The Brain Parasites, Part Four

WEDNESDAY, OCT. 24

I rolled over on the bed, feeling like I had the worst hangover of my life.

            “Good morning.” Dr. Reid pulled the last of the electrodes off my chest. “It looks like you had a good night’s sleep.”

            “Uhh . . .” I sat up. “What time is it?”

            “It’s just 8:30. We got a good read off of you.” He smiled. “How did you sleep?”

            “Uh, fine.” I fumbled for my jeans. “Can I get dressed now?”

            “Of course.” Reid tapped some buttons on the wall and pulled a flash drive from a USB port. “Take your time. We’ll be in touch.”

            “Dr. Reid?” I was already looking for Rachel on my phone. Three messages.

            He paused. “Yes?”

            “What’s seshai?”

            He blinked. “Why do you ask? I don’t know.”

            I was a reporter before I was a private detective, so I’m pretty good at spotting lies. Reid knew the word.

            I just shook my head. “Just something from a dream.”

            Then I got dressed. I didn’t quite run out the door, but I wasn’t sauntering either.

            I sat in my Honda, catching my breath and checked my phone. Six messages, all from Rachel. I erased Rachel’s messages before calling home. “Hi. It’s me.”

            “You asshole!” Rachel’s voice stormed my ear. “You said you were going to stay there half an hour! I hope you got a good night’s sleep, because I haven’t gotten any! By the way, everyone dies! Even Nick Fury and—okay, I may have watched Infinity War without you, but you said—”

            “Shut up.” I started the car. “I’m coming home. I don’t know what happened, but . . . I need you.” I twisted the key.

            “I’ll be right here. Jerk.”

Back home I staggered into the kitchen for a bottle of water and collapsed on a chair, rubbing my temples. Rachel stalked in from the office wearing a T-shirt and green panties, which, okay, did distract me from my headache a bit. “What the hell happened?”

            “I didn’t take the sedative, but I fell asleep anyway. Maybe it was the sleep machine.” I gulped some more water.

            “Yeah, Gary dropped ours off right after you left. It’s in the office.” She bent over me. “Hold still.”

            I closed my eyes and felt her fingers on my forehead and temples. My skull and my heart were pounding.

            Then Rachel sighed. “You idiot.”

            “It’s there? They called it . . . the seshai.”

            “Something’s there.” She wiped her hands on her T-shirt. “Not as strong as I felt in Russell. The what?”

“It called itself the seshai. It talked to me. Damn it.” I wanted a beer. And a bottle of Tylenol. And more beer. Probably not a good combination at 9:30 in the morning.

“Now what?” She sat down across the table. “I can’t take much more of this, Tom.”

“Yeah.” In the past year I’d been turned into a vampire, infected myself with flesh-eating fungus, and now this. Maybe it wasn’t too late to apply to McDonald’s. “Sorry.”

Rachel stood up and sighed again. “That pill was nothing. The numbers didn’t match up to anything I could find.” She stretched. “I’m going to take a shower. Try not to have a stroke before I’m done.”

Maybe the water was the sedative, not the pill. Or the Nyx machine. “Sorry.”

She kissed the top of my head. “Get some rest.”

I snorted. “Thanks.”

While Rachel showered I tried to look up every possibly spelling of “seshai” on the internet. Mostly I found variations on sushi and sashimi, which only made me hungry despite my blinding headache.

            I found a bottle of Tylenol in my desk and gulped a handful down dry. Then I drank the rest of my water and made my way to the kitchen for more.

            Rachel came out of the bedroom, fresh and clean in jeans and boots and a sweater. “Feeling any better?” She slugged my shoulder. “Jerk.”

            I couldn’t blame her. “I’m going to take a shower too. Then—”

            Then my phone buzzed in my pocket. It was the Reid Sleep Clinic. “Mr. Jurgen? This is Dr. Usher. At the clinic? Can you come in today? As soon as possible?”

            Uh-oh. “Is there a problem?” I switched the phone to speaker to Rachel could hear him. Maybe she’d pick something up from his voice.

            “No problem. We’d just like to discuss your results.”

            That seemed . . . quick. I glanced at Rachel. “Uh . . . is this about the seshai?”

            A short pause. “What’s that?”

            Rachel smiled and jabbed a finger at my phone. He knows, she mouthed without words.

            Yeah. Even without psychic powers, I could pick that up in his voice. “Just something I heard in a dream last night. I’ll be there in an hour.”

Terri escorted Rachel and me down the hall. “In here.” She seemed nervous as she knocked at a door. A nameplate on the wall read DR. ASHTON REID.

 Inside Reid sat behind a broad desk, with Usher next to him, staring at a laptop screen.

            “So what’s going on?” Rachel and I sat down. I looked from one doctor to the other. “You said this would take a few days.”

            “Your data indicated a need for immediate intervention.” Reid smiled at Rachel. “And you are?”

            “Rachel.” She stood up and smiled, holding out a hand. “Nice to meet you.” They shook.

            She shot me a glance and a nod. Yup. He had the seshai too.

            “What kind of intervention?” I didn’t have to pretend to be nervous. “Am I going to have to get hooked up to that machine again? Because I had the worst hangover of my life this morning.”

            “Maybe you should get one of those sleep machines you told me about.” Rachel nudged my shoulder. “Might help with your snoring.”

Reid nodded. “We can show you a line of them. You don’t have to get the most expensive model, of course. We mostly keep it for—”

“Oh, let’s cut the crap.” Usher shoved his laptop to one side. “We know who you are, Tom. Why you’re here. It all came out in the readings.”

Okay. They’d scanned my brain for 12 hours last night. I hoped they hadn’t picked up my adolescent fantasies about Justine Bateman on Family Ties. Or that dream about Rachel in a chain mail bikini. Or . . .

            I shook my head. “Fine. I’m not just a consultant, I’m a detective.” I tossed my business card on the desk. “Jolene Beckham hired me to find out why her boyfriend, Russell Lenehan—one of your patients?—was getting up and leaving the house at night. I don’t have all the answers yet, but Russell’s dead. And it’s inside my head.” I tapped my ear. “So I’d like to know what’s going on. What are the seshai?”
            Usher and Reid exchanged a glance. As if they were communicating silently with each other.

“They’re . . . from another dimension,” Reid said.

            “Are they demons?” I’ve encountered more than my fair share of demons, Not with 100 percent success, but still . . .

            Reid shook his head. “Not demons. They don’t mean any harm.”

            “Then why is Russell Lenehan dead? And Dale Kirkpatrick?”

            “You need to come to the clinic at least once a week to refresh the energy,” Usher said. “The sleep machine every night, too.”

            “Otherwise the seshai begins . . . eating your brain.” Reid shrugged.

            Oh hell. I’d taken Russell’s Nyx. Did that mean I’d contributed to his death?

            “You should tell people,” Rachel said. “I mean, that they need the machine every single night, at least.”

            And how the hell was I supposed to sleepwalk my way out to Oak Park once a week? Or sleep-drive? I wanted to start throwing things.

            “I was just trying different techniques for better sleep.” Reid crossed his arms. “I looked into meditation, drugs, sound therapy . . . I reviewed all the literature, and I tested everything on myself. The seshai—made their way into my through one of the Nyx machines that Dr. Usher developed. I contacted him, and we opened the clinic.”

            “To infect more people with the seshai?” He might have been talking about a coffee shop.

            “It’s what every organism wants.” Usher tapped a pen on the desk. “To survive and reproduce. They can’t do that in their original dimension anymore. As long as our patients—”

            “What about the naked thing in the park?” Rachel stomped a foot on the carpet. “Where that woman died?”

            “They need to come close every once in a while.” Usher glanced at Reid. “We’re together every day, but others—”

            Reid smiled. “Not naked, of course.” I hid a shudder at the mental image.

            “—have to come into contact with each other.” He folded his hands. “If you use the machine often enough throughout the day, you may not have to do any of that. I don’t know what happened to that woman. Maybe it was just her time.”

            “So Dale Kirkpatrick really was a patient here.” Russell said he’d seen her, but I still hadn’t been sure.

            Usher nodded. “She came to us—”

            “Tom, some of our patients are from Chicago or the other suburbs.” Reid was trying to sound reassuring. “We can manage this together with regular appointments and—”

            Wait a minute. “Why you telling us all this?” They were like Bond villains, about to launch their evil scheme because they thought we couldn’t stop them—

            Except they’d already done it.

“To stop you from poking around our clinic.” Usher tapped a pen on the desk. “Look, Tom, I hate to make threats, but the seshai won’t let you attack or endanger them. You’re better off just coming back here regularly—”

“Or they’ll kill him?” Rachel stood up. “You might have a right to survive and reproduce, but that’s not a right to rape people’s brains. Come on, Tom.” She grabbed my hand. “We’re done here. For now.”

I had more questions for them, but I could tell she needed to leave right away. Maybe because she’d been exposed to too many seshai at once. I stood up. “Yeah. This isn’t over.”

We stalked through the waiting room. I didn’t make a follow-up appointment with Terri. I resisted the urge to shout at the waiting patients: “They're here already! You're next! You're next, you’re next!” But I restrained myself, if only because most of them wouldn’t realize I was quoting from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and if any did, they’d think I was joking. Or crazy.

Out in the Honda I gripped the steering wheel with trembling fingers. “You know, I don’t think you’ve ever been so hot as you were just then in there. Except that one time on the beach—”

Rachel punched my arm. “Nobody messes with my boyfriend. Now shut up and drive.”

Still exhausted, I slept for most of the afternoon with the Nyx in the background. I missed a Skype appointment with a client, and I had to call another to say that I wouldn’t be tailing his wife tomorrow. Both were reasonably understanding, but I knew I couldn’t get away with ducking clients for too long. Seshai or no seshai. I’d have to do some work while I figured this out.

            Rachel made spaghetti with alfredo sauce for dinner. We drank some beers. “Are you okay?”

            “Fine.” I rubbed my head. “I think.”

            “So what are we going to do?” She twirled some pasta on her fork.

            “Hell if I know.” I sipped some beer. “We could firebomb the place.”

            “That wouldn’t help you. Or any of the others.”

            “It might stop the seshai from getting any further.”

“I don’t care about that.” She put her fork down. “Well, I do care about it, but I care about you more. Jerk.”

“Yeah, I’m at the top of my to-do list too. Along with you.”

Rachel opened another beer. “Want to watch TV and think about it?”

           

We were watching Infinity War after dinner. Rachel tried to restrain herself from spoilers. We were both a little distracted.

            “Wait!” I pointed at the screen. “Is he really dead?”

            She punched my arm. “Shut up and watch the movie.”

            Then my phone buzzed. Unknown number. Maybe a telemarketer. But sometimes unknown callers are the best kind. “Sorry. Just a second . . .” Racherl paused the movie. “Hello, Tom Jurgen speaking.”

            “Mr. Jurgen? It’s Terri Smith, from the Reid Clinic?” She was whispering. “I’m supposed to call you Friday about setting up your next appointment. But . . . I need to talk to you. Alone. I get off work at 10:30.”

            I sat up. “About what?”

            “I think you already know? There’s a coffee shop.” She gave me an address. “Bring your girlfriend.”