Psychic Friends

by Pearce Hansen

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

Many of her calls were people just seeking connection. Sometimes Carmel would talk with a customer for hours like two friends gabbing away. She would advise and cajole, flirt, talk dirty, conversate about pretty much anything at all. But the meter was always running in the background.

The next call was a drunk girl in Jacksonville wanting to brag about the new pickup truck her sugar daddy had bought her. Bored Deck offered no input. Carmel felt like playing solitaire, herself.

Many of Carmel’s customers wanted to share a secret with a stranger they would never meet. There would never be a call back after they unloaded their confession onto Carmel’s oh-so-willing shoulders.

Her next call was a kid in Boise, telling her about sawing the head off a woman’s corpse in a mausoleum and selling it to Satanists. Deck was more intrigued by this one.

Deck flashed a psychic Kodachrome for Carmel: This scruffy ghoul kid in that bone-cold house of death, down on one knee next to the cobwebby coffin. In the coffin, a headless withered mummy in rotted lace, her leathern-fingered hands crossed at the chest over bulges of material on the bodice that suggested they once enclosed ample breasts before those time-fragile tatas had sagged away into whatever they looked like now.

In the photo, the ghoul kid holds her severed head up in triumph, his breath a cloud of frozen steam ballooning in the frigid air. His fist is knotted in the head’s wavy coif of hair, the head’s mouth fallen open into a scream, exposing long yellow teeth jutting from the embalmed black gums in a perfect grill.

The ghoul kid is oblivious that the other dead in that cemetery — whose buried faces he had trudged across through filthy melting snow getting there — are writhing in their frozen coffins, laughing at him. Row after row of carcasses interred beneath snow-covered tombstones and monuments, within mausoleums and sepulchers, overflowing that icy graveyard’s subterranean darkness. They rattle with glee.

You cannot disrespect us, those Boise dead say to the ghoul kid. You will be with us soon enough. As Carmel’s vision ends, the laughing dead in the Deck’s snapshot rotate their bony gazes toward her. Deck interposes, and then they are gone.

The caller after the ghoul kid was an old lady in Baltimore eating cat food out of a can, wondering if her overdue Social Security check was coming the next day or not. Carmel hung up on her.

People telling her they were getting evicted and wondering if their dead spouse had hidden any valuables in the house. Single moms on welfare with no food in the cupboard, wondering if their ex was going to feed the kids soon. The hell with the fact the company had been threatening to drop her priority number if she did not step it up.

Deck liked Carmel’s staying on the line when the details were harsh. Deck fed off the readings; Carmel was still vague on the details. Deck had made her regret being curious before, so Carmel kept her questions to herself.

After Carmel hung up on the cat lady, the phone did not ring for a while. The tumble in her ranking had begun. She would be getting fewer and fewer calls. Deck would notice soon, but Carmel was not so worried about that anymore. They both knew they’d each die if they were ever separated, like conjoined twins.

Carmel made a fresh pot of coffee. She shuffled and dealt the cards into a Tetractys spread and then a Horseshoe, keeping her link to Deck open. Deck was borderline hot, and its wakeup thrum had grown to quite the vibration. They were firing on all cylinders tonight.

The phone rang.

“Psychic Dragon,” Carmel said, going for a seamlessly optimistic flow of words, steeled to milk the call hard. “What do you need to know tonight?”

“Well, I’m just wondering if the cards can tell when I’m going to get my daughter back.” The woman’s voice was strong but had the creak of an over-tightened guitar string.

Carmel opened Deck like a book: the Nine of Swords, showing a woman sitting bolt upright in her bed in the deep of the night, both hands pressed to her face, swords suspended in the darkness above her. Deck made the swords wiggle like they were about to fall, but it did not put much effort into the illusion. Deck was distracted.

Carmel said, “You’re worried about her.”

“No, actually I’m not.”

Carmel stropped Deck’s edge with her thumb, not feeling any vibes from Deck. Deck emitted an almost inaudible, unintelligible whisper. It was feeding on this call.

“I’m sure you two will be together again soon?” Carmel mouthed a silent curse at herself — she was asking rather than telling, a sin for anyone claiming to be psychic. Damn you, Deck.

“No,” the woman said. “The coroners in two counties told me they both have parts of her. I want to know when they’re going to give all of her back to me. I want to know if they really won’t be able to find her head in time for it to be buried with the rest of her.”

Carmel laid useless Deck down. “Tell me what happened.”

“Well, they say she was murdered,” the caller said, not mentioning Carmel was supposed to have the answers here. “They identified her from her tattoos. Sarah has a yellow sun inked on the small of her back, with blue birds flying over it. The Gila County sheriff has that part. Sarah has an angel on her right ankle; she always calls it her guardian. The coroner up in Flagstaff has that leg.”

Here was this woman in the darkest hour of her life, and the best she could muster up was Carmel, some faceless bimbo on the other end of a phone connection siphoning a dollar a minute off her phone bill. “I’m Carmel. Who’re you?”

“Irene.”

“Where’s the rest of your family, Irene?”

“Well, my son’s here, sleeping in the extra bedroom. But he’s less than helpful. He says, me being a bad mother means it’s my fault Sarah’s dead.”

Carmel never remembered exactly what they talked about afterwards. But she stayed on the line a while, spieling the kind of soft hokum to Irene that she would to any severely wounded animal encountered at the side of the road. The call would make a decent addition to Carmel’s paycheck. But who would be crass enough to mention that fact?

When Carmel finished with Irene’s call, she tugged off her headset. When she stood up, the phone rang and her gaze riveted to it. Part of her wanted to run as far as she could from the loud piece of technology. Another part wanted to pick it up and listen to one more tale of desperation.

Deck emitted a subsonic throb so deep as to be a growl, which rattled the window. Deck pulsed with lavender light. Tendrils of ectoplasm extended in all directions from Deck like the tentacles of a sea anemone, wavering in time to the glowing pulses. Deck was fully awake and raring for more readings.

Carmel scowled. If Deck got too excited, they could kiss yet another renter’s cleaning deposit goodbye. She’d discovered that ectoplasm was impossible to get out of the carpets without an exorcism. She turned toward the door.

A disembodied face hovered in front of her, blocking her exit. Carmel cringed away from it; she hated when Deck did stuff like this. Then realization dawned: it was the face of Sarah’s killer.

The image pulsed in her face confrontationally. Deck was pissed. Deck actually cared about the grieving mother in Arizona. Deck wasn’t just being greedy this time.

Carmel studied the face: a narrow, ill-shaven mug, that of a man who’d failed at every endeavor he’d ever attempted. The sick need in his eyes repulsed her, and she was forced to look away from the face.

“I’m proud of you, Deck,” Carmel said. “There’s hope for you yet. Okay. You can feed on this one’s soul; I won’t stop you this time. But I’m not you, okay? I’m still stuck in the flesh and I’m running on fumes here. We’ll nail this beast when I get back.”

Deck subsided, but Carmel knew they weren’t done talking about this. The phone kept ringing as Carmel grabbed her jacket and exited the front door.

As Carmel commenced her walk around the block, she considered. She had always thought Deck utterly selfish, like a bird-murdering house cat. Deck’s seeming hunger for justice was a new development. Carmel liked it. A lot.

Psychic vigilante: Carmel could get used to the title, with Deck in her corner. She smiled as she walked, thinking about many possible titles she might have.