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Welcome to our Web Exclusive section. Each month we will be bringing to you poetry, flash fiction, columns and more! With that, we welcome you to our January exclusives!
New England Reveries
Josef Desade
A soft respite as winter retreats,
A teasing soft breath; conversation piece.
Trees that sway to and fro,
An ominous vision that storm clouds sow.
Dirt stained
The world void of color
Grayscale
Soft patter of footsteps
Cloven hooves
December reveries
Amongst false awakenings
Somnolent whispers; hastening
Stained cotton, mark of the beast
December dreams...
Find more of Josef Desade here!
Quantum Traveler
E. W. Farnsworth
Dr. Fosgold, the psychiatrist, considered the young lady who lay constrained in a straitjacket on her bed. She was sweating profusely with her eyes wide, with burly orderlies on either side of her awaiting instructions.
“So, Karen, let’s walk through your vision one more time so I can understand the horror you have been through.”
The woman looked to her right and her left as she tugged at her jacket and worked at her tongue with her teeth.
“You were telling me how you had just returned from visiting your mother-in-law’s house.”
“I told you I killed the bitch for having me declared incompetent and incarcerated here.”
“Yet you have been confined to your bed in this hospital for the last two months.”
“I know what I know, Dr. Fosgold. Have the police visit my mother-in-law’s place to verify what I told you is true?”
“Again, Karen, please tell me the truth as you recall it.”
She drew a deep breath and then spoke word-for-word what he had already heard four separate times since her awakening: “I arrived at Mrs. Crabble’s house after the time she usually went to bed. I found her sewing materials in the usual box and selected her pinking shears and her sharp-nosed scissors. I ascended the stairs with those tools and went right to her bedroom where I found her sleeping. I stabbed out her eyes with the pointed scissors before she could react. Then I used the pinking shears to mark her body’s private parts while she screamed like a pig and bled out. She tried to reach out for me, but she fell to the floor all bloodied and crawled blind to the top of the stairs where she tumbled down to the bottom and lay still. I laughed so hard that I cried, and when I stopped crying I lay here again. Your minions, standing on either side of me, filled me with drugs, and they must have called you. Then you arrived and your interrogation began.”
The psychiatrist held Karen’s gaze for a moment. He said in an even voice, “The first time you told me your story, I called the police. A constable went to the Crabble residence and discovered the mutilated body of your mother-in-law lying in the condition you stated. The entire house has been declared a crime scene, but unless your presence there can be proven without a doubt, you cannot be judged a suspect. Your ex has sworn you had a motive for killing his mother, and he avers you have the strength and will to have done the deed. I am going to advise you to seek legal counsel, but frankly I cannot see any way the state can bring you to trial for murder even though you should shout from the rooftops that you did the deed.”
Karen slowly shook her head. Then she wept with copious tears and deep groans.
“Why are you weeping, young lady?”
“Not from grief at the vicious woman’s demise or from relief I am not to be considered the prime suspect. I am weeping because of what comes next.”
“And what will that be, Karen?” He was about to apply a stethoscope to her chest as a precaution.
“You shall see, doctor. I am not sure what comes next myself, but I know it will be logical and, more than that, just.” As she began to chortle thinking about the comedy of the situation she was in, she said, “It’s comical. Can’t you see that?”
The psychiatrist gesture to the orderlies to increase the dosage of the anti-psychosis solution that fed into the IV in her arm. He watched as her eyes fluttered before she succumbed to her meds.
The murder of Mrs. Crabble became a case of mysterious death before it became a cold case in the police files. Dr. Fosgold began to regard Karen’s confession as prescient wishful thinking. He stepped back on her medicine dosages. Then she began to dream again in technicolor.
“So, Karen, what is the substance of these new dreams of yours?”
The young lady was looking wild this morning. She looked for her minders, who were standing on either side of her bed.
“I have been seeing my husband out with a new whore, whom he brings to our home every night. I have noticed how he keeps a loaded pistol in the night table drawer by his side of our bed. I have seen him and his whore laughing and joking about my being a shut-in for the rest of my life. I have been plotting how to kill him using his own gun. Will you tell him about this?”
“Karen, our conversations are strictly private. I tell your husband nothing about them. If you want to warn him, we can summon the police, but I would advise against it. The police cannot go chasing after every idle threat emanating from a mental institution like this one. Do you think murdering your husband is necessary?”
“The more I examine Robert’s life, the more reprehensible and vile a creature he seems. At this point, I do not think I can restrain myself any longer. He and his whore must die.” Karen got a wicked smile on her face. As an afterthought, she said, “I suppose I have just earned an extra dose of Lithium for what I just said.” She watched as the doctor confirmed her suspicion by gesturing to the minions to increase the dosage in the drip.
Karen’s dreams became increasingly vivid and alarming. They built to a crescendo where the woman thought she was handling her husband’s weapon, aiming it just above his ear as he slept. She tried her best to handle the weapon’s recoil, but her shot was close enough to take off the top of Robert’s head. The whore was shrieking about the blood spattered all over her face and hair. The gun spoke again, jammed as it was down the woman’s throat. Karen wiped her hands in the mess of blood and brains of both victims. She carried the weapon down the stairs and across the property. She instinctively buried the piece in a drainage ditch. When she came to in the insane asylum, she was, as always, soaked in sweat and laughing.
As in the case of the murder of Mrs. Crabble, the psychiatrist first verified his patient’s story by having her repeat it to him many times while he telephoned the police to report the possible murder of Mr. Robert Crabble and his female friend at his residence. The police verified the attack in every detail except they could not find the murder weapon. No matter where the investigators dug in the drainage system, no gun was found.
The odd angles of the three murders caused Dr. Fosgold to consider engaging extraordinary people to fathom the mysteries. He therefore telephoned a doctor friend who worked for a classified government agency to discuss the details.
Dr. Asplundh was pleased to hear from her old friend and classmate Dr. Fosgold. He was only just broaching the reason for his call when Asplundh cut him off, suggesting they should plan to meet at a house her agency leased in the vicinity of the asylum. So, the two met the following day and talked for four hours in the agency safe house, which had all the security safeguards of a highly classified facility.
Asplundh asked for—and received—copies of the psychiatrist’s case notes. Then she combed through those notes with him, making a new set of notes of her own. She told him she would have to do some classified research before they talked again, and she told him her agency would do a background work-up on him so he could become privy to the results of her research.
Dr. Fosgold was given a list of details to ferret out of the Crabble family records while Asplundh did her investigations. Chief among her interests were the profession and activities of Robert Crabble. It did not take long for the psychiatrist to discover that Dr. Robert Crabble was a quantum physicist, and the woman who had been cohabiting with him when he was killed was a paranormal researcher for the Central Intelligence Agency.
Before Asplundh arranged heir next face-to-face meeting, she called Fosgold to resolve a minor issue of his misdemeanor for marijuana usage as an undergrad. She apologized about the depth of the background investigation being done on him, but she assured him it was necessary as a prelude to his being granted clearance and the need to know to solve the mysteries.
Dr. Fosgold was granted a top-secret clearance with a set of caveats into which Dr Asplund briefed him at the safe house. His four caveats were earmarked for quantum experimentation (dreams), dimensional time parsing, tactile distortion and remote viewing.
Asplundh explained Karen’s experiences were stemming from her involvement in her estranged husband’s scientific research. She said, “I must know about the highly classified practical work her husband was doing. I have already requested his file and the file of his CIA assistant. I should be able to review those with you at our next meeting. I know this is onerous for you.”
“You have just informed me that I will be terminated if I divulge any of the materials we shall be discussing. Why should I find that onerous? Just kidding! Anyway, how do you see everything fitting together?”
“Your patient must be moved to the second floor of this safe house for one week. Do you have any problem with that?”
“No. We can move her monitors, hospital bed and drip equipment here. I will stay here as well so we don’t have to worry about briefings for her normal orderlies.”
“Good. As to what she was involved in: at minimum, she was programmed for dream wandering and remote viewing and for affecting objects in distant locations. These are military applications of quantum mechanics.”
“Does this mean she can be charged with the three murders we know about?”
“Fortunately and unfortunately, no. The fact that our government has perfected these methods cannot be divulged in an ordinary court of law. Your patient doubtless has capabilities that surpass those of many of our agency practitioners. How we are going to deal with her future actions has me worried.”
The next meeting at the safe house occurred just after Karen’s relocation there. Asplundh herself handled her debriefing. The woman’s husband had sent her on numerous clandestine missions as well as criminal missions. It was clear that Robert had the motive to silence his wife for what she knew, yet he did not kill her. Asplundh deduced Robert had a reason for keeping his wife alive. She surmised he wanted to “change horses” to work with the comely CIA agent who died with him.
Asplundh’s elicitation included the knowledge that Mrs. Crabble was the instigator of Kaaren’s incarceration, saying, “My daughter-in-law is my son’s insurance in case his misdeeds should ever be discovered.” In other words, Karen could be blamed for all her husband’s crimes since she was the human agent behind them.
Besides having the young woman fill in details of how she was trained and what she did to accomplish the three murders, Asplundh gauged Karen’s motives for killing others. She told Dr. Fasgold, “Karen Crabble should be harmless since she has killed the people who betrayed her. In future, anyone who seems a threat could become a target, so I am going to recommend placing her in a classified psychiatric facility capable of conducting implemented interrogation periodically to gauge her current motivation. As she has no family and no friends, we must cultivate people for her to associate with.”
Dr. Fasgold handled the logistics for Karren’s transport to a secret annex of a naval hospital in the Washington, DC, area. Once he had turned his patient over to Asplundh’s psychiatric team, he was debriefed and allowed to reenter his normal practice. He thought his problems were over.
Three weeks after his return to the asylum, Fasgold had strange dreams. Those dreams at first involved the three murders Karen had accomplished. He felt as if he were experiencing her murders with the same level of detail and determination his patient had known. So vivid were his dreams, he telephoned Asplundh to share his concerns with her.
“Dr. Fasgold, please take copious notes about the dreams, particularly about any changes you discern in them. Meanwhile, I shall monitor Karen to see whether she is orchestrating what you are experiencing.”
Dr. Fasgold was aghast to discover that the persona in his dreams was rapidly transforming into a female. He experienced the first murder, not as a man, but as Karen herself. In a similar fashion, he—again, as Karen—killed Robert and his assistant. Further, he followed in the aftermath of the murders to the location in the drainage ditch where Karen had buried the murder weapon. He awakened in a cold sweat and raced out to find the place where the gun was buried. It was, indeed, right where he had learned it would be. He wrapped the gun in a towel and placed it in a shoebox, which he installed in his bank’s lock box.
Dr. Fasgold felt the hormonal changes his transformation were orchestrating. He knew that every day he was becoming a little more like Karen. Now his dreams shifted to the two orderlies who had stood by Karen’s bed. They had threatened her, and she now wanted to get her revenge. Syringes full of fentanyl became the psychiatrist’s weapons for eliminating those two sentinels. They succumbed to the overdoses before anyone guessed at the cause.
Asplundh was distraught when she received the news from her friend. “I have bad news for you as well, Dr. Fasgold” she said. “While you have become increasingly female, your former patient has become increasingly male. In fact, she has even taken on your appearance. I suspect there is a method in her madness. Because she cannot escape her classified sanitarium, she is substituting herself for you and vice versa.”
The deaths of the two orderlies were being solved as unintentional suicides through drug overdoses. The next mysterious death was more difficult to account for. Dr. Fasgold entered the lodging of the judge who had pronounced Karen incompetent. Dr. Fasgold saw the recognition and fear in the judge’s eyes as he succumbed to strangulation. Then Fasgold eliminated the director of the asylum and the director’s wife with the help of a scalpel to each of their carotid arteries. Those three unaccountable murders excited a full-court-press to find the murderer and bring him or her to justice. The problem was that the DNA evidence was not that of Fasgold but of one Karen Cabbble, a former patient who had gone missing.
Asplundh warned against Fasgold’s refusal to retreat to the sanctuary where he had placed his former patient. The psychiatrist, however, insisted that he had to overcome the monster that was rising up inside of him. Meanwhile, Asplundh stood a four-person watch team to monitor Karen’s vital signs. In her work-ups she discovered that Karen now had the unmistakable DNA signature of Dr. Fasgold. The breakthrough quantum exchange had been made on the life-code level. The scientist’s brain reeled to consider the implications, but she had to find practical solutions to the threats this capability represented.
Asplundh asked Fasgold to meet her at the safe house, but she was accompanied by a team of six from her agency. She was taking no chances against the potential implications of the transformation her friend was undergoing. When she arrived there, she found Dr. Fasgold was now Karen Crabble in everything but the clothing.
“Shall I call you Dr. Fasgold or Karen Crabble?”
The female figure laughed. “I was trained that such an exchange was possible, but I had no idea what it would feel like making it work.”
“Who are your designated targets, Karen?”
“I won’t be able to tell you until I am on the hunt. My actions are being controlled by my lab director.”
“And who would that be when he is at home, Karen?”
“Dr. Stephen Berg of the CIA’s Quantum Lab, of course. By your brilliance and reputation, I thought you would have deduced that by now.”
“Berg must have been the instigator of your having been supplemented by his own lab rat.”
“Good girl! That’s the Asplundh I have heard of. I suppose now you can guess my next target?”
“I’d guess the same Stephen Berg.”
“Right you are! And you know why.”
“Because he wrecked your marriage to Robert?”
“My marriage was foundering on the rocks when he edged that slut of his into the middle of it.”
“Are you going to tell me how you plan to do it?”
“Only if you send your goons out of this building before I do.”
Dr. Asplundh immediately told her team to step outside, and they followed her order.
“They are gone for now. Are you going to tell me?”
“I am going to execute a flawless DNA exchange as I did with your Dr. Fasgold.”
“And I suppose you can do such a quantum exchange between any two points in the universe?”
“Yes, and amongst the seven dimensions of time as well.”
“And all you have to do is sleep, perchance to dream?”
“Precisely.”
“Will you show me? Right now?”
Karen smiled and nodded. She sat in the only chair in the room and instantly fell asleep. Asplundh snapped her fingers to be sure Karen was in deep sleep. Then she brought out a syringe full of fentanyl and injected the entire contents into Karen’s arm.
The young woman’s corpse relaxed entirely. Dr. Asplundh then summoned her team, who gently shifted Kareen’s body to a gurney they had retrieved from their emergency van.
Asplundh then called her director and said they were bringing a dream of dreaming the future home with them.