The Dream Machine: Book 6, The Eddie McCloskey Paranormal Mystery Series (The Unearthed) (5 page)

The driver was Middle Eastern and wore a stubble-beard and didn’t say a word. Manetti sat in the back with me and didn’t introduce us.

“First things first,” Manetti said. “Are you packing?”

“I don’t leave home without it these days.”

She nodded. “You’re not going to need it for this outing.”

“Better to have what you don’t need, than to need what you don’t have.”

“Skip the old wives’ philosophy. We’ve got a big job ahead of us.”

“Like what?”

“What do you know about dreams?”

“As much as the next guy.”

“False modesty is arrogance, Eddie.”

“It’s not false in this case.”

“Do you think we can see into the future?”

I thought about it. “No. We can only see into the past.”

“What does that mean?”

“By the time the light reaches me from whatever I’m looking at, I’m seeing the object in the past.”

“Do you have to do that?”

“Do what?”

The driver kept us on tree-lined back roads.

“Try to be smart?”

“Look, Manetti, you asked for my opinion and I gave it to you. I don’t think we can see into the future.”

Her voice shifted from hard to curious. “Why not?”

“Because it offends my delicate world view. I need to believe I have free will and that I can change the future. I have to think I have some control over what happens to me. If people can see into the future, it means that’s all probably bullshit.”

She was quiet for a stretch. Then: “I know what you mean.”

“If you really want to have a conversation about this, I need more context.”

“Soon.” She looked ahead.

The driver made a left. The road bent and we followed it for a short stretch until I saw a bay on one side and the Delaware River on the other. On the bay side, the marshes were wet and the reeds were tall. To our left, a short swath of green gave way to a rocky, narrow shore.

The driver slowed and made a right onto a road I hadn’t even seen. It was a one-way path, as narrow as a driveway. He followed the road as it widened to two lanes. Branches whipped by, inches from my window.

“We’re already there?” I said.

Manetti nodded.

The driver kept going until the trees broke again and suddenly, right in front of us, was a five-story building that looked like it’d just been built by NASA. It was sleek and metal and somehow imposing, despite being hemmed in by the trees. Marshes surrounded it, and the road turned into a stone bridge that led us to the entrance.

“What is this place?” I asked.

Manetti looked at me. “I can’t tell you the name.”

I remembered something her boss, Patterson, had told me in Oregon. “Funded by DARPA?”

She smiled. “Maybe.”

Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. This place was probably a line item buried in multiple budgets.

“What’s here?” Eddie said.

The car stopped. The driver popped the trunk for us but stayed behind the wheel and kept the engine running. We got out and I collected my bag from the trunk.

Manetti motioned me to follow her inside. The entrance was all glass and led to an open room with a desk, a guard, and a metal detector. I glanced back at the car once before going in. The driver turned it around and headed back out.

Inside, the guard behind the security desk nodded at Manetti. He was as emotional as a robot. She side-stepped the metal detector and held out a palm at me.

“You’ll need to surrender your firearm here.”

“Call your driver back,” I said.

“Eddie.”

The guard got up and came around the desk smoothly, hand riding his hip. There was something in his eye. It looked like he’d been waiting for any opportunity to draw his piece.

“Manetti, last time you and I got together, a lot went down. I was unarmed for part of it and dodged death enough to know now I was lucky. Eventually luck runs out. So now I come prepared. I’m not giving this gun up. I don’t even know what this place is—”

“It’s a research hospital,” she said.

“A research hospital?”

She nodded. “There is only one dangerous person here—”

“My threshold to carry is one.”

“And he’s under lock and key, constant surveillance. There will be about ten guards between you and him at all times. And you have no reason to interact with him.”

I shook my head. “Right now if your boss was here, I’d look at him and start talking about dynamic systems theory and how we can’t predict the method of failure.”

“Eddie, I’m taking you to meet a fourteen-year-old epileptic girl who has at best another year to live. You have to trust me.”

There were only three people I completely trusted, and Manetti, as much as I liked her, didn’t make that cut. I knew she needed my help, and if she was desperate enough for it, that meant she was a liability.

“Remember what we discussed on the phone and in the car?” she said. “You and I are going to find out. Think about it.”

Could this girl see into the future? Were her dreams prophetic visions? I usually scoffed at bullshit like that. Manetti was the type not to take things like that seriously either. Yet here she was, looking like a believer.

I gave the guard my gun. He made sure the safety was on before putting it in the drawer and locking it up.

Manetti swiped a badge at the next door and we walked through an atrium on the way to what looked like a hospital wing. We passed a bank of elevators and approached a nurse’s station. A middle-aged woman wearing scrubs put down her romance novel and smiled at Manetti.

“Welcome back, Agnes.”

“Bix, this is Eddie. Eddie, Bix.”

“How you doing?” I have two smiles: self-deprecating and seductive. Seductive doesn’t work so well anymore and would have been inappropriate anyway, so I went with self-deprecating.

We shook hands. Bix said, “Dr. Zane is expecting you.”

It was one-thirty in the morning. I wondered what couldn’t wait.

“We’ll show ourselves back,” Manetti said.

We side-stepped the nurse’s station and I took in my surroundings as we headed down a narrow hallway. There were security feeds and monitoring units, just like we were at a hospital. Okay, so Manetti was telling the truth. The presence of one dangerous man still didn’t sit well with me, though.

Manetti stopped in the hallway in front of a partly-open door. Light spilled out of the office. She knocked twice and didn’t wait for an answer before stepping inside.

There was a short, heavyset guy in a white lab coat sitting behind a spotless desk. Half-eye glasses were perched on his nose and called attention to the acne scars on his cheeks. He stopped reading whatever he was reading on his computer and shifted just his eyes to us.

“You’re back,” he said.

“I’m back.” Manetti sat in one of the chairs facing him. I took the other. “This is the guy I told you about, Eddie McCloskey.”

“Dr. Zane.” He extended a hairy, pudgy hand and groaned at the effort of it. “I’m in charge of the clinical research here.”

“Nice to meet you.” It was hard not noticing all the Ivy League diplomas on display. “Manetti has given me the high-level, but she said you’d bring me up to speed. How do you study people’s dreams?”

He frowned. “Things have accelerated. We don’t have time for that.” He looked at Manetti. “This just came through from Alison.”

He swiveled his computer monitor so we could see what was on the screen. A frozen video image, black-and-white, of a bedroom. Somebody was in the bed, though from the graininess of the image I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman, or if the person was asleep. Studying the picture more, it had a weird quality to it. Some areas of the image were blank or blurred out, and a few of the items in the bedroom, like the lamp, looked…cartoonish…like someone had taken this image and later added cheap special effects to it.

Manetti tensed. “Where is this?”

“We don’t know.” Zane clicked a button and the video started. “That’s why we need your help.”

The bedspread rose and fell as the person took their shallow breaths. Nothing happened for a moment, then a dark figure stepped into the room, his back to the camera. Slowly, silently, he crept to the side of the bed and stood for a moment. His face was blurred. He was tall and lean, and once he took his pants off, visibly erect.

“What the hell is this…” I said.

But deep down, I already knew what was about to happen.

The man pulled the bedspread off the woman. She barely stirred. She wore a short night gown that had ridden up to her hips. The man started to touch himself.

“Manetti, what the hell are we watching?” I asked.

She didn’t answer, her eyes riveted to the screen.

The man got himself even more excited. But he must have made some noise, because the woman began to stir. When her eyes popped open, she opened her mouth and screamed but there was no sound. The man jumped on top of her.

I got up and looked away. I didn’t want to see anything else on that video.

Manetti and Zane watched for another minute, till Manetti said, “Okay, it’s over.”

I turned around, keeping my eyes off the monitor. “What the hell is going on here?”

“What you just saw on that video?” Manetti looked at me. “That
might
happen. It’s up to us to stop it.”

“I want my gun back.”

I forced myself to watch the video. After seeing it half a dozen times, I wanted to throw up, take a shower, burn my clothes, and jump into the nearest non-descript black sedan and order the driver to take me back to Philly, back to Sumiko. Ghost-hunting had gotten boring of late, but boring was better than this.

But I knew Manetti and her team were stretched way too thin if they’d felt the need to call on Average Joe me. They needed help. The woman on that—whatever we’d just watched—needed help. So I put on my proverbial big boy pants, took a deep breath, and faced Dr. Zane.

“How do you know this is going to happen?”

“Because Alison dreamed it,” he said.

“Who’s Alison?”

He looked at Manetti. She gave him the nod.

“She’s the teenaged girl that we think can see into the future in her dreams.”

I let that sink in. Manetti had told me as much over the phone, but a few hours ago it had seemed like a hypothetical. Now I had an ugly reality staring me in the face.

“What has she seen?”

It was Manetti’s turn to answer. “Mostly storms, naturally-occurring phenomenon. Up until two weeks ago, she hadn’t dreamed anything else. Then the shootout happened.”

“Then this other thing, which you’re already investigating. And now this.” I bobbed my head at the monitor. “The rape.”

“Yes.” Manetti turned to White. “We need to go to work on this.”

The doctor stifled a yawn with a closed fist. “Okay. I’m going to round.” He checked his watch. “I’ll be down in an hour. Let’s sync up before then.”

Manetti nodded and White left the room, shutting the door behind him.

For a moment we sat in silence. I had a million questions for her. She looked like she didn’t know where to start. We shared a companionable look.

“Ready?” she asked.

“Once more into the breach.”

She almost smiled. Almost. Manetti went up and sat where White had been. She brought the computer out of sleep. The last image—I’ll never forget it—burned more deeply in my mind. I was reminded of those shadows left in Hiroshima after the bomb. Forever burned in history.

“What’s the other thing?” I asked. “Maybe I could look at that while you do this. Divide and conquer.”

She shook her head. “This is where we need to focus right now. Tomorrow morning we’ll do the other thing.”

I sighed, not wanting any part of this but also not wanting to back down from the horror. I knew if I did, it would own me.

“Alright.”

***

We looked for clues. Anything that might identify the rapist, the woman, the house.

After I’d watched the video a dozen more times, I was able to figure out the man wasn’t wearing pants, he was wearing jeans.

Other than that, we had nothing.

“Neither of their faces are clear,” Manetti said.

“Which kind of makes this hard.”

She groaned, rubbed her eyes.

“How long have you been up?”

“Thirty-six hours.”

“Dear God.”

She stood and stretched. “What would you say? Something literate, like no rest for the weary.”

“I’d say, go lay down and I’ll see you tomorrow morning for the briefing.” I pointed at the screen. “We’re not getting anywhere with this.”

“We’re not,” she agreed.

“Were you expecting the faces to be clear?” I asked.

It took her a moment to realize I’d asked her something. “What?”

“I said, were you expecting the faces to be clear?”

She frowned, thought about it for a stretch. “Guess I was.”

“Why?”

“The faces weren’t blurred like this during her dream about the shootout at the mall,” Manetti said.

“Show me.”

Manetti sat back down and went through folders on the computer. The folders were labeled and ordered by date. She clicked on one from a week ago.

“Here you go.”

This video was in color, unlike the rape clip which was sort of black and white and fuzzy. This video was sharp, the details all filled in. I could see an Indian man behind the counter of what looked like a convenience store. Manetti switched it off quickly.

“So what gives?” I said.

Manetti shook her head. “Let’s watch and compare.”

“Good idea.”

She clicked the mouse and the video started. Again there was no sound. For whatever reason they could only see Alison’s dreams, not hear them. I made a mental note of that.

On screen, the camera seemed to be coming from somebody’s point of view as they walked around the store. There were a bunch of teens in there and occasionally the point of view shifted back to the Indian man at the front of the store. Manetti let it play for a minute.

The faces in this dream sequence were easy to make out, very well-defined. If I ran into one of these kids on the street, I would have recognized them.

“Why can we see them, but we can’t see the man and woman in the bedroom?” I asked.

She shook her head.

“Why is this in color but that’s in black and white?”

Again, she shook her head. “Eddie, you’re asking all the same questions I’ve already asked.”

“What did Dr. Zane say?”

She tore her eyes away from the screen. “That he didn’t know.”

“Let’s go back to the other dream.”

She brought the rape scene back up. It was still turning my stomach. But I forced myself to watch.

“It’s like somebody else dreamed this,” I said. “Is there any w—”

“No.” Manetti shook her head. “First thing I asked Zane. The dreams are…
stored
in separate environments. Alison dreamed both scenarios.”

Trust but confirm, as my brother Tim always said. I’d come back to that later with Dr. Zane, from a different angle.

“The rape dream doesn’t give anything away,” I said.

“Almost like Alison didn’t want to give anything away.”

“Hold on, are you saying she’s a lucid dreamer? She can control her dreams?”

Manetti shook her head. “No. She isn’t.”

“But how could you know? How do you test someone to see if they’re controlling their own dreams?”

Manetti hesitated and I knew she was holding back. “We just know she’s not, Eddie. Zane tested her six months ago.”

“When she dreams about people, does she usually know them?”

Manetti leaned back in her chair. “She hasn’t known any of them so far.”

“So far.” I pointed at the screen. “Let’s show her this. Maybe she knows them and that solves our problem.”

“We need to talk to Zane about that.”

“Why?”

“He doesn’t let the subjects see their dreams. He’s afraid that will invalidate the results on a go-forward basis.”

“To be frank, I don’t give a shit.”

She nodded. “And we’ll need to go through her parents.”

“I’ll let you deal with that.”

“Thanks.” She flipped me off.

I smirked. “Show them your badge. They’re going to trust you more than they would me.”

“In this day and age,” Manetti said, “nobody trusts the government anymore. Now let’s get back to work.”