Skillful Death (5 page)

“It will be hard to come by, but I can get you the blood of a bull. Drinking the blood will toughen the child within you and form him into the beginnings of a man,” the Midwife said.

“Please do,” the mother said.

The Midwife agreed, knowing that she could procure the substance for free and that it would have no effect on the mother’s pregnancy. The Midwife was always surprised by mothers. The bulk of them continued to grow more and more superstitious with each child they bore. She thought that at some point they’d grow pragmatic.

“I must bid you farewell,” the Midwife told the mother. “I have an ailing dog at home who needs my attention.”

“You’re so generous of spirit to go out of your way to tend to a dog,” the mother said.

The Midwife smiled and nodded as she made her way out of the chamber.

B
ACK
AT
HOME
,
THE
Midwife found Constantine in the same position as when she left. She paused and let her eyes adjust to the gloom inside the shack, and then waited to see his chest rise and fall before she approached.
 

The Midwife placed a hand on Constantine’s shoulder. His hair hung long and smelled of dirt. She left his side and fetched water for a bath. Smiling and humming, she built up the fire to heat the water. She tried to remember the last time she’d given Constantine a bath. Not since he’d been fast enough to run away from her scrub brush, she figured. Perhaps after giving him a good scrub, she could cut away some of that hair. He was almost old enough to begin working, but he’d have to look presentable first.

With the water heating, the Midwife pulled back the fleece. Constantine, deep in a coma, had soiled the Midwife’s bedding. A snarl screwed into her mouth and she lifted the boy by a wrist and an ankle. He moaned and started to wake as she carried him at arm’s length to the bathing pot. The water was still cold, but she no longer cared. She let go of his ankle and dipped him in the frigid water. Constantine howled as she submerged him in the bath.
 

He fought, still dazed and barely able to see. She held him in the water and rubbed his filthy skin with a cake of tallow soap. She had no objection to scrubbing a dirty boy since that task came up often in her work, but he’d soiled her bedding too. She’d have to wash everything that night and sleep in her clothes while her bedding dried. For that inconvenience, she took her payment from Constantine’s hide.
 

The Midwife grasped the boy’s hair and plunged his face under the water. When she tried to scrub his scalp, he screamed and cried. The skin covering the lump over his eye gave way, and black blood ran down his face and tainted the bath water.

“Oh, Constantine. I’m sorry to have hurt your head,” she said.
 

He thrashed and she lost his grip on his hair. She still held a few strands of his dark locks, torn from his scalp.
 

Constantine eyed the Midwife through his half lidded eyes. Her soap-filled hand had stopped trying to scrub holes in his skin, and she looked as if she might either laugh or cry. He couldn’t tell which.

The Midwife sat back on her heels and regarded the boy.

She raised a hand to touch his face and he flinched away. She pulled her hands to her chest, still clutching a couple strands of his hair. Finally, tears began to leak from the corners of her wrinkled eyes.
 

Constantine jumped from the tub of cold water and sprinted. His failing balance carried him almost halfway to the door and then he veered to the right. As the Midwife watched, he spilled to the floor and then picked himself up to escape through the door.

I
GUESS
MY
FAVORITE
of all the files I’ve worked was the dream emailer. I’m sitting at my little desk, looking up at the tiny window. It’s too high up on the wall to show me anything but sky and clouds. The phone rings. It’s the dream emailer. He claims that he doesn’t want the prize. He heard that I’m good at stopping mysterious stuff from happening and he wants my help. He says that every time he goes to sleep, his subconscious is able to email people. He needs it to stop because, while he’s dreaming, he keeps emailing his ex-girlfriend. She then shows up thinking that he wants to get back together with her.

His evidence matches the story, but what could be easier to fake? You can drum up an email header in less time than it takes to compose the body of the email, so who cares if it has a timestamp from when you were witnessed during a sleep study?

He volunteers to come down and sleep in my office so I can watch his account send an email. I wonder though—what’s that going to prove? He’ll just use an accomplice to send the email from a remote location. Still, I give him the address and tell him I’ll see him in a few hours. It won’t hurt to shake him down and see what he wants me to believe.

I have a tiny room off of my office. It’s a walk-in closet, really. I keep a cot in there. I’ve used it more than once when I had to be in the city overnight. Between that cot, a mini-fridge, and a microwave, I’ve outlasted three-day blizzards without any complaints. I’ve got only 9-to-5ers on my floor. After their day is done, I pretty much have a private bathroom too.
 

The dream emailer, let’s call him Ted, shows up around seven and we begin talking.

“When did this dream emailing start?” I ask.

“I’ve been studying lucid dreaming for a few years,” he says. “Have you heard of it?”

I nod.

“I just started to get decent control a few months ago. I read about a little device someone made to help them out with lucid dreaming. They put a little clip on your nose with a sensor to detect when you drop into REM sleep. Then a little box shocks you on your wrist. It’s not enough to wake you up, but just enough to send you a signal inside the dream. Problem is, you have to get used to wearing a clip on your nose and a box on your wrist. I can’t deal with that kind of thing. I don’t like things on my body when I’m asleep.

“I develop mobile apps, and I read about an app that listens to you breathe while you sleep and it calculates the total time you spend in REM. I put two and two together and I figure I can write an app to detect my REM sleep by my breathing. Then I play a low sound to get my attention. We’ve trained ourselves now, like Pavlov’s dogs, to respond to these little tones all through the day. You’ve got one sound to let you know you’ve got a text, another for emails, a third for meetings, another for phone calls. I figure I can train myself to recognize a tone which means I’m in deep sleep—dream territory.

“It took awhile, but it worked. Eventually, I came to recognize a particular tone to mean that I should question whether or not I was dreaming. One second, I’m riding a dolphin down a river of grape jelly, and then the tone goes off and I’m like ‘Hey! This must be a dream!’”

“And then you take control. Lucid dreaming,” I interject.

“Yes, exactly,” he says. “It’s a perfect world. You can control everything: where you are, who you meet, and what you do. It’s the perfect fantasy land.”

“So if you’re lucid dreaming and controlling everything, why can’t you control yourself enough to not send out emails to your old girlfriend?” I ask.

“That’s the thing. I’m good, but I’m not great. After a little while, I tend to forget that I’m dreaming. Suddenly, I’m just responding to the crazy dream world just like everyone else. Once you lose control of a lucid dream, they tend to get even weirder than ever. It was during one of those post-lucid dreams that I first found out that I had the ability to contact the real internet from my dream.”

“How do you explain that?” I ask.

“I can’t,” he says. “The first time it happened, I accidentally got drunk in my dream. I was intoxicated but sober at the same time, you know? I lost control of the dream and I found myself in the dream with a laptop, composing an email. I remember some of the details of the email, and how important it seemed at the time, but writing tends to swirl and flow in a dream. It doesn’t stay constant. The email I was writing was a big jumble of ideas. I tried to read it and it kept morphing. Anyway, my dream fingers hit the send button, and I didn’t think anything of it. At least until a couple of days—real days, not dream days—later.
 

“My friend called me up and said, ‘Hey, I’ve been meaning to call. Are you off the wagon again?’ I asked, ‘No, why?’ He sent me a copy of the email he’d received while I was asleep. It really did look like a drunk email, and it had come from my account in the middle of the night when I was asleep in my bed.”

“So you sleep-walked over to a machine and typed it up without fully waking up,” I say.

“Yup, that’s exactly what I thought at the time. I investigated the email, just to be sure. From my house I could have sent the email one of two ways. From my phone, I would see the ‘Mailer’ tag have a certain value, and from my computer, the ‘User Agent’ would be set a certain way. Neither of those things were true. Worse, based on the character set, the email was sent from an operating system that I don’t even use.”

“You’ve lost me in jargon,” I say.

“Suffice to say, I figured out that I didn’t send the email electronically from my apartment.”

“You walked to a neighbor’s? Someone played a prank?” I ask.

“All things that crossed my mind. Just for fun, I put a camera in my room and waited to see if it would happen again.”

“And it did.”

“It did. I wouldn’t be here if nothing had happened.”

“Of course,” I say. I’ve worked thousands of claims and I’ve seen every kind of scam. Every day I meet people who say they have proof of psychic, or telekinetic, or extraterrestrial, or just paranormal activity. It’s my job to discover the fakes, whether intentional or ignorant. They’re all fake, by the way. When I started this job, there was a tiny tickle in the back of my brain that said, “One of these days, I’m going to run across something real.” I haven’t.
 

What I do see is a couple of broad classes of people. There are confident scammers, and the frightened naive. This guy is portraying himself as a victim, so I figure he should be frightened of what he believes is true. But he’s not acting frightened. He’s acting like he can’t be proven wrong. He claims to be exasperated by his inability to control this paranormal power in his possession, but he doesn’t seem at all exasperated as I’m talking to him.

He continues, ”I studied this phenomenon on my own for a month before I gave up and looked for help. I finally got in touch with these sleep specialists across the river.”

“Garrison?” I ask. About once a month I get a remote-sensing person. These people claim that they have dreams where they can see what’s happening in another part of the world. Put them in isolation for a couple of days with this Garrison guy and it always turns out that they zone out while watching the news and then dream about it later.

“Yes, that’s him. He has a great lab and they monitored everything for me. Fortunately I have enough money to cover it, so at least I could pay my own way. I didn’t want to lie to my insurance company about why I needed a sleep study. I barely slept until I convinced them not to tape on the electrodes every night. They watched me for a week. Somehow, while I was in total isolation, I managed to send out dozens of emails from my dreams. A lot of them I didn’t care about. They were perfectly normal replies to friends and family. But I sent a couple of emails to work that made no sense at all. Everyone thought I was going crazy.”

“And you?” I ask.

“Me what?”

“Did you think you were going crazy?”

“Well, no. Not really. I remembered sending the emails from my dreams. I’m really good with machines. I guess it didn’t overwhelm me that I have a connection with computers that seems to transcend the physical realm.”

“Really?” I ask.

He shrugs.

“If you had to guess,” I begin, “would you say that your mind is reaching out and pressing the keys of a real machine somewhere, or that you’re jacking directly into the net?”