PsyCop 6: GhosTV (33 page)

Not Five Faith, then. Just pervy. And here I’d thought all I needed to worry about was Jacob and the picture of my ectoplasm hand. If it weren’t for Five Faith, I would’ve been spooked by the idea of someone actually taking pictures of me to whack off to later, but now I was practically giddy with relief. It really goes to show how everything’s relative.

I backed up even farther and found more PsyTrain stuff. A graduation party, it looked like, since there was a cake and a
Congratulations,
Sophie
banner and a bunch of smiling Psychs. Mostly smiling, anyway. One of ’em looked a little more like me, cursed with a permanent scowl. Where had I seen her before? The cafeteria? Faun Windsong’s class? Or maybe in the hallway?

In the hallway.

My brain seized up with the notion that the hallway was really important, though it hadn’t quite connected the dots yet. I backed through a few more photos—Sophie cutting her cake, Faun Windsong gesticulating as she said something self-important—and then that was it. No more pictures.

“There you are.”

I flinched and turned. I’d been hovering near the restaurant doorway so long Lyle had come looking for me. Maybe I should’ve ducked into the bathroom instead—at least I would’ve been behind a locked door.

“Sometimes the signal cuts out if you hold it with your thumb over the…ohmigod.” He was staring at the phone in my hand. I’d been caught rifling through his photos—he knew it, and I knew it. And I’d caught him taking jerk-off pictures of me—and all of this was conveyed by the look of complete and utter dismay on his face. He didn’t flush this time. He went white.

Then he made a grab for the phone.

I raised it up above my head. He’d either have to jump, or climb me to reach it. He started to jump, as if batting it out of my hand would make any difference now that I’d seen the snapshots. “Stop it.” Jump, swipe. “Cut it ou—so help me God, I will pistol-whip you if you don’t quit it.”

He stopped jumping at me and crossed his arms defensively. Now he was flushed from all the aerobic activity. His hair was messed up, but the Grey Flannel still smelled pretty good. Once I was fairly sure he wasn’t going to try anything that made it obvious I wouldn’t know how to pistol-whip someone if my life depended on it, I lowered the phone and thumbed back to the first shot of the party. I held the phone under his nose, jabbed my finger at the scowling woman, and said, “Who’s that?”

He cocked his head and squinted at the photo. His skin flickered transparent. “That’s Karen Frugali.”

Really? Karen Frugali took off long before I’d come to California. So why was I convinced I’d seen her before? I squinted at the tiny photo myself. If I’d known her back at Camp Hell, I would’ve remembered—after all, there were only a handful of us mediums there, and lately all of us but Dead Darla were present and accounted for. Even if Dead Darla had grown out her cherry-red hair and managed to lose half her body weight, she’d still be around forty years old. Too old to re-emerge with a new name and a new identity as this thirtyish Karen Frugali. Plus, Faun Windsong wouldn’t have been able to resist telling me about her, in a know-it-all kind of way.

“Look,” Lyle stammered, “I can explain. I was just—”

“Shut up.” Karen Frugali. Where had I seen her? I tried to picture her outside, then in the lobby, then in the hallway. Why was my brain stuck on the hallway? Maybe there was a photo of her, hanging on the wall inside the PsyTrain building. I didn’t particularly remember seeing any photos, but maybe my subconscious did. The hallway. Photos hung in hallways, right? Except I remembered stucco walls when I thought of PsyTrain hallways, not collections of framed photos.

Okay, so what else was important about the hallway? The main thing that came to mind, not that it meant jack squat, was that when I’d lied to Dreyfuss about seeing….

I stared at the tiny scowling face harder, and my pulse started to pound in my temples.

The blood ghost. That was her.

Karen Frugali was the blood ghost.

Karen Frugali’s story, once we put it all together, was rough for me to contemplate—because it seemed that while she and I’d had different timing and different circumstances, some parts of our history ran uncomfortably parallel to one another. She’d been a waitress in Kentucky who married her high school sweetheart and tried for nearly nine years to have a kid. When she finally did, one day she found the baby boy in its crib, motionless and blue.

The students and teachers who’d known her all described her personality in general as being extreme—and apparently she’d been as extreme in her grief over her son’s sudden death as she was about every other aspect of her life. So extreme that not only did her husband file for divorce once he’d checked her into the psychiatric ward of the local hospital for observation, but extreme enough to trigger her latent psychic talent: astral projection. She spent her days shuffling from counselor to counselor, and her nights wandering in search of the spirit of her baby boy.

In this day and age, I would’ve thought the medical profession wouldn’t be so quick to lock someone up in the nuthouse—then again, I’ve seen what passes for a modern Psych testing kit, so maybe I shouldn’t be so shocked. Karen was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia, evidenced by elaborate fantasies of grandeur and exacer-bated by the tragic loss of a child. And since she came from a “good” family where people didn’t talk about things like mental illness, she was mortified.

Although her only resource consisted of half an hour of recreational computer time per day, Karen used that time to research astral projection, lucid dreaming and remote viewing online, until she was able to not only think clearly enough during her OBEs to stop aimlessly searching for her son, but also to remember the projections clearly when she woke back up.

Once she’d mastered projecting, a graphic description she provided of the chief psychiatrist listening to Mozart and conducting an imagi-nary orchestra with an emery board—all while he took a lengthy and explosive crap—was enough to merit a new volley of Psych screening, and then, a reversal of the schizophrenia diagnosis.

Which wasn’t to say Karen Frugali was emotionally healthy. Just that she really could travel without her body holding her back, and then remember what she’d seen.

She’d been the first one to disappear. Everyone else who vanished after she did was part of the Bert Chekotah Fan Club—including the star of the show, Chekotah himself. Circumstances pointed to Faun Windsong flying into a jealous rage, eliminating her competition, then finishing off her straying man as the icing on the cake. Except…that didn’t jibe with her genuine distress, and the whole “No TV” writing marathon I’d caught the tail end of.

“Our best bet,” Jacob said, “is to try and see if Karen might be able to help us out. Find her spirit. Talk to it. Figure out where her body is, and maybe….” he looked away without finishing that thought. Maybe we’d find the others. Debbie. Lisa.

Although, that didn’t seem quite right, either. Maybe Karen had been butchered, but Chekotah had simply disappeared…or dissolved. There were piles of clothes in Debbie’s and Lisa’s rooms, too. Hard to say if they’d been full of ectoplasm at any point or not. But they might have been.

I walked the halls and grounds for hours searching for a glimpse of Karen Frugali’s ghost, but no dice. Dreyfuss pulled everything he could find on Karen, from her high school transcripts to her MySpace page to her dental records. Jacob interviewed students, instructors, janitors, guards. The sun set, and PsyTrain residents ate their dinner—which I skipped, as I was still packed with burritos—although, disturbingly enough, it was tempting to try to cram a little more in.

It neared midnight—I no longer bothered converting things to “my time” since I’d been so sore, exhausted and sleep-deprived since I’d arrived that my subjective time seemed irrelevant—and I took a quick shower and fell into bed. Jacob was busy jabbing keys on his laptop and scowling at it. “Come to bed,” I told him. “Maybe sleeping on it will help.”

“In a minute.”

He sounded snippy. Since there was no arguing with him even on the best of days, I rolled over and faced the wall, and ignored that little itch in my throat that told me a Valium would be really, really nice, or maybe an Auracel. Deadening my Psych sensitivity for the sake of the floaty feeling the Auracel would give me was no kind of option, plus I’d sacrificed my Valium to Faun. Enough Mexican food had moved along that my stomach didn’t hurt quite as much, that was a bonus. I focused on that, and on my breathing, and how good it felt to finally lie down and rest my eyes.

That seemed to do the trick, relaxing and breathing, because my aches and pains fell away, and eventually I realized I felt pretty damn good. I gave a stretch and prodded something with my hand, something that resisted, and then gave.

I opened my eyes. My hand was inside the wall.

I sat up. Jacob was down on one knee in front of the GhosTV, frown-ing at his notes. He tweaked one of the dials, and my head started to buzz a little bit. He checked his watch and jotted down a few more notes, while I rolled my astral eyes. I had nothing against testing the damn GhosTV, but it would have been nice of him to consult me first.

I’d be hungry as hell come morning, but I supposed I should be grate-ful for the opportunity to carry on with the investigation even in my sleep—plus, there was always the chance I’d get someone to really open up and tell me all the things their internal censors wouldn’t let them say while they were physical, the way Jacob had admitted he was worried I wasn’t attracted to him while he was pounding my astral ass. I attempted to float out into the hall, and found that I didn’t need to. I was just there. I took a good look around. Yep. It looked like the hall. Pretty spiffy. I dropped through the floor toward Karen’s and Lisa’s rooms. The ball-pit sensation was fleeting. I found myself downstairs in a split second. The hall looked the same—but the people in it…those were new.

I recognized both of them from Faun Windsong’s astral projection class. A middle-aged woman who’d had a bad perm in real life was standing by the elevators with her eyes closed, groping along the wall. She had astral hair like Lady Godiva, long and blonde, hanging down to her thighs in heavy, luxurious waves. Thankfully, unlike Lady Godiva, she wasn’t naked. And the Asian guy who’d asked the insuf-ferable question about the silver cord—he was floating by the ceiling like a big, guy-shaped helium balloon, and he was dressed like the Matrix. “Hey, Leather Boy,” I called. “You’re astral.”

“Am I out?” he said. He floundered and bobbed against the ceiling.

“I feel like I’m out.”

“You’re astral. C’mere a minute. I want to ask you a few questions.” He floundered some more, elbowed the ceiling, then floated in a slow rotation until his back was to me and his nose was against the textured stucco. His long, black duster didn’t look particularly cool dangling like that as he struggled to control his astral body. “Am I out? My head is buzzing. What do I do?”

I sighed, left him to find his footing, and went to chat with perm-lady instead. “Hey…you’re astral,” I told her.

“Maybe I’m dreaming. It feels the same.”

Did it? Not to me. Dreaming had weird time-lurches and jumps of logic in it, and people who were really composites of two other people, and usually I was naked but I only realized it at the most embarrassing time. At the moment, I was still in my jeans, my black high-tops and my favorite T-shirt. “Nope, you’re not dreaming. Definitely astral.”

“It’s so hard to see.”

“Your eyes are closed.”

“But if I open them, I’ll wake up. I’ve been trying to do this all year and I can’t screw it up now—I don’t want to wake up.” Given the range of the GhosTV and the frequency it was playing at, I was guessing she’d be pretty safe opening her eyes. “You won’t know ’til you try. Give it a shot.”

“I can’t. I’ll wake up.”

“I promise,” I said—which was a lie, since for all I knew she really would snap awake if she opened her eyes, “you’re totally astral and you won’t wake up.”

She groped the wall some more, then ran her hands down the front of her body, through the silver cord that snaked out of her solar plexus, then back up where she touched her own face. I waited expectantly for her to open her eyes, but instead she found the wall again and started working her way away from me. “Where’re you going?”

“I don’t want to wake up.”

Behind me, the Asian guy said, “Am I out?”

I sighed. Astral witnesses were nowhere near as helpful as I thought they would be.

Jacob had been so rational while he was astral. Weirdly vulnerable, and he didn’t remember a lick of it after he woke up, but still rational. And Faun Windsong—she’d made plenty of sense, too. Faun had experience, while Jacob had proximity to the GhosTV, and, it would seem, a pretty highly developed talent. Not light worker talent…but maybe the type of talent didn’t matter. Just the strength. He’d be pretty stoked to hear that theory, though I’d probably need to think of a better name than “the red veiny talent.”

I thought about Jacob, and found myself back in our room. My physical body was in bed with its face to the wall. Jacob was sitting at the piled-high desk, stroking his beard and staring at the GhosTV. He looked tired—but he also looked stubborn enough to stay up all night, if that was what it took.

So I couldn’t expect him to go astral anytime soon, but Jacob wasn’t the one I needed to talk to, anyway. He didn’t know any more about the case than I knew. Faun Windsong, though…maybe she hadn’t been entirely truthful with me after Chekotah dissolved. Or maybe she remembered something that was so horrible her conscious mind blocked it out, but her astral body would be able to fill me in on the details. Either way, I figured she’d be my best bet.

I thought about the Quiet Room where I’d last seen her swaddled in an afghan, felt a sense of rapid motion, and then, there I was. The lights were low, but it was the Quiet Room all right, all recliners and bland artwork and philodendrons. Faun was still bundled up on the couch, zonked out with her burnt hand wrapped in gauze sticking out from a fold in the afghan, but there was someone else with her now—a guy sitting in one of the recliners with his upper body leaning forward and his hands clasped between his knees, watching her anxiously.