PsyCop 5: Camp Hell (12 page)

“I’m a medium too,” she said. “A strong level four. My name’s Darla. They call me Dead Darla.” She smiled, an evil smile that she’d probably practiced in her makeup mirror. “I don’t mind. I kind of like it.”

“Vic Bayne….”

“Cool name. So, what’s your level?”

“I, uh… they haven’t tested me yet.” Supposedly I still had Thorazine in my system, so they’d held off on the “testing” that seemed to be the ultimate placement exam of the psychic world.

Darla slipped her hand through my arm and pressed herself against me. She was as wide as I was tall, and hard to say for sure, but I think I felt her tits against my arm. Damn. If I told her I was queer, she’d know that I knew she was flirting with me, and she’d be embarrassed. I figured I’d just do my oblivious act. And eventually someone would find me and another male resident with our pants down, and everyone would whisper about it in the cafeteria, give me a few nasty looks, and after that I wouldn’t have to worry about the unwelcome female attention anymore.

But for now, Darla was soft and pillowy against my arm. She pulled on me, and stood on her tippytoes like she had something good to tell me. I leaned over.

“I can give you some hints,” she whispered. “The better you score, the higher paying job you’ll get once training’s over.”

“Okay,” I said. Because I was busy trying to figure out how to take my arm back without pissing off Dead Darla, and it seemed to me that I made an enemy out of her, I’d be really, really sorry.

She pressed my arm into her softness. It couldn’t have all been tits. Really difficult to tell, with the big, oversized black sweater she had on. She pulled me away from the smokers’ lounge and down toward the pop machines. “First, the tester will give you an item that belongs to a dead person and try to get you to tell them who it belonged to. They switch that every time, so I can’t help you with that, but I think maybe that’s more to see if you’ve got any precog tendencies or not.”

“Precog?”

“Precognitive. Knowing something without seeing or hearing it directly. Knowing the future.”

“I’ll bomb that for sure.” If I had any kind of precog edge, I wouldn’t have landed myself in the nuthouse by telling Mister Lubowski, my homeroom teacher, about the accident I saw that no one else could see…and then insisting I was right until they shot me up with sedatives and put me away. Fucking field trip. I would’ve cut class that day and cruised Boystown instead if I’d been precognitive.

Or at least I would’ve taken it all back sooner, everything I’d described, maybe said I was just making it up for attention. But no. I laid it all out there, everything I’d seen, down to the last spurting compound fracture. And before I knew it there was a straightjacket with my name on it.

“Don’t worry about it,” said Darla. “I just made stuff up, whatever came into my head, and I still scored high. See, if you really are a medium, you’ll be able to tell them about the dead lady.”

We slipped past the pop machines and down a dim flight of stairs that smelled like urine. “They never use this part of the building for anything else.” She wrinkled her nose. “Maybe they’re scared they’ll clean the ghost out if they hose it down.”

“Can that…happen?”

“A few physical things affect ghosts, but mostly salt, I think. Some Voodoo-based rituals use substances like soap and ammonia, though, so I think they’re gonna keep playing it safe. Because what’ll they do if they scare off the testing ghost? Kill someone just to make a new one?”

She smiled her evil smile at me. Too bad she wanted to do more than just pal around together. She seemed to know a lot about the way things worked.

The stairwell let out into a dingy hall with a few old offices on either side, a drinking fountain at the end, a red fire extinguisher in a rusted box, and a pair of restrooms. Dead Darla opened the ladies’ room door. I hung back like a vampire that hadn’t been invited across the threshold. “Come on.” She flashed her wicked grin over her shoulder. “No one will know.”

I took a step forward. The reluctance to enter a ladies’ room gave way to the realization that if we were as completely alone as she said we were, she might want to do it. I prepared a lie. Crabs? No, genital warts. That would cool her off.

Darla walked toward a hole in the wall where a sink used to be with her arms spread wide. “Right here,” she said, “is a cold spot.”

-THIRTEEN-

I blinked. Dead Darla stood in the middle of a fucked-up film loop of a woman falling and cracking her head on the sink that wasn’t there anymore. I couldn’t see the sink. But I saw the blood.

Darla closed her eyes and held her hands out to each side, palm up, as if she was trying to catch raindrops. “It feels like a woman, to me. That’s what I told them. And it’s sudden. An accident.”

Slip. Crack. Bleed.

Yeah, it looked like an accident to me.

I rubbed my upper arms and my teeth started to chatter. I expected to see my own breath, but I didn’t. “It’s freezing in here.”

“You feel it too?” Darla opened her eyes and beamed at me. “What about the details? Are you getting any of them?”

“The details, that’s where they’ll get you.”

I swung around. A man stepped out of one of the stalls, transparent, gaunt. His arms hung before him, wrists slashed vertically from elbow to palm. Suicide Charlie at CCMHC had told me that was the proper way to cut yourself if you really meant business.

The guy who’d spoken had been successful, judging by the fact that he was now transparent.

“Vic?”

I glanced at Darla. The woman she was standing in fell and split her head. Again.

“I told ‘em what I saw,” said the guy with the slit wrists. “Everything. That was my mistake.”

“I don’t like it in here,” I told Darla. I backed toward the door.

“This isn’t a malicious spirit,” she said. “She won’t hurt you.”

“That’s right,” said the bleeder. “It’s the head honchos around here you’ve gotta look out for. And the Feds. See, they tell you to do your best. And when you do…?”

Most ghosts just died over and over, but this one was talking to me. If Darla hadn’t been there, I might have even been able to ask it a few questions. But I was glad she was there, because the fact that it saw me, was talking to me, scared me shitless. I felt like I was going to spew, but there was a ghost between me and the nearest toilet. I staggered out into the hall and prayed that the drinking fountain still worked. The knob was gone. I darted across to the men’s room and locked the door behind me.

“Vic?” Dead Darla tapped on the door.

“I need a minute.” I went to the sink and tried the taps. Water chugged out, reluctantly at first. I splashed water on my face and looked at the paper towel dispenser. It was empty. I dried my face with the hem of my T-shirt. A few deep breaths, and my breathing seemed to be under control. Good. I unlocked the door and looked out. There was Darla, fluttering her mascara-tarred eyelashes. “Hey,” I said. “I’m, uh, chock full o’ meds right now. I think I just wanna hang out down here. Alone. For a little while.”

She tried to figure out what I meant—whether I was trying to snoop around and augment my test scores, or whether I had diarrhea, or whether I was just weird. Whatever the case, I wanted to be alone, and that was the last thing she wanted to hear. But I’m guessing she was reluctant to burn any bridges, either. “Oh, okay. I have a Sixth Sensory Skills workshop after dinner. Are you in that workshop? Maybe we can hang out afterward.”

“I’m not sure. I might. I’ll, uh, see if I see you.”

“Well, all right, then.” I think she might’ve hugged me, but I had the door open in such a way that only a six-inch strip of me showed. She was still smiling at me when I closed the door, locked it, slumped against it and let my breath out in a long, slow hiss.

“Shit,” I said, out loud. Darla had felt a cold spot? Sensed a female presence? I could’ve told her what kind of earrings the ghost was wearing, which tile exactly she’d slid on, and how far her blood had spread.

And then there was the slit-wrist guy. I’d heard him, clear as if he’d been in the room with me. I guess that, technically, he was.

I had no idea what to make of the stuff he’d said about testing too high. I didn’t know if ghosts could lie or not. But even if he could, why would he? He had nothing to gain by making me score badly on a psychic abilities test.

I didn’t even know what I was supposed to be afraid of—but whatever it was, it was bad enough that he chose to buy his way out with a razor blade. Either that, or someone else had helped him do it, just to make it look like a suicide. I supposed I could go in there and ask him. Yeah, right.

The thought that I might’ve taken that test without first talking to Dead Darla—or her very dead friend—made my institutional lunch threaten to repeat. I’d have to dumb it down. Say I “sensed” stuff rather than saw or heard it. Maybe even get some details wrong, the age, the gender. Point to the wrong spot.

According to my preliminary Psych tests, it really was ghosts that I was seeing, and not schizophrenic hallucinations.

Damn. Good thing the Thorazine had done the talking for the first round. I’d pointed out which morgue vaults had movement in them, but I was too zonked out to follow the crazy stories the inhabitants were going on about well enough to repeat them.

I splashed more water on myself, tweaked my ‘hawk into place, untangled my safety pin earrings, then pressed my cheek against the coolness of the old tile wall and wondered if it might have been safer for me to stay in the nuthouse.

Time passed, a lot of it, and I figured I’d better be somewhere findable unless I wanted to turn up on the scrutiny end of a search party.

I’d been hoping to sneak back to my floor unnoticed, but no such luck. There was a teased-haired Art School Punk in a black Nehru jacket at the top of the stairs. His back was to me, and he was busy beating up the pop machine. He stopped shaking the thing and looked at me over his shoulder. His eyeliner was perfect. “It ate my quarter,” he said. His voice was as smooth and deep as a radio announcer’s.

“You won’t get anything by shaking it,” I told him. “They’re built to hold on to the cans that way.” I was familiar with the make and model. We’d had one at the loony bin; it was a good source of extra income for me. A thirsty schizophrenic will do anything for some pop.

I knelt down and pressed open the chute. If I angled myself just right, I could sneak an arm up into the works and coax one of the cans out of its track. It wasn’t easy. I practically had to twist my shoulder out of its socket, and it was cold in there, as cold as you could get without freezing. But it was about the only parlor trick I could do. That, and talking to dead people.

I reached, and strained, and finally, finally, I poked and prodded hard enough to make something give way. There was a thunk and a roll (Slip. Crack. Bleed. Don’t think about it…) and a frosty can of ginger ale rolled out of the chute. I pulled my frozen arm out and handed the can to the eyeliner guy.

“I like a man who knows how to use his hands,” he said. He had a very naughty smile. “Come back.”

“Okay.”

“We’re in your car.”

“What car?” Me? Owning a car? That was hilarious. I didn’t even own a Walkman.

“I’ll count again, from ten to one. And this time, you
will
come back.”

No, that’s not what he was going to say. What he had said? He’d told me I needed a reward. He took my frozen hand between his, so big and warm, and breathed on it. That was the sexiest thing anyone had ever done to me. And then….

“Ten, you begin to be aware of the sounds and feelings of the present. We’re in your car. Your very small car.”

I don’t have a car. If we go in the stairwell, no one will see us. No one uses that stairwell. It smells like piss, and we think it’s funny.

“Seven, you’re aware of your body, the way it rests against the seat. The trash bag overflowing with fast food napkins under your right hand….”

We think it’s…funny. Damn. It felt so good to laugh with him.

“Three, you think that maybe it would be a good idea if you came back so that I can eat something before I faint….”

I opened my eyes. My windshield was foggy. The digital clock on my dash read 2:46. That couldn’t be right. It was ten after twelve.

“Two, you’re breathing, you’re relaxed.”

“Holy fuck.”

“And one. Please don’t make me count down again.”

I gawked at Stefan. He was so old. “What time is it?”

“Almost three. Look, we’re not going to do this on the spur of the moment anymore. We can’t. You’ve got to allot enough time if you’re going to be diving in that deep, that fast. Call my office before you come. Give me a chance to juggle my schedule.”

“Dead Darla. I met Dead Darla again. I remember her. She used to like me. Before….”

“Before she realized we were fucking each other. I remember full well the force of her loathing when she caught us coming out of the stairwell and she told me my pants were on inside-out.” He smiled. “It was pretty funny. When you think about it.”

No kidding. I’d never expected so much gratitude for a lousy can of pop.

“Don’t look at me like that,” Stefan snapped. “My schedule’s all screwed up and I’m starving. And it’s not as if you’re hurting for company.”

Shit. I hadn’t been giving him a “look.” Had I? I was just confused. Five minutes ago, I’d been a young kid who was busy showing off for a psych with a come-hither smile and perfect eyeliner.

Stefan had been a middle-aged guy fantasizing about a cheeseburger.

“Besides,” he said. “You’re not even my type anymore.”

“I wasn’t looking at you like…I mean, I don’t want to…I’m not trying to….”

“And that lover of yours will skin me alive if I so much as linger too long over a handshake with you. So no funny stuff.”

“You picked that up? From Jacob?” He hadn’t acted like he was jealous of Stefan, not once they’d met. But who was I to differentiate the way people felt from the things they chose to say?

“Not…per se.”

In other words, Stefan wasn’t planning to elaborate on what he meant. I wished I could miraculously produce a granola bar from thin air; maybe I could use it to bribe a straight answer out of him. “Don’t worry about Jacob. He’s fine. And I’m not flirting with you. This regression stuff…it’s just confusing.”