Dream Eyes (2 page)

He eased past the body and focused the sharp light on the twisted rock passage. The urge to swim forward as quickly as possible was almost overwhelming. But impulsive decisions would kill him as surely as running out of air. He forced himself to drift for a few seconds.

There it was, the faint but steady pull of the current. It would either be his lifeline or the false lure that drew him to his death. He slipped into the stream of the ultra-clear water and allowed it to guide him deeper into the maze.

The islanders claimed that there was an exit to the sea. That had been proven years ago by a simple dye test. A coloring agent poured into the cavern pool had emerged a short distance offshore. But the island was riddled with caves, and no one had been able to find the underwater exit point. Divers had died trying.

It was getting hard to breathe off the first tank of air, the one he had grabbed when he had been forced into the water. It was almost empty. He took it off and set it down on a rocky ledge with great care. The last thing he needed now was to stir up the sediment on the floor of the cave. If that happened, he would be forced to waste precious time waiting for the current to clear out the storm of debris. Time meant air usage. He had none to spare. There was, in fact, a staggeringly high probability that he would not have enough air regardless of how carefully he managed the one commodity that meant life or death.

He slipped on the dead man’s tank and waited a beat, drifting upward a little. Sometimes in a flooded cave the current was stronger toward the roof of the tunnel.

Once again he sensed it, the faint, invisible tug that urged him deeper into the flooded labyrinth.

Sometime later—he refused to look at his watch because there was no point—the flashlight began to go dark. He used it as long as possible, but the beam faded rapidly. The endless night closed in around him. Until now he had never had a problem with darkness. His paranormal night vision allowed him to navigate without the aid of normal light. In other circumstances, the natural para-radiation in the rocks would have been sufficient to illuminate his surroundings. But the strange aurora that had appeared in the cavern and the explosion that had followed had seared his senses, rendering him psychically blind. There was no way to know if the effects would be permanent and not much point in worrying about it now. The loss of his talent would not matter if he did not make it out of the flooded catacombs alive.

He fumbled with the flashlight that he had taken off the body, nearly dropping it in the process of switching it on. The chill of the water was making him clumsy. The thin 3mm suit he wore provided only limited protection. Although the island was in the Caribbean, he was in freshwater here in the cave, and the temperature at this depth was unpleasantly cold.

Ten minutes later, he rounded a bend and saw that the rocky corridor through which he was swimming narrowed drastically. He was forced to take off his tank and push it into and beyond the choke point. He barely managed to squeeze through after it. The nightmare scenario of getting stuck—unable to go forward or back—sent his heart rate climbing. He was suddenly using air at an even faster rate.

And then he was on the other side. The passage widened once more. Gradually, he got his breathing back under control. But the damage had been done. He had used up a lot of air.

He got the first clue that the current was guiding him in the right direction when he noticed that the once crystal-clear water was starting to become somewhat murky. It was an indication that he had reached the point where the freshwater of the underground river was converging with seawater. That still left a lot of room for things to go wrong. It was entirely possible that he would discover the exit only to find out that he could not fit through it. If that happened, he would spend his last minutes as a condemned man gazing upward through the stone bars of his cell at the summer sunlight filtering through the tropical sea.

The second flashlight slowly died, plunging him into absolute darkness. Instinctively he tried to heighten his talent. Nothing happened. He was still psi-blind.

All he could do now was try to follow the current. He swam slowly, his hands outstretched in an attempt to ward off a close encounter with the rocky walls of the cave.

At one point, to keep his spirits up more than anything else, he took the regulator out of his mouth long enough to taste the water. It was unmistakably salty. He was now in a sea cave.

When he perceived the first, faint glow infusing the endless realm of night, he considered the possibility that he was hallucinating. It was a reasonable assumption, given the sensory disorientation created by the absolute darkness and the fact that he knew he was sucking up the last of his air. Maybe this was the mysterious bright light that those who had survived near-death experiences described. In his case, it would be followed by for-real death.

One thing was certain. If he survived, he would never again take the light of a summer day for granted.

The pale glow brightened steadily. He swam faster. Nothing to lose.

Two

Y
ou’re too late,” the ghost in the mirror said. “I’m already dead.”

There was no accusation in the words, just a calm statement of fact. Dr. Evelyn Ballinger had always been logical and even-tempered in life, reserving her deepest passions for her work. There was no reason why death would give her a personality transplant. But knowing that did nothing to temper the terrible sense of dread and guilt that chilled Gwen Frazier’s blood. If only she had opened the e-mail last night instead of this morning.

If only
. The two most despairing words in the English language.

She crossed the cluttered, heavily draped room that Evelyn had converted into an office. All of the rooms in the house were dark. Evelyn had never liked sunlight. She claimed it interfered with her work.

Gwen’s movement through the room stirred the still air. The crystal wind chimes suspended from the ceiling shivered, producing an eerie music that seemed to come from beyond the grave. The sound raised the hair on the back of Gwen’s neck.

In the doorway behind her, Max, Evelyn’s burly gray cat, meowed plaintively as if demanding that Gwen fix the situation. But there was no fixing death.

The body was crumpled on the floor beside the desk. Evelyn had been in her early seventies, a large, generously proportioned woman who had been caught in a fashion time warp like so many others who resided in the small town of Wilby, Oregon. With her long gray hair, voluminous tie-dyed skirts, and crystal jewelry, she had been a model of the proudly eccentric look that Gwen privately labeled
Hippie Couture
.

Evelyn’s blue eyes stared lifelessly at the ceiling. Her reading glasses lay on the floor. A photo had fallen beside one hand. The pinhole at the top of the picture indicated it had come from the corkboard over the desk. There was no blood or obvious bruising on the body.

“No sign of an injury, you’ll notice,” the mirror ghost said. “What does that tell us?”

“Always the instructor,” Gwen said. “You can’t help yourself, can you?”

“No point changing now, is there, dear? I repeat my question. What does the lack of an obvious injury indicate?”

“Could be natural causes. You were seventy-two years old, a type two diabetic who insisted on eating all the wrong foods, and you were absentminded when it came to taking your meds. You refused to lose weight, and the only exercise you got was an occasional stroll down by the river.”

“Ah, yes, the river,” the ghost said softly. “You won’t forget the river or the falls, will you, dear?”

“No,” Gwen said. “Never.”

She knew there was no hope, but she made herself check for a pulse. There was only the terrible chill and the utter stillness of death. She got slowly to her feet.

“This scene looks dreadfully familiar, doesn’t it?” the ghost said. “Brings to mind what happened two years ago.”

“Yes,” Gwen said. “It does.”

“Another person connected to the study is dead by what appears to be natural causes. Bit of a coincidence, don’t you think?”

Gwen looked at the vision in the mirror. The ghosts were always wispy, smoky images—never sharp and clear like photographs. For the most part, the specters she encountered were strangers, but she had known a few of them all too well. Evelyn Ballinger had now joined that short list. Evelyn had been both mentor and friend.

“I’m sorry,” Gwen said to the ghost. “I didn’t see your e-mail until this morning. I called you right away. When you didn’t answer your phone, I knew something was wrong.”

“Of course you did, dear.” The ghost chuckled. “You’re psychic.”

“I got into the car and drove down here to see you. But it’s a four-hour trip from Seattle.”

“You mustn’t blame yourself, dear,” the ghost said. “There is nothing you could have done. It happened last night, as you can see. I was working here in my office. You remember that I was always a night owl.”

“Yes,” Gwen said. “I remember. Your e-mail to me came in around two o’clock this morning.”

“Ah, yes, of course. You would have been asleep.”

But she hadn’t been asleep, Gwen thought. She had been walking the floors of her small condo, trying to work off the disturbing images from the dream. It had been two years since Zander Taylor’s death, but each summer in late August the nightmares struck. Her talent for lucid dreaming allowed her to control the dreams to some extent, but she had not been able to dispel them. Each time she dreamed the terrifying scenes from that summer of death, she came awake with the same unnerving sense that it had not ended with Taylor going over the falls.

“I was up,” Gwen said. “But I wasn’t checking e-mail.”

She stepped back from the body and dug her phone out of her tote. Max meowed again and lashed his tail.

“I’m sorry, Max. There’s nothing I can do. It’s too late.”

Max did not look satisfied with that response. He watched her intently with his green-gold eyes.

She concentrated on punching in the emergency number and tried not to look at the mirror. Talking to ghosts was not a good thing. It made other people—potential lovers as well as friends—extremely nervous. After all, there were no ghosts. She was really talking to herself, trying to make sense of the messages that her odd form of intuition picked up at the scenes of violent death.

She usually went out of her way to avoid such conversations because she found them incredibly frustrating. There was, after all, very little she could do for the dead. That was the job of the police.

Years ago she had come to realize that if she was seeing ghosts in mirrors, windows, pools of water and other reflective surfaces, it meant that she had stumbled into one of the dark places in the world, a place tainted with the heavy energy that was laid down at the time of violent death. As the old saying went, murder left a stain. But she was not a cop or a trained investigator. She was just a psychic counselor who interpreted dreams for her clients and earned a little money on the side writing scripts for a low-budget cable television series. There was nothing she could do to find justice for the dead.

“When Wesley Lancaster finds out about my death, he’ll probably want you to turn it into a script for his show,” the ghost in the mirror said. “I can see it now.
Was this reclusive paranormal investigator murdered by paranormal means? Is there a link to the mysterious deaths that occurred in this same small town two years ago
?”

“You’re distracting me,” Gwen said. “I’m trying to call 911.”

“Why bother? We both know where this is going. The authorities will assume that I died of natural causes.”

“Which is entirely possible.”

“But your intuition is telling you that I was murdered like the others.”

“My intuition has sent me in the wrong direction before,” Gwen said.

“You’re thinking about what happened two years ago, aren’t you?”

“Of course I am. I’ve been thinking about it all night and during the drive from Seattle.”

Gwen turned her back on the ghost in the mirror and focused on the crisp voice of the 911 operator.

“What is the nature of your emergency?” the woman asked.

“I just found the body of an old friend,” Gwen said. “Dr. Evelyn Ballinger.”

“Ballinger? The crazy old lady who lives out on Miller Road?”

“I’m sure your professionalism would be an inspiration to 911 operators everywhere,” Gwen said.

She rattled off the stark facts and verified the address.

“I’ve got cars on the way,” the operator said. “Your name, ma’am?”

“Gwendolyn Frazier.”

“Please stay at the scene, ma’am.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

Gwen ended the call and wondered if Harold Oxley, the Wilby chief of police, would be among the first responders. Probably. It was a small town, after all.

When she turned back to the mirror, the psychic vision made a tut-tutting sound.

“No one except you and the killer will know that I was murdered, let alone that I was killed by paranormal means. The perp will never be brought to justice, not unless you do something about this.”

Just like last time,
Gwen thought.

“There’s nothing I can do,” she said. “I’m not a cop and I’m not a private investigator.”

“No, but you owe me, don’t you? When you were locked up at the Summerlight Academy, I taught you how to handle your talent. And I’m the one who got you the job writing those scripts for
Dead of Night
. We were friends. And this time it’s different, isn’t it? Two years ago, you didn’t know any psychic investigators. But now you are aware of a certain security consulting firm that specializes in the paranormal, aren’t you?”

The annoying thing about talking to ghosts was that it was a lot like talking to yourself, Gwen thought, which was pretty much exactly what was going on.

She closed the phone and dropped it back into her tote. For the first time, she noticed that there was an empty space on top of the desk. A film of dust traced the outline of the place where a laptop had once sat.