Alice was able to easily tap into his mind and find that Rant was confusing his mind, swirling around memories just for fun. The two had an immediate connection, and Craig had been working as the chief director of the secret organization ever since.

  Craig possessed the benefit of perspective, as the only non-psy in the main task-force of Crowden. He believed in their capabilities and was able to harness them through simple motivation and support. His efficient optimism, though, was no match for Alice’s well-built cynicism, cultivated since her left eye had been permanently damaged. She’d never spoken about the incident to Craig, desperate in his efforts to give her a safe space to indulge in his lack of judgment. They had a friendship that grew inside his heart to the point of something he thought of as inappropriate, for the sake of their friendship, anyway. Alice was younger than him, and her behavior often made him feel like he was fathering her. Her alcohol and drug use, her promiscuousness, along with psychic abilities unknown to the human world that made her feel invincible, worried him more than his logical mind could comprehend. He knew that the only reason she worked for Crowden is because she lacked any other meaning in her life. She felt like she wasn’t worthy of satisfaction outside of this, so it drove her to do things that were beyond irrational. Craig knew this, and it consistently broke his heart.

  He knew, then, inside his broken heart, that this was going to be one of those moments. The woman, with whom they’d managed to get into contact with, the other female psy, was going to use her connection to pain and alienation, to lure Alice into her world. And then, maybe then, she would fabricate an existence of meaning that thrived beyond that of Crowden. Even for a non-psy, Craig could sense the intrigue buried in Alice’s demeanor from a few yards away, and he was afraid of it.

  “What’s happening?!” Emmett screamed over the flickering flames. Craig kept watching as the masked stranger walked directly up to Alice. Craig watched her lift her hand up and put her fingers onto Alice’s forehead. Craig felt the world around him go silent, while the two women snapped out of his reach, leaving a small gust of air behind them.

  “Oh my God,” Craig muttered to himself. Emmett was still repeating the same question behind him. The sound was dull and pointless.

  He turned and jogged over to Emmett. He crouched beside him and touched his uninjured ankle. “She took her somewhere. We have to get up to Crowden as soon as possible. How badly are you hurt?”

  Emmett yanked on his pant leg and let out a yelp of pain. “I’ve permanently become a part of my least favorite pair of pants.”

  “Shit,” Craig touched the fabric lightly. Even before his finger had made contact with it, he could feel the searing of the flames that enmeshed Emmett’s pants to his skin. “We’ll get you to the hospital first, then. Tobias?” He yelled behind Emmett. Tobias responded by raising his head. He was holding Ella awkwardly by her head that Alice had placed quickly into his lap before she was tugged away by an invisible force.

  “Is Ella ok?”

  “She hasn’t opened her eyes yet, if that’s what you’re asking. Her head is bleeding a little bit.”

  “Fuck”, the cursing had escalated. He patted his pockets for his phone and removed it, not calling 911, but the paramedics who were on call at Crowden. There had been a few handfuls of situations where they were required—psy training season was just around the corner.

  “We aren’t far from you, please come as fast you can.” Craig hung up quickly. He crouched once more and put his face in his hands. Tobias was coming towards them, carrying Ella’s small body. Craig could see that she was breathing when he helped him lower her onto the ground, placing her head softly underneath Tobias’ jacket. He touched her face and wiped the blood that was leaking from her forehead.

  He once more put his head in his hands.

  “What the fuck is going on, Craig? What do you know that we don’t?”

  Craig lifted his face up from between his hands and saw that Tobias and Emmett were staring at him. They looked concerned, angry, and confused. He realized that he wasn’t able to detect who had actually posed the question.

  They’d been denied the truth for the amount of time that they waited for Alice to emerge from her hideout in the woods. But was sitting by the side of the road after an intensely dramatic and traumatic experience really the right time to reveal it to them?

  Craig sighed, feeling the heavy burden of leadership that Alice so often heaved onto him, involuntarily. “There’s a connection between this female psy and Alice that we knew about before we started projecting. I can’t entirely say right now, though, what it is. I think that there is more that Alice knows, and isn’t telling us.”

  Emmett found his way onto his feet, and hobbled toward the wreckage. He put both his hands on his head, and did what he could to contain the anger that was bubbling in his blood.

  Chapter 10

  Angela and Alice were sitting in Angela’s own version of the Quiet Room. Instead of that title, she called it “the area where she found contact”. She used it often to meditate and observe herself, to practice utilizing her own abilities, while watching her weaknesses without judgment or criticism. There were only two chairs in the room, three orchids sitting on a display table, an old radio, and a scent diffuser. If she felt so inclined, she would sometimes sit on a meditation cushion. This also made the area appear to make more sense to the common person surveying her hallway.

  On their way to this room, Alice had observed multiple degrees hanging on the wall. Without having the conversation, Alice was able to sense that Angela was a psychiatrist, working in an outpatient office and treating those with psychotic disorders. She was renowned for her supposedly “radical” practice of integrating mindfulness into the treatment of hallucinations and delusions. Angela taught her patients to embrace their symptoms, rather than to stuff them down with pills and other talk therapies. This, of course, was a sneaky way of watching out for upcoming psies like her, as it wasn’t uncommon for a strong psychic to mistake their own abilities for mental illness. If you tell someone you trust that you are hearing voices, and are able to manipulate another person’s thoughts, their first step in helping you is to seek medical attention. Unless one is a psy, the thought of one actually expressing special abilities was the furthest possibility from their mind.

  Occasionally, Angela invited her patients into her home, offering to engage in guided meditation sessions with her. Here, she was able to penetrate their mind, and either pick up if this was another psy she had to deal with, or if this
person was indeed suffering from a mental illness. If it was a mental illness, she could pinpoint the issue instantly, climbing into their brain with her unique style of lobotomy. She would calm the rapid firing of neurons and re-stitch the broken pieces of matter. Angela, then, could project her abilities into all of the damaged brains around the world, would be entirely responsible for curing mental illness.

  But this, of course, was too exposing, and not at the top of her priority list.

  “I can’t take off the mask that quickly. It’s best to make them believe I’m just a very good psychiatrist, rather than a gifted psychic.”

  They sat opposite one another, in chairs that were adorned with buttons that toggled massaging beads in the lower back and shoulders. Alice could have easily sunk into one of these and eased herself into sleep, but more pressing matters were at hand.

  “So this is where the magic happens, eh?” Alice looked around the room. “This looks fairly legit. Let me guess,” She pointed at the diffuser as it puffed out a small billow of smoke. “Lavender?”

  Angela nodded, grinning. “Its anti-anxiety effects have been proven effective. I’m sure you’ve noticed that I place the scent everywhere around my home.”

  “That must be why I feel so unconcerned with a woman who just confessed to me that she killed her father at the age of ten. Botany—who’d have thought?”

  Angela settled herself in her seat. “So, we must set some boundaries for this. What is it you most want to know about me? What would benefit you the most?”

  Alice crossed her arms and leaned her head back thoughtfully. “Well, it’s entirely pointless to ask how you knew where I was, who I was, and everything about me, of course. That’s my story. I want to know about your story—beyond the daddy-killing, of course.”

  “Fair.” Angela closed her eyes and placed her hands on her knees. “I’m going to open up for thirty seconds. I will let you inside to wander wherever you please. Find the story that most satisfies you.”

  Alice felt the return of her abilities like a rock falling from great heights. She sighed out loud, like a person who had been thirsty for days and finally felt that first touch of water hitting their lips.

  She tipped her way inside Angela’s mind with a caution she’d never experienced before. She saw what she had done to her father—the deep hot rage that emitted from a ten-year-old was real. She watched her pretend to feel upset when he finally passed, and attended the funeral with her mother. She watched her beginning to utilize her powers more often, with more control, and with more and more self-congratulation. Angela stole toys from stores by distracting the clerks, she manipulated her teachers into forgetting the days she was absent, making them mark her work with more ease than the other children, making those she didn’t like walk into walls. She watched her masturbate for the first time by only using her mind, cumming with an exhilaration that only further grounded her belief in her own God-like potential.

  Then, she finally saw something that was of relevance: She walked into a courthouse, searching for three men in particular, and used a name that Alice believed initially to be of irrelevance—but it was her father’s. She, of course, wasn’t looking for him, but for the three lawyers of whom she would eventually kill by making their amygdalas explode. She saw her sitting in a bar, two of the murdered lawyers sitting at the bar and chatting up the bartender. She tasted the gin and tonic in the Hole in the Wall beer house, strong on the tonic, low on the gin factor. Alice observed that Angela was reading their minds, and made one of them accidentally spill a pint of beer onto the other. She was tempted that night to do the duty right then and there, and was pleasured by the fantasy: A vision of the other bar attendees screaming, bewildered and in panic, fleeing the establishment as she sat silent in the corner. But the theatrics would have to wait, for now.

  Alice searched as fast as she could for the obvious question: Why? If she was just a psychopath who also happened to possess extraordinary psychic abilities, then why did she take the extra effort to stalk and learn about the men who knew each other, who all lived in same neighborhood, married with wives and children and dogs and contained in a white-picket-fence? Why not cause a unified frenzy and make all of their amygdalas explode while they played with their children? While they fucked their wives? Why scope them out with such restraint?

  Alice found the police officer who had also been killed in the same violent fashion. At first, all she could see were dandelions, obstructing her vision and rushing her with a fierce floral scent. She managed to push past them, t and found a woman of similar stature as Angela, bent over weeds and tugging them from their root in the ground. A young man in a police uniform skulked behind her, and surprised her with a tap on the shoulder.

  He informed her that her vast flower arrangements were disturbing the neighbors and that this would be her last warning. The woman scowled in response, but said nothing to combat him. The police officer had red hair, and was large around the middle. Alice then picked up the outline of Angela’s body in a greenhouse not far from where the woman was removing weeds. It clicked in for Alice that this must be Angela’s mother. Angela closed her eyes, and soft, squishy bursting sound followed. The young man was in a drive-through buying coffee when his amygdala exploded, spurting blood all over his cruiser and the hand of the woman who was handing it to him. Angela was smoking in this vision, and breathed out a thick puff of smoke through her teeth when she knew the deed had been done.

  Alice barely had time to dwell on the impulsive and more-than-likely satisfying act committed by Angela while she held such restraint on the lawyers she was stalking. She immediately felt heat and the smell of scorching grass, watching a wall of flames run between two houses in a quiet suburban night. Alice refocused her point of view and saw the neighbors who had complained about Angela’s mother’s extravagant floral arrangements crying on their front lawns, stars peering down on them with a lazy light.

  Angela was cold here, classically emotionless about disrupting the lives of seemingly-innocent strangers. Yet, there was rage behind this coldness, oddly, as there often seems to be. Alice saw Angela moving at another funeral amongst many red-heads. She saw her speaking to two people with blindingly orange heads, dressed in a tight, silk black dress. She watched as Angela manipulated them into changing over their deed to the house they were presently sitting in, and convince them that they had reached the age where it was time to submit to retirement care. She brought her mother into the house that the young police officer was going to get in his parents' will—a gothic looking monster that had been passed down through his lineage for centuries. But now Angela had it, and happily moved her mother in within a day, projecting all of her items over province lines. Her mother was ecstatic, and Angela felt for the first time, something resembling love. It was a healthy respect for a person who had put up with so much in her lifetime, and yet was being punished for her gentle nature.

  Alice couldn’t stay there. She kept moving. She needed to find out more about the lawyers.

  “Not so fast, baby.” Alice didn’t realize that she, too, had closed her eyes while she was attempting reading the open portion of Angela’s mind. She opened them now instinctively, and found Angela straddling her, with both her hands on her throat. “The alarm has rung. You’ve been inside me for thirty-seconds. It’s time to come home, now.”

  “You weren’t entirely open to me. You tried blurring things, I could feel it.”

  “Maybe you’re not as good a psy as your team persuades you to be.” Angela pressed two thumbs against her vocal cords. “Maybe you’ve never had to get pass someone as good as me.”

  “That’s already been established.” Alice placed her hands on Angela’s forearms. They were thin, and if she wanted to exert herself physically, she could probably greatly injure her. That is, if she could manage it before she ripped her throat apart.

  “My arms are tiny. But you wouldn’t be able to do it in time before I crushed this beautiful voice box.”


  Alice still tainted her grip. “I still need to know why. You still haven’t given me enough of a reason why I should trust you. And although I am into kinky stuff, this—” she wrapped her hands around Angela’s, lining them up with her own throat. “This, isn’t helping. And like I said earlier, you would be doing me a favor. But I know you won’t do it. You can’t do it. There’s something else that you want from me in return. If I’m dead, you can’t retrieve that from my dead mind.”

  Angela giggled, genuinely this time. It scared Alice slightly.

  Angela intermittently tightened her grip on Alice’s throat, and then released it. She wasn’t breathing hard, but moved with the elevation of Alice’s stomach. “I told you not to go too far, and you disobeyed me. I don’t like being disobeyed.”

  “You’ve heard me, Angela. You do your worst.”

  Angela moved her face closer to Alice’s. She was grinning, with half of her mouth open. Suddenly, Alice felt relaxed, comfortable, and strangely aroused. Angela was bringing her open mouth closer to Alice’s, when Alice shot a look at the diffuser. “Lavender. I’m sure it’s all the lavender that’s making me feel this.”

  Angela’s lips trembled over Alice’s. “Like you said—botany. Who knew?”