Marcus opened up a browser window on his computer and checked his online calendar. He forwarded the date to December 8, 2008, to weeks from now. He spent a couple minutes shuffling things around and clearing up more space for Hannah. Hannah was finally starting to show some progress but her case was an unusual one. During her last few sessions she had begun showing signs he had never seen before. He looked down at his notes and read the names she had mentioned during her last visit. They sounded like gibberish, "Ghuuz, Jaynon, Liian". Marcus had looked them up online and asked some questions of other doctors but couldn't find any references to them.
Marcus opened his email and skimmed through his professional alerts filter. There were several recent articles from some of his former classmates, he checked to see if there were any new foci he could use on his existing cases but nothing seemed to apply. He was just about to close off his email when he noticed a bulletin from Maypole Pharmaceuticals. They provided the only FDA approved drugs for treating spiritual attunement issues.
The announcement was basically a summary of upcoming products and links to pricing information and product trials for existing drugs. Near the bottom of the email was a small blurb that caught Marcus' attention. It read, "Due to recent material shortages the price of all Maypole products will be rising 6.5% in the coming quarter. We regret this price increase, and assure you it is only temporary. Our new processing plant is scheduled to open in the first quarter of 2014 at which point we will reassess our pricing structure and bring our quality products down to their previous price levels."
Marcus shut his browser down and cursed, "Bullshit." Everyone who knew anything about Maypole knew that they had been regularly losing trucks. Some had mysteriously gone missing, others were destroyed in bizarre accidents. One had been lost only a month ago along a highway near the Canadian border.
Marcus had recognized the potential for profit early on in Maypole's company development and had decided to set up a series of investments. It was a minor breach of ethics in his eyes. He knew their products worked, he had been on the team that had helped arrange the testing during his final years of college. He had even signed up to be a control subject for one trial, to make a little extra cash for books.
Marcus considered himself a responsible investor. He read all the documentation they sent, he actively participated in shareholder meetings, he had even helped in the decision process when they decided to bring in a police officer to investigate the missing and destroyed trucks. At first they had thought that a militant religious group had been attacking the shipments, but more and more the accidents had developed the flavour of the supernatural - and that left a bitter taste.
The first report from the investigating officer had been due a week ago, but so far Marcus hadn't heard anything from the Maypole board about it. Marcus knew that it was possible that someone was simply slacking off and that the paperwork was taking its sweet time, bumping around as an internal memo at Maypole, waiting for approval from a manager somewhere. Deep in his gut, though, Marcus knew it must be something else. The issue was too huge to be sidetracked.
Marcus decided he needed more information and needed it now. He picked up the phone and dialed Jason Podraza's number. It rang twice before Jason answered. His voice sounded like he had been gargling sandpaper. Marcus said, "Jason, it's Marcus Coburn here, you have a minute?"
From the other end of the line came a couple coughs and a groan. Jason made a sound that could have been either "yup" or "nope". Marcus waited for him to continue. Marcus could hear noises coming from the other end of the line, first the creaking of a bed frame, then a soft shuffling noise. Marcus heard a clinking noise and then hear Jason gulp before saying, "What the fuck man, it's like eight in the morning here. Why the fuck are you calling me on a weekend?"
Marcus glanced back down at his calendar before saying, "Jason, it's Monday, and it's getting closer to noon. I'm in the same time zone as you, remember?"
Marcus heard a dry laugh and another clinking noise. When Jason spoke again he sounded much more awake, "Wow. Monday huh? Shit, that was a hell of a party, you should have been there." Jason laughed again and continued, "Okay, what do you need buddy? I should probably drag my ass into work. If I miss another full day they'll turf me for sure."
Marcus got straight to the point, "I need more information on what's happening with the trucks. Oh, and I need anything you can get on one of the truck drivers. His name is Lloyd or something. I didn't manage to get his last name. Whatever you can find out."
"Lloyd Hutton," Jason said,"his name is on everything that's been in or out of the GM's office lately."
"Hutton, huh? Okay, that's a start, what else do you know?"
There were some more shuffling noises and then a thump and Jason muttered from a distance, "Shit." For a couple seconds the phone was quiet and then Jason said, "Sorry, buddy, dropped the phone while I was getting on my pants. I don't really know anything else about it since that Lloyd guy got sent to the hospital."
"What!" Marcus exclaimed, "Back up a second, Lloyd is in the hospital?"
"Yeah, I told you that last time, didn't I?" Jason sounded confused, "Wait, ha, no, okay. Yeah I remember the last thing I told YOU," Jason put a strange emphasis on the word "you", Marcus found it a little worrisome. Jason continued, "was that we had lost a truck North of Seattle. Yeah, that Lloyd guy was driving it. Why is everyone so worried about this guy? Is he a mob guy or something? Is he behind these trucks going missing?"
Only a small number of people had been informed that there was an officer investigating the disappearances. Luckily word hadn't filtered down to Jason yet, which was good news. The way Jason was talking now it sounded like he was feeding information to several sources outside the company. He was getting greedy, which meant it was getting to be about time to sever all ties with him. Such a shame, he was a fairly bright kid who worked in the mail room. His combination of loose morals, access to corporate documents, and computer skills would be nearly impossible to track down elsewhere within the company. Marcus was half tempted to pull his shares out while they were still worth something.
"Can you keep a secret, Jason?" Marcus asked.
Jason's dry laugh came bursting out of the receiver, "Shit man, you know I can't."
Marcus said, "Okay, then it's probably best if you don't know who Lloyd is. I know you probably won't take my word for it on this one, but you need to back down from it a bit. Get me what you can and then either quit or stop snooping around. I doubt they'll be too happy with either of us if they find out about our arrangement."
Jason said, "Right, okay mom, I'll look both ways as I cross the street. You worry about your shit, I can handle this. I'll call you tonight when I get off work. You going to buy that rare lunch box from my buddy's eBay auction?"
"Yeah, how rare do you think it's going to be?"
"Depends on what I find out I guess, probably a bit more rare than the action figure you bought last time."
Marcus laughed, "That's pretty rare. That action figure might as well have been gold plated."
Jason didn’t have an “eBay buddy” - he had set up the auctions as a method of transferring funds in a way that made them difficult to track. He had a series of eBay accounts set up that sold all manner of geeky memorabilia. The items that Jason found were the genuine article and he probably made a fair amount of money off legitimate sales. When Marcus bought information off him all he had to do was go through Jason’s auctions and find the item with the highest “Buy it Now” price and order that item.
Jason replied, "If this shit is as crazy as I think it is, that lunch box is going to be diamond encrusted."
Marcus heard the line go dead and he hung up the phone. He grabbed a clipboard and a pen and stood up from his desk. He walked over to his bookshelf and picked up a small statuette and carried it out into the waiting room of his office. As he walked in he smiled at Grace, who was busy sorting through some patient records, compiling a summary of dosages and progress reports due back to Maypole in time for the quarterlies.
Grace looked up and asked, "How's it going, Doctor C?"
"It is going well, well enough anyway," Marcus replied, "How do you feel about taking a long lunch on me today, Grace? You've been working pretty hard lately."
Grace brightened up instantly. She slapped the folder she was working on closed and leapt to her feet, "You don't have to ask me twice, you want me to pick something up for you?"
Marcus and his stomach disagreed for a moment, he wanted to just get on with this as quickly as possible. But he felt absolutely ravenous even though he usually took his lunch later in the day to offset his long days at the office. In the end, his stomach won, "Sure Grace, could you grab me a soup and sandwich from that place on the corner on your way back up? Don't rush, though, it isn't urgent."
"Okay, you want your usual?" Marcus nodded and Grace continued, "We'll see you in a bit then, remember you have a one o'clock, I'll probably be back a bit after they get here."
As Grace left the office Marcus snuck a peek at her ass. He watched as the fabric of her skirt tugged at the edges of her full tight bottom, the sway of her hips a little bit hypnotic. It was almost a shame she was so great at her job. Most days she was finished her work before he even got there, and then spent the rest of the day playing games on the computer and taking calls. She did work before Marcus even realized it needed to be done, and he considered himself to be at the higher end of the scale when it came to organizational skills. Marcus hadn't found a single task that phased her yet.
It sometimes annoyed him that he hadn't even looked at her resume before hiring her. He had hired her on purely based on a recommendation from his pants. When he found out how incredible she was at her job and how well they worked together he had been a little upset simply because there was no way he could justify an office fling now, he needed her too much to risk it.
Marcus heard the outer door close and turned his attention to the giant clock in the waiting room. He moved up to face it, standing only about two feet away. He reached out and undid the clasp that held the glass front in place. Of all the things in the office, this was probably the most expensive. It was precision engineered and filled with all sorts of strange materials. Many of the internal components were made with pure silver and gold, and as a result they wore down quickly and had to be sent out for repair often.
He swung the glass out of the way and pressed on the center of the clock. The hands all snapped into the noon position and a small panel opened near the base of the clock. Marcus set the statuette inside the exposed hole and pressed the center of the clock gain to close it. The statuette was pulled into the clock and the panel closed. Immediately the clock took on a sort of orange haze. Marcus waited for his eyes to adjust, it always took him a few minutes.
Marcus Coburn stood in front of the clock and squinted until the hands came back into focus. This was a necessary part of the ritual. Throughout history people have created tiny objects that could focus spiritual energy, one of the most popular being the Christian cross. These totems allow their wielders to perceive things they weren't normally able to. For Christians a cross or Rosary beads allowed them to open their minds to the general layer of spiritual energy that encompassed everything. Was it God? Not likely. As far as Marcus was concerned it was simply a form of energy they couldn't measure before.
Manipulating it was simple once you knew what to look for. Many of the other student in Marcus' graduating class had gone on to work with scientists on devices that could measure and quantify the energies. Marcus had always preferred the drama behind finding and fine tuning more classical methods. Runes and rituals had true power when properly done. Marcus preferred using himself as the tool to unlock their secrets.
Marcus concentrated and started to hum quietly to himself. What he hummed wasn't a song, really, but more of a series of notes. The sound was rhythmic but not particularly melodic. As he did so he wrote a name on the clipboard, "Lloyd Hutton".
He continued writing the name over and over again on the sheet of paper. He didn't look at the page as he did, his focus stayed continuously on the clock. The words intertwined and overlaid each other, forming a strange jumble on the page. His hand moved more and more swiftly, his hands flew across the page. After about two minutes of this he heard the pen tear through the page. He pinched the page between two fingers and tore it off and let it fall to the floor. As he did the hands on the clock started to march slowly backwards.
Marcus continued writing the name over and over again, the scratching sound of the pen joined in to the rhythm of his humming. The clock began to speed up, as it did the ticking of the second hand joined into the music. The scratching, humming, ticking symphony continued on for twenty six minutes. When it stopped it was only because Marcus had run out of paper to draw on. He looked down around his feet. Scattered all around him were pictures formed by names. In one a man stood by a roadside smoking, in another the man lay by a tree, blood and ice in his beard.
Marcus bent over and gathered the sheets from the floor. He flipped through them, trying to make some sense of the images. He opened the clock and took out the statuette. He then carefully closed and latched the clock. The hands of the clock automatically moved back to the correct position.
Marcus took the pages back into his office and locked the door. He still had some time before his next appointment arrived to try and make some sense of these.
Once he was back at his desk Marcus began the frustrating process of trying to make sense of the information that was scattered across the pages. All together here were a dozen pictures. Five of them were clearly off target chronologically. The scrying process was inaccurate at the best of times. Occasionally Marcus would get images from his own childhood, or from people around him. It was one of the reasons he had Grace leave the office, he didn't want her wavelengths interfering with the reading.
One time Marcus had spent hours researching an image of a tree he had found. The tree was fairly unremarkable, and it was only when Marcus compared some of his other images that he concluded that the picture had been of the tree that the statuette he was using as a focus. He had long since learned to tune out the wavelengths of plants, but in the beginning it had been difficult.
Scrying was actually one of the easiest things to learn for a parapsychiatrist. Once a doctor of parapsychology learned how the underlying spiritual energy of the universe worked it became a relatively simple task to for rituals designed to detect fluctuations in the wavelengths. Marcus often compared it to a lake on a slightly windy day. Even from a still photograph of the lake you could tell how windy it was simple based on the height of the waves. If you looked closer you could see the interference of the boats that had passed by recently, even if there were no boats in the photo. Scrying was like that. If you knew what sort of waves you were looking for, you could attune yourself to them and find out what sort of boats had passed by. And just as with waves, it helped to be closer to the source, and they tended to dissipate with time.
In this case Marcus office was a fair distance from the source, but it had happened fairly recently so the ripples were still strong. Marcus flipped through the drawings, trying to place them in order. Once they were all spread out in front of him his brow furrowed, "This can't be right," he muttered. He shuffled the pages around again and took another look. Somehow, underneath all the other drawings, was a pattern that formed a larger image. No matter how Marcus rearranged the images he could still see it. It looked like a face, but Marcus couldn't tell who it was. He looked away and back again and the face seemed even clearer.
Marcus opened the top right drawer of his desk and got out his digital camera. He pressed the power button and brought it up to take some photos of the strange effect. He lined up the viewfinder so that the face appeared clearly in the center. He pressed the button to take the photo, as he did the image changed it's expression. Marcus took a sharp breath and pushed his chair back a bit from the desk.
Was he imagining things? He looked again at the image he had just taken on his digital camera and down at the pages, there was a definite difference. The image on the camera was slightly different, the mouth was a little more open, there was a bit more tension in the eyes. Marcus pointed the camera back at the sheets of paper and switched the digital camera into video mode. He pressed the button to start recording. As he did he could clearly see the face changing on the viewfinder. The face appeared to be speaking, its mouth slowly opening and closing, as if the ink lines were flowing across the page and forming new images.
Marcus watched the viewfinder for about thirty seconds, trying to read the lips of the ink face. A red light came on in the viewfinder and Marcus spat, "Dammit! Out of memory?" He tore open his desk drawer looking for his spare memory card. He was still holding the camera with one hand as he rummaged through the drawer, tossing pens aside. "Where the hell is it?"
The camera beeped and stopped recording. Marcus set the camera down and looked back at the pages on the desk. As he did the ink seemed to spread, seeping into the pages and running off his desk in long black rivulets. The pages were now completely soaked through with ink. Marcus bolted out into the lobby, almost knocking over his next patient as he ran. He continued out into the washroom and grabbed a handful of paper towels. He ran back into the office and began mopping up the excess ink. He picked up the pages from his desk and tossed them into the wastebasket. He scrubbed and scrubbed with the paper towels but was unable to get all the ink off. When he ran out of paper towel he threw himself back into his chair and let out a sound that sounded halfway between a sigh and a growl. He looked at his ink stained desk and frowned. There in the middle of the desk was the face he had seen in the drawings, and the face looked very angry.
The rest of the afternoon passed so slowly that Marcus thought the ink man had caused some sort of shift in his perception of time. The two patients Marcus had lined up for this afternoon had originally seemed interesting, or at least lucrative, but now all he could think about were a pair of inky lips mouthing an incomprehensible message. Over and over the image reformed in his mind. The tall forehead, the thin lips and narrow eyes. But the feature that had stood out the most was the nose. The nose was thin, almost blade like, with a sharp change in direction near the bottom. Marcus wasn't sure if it was because of a crooked line in his drawing or if he had somehow accurately reproduced a real man's face. Had he seen that face somewhere before, or was his imagination filling in details from the faces of former acquaintances?
Marcus nodded his head and said, "Go on, tell me everything you remember." It was one of the great joys of his position, he could allow his mind to wander and nobody would know the difference. Marcus had already diagnosed the current patient and begun treatment. He needed to know little else, but the patient was comforted by the visits, he enjoyed the opportunity to vent about his irrelevant problems. So once a week Marcus sat with this man and tuned out for three hundred dollars an hour. Once a week Marcus sat with a man whose name he wouldn't even remember were it not for Grace's weekly reminder.
Blackened teeth touched a bottom lip, the sound of a "V". The face had said that word twice. What was it? "Live"? "Evil"? Marcus doubted the word was "Evil". He found that the concepts of good and evil tended to dissipate in death. Most spirits were a resonance, an echo of life. If someone desired something enough, pursued it long enough, they set up wavelengths to that effect. Marcus remembered an instance where the son of one of his patients had been in a car crash one week before he was supposed to be married. On the day of the wedding people reported seeing an ethereal young man in the church. The haunting wasn't good or evil, it was an echo of desires held in life.
The patient's voice touched the edge of Marcus' perception, "...it was really strange. It was as if it was trying to deliver a message, you know? I am used to my wife's ghost now, and even find it comforting that she's still around in some form. But this other thing wasn't anything I'd ever seen. It was like a face in the static on my television. I remember the mouth the most, opening and closing to the sound of static."
Marcus sat bolt upright and said, "A face, you say? What did it look like?" Marcus leaned far forward in his seat, both dreading and craving the response. Suddenly the patient's name came to him and he said, "Ken, did you recognize the face?"
Ken answered, "No, I don't think I knew him. He was thin, gaunt even. His nose looked broken, I remember that the most. His nose was really strange, too long, and bent."
Marcus tried to think of other questions to ask, but he was at a loss for words. He sat with his mouth hanging open as if he were about to speak. He brought his hand up to his chin and scratched it a bit. He started, "The man, was he," but the question died on Marcus' lips. He thought for a moment and rephrased the question, "Was this the only time you saw the man?"
"Yeah," said Ken, "Just the one time. It was this afternoon, just before I..."
Marcus blurted out, "What time, Ken, what time did this happen?"
Ken stammered for a second, startled by the sudden outburst. He was used to answering direct questions from Doctor Coburn about things, however, so his answer came quickly, "About one? Yeah, one-ish I think. I didn't look at the clock, as I said I was just waking up when it happened, and once I was fully awake the face disappeared."
Marcus looked down at his digital camera and then back at his patient before saying, "Ken, I need to cut our visit short today. I need to look into this more. It's nothing to worry about, I assure you, but I need to do a bit of research and I'd like to get right on it." Marcus considered offering Ken a discount on the session but decided to wait and see if he brought it up.
Ken looked at his watch expectantly for a moment and the said, "Sure. Okay. I guess I'll see you next week then?"
Marcus could see the concern on Ken's face, but had no idea how he could offer any relief at this moment. Instead he shuffled Ken to the door and wished him a good day as he pushed him out into the hallway outside his office. Marcus ran back into his office and scooped up his notebook, digital camera, and the keys to his car. As he left the office his stomach rumbled and he realized that Grace still hadn't returned from lunch. He took a moment to scribble a note and tack it to the office door before he left.