AnnaBeth's chest rose and fell slowly, her body on automatic pilot while her brain skipped town. I stared at her face for a few minutes, memorizing the shape of her skull — things can change on the Other Side, but generally the skull stays the same. She had a flat face, her cheekbones nearly perpendicular lines down the front of her head. A cosmetic surgeon had done some work to her nose so that it wasn't such a prominent point on her face and her lips, while full, weren't swollen with wasp toxins or pork fat or whatever the hell was the current injection treatment of the day.
She was tall, topping my 5'10" by at least two inches and she picked up another two inches from her Italian leather shoes. I took them off her feet and massaged her toes for a little while because I could. Her skin was warm and soft. Recent pedicure too.
There was no reaction — involuntary or otherwise — when I pulled hard on the little toe of her left foot. She was ready.
I washed down the slow release tablet with a large glass of filtered water — it would be three hours before the gel cap ruptured and lit my stomach on fire — and laid out the chemical regime required to get me in AnnaBeth's head. After injecting and snorting everything, I lay down on the cot next to her and nuzzled my face into the hollow of her neck, breathing her scent deeply as I waited for the separation.
It gets easier every time.
I was in the mid-60s of my mental countdown from one hundred when a pinwheel of lights exploded through my eyelids, outlining the room like a photographic negative, and my skin erupted in a thousand points of goose flesh. My cock went hard instantly, and there was a hard pop of changing air pressure against my eardrums as I pierced the thin veil of reality and fell into her brain. Vertigo assailed me and I ran through a couple of Tantric chants to reset my equilibrium. As I leveled out, I opened my eyes and, while waiting for them to solidify, I examined the subtle differences in the room. The wallpaper and carpet were purposefully bland and, as the room had no window, there wasn't any daylight to ignite my translucent eyes. There is a reason most native shamans do trans- reality travel after nightfall: the shadows are your friends until your spirit completes the transference. Light has a tendency to get in through the cracks and wreak havoc on the soft spots.
AnnaBeth was gone. I was mildly surprised. Most of my clients don't have the spiritual faculties to do a Houdini on me, but there have been a few.
Sofie, for one.
I shook my head. I had been thinking about hauntings, thinking about AnnaBeth's claim as I had split the veil. Suggestibility came with the territory. You have to be careful to not let yourself get too influenced by your environment. You have to be cautious of your own guilt and nightmares: they grab any hook they can. It's best to remain focused: I had three hours until the pill in my belly broke and my stomach acids went ape-shit on the homeopathic solution that would snap me back to meatspace. I stood up and went out into my office.
AnnaBeth had really done a runner. She wasn't there either. The east-facing window was open, the cheap Levolour blinds knocked askew, and a small breeze was coming in from the fire escape.
I geared up — gun, hat and the old knuckles of my patron saint — and climbed out onto the narrow metal balcony. In AnnaBeth's world, the air smelled like it only rained at night and, by midday, the only hint remaining of the previous night's rainfall was how metal still smelled cold after a few hours in the weak morning sun. The fire escape creaked and groaned underneath me as I climbed up to the roof. Subtle differences. I knew the fire escape was solid. I had rebolted it myself earlier this year, but AnnaBeth didn't know that and her perception of fire escapes on old brownstones was that they were all ready to fall off. You have to be cognizant of the subtle differences. You are, after all, not in your own head.
There was a pigeon coop on the roof, straight out of a '40s noir film. Several uncaged pigeons rose up in surprise as I came over the edge of the roof, the sound of their wings shattering the crisp silence of the air.
AnnaBeth was waiting for me next to the coop, a wide-eyed pigeon held tightly in her hand. She was naked and the flesh along her left flank was smooth and unmarred. The distortion in her body started at the shoulders, her collarbones forced outward like cracked rock to make space for a second head. Her right one was normal, very much like the head I had been staring at a little while ago, and her left was gaunt and starved. The right seemed to be asleep and the left glared at me with visible hatred and hunger while her hands stroked the pigeon with manic fervor.
"Hello, little sister," I said.
The eyelids on her right head fluttered but didn't open.
"She can't hear you," the left head said. Her voice was flat and hard like stones skipping across a pond. "She doesn't want to hear you."
"That's alright," I said. "I wanted to talk to you anyway." I moved closer, drifting casually forward as I spoke. I kept my hands in plain view, giving nothing away as I approached the naked two-headed woman. "It's been a long time since anyone has talked to you."
The motion of her hands stopped for a second and her left head nodded. "A long time."
"Can you tell me what happened?" I asked.
She shook her head. "She knows," she said, her eyes rolling towards the other slumbering head. "Ask her."
"I can't do that right now, can I? So I'm asking you." I had come five steps closer; close enough for hand-to-hand combat if it came to that. Close enough for the gun. I flexed my shoulder blades and felt the muscles in my left arm jump, just enough to bring the handle of the gun forward.
She anticipated my next move. Her right hand rose up, knifing towards the sky while her left rotated in a clockwise direction and hurled the startled pigeon at me.
Not as startled as I. I had barely gotten the gun out of its holster when her avian projectile hit me. She had shaped the bird into a missile and its wings never even opened as it flew at me like a softball champion's record-breaking fastball. The gun went off, the shot going wild, and the other loose pigeons took flight in a spasm of white and grey feathers. I stumbled back against the brick-layered wall of the building's decrepit elevator, the fedora falling down on my face.
The bitch had javelined me with a pigeon.
The bird came out of its stunned state as its head pierced my side and it started banging its wing against my chest and arm. I pushed the hat out of my eyes and, making an effort to ignore the bird embedded in my side, I tried to get off a shot at the two-headed naked lady before she could throw another bird at me.
AnnaBeth's left head ignored me and her right lolled unconsciously, looking back at me with its silent eyes as she ran towards the edge of the roof, a pigeon clutched in either hand. With her arms spread wide, she leaped off the roof. She didn't fall; she just dipped a little and then rose back up, her golden hair streaming out behind her as she flew off.
I got a hand on a wing of the bird in my side and yanked the pigeon free, feeling the hot pulse of blood from the hole left in my chest. I heard the bird's wing snap as I tossed it aside and it flopped on the rooftop, its head stained red with my blood.
I staggered like a drunken prizefighter to the edge of the roof and fired a few shots. AnnaBeth twitched once, a dark line creasing her naked ass, and a pink mist rose up in her wake — a drifting vapor trail that I could follow.
It's funny how people react to dream states, even when they know they are in one. I knew I could fly, just as easily as she was, but I had never been able to do it, never quite had the mental acuity and wherewithal to trust myself enough to stay aloft. But I had no trouble flying in a vehicle. There was something about the persistence of a conveyance that gave me the security I needed to transverse the air.
I summoned a ghost cab and, while it formed out of the available ambiance of dust particles, I dressed my wound with spider silk from the dark corners of the pigeon coop.
Lancelot. Jesus Christ. The King in Winter. These sorts of wounds never healed well. Not the haunted ones.