M Sellars - Harm none

“Yeah, I thought so. Look, I appreciate your concern and all, but I gotta draw the line somewhere. Since I’m the one with the badge, I’m goin’ and you’re stayin’.”

Ben moved past me as he made the declaration. I waited until he reached the front door before I released the compact ball of energy I had formed inside my mind. It sailed invisibly along a crackling ethereal arc and enveloped my friend with a light aura of static. Its earthly manifestation came with a familiar electric snap when he reached for the doorknob. The only thing that remained for me to do was make a suggestion.

“If that’s the way you feel, okay,” I called after him. “By the way, what’s that crawling on your arm?”

Ben looked down at his sleeve absently, and his eyes suddenly grew wide in horror. His face began to pale as he slapped at his arm and let out a surprised yelp. The rest of us in the room saw nothing. Only I knew what he was witnessing, and that was only because I had been the one to create the illusion. An illusion that took advantage of my friend’s irrational fear of spiders and was done in the name of making my point.

“Jeezus!” he shouted aloud as he whipped about, quickly slipping himself out of his sport coat and shaking it violently. “Holy fuckin’ shit! How the hell did that goddamn thing get on me?!”

“Calm down, Ben,” Felicity told him. “It’s gone.”

She was correct. In truth, it had never actually been there. What he had seen had only been in his head, and that spectre could last no more than a few brief seconds. It was definitely gone.

“Whaddaya mean gone?” he shouted, still slapping his jacket against the door. “Did you see that fuckin’ thing? It was huge! It was a goddamn tarantula!”

“She’s right, Ben, it was never even there,” I expounded. “It was just a glamour.”

“There’s nothin’ glamorous about it!” he shot back, still visibly shaken but starting to calm. “It’s a friggin’ spider.”

“No, Ben,” Felicity corrected, “a glamour, not glamorous. It was an illusion. A phantom image. All courtesy of your best friend here.”

“Whoa, cool,” R.J.’s voice came from behind us, followed by Cally sternly shushing him.

“You mean like it was a spell or somethin’?” he asked as he gingerly inspected his jacket, holding it at arms length.

“You could call it something like that,” I explained. “It’s really just some basic hypnosis, the power of suggestion, and admittedly a little psychic energy thrown in for good measure. Sorry, but I figured you’d be a little more receptive to the idea if you experienced it first hand.”

“You’re tryin’ to tell me that this asshole might be able to do somethin’ like that?” He was carefully slipping his sport coat back onto his large frame, still appearing somewhat uneasy and keeping an eye out for the imagined spider.

“Maybe. Maybe not. I just don’t know.”

“So what if he can? What’re you gonna do about it?” he queried.

“Catch it before it happens. Try to block it. Warn you,” I outlined. “I don’t know. In any event, I’ll be much better prepared to recognize a glamour than you will.”

“Well, as long as I ignore spiders crawling on me, I should be okay,” he protested.

“He would most likely do something worse. Remember, I just scared the hell out of you, and I’m your best friend. Like I said, I used only a small”-I laid heavy emphasis on the word small-“amount of the psychic energy I could muster. I doubt he’ll be anywhere near as nice.”

“Is he shittin’ me?” Ben asked Felicity seriously.

“As much as I wish he was,” she frowned, “no. He’s telling you the truth.”

“Lovely. You know I oughta kick your ass for that stunt,” Ben told me with a slight grin then glanced back to my wife as if for approval.

“Hey, it’s between you two.” She held up her hands in a mock leave-me-out-of-it gesture and then suddenly grew earnest. “Do me a favor, Ben. If you’re going to take him with you, this time don’t bring him home with any stitches.”

“Count on it.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” I mumbled.

“She just knows your track record, white man,” he turned back to me. “Just one question. Why’d you hafta pick spiders? You know I can’t stand the things.”

“Actually, I didn’t, you did. All I said was ‘what’s that crawling on your arm?’ Your own fears and imagination did the rest of the work for me.”

He shook his head. “Just what I needed ta’ hear.”

I was still clipping my visitor’s badge onto my pocket when Carl Deckert met the two of us at the door to the MCS command post. His normally laid back demeanor had been replaced by one of frantic urgency as he held the door open and hustled us into the room.

“I’ve got something you might want to have a look at,” he told us as he excitedly waved a sheaf of papers at us. “You’re not gonna believe it.”

“What?” Ben queried, following him to a nearby desk. “Whaddaya have?”

Shadows fell darkly across the corner area from the flickering fluorescent tubes in the ceiling lights as they dimly sputtered away towards uselessness. Deckert reached out and craned the flexible neck of a small lamp forward and switched it on, effectively illuminating at least part of the desk’s scarred surface.

“I just got this right after you hung up,” he spoke rapidly as he shuffled through the papers and slid an eight-by-ten photo beneath the puddle of light. “The lab lifted this from the little girl’s vinyl book bag.”

The black-and-white-toned image depicted a curving pattern of lines arcing around into what might have been a tight whorl. Might have been, because they abruptly ended in a blank, smeary looking splotch.

“This one is from the Barnes woman,” he continued and slid a similar grey-toned image in next to the original.

“Son-of-a-bitch,” Ben slowly enunciated the words as he leaned forward to inspect the fingerprint photos more closely.

Not being familiar with fingerprint analysis, I appealed, “Somebody want to fill me in?”

“It’s a partial right thumbprint,” Detective Deckert explained. “The one you turned us on to with your vision or whatever you call it.”

“Yeah, I kinda caught on to that,” I acknowledged. “But I thought it was too smudged to do anything with.”

“That’s what we thought,” he continued. “But that was before we got the second print which just happened to be quite a bit clearer.”

“They both look smudged to me.”

“It’s a scar,” Ben volunteered, completing the explanation for me, then turned to Deckert. “Any hits from AFIS?”

“Not yet,” he returned. “It’s been scanned, and they’re trying to do a digital image match, but that takes a little longer. The first one didn’t hit, but this one is clearer, so maybe…”

“One of you Detective Storm?” a voice issued from behind us.

We turned to find a uniformed officer peering at us expectantly, a manila envelope tucked under his arm.

“That’s me,” Ben answered.

“Got something here from Capitol Bank for you.” The officer held out a clipboard and pen. “I need ya to sign for it.”

Ben quickly scribbled his signature on the paperwork then exchanged the clipboard for the envelope and muttered a quick “thanks.” He was already ripping it open before the officer was out the door.

“Hey Storm!” another voice called from across the room. “Got a cellular call from a Special Agent Mandalay on line two. Wants to talk to you.”

“Tell ‘im I’m not here,” he shouted back as he rifled through the contents of the envelope.

“He’s a she,” the voice returned.