Dead Waters - Anton Strout [37]
I looked down at the person’s hands in his lap. They were my own, settled on top of my satchel. How I was myself in this vision, I didn’t know, but before I could give it much more thought, I noticed movement in the sheets of the bed I was sitting on.
I bolted up and spun around. Something was rising up in the middle of the bed, as if a line was drawing up the bedspread from its center point. I backed away from it, feeling for my bat at my side and relaxing a little when my hand found it in my holster. I pulled it free, extended it, and waited.
The sheet fell away, revealing a haunting and familiar face—Cassie, the ghost tattooist from the antiques store at the Gibson-Case Center. Her dead eyes were covered by her dark, giant hipster sunglasses, with a hint of a blood trickling out from behind them. Her tattoo gun was in her hand and she revved its motor. The dangling cord of the device dissolved off into a swirl of mist trailing behind her as she stepped through the bed toward me.
“No,” I said to myself, as firm as I could to control my panic. I swung my bat at her, but it passed right through, her solid form twirling into a cloud of mist before re-forming in my bat’s wake. She revved the needle gun again and kept advancing. I couldn’t hit her, but I wasn’t going to wait to find out if she could attack me, not with that needle gun in her hand.
The backs of my legs hit the dresser behind me. I had every plan to dash left, then forward toward a closed door that hopefully led out of the room, but before I could run, the sound of sliding drawers hit my ears.
The dresser drawers on either side of my legs fell to the floor and a pair of human arms reached out from within, wrapping around my body. I recognized the tweed sleeves of the jacket; Mason Redfield’s arms wrapped tight around my legs, immobilizing me.
Trapped. Screw this, I thought. Time to pull myself out of the vision. I closed my mind’s eye, only to have it slam back open on me. I willed it closed again, but again, it came flying open. All the while the tattooist kept advancing on me. I had never personally taken a beating as myself in a vision before, and I didn’t plan on starting now.
The tattooist crept closer, which meant only one thing: I had to free myself from the professor’s arms. Now. I slammed my bat down along the side of my left leg as the two arms wrapped around me. The blow stung my leg, but it hurt the professor’s arm more than it did me.
The arms let go of my legs, and I ran for the door across the room. The blind tattooist cocked her head, listening for my steps, correcting her course. I pulled at the doorknob.
Locked.
I spun and pressed my back against the door. Across the room, the younger Mason Redfield I had seen in my psychometric vision pulled himself out of the dresser, shattering it apart into a pile of wreckage. My brain filled with their raw emotional states from when I had first experienced both of them—the woman’s jealous rage and Mason Redfield’s fear from the night I had seen him fighting ghouls with the Inspectre. I started to sweat, slamming my head back against the door as all the emotions took over.
I hefted up my bat as the two of them closed with me. Maybe my bat would affect them or maybe it wouldn’t. Either way, I’d find out, going down swinging as best I could.
The pain in my leg still throbbed from where I had hit it with the bat. No, that wasn’t quite right . . . not where I had hit it. This was something else, a strange pulsing sensation on my other leg, higher and closer to my hip—my phone on vibrate. I reached into my pocket and pulled it out, flipping it open.
“Hello?”
Static came through on the line, but I could hear the faint sound of a voice behind it all.
“Hello?” I shouted into it.
It crackled again, and then through it all, “. . . kid?”
“Connor!” I shouted.
The psychometric vision rushed away from me and the