Dream Bodies

FBI Special Agent Henry Darrow stood in the tiny dressing room and surveyed the carnage that had stained the walls with scarlet splotches and left the floor covered in blood. This was the third such crime in five weeks - and all three shared too many common elements not to be related.

For beginners, all of the victims were models. All were female, in their early to mid-twenties, and on the rise in the New York fashion industry. All the killings had taken place in secure, enclosed spaces, and in impossibly brief windows of time.

In the current instance, the victim, 23-year-old Marisa Improliata, had stormed into the dressing room in the middle of a shoot after getting into a tiff with one of the other girls, Andrea Mulvaney, who was reputed to be her lover. Improliata had bolted the door, and screamed enraged insults at Mulvaney when the latter came knocking.

A cluster of witnesses had gathered around, including the promoter and the photographer, as well as a couple of the shoot's stylists and several of the models. This added up to about nine witnesses, who were either in close collusion or else were telling the truth about what happened next: Improliata's screams of rage had abruptly turned into shrieks of terror. Then there had come several wall-shaking thumps, accompanied by the gristly tearing sounds of Improliata's body being disjointed and rent apart. Silence had fallen then - an eerie, stark stillness from the dressing room, and a shocked hush among those gathered outside the door. Then the photographer - a tall, brawny man massing a good 250 pounds - had kicked the door in.

The sight that awaited them was a nightmarish study in red, like something from an abattoir or a war zone. Improliata - or what was left of her - was alone in the room; no perpetrator was in evidence, and the anorexic-looking young woman had certainly not done such violence to herself. The guy who'd committed the murder, if it were a guy, would have had to have been a monster in every sense of the word, and probably out of his mind on something akin to PCP. Either that, or the perp would have had to have been some sort of large, non-human predator. But there was simply no space in the dressing room for large predators, and no way any man or beast had slipped in and then escaped once more without being seen by the crowd outside the door.

Darrow, his hands feeling like sausages in the too-tight nitrile gloves he wore, tapped on the walls once again to sound out any unseen hatch. Nothing. His mind flashed to tales of spontaneous human combustion. Could something similar happen that caused a person's body to fly apart? Even if there was, it would have to be vanishingly rare, or he'd have heard about it. And three cases in the same city in just over a month? All of them resulting in the deaths of fashion models? No. There a pattern here. Just not enough of a pattern for Darrow to make sense of yet.

The victim's parts and pieces had been gathered by the coroner's team, and the witnesses grilled by the NYPD, but the extreme nature of the case had prompted the FBI's involvement. From there, the impossible, grisly nature of the case had caused it to be funneled to Darrow.

How Darrow had come to be the go-to man for the grotesque and unusual crimes he kept being assigned was something of a mystery. Darrow himself had no special interest in the sorts of things with which his case load seemed preferentially loaded: Occult killings and ritual human sacrifices, kidnappings, murders, and forced abortions by religious fanatics raving about the end times - everything but UFO abductions and sightings of Bigfoot. Wags at the office had tacked up a poster in his cubicle of a hovering UFO with the legend I WANT TO BELIEVE, a novelty item tied into a science fiction TV series about - go figure - an FBI agent who spent a number of seasons chasing apparitions, aliens, and killer mutants. Evidently, the show had been a monster hit forty or so years before. Darrow had never seen an episode.

Nor did he need to, with his workdays so full of the bizarre and inexplicable. Frankly, Darrow was getting a little tired of the cavalcade of strangeness. But part of him found this case compelling for the very reasons that it seemed so grotesque and unbelievable. He was well beyond feeling disgust or dismay at the crime scene's gore - he'd seen worse just last week at an abandoned factory where a mass suicide of doomsday cultists had taken place in stages, the first part being a literal slaughter of the faithful by henchmen with chainsaws and axes, followed up by the executioners committing suicide by drinking acid. Darrow couldn't comprehend the growing violence that had seized the world over the past few years. Yes, things were bad... but bad enough to account for the terrible things he and other law enforcement personnel were seeing?

A killing as spectacularly brutal as the one Darrow was investigating was not outside of human imagination, of that he was certain. The problem was that he simply didn't see how it was within the possibility of human capability. Assuming the witnesses were telling the truth - the objective truth, not something garbled by fear or shock, and not something manipulated by brainwashing, drugs, or some other crowd-affecting means -- a woman locked in a room all by herself had mysteriously been torn to pieces by some enormously powerful agency ... an agency of which there was no trace scant seconds later. That was plainly, simply impossible.

So what possible explanations were there? Darrow began a mental list for the thirty-sixth time: The nine witnesses could all be in on some sort of conspiracy; but that didn't make sense to Darrow. As far as he could tell, even if someone, or several someones, had a psychotic side to their personalities and a white-hot grudge against Improliata, the method of the killing went far beyond human limitations or practical considerations. If she'd been shot, stabbed, or poisoned, maybe strangled or simply beaten to death, this would have fit a human scale; being torn limb from limb as she was, with her torso ripped open into the bargain, would have required a frenzied mob or else a fair amount of time and focused effort, not to mention tools of destruction. None of the models had any reason to like Improliata, but neither did they have much in common; it was hard to imagine either a mass attack (especially in the cramped confines of the dressing room) or a reason to murder and dismember the victim that would encompass all of those who happened to be present.

Another possibility was that the perpetrator had entered and then exited the room through some sort of concealed door or other means of ingress, but the cops - and now Darrow - had examined floor, walls, and ceiling, and found no such secret passage.

Briefly, Darrow considered teleportation. Could the killer have appeared and then disappeared using some advanced form of matter transmission? Quantum teleportation had been used for decades for secure data transmission, and there were news reports of university researchers and corporate R&D experiments successfully teleporting mass, but those reports had said the technology used enormous amounts of energy and computational power to move less than a single gram. Whatever man or creature had attacked Improliata had been massive and powerful. Nothing on Earth could have teleported such a being, and even if it were possible... why? What use could there possibly have been in expending that kind of energy just to kill a beauty queen?

The killing could not have happened as he was being told it had, Darrow concluded. And yet, it couldn't have happened any other way. Clearly, the young woman had no been butchered elsewhere and then brought here: Blood and minute amounts of soft tissue, even ligament and bone, covered the walls. This couldn't have been done by splashing gore out of buckets or even painting it on with brushes, and it begged belief to think that the nine witnesses had banded together to fabricate a lethal, sadistic hoax. The room could accommodate three people at one time - that was, Darrow gathered, a chief gripe among the models - but there was no extra space to swing a cat, much less take a human being to pieces.

If this murder could not have happened in the realm of the sane and possible, Darrow decided, then it was time for him to start investigating the insane and impossible. Luckily, he had a starting point -- someone to whom he could take his questions and have them treated seriously.

***

The fed was thorough.

I stand in the muted glow of a flashlight covered with a handkerchief. It's the middle of the night and I'm not supposed to be here. No one is: This is still an active crime scene. I don't care about that except insofar as it means I need to be careful about not leaving any trace of my visitation.

For that reason more than anything, I'm not happy about having to put my bare hand on the doorknob. Little enough chance that I'll leave prints, though; no one has cleaned the knob off yet, and the metal is covered in dried blood. Not that my prints are in any database, and anyway, there is no better source of information available to me. The shortest distance between A and B right now is a mind-meld with a witness made of brass. I'm a professional: I do my job the best, most effective way I know how. Besides, my client is paying me big enough bucks that I'm willing to tamp down any reservations and press my flesh against the still slightly sticky, rust-red residue of human blood.

At least I don't have to resort to touching the walls, which are covered with lumpy little bits of flesh and hair - and, I think, some organ meat, as well. Holy Jesus Christ. I'm in the business of killing, myself, and I'm not usually squeamish about death or executions, but this is the work of something less than human.

Or something much more...

The doorknob is full of the fed's puzzlement and frustration. I get glimpses of how he photographed, measured, sketched, and collected samples. It's like watching a stuttering video feed - I get the story, but in jerky, hectic form.

That's just the first, cool layer, though. Like a dollop of sweet normalcy floating on a dense lower strata, I swallow the fed's impressions and then delve deeper to find myself immersed in an intense, horrifying moment - a moment seared into the doorknob's metallic molecular lattice. The moment vibrates with urgent clarity: The girl came into the room, burning with anger. Burning because... because her girlfriend was flirting? sleeping? with some other woman... She bolted the door, stood there screaming her head off... then (and this is almost funny) she took stock of herself in the mirror, picked up a tube of eyeliner, and - still screaming - performed a delicate touch-up. Then she threw the tube down and began to whirl back toward the door... when...

A glimpse: of something nasty, ash-grey... huge, suddenly filling the room... a shock of flesh grasped, torn, then a madness of horror and destruction -- redness, surging terror, everything blurring, and... black.

Jolted, overwhelmed, I come back to the present and have to rush out of the room to the toilet down the hall. I try to make as little noise as possible as I vomit my guts out. Well, so much for leaving no traces, I think, wiping the rim with toilet paper and then flushing the mess away. Fucking hell, my mouth tastes vile and my mind tastes worse.

I have no idea what sort of creature I've just seen - where it came from, what it was. But it left an imprint in the metal doorknob, and now that imprint is stamped on my own mind. It's a mark that carries deep dread, cold malaise, and black, black evil.

***

"Darrow. Long time."

Jason Darius stepped back enough to allow the special agent to clear the door and enter his flat.

"I love what you've done with the place," Darrow deadpanned. "Aren't you guys supposed to be fabulous?"

"I save all that for the stage, darling." Darius walked across the meagerly furnished room, which offered only a table and two chairs and a couple of bookcases. A gas stove stood opposite the door, near a window that looked out, through greasy windowpanes, on an alleyway and a similarly dilapidated building across the way. Darius turned a knob on the stove and a burner flared into blue hissing life. "Want some tea?"

"No thanks."

"Come on. I know you're on duty, but really... what's the harm?"

Darrow knew Darius from a hate crimes investigation he'd conducted almost two years earlier, when a few teenage homophobes had followed the drag performer up a street one late night after Darius had performed at a club. He'd still been in full regalia, which seemed to act as a signal to the kids that he was fair game for their predations. They'd yelled slurs and then pushed him down; a couple of them took a few half-hearted kicks at him, and then they had all run off down the block like the pack animals they were. Darius wouldn't have involved the cops, but a small group of bystanders did; they swarmed around Darius, tutting and dialing 911. The cops, miraculously, weren't long in arriving; they were just as prompt in referring the matter to the feds. Darius told Darrow, as the special agent interviewed him, that he'd felt more mugged by the indignation of his rescuers than by the juvenile hatred of his attackers.

In the course of their interview, Darrow had taken note of some strange details in the citizen intelligence file on Darius provided by the NSA, and Darius, seeming quite unconcerned, had informed Darrow of his interest in the arcane and the supernatural. Darrow had thanked him and mentally filed that tidbit away. He'd had occasion since then to look Darius up for a few consultations.

"What's it this time?" Darius asked, as though on cue. "Werewolves? Witches? Bann sidhe?"

"Not really sure," Darrow said.

Darius seated himself and looked at Darrow. "Have a seat. Tell me about it."

Darrow did. He outlined the case, listed its peculiarities, went over the physical evidence - none of which had been attributed to a perp - and, as he was talking, reflexively accepted a cup of tea, which he sipped at occasionally as he related the different hypotheses he'd considered and then explained why none of them held up. Darrow's cup was down to cold dregs by the time he summarized with, "There you have it. I'm stumped, so I hope you have an idea."

Darius was on his own second cup by then. He frowned at Darrow over the steaming rim as he took a gulp, then set his cup on the table. "Ever read any Castaneda?"

"Carlos Castaneda?" This was clearly not what Darrow had expected Darius to come up with. "A little, in college. The first couple of books. He lost me after that."

"Yeah, he got pretty out there." Darius could have gone into detail about the myriad of ways in which Castaneda's writings departed from any reality he knew about, but he could also have discussed how some of the wildest stuff in the books corresponded to things he'd seen and done himself. Instead, he resolved to stick to the most relevant aspect of Castaneda's lore.

Darrow was looking at him expectantly.

"Dream bodies," Darius said.

Darrow seemed to ponder this. "Well, the victims are all beautiful, of course. They belong to the fashion world..."

"No, I mean... what Castaneda calls dream bodies. Physical manifestations of mental energy. Consciousness projected from the sleeping body, or the physical body in a deep trance."

"You mean astral projection?"

"Sort of, only with a physical apparition. If you ask me, Castaneda got this from Indians in India - gurus, fakirs, those guys. As far as I know, Central American shamans don't do anything like it. But if you read... well, some of what I've read, from India and Nepal, there are insinuations of healers, sages, and magicians who can will themselves out of their physical bodies and then create temporary bodies instead of drifting around in an incorporeal state."

"Made out of what?" Darrow asked. "Ectoplasm?"

"Sure," Darius said. "Why not? Whatever. The point is, that strikes me as one possibility. But more relevant to our investigation is this: However they did it, who has motive for these killings?"

"Mission killers," Darrow said. "People who think they're doing God's work by eradicating certain 'kinds' of people. With all the anti-media, anti-Hollywood rhetoric in the tabloids and on talk radio these days, that was the first thing I thought of. Professional rivals who want to thin the field of competition. Enemies... though as far as I can tell, the three victims had no enemies, and only a few professional contacts and acquaintances, in common."

"And of those few common professional acquaintances," Darius said, "are any of them from India or Nepal, or maybe Mongolia?"

Darrow had done his digging, and knew none of the women - or men - he'd looked into fit that description.

But...

"One of them grew up in an ashram," he recalled. "Anastasia Berkhardt."

That pricked Darius' interest. "What sort of ashram?" he asked.

"Someplace in Maine. The seventh star or something."

"The Seven Points of Starlight?" Darius asked.

"That's it. More of a cult than a traditional Indian ashram though."

"No, quite the opposite, actually," Darius said. "An American stronghold of very traditional, and very powerful, lore. Ancient wisdom. Father to son kind of stuff. Mother to daughter. Secret society."

"They're awfully public," Darrow objected.

"Why shouldn't they be? You've seen the impossible with your own eyes, and more than once, and you still don't believe it's anything more than a cult or some kind of commune." Darius reached once more for the teapot and refilled his cup. "The best strategy is the one they are following. It comes right out of the earliest pages of their playbook. Misdirection. Illusion. Exploit expectations. Hide in plain sight."

"You mean these people are dangerous?"

"Not as a whole, no. But from what you've told me..." Darius stirred a dollop of milk into his tea. "At least one of them has got no compunctions about using whatever ancient secrets she grew up with."

***

I'm listening from the other room as the fed quizzes Anastasia. She has alibis. She has a sweet persona. She also knows how to... what did that old radio show call it? Muddle the minds of men? Whatever. She can do that. When the fed leaves, I enter the living room. She offered him coffee but he said something about having drunk too much tea. He never touched the tongs she uses for her sugar cubes. But the chair he was sitting in... that's a hardwood. It's still warm when I slouch into it, doing my best to maximize surface contact between me and the wood. The impressions are superficial, and already dissipating quickly, but I do get a general sense.

"He thinks you're a dead end," I tell her.

She smiles sweetly. "My sister doesn't need to hear that. Once I tell her how worried I am, she'll jump in and take action like the hothead she is."

"What part do I play?" I ask.

Heartlessness must run in the family. I don't mind killing, but even I am impressed at the plan she outlines.

***

Three days after his chat with Darius, having gone over the files from each of the three murder cases and visited the physical locations of the first two, Darrow was back at crime scene number three. The tiny dressing room was still a mess; it hadn't been cleared yet so the studio owner wasn't allowed to clean it up. As a result, the studio was more or less abandoned. The photographer was working somewhere else. Darrow was alone in the space, which comprised a main studio, a short, narrow hallway, a restroom, a couple of storage rooms, and office, and the dressing room with its single door and its cramped dimensions.

Rending a living, struggling human being into half a dozen detached body parts was too arduous a task for a single person, Darrow reflected for the three hundredth time. A mob might be able to do it, but not in a tiny dressing room like this one. There had been a mob, sort of, but they had been standing on the other side of that single, locked door.

It was similar to the way victim number two had died - alone in her locked hotel suite bathroom. Her body was far more intact - only the head had been ripped off. But no one had found the body for half a day - plenty of time for a killer to do his dirty work and make his escape.

And victim number one had died in her car, at a stoplight, her throat crushed. Again, those in the vicinity had seen no perpetrator; jut a car stopping at the light at about 11:10 p.m. and then, suddenly, starting to roll through the intersection. It was a quiet street and the car didn't collide with anything other than a street sign; witnesses who approached the car, thinking the driver might have had a seizure, reported that she was alone in the vehicle, slumped over sideways in her seat. The seatbelt stopped her from crumpling all the way into the passenger side. People had been present the whole time as emergency services was called and an ambulance arrived; they saw the EMTs puzzling over her injuries and pronouncing her dead; they saw the body taken away.

Impossible murders, or at least unlikely. Darrow had no explanations -- unless he accepted Darius' theory about a "dream body," a superhumanly powerful mass of ectoplasm constructed by the trained mind and will of an adept in some unholy dark art...

Like the one, Darrow's shocked mind thought, looming up before him now. He'd turned to walk back up the hall to the studio space, and there it was. Hulking, towering, featureless - ash-gray, and ashy in texture, too, from what he could see; featureless, nightmarish, and moving toward him -

Until it suddenly melted away, its ashy form breaking apart, a few last gray flakes drifting toward the floor and evaporating before they got there...

***

Just as Anastasia knew she would, her younger sister, Indira, had panicked. Anastasia had me keep watch on her sister; when Indira went into her bedroom, I shifted my position, moving from the fire escape outside the common room where her roommates were watching television to a station outside the hallway. I know a few tricks about opening locked doors and windows; first I let myself into the hallway, then I silently coaxed open the door to Indira's apartment.

The common room was off to the left, out of sight of the door; directly ahead was the kitchen. Luckily, no one had chosen that moment to abandon the "Transformers" movie and go get a snack. Anastasia had described the flat's layout to me perfectly; I had no problem identifying Indira's bedroom door.

I had waited the prescribed twelve minutes before making my move. When I entered her room, Indira was sitting on the floor in a lotus position with her eyes white blanks. It looked so stereotyped that I almost wondered if she were faking it - expecting me, maybe. But she didn't move as I eased into the room. She didn't react at all as I noiselessly withdrew my silenced gun. And with the Transformers slugging it out in the other room, neither she nor her roommates heard the pop my gun emitted as it sent a bullet through her head.

The blank eyes were shut and a pool of blood was spreading across the thin industrial carpet as I left the room. There was a small spatter of blood, hair, and gray matter on the wall behind where Indira had been sitting. It reminded me of the state she's left that little tiny dressing room in.

Seconds later I was out of the flat, then on the street level, then making my way to my next destination. Lucky me, I guessed right and found the fed in the first bar I checked - just two blocks from the studio where, had my timing been wrong, his demolished body would have lain in strewn pieces just like that of Marisa Improliata.

It wasn't that Indira was friends with Marisa, or even liked her. She knew Marisa, and preferred to stay away from her, finding her penchant for dramatics distasteful. And it wasn't that she even really cared about Denise Carter or Jeni D'Agostino, the other two who Indira killed with her out-of-body mojo. And she didn't hate her little sister, or fear Indira's entr�e into the field of modeling - if anything, Anastasia was a little ashamed that it was she, herself, who had encouraged Indira to try out for her first modeling gigs. She'd thought it would give her little sister some focus, and she thought - probably correctly - that Indira would do well. Like Anastasia, she had her mother's amazing looks, and their mother had been one of India's great Bollywood beauties for a brief time, before marrying their father and joining him in a spiritual quest for ancient knowledge.

That quest had led to the founding of the Seven Points of Starlight Ashram in their father's native Maine. Mother and Father had never become the adepts they aimed to be, but they did attract a few - and those adepts taught their students. And their daughters. And Indira had been a prodigy - but she also had been a American teenager, when the time came, and turned away from the path to enlightenment, deciding she preferred the glamor of fame and fortune, just as her older sister did. When she grew impatient with the years-long process of paying her dues, waiting for her beauty to dazzle the world enough to forgive her diva-like attitude, Indira planned a shortcut: Identify and eliminate the key rivals standing between her and success.

Anastasia was no paragon of wisdom or virtue. But she did have a sense of fair play. She also had a strong streak of pragmatism: She knew she wouldn't win in a face-off against her sister. She needed a pro, like me, someone who knew how to kill using less esoteric means. The fact that I have a talent for reading recent events off the walls and furniture was just a bonus.

And tonight, thanks to the impressions I got off the doorknob about the fed, it might just get me laid. It's been a long time - too long; and after a freaky job like this one, I kind of need it.

I take up an inconspicuous place at the bar not far from the fed. In person he's as attractive as I thought he might be. It's a shame I can't read people off their own flesh; a simple handshake won't be good enough. Maybe I can pick up his glass, get a decent read of him that way.

Then I see he has a pen in his pocket. Looks like metal. Perfect. If the pen had good things to say about him, I'm of a mind to get to know the fed a little better tonight. And judging from the way he's pouring the shots down his throat I won't even have to get him drunk.

***

Darrow honestly didn't know what the hell had happened in the studio. His over-worked brain playing tricks? A lack of sleep leading to waking dreams that incorporated the things Darius had told him about ectoplasmic monsters?

He hoisted his third double single malt and took a sip - a slurp, really. He should slow down. He was getting too sloppy, too fast.

Then he saw the handsome guy a few places down leaning in slightly, as though to get a better look at him. The guy saw him take note, and smiled.

Darrow smiled back.

The guy disappeared, and then - had he actually gotten up and walked, or had he simply manifested, like that nightmare monster? - he turned up at Darrow's elbow, perched on the next stool, which had been unoccupied until suddenly it wasn't.

"You look like it's been a day," the handsome guy said.

"Brother, you don' know the god damned half of it," Darrow said, trying to be sure the words came out distinct and managing to sound drunk because of it.

"I can't wait to hear," the handsome guy responded.

Darrow hesitated. Was this fella flirting? This way too handsome for Darrow's league hunk of manflesh? Was he interested? Or was he a psycho killer of the stripe that had started... or so the rumors said... to infest gay bars like this one?

"And I would love to tell you, but I can't," Darrow said. "Jus' take my word for it. But there are all kind 'a' better things to talk about anyway."

"Starting with a name?" The guy stuck out a hand. Darrow grasped it with his left hand, then set his drink down and tried again, the proper way, with his right.

"Nice to meet you," Darrow said. "Henry."

The handsome guy plucked the pen out of Darrow's pocket. It was a metal pen, one he'd nabbed from a bank about ten years earlier. Somehow, he'd never lost it, and it had become sort of a good luck talisman. Snatching it like that, straight out of his pocket... well, that was a strange thing to do, Darrow thought.

"Hey, that's my pen," he said.

The handsome guy seemed to be regarding the pen in deep thought. Then he handed it over.

"Yes it is," he said. "Sorry. I just wanted to take a look." Before Darrow could wonder too much what was so fascinating about a pen, the guy smiled and offered his own name: "I'm Randall."

"Well, Randall," Darrow said, "anytime a good looking guy like you wants to grab hold of my pen..." He smiled at his new friend. "You go right ahead."