The Dream Machine: Book 6, The Eddie McCloskey Paranormal Mystery Series (The Unearthed) (26 page)

“This is not a natural state of sleep,” Dr. Nareev explained. “So whatever we see might not…”

“I don’t care about the validity of this experiment. If this works, great. If not, I’m in no worse a position. If I get anything out of this, I’ll be better off. Right now I have nowhere to go. So are you going to help or not?”

Dr. Zane jumped in before she could answer. “Absolutely not. We are not going to do this in an uncontrolled environment with all our other patients watching, while Alison is under the influence of—”

I grabbed his lab coat. “This is going to happen, Zane. So if you’re not going to help, stay the hell out of the way.”

“We can’t—”

“Can’t? You want to talk about can’t? Here’s a can’t for you. I can’t let this guy get away. Are you going to stand in the way of that?”

Zane held my stare as long as he could, which was longer than I would have expected. But finally he backed down. I turned to Dr. Nareev.

Dr. Nareev put her hand on her chin and looked down at Alison, who was still lying flat on her back. Since Deanna had sedated her, she hadn’t moved an inch.

“Yes. Okay.” Dr. Nareev looked over at one of her research assistants. “Please bring us a computer and her sleeve.”

The guy nodded and hurried off. He bounded up the steps. I scanned the crowd of patients and spotted Betty, the patient I’d talked to earlier. She was wearing another baggy sweatshirt with a different college logo on it. I waved her over. For a moment, she didn’t move. But then she slowly came over.

“I need your help here too, Betty.”

She looked from me to Alison and back. “What’s going on?”

“We need Alison to dream about someone in particular. The man that broke out of here tonight.”

It took Betty a moment to process that bit of information. “Why?”

“If I told you, you’d think I was crazy.”

“I’m already there, I think.”

Zane stepped between us. “Don’t you dare say a word.”

Zane’s attitude only prompted to do just that. “She might be able to see where he is right now, or maybe in the future.”

Betty’s eyes almost popped out of her head.

“Oh that’s fucking great!” Zane yelled. “Just. Fucking. Great. Do you have any idea how much work my team has put into this research? You’re pissing away years and years of effort here, you fucking asshole!”

I wanted to hit him, but I didn’t have to. The security guard I’d talked to earlier intervened and grabbed Zane’s shoulder.

“Doctor, two of our men were killed tonight. This girl might be able to help.”

Zane opened his mouth to protest, but finally he realized how terrible he must have looked to everybody there. He shrugged out of the security guard’s grip and trudged away miserably upstairs.

I turned back to Betty. “How does this work?”

She nodded at Dr. Nareev. “I usually study images before I fall asleep and then sometimes they’ll use sound. They’ve played songs while I was asleep to get me to dream about certain things.”

That gave me an idea. The security guard had started to go back to his group, but I called out to him.

“I need to play White’s voice for her. Zane told me earlier that you recorded conversations between Alison and White. We need those right now.”

The research assistant came back downstairs carrying the equipment. Up until this point, I hadn’t seen these sleeves, but Dr. Nareev’s earlier description was spot on. It looked like one of those gel packs you keep in the freezer and bust out when you’ve hurt yourself. A wire ran from the sleeve and the assistant plugged it directly into the laptop, then he set the computer on the floor next to Alison.

Dr. Nareev kneeled beside her and took the sleeve from her assistant. She took a bottle of gel out of the pocket of her lab coat. It was blue and viscous and I had no idea what it was.

As if reading my mind, she looked up. “Glue. It will keep the sleeve in place and takes several hours to dissolve. And it does not interfere with the MRI.”

Dr. Nareev squirted a healthy dose of the glue around the inside of the sleeve. Her assistant put one hand under Alison’s neck and Dr. Nareev slipped the sleeve over Alison’s head. She pulled it down all the way. The front of the thing actually covered Alison’s eyes and came to the tip of her nose. Dr. Nareev contoured it to fit her face and made sure it was secured to the sides and back of her head. When she gave her assistant the nod, he carefully laid Alison’s head back down on the pillow.

“Start it up,” Dr. Nareev said.

The assistant turned on the laptop and plugged it into a wall socket.

Dr. Nareev looked at me. “This sleeve is a big part of the patent. We no longer need these huge machines to perform functional MRIs on patients. We just slip this on. It works just as well.”

The assistant got the laptop up and running. He opened an application and a video player popped up. The image on the player was mostly black though there were some ripples and patterns swirling around on the screen.

“It’s ready,” he said.

“She’s all yours, Eddie,” Dr. Nareev said, her voice and look full of curiosity like she was just as interested to see what I’d do as what Alison would dream of.

“Can you have the sound ready? I’m going to talk to her first.”

Dr. Nareev nodded.

I held my hand up and waved to get everybody’s attention. “Everybody, I need absolute quiet in here. In case you haven’t been keeping score, Alison might be able to help us find the man that broke out of here. So please be quiet while we work this and give us some space. I don’t want anything else influencing Alison right now.”

There was collective murmuring and everybody quieted down as they moved to the other side of the basement.

I sat next to Alison. The research assistant handed me the laptop.

“She’s not dreaming right now,” he said.

The screen on the video player was still dark. All I could see were those strange grey ripples that seemed to follow a patternless rhythm.

I motioned for him to back away. He did. Dr. Nareev sat next to me, putting her back on the wall also to watch the monitor along with me.

I took a deep breath and started.

“Alison, this is Eddie. I know you can hear me.”

The dark screen remained just that. The ripples continued as if I hadn’t spoken at all.

“I know you can hear me and I’m going to ask for your help.” I took another breath and told myself to slow down. The last thing Alison wanted to do right now, assuming she could even hear me, was help me. I needed to do this the hard way. Nice and easy and slow. I had to build up a case, had to craft an argument that would make her see it my way and open her mind to the possibility.

“White told me everything. White told me how he forced you to stage the rape sequence in your dreams. White told me how he forced you to stage the shooting sequence where I killed Manetti.”

I forced myself to begin every sentence with White. I wanted to hear everything I was saying, but the repetition of the word White was the key. In many ways, I felt like sitting in a dark house trying to coax a ghost in talking to me.

“White did this. White forced you. White tricked you. White did this to you.”

The screen was still dark.

“White…White…think about White…think about where he is…think about where he might be…White…”

Still nothing.

“White tricked you…White forced you…White is somewhere right now…”

I thought I saw something blip on the screen, but it happened so quickly I couldn’t be sure. Holding up my tablet, I hit play on the audio file I had of White talking. His voice came through the tablet loud and clear. I held it over Alison’s face.

“…experiments are important. Ask Dr. Zane, I’m very cooperative and have behaved well. He’ll tell you…”

I listened to White drone on and on. I didn’t know what the audio recording was from. All that mattered was the sound of White’s voice. When it ended, I played it again for her. And again.

The screen on the laptop, however, remained dark. She wasn’t dreaming.

“White…listen to his voice, Alison…just listen…”

Dr. Nareev was looking at the monitor and shaking her head.

But I wasn’t ready to give up.

“White…White…”

Suddenly the screen flashed. After staring a black image for so long, the bright flash was practically blinding. After my eyes adjusted, I realized what I was looking at.

White.

The color white.

I turned to Dr. Nareev and mouthed,
It’s working.

She held up a finger and twirled it:
Keep going.

“White. You enjoyed talking to him. But White tricked you. You thought White was your friend. But White tricked you. You never thought White would hurt anybody, but White broke that promise to you, didn’t he?”

I had no idea if I was even close to the truth here. For all I knew Alison had agreed to help him, not caring whether he killed anybody or not. But I figured this was the safest course. It gave her room to distance herself from White and the wrong-doing. If she thought I believed this, maybe she’d open up.

“White got away tonight. White went somewhere. Where did White go?”

The image began to take on color, and shapes appeared. Something big and rectangular, getting bigger and bigger.

“Where did White go? Where did White go?”

The image became more detailed. The rectangle became two rectangles, a bigger one on the bottom and a smaller one on top. Lines formed inside of both rectangles. The color became sharper, more uniform. Tan. It was a two-story house. A house! Windows formed and a door and a porch…around the house were sand dunes and in the distance the sea, or the bay, or some big inlet.

“Where did White go?”

At five, voices woke me. I looked down to find Alison still sleeping next to me. Dr. Nareev had taken the sleeve off her head. There is nothing like sleep to make somebody look peaceful and content. Alison was anything but, and now that I was onto her it would get a lot worse before it got better. In fact, it’d probably never get better.

She was out of time.

It made me think about my own life. As a teen, I pretty much epitomized the concept of bad decisions. I was naturally smart and loved reading, but whenever a teacher put a book in my hands, no matter how good it might have been, I shut down and refused to read it. Over the last decade I’d been making up for lost time in that regard.

I’d made it out of high school by the skin of my teeth, my SAT scores completely out of sync with my poor grades. Of course the discrepancy was a huge red flag in the admissions offices of the few colleges I’d bothered applying to. It told everybody that I was reasonably intelligent, but lacked drive or direction.

In my early twenties I bounced around between meaningless jobs, raging against how unfair the system was when I had nobody to blame but myself. Fast forward a few years and I was basically leeching off my older brother.

I closed out my late twenties by spiraling into a self-destructive pattern. Prison was the wake-up call I needed. Looking back now I was grateful for my stretch, as much as I’d hated it then.

Since my release, I’d spent my time making up for a lot of things. I had that luxury. It made me realize how lucky I was. How lucky anybody was that had time. The minutes and hours were a blessing. Time to make the most of these next ones.

The voices that had woken me were still going. It took my eyes a moment to register what I was seeing.

Special Agents Riehl and Megan Turner were talking to the security team. It amused me I didn’t even know what Riehl’s first name was. Would I ever? Probably not.

As always I was impressed by Riehl’s size. He had half a foot on me and was solid muscle. He probably could have made a fortune playing in the NFL or headlining American Gladiators. Megan Turner barely came up to his chest and her dark hair was pulled back into a ponytail. She was a couple years out of college and had fair skin. Of the pair of them, she was the first to notice me.

I got up and ambled over stiffly. Riehl ended his conversation with the security guards. He and Megan met me halfway.

“Eddie.” Megan came in for the hug. We had fought side-by-side in Oregon. I had saved her life, and she had saved mine. We would always be in each other’s debt. I hugged her back.

“Good to see you, under the circumstances.”

I broke the hug first and eyeballed Riehl.

“Eddie.”

“Riehl.”

He was deadly serious as he offered me his hand. “Good to see you’re still vertical.”

“Almost wasn’t,” I said. “How’d you guys get here?”

“Patterson pulled us off the detail and we chased the storm all the way from D.C. Made shit time but got here as soon as we could.”

I nodded. “This guy that shot Manetti? He’s a low-life. But dangerous.”

“I’m dangerous,” Riehl said, matter of factly. “I read his file and I’m unimpressed. Small-time jerkoff. This guy is about to enter a world of hurt.”

I liked the sound of that.

Megan kept her eyes on me. “Most of his known associates are dead, somewhere else, or serving. The only local guy we found is one Christian Lettes. He’s an enforcer type. He fights in the local MMA circuits. According to LE he’s got a bunch of friends tied into the local skinheads.”

Riehl gave me a cold, hard stare. “Pater said you’d be able to help.”

“This Lettes guy, does he have a big tattoo of a cross on his chest?”

Megan looked at me sideways. “How’d you know that?”

I could picture it clearly, because I’d seen it in Alison’s dream. “I think I found them.”