Dead Waters

9

Jane was out cold when I got home, and rather than risk waking her by trying to slip silently into bed, I crashed out on my couch in the living room. I had fallen asleep there plenty of times when I was single and I convinced myself it would just be easier, but when I woke in the morning, I just felt lame for doing it. I scribbled a quick note telling Jane that I loved her, left it on the pillow next to her in my bedroom, and hurried out of my apartment as I slipped my satchel over my shoulder before she could wake. If I was lucky, I could catch the early-morning rush of students bustling around New York University.

I hit up Bagels on the Square for one with everything and enough coffee to wake the dead before skulking around the empty fountain in the center of Washington Square Park. I hoped to find someone who could tell me more about Professor Redfield, but other than a few students calling him a whack job or a lovable eccentric, I spent more time fending off the weed dealers than getting anything accomplished. Frustrated, I moved out of the park and made my way up University Place a few blocks in search of a more productive venue.

Stuck somewhere between my guilt from avoiding Jane this morning and still asking around campus about the professor, I found that I had wandered into one of the antiques stores around Tenth Street. The store was long and narrow, but packed with an eclectic mix of furniture, none of it looking more than sixty or seventy years old. Just seeing the type of stuff I was used to picking through as a psychometrist helped take away some of my stress, and as I worked my way back through the mostly deserted store, I thought maybe I could unstress myself a little more by contending with some of my Jane issues, too. The recent developments with my powers left me unsure about the whole Jane situation, but I was willing to try to push myself past all the angry flare-ups that had been happening. Maybe if I baby-stepped my way into pricing out some dressers with her in mind, it would at least be a step in the right direction.

Near the back of the store was a mixed collection of bedroom pieces, almost all of it having seen better days. Still, a few bits of furniture showed some promise. One was a dark brown art deco–looking unit with brushed brass pulls on the front of it. I went over to it, stripping off my gloves. If I was going to find something special enough for Jane to have after all my ridiculousness, it had to be the right piece but also one that wasn’t too psychometrically charged that I might trigger off it once it was in my home. I lay my hands down on top of the polished-smooth top of it and pressed my power into it.

My mind’s eye pushed back through the history of the object, searching its past. The image forming in my mind resolved into that of an empty and unfamiliar bedroom. The whole place was tastefully done up in the same mid-Century style of the dresser with the focus of the room being a king-sized bed, which I sat upon, that took up a large portion of the space. I pressed myself into the mind of whoever I was, trying to gather what information I could about the dresser’s previous owners.

Nothing. The mind was a complete blank. I fished around in the emptiness for the thoughts of another, but still nothing.

“What the hell . . . ?” I asked, out loud. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before, but something odd struck me when I spoke. My voice. What usually happened in one of my visions was that I always sounded like someone else, but not this time. I sounded like me.

I looked down at the person’s hands in his lap. They were my own, settled on top of my satchel. How I was myself in this vision, I didn’t know, but before I could give it much more thought, I noticed movement in the sheets of the bed I was sitting on.

I bolted up and spun around. Something was rising up in the middle of the bed, as if a line was drawing up the bedspread from its center point. I backed away from it, feeling for my bat at my side and relaxing a little when my hand found it in my holster. I pulled it free, extended it, and waited.

The sheet fell away, revealing a haunting and familiar face—Cassie, the ghost tattooist from the antiques store at the Gibson-Case Center. Her dead eyes were covered by her dark, giant hipster sunglasses, with a hint of a blood trickling out from behind them. Her tattoo gun was in her hand and she revved its motor. The dangling cord of the device dissolved off into a swirl of mist trailing behind her as she stepped through the bed toward me.

“No,” I said to myself, as firm as I could to control my panic. I swung my bat at her, but it passed right through, her solid form twirling into a cloud of mist before re-forming in my bat’s wake. She revved the needle gun again and kept advancing. I couldn’t hit her, but I wasn’t going to wait to find out if she could attack me, not with that needle gun in her hand.

The backs of my legs hit the dresser behind me. I had every plan to dash left, then forward toward a closed door that hopefully led out of the room, but before I could run, the sound of sliding drawers hit my ears.

The dresser drawers on either side of my legs fell to the floor and a pair of human arms reached out from within, wrapping around my body. I recognized the tweed sleeves of the jacket; Mason Redfield’s arms wrapped tight around my legs, immobilizing me.

Trapped. Screw this, I thought. Time to pull myself out of the vision. I closed my mind’s eye, only to have it slam back open on me. I willed it closed again, but again, it came flying open. All the while the tattooist kept advancing on me. I had never personally taken a beating as myself in a vision before, and I didn’t plan on starting now.

The tattooist crept closer, which meant only one thing: I had to free myself from the professor’s arms. Now. I slammed my bat down along the side of my left leg as the two arms wrapped around me. The blow stung my leg, but it hurt the professor’s arm more than it did me.

The arms let go of my legs, and I ran for the door across the room. The blind tattooist cocked her head, listening for my steps, correcting her course. I pulled at the doorknob.

Locked.

I spun and pressed my back against the door. Across the room, the younger Mason Redfield I had seen in my psychometric vision pulled himself out of the dresser, shattering it apart into a pile of wreckage. My brain filled with their raw emotional states from when I had first experienced both of them—the woman’s jealous rage and Mason Redfield’s fear from the night I had seen him fighting ghouls with the Inspectre. I started to sweat, slamming my head back against the door as all the emotions took over.

I hefted up my bat as the two of them closed with me. Maybe my bat would affect them or maybe it wouldn’t. Either way, I’d find out, going down swinging as best I could.

The pain in my leg still throbbed from where I had hit it with the bat. No, that wasn’t quite right . . . not where I had hit it. This was something else, a strange pulsing sensation on my other leg, higher and closer to my hip—my phone on vibrate. I reached into my pocket and pulled it out, flipping it open.

“Hello?”

Static came through on the line, but I could hear the faint sound of a voice behind it all.

“Hello?” I shouted into it.

It crackled again, and then through it all, “. . . kid?”

“Connor!” I shouted.

The psychometric vision rushed away from me and the real world snapped back to the inside of the store on University Place, where I fell face-first into the dresser I had been reading. My head slammed down onto it, and I fell to the floor, dropping my phone. The cool tile pressed against me and I scrabbled for my cell, my hand closing over it.

“I’m here,” I shouted. The sound of footsteps came toward me from the front of the store. I held my phone back up to my ear.

“You okay, kid?” Connor asked. “Took you long enough to answer.”

“Yeah,” I said, using the dresser to steady myself as I helped myself up. “I was just dealing with something.” I didn’t dare tell him about the episode for fear that he might take me off active. For now, I simply had to resist using my powers.

The owner of the shop I had heard coming in came around the end of the aisle, a look of concern on her face. I smiled and gave her a thumbs-up. She gave me a nervous smile back and retreated.

“Any luck tracking down leads on the professor?” Connor asked.

“Not much. Got a bunch of people saying he was a bit eccentric, as you might imagine, but I could have told you that before wandering around down here. Seemed mostly positive from what I was able to gather so far.”

“You think maybe you could head on up to the offices?” he asked. “Things are backing up here and I’m afraid for our partners desk under this level of paperwork.”

“Yeah,” I said without hesitation, starting off east through the Village. “Not a problem.” The thought of sitting down at my desk and not using an ounce of psychometry for a little while felt like the best idea in the world right now.

I slipped my phone back into my pocket and pulled my gloves back on. To double ensure I didn’t trigger a blessed thing, I jammed my hands down into my jacket pockets. My brain and emotions needed to settle. It saddened me that sometimes shopping was far more perilous that dealing with zombies and vampires.