Authors: Robert W Walker
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Once abed, Rae felt the aloneness of being alone. In a world filled with pairings, people who held hands and joined dreams, Rae knew all too well she had no one in her adult personal life to fill a void she felt. At times the loneliness and the void receded, allowing her peace. At other times, it bubbled to the surface, a cauldron of sadness. And reading the latest bestselling ‘heal thyself’ opus, The Secret of Secrets, suggested by her best friend, Etta Pace, hadn’t helped.
Etta—who often enjoyed a few weeks to a month of peace before her next trauma or turmoil—had shared her copy of the book. Dr. Geoffrey Caine’s voice had not helped one whit. In fact, she gagged on paragraphs filled with clichés and repeated saccharine-filled lines she believed about as insightful and useful as re-runs of TV’s Brady Bunch. What could Etta have been thinking when she forced the book on Rae, repeatedly insisting, “Take it, take it! You need it, and you’ll love it. Chicken Soup for the Soul kinda thing.”
Frankly, the book did not live up to the standard of Chicken Soup. She placed the thin volume on the nightstand, schooched into her favored sleeping position, and attempting sleep, she instead wound up staring at the overhead fan as it whirred round; frrr-rump, frrr-rump to each cycle of its whirring life. Rae gave thought to the electrical current that acted as its lifeblood, and this led to thoughts of the spilling of human blood by this maniac in Charleston, West Virginia.
She wondered if the killer might be a degenerate inbred creature, a prurient, despicable unwashed
uneducated backwoods ignorant who could only ‘get off’ by playing God, holding life in one hand, death in the other. Else an equally sickening character, one who wanted to be a headline, hoping to join the infamous ranks of Charles Manson, John Wayne Gacy, Jeffrey Dalhmer, and that like. Else a mindless killing machine like Leather Face in the Texas Chainsaw Murder flicks?
Sleep continued to elude Rae. Her mind raced with a curious search for patterns, connectitons and relationships she’d sought in the murder books, now safely tucked away in a bureau drawer yet in her mind. Each victim had owned a pet or two. Each had frequented the dog park somewhere in Charleston. Each had to use a vet. Each had to utilize the services of places like Petland. These crossings might not, to the casual observer, have a great deal of
connectedness or importance, but to a trained law enforcement officer, these links screamed for investigation. She made a mental note to pursue whether or not Charleston authorities and-or Charleston FBI had exhausted such possibilities.
Suppose the vet was a nutcase. Or the clerk at Petland who groomed each victim’s dog while keeping book on the human clients? Learning who was married and who was single. Suppose the handsome, smiling, friendly neighbor at the dog park had a lot more on his mind than allowing his dog off the leash among the ladies who came and went, and whose pets intermingled with his own? The lynchpin holding all these victims together might well lead to a killer.
No one had told Rae that the victims’ pets had also been dispatched—via a large raw steak laced with arsenic—a sure sign of premeditation. Measuring out amounts of arsenic for the family dog. Coward apparently didn’t dare take on a dog with his hammer and nails.
She imagined a frustrated pharmacists or bag boy that each victim had interacted with, perhaps someone who felt slighted by the victims? The needle lay in the haystack, but the haystack could be reduced if patterns and relationships were pitch-forked away in the process of elimination. But the method was slow and time was the enemy here. In fact, time might be the most precious commodity they had, and they couldn’t afford to waste a minute.
The game of twenty questions continued to plague her. How many things did the victims have in common, aside from the geography? The local grocery store, WalMart, Taylor’s bookstore, the local Drug Emporium as it was called, sounding like a ‘palace of painkillers’, the local doctors and dentists, restaurants, theaters, civic centers, and local museums? The crisscrossing of their lives may’ve intersected with their common killer far sooner and in far more ways than in their bedrooms on the night he killed his vulnerable, slumbering victims.
It was to this discordant symphony of concerns that Rae finally found sleep, but when her alarm rang the next morning, she felt as if she’d had no sleep at all. And in her morning stupor, she stumbled toward the shower. Under the hot spray, her mind picked up where it’d left off, racing anew with the question of entwining, intersecting lives. What did all these victims have in common, what had led to their demise? Their lives had been cut short, gone out prematurely under horrid, traumatic conditions, snuffed out like so many precious candles but in a shower of pain.
Nothing in this world, in Rae Hiyakawa’s opinion, meant more than life itself—and taking a life was the worst sin of all the sins of all the religions of the earth. The only thing Rae Hiyakawa would willingly, voluntarily give up her own life for was her daughter. For Nia she’d take a bullet. For the U.S. President, no.
She toweled off, grinning at the conclusion to her thoughts, saying, “Good thing I’m not Secret Service.”
Behind her, unseen, in the fog and condensation against her shower door, her Irish Wiccan mother, Alice Murphy, materialized, blowing a kiss and a wish in Rae’s direction. At her side, shouldering her, Rae’s father, Hiro, smiled.
SIX
Charleston, WV, Same Night
A deadly hammer rose overhead, huge and ugly, in the hand of someone intent on murdering another victim. Over X’s head it hung. Hung in the air as if giving a final thought to not falling. Halting as if it wanted nothing to do with this killer’s intent.
# # #
Quantico, Virginia Headquarters, PSI Unit next day
Rae sat beneath the restraining coils of the CRAWL again, the electrodes attached to her temples. Trying anew. A fresh start to a new day. But already, her mind began to wander off the case at hand.
The woman at peace image had returned and threatened to blot out all else. Rae would be showering, shopping, or gardening, totally relaxed, her mind off herself and what she did for a living—psychically chasing killers—when Rae would get a sense of déjà vu involving a lone female figure in a pure white dress and veil floating overhead, moving toward the heavens. Floating on air, an angelic thing indeed.
Symbolic no doubt.
Symbolic of what precisely? Room for plenty of question and answer and doubt.
A victim of pain and suffering not buried in some cave or sepulcher known only to her torturer, but floating over a busy street in mid-air. Both adding to the imagery, the symbolic threads—threads as large and racing as rivers, the waters deep and green. Why a busy street? Why hovering over a cityscape? Did it have significance in and of itself? The geography, the locale? Street noises filtered up as if creating a rhythmic tune, like Neil Diamond’s A Beautiful Noise, comin’ off the street…but there remained a strident discord, a note out of sync that sounded like metal scraping metal mixed with the crushing sound of—of what? Hard shelled Beetles being stepped on? Green beetles with eye-like patches on their crusty backs.
The woman is not the walking dead but the floating dead. Dead or dying—hard to say. Each time Aurelia ‘Rae’ Murphy Hiyakawa lifted a hand out to touch the three-dimensional holograph overhead, just out of reach in her bedroom at times--reaching as she did now where she sat contemplating, in deep trance at FBI headquarters where again she was seeing the floating woman wrapped in what seemed a sheet. The sheet tightly wound her thin body mummy fashion.
Then the image vanished in the blue sky—the same sky with the whitest, fluffiest clouds imaginable. A lovely blue it was, too. She’d once been to Hawaii where in real life she’d seen a sky like this, clouds like this, colors this brilliant, like those seen in cartoons.
As it faded this time, she wondered if the Cerebral Remote Viewing & Language Stratagems program or CRAWL had gotten the image, and if so, might she perhaps later isolate it and give it conscious attention and study, as it’d been disturbing her now for weeks.
The CRAWL was a rather miraculous software program designed by the young genius formerly known as Eddy, now Copernicus. The program proved wondrous to say the least, a device that magically transformed her thoughts and visions into images, a device that displayed these images on a screen in the form of symbolic language, objects, full-blown in passionate color, in shapes, forms, blobs, and dream.
Did this recurrent dream image of the floater on air have any true meaning? Or was it mere psychic flotsam. The human mind created a surprising amount of junk-stuff. Junk in the form of useless images that rose out of the psyche all the time—at least as much if not more than it created useful vision. Chaff far more than wheat. Flotsam of the mind.
The mind and subconscious created in the manor of a child’s erector set any image it wanted, quite often independent of its supposed master—one’s self, the self; in fact, the human brain had no master save itself, and the debate over the difference between the three pound human brain and the weightless mind and soul continued unabated as it had since man became a sentient being, having created and conquered language.
Three pounds of pure enigma wrapped in an enigma, parts of which science, neurology, surgery, and psychiatry might never fathom. Random bio-chemical and electrical impulses bombarding one another; synaptic ships at sea in a black inner space man had as yet to set his stamp upon, a universe still unconquered, where flares collided with interior stars, and stars warred with more ships colliding, explaining déjà vu single and déjà vu multiple, explaining normal mood swings, and brain tsunami amounting to polar disorder to the shooting pain of migraines. Maybe.
Even so, still the floating lady seemed so very at peace and not at all what Rae normally dealt with—the victim of violent crime. She seemed not a victim at all; after all, she had a smile on her face. A wide smile. But then said smile could mean she was at peace at this moment, and that she still might well be a victim somewhere out there in the world. But who was she? Where was she? Where was she rising to—her heaven? Rising from noisy, busy street scene below her.
Even more puzzling, why should Rae own the returning feeling of déjà vu inside herself? Why did she feel at once pleased and displeased with this image? Aurelia asked herself these questions again, as she’d done before, alone in her bedroom at home. Now here it had invaded her workspace, this strange scenario, and while she knew it was a repeating dream image of sorts, one of those real naggers that wouldn’t leave her alone, it insisted she think of it as a kind of looping, recurrent thing—as in a déjà vu moment. No matter how often the vision came to her, it felt like a rerun…a replay…a blip stuck in the coiled inner ear and third eye inside her head.
Is there more to a memory that hasn’t yet happened than symbolic language, she wondered. Has it more to do with the seer herself than the symbol? Has it to do with the seer at all? Or is it from without, a signal. A sign. A warning. A plea. A cry for help?
Reaching out once again to touch the floating angelic woman, Rae’s more objective side studied the features, focusing on what appeared a pure, androgynous, and quite unrecognizable blank slate. She was reminded of the creepy old black and white film, Invasion of the Body Snatchers in which blank-slate clones of human beings were hatching from pods to take over their counterparts in order to repopulate the Earth with unfeeling aliens. But this blank slate, Rae believed, once had great feeling and emotion; she was once all too human.
The image remained just beyond the reach of her mental fingertips.
From the observation booth, others watched her unusual behavior inside her familiar cocoon. They too saw the recurrent image. Ashley Phillips, Dr. Waldron, what think-tank experts she could get to return, they’d all tired of this lady of peace, this sky floater. No one thought it relevant to the case at hand.
And perhaps it wasn’t. It’d first come to Aurelia before she ever heard of the case, long before it’d been brought to the PSI Unit.
She wondered what her Buddhist father might have said about déjà vu occurrences, and this recurrent dream in particular. Conversely, she wondered what her Irish Wiccan mother would say of this strange image and it’s déjà effect.
Then she heard her mother’s soothing voice in her head. “All life is connected in so many myriad ways, Rae. Thought itself is part of the geophysical world and the substrings of particle matter spoken of in astrophysics.”
“Listen to your mother,” came her father’s voice. “Sub-strata strings carry thought, and if so, can the déjà vu be someone else’s memory returning for a second bombardment on the individual mind? Or a reflection, a mirroring—you being the psychic mirror.”
Up till now, Aurelia Murphy Hiyakawa had sat in the lotus position, contemplating a series of murders, her concentration facing a kind of ‘pong’ game with the image of the floating, featureless girl in the bustling Times Square-like setting.
It meant nothing to her. She could seize it not. Yet the image had made an indelible impression, and it had intruded on an earlier case she’d been working, a missing persons case and a cold one at that. One which simply defied heating up.
She finally gave up the ghost, calling it quits. “Sorry…sorry,” she called out, which had become her signal for ‘enough is enough’ and that she must shut down. “Hate to disappoint everyone, but…”