Empath: Into the Shadow, Chapter 4

September 16th 2016

Jeffery woke with a startle. He had dreamed of the hospital again, being trapped in its walls with the recycled air and dirty sheets. He had dreamed of escaping. He got up and sat on the corner of the bed and rubbed his neck and face. It was just a nightmare. I’m never going back to that place. He had spent the better part of the year confined in its hallways and tried not to think about how the doctor said he should have long term care since he had two visits to the ER in the past year. Jeffery had been diagnosed schizophrenic. He was only eighteen but the stress and anxiety of his first semester of college triggered a change in him leading to his eventual withdrawal from classes due to hospitalization.

The voices started one night while he was in his dorm room alone studying for his final exams. They were whispers at first and he looked in the hallway to see if anyone was out there but it was the middle of the night and his roommate and most of the other students were asleep. It hadn’t occurred to him but he was suffering from insomnia for the several weeks prior to finals. The whispers turned into shouts and screams as he tossed and turned trying to sleep. The next morning Jeffrey called his mother crying and telling her what was happening. She took him to the hospital that very same day. Jeffrey was crying the entire time explaining to them the voices, none seemed to be speaking directly at him and he only heard a few voices maybe three to five at the most but they were in his head echoing as if in a cave. Now through medication the voices subsided but he still heard them from time to time when they wore off.

Jeffrey started to hear them now as he sat on his bed. Whispers and echoes at first. A male voice and a female voice, both sounded in pain. Then there was another male voice yelling in anger, that one he heard all the time. The angry voice scared him the most as it ranted and raved about the end of times. The voices had become familiar to him, he had heard several others but these three were the loudest and stuck with him the most. He could barely hear the two whispers as the angry male voice screamed. Jeffery covered his ears as if it would deafen the sound and walked slowly out of the room down the hallway towards the bathroom.

He could smell bacon and hear the sizzling of a frying pan as his mother cooked breakfast downstairs. The voices made him want to bang his head against the wall to try and get them out. The bathroom tiles were cold against his feet as he stepped off the carpeting of the hallway into the bathroom and headed straight to the medicine cabinet. He swallowed his pills and gulped some water from the faucet to wash them down. He undressed and turned the shower on, making the water as hot as possible. Jeffery got in and covered his ears and began to cry. The scolding water pounded against him turning his skin red. After a few minutes as the pills in his stomach dissolved and the voices began to dissipate slowly, a sigh of relief escaped his lungs as he began to bathe. He could feel the drugs in his system, mixed with the relaxing hot water, he felt drowsy and his legs felt like rubber.

Jeffery stepped out of the shower and nearly fell because he was so intoxicated. He reached for his towel and dried off then stumbled to the sink and brushed his teeth slowly. He spit and looked up at the mirror all fogged up and wiped the glass, blood shot eyes stared back at him with a mouth full of rotted teeth in a grin, wrinkles lined the face with thinning grey hair. Jeffery recognized the face as not his own and stepped back. A scream choked up in his throat but didn’t get free, he closed his eyes hard shaking his head and when he opened them the face was gone. Rubbing his eyes he stared into the mirror. I’m hallucinating…seeing things now. God help me. What is happening to me?

Jeffery wrapped his towel around his waist and walked to his room as if in a drunken stupor. He got dressed but because of the intoxicating effects of the drugs he put his shirt on backwards and didn’t notice. He walked slowly out into the hallway and down the steps, clutching onto the railing so not to fall because his equilibrium was so impaired. He stumbled into the kitchen and heavily plopped down in a seat nearly tipping the chair over backwards. His mother turned around and looked at him.

“Are you alright?” she asked. No, he thought, I’m fucking seeing things now.

“Yeah…I’m fine. It’s just my medication. Makes me feel woozy.”

“Well eat up,” she said putting his breakfast in front of him, “maybe it’ll make you feel better. You’re supposed to take it with food anyway.” Jeffery started to eat his eggs and bacon with toast as his mother poured him a glass of orange juice.

“Someone called for you the other day. A doctor, wanted to know if you’d be interested in a study at Harvard University. I said I didn’t think you’d be interested. It’s a two-week program where you have to be off medication. It has something to do with dreams and people who have vivid ones and something about psychosis, I don’t know what that means. He said you fit the criteria. I wrote down his name and number on the pad by the phone.” She placed the glass of orange juice in front of him. He drank it in three big gulps, a little dripped out of the corner of his mouth onto his chin and he wiped it away with a napkin. Jeffrey finished his meal and stumbled to the living room. His mother was talking to him from the other room but he could barely hear. He lay on the couch and slipped into a dreamless sleep.

* * *

Will Brown had stayed up all night, although it was only a short story on the morning news, he had seen for sure this was the Kelly from his premonition, the escaped patient. As he had left his place of former employment, Will had to pull over from the apprehensive feeling that something was coming and on the side of the road slipped into a vision of a clearing in the forest with blue flowers all around, Kelly in the middle with pills in her hand. What Will had not known is that in interfering it had caused a chain reaction that had brought her to that point and him in center view of something that went deeper. The story on the news still reported Kelly as missing but at the time of the airing was about when Justin stumbled into the clearing. By the time the news was over, the search party had found Justin and Kelly.

Justin came out of the woods and reached for his phone as a police officer helped Kelly to a waiting ambulance. Should I call headquarters to give a report first or Will? Justin decided on calling Will first to see how he had known. He dialed and Will picked up the phone immediately.

“Hello? Justin? Did you find her?” Will asked without hesitation.

“Yes…how did you know she was going to try and escape?” Justin asked.

“I had a vision, a premonition of Kelly in the middle of a field of blue flowers. I just knew her name and that she was in danger and that she was connected to you in some way. I saw on the morning news about it, which confirmed my suspicions. Is she alright, she didn’t kill herself right?” Will said and the hair on the back of Justin’s neck stood end. How is that possible? The flowers and knowing that she was going to make a suicide attempt? One word stuck out in his mind psychic but that was something Justin had a hard time in believing.

“Justin?” Will said noticing the hesitation. Justin cleared his throat.

“Ummm… she’s fine. I found her before she did anything. It was like something was driving me further into the woods away from the search party. I was the one who found her and stopped her.” Justin neglected he had heard a voice in the back of his mind urging him to hurry purposely. He silently knew what ever was going on with these supposed psychics was also in some way affecting him the closer he got to them and believed more.

“Great! Thank God! I was so worried. I’ve been up all night. And just to let you know I’ve decided to do that sleep study. I’ll call that number after I get a few hours of sleep first.” Will said.

“Okay… listen I have to make another call. I may have more questions for you later and might want to meet in person before the study. I’ll be in contact.” Justin said and hung up before Will could say goodbye. Justin quickly dialed his superior’s private number. Clairvoyance, it does exist. On the third ring his superior picked up.

“Listen you’re not going to believe this…” Justin began.

* * *

Will put his phone on the charger after Justin had hung up. He didn’t feel tired at all but hungry. He went to the kitchen and started boiling water to make Cup of Noodles. His roommate Matt came into the kitchen without a shirt on and opened the fridge and gulped down some ice tea directly from the bottle.

“You’re up early,” Will said.

“Yeah, I’m trying to get back on a normal sleep schedulem” Matt said as he started making mac and cheese.

“Listen, I want your input on something. First off I quit my job but I have the next month’s rent in my bank account, maybe two months if I’m lucky. But I just wanted your opinion on something…” Will said.

“Sure man, you can tell me anything, and it’s about time that fucking job sucked. It was dragging you down so much,” Matt said as he put the mac and cheese in the microwave. “What’s up?”

Will began to recount his premonition of Kelly, the apprehensive feeling something big was on the horizon and the sleep study at Harvard University, also mentioning the incident in the lunchroom the day before. Matt listened intently as he and Will ate. By the time they finished eating Will had stopped recounting what had happened. There was a moment of silence as Matt thought.

“Well I think this sleep study is most likely an experiment to understand or pinpoint who is psychic and who is not. Also your premonition and reversing your emotions suggests what I always said you are an empath, but maybe something even stronger. A reverse empath…” Matt said.

“I told you I told them that at the hospital, they said it was just psychosis.”

“Well of course, they want to cover up the thought of any psychic phenomena as mental illness because they have yet to fully understand it,” Matt explained.

“It’s not just that but that damn coke head Freud. Guy spent the majority of his life high on cocaine and believed it could treat mental illness and wasn’t addictive. Wrong. He even believed all dreams were just repressed sexual drive and only came when in conflict or something like that. Wrong. We dream every night even if we don’t remember and when in REM our brains are alight, usage at close to 100% capacity. What if our minds connect fully to God when we sleep, the collective unconscious…” Matt started rambling. If I don’t stop him now he’ll go for hours, Will thought.

“Hey man I gotta go to sleep I’ve been up all night,” Will cut him off.

“Oh ok man that’s fine. Goodnight even though its morning,” Matt said and laughed. Will left the kitchen and went to his room, which was the living room but there was a pullout couch. He laid on the bed for a few minutes with his eyes open to the little light from between the cracks of the blinds. He thought about masturbating decided he didn’t feel like it. Thought about drinking, remembered he probably had to be sober a full week before the sleep study or experiment and decided to quit again probably the sixth time in just as many months. As he lay there wanting sweet unconsciousness, he closed his eyes and began to talk to God like he sometimes did. Not exactly praying but talking aloud, trying to have a conversation with an entity that may or may not be there. Even though his faith would sometimes falter, Will felt just talking aloud to no one at all about your problems was good for the soul. Even if God was dead and he was just talking to himself.

“Lord I don’t know where I’m going in life. I have so many dreams. So many fantasies I want to be reality. I’m just tired. Tired of being alone all the time. Once you told me ‘listen to her’ and I heard her voice calling out my name like I called out hers to the stars. I thought I wanted my Sugar back. I just want someone who I can share my soul with now.” Tears started to form at the corners of his eyes and Will wiped them away. “Lord is it selfish to pray for yourself? I pray for happiness to all the people in the world but my own prayers are so much stronger in my heart. My heart that is broken like glass in shards.” Melt the pieces back together into a new form. Will heard the whisper in his mind. Often times when he needed God, God was there for him but not all the time did he hear the voice. He questioned it in the back of his mind always wondering if it was just his imagination. But even if it was imaginary, it’s nice to think God is always there to talk to when no one else was. But what Will did not know was that it wasn’t the voice of God but the presence of a light being watching over him.

“A new form?” Will asked. You’ve got a new story to write. And it has nothing to do with your past. Will heard the whisper again and thought for a moment. “Where does the story end?” Will asked. Where the story ends is where it begins. It changes everyday with the choices you make. There is no beginning or end as they are one and the same. Where one story ends, another begins. The alpha and the omega. The beginning and the end, whatever story you write is just another part of the spiral. “You speak in riddles.” Will said. It’s truth. Hard to comprehend when so full of desire, clear your mind and listen. You will hear the one your heart truly needs. Will began to relax and calmed his own thoughts by concentrating on his breathing. Moments passed as his crown chakra opened up wide. It was distant at first but he heard a sweet female voice in his head one he recognized but didn’t know where from, and she was singing.

* * *

Amanda wiped away tears. Every day she put on a smile for everyone but deep down she was connected to Will in someway, they had the same sadness that creeped into their mind. When she was alone she was weak to her own emotions. Around people she was weak to their emotions. Currently she was on house arrest after losing her license from several DUIs. She didn’t know where she wanted to go in life but she knew she had to keep her head on straight and stop fucking it up. She was on the edge of her bed and had just woken up from a horrible dream where she was running through the woods in a thunderstorm at night. The dream left her with a feeling that depressed her to the core. One that reminded her of when she had been drinking heavily and just wanted to die.

Even if she didn’t know it, Amanda was very special. She had a light inside her that fought the darkness but now it was somewhat dim. Because she was a twin, Amanda had natural psychic abilities. Though through the years she and her twin brother had grown apart, he had become somewhat abusive before he moved away. Amanda craved that kind of connection again, a bond that went as deep as the soul yet she was awkward and protected her somewhat sad heart behind a smile for everyone. She pushed the feelings of sadness away and concentrated reciting by memory the Red Hot Chili Peppers song Under the Bridge.

“Sometimes I feel

Like I don’t have a partner

Sometimes I feel

Like my only friend

Is the city I live in

The city of Angels

Lonely as I am

Together we cry…”

* * *

Will listened to the familiar voice and was reminded how music connects us all. Even though he did not know whose voice he heard or if it was imaginary, he listened. His lips mimicked every syllable and he spoke aloud the chorus, “I don’t ever wanna feel like I did that day. Take me to the place I love. Take me all the way.” And his mind slowly drifted off to sleep as he listened to an angelic voice. As he slept, the news of his premonition had reached several at the top of the NSA. Justin had typed up a report and emailed it to his superiors. They knew something was going on in the Lehigh Valley what they didn’t know was what. They were tracking the weather for phenomena through NASA and patterns in storm systems and cold/warm fronts seemed to indicate some type of electromagnetic activity. Also the area had higher rates of ER admittance for mental illness related problems. They had found Will and several others in the area suitable for examination, as they believed these occurrences to be of psychic phenomena.

They were all selected for the sole reason because they were admitted multiple times and not coincidentally the same exact days the ER got flooded with patients that exhibited similar symptoms. The experiments had been designed by the top in fringe science at Harvard University in Massachusetts where they would be held. They hoped to pinpoint what exactly was going on through these people. So far Will had been the most promising of the patients as he was to the only to identify himself as an empath his first hospital admittance and then later proved he was and might be something more. As Will slept the day away, the world slowly turned and the characters of the story with it, and none knew what exactly would happen as the future was not yet written.