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  A SENSITIVE TIME

  LEE ISSEROW

  Copyright © 2017 Lee Isserow

  All rights reserved.

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  A Sensitive Time

  *

  His breathing was slow, soft, shallow, and she held him close as he slept. It had taken him three hours to stop crying. Three hours to stop blaming himself. Three hours to finally admit that there was nothing he could have done.

  She was still wide awake. The day had exhausted her, but caring for him in this time of need had sent her adrenaline surging, and it was still rocketing through her system. Her thoughts were like the wind making its way around a tree. Flowing one way then being split off in another direction, two or three directions at times, reconvening on the other side as something the same, and yet different.

  He needed her now more than ever, and she knew it. He was always the strong one, always the one who looked after her, helping her with the crisis of the day or week or month. Always level headed, always a rock.

  Yet this, the death of his mother, the death of the one family member he had left, was the straw that broke the proverbial camel. And not just its back, the whole damn thing. Every limb fractured, its belly torn open, the organs flopping out, fluids of one kind or another oozing out in a puddle around the poor thing's dishevelled corpse.

  He could get better. He would get better. She reminded herself that these things take time. Reminded herself that time heals all wounds, that time flies like an arrow, that time is the longest distance between two places, that time... is a created thing. That time is an illusion.

  Her thoughts were doing it again, going on that journey and coming back changed. Those thoughts, those quotes, she wasn't even sure where they were coming from. They were the kind of thing he would say. He always had a good memory for sayings and so forth, always seemed to be able to pull exactly the right one out at the right time. It was like he had memorised those little books of wisdom they sell by checkouts, even though he swore he hadn't.

  He would get better, she reminded herself, putting her thoughts back on track. That was all that mattered.

  He moved in his sleep, let out a longer breath. There was something on the air as it escaped his lips. Something she had never felt before. A notion, a feeling, that didn't quite seem as though it were her own.

  She ignored it. She needed to sleep. Tomorrow would be a new day, the grief would be just that little bit smaller. The day after that smaller still, and on and on until rather than mourning his mother's passing, he would just miss her. One day, he might forget about her all together.

  But it would be a long time until then, she reminded herself, closing her eyes, willing herself into unconsciousness.

  Another long exhale from him.

  Her eyes opened wide. This time it was unmistakable.

  It could have been a fraction of a dream, she tried to pretend as such, but deep down knew that it was real. She waited again for him to breath. The inhale had nothing on it, and he held it for what felt like an eternity. And then out it came. A long, soft sigh. And she had no idea how she knew it, but she did.

  He killed her.

  *

  It wasn't malicious. He loved his mother, that was clear. But he hated the pain she was in.

  He doubled up her meds. His mother protested of course, knew her dose, it had been the same for the best part of the year. But he assured her that the doctors had told him that she was to take more, to alleviate the agony, to make her more comfortable.

  She could see it in the old woman's eyes, watching through his eyes. There was disbelief, not about the doctor at least. But there was something in his face, something that told her that one way or another, the pain would be gone if she did as she was told. So she took the extra meds with no further argument or questions.

  He waited outside her door. There was a steely calm that took him over. A calm that felt so familiar. He took deep breaths, checking in on her until she passed out. Then he took the pillow from under her head. The old woman already looked at peace. This was just a small act, to allow that peace to continue.

  She didn't struggle. Her breath was already weak, it didn't take long until there was no breath at all. Then he placed the pillow back under her head. Held his mother's hand in his. Said goodbye.

  *

  His exhale ceased and she was back in the room, in the bed, holding him close.

  It wasn't real, it couldn't be real.

  A dream, it must have been a dream, even if it were only for a split second.

  Yet she knew it wasn't.

  And she knew what this meant she was.

  It was all over the news. She wasn't the only one.

  He exhaled again. And she took in more of his memories.

  And she remembered that his mother wasn't the only one either.

  *

  He had done it before, and not just to family members, but to strangers too.

  It wasn't a daily activity, he wasn't that prolific, it was only when he couldn't contain the urge any longer. He fought it, he fought it so very hard, tried to stave off the dark notions that crept through the dank, inky black swamps that fettered and rotted and bubbled away in the back of his mind. But it was always a battle he lost.

  Old age homes were easy pickings, they were under-funded, under-staffed, he could slip in and out with barely anyone noticing him. He had done it ever since he was a child, and would do it until the day he died. He knew it. He had accepted that this vile part of himself had a hunger that needed to be sated, and as long as it didn't harm anyone young and vibrant, with a full life ahead of them, he was okay with the occasional slip, an indiscretion, a pillow over the face every now and then.

  *

  The breath ended. And she came out of the memories wondering who this person was, the man who slept beside her, who had slept beside her every night for the last six years. He wasn't that man, this awful person lying in their bed. That man was kind, he was gentle, he was a beautiful soul.

  That man, she realised, never existed.

  He was putting on a mask, a facade, he was the charismatic leading man in a play and she was right in the front row. That mask had never slipped. Not whilst he was awake.

  But now, now that she had the first inklings of this gift, a gift that she knew would likely turn into a curse if the papers could be believed, she was seeing right through his theatrical make up, seeing the actor behind it. And she didn't like him one bit.

  He exhaled.

  *

  She was a good mate, he thought, when he first met her. Nice to look at, a bit on the frail side emotionally, but he could deal with that. He did love her, in his own way, she could feel that coming through with the memory. But it wasn't anything close to the way she loved him. It wasn't real love. It was functional. And the sex was good, he liked the sex.

  He watched her sleep sometimes, when the darkness reared its head. He would watch her, listen to her breath, and clutch the pillow beneath his head. It would be so easy, so very easy. She wasn't a fighter, she'd barely fight at all. But he hadn't let himself give in. She was too precious, part of his well-crafted facade. He couldn't risk that. Not yet.

  *

  The sound of his exhale disappeared into the night, and once more she was pulled out and back into the real world. Her body was two steps ahead of her mind, had already rolled on top of him, her knees pinning his hands to the bed, the pillow in her hands, held with all her strength over his face.

  He struggled longer than his mother. Certainly fought more than she did, more than any of them did. He was always the stro
ng one, she reminded herself, always level headed, always a rock.

  With time, and not that much time, he was no longer fighting. She could no longer hear his breath, no longer remember his memories.

  She pulled the pillow away and looked at his face, so still, so panicked. She had never seen that look on his face before. But she had seen it on the face of so many others he had euthanised over the years

  And then, it came to her.

  That the action was not hers. His death was not at her hands.

  It was at the hands of his memories, his personality traits borrowed, personality traits that were dissipating as the realisation came up on her with a chill that he was dead. That it was all his fault that it was all her fault. His dark notions swimming through her head, in and out and gone with the wind.

  But, of course, the police would never believe that.

  *

  A Sensitive Time is a prequel to the novel Touch Sensitive, available exclusively from ABAM.info

  SYNOPSIS

  *

  John Ballard is a PI with a condition. One in a million born with a sensitivity. 

  He absorbs the memories of whatever or whoever he touches. 

  The cops call him in to help on a case, a gruesome and inexplicably artistic murder that only someone with his gift can solve. 

  But absorbing the memories of the mutilated body is going to send John's life spiralling out of control, force him to cross every line, betray everyone who trusts him.

  He doesn't just want to find the killer - he needs to find her - because the one thing that's clear about the woman behind the crime, is that she's a sensitive too.  

  And the more he learns about this mysterious woman that shares his gift, the more he's convinced he's in love with her, and will do whatever it takes to keep the police off her scent.

  An exclusive preview of Touch Sensitive

  *

  Ever since I discovered my sensitivity, shit has done its very best to turn up on my doorstep. Today’s shit is a missing girl. But rather than doing anything practical to track her down, I’m stuck here, waiting.

  Waiting is the majority of the job. I’ve become a little too good at it. Sitting or standing just out of view, sometimes even in plain sight. The key is to think yourself invisible, passive enough to be ignored. Inconspicuous. Nonchalant. You get good at word games and coming up with synonyms when most days are nothing but killing time. Without them, all this loitering isn’t great for one’s sanity. The mind wanders whilst the body lies fallow.

  I’m sat on a lone wooden bench inexplicably placed on a small patch of suburban wasteland. There used to be grass and trees here, a visual respite from the surrounding buildings, hiding behind a knee-high redbrick wall.

  Sometime recently, the council had some money to burn, an underspend that needed to be overspent. They ripped up the grass, shifted a few trees, and dumped tarmac down to make a path. A slim island of grass still remains, a few feet wide by maybe ten feet long, but it looks like someone clumsy took a sledgehammer at the wall to let the path meet the street. Not that much money to waste, obviously, or they would have made it all pretty. Maybe these days this is the city equivalent of woodland. A dogshit-stained oasis. A little bit of green to relax the eyes from the monotopian greys and browns that lie beyond its borders.

  I’m loitering just off a nice street, South Bedford. They call this the Georgian Quarter, and if the facades were more cared for, they’d probably feel illustrious, affluent, erudite. But the house I’m staring at hasn’t been painted for years. Brickwork cracking, paint peeling from the door and window frames. No longer are these the million-pound houses fit for wealthy families. They’ve long since been broken up into apartments, as many as can be shoved into the weary, flayed skin of once-great buildings. Rooms constructed of thin plasterboard walls, a former magnificent sitting room turned into an open-plan lounge and kitchen, two bed and bath. That’s how we live these days—either sharing a fraction of a relic from a bygone era, or in a newly constructed cube that lacks anything close to character or charisma. A soulless void with some IKEA trimmings to make it something close to habitable. Desmond Morris knew this was coming, that Western society was building itself a zoo. He saw the isolation epidemic decades before it had a hashtag, Spotify ads, and support line.

  This level of isolation is an amorphous beast, thriving on dark thoughts, growing in the crevices of the subconscious. Spreading roots through the unobserved, backward swamps of neural tissue. Laying foundations of loneliness with a mighty thicket of demonic foliage. Stretching contorted vines, night-blooming flowers blossoming from thorny black stems. Sickly, putrefied pollen of despondence carried on the gentle breeze of absentminded thoughts, whisked on a forlorn wind of half-remembered nightmares. A weakened mind is prone to an allergic reaction, an assimilation of those twisted, sorrowful notions as one’s own.

  Knowing that those crippling, chronic, paralysing feelings of dejection aren’t your own doesn’t make it any better. There’s no easy or quick fix. Not if you don’t have a support system or the faculties to escape a self-destructive mindscape. You start to become invisible. Disappear in plain sight. To catch eye contact from a stranger gets the paranoia bubbling. “Why would they be looking at me?”

  Another smoke will clear the air. Figuratively, at least. Sitting in one place for too long can be mad-making. A casual observation becomes a rant becomes a deconstruction. All presented in a soliloquy, to an audience of one that already knows the lines, reading from the same damn page. Therapy was not helpful. It encouraged this, if anything.

  I’ve been here for close to two hours. If patience is a virtue, what does that make waiting? The path to equanimity? An off-ramp for the potentially virtuous? Eleven cigarette butts lie by my feet, the twelfth soon to join them. Normal people have watches; I have I am, etched into my bones, the grain in the wood. smoking as my sundial, cancer as my copilot. I know I should stop, but at thirty-something, I’ve been smoking for more years than I haven’t. It’s part of who And if I stopped, how would I get through all this waiting? Other PIs have a healthy podcast addiction, but the only ones I listen to tend to result in laughter, and a guy giggling to himself doesn’t make great for inconspicuous. Plus, I got to keep my head in the game.

  He intended to return in twenty to thirty minutes. That was a half hour or so before I got here. Junkies can’t keep time for shit, unless it’s for their appointment at the dole office. That’s unfair, a broad statement. I should appreciate a day sitting outside in the sun, right? Even if I can only glimpse it through the canopy of leaves above. Be happy that it’s not grey or cold or raining.

  But there’s a girl missing. Every second could count, and I’ve wasted 7,200 seconds sitting here waiting for this shitbag to get back. I think about moving, going back to his door, getting another read on it. Maybe I missed something.

  Maybe he left a memory of where he was going. People do that, when they’re thinking clearly. Unfortunately, his mind was a thick, opiate sludge. Like trying to find a needle in a rotting, pulsating, oozing haystack of disjointed thoughts, decisions, intents. Sense memories seen through a fog of drug-seeking aimlessness and distraction. I don’t know how these people function. Fifteen minutes becoming two hours. Time stretched, contorted, every second elongated beyond recognition. There’s probably a Nobel Prize waiting in the wings for whoever figures out the correlation between junkie time and normal time.

  If only the building didn’t have a key fob entry, a magnetic lock on the door, I could have been in and out by now. An hour and a half closer to finding her. Need to learn about RFID frequencies, work out how to hack them. Been waxing lyrical about investing time and money into that shit for nigh on ever. Times like these, it’d be handy. Yet I keep putting it off—as if I’ve got other, more important things going on.

  In all honesty, nothing is more important than the work. Yet I procrastinate from learning things that would be handy to the job. Sensitivity
has made me apathetic. Knowing the deepest, darkest thoughts and the most closely guarded memories of strangers has made me hate the world around me. Hate people—all of them. Everyone seems to have something they’re ashamed of, or something they should be ashamed of, that they keep locked up deep inside. Not deep enough, though, when someone like me is around.

  There are no secrets you can keep from a sensitive.

  2

  Another cigarette meets my boot heel as he finally returns. Looks different to the image of himself I got from the read. In the sense memory, he was more clean-cut, cleaner in general, with designer stubble and coiffed hair. His imagined self is probably built on facets of his former self; doesn’t slouch, his hair isn’t thinning, his clothes don’t look like hand-me-downs from a hobo. It’s amazing how different people’s perceptions of themselves are to the truth. Everyone is like that, not just junkies. As a species, they seem to have perceptual dysmorphia about their appearances.

  We, not they. I’m still human, I am human. Even though it’s increasingly difficult to remember that—or hard to admit it, given the filth I crawl through on an almost daily basis . . .

  Dysmorphia, that’s only usually a diagnosis for people with eating disorders, the ones who look at their skeletal frames in a mirror and still feel like they need to lose another ten pounds. Sensitives, we see everyone else’s distorted perceptions. After this long, the way we see ourselves has pretty much lined up with reality. We’re maybe the only ones who see ourselves as we really are, and in truth, it’s yet another checked box in the long list of reasons why this is a damn curse. Delusion, fantasy of one’s appearance would be nice every now and then.

  God, he’s taking forever getting to that door. Tiny, snail-pace footsteps, like he’s thinking long and hard about each one. Heel-toe, heel-toe. He’s moving slow, but erratically, looking over his shoulder like he’s expecting to be followed, stopped, searched. Obviously doesn’t know that when you look as suspicious as this fettered dickspurt, you’re more likely to get stopped than not. He’s clutching the record bag hanging off his bony shoulder like his life depends on it. There’s probably a brick in there, already cut with powdered milk, maybe caffeine. When he bags it up, he’ll cut it down again for sure, with flour or talc, I reckon. Cheap and dumb cutting.