Afterlife - Douglas Clegg [80]
Julie’s imagination began to run wild. You’re a fool, you can’t have seen anything in the mirror. You can’t have seen a man with a blurred face anywhere. It’s the dreams you’ve been having. It’s Hut’s death. It has gotten to you and instead of dealing with it, you’ve been dancing around it. You saw the video with Mel. You saw that all you filmed was yourself, maybe dreaming of sex with Hut. Maybe dreaming of things because the raw deal you got with his murder was too much for you to handle. Hut was part of some psychic study as a kid. No wonder he never talked about it. But he did talk to Livy about her brain radio. He did try to tell her—she was sure of it—that something bad had happened in his childhood. Maybe when he talked about the Hutchinsons being horrible to him, he was confusing it. Maybe his memories had been like crossed wires. Or maybe Michael Diamond had been telling the truth: that the fire in the building took the memories. Blocked them. That’s nuts to think any of this is real. You don’t genuinely believe in…but the Streaming session with Diamond had seemed too real. She had never felt someone else’s consciousness, inside her like that. Am I going insane? Is this what it is? But she could answer her own question: it was as if someone was fucking with her. As if someone had already crawled inside her mind and was screwing with the way she saw things. The way she perceived. The video. The Streaming. It was all about her brain itself hitting short-circuits. It was not insanity. At best, it was shock and paranoia. Post-traumatic stress. Seeing her husband’s body on a metal table. Seeing how he’d been carved into. Seeing Matt’s arm, with its carvings. Seeing things. That’s all it was. Seeing things. It wasn’t that she herself was losing her mind. It was a problem of vision. It was a problem of how things are seen, and what happens when a shock occurs.
She waited for Joe, and her mind spun until she just wanted to feel as if something made sense.
Joe came out of the bedroom and said, “Nothing there, either.”
She could see in his face the doubt. Even Joe, who believed in psychic phenomena wholeheartedly, thought she had gone off the deep end.
“Look,” he said, anticipating her mood. “You’ve had some shocks. I’m not saying that none of this adds up to anything. But I think if we’re going to call the police, we need more. I’ll look up some stuff and call some friends who are more expert on this. I’ll find out more about Project Daylight. Don’t worry about this. Let me drive you home, okay?”
7
Joe drove her back in her Camry, and when they got near Rellingford, he offered to spend the night, but she could tell he wanted to get home. She insisted that she was all right. So, they drove to the train station and she saw him off. She enjoyed the ride back with all the windows down and the slight wind blowing through the car, giving her a nice chill. She felt better. She wasn’t sure what to make of Michael Diamond or what she’d seen—or hadn’t seen—at his place. But she’d handle it later.
When Julie walked in the front door of her house, her sister was in the living room, covered with a blanket on the couch, with Livy, in her jammies, curled up around her.
Mel opened her eyes. “How’d it go?”
“I’ll tell you tomorrow. Thanks for coming over,” Julie whispered, lifting Livy up in her arms. Livy was so sound asleep that she barely stirred as her mother carried her to her bedroom.
She was too tired to clear out the guest room for Mel, so she and her sister slept together up in the big king-sized bed in Julie’s room. When Julie got up in the morning, Mel already had coffee made. The kids had gone off to school. It was after eleven.
Mel barely said a word, but hugged her. “I love you, Julie. You’re the best little sister in the whole world. But I don’t want you going in the city anymore. And I don’t even think your friend Joe was much help to you. And I certainly think that Michael Diamond was bad news from the start. I wish I’d told mom to go by herself