on.”
Problem is, “on” was the last place I wanted to be.
CHAPTER 20
Usually, whenever I would find myself sitting in a morgue, I’d be in a much worse state than I was right now. The pain trying to claw its way out through the side of my skull would be so intense that I’d be wishing for a family-sized bottle of aspirin. And, the voices inside my head would be so loud that I’d want to wash every last one of those pills down with enough alcohol to send myself into a coma.
What’s worse, all of that torment would be happening before I had even come face to face with the corpse of the victim I was trying to help. It was all just part of the territory.
But today that simply wasn’t the case. For all intents and purposes, outwardly I was just fine. Of course, that determination really was dependent upon your particular point of view. I was certainly stressed, but for a change, the cause behind it was definitely grounded in the here and now, as opposed to the preternatural ether.
The simple fact was that, after all the years of inescapable chatter, the silence filling my head at this very moment was, to say the least, unnerving. Hearing the tortured souls of the dead had become my norm, so their glaring absence was an alien concept as far as I was concerned-especially here, in a place where they normally gathered as if they were attending a morbid party being thrown in their honor.
In a very real way, the unbreakable quiet had taken with it not only their voices but my own identity as well. I was no longer “The Witch” who helped the police. I was just some guy going through the motions and trying to pretend nothing had changed, when in fact, almost the exact opposite was true; nothing was the same. This minor personal epiphany made me realize that when Miranda had said she could make the voices stop, she had not been making an offer for the purpose of bribing or even baiting me; she had been issuing a clear and explicit threat.
And now, obviously, she was making good on it.
However, as bad as this oddly foreign experience seemed to be, it was actually the least of my tortures at the moment. The worst actually had an unseen manifestation, which took the form of a sinking hollowness in the pit of my stomach. But, unlike its ethereal cousins that normally plagued me under circumstances such as these, this one was of my own making. My rampant fear regarding the horrific vision Ariel had guided me through was now fueling my reservations about allowing Felicity to go forward with standing in for me as a conduit. If the added fuel wasn’t bad enough, explaining the process to Doctor Kingston was fanning the flames even more. And, quite simply, every last bit of it was starting to make me feel physically ill.
“So let me see if I understand, Mister Gant,” the county M.E. said, summing up the explanation I’d just tried to give her. “What you’re telling me is that you somehow psychically connect with the immortal soul of the deceased and then proceed to conduct a pseudo-forensic interview about the crime. Correct?”
“Close, but not exactly.” I scrunched my face and gave my head a tentative sideways dip. My anxiety was competing with everything else for my undivided attention, not to mention that I was already struggling to explain a nebulous concept to someone who was likely a skeptic. So, getting my point across definitely wasn’t coming easy for me this morning. I shrugged and told her, “Something of that sort would be ideal, of course, but I’m afraid it just doesn’t happen that way.”
“Then how does it happen?”
“Well, you were right about the connection part. But once that’s done, I really just turn into an observer. What I see generally doesn’t make much sense, but I watch anyway and try to remember whatever I can. Usually that’s fairly easy. It’s the forgetting that I have problems with. But anyway, I also listen… And then afterwards, when it’s over, it all comes down to me trying to shove a bunch of really bizarre puzzle pieces together.
“If it works the way it’s supposed to, I pick up enough clues to actually make them fit and form at least a partial picture. And, if I’m lucky, that picture fills in some blanks for the police, which in turn helps solve the crime.”
“You make it sound fairly simple.”
“Believe me, it isn’t. I wish it was.”
“So you still get these clues from the spirit of the deceased though, right?”
“Sometimes yes. Other times…well…it’s pretty hard to explain, but the victim definitely plays a role in it, yes.”
“So you’re saying it’s a ‘had to be there’ kind of thing,” Doctor Kingston said, boiling down the ambiguity of my answer to a simple phrase. However, her tone didn’t sound at all mocking, which was a bit of a surprise given some of my previous experiences, in particular with persons of the scientific ilk.
I nodded. “Yeah, pretty much.”
“I see,” she replied, leaning back in her chair. A crease formed across her forehead, and it was obvious that she was carefully digesting everything I’d told her thus far. Finally she said, “So what if it doesn’t work like it’s supposed to?”
“Best case scenario, I just don’t get anything,” I told her.
“That implies there is also a worst case scenario,” she prompted.
I shrugged. “There always is with just about everything, isn’t there?”
“Can you give me an example?” Doctor Kingston asked.
Under the circumstances, I really didn’t want to start down that path. I was having enough trouble going along with this as it was. Dredging up the things that could go wrong certainly wouldn’t help.
I tried to circumvent the question while still reassuring her and at the same time myself. “It’s nothing that you would need to be concerned about.”
“But what about you?” she pressed.
I lied, not that I expected it to go unnoticed, but I gave it a shot anyway. “Not really.”
As expected, she looked at me with something akin to suspicion. “Are you absolutely certain about that?”
“I take it we’re coming back around to something you’ve heard?” I asked.
She acknowledged with a dip of her head. “Yes, I’ve been privy to a few stories.”
I shrugged. She obviously wasn’t going to let up, so I had no choice but to address her concern, like it or not. “Then maybe it would be easier for me to answer you if you share what you’ve heard,” I said. “Then I can tell you if it’s legitimate or unfounded.”
“All right then,” she said. “I’ve been told by an extremely reliable source that while doing this sort of thing you have experienced maladies ranging from violent seizures to an apparent cardiac arrest. Spontaneous hemorrhaging and the sudden appearance of stigmata-like wounds were also mentioned.”
I let out a heavy sigh in the wake of the comment. As the memories conjured by it began to overtake my brain, I muttered, “Well, unfortunately, I’m afraid I can’t deny any of that.”
“So then you can see my concern?” she pressed.
The question didn’t register. My attention had already taken a hard right turn and was now well off course, speeding headlong through a darkened tunnel of foreboding. I knew she had said something to me, but since the words didn’t connect, I simply grunted what I thought might be an appropriate response. “Yeah…”
“All of those things sound fairly serious to me. So for my own peace of mind, what I really need to know is if they are something that could possibly happen today if I were to allow you to go through with this?”
The question echoed past me as I stared through her at the wall. Again, the words were nothing more than noise rattling in my ears, with no meaning or reason.
The painful memories that were now assaulting me had already been in the back of my mind; they always were. However, I purposely kept them locked away. That tactic seemed to work for the most part, until someone would come along and manage to let them out, that is. Just like was happening right now.
With them now on the loose and running unchecked through the front of my brain, my anxiety received an unwanted boost that felt like it all but stopped my heart. I couldn’t keep myself from extrapolating the experiences and applying them to the current situation. Unfortunately, in each of these mental simulations, I was not the subject, Felicity was.
The hole in the pit of my stomach was growing. I could feel it expanding through my gut as the bile churned
