Call Me Nightmare Read online

  Call Me Nightmare

  By Ryan Maitland

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  Chapter 1

  It’s Me… Again

  Russian is hard…

  I was learning Russian as a kind of cross between a hobby and a skill for my job… I had mastered learning the Cyrillic alphabet, no small feat mind you, and I was learning how changing one small word might end up having to change several other words in the sentence, because of the complex rules of grammar that Russian has…

  Bright side? As I was learning Russian, I was understanding my native language at a deeper level. It’s a side-effect of learning another language.

  So, why am I learning Russian as both a hobby and as part of my job, you may ask? Well, my part-time, freelance, job happens to be with the Central Intelligence Agency, better known as the CIA. I work under Project Aesop, a unit made up of psychics (including yours truly) and headed by one Earl E. Mansplainer…

  I know… you’re thinking that name can’t be real and that’s because it’s not.

  Look, there are only two names in this book that are real: mine (Jane Doe) and that of Mr. Fluffybutt. I do this because I’m dealing with highly sensitive, or outright classified, material that had to be vetted and scrutinized up the wazoo before I could get the powers-that-be to authorize these events ever seeing the light of day. One of the compromises I made was in changing the names of people to whatever I feel like, so long as it’s not their real names. This means that the people in this book are named according to my whims. If I like people, then they get normal, or even flattering names, and if I don’t like them, then they get stuck with a name like Earl E. Mansplainer…

  So, now you may be asking why am I even bothering to write this if it has caused me so much grief. That’s a fair question, and the answer is fairly straightforward: I want to disillusion all the hero-worshipping I’ve seen in my long life and to set the records straight.

  I am Jane Doe and this is the third installment of my memoirs. I am writing this from the year 2085, but the events in this book took place in the year 2019…

  Now… where was I? Oh, right! I was learning Russian…

  I was using software provided to me by my ‘liaison’, who prefers I call him my ‘handler’ but that makes me sound like some kind of dangerous beast at the circus, or like a trained monkey… I was pretty sure the software had some spyware as part of the package, since, you know, Earl is a spy and all, but I didn’t see a way around it. I needed the microphone on my computer to get the pronunciation, not to mention the accent, right if I was going to be fluent in the language.

  This isn’t to say I haven’t taken measures to limit the amount of spying Earl does on me, though… I’ve covered my laptop camera with some electrical tape and disabled the built-in microphone, using the kind you plug in as part of a set of headphones. Whenever I’m not using this program, I unplug these and make sure to completely shut the laptop down when I’m not using it.

  Now, I could take it to some tech-guy to see if they could flush out the spyware, but I see three potential problems with this… For one thing, they could just as easily be paid by Earl to either turn a blind eye to the issue, for another thing, they could put more spyware into my laptop and, finally, the code might be buried so deep that they might not be able to find it anyway!

  Now you, having seen so many spy movies and TV shows, are probably wondering why Earl doesn’t just bug my house. Another fair question! Kudos!

  The answer is this: my house is haunted by a pair of ghosts that do not take kindly to my house being bugged. Earl has tried to bug my house before, and Peter and Wendy, the ghosts haunting my house, have usually destroyed the bugs as soon as they have found them. They treat it like a game and I encourage them to think this way.

  Hey, how else are you supposed to keep a couple of ghost children occupied?

  And so that’s my situation… I’m learning Russian because it makes me more useful to the CIA, especially since tensions between us and Russia were heating up, and the more spy-work I do for them, the more they let me work on the cases I much prefer: finding those that are lost.

  Maybe now is a good time to explain just what it is that I can do…

  I have two main abilities, as I count them, with some aspects that I consider to be side-effects or offshoots, however you want to think of them. I can see and hear ghosts, thus making me a spooky, in Project Aesop slang, and I can get into people’s heads when I’m holding a focal object, making me a mental in that same slang. A focal object is just something that is emotionally significant to the target that I hold in my hands and allows me to get into their heads. I don’t know why it works, it just does. When I hold an object with a good connection, I can get into their heads and experience everything they do, right down to their thoughts. If I push harder, I can even talk to them, inside their heads. If I speak softly, they think it’s their own inner monologue and tend to respond accordingly, but if I speak loudly, then they can hear my voice in their head.

  So, in a sense, I’m a glorified walkie-talkie…

  All right, I think that’s enough exposition…

  “Someone’s coming up the driveway!” Wendy announced.

  Wendy is the sister of Peter. They appear the same age, but I think Wendy might have been a little older when she died, or maybe she just seems more mature, to me. It’s still winter, and Wendy froze to death, so she has taken to wearing a thick sweater, mittens, and snow boots, even though ghosts can’t really feel the cold, or so I’m told. Today she looks to be, maybe, eight years old, but this can fluctuate with ghosts, since they can appear any age they like.

  Peter and Wendy make for an odd pair of ghosts not just because of how powerful they are, which is largely due to me living with them, but also because they are the only ghosts I’ve ever encountered that prefer floating over giving the illusion of standing or walking on solid ground. I attribute this to their love of the book Peter Pan and because, if you could, why wouldn’t you fly around everywhere? I know if I’m ever a ghost, there’s no way I’d be stuck to the ground!

  I exit out of the language program and unplug the headphones before shutting everything down and head to the door.

  I look out of the windows overlooking the gravel driveway and see a black sedan with dark tinted windows, which is definitely suspicious… that is, until I see a man with a lopsided goatee dressed in a suit, complete with dress shoes and a pretentious fedora, get out of the car.

  I recognize him immediately as Earl…

  “Okay, kids!” I tell the young boy dressed in a light shirt and pants whose resemblance to Wendy would have alerted everyone that they were siblings. “It’s just Earl. You can stand down from high alert!”

  Peter looks distinctly disappointed that he won’t get to harass any intruders. That’s one of his favorite pastimes, after all… the result of which is that postal workers draw straws to see who delivers mail to my house…

  As I watch the man, I see him head to his trunk and pull out a large box that he carries in both hands.

  I open the door and greet Earl with a genial, “Morning! What’s in the box?”

  “Oh, just a few things I hoped you would help me with…” he shrugs.

  “Oh? Like what?” I asked, getting suspicious.

  “Well, I thought I might try on a hat and ask your opinion of it,” he answers cheerily enough, but I recognize the codewords well enough.

  He’s talking about Project Top Hat, a joint venture between the CIA and the FBI,
which consists of me using my abilities to find missing-persons. Mind you, the FBI doesn’t know how the CIA gets the tips, since that would be highly classified. I think they think the tips come from some deep data mining of government databases and networks, or maybe spying on people’s phone calls, or something.

  The fact that Earl is even using codewords suggests that someone might be listening in on us… That ‘someone’ is most likely Tim Foyle, a journalist for the local paper that just so happens to run a conspiracy-theory blog in his free time. I recently came up on his radar after he was invited to a séance shortly before a man accused me of murdering his best friend in some kind of bizarre satanic ritual. Since then, he’s become something of a stalker… He’s learned not to actually park on my property, as his car is likely to be pelted by gravel thrown by Peter and Wendy, which I hope he attributes to the wind, but that just means he parks outside the tall stone wall surrounding the mini-mansion, so he’s harder to see from the house.

  As if I don’t have enough people spying on me…

  I invite Earl in and prepare for my side-job…

  Chapter 2

  Undercover

  I led Earl to the dining room, one of the many specialized rooms of my old Victorian-era-style house. My house also includes a receiving room, a library (with a sad number of books), a game room (that the kids mostly use), and something that I think used to be a smoking room, given the lingering smell that I can’t seem to get rid of. I don’t actually use most of these rooms, as the rooms most important to me are the kitchen, the dining room, and my serenity room that used to be a nursery.

  Now, the kitchen… I would have bought this house for the kitchen alone. It’s large, to put it mildly. It was originally designed to serve the needs of a personal chef and their attendants, so it’s incredibly spacious when it’s just me doing the cooking. One of the previous owners of the house had refurbished the kitchen with modern appliances and updated the styling of the attached pantry and I couldn’t thank them enough for leaving it all behind when they ran screaming for the hills after Peter did his level best to scare them away!

  As modern as the kitchen is, the dining room is more… let’s say dated, but in a good way, I think. The dining room is large, with a long wooden table serving as the centerpiece of the room. The table, as Peter has explained, is as old as the house and part of me wonders if the room was built around the table, given how large and sturdy it is. The table is large enough to sit twelve people comfortably, without anyone bumping elbows, and is situated far enough from the walls to allow servants to go about their business without any of the diners needing to move their chairs closer to the table.

  When I’m working with Earl, I do most of my work in the dining room, allowing him to set up his equipment of a video camera on a small tripod, a tape recorder, and a laptop with a camera pointing at me. He also takes out a notepad just in case Peter and Wendy get upset and decide to go poltergeist on him or the electronics.

  While Earl is setting up, I go through the box to find baggies of personal items ranging from clothes, jewelry, and toys. Each baggie is individually labelled with a long number, no doubt so Earl can keep track of which case I’m giving information on.

  “We’ll start with the bag holding the blue shirt,” Earl informs me. “It’s a priority case. The shirt is from an undercover detective that missed his last two check-ins.”

  I search the box and quickly find the dark blue, button-up, shirt still sealed in its plastic bag. I open the bag and I’m hit with a musty odor akin to unwashed gym clothes. This actually gives me a fair amount of hope about how useful it will be for my ability. My ability to use objects as a focus to hone in on a person’s thoughts depends largely on how significant the object is, emotionally, to the target. Objects that hold bodily secretions, such as blood, sweat, and tears, also offer a significant connection, so the fact that this shirt hasn’t been washed should make for a good connection for me.

  “I’m ready if you’re ready,” I announced, trying to prepare myself for what’s coming.

  “I’m ready,” Earl declares as the red light on the camera turns on.

  I pull the shirt out, testing the connection with my fingertips. It’s a decent connection and should work plenty well enough for our purposes. I push deeper and immerse myself in another person’s senses.

  And I immediately regret it…

  The first sensations I feel are of pain in my wrists, ankles, chest, and abdomen. The next thing I notice is a giant, gorilla-sized, fist flying at my face and hitting me in the cheek hard enough that I hear a crunch that’s either bone fracturing or one of my teeth breaking loose!

  I immediately drop the shirt, panting a little at the force of the blow that the poor detective felt firsthand, and rubbing the spot on my cheek where I felt it secondhand.

  “What happened?” Earl asked, looking concerned.

  “He’s tied up,” I tell him, feeling my teeth with my tongue to make sure they’re all still there. None are loose, thankfully. “He’s been roughed up and somebody just punched him in the face!”

  I try to be clinical about the experience, the better to distance myself, emotionally, from the trauma I’m experiencing, but it’s hard to do it when it still feels like you were the one that just got punched!

  It also doesn’t help that this is going to leave a bruise…

  That probably bears some explanation. When I’m in another’s head, I experience everything that they do. Now, when it comes to pain and damage to the body, what the mind experiences is reflected in the body. Earl calls it a ‘psychosomatic response’, which just means that if the mind believes it happened, it will make the body act like it happened.

  So, yeah, chalk that up as another part of my ability that sucks…

  “Okay, let’s try that again…” I mutter, picking up the shirt again.

  All the pain from before is still there, but now the man is feeling around his mouth for loose teeth. His tongue finds one, a molar, and the tooth is so loose it pops right out in a torrent of coppery-tasting blood! The man spits the tooth out on the floor, but I think he was aiming for one of the two men that he can see.

  “He’s in a warehouse of some kind,” I announce to Earl, my own body feeling distant to me.

  One of the man’s eyes seems to be swollen shut, so it’s hard to make out details, other than the impression of a concrete floor, something that’s probably boxes stacked everywhere, and bad overhead lighting that casts sharp shadows everywhere I look.

  “There are two men,” I continue narrating to Earl. “One looks like a gorilla in a suit, and the other is shorter, skinnier, and has a better suit.”

  “I’m guessing the skinny one’s in charge,” Earl considers, thinking out loud.

  My guess is that his guess is right, looking at the pair of them. The larger man has a misshapen, somewhat lumpy, face from too many brawls. He’s wearing black jeans and a black t-shirt that’s straining against the bulk of his muscles. It’s the kind of outfit that seems appropriate for someone that anticipates getting blood all over them. Blood doesn’t show up well against black fabric…

  Don’t ask me how I know, just trust me on this…

  “The skinny guy is bald,” I narrate, trying to describe as much detail as I can to Earl. “There’s a swastika tattoo over his left ear and he’s holding a gun, pointing it in the general direction of the detective. I don’t think he’s actually aiming the gun, though, just pointing it at the detective. He’s sitting on a box of some kind while the bruiser is standing, looking ready to throw another punch.”

  “But where are they?” Earl asks, sounding frustrated.

  “I’ll try to find out,” I tell him.

  I push deeper, deep enough to hear the detective’s thoughts.

  If I don’t give them something, and soon, the skinhead will stop the bruiser and finish me off himself!

  “That looks like it really hurt!” the skinhead mocked, looking annoyed. “Especially w
ith that tooth on the floor!”

  “Fuck you!” the detective screams at him, his thoughts tumbling over themselves with whispers that he’s dead either way this turns out.

  “You know,” the skinhead continues like the detective hadn’t said anything, “you can make all this stop if you just tell me where the drugs are!”

  With this revelation, I reset my priorities from finding out where the detective is now, to where he can send the skinhead and bruiser for an ambush. If I can get even one of them away, it will buy me enough time to try to find out where the detective is and relay the information to Earl to mobilize a rescue operation. With some luck, they might even make it in time to save the detective!

  At least, that’s the plan…

  I push deeper, whispering in the detective’s ear in a voice soft enough that he should hear it as his own thoughts, “I gotta give them something! Where the fuck can I send them that is believable and far enough away that it will buy me some time to figure a way outta this mess?” I murmur into his head, trying to mimic his speech patterns as well as I can, the better to make it believable that it’s his voice he’s hearing, not mine.

  Thankfully, the detective thought of a foreclosed house for sale.

  “That’s it!” I whisper in his head. “Tell them the drugs are there!”

  The detective does just that and I rattle off the address to Earl, who seems to be on the phone with the police in the detective’s jurisdiction.

  “Cops are on their way to ambush them, but we need to know where the detective is, right now!” Earl informs me, like I didn’t already know…

  I see the bruiser leave, leaving only the skinhead.

  “Good,” I whisper in the man’s head. “One down, one to go… Now, where the hell am I? Come on! Think!”

  The detective’s thoughts become jumbled as he tries to piece together the different clues available to him, from the fact that it seems to be in a warehouse, to cataloging the different places these dealers own or are likely to use, and finally looking around at some of the labels of the boxes on the shelves around him.