SPEAK FOR THE DEAD, Chapter 1/?
Nov. 20th, 2005 10:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
madwomanwithaboxThis is the first chapter of my novel written for NaNoWriMo '05. The work contains heavy graphic violence, mild sexual content, and graphic language. Figure it's a hard R rating for this one, so read at your own risk. I'll include necessary warnings for each chapter, but this is a blanket warning for you all...if you think you might be turned off by graphic stuff, avoid these entries.
Also, forgive my spelling errors...I'm tired and I didnt' run spellcheck. Incorrect grammar is probably on purpose.
Ready? Good...here's hoping it doesn't suck. ;p
“Name?”
“Betty Cowles. Thirtysomething female out of Riverside...done in with a single shot to the back of the head, execution style.”
“You hear this on the scanner, Callahan?”
I paused, falling silent for a moment as I turned my car into the driveway of the house we'd just pulled up to…knowing I looked about as lousy as I felt. “Hasn’t been broadcast yet...no one knows she’s dead.”
Artie Jackson simply chuckled, shaking his head a bit as I put the car in park and cut the engine. “Think you’re so goddamned smart, don’t ya?”
“Not smart, Jacko...just *right.* And I wish to God that for once I could be wrong.”
He sobered at that, reaching over to pat my arm briefly. He was sympathetic…to a degree. Always to a degree…no one else in the world knew what I was going through. Well…not in the eyes of the law, anyway.
“It’s a rough lot, Cain…but you get by. You got what it takes to handle this, you know that.” He remarked paternally.
“Yeah.” I replied hollowly. “I know that.” And that was the problem…I *didn’t* want to know.
Finally he sighed, settling back again. “All right, kiddo, all right...let's see just how good you really are.”
Without answering I cut the engine and opened my door, sliding out of the car as Artie followed suit beside me. His tone was all friendly camraderie and warmth, but I knew what he was thinking: placate the maniac. I’d spent fifteen years of my life as a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic with a downswing around the time I joined the LAPD, thank God...and let me tell you, overcoming the ‘crazy’ stigma ain’t as easy as it looks on TV. The hell of it was, Jackson was one of my biggest goddamn supporters when my life got turned upside down. He had my back from day one, and not just for show, either...
...Artie never does anything for show.
See, the world used to be a normal place...but in 1970 when a werewolf lost control and transformed one bright and sunny afternoon right smack dab in the middle of downtown LA, things changed...and when I say changed, I mean in the absolute biggest way you could possibly imagine. Artie likes to say that things don’t go ‘bump’ in the night anymore...they go ‘bump’ on Main Street and eleven in the morning, and they get hauled in for disturbing the peace of they bump too loud.
That’s right…the monsters went public. Took nearly thirty years, but now we shop in grocery stores and vote in elections without sending folks screaming, unless they’re intolerant. Yeah, safe to say that race relations have improved greatly since the Seventies now that blacks and whites can join together and hate our kind.
Yes, I say our kind because I’m one of them…me and Artie together. The world’s a rough place, especially now, and that’s where guys like him and me come in. With the rise of Paranormal creatures into the mainstream world, the rise of Paranormals in the underworld was an inevitable fact. Law enforcement had to compensate…adapt to the reality of dealing with folks that had the strength of a dozen men and could move to kill quicker than most cops could shoot. The LAPD was the first to address this growing problem, creating their own Paranormal Crimes division.
Which is how Artie and I ended up at this future crime scene. Confusing, I know, but you’ll see what I mean in a minute.
Artie took the lead as we headed up to the front door, which was still shut. Everything was quiet and clean...still a home, and not yet a legal jurisdiction. There was no tape barring the door, no seal to ensure the scene was untainted...not even a squad car outside. We'd beaten the rest of the force to this one, but not in enough time to help the victim laying inside.
I oughta know...dealing with the dead has become my whole fucking life.
“Think he's still in the house?” I asked, glancing over at Artie as we climbed up the front stoop.
“Your show, kid...I'm just here for the main attraction.” he grunted in reply.
“Jacko...” I bit off testily.
Sighing, Artie simply stood for a moment, then shook his head. “Nope...but follow protocol just to be safe, eh?”
“Bullshit, man...if a guy can't trust your ears? Who can he trust?”
“Shut up and quit tellin' Grandpa how to suck his eggs, will ya? Do as you're told, goddamnit.”
Rolling my eyes, I withdrew my sidearm as he followed suit...not that Jacko needed it, mind you. Artie may have been eighty five years old, but he was also a vampire...and one of the most well-respected Paranormals in the country, not to mention the world. His supernatural gifts made him a force to be reckoned with in the field...but above all else, the man was a good cop. Scratch that...a great cop. And nothing, not super powers or a long life, beats good police work.
Now if only he’d quit acting like the precinct father? I’d be just swell…
Artie nodded silently, indicating he'd cover me as I banged on the door. “Betty Cowles! LAPD, open up!” I barked, waiting for a response. As I expected...there was none.
Gaze flickering to Artie, I nodded and counted down from three on my fingers, kicking in the door when I reached one.
I moved inside quickly, gun leveled as I inspected the foyer for any potential threat. Nothing. Okay…so far so good.
All I did was cross the threshold when I froze. I could feel it, like a shock of something worse than cold water being dumped on my head.
The dead…they were here.
You heard me right...spooks. Ghosts. Spirits. I wasn’t speaking figuratively: I talk to the dead...see them, hear them, the works. Been doing it since I got shot two years ago.
I knew the victim…the dead woman was there, and I was pretty sure Artie did, too. Not simply because the cold and stillness was so thick I actually gagged on it, causing him to reach over and slap me on the back, but because it was simply *there.*
“Thanks.” I croaked, coughing a bit. When I finally settled down, I glanced at him, my throat still constricted.
“You feel that?” I asked quietly.
Artie nodded slowly. “Kinda…someone ain’t walkin’ on my grave, they’re *dancing* on it.” When a ghost is present, it's always a tangible thing, even to a Null...normal folks, the nongifted. Sometimes it's a chill up your spine, or just a feeling you're not alone. The more volatile the spirit, the more powerful the sensation they create...and the more violent the death, the more adverse that feeling is.
Judging from the way my skin turned to ice and my chest was going tight, this woman died brutally...and if the throbbing building in my skull was any indication, she also died very, *very* painfully.
“Cain...*Cain!* What is it, kid?” he asked.
Artie's low, urgent tones barely reached me as I blinked hard against the pulsing ache at the base of my skull...if I touched my head, I almost expected my hand to come away with blood. I swallowed hard, slowly holstering my weapon...I couldn't fucking handle a damn gun in this shape. “All clear...there *can’t be anyone in the house…she's here.”
“You sure?”
“You *feel* that weird vibe, Jacko, you said it yourself. Spirit wouldn’t linger if the killer was still around. Just start looking for the fucking body...I’ll see what I can find out.”
“Getting real comfortable handing out orders there, ain’t ya? Joe and me gotta worry about our jobs?”
I just rolled my eyes…Joe Lawrence was head of the Null division of our unit, while Artie was *my* supervisor…in charge of the PI team. “Yeah, like I really want a goddamn desk job.”
“Hmph…think if this were some half-assed desk job that I’d still be workin’?”
“You do an awful lot of paperwork, Jacko...guy could get to thinking that you enjoy it.”
“Like Mr. Holly said...that’ll be the day.” He huffed. A moment later, I felt Artie holster his weapon as he moved to my side. “I don’t like this. Never been real comfortable unless I know what I’m staring in the face.”
“Yeah, well, join the club.” I growled testily, moving further into the house. Reaching the end of the foyer, I paused at the foot of the staircase leading to the second floor. “I told you once before, Jacko…I been studying this shit since day one, but I still don’t know jack shit.”
“Well you know more than most.”
“Just what I read in new age books and all that warm fuzzy crap. The rest is just experience. It’s what I know and what I’ve seen. Even after two years of this, it’s all just guess work and clutching…at straws…*shit*…” I wheezed, reaching up to clutch at my chest.
“Cain?...” Artie asked warily, laying a hand on my shoulder.
I just shrugged him off. “I think she knows...we’re here. Wants help. Find her.”
With a dubious look, he just patted my shoulder in a paternal fashion and moved to head up the staircase. As he did, I caught sight of him draw his jacket back to make his holster more accessible.
My advocate...my biggest supporter. Even he still couldn't accept the facts for what they were. Not entirely, anyway.
Fucked up, ain't it? In a world where the monsters are real, no one can believe that a guy like me communes with the dead.
I stood for a full minute, waiting for the tightness to pass until I could breathe again. This ghost wasn’t malevolent, just scared...out of control. She was dangerous, but not evil, so I was pretty sure she wouldn’t kill me...emphasis on the ‘pretty sure’ part.
Once I was sure I could move without stumbling or passing out from hyperventilation, I moved into the living room adjoining the small foyer. I glanced around to begin my quest of finding Betty Cowles. Not literally, but I was looking for something to give me a better idea of who this woman was. Décor was feminine…probably single. A little cool, too nice looking, so I assumed she wasn’t home a lot. Probably lived for her job…kind of like me.
Me…yeah, my story’s one for the books. It's a long sucker and a little on the complicated side, but I'll try to give you the condensed version. Two years ago, I was a cop. I got shot on the job and died on the table. Took them almost four and a half minutes to resuscitate me, but I came back. Trick is...I came back a little bit different.
When I realized I was communicating with the dead, I started having problems. Why? Nobody believed me. Like I said, I was diagnosed schizo a good part of my life, but when I got older I improved...psychiatrist cleared me around the time I signed up at the Academy. I thought the *voices* were bad? The visions were ten times worse…and the hell of it was that I couldn’t convince anybody I was seeing ghosts. Now you may be thinking that in this day and age, schizo or no, I ought to be able to convince someone of the truth, right? That maybe the psychiatric problems have a different foundation? Wrong.
Vampires and werewolves and witches may be real, but there's never been any conclusive scientific proof that ghosts actually exist. Everyone else is covered, but spirits? What spirits? They don’t exist, you can’t read them on your instruments. Fucked up, right? Seems everyone’s explainable except my kind.
Vampires? When they’re bitten, a quick-acting venom secreted by the fangs enters the bloodstream and changes their biological makeup in a matter of hours, creating a biological need for blood to survive. Their bodies digest certain crucial nutrients it finds in plasma and white blood cells, and red blood cells are assimilated into the bloodstream to carry oxygen. Depending on your breed, certain weaknesses may apply...as of the last study done by the Lawrence Institute, which specializes in Paranormal medical research, there were fourteen different strains of vampirism in the US, twenty percent of which were resistant to sunlight, and six percent which were immune to it.
Werewolves are even better...lycanthropy. Nasty little bug that takes about a month to manifest...adds parts you never had, takes away others, and gives the gift of longevity. The disease strikes the brain first, altering the various lobes and hemispheres to more easily match those of a wolf...or if you’re another kind of were, the flavor you picked up. We’ll stick with wolves for the moment, though...and in werewolves, the disease adds other things like extra nasal membranes. This gives the victim a keener sense of smell. Other enhancements take place in the eyes and ears, the vocal chords change to allow for canine speech like growling and howling. Finally, muscle and bone mass increases...extra muscles and a new set of bones added to the skeletal structure allows for the transformation that takes place when the virus goes active. Like some viruses, it lays dormant in four week intervals...manifests on a lunar cycle, much like female menstruation. Believe it or not, there’s actually a four percent surplus of female lycanthropes in the US over males.
You can prove they exist through cold, hard fact...a little bit of mysticism and a whole lotta science. Ghosts, though? All the parapsychology in the world’s not going to reveal a body to dissect or a brain to pick. They’re the dead...they leave no trace. And naturally, *my* kind get screwed because of it.
Due to the fact ghost, scientifically and legally, don’t exist, neither do mediums. By default, it used to be that folks like me weren't legally recognized as Paranormals, and therefore not protected under the amendments to the Civil Rights Act that have guarded the rights of Paranormals since the Uprising. We had all the rights Nulls do...but none of the protections Paranormals are given to let them live normal lives...no specialized medical care for our abilities, no retroactive court rulings to allow the overturn of unfair convictions resulting from our conditions and the like. A vampire couldn't be charged with murder for trurning a guy if the act was consensual...but if a medium is diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, like I was, and committed by a licensed psychiatrist, there’s no law requiring a reevaluation...no possible chance that person will ever stop being forced to medicate themselves, no end to the promises that the voices will go away, or that the visions will stop. The ones locked up will never see freedom...and never know any real peace of mind.
That was my story after I came back to active duty...but I got lucky in a lot of ways. My personal circumstances were one, seeing as how they changed things for the likes of a lot of spirit mediums. Another way I got lucky was Artie Jackson himself…a fact I’m not gonna forget any time soon.
I strolled over to the sofa, my gaze traveling slowly over the room when I spotted a sheaf of papers on the immaculate glass topped coffee table. Reaching into my pocket, I withdrew a pair of latex gloves and pulled them on before picking up the stack, paging through them carefully. There were several lists of names, along with a couple of photocopied maps. After a few moments of inspection, I realized the maps were directions to a grave…maps of a cemetery.
“Artie!” I called out, turning to head for the staircase again, papers in hand. Artie, I think I got something!”
“Me too, Cain! Looks like we got our stiff!”
Even as he spoke, I winced. Sure, I knew the chick was dead, but still...when you know something horrible’s happened, you irrationally pray that you’re wrong. Subconsciously, some part of me wanted Betty to be alive.
However, she was dead, and her killer was at large. Time to get to work.
I stopped just short of the doorway, my gaze caught by a flash of gold on the floor. Bending down, with one gloved hand I picked up a gold chain, a small pendant hanging from it. Closer inspection revealed it was a tablet...the Ten Commandments, if I wasn’t mistaken. The necklace itself was feminine in nature...so Betty was a good little Christian. Damn. I hate shit like this...learning about the murders I investigate, especially when they’re spirits that I see. I have to get to know them to help them, and it drives things home just a little bit harder...no matter what I do, I’ll never be able to use my gift to save someone before it’s too late.
Moving right up to the foot of the stairs, I fully intended to head up and join Artie when I felt it again. The pain, the suffocation, the chill…they’d all abated some as I lost focus of the spirit, but here I could feel her again. Invisible bands were constricting my breath, the jackhammer in my head was pounding out a tune that might have been fun to dance to if it wasn’t currently splitting my skull into tiny little pieces. Not even the deathly chill that filled the air once more was helping my head...this wasn’t the refreshing coolness that can soothe pain, but the biting touch of the final end to all suffering.
This woman was trying to talk to me...and it was ripping me apart.
“Cain! What’re you waiting for, Christmas?”
I barely heard him as the pain in my head dulled but my skin continued to try and crawl off my body…usually a sign of weakening reserves in a ghost. The most taxing thing a specter can do is manifest visually…meaning she was here…*really* here, visible if I opened my eyes.
And by the sudden, radiant chill against my face, I knew she was standing in front of me.
I opened my eyes to find Betty about a foot and a half ahead of me, clear as day. That’s another misconception about the dead...there’s nothing special about the way they look, not usually. The further removed from death a spirit is, the easier they are on the eyes...people that have been dead a hundred years tend to look just like they did in life, just a little out of place. The recently dead, however? That’s a whole other ball of wax entirely. To them, death is still recent...still real. It’s more than just a current event, it’s their whole world, so they appear as they were when they died...if death was easy, that’s the exception. Those who die in their sleep or from something swift and sudden, like an aneurysm, then the apparition very closely resembles the living. It is, however, usually pretty agitated.
But if you’re Betty Cowles and died from a gunshot to the back of the head...then that’s what houseguests get to see when you go to answer the door.
She was white as a sheet, not because she was a specter. No, it was blood loss…because of the gaping hole in her skull, blood dripping on the floor one individual drip at a time. I couldn’t see into it since she was facing me, but I knew her head had been blown wide open since the back of her skull was visibly hanging on by a thread. It hadn’t been blown off very cleanly and still clung, or got tangled in pieces of her scalp and hair, letting it hang open like a door on shaky hinges, allowing me to look at the back of her head as it faced front along with the rest of her. Silky, platinum blonde hair was bright fire engine red with blood, a streak of it marring her milky cheek as dark, soulful brown eyes met mine.
“Let the dead rest in peace.” she whispered, her eyes filling with tears as her clenched fists trembled with emotion as she held them at her sides. Whether it was rage or fear, I wasn’t quite sure. “Let them rest, damn you.”
I couldn’t answer, only watch her closely as I fought for breath, looking for clues about her death and her life as I tried to make sense of her remarks. It wasn’t anything unusual...in my two years of dealing with this gift, I’ve learned that the newly dead most often can’t speak. Unless it’s their own final words...anything they said in their last hours...they’re often too disoriented and in too much pain to recall things like speech. Like the restoration of appearance, it all comes with time. The dead are just like any living creature...they were, after all, alive once. They need time to heal…a chance to mend, to make peace with their new state before they move on to wherever it is we go when we die.
What I had on my hands at the moment was a traumatized young woman that had died horribly and probably wasn’t yet aware she was dead. She was reliving the final moments of her life, and speaking to me as she’d likely spoken to her killer. I hadn’t had enough time to get any background on Cowles, so I had no clue what she was talking about...and asking her wouldn’t bring me any answers.
“Cain! Cain, you still down there?”
“Leave me alone!” she cried, reaching up to clutch her head, making the free-hanging section of her skull swing wildly as her hand knocked into it. “I’m not going to help you!”
Easy enough to figure out…she was talking to her killer. He wanted something…I tried to piece it together, the names, maps…’let the dead rest in peace’…it had to be connected to that goddamn cemetery. It *had* to be. I tried looking for more clues in her appearance, but didn’t find much more to go on. Her clothing was drenched with blood and disheveled, but I could still discern the nightgown she wore. No...not nightgown. That was a slip...I thought. I hoped. Women’s clothes all looked the same to me...
I was dimly aware of the footsteps slowly descending the staircase…careful, cautious not to make too much noise and jerk me too suddenly out of this strange, agonized state I was in. Artie…had to be. Probably found her body upstairs in her bedroom or something, I was willing to bet money on it. Absently, I found myself grateful once again for vampiric telepathy. When a ghost hit me hard, it was a little like deep sea diving. It takes the dead a lot of energy to manifest visibly, and it takes just as much for me to deal with the kind of energy they work with. It’s pressure on my mind and my body...hell, on my soul. There’s something in me that’s tied to these suckers, and every time they show up in front of me it’s like they’re trying to take that something *back* and kill me all over again. So, like with any deep sea diver, if I come up too fast from a swim with the spirits, I’m liable to end up with the psychic bends. The numerous visits I’d made to the hospital in the last six or seven months since coming back to work as an Investigator was proof of that. Artie didn’t need to talk to me to find out when I was in the grips of a spectral encounter...he just had to listen to my thoughts.
Suddenly Betty’s ghost advanced, her eyes wild as she reached out to grab me. There was awareness in her eyes...not the bright panic I usually see in the gaze of a new ghost, but actual *clarity*...she knew I was there. She knew what was happening.
And she was screaming. “He’s waking the dead...waking the dead...YOU CAN’T LET HIM WAKE THE DEAD!!!”
Ghosts can’t touch, but being only human, I reflexively staggered back a few steps, taken off guard by her movement, her screaming, and above all the look in her eyes. Still, she tried to grab me, her spectral hands plunging into my body...and just like that the pain in my head intensified. I felt the bullet ripping into my flesh, shattering my skull, choking me with fear because he had the keys he was going to wake the dead wake the dead wake the dead...
An image of a cemetery crawling with half-rotted corpses filled my mind before everything went black.
Also, forgive my spelling errors...I'm tired and I didnt' run spellcheck. Incorrect grammar is probably on purpose.
Ready? Good...here's hoping it doesn't suck. ;p
“Name?”
“Betty Cowles. Thirtysomething female out of Riverside...done in with a single shot to the back of the head, execution style.”
“You hear this on the scanner, Callahan?”
I paused, falling silent for a moment as I turned my car into the driveway of the house we'd just pulled up to…knowing I looked about as lousy as I felt. “Hasn’t been broadcast yet...no one knows she’s dead.”
Artie Jackson simply chuckled, shaking his head a bit as I put the car in park and cut the engine. “Think you’re so goddamned smart, don’t ya?”
“Not smart, Jacko...just *right.* And I wish to God that for once I could be wrong.”
He sobered at that, reaching over to pat my arm briefly. He was sympathetic…to a degree. Always to a degree…no one else in the world knew what I was going through. Well…not in the eyes of the law, anyway.
“It’s a rough lot, Cain…but you get by. You got what it takes to handle this, you know that.” He remarked paternally.
“Yeah.” I replied hollowly. “I know that.” And that was the problem…I *didn’t* want to know.
Finally he sighed, settling back again. “All right, kiddo, all right...let's see just how good you really are.”
Without answering I cut the engine and opened my door, sliding out of the car as Artie followed suit beside me. His tone was all friendly camraderie and warmth, but I knew what he was thinking: placate the maniac. I’d spent fifteen years of my life as a diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic with a downswing around the time I joined the LAPD, thank God...and let me tell you, overcoming the ‘crazy’ stigma ain’t as easy as it looks on TV. The hell of it was, Jackson was one of my biggest goddamn supporters when my life got turned upside down. He had my back from day one, and not just for show, either...
...Artie never does anything for show.
See, the world used to be a normal place...but in 1970 when a werewolf lost control and transformed one bright and sunny afternoon right smack dab in the middle of downtown LA, things changed...and when I say changed, I mean in the absolute biggest way you could possibly imagine. Artie likes to say that things don’t go ‘bump’ in the night anymore...they go ‘bump’ on Main Street and eleven in the morning, and they get hauled in for disturbing the peace of they bump too loud.
That’s right…the monsters went public. Took nearly thirty years, but now we shop in grocery stores and vote in elections without sending folks screaming, unless they’re intolerant. Yeah, safe to say that race relations have improved greatly since the Seventies now that blacks and whites can join together and hate our kind.
Yes, I say our kind because I’m one of them…me and Artie together. The world’s a rough place, especially now, and that’s where guys like him and me come in. With the rise of Paranormal creatures into the mainstream world, the rise of Paranormals in the underworld was an inevitable fact. Law enforcement had to compensate…adapt to the reality of dealing with folks that had the strength of a dozen men and could move to kill quicker than most cops could shoot. The LAPD was the first to address this growing problem, creating their own Paranormal Crimes division.
Which is how Artie and I ended up at this future crime scene. Confusing, I know, but you’ll see what I mean in a minute.
Artie took the lead as we headed up to the front door, which was still shut. Everything was quiet and clean...still a home, and not yet a legal jurisdiction. There was no tape barring the door, no seal to ensure the scene was untainted...not even a squad car outside. We'd beaten the rest of the force to this one, but not in enough time to help the victim laying inside.
I oughta know...dealing with the dead has become my whole fucking life.
“Think he's still in the house?” I asked, glancing over at Artie as we climbed up the front stoop.
“Your show, kid...I'm just here for the main attraction.” he grunted in reply.
“Jacko...” I bit off testily.
Sighing, Artie simply stood for a moment, then shook his head. “Nope...but follow protocol just to be safe, eh?”
“Bullshit, man...if a guy can't trust your ears? Who can he trust?”
“Shut up and quit tellin' Grandpa how to suck his eggs, will ya? Do as you're told, goddamnit.”
Rolling my eyes, I withdrew my sidearm as he followed suit...not that Jacko needed it, mind you. Artie may have been eighty five years old, but he was also a vampire...and one of the most well-respected Paranormals in the country, not to mention the world. His supernatural gifts made him a force to be reckoned with in the field...but above all else, the man was a good cop. Scratch that...a great cop. And nothing, not super powers or a long life, beats good police work.
Now if only he’d quit acting like the precinct father? I’d be just swell…
Artie nodded silently, indicating he'd cover me as I banged on the door. “Betty Cowles! LAPD, open up!” I barked, waiting for a response. As I expected...there was none.
Gaze flickering to Artie, I nodded and counted down from three on my fingers, kicking in the door when I reached one.
I moved inside quickly, gun leveled as I inspected the foyer for any potential threat. Nothing. Okay…so far so good.
All I did was cross the threshold when I froze. I could feel it, like a shock of something worse than cold water being dumped on my head.
The dead…they were here.
You heard me right...spooks. Ghosts. Spirits. I wasn’t speaking figuratively: I talk to the dead...see them, hear them, the works. Been doing it since I got shot two years ago.
I knew the victim…the dead woman was there, and I was pretty sure Artie did, too. Not simply because the cold and stillness was so thick I actually gagged on it, causing him to reach over and slap me on the back, but because it was simply *there.*
“Thanks.” I croaked, coughing a bit. When I finally settled down, I glanced at him, my throat still constricted.
“You feel that?” I asked quietly.
Artie nodded slowly. “Kinda…someone ain’t walkin’ on my grave, they’re *dancing* on it.” When a ghost is present, it's always a tangible thing, even to a Null...normal folks, the nongifted. Sometimes it's a chill up your spine, or just a feeling you're not alone. The more volatile the spirit, the more powerful the sensation they create...and the more violent the death, the more adverse that feeling is.
Judging from the way my skin turned to ice and my chest was going tight, this woman died brutally...and if the throbbing building in my skull was any indication, she also died very, *very* painfully.
“Cain...*Cain!* What is it, kid?” he asked.
Artie's low, urgent tones barely reached me as I blinked hard against the pulsing ache at the base of my skull...if I touched my head, I almost expected my hand to come away with blood. I swallowed hard, slowly holstering my weapon...I couldn't fucking handle a damn gun in this shape. “All clear...there *can’t be anyone in the house…she's here.”
“You sure?”
“You *feel* that weird vibe, Jacko, you said it yourself. Spirit wouldn’t linger if the killer was still around. Just start looking for the fucking body...I’ll see what I can find out.”
“Getting real comfortable handing out orders there, ain’t ya? Joe and me gotta worry about our jobs?”
I just rolled my eyes…Joe Lawrence was head of the Null division of our unit, while Artie was *my* supervisor…in charge of the PI team. “Yeah, like I really want a goddamn desk job.”
“Hmph…think if this were some half-assed desk job that I’d still be workin’?”
“You do an awful lot of paperwork, Jacko...guy could get to thinking that you enjoy it.”
“Like Mr. Holly said...that’ll be the day.” He huffed. A moment later, I felt Artie holster his weapon as he moved to my side. “I don’t like this. Never been real comfortable unless I know what I’m staring in the face.”
“Yeah, well, join the club.” I growled testily, moving further into the house. Reaching the end of the foyer, I paused at the foot of the staircase leading to the second floor. “I told you once before, Jacko…I been studying this shit since day one, but I still don’t know jack shit.”
“Well you know more than most.”
“Just what I read in new age books and all that warm fuzzy crap. The rest is just experience. It’s what I know and what I’ve seen. Even after two years of this, it’s all just guess work and clutching…at straws…*shit*…” I wheezed, reaching up to clutch at my chest.
“Cain?...” Artie asked warily, laying a hand on my shoulder.
I just shrugged him off. “I think she knows...we’re here. Wants help. Find her.”
With a dubious look, he just patted my shoulder in a paternal fashion and moved to head up the staircase. As he did, I caught sight of him draw his jacket back to make his holster more accessible.
My advocate...my biggest supporter. Even he still couldn't accept the facts for what they were. Not entirely, anyway.
Fucked up, ain't it? In a world where the monsters are real, no one can believe that a guy like me communes with the dead.
I stood for a full minute, waiting for the tightness to pass until I could breathe again. This ghost wasn’t malevolent, just scared...out of control. She was dangerous, but not evil, so I was pretty sure she wouldn’t kill me...emphasis on the ‘pretty sure’ part.
Once I was sure I could move without stumbling or passing out from hyperventilation, I moved into the living room adjoining the small foyer. I glanced around to begin my quest of finding Betty Cowles. Not literally, but I was looking for something to give me a better idea of who this woman was. Décor was feminine…probably single. A little cool, too nice looking, so I assumed she wasn’t home a lot. Probably lived for her job…kind of like me.
Me…yeah, my story’s one for the books. It's a long sucker and a little on the complicated side, but I'll try to give you the condensed version. Two years ago, I was a cop. I got shot on the job and died on the table. Took them almost four and a half minutes to resuscitate me, but I came back. Trick is...I came back a little bit different.
When I realized I was communicating with the dead, I started having problems. Why? Nobody believed me. Like I said, I was diagnosed schizo a good part of my life, but when I got older I improved...psychiatrist cleared me around the time I signed up at the Academy. I thought the *voices* were bad? The visions were ten times worse…and the hell of it was that I couldn’t convince anybody I was seeing ghosts. Now you may be thinking that in this day and age, schizo or no, I ought to be able to convince someone of the truth, right? That maybe the psychiatric problems have a different foundation? Wrong.
Vampires and werewolves and witches may be real, but there's never been any conclusive scientific proof that ghosts actually exist. Everyone else is covered, but spirits? What spirits? They don’t exist, you can’t read them on your instruments. Fucked up, right? Seems everyone’s explainable except my kind.
Vampires? When they’re bitten, a quick-acting venom secreted by the fangs enters the bloodstream and changes their biological makeup in a matter of hours, creating a biological need for blood to survive. Their bodies digest certain crucial nutrients it finds in plasma and white blood cells, and red blood cells are assimilated into the bloodstream to carry oxygen. Depending on your breed, certain weaknesses may apply...as of the last study done by the Lawrence Institute, which specializes in Paranormal medical research, there were fourteen different strains of vampirism in the US, twenty percent of which were resistant to sunlight, and six percent which were immune to it.
Werewolves are even better...lycanthropy. Nasty little bug that takes about a month to manifest...adds parts you never had, takes away others, and gives the gift of longevity. The disease strikes the brain first, altering the various lobes and hemispheres to more easily match those of a wolf...or if you’re another kind of were, the flavor you picked up. We’ll stick with wolves for the moment, though...and in werewolves, the disease adds other things like extra nasal membranes. This gives the victim a keener sense of smell. Other enhancements take place in the eyes and ears, the vocal chords change to allow for canine speech like growling and howling. Finally, muscle and bone mass increases...extra muscles and a new set of bones added to the skeletal structure allows for the transformation that takes place when the virus goes active. Like some viruses, it lays dormant in four week intervals...manifests on a lunar cycle, much like female menstruation. Believe it or not, there’s actually a four percent surplus of female lycanthropes in the US over males.
You can prove they exist through cold, hard fact...a little bit of mysticism and a whole lotta science. Ghosts, though? All the parapsychology in the world’s not going to reveal a body to dissect or a brain to pick. They’re the dead...they leave no trace. And naturally, *my* kind get screwed because of it.
Due to the fact ghost, scientifically and legally, don’t exist, neither do mediums. By default, it used to be that folks like me weren't legally recognized as Paranormals, and therefore not protected under the amendments to the Civil Rights Act that have guarded the rights of Paranormals since the Uprising. We had all the rights Nulls do...but none of the protections Paranormals are given to let them live normal lives...no specialized medical care for our abilities, no retroactive court rulings to allow the overturn of unfair convictions resulting from our conditions and the like. A vampire couldn't be charged with murder for trurning a guy if the act was consensual...but if a medium is diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, like I was, and committed by a licensed psychiatrist, there’s no law requiring a reevaluation...no possible chance that person will ever stop being forced to medicate themselves, no end to the promises that the voices will go away, or that the visions will stop. The ones locked up will never see freedom...and never know any real peace of mind.
That was my story after I came back to active duty...but I got lucky in a lot of ways. My personal circumstances were one, seeing as how they changed things for the likes of a lot of spirit mediums. Another way I got lucky was Artie Jackson himself…a fact I’m not gonna forget any time soon.
I strolled over to the sofa, my gaze traveling slowly over the room when I spotted a sheaf of papers on the immaculate glass topped coffee table. Reaching into my pocket, I withdrew a pair of latex gloves and pulled them on before picking up the stack, paging through them carefully. There were several lists of names, along with a couple of photocopied maps. After a few moments of inspection, I realized the maps were directions to a grave…maps of a cemetery.
“Artie!” I called out, turning to head for the staircase again, papers in hand. Artie, I think I got something!”
“Me too, Cain! Looks like we got our stiff!”
Even as he spoke, I winced. Sure, I knew the chick was dead, but still...when you know something horrible’s happened, you irrationally pray that you’re wrong. Subconsciously, some part of me wanted Betty to be alive.
However, she was dead, and her killer was at large. Time to get to work.
I stopped just short of the doorway, my gaze caught by a flash of gold on the floor. Bending down, with one gloved hand I picked up a gold chain, a small pendant hanging from it. Closer inspection revealed it was a tablet...the Ten Commandments, if I wasn’t mistaken. The necklace itself was feminine in nature...so Betty was a good little Christian. Damn. I hate shit like this...learning about the murders I investigate, especially when they’re spirits that I see. I have to get to know them to help them, and it drives things home just a little bit harder...no matter what I do, I’ll never be able to use my gift to save someone before it’s too late.
Moving right up to the foot of the stairs, I fully intended to head up and join Artie when I felt it again. The pain, the suffocation, the chill…they’d all abated some as I lost focus of the spirit, but here I could feel her again. Invisible bands were constricting my breath, the jackhammer in my head was pounding out a tune that might have been fun to dance to if it wasn’t currently splitting my skull into tiny little pieces. Not even the deathly chill that filled the air once more was helping my head...this wasn’t the refreshing coolness that can soothe pain, but the biting touch of the final end to all suffering.
This woman was trying to talk to me...and it was ripping me apart.
“Cain! What’re you waiting for, Christmas?”
I barely heard him as the pain in my head dulled but my skin continued to try and crawl off my body…usually a sign of weakening reserves in a ghost. The most taxing thing a specter can do is manifest visually…meaning she was here…*really* here, visible if I opened my eyes.
And by the sudden, radiant chill against my face, I knew she was standing in front of me.
I opened my eyes to find Betty about a foot and a half ahead of me, clear as day. That’s another misconception about the dead...there’s nothing special about the way they look, not usually. The further removed from death a spirit is, the easier they are on the eyes...people that have been dead a hundred years tend to look just like they did in life, just a little out of place. The recently dead, however? That’s a whole other ball of wax entirely. To them, death is still recent...still real. It’s more than just a current event, it’s their whole world, so they appear as they were when they died...if death was easy, that’s the exception. Those who die in their sleep or from something swift and sudden, like an aneurysm, then the apparition very closely resembles the living. It is, however, usually pretty agitated.
But if you’re Betty Cowles and died from a gunshot to the back of the head...then that’s what houseguests get to see when you go to answer the door.
She was white as a sheet, not because she was a specter. No, it was blood loss…because of the gaping hole in her skull, blood dripping on the floor one individual drip at a time. I couldn’t see into it since she was facing me, but I knew her head had been blown wide open since the back of her skull was visibly hanging on by a thread. It hadn’t been blown off very cleanly and still clung, or got tangled in pieces of her scalp and hair, letting it hang open like a door on shaky hinges, allowing me to look at the back of her head as it faced front along with the rest of her. Silky, platinum blonde hair was bright fire engine red with blood, a streak of it marring her milky cheek as dark, soulful brown eyes met mine.
“Let the dead rest in peace.” she whispered, her eyes filling with tears as her clenched fists trembled with emotion as she held them at her sides. Whether it was rage or fear, I wasn’t quite sure. “Let them rest, damn you.”
I couldn’t answer, only watch her closely as I fought for breath, looking for clues about her death and her life as I tried to make sense of her remarks. It wasn’t anything unusual...in my two years of dealing with this gift, I’ve learned that the newly dead most often can’t speak. Unless it’s their own final words...anything they said in their last hours...they’re often too disoriented and in too much pain to recall things like speech. Like the restoration of appearance, it all comes with time. The dead are just like any living creature...they were, after all, alive once. They need time to heal…a chance to mend, to make peace with their new state before they move on to wherever it is we go when we die.
What I had on my hands at the moment was a traumatized young woman that had died horribly and probably wasn’t yet aware she was dead. She was reliving the final moments of her life, and speaking to me as she’d likely spoken to her killer. I hadn’t had enough time to get any background on Cowles, so I had no clue what she was talking about...and asking her wouldn’t bring me any answers.
“Cain! Cain, you still down there?”
“Leave me alone!” she cried, reaching up to clutch her head, making the free-hanging section of her skull swing wildly as her hand knocked into it. “I’m not going to help you!”
Easy enough to figure out…she was talking to her killer. He wanted something…I tried to piece it together, the names, maps…’let the dead rest in peace’…it had to be connected to that goddamn cemetery. It *had* to be. I tried looking for more clues in her appearance, but didn’t find much more to go on. Her clothing was drenched with blood and disheveled, but I could still discern the nightgown she wore. No...not nightgown. That was a slip...I thought. I hoped. Women’s clothes all looked the same to me...
I was dimly aware of the footsteps slowly descending the staircase…careful, cautious not to make too much noise and jerk me too suddenly out of this strange, agonized state I was in. Artie…had to be. Probably found her body upstairs in her bedroom or something, I was willing to bet money on it. Absently, I found myself grateful once again for vampiric telepathy. When a ghost hit me hard, it was a little like deep sea diving. It takes the dead a lot of energy to manifest visibly, and it takes just as much for me to deal with the kind of energy they work with. It’s pressure on my mind and my body...hell, on my soul. There’s something in me that’s tied to these suckers, and every time they show up in front of me it’s like they’re trying to take that something *back* and kill me all over again. So, like with any deep sea diver, if I come up too fast from a swim with the spirits, I’m liable to end up with the psychic bends. The numerous visits I’d made to the hospital in the last six or seven months since coming back to work as an Investigator was proof of that. Artie didn’t need to talk to me to find out when I was in the grips of a spectral encounter...he just had to listen to my thoughts.
Suddenly Betty’s ghost advanced, her eyes wild as she reached out to grab me. There was awareness in her eyes...not the bright panic I usually see in the gaze of a new ghost, but actual *clarity*...she knew I was there. She knew what was happening.
And she was screaming. “He’s waking the dead...waking the dead...YOU CAN’T LET HIM WAKE THE DEAD!!!”
Ghosts can’t touch, but being only human, I reflexively staggered back a few steps, taken off guard by her movement, her screaming, and above all the look in her eyes. Still, she tried to grab me, her spectral hands plunging into my body...and just like that the pain in my head intensified. I felt the bullet ripping into my flesh, shattering my skull, choking me with fear because he had the keys he was going to wake the dead wake the dead wake the dead...
An image of a cemetery crawling with half-rotted corpses filled my mind before everything went black.
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no subject
Date: 2005-11-21 05:54 pm (UTC)I love Cain. But the story needs more Joey. Then again, my muses are a bit biased. :P
no subject
Date: 2005-11-24 12:49 am (UTC)*recovers from shock*
*applauds loudly....whistles annoyingly* YAAAAAAYYY!!!! More more more!!! WOO WOO WOO!!!
:)
no subject
Date: 2005-11-24 08:25 pm (UTC)