Deja Blue by Robert W Walker

house while she easily found the bungalow bedroom. At the entryway, she felt it. A strong presence in the room. Looking on the brutalized corpse, the sight set her reeling. It was one thing to see nails driven into a victim’s head and eyes in crime scene photos, quite another to see this first hand.
     
    She gasped and felt a sharp pain in her eyes as if those nails had been driven into her instead of the victim. She pulled her eyes away only to find blood spatters everywhere.
     
Blood on every surface.
     
Bureau drawers and mirror.
     
Walls, ceiling, floor, bed.
     
And of course the body, where Rae’s eyes, in the end, returned.
     
There was nowhere in the room that blood had not rained.
     
The work of the flying, bloodied hammer, acting like a heavy paintbrush dipped in the red fluid of life.
     
    She closed her eyes on the horror of the scene and tried instead to concentrate on the presence she felt. It’d waned. Gone actually. May as well be attempting to pull fog together with a rope, to tether mist. To regain that initial contact with the victim now would be as difficult as taming a seahorse.
     
    When she opened her eyes again, Rae Hiyakawa, stood over the victim, and looking across to the other side of the bed, she saw the shadowy figure of a man, a man of atoms racing and struggling in all directions to hold his form together, a kind of hologram, and inside this moving, whirring shape, features fought to come together, to show her who he was. Doctor, lawyer, beggar man, thief? Thief of lives, yes.
     
She could hardly believe it herself.
     
It’s never this easy, her mind screamed.
     
Can’t be, yet…here he is. Taking shape.
     
    Perhaps the fiend, at the root of his soul, wanted nothing more than to be identified, cornered, and stopped— perhaps even killed. Perhaps he meant to show himself to the visiting psychic in order to end this nightmare; perhaps it’d all begun as an elaborate death by suicide, the reason for the in-your-face-god-awful-modus-operandi with the hammer and nails and letters to local newspapers laying claim to his murder spree the result of sleepwalking! The absurdity of the claim itself part of the plea to “Find me, corner me, kill me.”
     
    If so, this desire for his own end had begun with the Dream Killer’s very first victim.
     
    The apparition of the man was large, muscular as it came into a more distinct shape. Rae’s partitioned mind was in part aware of Kunati and Orvison watching her watching the shape come into focus. They did so from the entryway to the room, unable to see what she saw. Carl Orvison with a digital camera, filmed Rae’s every step and grimace.
     
    A special part of Rae’s mind focused on the phantom taking shape, while a voice in her head told her to not work too hard in trying to see the features of the dark form across from her, the other side of the bed in a cracked bureau mirror. The killer’s form looked down over the corpse almost counterpoint to her position the other side of the bed; but he was not there—but in the mirror only. A shapeless figure in an aura of green.
     
    Don’t look too closely, came the warning, something about her sanity, that if she did dig too deep, look too long, the features of the vision across from her would fade faster than water through a sieve—like that first faint contact with the victim’s spectral remains. It was the voice of experience, her own voice, repeating a lesson learned from Gene Kiley. She forced herself to completely relax, a difficult thing with the stench of freshly shed blood assailing the nostrils while getting an image of a killer, however vague, however shapeless in overalls.
     
    Shapeless in overalls. She put that detail away in another compartment of her mind for later.
     
    She closed her eyes on the shape in the glass, daring it to disappear, to leave this place. She felt the heaviness of this spirit, the sadness, the loss, and then a surprise: love, compassion,