Double Visions Read online

  The woman suddenly looked around nervously in their direction, like a gazelle catching the scent of a lion. The man bolted forward with impressive pace, exploding from the tree line and shocking the young woman into becoming rooted to the spot. Jane knew what was going to happen before it did and the man leapt forward like a giant cat, bringing the woman down.

  Up close, the young woman’s halo of light started to dim and Jane felt the man’s anger begin to grow; whoever he had been expecting the woman to be, lying under them, wasn’t her. As the light faded, the woman’s features became clear and she recognised her as Lana Genovese, the young woman who had visited her in a vision earlier in the day before vanishing into thin air.

  Jane felt the man’s hands raise high in the air and then slam down hard on their victim’s face. Again and again they fell, harder and harder, until the young woman’s features were splattered and obscured by blood. She felt the man’s rage burn hot in his veins and his frustration boiled over. He had been cheated again, his hopes raised by another false face that sought to mock and taunt him. He knew that she was out there and that they couldn’t hide her forever. He would find her again; he would save her and together they would become one.

  Jane stared out in horror as the man withdrew a long silver knife and tore open Lana Genovese’s blouse. Carefully, he carved a symbol into her soft white flesh, a pentagram with a crucifix inside. It was the same symbol that the Crucifier had carved into his victims 8 years ago. Arthur Durage had been caught and identified as the serial killer. Karl Meyers’ bullet had taken his life and ended his reign, or so everyone had believed, including her.

  When the vision faded abruptly, Jane was yanked back into the real world again and landed with a hard jolting smack that rattled her senses. She’d had plenty of visions before, but none had ever felt like this. Normally, she was in control. She was the one able to observe from a safe distance and piggyback on the victim. She had learnt early on to block out any invading emotions of the poor soul’s last moments on earth. It was a very necessary tool that enabled her to be of some use to the dead and help bring their killers to justice. But this vision had felt alien to her, like she was being forced to participate, linked like never before to the killer and not the victim.

  She stood on shaky legs and made her way back up through the sand dunes, treading carefully for fear of another psychic quicksand grab. The victim in this vision had been Lana Genovese, the woman who had visited her earlier that day. Jane had feared the worst for the young woman. The dead only appeared before her begging for help when they had been torn from this world at the hands of another. She had expected to read the papers in a few days’ time and see that Lana Genovese had met her demise. She had never expected to see it first-hand. She wiped her hands against her top as though they were smeared with some invisible excrement. She knew that the feelings of the killer’s excitement and pleasure would take a long time to scrub from her mind.

  ----------

  Randall Zerneck trailed the woman unnecessarily carefully back towards the parking area. She seemed distracted as she stumbled up through the sloping sands and for a brief moment Randall wondered if what he was seeing was real and not an act. It was only a brief momentary lapse as his cynical nature overrode all else. Even if Ms Parkes wasn’t performing for his benefit, she probably came to such a deserted spot to practise unobserved. For a moment, he wanted to call her bluff, reach out and metaphorically grab her to tell her that he wasn’t fooled, to tell her that he wasn’t scared. That last thought surprised him; he had been sure that it was all an act, but he couldn’t deny the rash of goosebumps currently peppering his arm. All of a sudden, his isolated location made him feel very vulnerable. The wind through the dunes seemed ominous and dark and he hurried his feet, eager to be back in his car where this fleeting emotion would be reviewed as silly and laughable.

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  Jane drove slowly home. Her mind tried to tackle the problem but could find no adequate solution. Lana Genovese had visited her as a precursor to her own death, a death that Jane had later witnessed or, more accurately, experienced. Jane had worked on the original Crucifier case and had been instrumental to the killer’s reign of terror being brought to a shuddering halt. She also knew that she was the last person that the police would want to see again, let alone acknowledge. Her eagerness and arrogance had cost DI Karl Meyers his life and forced her into retirement. But she also knew that if they’d got the wrong man, if Arthur Durage had not been the Crucifier, then there was still a killer out there and she couldn’t look away even though she wanted to.

  She reached her small cottage quickly. Normally, the pretty home was of great comfort to her, an oasis of calm against the swirling invading tide that often threatened her sanity. But that sanctuary had been shattered that morning by Lana Genovese’s appearance. At first she had assumed that her carefully constructed barricade had been breached, but the more she thought about it, the more it seemed like the vision had been beamed in from another source. Much like her sickening experience of the young woman’s death, it seemed as though the images were being shown to her rather than emanating from her.

  She passed quickly through the house and out the back to her garden. At the bottom of the long lawn stood a small summer house that had remained empty for several years now. It was a circular wooden building that was still meticulously maintained from the outside, but she hadn’t set foot inside since she had closed and locked the doors 8 years ago.

  She took the key with a trembling hand from her pocket and stood warily by the door. Inside was her haven, a place of safety and shelter and peace. It had been here where she had retreated to process her visions, to separate the fact from fiction and to filter the pertinent clues to catch a monster.

  The key turned without hesitation and the lock tumbled freely. A waft of stale air rushed at her from within, and with it a blast of blinding memories. Death and pain hit her hard in a scorching ray of light as the remnants of dozens of victims screamed for justice and vengeance at once. Fortunately, the blast was short-lived and the air settled around her. She could feel her hair standing up alive with electricity and the fillings in her teeth felt hot as they sizzled.

  She stepped inside and walked to the centre of the room. There was soft red carpeting underfoot and a large cushion seat in the middle of the summer house. Jane stood and looked down at the seat, which still seemed to hold an imprint of her from the last time that she’d sat and opened her mind. There were three wind chimes adorning the walls; these were her alarm system. One jingling bell told her that she was in the Shadow World, two bells was a warning that she was getting close to the limit, and the third bell told her to get the hell out and quick. She had only ever heard the third bell once, that night when she’d tapped into Arthur Durage and known that he was the Crucifier. She had been so sure that she’d discovered the killer’s hidden face that she’d rushed out to find him, full of her own importance. Karl Meyers had told her to wait when she’d called him, but she hadn’t listened and he had paid with his life.

  She tried to shake the feelings of guilt from her thoughts. Any strong emotions here were counterproductive. She had found that the visions tended to stay in her mind for a few hours, like they were recorded to an internal hard drive, one that she could replay for a limited time after. It was here that she came to process the images, to replay them and study the angles for anything of use.

  The powerful feeling of familiarity connected to the Crucifier case was what had brought her back to this place. Lana Genovese had appeared to her before her death, which had been out of the ordinary to begin with. Jane thought that she could have maybe let the vision go, if not for the second vision where she had been staring out of the killer’s eyes as he’d carved the Crucifier symbol into the poor young woman’s flesh. If Karl Meyers had died trying to capture the wrong man, or if Arthur Durage was still alive, then she had a duty to discover the truth.

  She sat upon the cushion and cle
ared her mind. She allowed the swinging scythe to cut through the air around her, the reflective blade glimmering as the threshold to the Shadow World appeared. For a moment she felt a surprising sense of eagerness and she realised just how much she had missed this. In the distance she heard the first bell ring and she knew that she was home.

  CHAPTER THREE

  UP AND RUNNING

  Delores Hubble yanked stiffly on the small dog’s lead. The Yorkshire Terrier jolted with the pull and looked up with an angry stare.

  “Don’t you look at me that way, Mrs Miggins,” Delores huffed. “I’m the one in charge here,” she said a little dubiously. The small dog seemed to have an uncanny habit of gaining the upper hand in any disagreement and she let the dog go back to sniffing hard at the undergrowth.

  Delores was 85 now but still healthy enough to walk the fussy dog twice a day. She knew that the day was approaching fast when she would struggle to make the short journey, but she was still fighting hard to put that day off for as long as possible.

  Mrs Miggins was on a retractable 12 foot lead and the small brown ball of fur was now a full 12 feet away and had disappeared into the long grass out of sight. Suddenly, the lead began to jerk as though the dog had found something of great interest. Delores tried calling and whistling but to no avail as the dog simply ignored her.

  She marched over meaning to scold the animal for its poor discipline, but in her heart she knew that she would back down from the confrontation with her pet; she was still not sure just who held which end of the lead.

  Delores pushed her way into the undergrowth on increasingly unsteady legs as the weeds and brambles tried to stop her. Eventually, she pushed her way through and came upon the small dog and its find.

  Delores’ heart almost stopped completely and her clenched fist reached immediately towards her chest.

  The young woman on the floor was lying spreadeagled and stripped of all clothing. The poor thing’s face had been obliterated and the stench of drying blood was thick in the air. Mrs Miggins’ furry face was dipped in crimson as she lapped at the pooling lifeforce around the body.

  Delores stared down in horror and shock at the dead body before her and tried to slow her racing heart, which was skipping the odd beat in two. The woman’s hands were staked into the ground and she was displayed in an unmistakable crucified pose. There was a symbol carved into the woman’s chest. It was a symbol that had held the town and surrounding area in a tight, vice-like grip of fear several years ago, a symbol that Delores knew none of them would ever forget. This time she dragged Mrs Miggins with her, caring little about the animal’s whining protest as she headed back out of the woodland clearing.

  ----------

  Randall felt the annoying vibration in his coat and was glad that he’d remembered to switch the phone to silent. He was currently skulking around the side of Jane Parkes’ home and was doing so under the cover of the darkening night.

  He knew that he was pushing his luck by sneaking around like this, but right now his blood was full of enough hard liquor to render the concerns mute.

  The Parkes woman was sitting motionless in a little summer house at the bottom of her garden. Randall held a flowery branch of something chokingly fragrant away from his face as he watched on. The woman was either getting ready for a comeback and practising her art, or else…; no, there was nothing else that made any sense.

  He turned slowly and made his way back around the cottage. He hated the flowers with their sunny smiles and effervescent outlook. His own future was as black as could be and he angrily ripped a few heads off in petty jealously as he passed.

  Fortunately for him, the Parkes’ cottage was set back from the main road along a narrow country lane. There were no neighbours within earshot and that suited his purposes just fine.

  He hiked his way back up the lane until he was sure that he wouldn’t be heard if Parkes was faking her trance. He pulled out the phone and looked down at the green screen. The phone was old and no doubt laughably out of date, but it was functional and he did only need it to be a phone after all.

  The small graphic showed him that someone had left a message and his forehead crinkled in surprise. There were not many people who still bothered to call him anymore; his list of friends had faded away and the few people that still remained in his life were mainly paid tipsters.

  He rang the answer phone and his eyes started to widen in shock at the news. It was an old friend from The Globe newspaper, or least someone who had once been a friend. A body had been discovered in the woodland around Faircliff. A young woman had been murdered and a familiar symbol had been carved into the corpse. The Crucifier was back.

  ----------

  Jane walked the path through her memories and tried to find the vision footage, but inexplicably it wasn’t there. Neither Lana Genovese’s visit nor her murder was anywhere to be found and Jane found this fact to be more disturbing than the vision itself. Her lack of power was particularly alarming; both the visions and her recall were beyond her control as though someone had shown her the image before blocking the signal.

  She pushed harder and harder, deeper and deeper, until she was dimly aware of the second bell ringing, the warning that she was going too far. Her face was bathed in sweat and droplets fell from her strained red features. She pushed with aching psychic muscles that had grown weak and lazy over her retirement years. She powered forwards with every ounce of strength that she could muster, driving her ability harder than ever before, fuelled by desperation and fury. Eventually, she started to feel like she was growing closer. The darkness began to slowly part as the sepia tones grew dizzyingly faster. She could feel him growing closer with every passing second that spanned years, and then she was there - she was inside him. There had been a small trace essence that he had left behind when she’d been in him before and she’d caught the scent, but only just and the signal was weak. She dared not make a move or a sound as she crept into his mind and hid in the shadows.

  She risked the tiniest peek and saw out of the corner of his eyes. The room around him was plain and ordinary. This was no monster’s dungeon, no Crucifier’s basement. She risked a further, wider look with as much stealth as she could muster. It looked like a typical hotel room and she started to try and spot anything with an insignia on to give her a location, but oddly there was nothing in sight. There were no monogrammed towels, no stationery, no logos anywhere to be seen.

  The man was sitting on the edge of his bed, his hands clasped in front of him like he was praying, but Jane could sense no God here. Suddenly, the man stood and moved towards a bathroom. His hand reached out and flicked on a buzzing fluorescent overhead light and the sudden illumination startled Jane. There was a bathroom cabinet on the wall with mirrored doors and Jane held her breath as the man approached the reflective surface, knowing that she would catch a glimpse of his face. In the far distance she heard a third bell ring and she knew that she should flee and quickly, but she couldn’t - not yet… just a few seconds longer.

  “No,” she heard his voice growl in her head, as his hand reached out and shattered the mirror with a single blow.

  The pain was instant and Jane fled back to herself as swiftly as she could manage. When she opened her eyes it was too quickly and she immediately had to turn to one side as her lunch came flying violently out of her mouth. Her head spun at a thousand miles an hour as she slammed her barricades back up in case the man had followed her trail back home, but she was alone. Whoever he was, he had been able to sense her presence and had broken the mirror to stop her from seeing his face. Speaking of which, she looked down in disbelief at her bleeding hand. The cut looked deep and she stared in fascination, wondering just how it was possible that such physical damage could have been inflicted from a psychic link. Whatever her connection to the killer was, it was the strongest bond that she had ever known. She had been able to look inside his head, but he had been able to look back inside hers.

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&n
bsp; The smell of dusty paper hung thickly in the air as the man opened the large dark leather ledger. Inside was every scrap of coverage on the Crucifier case, every printed word. Every grainy image was carefully cut and pasted into the creaky bound book.

  The room was small and dark, just how he liked it. There was a bed immaculately made up and the furniture was sparse. There was no space here for the sinful luxury of the deviant masses; his was a life of purity and servitude. The curtains were kept drawn as shelter from the darkness outside and he only allowed himself candles as a source of light. A single table stood in the centre of the room and he ate only pure foods devoid of contamination. The bedsit was small but it suited his needs. Anything larger would have felt gluttonous and he was, after all, a pious man.

  His hands lifted each page of the ledger with loving care, turning the pages carefully so as not to damage the official record of his world. He gently touched the face of the man in the photographs. Arthur Durage had been held up to the world as a monster, the purveyor of nightmares so dark that they threatened to swallow you whole and spit out the bones. But the man knew the truth. He knew what evil lurked in the hearts of the so-called innocent. The twisted masks that the children wore had been torn down and their true visages exposed to the world, a world of light and hallowed justice.

  The man pulled out a second ledger. This one was almost empty, but it had many pages to fill. The work was far from finished and before he was done, these pages would ring out with tales of his heroism and spiritual service. He knew that his reward would not come until after much great suffering; that was the price to pay and he wouldn’t be the first man to make such a sacrifice. He wasn’t under any illusions as to the way that the world would view him; his was the long game, and most great men did have to die before they were ever fully appreciated.