Лорел Гамильтон - Strange Candy

Jasmine had studied the pictures; the basement slaughter room with its old-fashioned autopsy table. Bernard had been a mortician before he retired. Jasmine had found morticians to be some of the most stable and sane people she had ever met. You had to be pretty well grounded to work with the dead,

day after day. As a mortician, Bernard had been the best, until he retired.

He brought sixteen women down his basement steps, ranging in age from forty-five to sixty-nine. He tapped them on the head, not too hard, strapped them to his table, and started the embalming process while they were still alive. Technically, most of them just bled to death. Bernard drained out their blood and pumped in embalming fluid, simple. They bled to death.

But Jasmine knew it was not simple, that they hadn’t just bled to death, that they had strained against the tape over their mouths, struggled against the straps at wrist and ankle until they rubbed the skin away and bled faster. As you grow older the skin tears more easily, thin and fine as parchment.

And Jasmine was in charge of Bernard’s rehabilitation. Dreaming. Images swimming, colored clouds floating across the mind. Brief glimpses of places, people, sharp glittering bits of emotion. The dreamer moved in his sleep, almost awake, dreams surfacing, spilling over his conscious mind. Bright memories of make-believe following his thoughts like hounds on a scent. He would remember. Jasmine would see that he never forgot.

Bernard C. woke screaming. It was the best that Jasmine could do. She had tried to make him remorseful, sympathetic to his victims, but Bernard was a sociopath; he didn’t really believe in other people. They were just amusing things, not real, not like he was real. He had embalmed sixteen women alive because he had wanted to do it. It was pleasant—amusing.

She could not make him feel things he had no capacity to feel. His emotions were a great roaring silence. But he could feel fear for himself. He could feel his own pain. So every night when he slept, Jasmine hurt him. She strapped him to his own table and had his victims bleed him dry. She buried him alive; she closed him in the dark until air burned in his chest and he suffocated. She terrorized him night af ter night, until Bernard did feel one emotion. Hate. He hated Dr. Cooper, not the burning hatred of a “normal” person but the cold hate of a sociopath. Cold hate never dies, never wavers. Bernard’s fondest wish was to strap Dr. Cooper to a table.

Jasmine knew this, felt it. The therapy was working. And if Bernard C. ever got Dr. Cooper alone, he’d do worse than kill her. He wasn’t alone. If you asked most of the men in Clarkson Maximum Security Prison what they most desired in the whole world it was to have Dr. Cooper at their mercy.

The Clarkson Prison had the highest rate of successful rehabilitation for violent criminals in the country, perhaps in the world. Some had found in their dreams the taste of other people’s tears, sympathy for others, at last. Other dreams held the taste of blood, the pulse of their own hearts dying.

Distance is no protection against psychic ability. Dr. Cooper knew what their dreams tasted of; she could find them wherever they would go. Only death would free them from her, and some of them weren’t sure about that.

Dr. Jasmine Cooper, empath/dream therapist, most hated and feared person in a building full of monsters, was at her desk doing paperwork when the phone rang. She ignored it, knowing the machine would pick up. It did. Her voice first and then, af ter the beep, a man’s voice, “Hello, Jasmine, this is Dr. Edward Bromley, again.” Silence, then, “Well, we have a problem at the school that requires your special touch. This is the fif th message I’ve lef t, Jasmine. Call me or a child’s going to die.”

She picked up at the last moment. “Dr. Bromley.” Her voice was utterly neutral, a trick she’d picked up from some of her patients.

“Ah, yes. Jasmine. I’m glad you picked up. Can we have a visual to go along with the voice?”

She stared at the small credit-card-thin screen just above the phone. The screen was a blank silver-gray. “No,” she said. “What do you want, Dr. Bromley?”

He sighed. “Jasmine, or should I call you Dr. Cooper?”

“That would be fine. What do you want?”

“I would really like to see your face when I tell you.”

“Why?”

“Damn it, Jasmine.. .Dr. Cooper. Do you know how hard it was for me to come to you with this?”

“No,” she lied. His anxiety oozed over the lines, trembling with distance and electricity and a touch of fear. Something was very wrong.

“Tell me what you want, Bromley. What needs my special touch?” Her voice held a bite, sarcasm leaking through her professionalism. She could feel her face crumbling. She didn’t dare let Bromley see her like this. She could feel the hate blazing through her eyes, trembling down her hands. He’d see it too. Even he wasn’t that blind.

“There’s a problem at the school.” He hesitated, only his breathing still hissing through the line.

“What sort of problem?”

“Bad dreams, no, nightmares. Freaking, bloody, awful nightmares. We’ve had one attempted suicide.” “Student or teacher?”

“Student, but he was an advanced student. He had training, but the dreams just ate him alive. He slit his wrists because he didn’t ever want to fall asleep again.”

Jasmine smiled. “You’ve been doing this long enough, Bromley. You’ve got a powerful untrained dreamer in the school. Police yourself.”

“We tried, Jas.”

“No,” she said, “no one calls me that anymore.” The old nickname crept along her skin, raising the hairs on her arms.

“Jasmine, then. Do you remember Nicky?”

“He was a dreamer a few years older than I was.”

“Yes. He’s dead.”

She stared at the phone receiver wondering what Bromley’s face looked like right now, this minute. A trickle of sweat oozed down her forehead; she wiped it with the back of her hand. “What happened?”

“He tried to take care of the nightmares. We think he linked up with our rogue dreamer and a blood vessel in his brain burst. An embolism.”

Jasmine swallowed hard, hoped Bromley couldn’t hear it. “It happens.” Her voice was level, so bland she knew the strain showed.

“Not to fully trained dreamers. Nicky was almost as good as you were. People with that kind of talent don’t burst their brains, not without help.”

“It is impossible to truly kill someone during a dream session. A bad heart, well it happens. Nicky didn’t die in dream. He just died. Coincidence.”

“You don’t believe that any more than I do.”

“Read any textbook on psychic phenomena, Bromley. You wrote the standard: no one can kill another person by dreaming them to death.”

“We both know that isn’t true.”

“There is no record of it ever happening.”

“Because I destroyed the record, Jasmine. You owe me.”

There it was, bland and clear, and no ignoring it. “Are you recording this?”

“No.”

“Don’t be.”

“You think I’d get you to admit something on tape and then blackmail you with it?”

“Obligate me, maybe.”

“I’m not recording this, Jasmine. Talk to me, please.”

Maybe it was the please that did it, or perhaps the rushing sense of fear. “So you’ve got another dreamer that can kill during dream. Someone at least as powerful as I was.”

“God, Jasmine, don’t ever say it like that again. If someone should overhear.”

“You said talk, I’m talking. Do you know who it is?”

“We think so. A student who just arrived two months ago. A ten-year-old girl named Lisbeth Pearson.” “Why do you think it’s her?”