Stone Shadow

Dallas

Jack came in to work badly hung over and with a guilt about his self-indulgent dream fantasies and a paranoia about his sloppy policework of late. The water he'd remembered to put in the bowl outside was still there but the dog food he'd managed to set out was gone. That was the bright spot of the day.

When he got to work, made even more paranoid by the attempted sniping of a Dallas cop car in one of the predominantly black balkanized sectors which had dominated the morning news, the damn guys from the AG's office were all over him like white on rice and he was maneuvered into a room and found himself even before he'd had his morning coffee watching Ukie on videotape:

“Okay. Start it.” To Eichord with a self satisfied, smiling we-told-you-so-but-you-wouldn't-listen type of nod. “Watch this."

“He never lets himself be seen. He stays back. In the shadows. You can see he's tall from the shadows. Tall like a professional basketball nigger. He likes to hur—"

“Stop it. There! See that! Go back,” the one named Sawyer told the man standing by the video playback.

“What?"

“Rewind. Go back.” He was excited, turning to Jack. “Eichord. I want you to watch this. Did you catch it? Go on. Play it."

The other man pressed the play switch and Ukie said, “In the WATER. He showed me under the water. These big—"

“No. Shit. You went too far. Go forward just one second. Okay—STOP. All right. Now.” He pressed play again.

“—don't know.” Ukie was crying and Eichord remembered the incongruousness of the moment, and then Ukie composed himself a bit and continued, “He never lets himself be seen. He stays back. In the shadows.” Eichord watched the very convincing way that Ukie shuddered in fear. “You can see he's tall from the shadows. Tall like a professional basketball nigger.” And they stopped it again.

Eichord thought he knew what they were going for. The shuddering or trembling was a possible tip-off. Either Ukie was one consummate actor or he believed what he was saying.

Sawyer flipped a fluorescent light above them and Eichord, badly hung over, was blinded by it and was blinking like a bat coming out of a dark cave into a flashlight beam as the man excitedly demanded of him, “Well, what about THAT shit?"

“Yeah. It's pretty effective-looking trembling, I'll admit. Hard to know if it's an acting job or not."

“Trembling?” Eichord nodded. “What the hell are you talking about—TREMBLING?” He acted as if Jack had been speaking Swahili.

And Eichord answered like Hackabee, “Trembling, Trepidant. Timorous. Timid ... tremulant?"

“What the shit?"

“You played the video where he shakes. A little dramatic shudder while he tells me he never sees the guy. Pretty good. Method acting, for all I know."

“I don't understand what the fuck this man is talking about,” he said to Wally Michaels, who fought a smile back and gestured innocently as if to say keep me out of this.

“What in the jolly fuck are you talking here, mister? I just showed you where your murder suspect implicates a fucking NIGGER in the fucking surveillance tape and you sit there with some trembling shit that doesn't make a lick of sense. And by the way you've got a piece of fucking TOILET PAPER stuck to your cheek.” The other man snickered under his breath as the AG's man shook his head in disgust.

“Oh,” Eichord mumbled. “I forgot.” He reached and felt the impromptu coagulant on his face. “I cut myself shaving, he mumbled. No shit.

“He never lets himself be seen. He stays back. In the shadows. You can see he's tall from the sh—” The man stopped it with a vengeance and turned to Eichord, who felt himself coming apart. “Pay attention. Listen, goddammit.” Click.

“—dows. Tall like a professional basketball nigger."

“JEEZUS! He's fucking TELLING you the killer is a tall nigger That's your own goddamn interrogation and you missed it."

Eichord wanted a drink. No. First what he wanted to do was reach over and grab this moron by the shirt collar and tie, grab evening and just twist until the idiot was right there in his face and then put his lights out for him. No. Grab the lapels of the cheap suit in a cross-X grab and put a reverse chicken choke on the ignorant son of a bitch. Put him in a ball right here on the floor. THEN go out and get the drink. But what he did was take a very deep breath and begin slowly tap-dancing, fine-tooth comb in hand, patience ebbing but under control, as he took the two shoe flies step by step, fact by fact, through the long parade of deaths that were currently attributable to the Grave-digger perp or perps unknown, dancing all the while not unlike Gene Kelly in the rain-filled gutter, dancing through the modus operandi, the opportunity patterns, the random factoring, the lack of commonality, the day danced away, Eichord shuffle-kicking through a shit clog of red tape trying to convince these characters that “tall like a basketball nigger” was just a nigger of speech.

The tap dance was fairly effective but they weren't buying it without music so Eichord ended up having to get on the horn and have the ballet orchestrated by McTuff, and finally he got them pulled out of his thinning hair, if not clean back to Austin, and by midafternoon, when he had an appointment with a psychiatrist named Sue Mandel, they'd left. He figured Sue to be a tough old gal in her fifties, hair pulled back into a bun, about five feet tall, Dr. Ruth only more severe-looking.

He was tired and muttering under his breath about the “scum-wad bureaucrats” and the time-wasters and the fumblers and bumblers and depradations and degradations and the furriers and scurriers, and the rest of them nasty folks, when he walked in and old Sue slapped him on the back with a hand like a catcher's mitt.

“Jack?” Sue said with a big smile, in a voice an octave deeper than his own. Sue was a guy.

“You're Sue Mandel?"

“One and the same, pally. Pull up a toadstool.” The shrink was six feet tall, went about 210, and had a blue beard. But truthfully Eichord scarcely blinked an eye at it. By now he was used to the constant confusion of this ever-changing and unpredictable murder case. It was a case where he'd met the most beautiful woman he'd ever made fantasized love to and she spelled her first name like a man's, Noel as in Coward, so why not a shrink named Sue?

“You're a big name around here, bub. I've been reading up on your activities since the Lonely Hearts case. Proud to meet you."

“That's good of you,” Jack said. He liked the guy. The guy had taste even if he did have a shitty name.

“I'm sure you want to know about our friend"—he vaguely gestured in the direction of where Ukie was kept under lock and key—"right?"

“Sure do."

“Nobody would love to tell you more than yours truly. Problem is I can't be sure. We've talked a lot. He has deep-seated problems. He has the self-esteem of about the level one might expect in light of his record as a KSP, but the big question—are the intense anxieties and frustrations enough to trigger the mass murders? No way to know. The results of the tests are inconclusive. The polygraphs are too inconclusive to base any judgments on himself is a skizzy kind of character who does a lot of role-playing, but he's a terrorized and subjugated personality the nightmares—let's call them—the thing that shows him the graves—that figure is very real to Ukie. He believes that someone is capable of controlling his mind and whatever it is must be very powerful."

“Just for the sake of argument, Dr. Mandel, could such a thing as a neural pathway exist?"

“Sure it exists.” He smiled. “But let's define what a neural pathway is. It's not a concrete tunnel that a brain railroad runs on, where your thought goes at 2:55 every afternoon to catch the train home. Forget pathway. Call it a thought plateau where certain types of empathic rapport transcend ordinary understanding. You stand there and the back of your neck gets a signal from your brain and the hairs bristle and when you turn around somebody is watching you. Coincidence. Maybe. Or maybe instead of a sixth sense or eyes in the back of your head we say your brain went into a higher thought plateau. A place it normally doesn't function in. And the supernormal thought level allowed you to make a supernormal appraisal of a situation—based on an assessment of probabilities or circumstances or situations that normally would not occur to you."

“Could a subject, say under hypnosis, be placed on that level of understanding by another person's will? That is to say could another individual implant the proper suggestions so that at given times, in response to whatever stimuli had been programmed, that other person could cause you to think on that plateau?"

“It's not likely but it is within the realm of possibility. If two persons were very closely attuned—and I mean to the extent that, they sometimes felt they could ‘read the other one's mind’ as the saying goes-and one of these parties is strongly dominant to the other, there's a very real possibility that someone who was highly susceptible to that sort of thought manipulation would be placed in a position where they would subconsciously allow the subjugation of their own will and the implementation of thought by the other party. I know of few documented examples of it in anything resembling clinical studies, but I wouldn't rule it out."

“What about his description of the tall man who stands in the shadows? Is this a real person?"

“I'd say the person is very real to Ukie. He could be real. And if a closely attuned person was capable of the kind of thought-image projection we're talking about, it might be that he or she could project a shared reality rather than an imagined projection.

“My feeling, however, is that it could be what we could term, an extremely heightened reality. If I was capable of manipulating your thoughts on that sort of level—let's say that I could force you to picture me standing on this desk and flapping my arms like wings and jumping off the desk. Admittedly a ludicrous image. But what would the heightened reality appear to be in the mind of the recipient? Would it be possible for me to coerce you into thinking you visualized me flying from the desk? Truthfully, I'm not sure. But my sense of the thought manipulation thing is one of sharing a mental picture of a heightened reality."

“But I thought—I mean, this is just layman language and I may have it all wrong—but I thought like a person couldn't be hypnotized against their will or made to do something bad that they wouldn't have found morally acceptable. I realize all this is oversimplification but isn't thought manipulation the same thing essentially as hypnosis?"

“No, that's not precisely right. But first off here, I think we're getting a little cumbersome with the plateau as a metaphor. In the broadest sense we're talking about superimposed personalities-where one is extremely dominant and one equally subservient. If the dominant of the two is supremely aggressive, sociopathic, antisocial, angry ... If he has the desire to punish ... If you counterpoint this with an individual who has a desire, suppressed or not, to be punished, you have a formidable scenario potentially. The dominant one can be enormously fearsome and consciously abominated by the passive one, but beneath that layer the passive individual in fact welcomes the aggression, you see."

“Can you point me toward a clinical book to help me understand this phenomenon?"

“Not offhand. The problem is it isn't a scientifically suitable subject. An intangible field like that—and one where there is so little hard evidence of its real existence—is not one to draw a multitude of clinicians. There just isn't much reliable information or research that has been documented. You could research the psychiatric abstracts that would be a way to get some reference material. There's an enormous amount of interest in it, obviously. I seem to recall, oh, maybe fifteen years ago reading about some covert research project into the subject of thought manipulation by one of the hush-hush government agencies, but I don't think much came of it."