Broken Mirror

By Alekto

I don't own anything to do with 'The Dead Zone'. I'm just borrowing the characters for a while. This is written from Johnny's POV and takes place during the first season. Grateful thanks are due to Jane and Julia for their time and trouble in beta reading this for me. Any mistakes left are all mine.

Overall I'd rate this as PG-13.

Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell;

And in the lowest deep a lower deep

Still threat'ning to devour me opens wide,

To which the Hell I suffer seems a Heav'n.

From 'Paradise Lost', book 4, 1.75-8 by John Milton

Chapter 1

As a child I'd never liked the rain. It had meant I'd had to stay inside when I'd far rather have been running around and playing.

The car crash six years ago had put an end to my running around, playing hockey, anything like that. A car crash and six years locked away from the world in a coma had put an end to so many things, and so many relationships. Friends had moved on or moved away. My fiancée, Sarah, had ended up getting married but not to me. Her husband was the local sheriff, Walt Bannerman, who seemed to be a decent, fair-minded man. Sometimes, at night in the dark when I couldn't help but remember how alone I was, I sometimes wished he wasn't so likeable. It would have been so much easier to hate him.

Everything had changed with my waking up - especially me. I see things now that other people don't see, that I didn't see before the car crash and the coma. Call it what you will: second sight, ESP, precognition, psychometry, or any of a dozen other names, but I ended up gifted or cursed with visions of the future, of the past, of other places, of events that would happen, or events that would with my intervention never happen.

My 'talent' helped my former fiancee's husband catch a murderer. And saved his life. Still, it's not really felt to be entirely respectable for the police to consult a psychic, is it? How many sceptics believe that what I do, what I see, is hardly a step up from auguring the future from the entrails of slaughtered animals ... or even witchcraft?

Nowadays, though, I like the rain: its freshness, the sound it makes beating against the roof, the jewel-like glistening of wet leaves as they catch the light, the way it offers insulation from a sometimes too intrusive outside world.

As a child I'd seen only cause and effect, as children do, and I'd missed out on the ephemeral beauty of a rain storm.

*********

The rain that had started late that night had been more high drama than art. It had beaten down with relentless fury, sluicing down the sides of buildings, creating miniature torrents in gutters and along the roads. Passing cars threw up sheets of water as they cut through the rain soaked streets. The streets, deserted of pedestrians had been abandoned to the elements.

The early evening had been one of the cool, crisp evenings of a summer that was gradually sliding into autumn. The pleasant, balmy heat of a New England summer was a distant memory as the chill Atlantic air offered mute warning of the winter to come. The sky had been clear, the air still, as people had made their way home. The bright chatter and unselfconscious laughter of friends on evenings out, carried far in the night air. Then the clouds had drifted in and the rain had started to fall, washing the dirt and fallen leaves away, and everyone who could, had headed inside out of the downpour.

No one was outside to hear the terrified, gasping sobs that spoke of a despair no rain could ever wash away.

*********

Brrrrrrrng!

My mind hauled itself to unwilling wakefulness, struggling to understand the sound. Sleep befuddled memories surfaced: fire drill? Alarm clock?

Brrrrrrng!

Ah, telephone! That was it! I reached over, groping for the receiver I knew was there - somewhere. My hand nudged against something. It moved. Moments later I heard the crash of the previous night's coffee mug hitting the floor. "Damn!" I couldn't help but mutter.

Brrrrrrng!

The phone was there, somewhere. I was just about awake enough to realise that a phone call while it wasn't even dawn yet was never a good sign. My questing hand wandered over the clock radio, a half-forgotten novel, and then, finally, the phone. I picked it up and thumbed the 'answer' button more by instinct than aim. "Hello?" I said, not bothering to conceal the irritation I knew had to have been apparent in my voice at having been woken up.

"Johnny?" replied the voice on the end of the line, "it's Walt... Bannerman. I've got a... situation I think I could use your help on. It looks like ..well, I don't know exactly, but it's some really odd stuff. We've so far managed to keep it largely out of the papers, but I don't know how much longer we can do that, especially after tonight. Look. I don't want to explain over the phone. I've got a deputy on his way over to you to give you a ride over here - there're some things I'd like you to have a look at, see if you get anything from it or something, I don't know... whatever."

He'd sounded worried, uncertain. That alone was unusual enough to grab my attention. "Sure, Walt, I'll be there." I agreed. I rolled out of bed, mindful as always of my bad leg, and made my way to the kitchen for the cup of coffee that such an early morning demanded.

*********

I'd barely started on the coffee when the doorbell rang announcing the arrival - I presumed - of Walt's deputy. Mug in hand I went to open the door. The deputy was stood there, soaked through from even the short distance from his car to the house. In the dim light from the hall behind me he seemed pale and almost impossibly young. Or maybe that was just me feeling my years.

"Mr Smith?" he asked uncertainly.

"Come in," I beckoned. "I won't be a minute. Have some coffee, deputy ...?"

"Higgins, sir. Jasper Higgins. I... uh...only started here a couple of days back. Moved from Vermont," he added as if he felt the extra detail was somehow required. It was a reflection of how tired I was that I was about to stick out my hand in automatic reply to the introduction before more recently learned instincts halted the movement and I settled with a simple nod.

"John Smith. Good to know you."

Uncomfortable silence descended, and I couldn't help but feel a flash of sympathy for Jasper Higgins' predicament. After all, I wouldn't know what to say for small talk to someone who says they can see visions. I finished the coffee, noting absently that Jasper hadn't touched his, shrugged into my coat and started for the door.

The sort of leery reaction that Jasper had shown to me was something I was going to have to start to get used to, I reflected wryly.

********

The car ride to wherever Walt had called from went unrelieved by conversation. The couple of attempts I made to pass the time elicited minimal response, and in the end I gave up and contented myself with watching the rain bounce off the road.

Just as the first pink grey smudges of dawn were lightening the sky, the car pulled into the driveway of a large, but otherwise unremarkable suburban house. Two other police cars were parked in the drive along with an ambulance. The early hour had deterred all but the most avid onlookers, but there were still a few people around, stood on the street in small clusters or peering out from the warm, dry comfort of their houses for what they could make out through the verdure.

"Hi Johnny," Walt greeted holding an umbrella over both of us as I got out from the car. "Glad you could make it." Walt knew me - he didn't even offer to shake hands.

"Walt," I replied evenly, non-judgementally, as if getting dragged out of bed to consult for the sheriff was nothing more than an everyday occurrence - which, at least for the time being, it wasn't. Then I noticed his out of character discomposure, and resolved to continue in a more charitable vein. "What do you need me to do?"

He led the way towards the house, adjusting his pace to mine. "I got the call a couple of hours ago. Lynn Carpenter, high school senior, on the way home from an evening out with her friends. They dropped her off just down the road, less than a hundred yards from her front door. Between there and here, she went missing. We've searched the local area. There's been no sign of her. Based on what we've found in the house, we think she's been abducted."

"Any contact with the kidnappers? Any sort of ransom demand?" I asked. Walt had said there was something weird going on. An abduction might not have been exactly routine, but it was not so out of the ordinary to have so jolted Walt's usual equanimity.

"No, nothing like that," he answered. "Come on. I'll show you what we have got. Perhaps you can make sense of it, 'cause we sure as hell can't."

He didn't elaborate, and I contented myself with following him as he led me into the house. As we walked through to the back of the house, I saw a couple, presumably Lynn's parents, clinging on to each other as they sat on a sofa, offering the other what support they could in the face of the unknown. They returned my gaze with a mixture of hope and disbelief. "William and Mary Carpenter," explained Walt in passing. "Mr Carpenter says he heard a noise downstairs at about three a.m. He thought it might have been their daughter returning late - she'd apparently been told to be home by two a.m. He went downstairs to confront her about it, but instead he found this," he finished, pushing open the door to the conservatory.

We stopped in the doorway, just looking at the room. All the plants in the room had been cut down at the stem and pushed to the sides of the room out of the way. Painted red figures had been daubed onto the walls, life size, anthropomorphic. Another figure had been painted spread-eagled on the floor. Upon it were draped skirt, top, shoes, jewellery, and resting on the figure's head, a hank of hair. A coat was folded neatly on the floor at one side.

"Hers?" I asked.

"All of it," Walt confirmed. "Everything she was wearing when she went out, even down to underwear. We haven't checked DNA yet, but the parents have confirmed that the hair's her colour as well. I called the FBI. I'm expecting them here in a couple of hours. Standard procedure, especially for something this weird."

I nodded. Weird was right. I looked at the figures painted on the walls. All different, or were they just different representations of the same image? And why the plants? Was it just to make room for the paintings on the walls or was there some other purpose?

I glanced back to Walt. "You know I have to touch something," I mentioned, mindful of disturbing any evidence in the room.

"Hmh? Oh, yeah," he replied. "For this one, though, we'll have to wait on the Feds. They'll probably want their forensic people to go over it first."

"*This* one?" I queried. "There've been others like this?"

"Yes. No, well not kidnappings. Break-ins, vandalism, that sort of thing, but there've been figures painted at each scene that looked the same as these. No one got hurt, nothing's even been stolen so far as we can find. The most recent we found was yesterday. Forensics has been over it already. Do you want to take a look?"

It was as much a request as a question, and I thought again of the parents not knowing what had happened to their little girl. "Sure," I agreed. "Let's go."

We didn't have to drive far from the house. Walt was soon pulling in to an empty car park on a small industrial park. "We had a call to a break-in yesterday at Meridian Inc., a software firm located here," he explained. "Whomever it was managed to bypass security and get in without setting off any of the alarms. A competent job but not extraordinary: they managed to trigger an alarm on their way out and their security firm routed the call to us automatically. We found that their conference suite had been 'redecorated', but nothing was missing despite their being thousands of dollars worth of computer gear there for the taking. The scene's pretty much as it was when we found it. The clean up crew are only due later this morning."

I nodded, only half listening to Walt's commentary as the building's night watchman let us in and pointed us towards Meridian's offices. At the door of the conference room Walt paused and gestured for me to go first. I gripped the door handle warily. Nothing. I pushed the door open and looked into the room beyond. It was large and bright, even in the early dawn light. Around the walls decorative ferns and palms in pots had been cut down, and the pristine white of the walls broken up by man size figures painted in dark red.

I walked up to the nearest painted figure and slowly lifted my hand. I paused for a moment, taking the time to steel myself for what was to come. Experiencing visions wasn't... comfortable. It was like a roller-coaster ride into the future, into the past, into another person's mind.

I reached out and touched the figure...

To be continued...