Ashes To Ashes: Ashton Ford, Psychic Detective (17 page)

After that I felt a lot better—better enough
to send to the kitchen for bacon and eggs and a pot of
coffee—better yet, enough to tackle the shorthand in Powell's
little notebooks while auditing the cassette tapes I'd found
earlier.

The tapes turned out to be
music and nothing else—Strauss, I believe—but the notebooks proved
to be a code within a code, rambling phrases buried inside
systematically abbreviated longhand, similar to the so-called
Phillips Code used by Morse telegraphers in the old days to
shorten wire time—duck soup, really, for the trained cryptoanalyst,
which was one of my navy talents.

Duck soup, that is, with regard to the
abbreviations, per se, but these were notes designed for
communication only with the self who wrote them—sort of like
memory-joggers—and I did not possess the memories to be jogged.

K wnts opr
I took to mean "Kalinsky wants operator," but
what the hell did that tell me?

Stl Ingst bt cnt frvr
hldby
I would say is "Stall longest but
cannot forever hold at bay"—so what?

It usually takes a leap of mind to overcome
personal codes; you go for a logic system, and it helps to know a
little something about the context of reality in which the notes
are placed.

The trouble with leaping the mind is that
sometimes you superimpose your own imagined reality upon the
contextual reality of the noter to force an improper conclusion.
But I was trying, and here is the way I leaped the two notes shown
above:

"Kalinsky wants the operator. I will stall
him as long as possible but I know that, sooner or later, I will
have to give him the operator."

I will not burden you with
the whole process. The above should give insight enough into the
problems and uncertainties of such an endeavor—and to indicate
that, after struggling for two hours with the Powell notes (this
particular set from a notebook dated on the cover at just a few
months prior to that moment) I still was left with more conjecture
than certainty.

Even supposing that my construction of the
"joggers" given above is accurate, I am still left with the
question: what operator? Obviously he was not referring to a
telephone operator.

We leap the mind, though,
in a logic system that respects a contextual reality. So we put the
above together with something that appears as
trbl brch pfsnl etcs
and
mk rbt KH
plus
bt wo pys bls
?"

This give us a "terrible breach of
professional ethics—make a robot of Karen—but who pays the
bills?"

Thusly a logical movement is formed, a
mentality is frameworked, a conjecture takes shape as:

"Kalinsky has been after me to give him the
operator. I will stall him as long as possible, but I know that,
sooner or later, I will have to give it to him. And this places me
in a hell of a dilemma. Not only is it a terrible breach of
professional ethics, but it will make a robot of Karen. But, what
the hell, after all, who is paying the bills around here?"

After that sort of synthesis, it takes no
great leap to the "operator."

I already knew, or thought I knew, what
Powell meant by that, but nowhere in the notebooks did this
mysterious "operator" stand up and identify itself.

So I went to the scratch pads and calendars,
the doodles, comparing Powell's with Kalinsky's—and that is how I
found the operator. It appeared in both sets of
doodles—repetitively in Powell's, only once but heavily outlined in
truncated form in Kalinsky's.

I was shaking inside as I went down to the
kitchen and personally supervised the putting together of a
breakfast tray for Karen. It was now about eight o'clock. I was
told that Kalinsky had gone to bed with orders that he not be
disturbed until noon.

Marcia Kalinsky customarily slept until ten
or eleven, often later on Sundays after a hard night at poolside;
according to the poop in the kitchen, she had retired under
sedation at about two o'clock and had left an order for poolside
brunch at twelve-thirty.

I took the tray to Karen's apartment and
told the sleepy-eyed watchdog to get lost.

He replied, "Sorry, sir, I was instructed to
cooperate with you, but I am to remain at my post."

I said, "Move your chair to the hallway,
then."

He was eyeing the breakfast tray with more
than casual interest. I asked him, "Have you eaten yet?"

He said, "No sir, but I'm due to be relieved
pretty soon."

I said, "Okay. Wait outside for him, though.
And tell him to stay out there until I say otherwise. You can't
expect Miss Highland to get up and move around with you guys
lounging about in here."

He dropped his eyes and said, "Sure, I
understand. She's still asleep, though." He glanced at his watch.
"I gave her her last medication at four. She's due again."

I told him, "That's been changed. No more
medication unless I say so."

"Mr. Kalinsky—"

"Wake him up, if you want to. But no more
medication."

The guard/paramedic replied with eyes only
and carried a chair into the hallway. I closed the door and locked
it and took the tray into the bedroom.

The shades were drawn, the room in deep
gloom. I opened it up to both light and air, went to the bathroom
and dampened a small towel, sat on the bed and sponged her
awake.

She was groggy from God knew what mixture of
downer drugs and had a hell of time focusing on me, but I'm the
stubborn type and I kept at her until it was obvious that she was
functioning properly at the conscious level.

I forced strong black coffee on her and
spoon-fed oatmeal and toast into her, then lit a cigarette and
handed it to her. So far, not a word between us. The first ones
came with the exhalation of smoke and in a very small voice. "I had
a terrible dream."

"Tell me about it."

"I was ... walking ... it
was night ... somewhere—oh, the trail, the trail to the little
meadow. This monster—oh, a horrible monster—leaped out at me from
the dark. Had fangs like ... like a werewolf or something, horrible
yellow eyes, and it was frothing at the mouth. I hit it ... picked
up something and hit it. When I ... did that ... it turned into
Carl and ... and there was blood everywhere."

I took the cigarette from her and dragged on
it, gave it back, said, "And then?"

"I ... don't know. It was
all just ... very unpleasant. And endless."

"Endless, yeah," I said gloomily.

She sighed. "Yes." She looked about her,
asked, "Who put me to bed?"

"You remember being put to bed?"

"Vaguely, yes. Or did I
dream it? Did you ...?"

I grinned and shook my head. "Not yet. We
have another problem to clear up, first. Do you remember what
happened to Marcia last night?"

The great eyes clouded, fell. She took a
thoughtful pull at the cigarette, gave me an oblique gaze and said,
"Yes. She thought I did it. Did I do it?"

I asked, "Did you?"

She said, "How could ...? I wouldn't even
know how to do that."

"Do you remember being there? At the pool?
When she was drowning?"

"I ... I'm not sure. There
is some—I seem to have a picture of that but ... I don't know if
I'm remembering what she said or what I actually saw."

"Or something you dreamed?"

"I hope so. Is it a dream?"

I said, "Karen, our only
touch with the world is through our minds. But all we ever really
see is a shadow play, something that our mind interprets for us
from sense excitations. Reality for you and for me, reality for
every human being, is always a mental quality. The only way that we
ever even know that a real world exists out there beyond the mind
is when we compare our mental worlds with each other and find a
correspondence. A dream is just another shadow play, except that it
does not have its source in the outside world. That is why it is
sometimes difficult to distinguish between something physically
experienced and something only dreamed. Do you understand what I am
saying?"

She replied, "I think so."

I continued, "Some dreams are so vivid, seem
so real, that we actually store in memory phantom sense perceptions
that are every bit as valid as an actual, physical experience. That
is, we store odor memories, tactile memories, visual memories,
auditory memories, just as though our dream had flesh—and, in
remembering the dream, all those memories come flooding back with
all the strength of a remembered actual event; sometimes
stronger."

She said, "Yes, I
..."

I was talking with two goals in mind. One,
to stimulate her intellectually, make sure that she was mentally
functioning; secondly, to provide a mental framework from which she
might view her own confusions.

But I was leading her, really, into a
confrontation with her "operator."

And I decided that the moment had
arrived.

"For example," I continued, in the same
conversational tone, "what if I were to ask you if you remember
Elena Magdalena?"

Her eyes blinked rapidly, twice; a
now-familiar expression spread quickly across her face, and she
replied, in a normal voice, "Yes, I understand."

I watched her closely for a moment, then
asked her, "What do you understand, Karen?"

She replied, without pause, "I will see as
you say, hear as you say, think as you say, do as you say."

Son of a gun, as easy as that.

The girl was in a deep hypnotic trance,
somnambulistic level. She was, indeed, a human robot. She would
walk around with eyes wide open and all sensory apparatus fully
functioning, yet with the objective functions of mind totally set
aside, nothing but the receptive web of the subjective mind—or the
subconscious—operative and awaiting instructions.

The "operator," here, was a simple auditory
trigger keyed to a posthypnotic suggestion that, in effect,
operated not only to return her instantly to deep trance but also,
apparently, served as a transfer function—a transfer of control,
that is, to whomever operated the trigger.

To test it, I told her in a purely
conversational tone of voice, "You will awaken when I tell you to,
and you will have no conscious memory that you have been in trance
or that you have been given instructions. Nevertheless, after you
have awakened and when you hear me say to you, 'Jump, Karen,' you
will immediately go to the window and close it. If someone asks
why you closed the window, you will explain that a storm is coming
and that you do not want the rain to come in. Do you
understand?"

She replied, sounding entirely natural,
"Yes, I understand."

I said, "Wake up, then. Now."

With no visible alteration of her mood or
demeanor, she said to me, "Yes, I have had dreams that seemed so
vivid. I could actually smell the flowers and feel the fur on a
squirrel."

She was right back where
the earlier conversation had been interrupted. We chatted about
dreams for a minute or two, and we both had some coffee and smoked
cigarettes.

Then, very quietly, I said, "Jump,
Karen."

She casually threw back the covers and got
out of bed, slipped on a dressing gown, and went and closed all the
windows that I had opened when I came in. She returned to the bed,
removed the gown, lay down, and again picked up the
conversation.

"Dreams are really neat, though. Sometimes
better than..."

I said, "Why did you do that?"

"Why did I do what?"

"Why did you close the windows? Are you
cold?"

She said, "No, but we don't want it raining
in here, do we?"

I said, "Karen, it is not raining."

She replied, "It will be when the storm
arrives."

I said, "What storm is that?"

She looked confused, and said, "Oh my. Did I
dream that too?"

You see, there is a correlation there.

A corroboration, in fact, of the hypothesis
I had been forming.

I quietly said, "Elena Magdalena," and put
her back into that other reality.

Then, damn it, I had to figure the best way
to get in there with her.

Chapter Twenty-One:
Hypothesis

You need to have an understanding of the way
hypnosis works if you are going to believe the rest of this
story.

I doubt that anyone knows for sure precisely
how or why it works, but those of us who have worked with it do not
doubt that it does work, and sometimes in awesome ways.

So please bear with me a moment, while I
refresh your understanding whether it needs it or not—and as only
I, in my noncredentialed way, may approach the subject.

The human mind appears to
be a duality of form, fit, and function (an old engineering term
that works very well here) that manifests consciousness as the
conscious and the subconscious minds, or the objective and
subjective (psychology terminology), but which I prefer to consider
a single force exhibiting various aspects at specific levels of
activity (pure physics) to provide a totality of individual
experience that we humans quantify as a living soul (metaphysical
stuff).

This is not an auspicious beginning, is
it?—but, remember, I asked you to bear.

One aspect of the duality has to do with
reasoning power: How do we understand with the intellect what we
perceive through the senses?

Psychologists and logicians alike recognize
two basic modes of reasoning, the inductive and the deductive
methods. Hypnosis theory tells us that the conscious mind is
capable of both modes, but that the subconscious mind is capable
only of deductive reasoning.