PsyCop: GhosTV Part 16

I pushed my hand through the far wall of the bathroom and it met with some resistance. I was probably ranging too far from my physical body. All I wanted was a tiny peek, though, so I pushed a little harder and felt a flex, and then a give, as my fingers broke through.

I followed with my head.

Dreyfuss' room was even darker than the bathroom, but a sliver of streetlight shone in through the side of the curtain. He was in bed, presumably asleep, wrapped tight in his sheets and curled up in a fetal position. A few corkscrews of hair stuck out the top of the blanket roll.

Okay, I told myself. I've had my fun. Time to go back. Except I didn't feel like going back to that cramped room with its small bed and disappointing TV. As long as I stayed in the building, I decided, I wouldn't accidentally float away, so it couldn't hurt to do a little more exploring. With no one to get in my way, a quick peek around might save Jacob and me a whole lot of time in our investigation.

I pulled my head back into the bathroom and floated to the wall that separated the bath from the hallway, which I tested with my hand.

That wall was easy. My hand slipped right through. I followed with my head. There it was-the hall. A row of identical doors on each side, an elevator at the end, slightly worn carpet and stucco walls.

I floated to the room across the hall and pushed my head through the door. A sleeping person. Same in the next room, and the next.

The rooms held the same basic pieces of furniture, but they had different personal stuff in them, at varying levels of tidiness. I couldn't say for sure what color anything was, though whether the reason was because it was so dark, or because my astral vision was naturally desaturated, I didn't know.

Not only did it quickly get boring to look at sleeping person after 122.

sleeping person, but I felt slimy about invading the residents' privacy, too. I told myself it was no worse than any other psychic search, and that I was well within my rights to pry all I wanted. My paper PsyCop license said so. But a look at a guy who'd fallen asleep with his TV on, muted, his dentures on the nightstand beside him, his hand down the front of his boxers, and his toothless mouth snoring wide-that sent me backpedaling into the hall wis.h.i.+ng I could take an astral shower.

What did I think I'd find in the residents' rooms, anyway? The chance that any of them were involved was pretty slim. It wasn't as if any of them were effective, practicing Psychs. Or if they were, they wouldn't know as much, since no one had ever really ranked them.

The thought of getting farther away from my body didn't make me quite as anxious anymore, so I figured I could take advantage of my situation to get a look at Lisa's room with my astral eyes and see if I'd missed anything. Good thinking on Dreyfuss' part to score us the room above hers...unless it was all just part of his nefarious master plan. Which it probably was. Still, I couldn't let his motives stop me from finding Lisa, so I floated back to my door to get my bearings, then I imagined myself sinking down, down, down.

The floor felt permeable, but more solid somehow than the walls.

Like pus.h.i.+ng through one of those ball pits at a kiddie restaurant. Not that I'd ever played in a ball pit as a child. But a few years before, I'd scoured one for body parts in the investigation of a particularly inventive crime.

My feet popped free, then my legs, my a.s.s, my shoulders and head.

I opened my eyes. The first floor was much more shadowy than the second, though the layout was the same. I floated myself down to eye-level with the doorway to try to get a look at the room number, just to be sure I'd been traveling in the right direction.

The number on the door wasn't a number. It was...a shape. A glyph.

123.

Some weird combination of loops and sticks I had no way to interpret. My astral head hurt just looking at it.

Maybe it had always been that way, and I simply hadn't noticed when Chekotah had shown me the room. No problem. I'd just poke my head in and look for the bag of Cheetos to make sure I was in the right spot. I mashed my forehead into the door and felt significant resistance. It flexed and held, springy, like a mattress. Distance from my physical body seemed to be making my astral body wimpier. But since I'd made my way through some resistance on Dreyfuss' wall, I decided to suck some white light, gather my will, and give that door a big, hard push.

That's when everything went sparkly. And then black.

124.

Chapter 15.

"What are you doing?"

I blinked. It was dark, murky-dark, and after a moment of laggy disorientation, I remembered I'd been cruising through an astral projection. I blinked again, knuckled my eyes, but I couldn't seem to see.

"Can you hear me?"

I looked around for the woman who was talking to me, but it was so d.a.m.n dark. "h.e.l.lo?" Stupid thing to say, I know. I could suddenly sympathize with every character in a horror flick who'd never come up with a more logical response.

"It's very common for beginners to have trouble opening their eyes," she said.

They were open plenty before, but then I rammed into...whatever that was. It took a few tries, because I'd begun to get confused about opening my astral eyes as opposed to opening my physical eyes, but as I thought back to the way I felt flying around my bathroom, my astral body figured out a way to replicate the sensation and my astral eyes opened. Someone was crouched over me-a woman about my age with spiky hair and gla.s.ses (astral gla.s.ses?) Her outfit had a shapeless, hand-dyed, third-world seamstress kind of look to it, and it was topped off with a necklace that looked like someone's jute-and-stones collection had tangled together in their drawer and stuck that way. Her skin was luminous. She was slightly translucent.

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"You're astral," I said.

"Well, at least you know what's going on."

"Why was it so hard to open my eyes?"

"Anxiety's usually the main reason, although a high-protein Western diet has a tendency to make projecting more difficult. And alcohol.

You don't drink, do you?"

"No." I didn't mention the Valium. "What's your name?" She crossed her arms and looked at me. "You really are a newbie, aren't you? We can't do introductions; my name wouldn't make any sense to you even if I told you. The right hemisphere of your physical brain isn't in the loop."

Good information, but it seemed to me she was awfully know-it-all about it. "Yeah. I am new. It's my first time out." Astral Lady nodded gravely. "Good, that's good. I'd rather you were a wandering newbie than one of those nosy Feds they brought in." By "one of those nosy Feds," I presume she meant me. I glanced down at myself to see why that wasn't readily apparent, and saw I was projecting in an old pair of jeans and my favorite black T-s.h.i.+rt, despite the fact that the physical clothes were in a laundry basket somewhere in Chicago. I decided it was against my best interests to announce I was with Dreyfuss, not that it took much arm-twisting.

"I'm Lisa's friend. I couldn't reach her-"

"And you were worried, and so you projected. I'll bet you were thinking about her as you fell asleep, and that triggered the release of your astral body." Know-it-alls were pretty easy to lie to. The ones who really liked to hear themselves talk spun out whatever story they wanted to hear, and all you had to do was let 'em ramble. "She was my friend, too."

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"Is this Lisa's room? How can you tell? What's with the number on the door?"

"You really are a newbie." She looked at me with pity, and a hint of smugness. "It's your brain, your right hemisphere. You haven't noticed it's impossible to count in the astral?" That was about the dumbest thing I'd ever heard, so of course I had to try. A few numbers, just to see....

The numbers squirmed away from me like a half-remembered dream.

"No. I guess not. So how come you can't tell me your name, but you understand when I say Lisa?"

"Have you even had the intro lecture? Do you know anything at all?"

"I know I'm astral," I said. That should count for something.

"Say we've heard of someone-Bono, or Al Gore...or Lisa-then that name lives in our long-term memories. If we're having a fairly lucid trip, we'll be able to understand the names of people we already know, and even talk to each other about them, as long as both of us know them. If not? If I try to tell you my mother's name, for instance?

Here's what you'll hear." She said something else, but I didn't quite catch it.

"What?"

"Exactly. Other concepts are slippery, too. Numbers get scrambled.

Other memories? You don't usually know until you try to think them, and you can't. It all depends on where the information fires in the brain. And even that's not fully mapped."

If I were in my physical body, I would have had some kind of reaction to the thought of psychic phenomena being mapped to various parts of the brain-because of course I could always place myself in the guinea pig hotseat and imagine those electrodes sprouting from my own head. Not just glued on, either, but wired through holes that'd 127.

been drilled through my skull. Astrally, though, I was able to follow that thought with a certain amount of detachment.

"I tried to get into Lisa's room, but it felt like I'd stuck a penny in an electrical socket."

"Of course. That means it's protected. Our shaman is a very high level.

He sealed the rooms to prevent them from being contaminated." Contaminated by what? And what was a shaman, anyway? I was sickened by the idea that I'd imprinted on the talent and level system that had been created by a government that wanted to milk my own talent at any cost.

Astral Lady planted her hands on her hips and looked at me funny.

"Have we met before?"

"I doubt it."

"Are you sure? Something about the way you're scowling is awfully familiar."

I shook my head.

"Maybe not in the physical...but it's possible we've had this conversation before and we just don't remember it. Plenty of people project, but it takes talent and a lot of training to remember the trip."

"I've had all the training I care to have, thank you very much. And I'm sure we haven't met. I'm not local."

"You were worried about Lisa and you found yourself outside her room. Distance really isn't an issue-which you'd know if you just took a basic course."

"You seem pretty keen on training."

"Well, I would hope so. It's my life's work."

People tended to get pretty p.r.i.c.kly if they thought you were impugning 128.

their "life's work," but I had to press. Besides, if you're going to fall out of your body, you could run across a lot worse than a Psych trainer. Even one wearing astral Birkenstocks. "If you're the pro, then tell me. Where's my silver cord?" I looked down at her midsection, and now that I was searching for it, there it was. It glowed gently, and it looked less substantial than she did. "You've got one. Where's mine?"

"Don't worry." She pointed at my head. "You just can't see it. Your third eye's connected to a thick rope of power." She floated up closer and squinted at it. "Lots of power. Two strands, all wrapped together.

Someone's looking out for you, someone very strong." I clapped my hand to my forehead, thinking maybe I could feel this astral power cable. I couldn't. "Really? You sure?"

"You don't know? Or you don't remember. These types of things don't just happen for no reason. You must have partic.i.p.ated in some sort of ritual, or you're carrying an expensive charm." Astral Lady took a good look at my silver cord, and followed it upward. Her gaze stopped there as if an image of the Virgin Mary had appeared in one of the water stains in the ceiling. "Would you look at that?" I looked up, too. I still didn't see any cord.

"The whole ceiling's lit up," she said.

It was? It looked awfully dark to me. Maybe the difference in our perception was one of those slippery things she'd mentioned before, something you don't notice is missing until you need it. Or maybe I should have broken that Valium in half.

She grabbed me by the shoulder. Disturbingly, it felt like a physical hand...except, it kind of didn't. "Let's go see what's up there."

"No, it's okay-"

I might have had a supercharged powercord coming out of my 129.

forehead, but Astral Lady was obviously a veteran at controlling her subtle bodies. She pulled me along like Jacob does when I'm daw-dling too long at the grocery store, and he gets in front of the cart and hauls it like a team of oxen.

We flew up through the ball pit of the ceiling and into my room so fast it was as if we were astrally greased. We emerged in the sea of furniture. I stood partially in the spare bed, with one foot in the tiny open aisle. Astral Lady was directly in front of the GhosTV. "Here- here's what's glowing."

Maybe it was glowing a bit around the tube, like the old-fas.h.i.+oned sets used to when you turned them off in the dark.

"It's beautiful," she said.

Interesting, maybe. But beautiful? No doubt we were each looking through a different astral lens.

"There's some heavy energy here. But whose room is-?" She looked around, blinking at the extra bed and all the c.r.a.p stacked on top of it, and then, finally, she turned toward the bed and paused.

There we were, Jacob and me. We weren't exactly spooning anymore.

It looked more like he'd taken a sudden header and pinned me to the bed, where I decided it was futile to try to squeeze out from under him, so I might as well surrender and get some shut-eye myself.

Now that I knew to look at my forehead, I finally spotted it: my silver cord. It flickered like a hologram-now you see it, now you don't-but when I tilted my head just so, I saw even more. A thread of red wound through it, a vibrant streak that was more solid and opaque than my s.h.i.+mmery cord. That thread originated in Jacob's solar plexus.

I turned to ask Astral Lady about it, but she was staring at the opposite bed, the still-made bed br.i.m.m.i.n.g with clutter. Then she looked back at our bodies crammed into one bed. "Who are you? Who is he?

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Why are you in Bob's room?" Except she didn't say "Bob." I don't know what she said.

"I can't very well introduce myself here, can I?"

"What're you doing?"

"Sleeping?"

She stared for a moment, then said, "Oh, you're gay." Well, that might explain the large man on top of me.

"That's not a value judgment," she said. "I voted 'no' on Proposition Eight."

That last word was more of a mushy sound, but I a.s.sume she'd said Proposition Eight. Unless she thought her stance on wind power mattered to me one way or the other.

"I just thought, the way your silver cords were connected, maybe it was some sort of...ritual." She seemed really embarra.s.sed.

"Don't worry about it."

Still, she was so mortified, she'd gone pale-meaning, more transparent-and I was pretty sure she was about to bail on me...when instead she shot forward to the edge of the bed, flickered there like a jittery spirit, and got her face all up in my physical body.