“Can you reach the overhead light?” Jacob asked.
I looked at the train wreck on my mattress. “I need to figure out where to—”
“Don’t even think about it.” He held up his own blanket in invitation.
“Cut the light and come to bed.”
I wasn’t even going to risk draping a suit over the GhosTV. Heck, if we’d been able to re-crate the clumsy piece of furniture without smashing through the window, I would’ve voted for putting it completely away to ensure nothing happened to it while I slept. I hung my suit over the growing mountain of stuff on the spare bed, put my sidearm on the floor near the nightstand where I wouldn’t fall over it and accidentally shoot myself, then I turned off the light and climbed into bed in my underwear.
“You’re not worried about getting cold?”
I was facing Jacob with my head pillowed on his biceps. Our legs were woven together. Every exposed inch of me seemed to be pressed up against somewhere warm on him. “I’ll be fine,” I said into his neck.
His hand roamed my shoulder blades, skin gliding over skin. The back of my leg was still on fire, but the rest of the aches and pains I’d gathered over the course of the day settled into an annoying throb that Valium and exhaustion would erase soon enough.
First the drug dog at the airport, then trusting my life to Dreyfuss as he flew us here, and now the GhosTV that didn’t do anything—all the while Lisa’s trail grew colder. The day had been an emotional roller coaster—or maybe an emotional scrambler. Even an emotional people-flinger. One of those rides I would have been better off sitting out.
My head bumped against something hard, and it came back to me that I wasn’t in my own bed—heck, I wasn’t even in my own state— and I was currently mashed into a room that was way too small, and a bed where two “big and tall” guys could hardly squeeze into with a shoehorn.
Jacob would need to move over, simple as that. I gave a push, in hopes of prying him away from some of the mattress real estate, but couldn’t get a good sense of what was where, or which way I was even facing. Talk about disorientation. I usually had a sense of my headboard and my nightstand, but here everything seemed topsy-turvy, as if I was attempting to sleep in an entirely new hemisphere.
Whenever I can, I avoid opening my eyes if I wake up in the middle of the night. I feel like it helps me get back to sleep faster. In this case, though, the cop in me wasn’t going to rest if I didn’t get the lay of the land. I snuck one eye open and saw the wall an inch from my nose.
The wall? That was some fancy sleep choreography on Jacob’s part.
I’d finally fallen asleep facing the narrow lane between the beds with him curled against my back. I felt behind me for Jacob.
He was gone.
That’s how I’d ended up against the wall—I was alone. Huh? Where was Jacob? What was he thinking, going somewhere without letting me know? He wouldn’t do that, would he? That was totally not like him. He was probably just taking a leak, and the feel of him getting out of bed was the thing that woke me up. Nothing to worry about. I rolled to face the tiny aisle between the beds and attempted to make room for Jacob when he came back, but couldn’t quite figure out where the edge of the bed was. The more I skootched forward, the more space I seemed to have.
What the…?
I looked, really looked, at the opposite wall—what I could see of it in the murky dark, anyway—and tried to figure out where the crate lid and the luggage and all the other crap on the spare bed had gone.
Nothing. The room was an expanse of nothing, all the way to the opposite wall.
Oh, hell. I was the one who’d been abducted, not Jacob. I looked around in panic, and got a lentil-churning look at a mirror on the ceiling—me and Jacob, spooned together and swaddled in an ugly print sheet. Mirror? Where had the mirror come from? Wouldn’t I have noticed a mirrored ceiling within the first nanosecond of entering the room? Wouldn’t Jacob have at least made a passing attempt to get me to do something X-rated beneath it?
Even though I’d taken the classes, heard all the theories, and drank the Kool-Aid, it took me an extra few seconds to actually understand what was happening. I moved, but the mirror image didn’t move. I moved some more. I tried to get a feel for the bed I was laying on, except it wasn’t a bed. And I wasn’t on my back. And then I finally put it all together.
I was having an out-of-body experience.
At this point, most astral projection newbies usually get so freaked out that they snap right back into their physical shells. I, personally, was plenty freaked. But no snap.
At Camp Hell, they’d said on more than one occasion that our astral bodies are connected to our physical bodies with a silver cord that sprouts from the solar plexus. I looked down at my stomach. No cord.
Did that mean I was dead? Crap.
I tried to swim down to myself, but I felt too buoyant. I made it back to the wall to use it to climb down to my physical body, which did work, briefly. But then my hand sank into the wall. That might seem freaky, but strangely enough, my lack of substance didn’t bother me nearly as much as my missing silver cord. I could feel the difference between the open air and the wall. It was like having my arm in the sleeve of a snug sweater. I pushed a little bit more, and felt the freedom of the opposite side of the wall, like my fingertips had just emerged from the sleeve.
I threaded my arm back and forth through the wall a few times, and once that seemed okay, I took a chance and shoved my head through.
There it was. The bathroom.
A small plastic nightlight glowed from the outlet near the medicine cabinet, so I could somewhat see. Luckily, you-know-who wasn’t taking a late-night dump or anything. I tried to make out a few details so I could verify later that I wasn’t simply having some kind of elaborate sleeping fantasy, but it was too dark to get a really good look—incredibly, palpably dark, like I was wearing a pair of dirty sunglasses.
I pushed myself forward, feeling the strange glide of the wall all around my astral body as I passed through it. And then, there I was, fully, on the other side of the wall. Out of visual range of my physical body. I checked to see if that thought panicked me. It didn’t.
Strangely enough, it seemed easier to move around if my physical shell wasn’t in the room. I scooted around the perimeter of the ceiling, then experimented with controlling my descent. I was able to get down to about six feet.
Maybe if I was farther still from my physical body, I’d have even more leeway.
I could have just gone out into the hallway, I’m sure. But I’d been presented with a chance to peep at Con Dreyfuss, see if he was doing anything incriminating, and I couldn’t pass it up.
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 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 wishing 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 pushing 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 ass, 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.
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.
“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 damn dark. “Hello?” 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 glasses (astral glasses?) 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.
“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-shirt, 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.”
“Is this Lisa’s room? How can you tell? What’s with the number on the door?”