Concentrate!
Darkness, three, two, one…
75…34 something…
I can feel the car slowing…
Darkness, three, two, one…
The car quickly arcs into a turn and then bounces over a curb just as the streetlamp’s glow fills the cabin.
The envelope shifts.
I shift.
I catch a final glimpse as a fast food bag falls in front of it.
Mister and Ash something…
Mister Ash?
Mister Ash what?
The darkness remains and I can feel that the car is moving very slowly now.
We stop.
His voice reaches my ears again. “It’s okay, honey. You’re home now.”
CHAPTER 23
A sudden sense of calmness enveloped me, followed immediately by a screaming pain akin to that of a midnight leg cramp-only this leg cramp encompassed my entire body. I could feel myself double forward, then without warning I was propelled backward with explosive force.
And then the cramp-like pain melted away, leaving behind the sickening, dull ache that usually accompanies a bad hangover. In the span of a heartbeat, I felt myself slowly sinking into a murky darkness that was deepening with each passing second.
For some unknown reason, I had been summarily expelled from Heather Burke’s nightmare. Or it had reached its end. Or maybe I had been extracted with careful, calculated precision that just happened to be violently painful as well?
I wasn’t sure which was the real answer, but whichever was the case, I was grateful for the relief.
The psychic hangover was dissipating, and as I continued to sink, I began to feel warm and comfortable. Had it not been for the sharp noise that suddenly stabbed its way through my eardrums, I think I could have simply gone to sleep.
Instead, I was once again swimming in an inky void, the atmosphere thick around me like water. I wanted to do nothing more than relax and allow the calmness of the dark to overtake me, but the echo in my ears was more than enough to indicate that such comfort wasn’t to be.
Stark awareness seeped in to replace the drowsy feeling and poked at my grey matter with an annoying finger. It started by reminding me that I was once again Rowan Linden Gant and that I really needed to wake up.
The sharp noise shot into my left ear once again and rattled around inside my skull without remorse. It sounded for all the world like someone with a speech impediment saying “yo-yo.” It took a moment for me to realize that the words were actually “Yo, Row.”
A dim light in the distance seemed to beckon me, and I aimed myself toward it. Again, darkness began bleeding away, leaving in its wake first indigo, then blue, then charcoal grey. In a psychedelic explosion, color bloomed before me and settled slowly into the proper hues of reality. As if I didn’t have enough to deal with, the ethereal hangover returned and followed me into this plane of existence. Something told me that aspirin wasn’t going to help either.
Heather Burke was seated across from me, quietly sobbing, her face buried deeply into her hands. Her shoulders heaved, and she sucked in a breath before advancing the level of her grief another octave up the scale.
I knew exactly how she felt.
Utter violation permeated my being. I felt disgusted, sickened, and even in a way, filthy. I felt as though something had been taken from me. And worst of all, I still felt fear.
“You okay, Row?” Ben’s voice came from behind as he rested a large hand on my shoulder.
I jumped involuntarily when he touched me. Logically I knew he was my friend and that I was not the victim. But the sudden encroachment upon my space only served to increase the feeling of violation.
“Yeah,” I choked past a rising lump in my throat as I fought to shrug off feelings that didn’t belong to me. “I’m okay, but I think we’d better get someone for Miz Burke here to talk to. We’ve… She’s got a lot to deal with.”
“I’m not one hundred percent positive,” I told Ben and Charlee, “but I think we might be looking for someone with the last name Ash, or Ash-something. It’s also possible that his street number is seventy-five thirty-four.”
We were all back in my friend’s van, me riding shotgun this time. We were on our way to police headquarters after having finally reached someone to look after Heather Burke. I felt terrible just leaving her after dredging up the chemically repressed memories, but we had no choice. I’d obtained information that we needed to go over and decipher. I don’t know why, but something told me that time was a commodity that we simply did not have in abundance.
Still, before we left I gave her my home number and told her to feel free to call me if she wanted to talk about anything at all. I wasn’t exactly qualified to help her in a clinical sense, but for all intents and purposes we had shared the exact same experience. Sometimes that kind of understanding can be worth far more than the highest priced sheepskin.
“How’d you come up with the address?” Detective McLaughlin asked.
“When he was taking her home he had her on the back seat of his car,” I explained. “At some point when he hit the brakes suddenly, she rolled off into the floorboards. He’s a bit of a slob, so she ended up on top of a lot of trash, and it just happened that one of the things that was staring her in the face was an envelope.”
“And she read the address from it?”
“Actually, she more or less tried to. How conscious the effort was, I can’t be sure. It seemed like it was, but she was still under the influence of the drugs. She was at a severe disadvantage. At any rate it ended up as a latent memory that I was able to pick up. Unfortunately due to the darkness and shifting from the motion of the vehicle, she only made out a small part of it.”
“Sheesh, Storm was right,” she exclaimed. “You are spooky.”
“Ya’ get used to ‘im after awhile, Chuck,” Ben offered and then turned his attention to me. “Do ya’ know for a fact that it was his name and address she was lookin’ at?”
“No, not for a fact,” I admitted.
“So the envelope coulda just been some trash that wasn’t even his mail?”
“I suppose, but it’s worth looking into, right?”
“Yeah, we’ll check it out, but ya’ gotta figure there’s gonna be a hell of a lotta Ash’s and Ash-whatever’s in the phone book.”
“Shouldn’t the address help pin it down?” I submitted.
“Maybe,” he answered, “if it really is the address. Bein’ on an envelope it could be a piece of a zip code or somethin’.”
“Plus, we don’t know if he actually lives in Saint Louis,” Charlee added. “We know he gets around, so he could live outside of the metro area in another county, or even in Illinois.”
“I thought I actually had something,” I said in a dejected tone.
“You might,” she returned, “but we can’t chase it as if it were our only clue.”
“Ya’know, eggs, basket, all that shit,” Ben expressed. “So what else did’ya come up with?”
“He’s dressing them up and taking photographs of them.”
“You already said that much before the mumbo-jumbo,” Ben returned.
“I said maybe,” I reminded him. “What I’m telling you now is that it’s not a maybe. He’s definitely dressing them up in order to take the pictures.”
“Like how?” McLaughlin asked.
“Well, I only remember a couple of the outfits, but one was lingerie. A garter belt and stockings is what I saw for certain. The other was a party dress or something of that sort.”
“So the guy’s got a kink for prettyin’ up ‘is victims,” Ben offered.
“It’s more than that.” I shook my head. “He does something with their hair. I’m not sure what, but from the sensation I’m thinking he may put a wig on them.”
“So the asshole really is playing with dolls then,” he harrumphed.
“In a way, yes,” I acknowledged. “He even put something in her eyes, and I’m betting they were contact lenses. Maybe tinted or something. He’s doing all this with a specific purpose in mind…”