Rob Thurman - All Seeing Eye

Hector’s jaw muscles bunched at the casual dismissal of his brother’s life, but he said nothing.

All right, this was about as weird as it got, and coming from a homegrown Georgia psychic, that was saying something. “Hector,” I demanded, “what is this bullshit this guy is flinging? What’s he saying about Charlie?” I might not completely trust Allgood, but I damn sure trusted him more than Thackery. If I’d died on that cold bastard’s immaculate lab floor, his first thought would’ve been for the project, his second for calling the janitor to clean up my remains. Hector was far from perfect, but he was worlds away a better man than that. And right now, except for Eden’s sympathy and duty, he was the only one remotely on my side.

“He’s right,” he said thickly. “Charlie’s not gone. Not completely. His body died, but not before the experiment succeeded. Apparently, he was passing into a state of astral projection just as his heart stopped. Meleah couldn’t… we couldn’t revive him. There was nothing for him to return to.”

“And he’s just floating out there?” This was nuts. Flat-out nuts.

“We’re not sure what he’s doing or even how aware he is, but he’s there.” Hector stood, stripped off his lab coat, and hung it over the back of his chair. “The machine activated. It flooded Charlie’s body with alpha-wave ions to trigger an OOB. It worked just as it had once before. He’d made it once before.”

OOB being an out-of-body experience. But this particular time, unlike the first, he hadn’t made it back.

“How do you know he actually made it the first time?” I asked skeptically.

“It’s possible to read a very unique energy signal after the OOB is initiated. Plus, we wrote a word on a piece of paper on a desk five offices down when Charlie was already in the machine. When Charlie came back, he knew the word. He’d traveled down there and read it. Only five rooms, but we thought we’d start small.”

I could see movement in his lab-coat pocket. He was running a thumb over the bracelet.

“The second time we read the same signal as Charlie went out, but when he died, it dissipated. We thought he was gone, but…” Hector paused. “It turned out we were wrong. Unfortunately, it was weeks before we realized this, and during that time… people died.”

People were dying. That was the justification he’d used for the blackmail. People were dying. Now I was apparently about to find out why.

“What does one have to do with the other?” I asked with wariness. I had the sudden feeling that maybe I didn’t really want to know the connection. Considering the blackmail, my seizure on a cold lab floor, and Charlie’s murder, I couldn’t see any way the information could be classified as good, hopeful, or even remotely entertaining.

“People died,” I echoed. “Why?”

“There is no why,” he countered immediately. “Charlie wouldn’t be part of what was happening if he could stop it. He wouldn’t be able to stand it if he knew what he’d caused. Charlie…” His throat worked. “Charlie was a good man.”

At that, Thackery obviously made the decision that if the story was going to be told, he’d have to tell it. “Charles is trying to get back, but he has no place to return to. His body is no longer viable. But more than not having a destination, he also has no road, no pathway. There is no door, which was his body, for him to enter our layer of time and space, so he’s trying to make one. And that… that is not working out well for anyone.” He pursed his lips. “To say the least. We’re up to seven dead now. I hesitate to guess where the body count might eventually top out. It doesn’t bode well for the experiment or our careers.”

“Yes, our careers should always be foremost in our minds,” Hector said acidly. “You son of a bitch.”

“If the government pulls our plug along with our futures, Dr. Allgood, then there will be no way to stop, or help, Charles. Is that what you want?”

“No,” Hector shot back harshly. “That’s not what I want, Thackery. So just shut the hell up and get on with it.”

Dissension in the ranks. Ordinarily, I might have exploited it. But now, with all I knew and Charlie’s memories, memories of a better man than I was, lurking in the back of my mind, I couldn’t force myself to do it.

“Wait, just how is Charlie causing people to die?” I aimed the question at Hector, but it was Thackery who answered.

“It’s complicated.” He frowned. “It seems that the normal ether that forms the backdrop to our existence functions as a mirror. Energy, events, nearly everything bounces off of it… is reflected. However, in incidences of extreme violence, mental or physical, the ether can be frayed. Raveled like old cloth. If it frays enough, instead of mirroring an image, it imprints one. Records it, basically. This is what gives you your stereotypical ‘ghost.’ It’s simply a recording.”

“Yeah, that’s fucking fascinating,” I interjected, “but I’m still waiting to hear what it has to do with Charlie.”

The skin next to Thackery’s mouth whitened, but he deigned to explain. “The reason is twofold. First, these areas are weakened. Apparently, Charles senses this, and these are the places through which he’s trying to find his way back. Second, when this happens, the ether begins to rip. And when it does, those so-called recordings go from passive to active.”

Confused, I turned to Hector. “Plain talk, Hector. Tell me.”

Expression weary, he sighed and folded his arms. “Lizzie Borden took an axe and gave her father forty whacks, right?”

Okay. Simple enough. “Gotcha.”

“Suppose you went to her house and saw something. Maybe she was in the bedroom doing away with her mother or in the parlor with her father. You might actually see that if the place fit all the requirements of a true recording, but you would only see it. But if Charlie tries to come through…” He shifted his shoulders in discomfort but went on. “That recording goes from television to virtual reality. You wouldn’t be watching Lizzie. You would be the violence trigger. You would be Lizzie, or someone else in the house would. Charlie rips the ether, twists it. Your normal rules of physics and metaphysics go tumbling out the window, and the recording shifts to not-so-glorious three-D.”

“Normal and metaphysics, not sure I’ve heard those two in the same sentence before.” The floor was cold, even through the socks considerately left on my feet. Now it seemed even colder. “You’re saying that Charlie has tried to come home via a few haunted houses and caused past murders to be reenacted? That’s… hell, that’s crazy.”

“I know,” he said simply. “Here.” He lifted his lab coat and pulled a rolled-up folder out of an inner pocket.

And what he gave me made for interesting reading, if you were into slasher gore, which I wasn’t. Three houses, the sites of past brutal murders, were hit with copycat killings all within the past eight months. Two cases had been murder-suicides, and in the third, the poor bastard responsible for the new killings was rotting in a mental institute, claiming he’d been possessed. I wondered if the “almighty project” had any plans to help him out in the same fashion as Glory. Why did I have my doubts?

All three of the original murders had taken place before 1950 and had been brutal as hell. Their encores weren’t any less bloody. There were pictures. I closed the folder, dropped it onto the bed, and restrained the desire to rub my hand on my scrub pants. Gloves or not, those glossy papers had felt dirty to the touch.

“And you want me to find Charlie before he causes something like this again?” I shook my head, noticing that Thackery had disappeared while I had been looking at the files. “I can’t do that. Charlie’s not here. Wherever he is… whatever he is, I’m all about reality, okay? I know that sounds pretty fucking ridiculous, considering what I do, but hell…” I rubbed my forehead. The headache had subsided minutely, but it remained. “There it is.”