Лорел Гамильтон - Strange Candy

“We’ve only got one other dreamer in school right now. Malcolm hasn’t got the control. Lisbeth’s sucking him into everyone’s nightmares. We’re hiding all the sharp objects from Malcolm.”

“How old is he?”

“Fourteen.”

“Ten and fourteen, you’re still a baby-raper, Bromley.”

“The school did OK by you, Dr. Cooper. You’re the most respected dream therapist in this country. I saw on the news, you’ve set up two sister programs in different states. Did you get an invitation to do the same in, what was it, France?”

“England.”

“Without this school, you wouldn’t be where you are.”

Jasmine almost laughed, but it wasn’t funny, it was pathetic. He was right. She was keeper of the monsters, thanks to Bromley and others like him. And she hated them all.

He had asked her something, but she hadn’t heard.

“Excuse me, Dr. Bromley, can you repeat that, please?”

“When can you get here?”

Her stomach tightened, palms sweating. “I swore I’d never go back, Bromley.”

“I remember, Dr. Cooper, but this is an emergency. If you don’t come here and defuse the situation, I’ll have no choice.”

“There are always choices, Bromley.”

“Not here, not now, Jasmine. I write up my report and they’ll execute Lisbeth Pearson as a dangerous, uncontrollable psychic. Unless you can tame her, Lisbeth won’t see her eleventh birthday.”

Using the child’s name twice in a row—manipulation, a tug at the heartstrings. It worked like it was supposed to.

“I’ll come. It will take me a few hours to divide my patients between my fellow therapists, then I’ll be there.”

“Thank you, Dr. Cooper.”

“Send all the material you have on the child. I’ll give you my fax number. I’ll study it all on the trip and be ready to work when I arrive.”

“It’ll be to you as soon as we hang up.”

“One more thing. How do you know it’s the child?”

“I told you we don’t have any other students that could do it.”

Jasmine smiled, a bitter twist of lips. “What about a teacher, a trained dreamer that’s gone off the deep end?”

“We screen our workers, Jasmine.”

“I remember.”

“Dr. Roberts was a fluke. It couldn’t happen again. We see to that.”

“If you’ve got everything under such bloody good control, then what do you need me for?”

“Jasmine.”

“No, I don’t want to hear any more. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” She hung up the phone. Sweat was beading on her forehead despite the air-conditioned quiet of the room.

Dr. Roberts had taken a butcher knife to two students, and Jasmine would always carry the scar where she had thrown up an arm to keep the doctor from slashing her face. A guard had shot Roberts then, and she had fallen forward on her knees, still whispering, “Evil, you are all evil.”

Jasmine could control her dreams, but Roberts still accused her, questioned her at night before she could stop it. “You’re evil, aren’t you, Jasmine? You know you are.”

“Yes, Dr. Roberts, I know I am.” But Jasmine knew that everyone was evil, down deep when you scrape the skin away. Inside their heads everyone hunted, everyone killed, everyone was a monster.

The thought that Dr. Roberts couldn’t deal with was not the children’s evil, but her own. That morning when she woke she saw a monster looking back at her from the mirror. She had set out to kill the monster and gotten killed for it.

Jasmine knew the truth. You couldn’t kill The Monster. It was always there just behind your eyes. You could kill a monster, though. Jasmine was a great believer in the death penalty. It was the ultimate therapy. It cured everything. The first stirrings of fear crawled in her belly, low and real. It would get worse. Jasmine knew that it would get worse.

Dr. Cooper cradled her face on her arms, cheek pressed into the coolness of her desktop, and cried.

The school, that was all it was ever called, it had no other name. A lot of secret government projects had no names.

Thirty years ago, almost Jasmine’s lifetime, psychic phenomena became a proven scientific fact. In fact, there were so many psychics that scientists started making jokes about pod people. It didn’t stay funny for long. Most of the new breed were children. They had powers that were dependable and as testable as such phenomena ever would be. There were lots of theories as to why, suddenly, we had empaths and telepaths and dreamers coming out of the woodwork. The evolutionists said it was proof of their ideas; mankind was evolving. Others thought it was junk food, chemicals and preservatives in the American diet. The majority of talent did occur in industrialized nations. Maybe it was the pollution. Inoculations. The beginning of the Apocalypse. No one knew. Jasmine doubted anyone ever would.

But a few of the children had been dangerous, their powers so far beyond the dreams of normality that their families couldn’t cope. In most cases the families were afraid of their children. Glad to give them up to someplace that would care for them.

Jasmine’s family gave her up when she was five. Her mother cried and kissed her. Her older sister and brother hugged her dutifully. Her father said, “Be a good girl, Jas.”

The smell of pipe tobacco could still bring back the memory of her tall, dark-haired father. A twinge of memory like a badly healed scar.

What she remembered most of her mother was the cool sense of fear. That red lipsticked mouth kissing her, laughing, and wiping the lipstick smear off Jasmine’s cheek with a Kleenex. Laughing, golden hair, and the sick smell of fear. No perfume in the world could hide the stench from an empath.

But then maybe Mommy didn’t know, maybe she didn’t understand, maybe she had done her best. Maybe.

LISBETH Pearson was small for ten, with coppery red hair, almost dark enough to be auburn, but not quite. The hair fell in thick waves to her shoulders. Her face was that peaches-and-cream skin that some redheads have; no freckles, just creamy skin. Her eyes were a pale brown, almost amber. She wore a dress that seemed too young for her, with lace-topped white socks and patent leather shoes.

She looked like she was dressed for Halloween, or like someone else had dressed her. She was playing

alone with a dollhouse on the other side of a one-way mirror. Jasmine found that very funny. She remembered being on the other side of the glass. She had always known who was watching and what they were feeling. Always.

Lisbeth looked up and stared directly at the mirror, and smiled. Jasmine smiled and nodded back.

“Can she see us?” Dr. Bromley asked.

“No.”

“You acknowledged each other, I saw it.”

“Did we?”

“Don’t bullshit me, Jasmine.”

She turned to stare at the infamous Dr. Bromley, protector and tormentor of her childhood. He was five foot eight, but the weight he had gained made him seem smaller. His curly brown hair was fading back from a gleaming expanse of scalp. His hands, which had once looked strong, now resembled uncooked sausages. His face was blotched with red. Was he sick? She stared into his small eyes and thought, yes, maybe.

Beth could have told Bromley if he was dying. She had had a feel for death. Beth was dead, had been for twenty years. Tall, laughing, gray-eyed Beth. She had been able to think people to death, a wasting illness. She hadn’t meant to kill people, just didn’t know how to stop it. Neither did anyone else. So they killed her.

“Jasmine.. Jasmine”

“I’m sorry, Dr. Bromley, I was thinking about something.”

“Are you all right?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing.”

“Why?” he asked.

“You don’t look well.”