Chapter 4: A Scary Man

Jaime and the Stranger

JAIME’S ABILITY to block out others got better as he got older. He couldn’t avoid some of his classmates’ thoughts and by the end of the day, he was tired of blocking things and let much more slip through.

David still worked from home with occasional daytime visits to his office. He’d changed jobs to have a more flexible schedule so he could be with his son when needed. He was happy Jaime had made some friends and visited them at their houses or invited them to his house. David noted that all Jaime’s friends had been ESL students in kindergarten and were fluent signers.

One day after school, the two went to the grocery store for their weekly shopping trip. Jaime was tired and immediately put his headphones on to begin playing music and blocking out the thoughts of others. He wasn’t really paying attention to much else and wandered up an aisle in the store without his father.

Oh, yes. There’s a good one, he heard in his mind. It so shocked Jaime that he came to a dead stop and looked around him. At the end of the aisle he saw a man in a dark suit staring at him.

We have to get the rooms set up. And I can’t handle a little kid yet. But he’s perfect. I can tell by his eyes and the headphones. He has trouble blocking people out. I’ll have to let him pass for now, but I’ll be back. He’s one of the gifted ones. Together, we’ll rule the world.

Jaime wanted to shout at the intruder with his mind, but instead, he reflexively clamped down on all his own thoughts, burying them in the music that played through his headphones. He turned and ran back up the aisle, looking for his father as the stranger seemed to laugh in his head.

He was blinded to reason, not knowing where his father was. He saw the heavy door of the meat department ahead and rushed through it. The thoughts of the man, and everyone else in the store, were immediately muted. He decided to stay there until he could locate his father.

That presented a problem. He couldn’t hear anyone in the store and the cooler he’d rushed into was cold. Packages and haunches of meat lay on shelves and hung from hooks. And once the door was closed, it was dark.

He thought the man would probably leave the store once he’d disappeared. He would wait a few minutes and then push open the latch from the inside of the cooler to find his father.

By the time Jaime had managed to throw his entire weight against the plunger that would open the cooler door, his lips were blue and he was shivering. He stumbled out of the cooler and practically into the arms of a butcher.

“Here he is! I’ve got him!” the butcher called out. A flood of voices erupted in Jaime’s mind. Many were calling his name in his ears. Then he located his father and called out to him in his head. His father ran toward the meat department and caught his son in his arms. Jaime quickly scanned the thoughts he could hear in the store, but found no sign of the man he had heard in his head.

Had the man been talking to him? Or was he just thinking? Jaime couldn’t tell.

Jaime

Jaime hid in his room. The man in the grocery store had frightened him. Jaime’s closet offered some refuge from intruding thoughts, especially when he put on his headphones and concentrated on the music. He knew metal walls were the most effective at blocking others’ thoughts. When he rode in the car, he only ever heard his father’s thoughts beside him. With the creativity of a nine-year-old, he had ‘borrowed’ aluminum foil from the kitchen drawer and taped it to the walls of his closet. He believed it helped.

In the sanctuary of his closet, he slowed his speeding heart and thought about what had happened.

He had read a stranger’s thoughts in the store. They frightened him. But Jaime had to wonder how those thoughts had cut through the barrier of the music he was using to block others. Either the man simply broadcast his thoughts more loudly than most people, or...

Jaime’s heart nearly stopped beating. Or he had been broadcasting specifically to Jaime.

In all his life, he had experienced only one time that a person spoke to him in his head. His mother had directed her thoughts in response to his declaration that he loved her, just before she died. He had certainly experienced people thinking about him. It wasn’t that unusual. When he was introduced to teachers and other students who were told he didn’t speak, they always wondered what kind of kid he was and what caused his muteness. But no one tried to inside-voice speak to him.

As long as he could remember, Jaime had thought this was simply because other people didn’t like him and wouldn’t acknowledge him when he spoke to them in his head. When he began to learn sign language, he realized that other kids spoke to him in sign while their brains thought about what they were saying. Their thoughts were focused on their hands, though, and not on Jaime.

Jaime slowly came to the conclusion that other people were deaf in their heads. If he hadn’t learned sign language, he would eventually have had to use his out-loud voice or people would continue to just ignore him. At least now he had friends and could talk to them. They still ignored him in their heads, but they spoke with their hands.

What shocked him to silence when he heard the man in the store was the direction of his thoughts and the malevolence behind them. He was not a nice man. If the man had been ‘ready’ and Jaime had been older, Jaime knew he would have been kidnapped. But why? What did he need to be ready for?

And had the man been able to hear him?

Jaime had closed out most of the world with his headphones but he’d been thinking his own thoughts, mostly about school and Halloween coming soon. He’d already begun to meet new people in classes, but most of his classmates didn’t know sign language. Had the man heard his thoughts? Jaime had automatically closed himself off to other people when he heard the man in his head. He’d never felt the need to do that before. No one had ever heard him. He realized now that it was a skill he needed to practice regularly. He just needed to figure out what he had done to block anyone else from hearing him. What was it?

This problem occupied Jaime until his father found him for dinner.

Kenton

Kenton desperately wanted to be a telepath. He knew it was possible. He’d run all kinds of tests on students at the university. So much so that he’d gained a bit of a reputation as a crackpot. He’d only verified one actual telepathic case, but she had insisted on complete anonymity. He couldn’t use her data in any summary paper. He’d decided to carefully alter his findings in other instances for his dissertation.

It was real data, after all. It simply wasn’t the data from the subjects he cited. He felt justified in it. He barely passed his defense. His professors acknowledged his research but were all of the opinion the evidence cited was an outlier. He’d couched the material in an investigation of inner monologue and inner dialog. He explored some new data indicating that some people could not recognize their own inner monologue and believed they heard voices from outside their own head.

He speculated on all kinds of reasons for this, but his firm conclusion was that it was dangerous in the treatment of a person to ignore the idea that they might actually hear voices that emanated from external sources. The university had granted his doctorate, though there were committee members who still considered his study to be paranormal and not within the realm of real science.

What he needed was more examples, and there was no better place to get them than in his counseling practice. It was slow to gain momentum, but eventually he would get there.

Part two of his plan was to create a refuge where he could study people he identified as legitimately hearing voices in their heads without the interference of outside influences. This was sped along by two external factors.

The first was a visit he received from two men who identified themselves only as Smith from the FBI. They had read and studied his dissertation! Kenton immediately tensed up when they began discussing the possibility of his participation in studies they were conducting themselves. It was soon obvious they were not considering him as a researcher, but as a subject.

Kenton immediately left the country. He stayed in seclusion in India for two years, pretending to be a monk. He believed, rightly, that having this on his resume would shield the seriousness of his research. No one had seriously come to India to study the paranormal since the Beatles found enlightenment sixty years earlier.

He returned to Portland and immediately rented an office that was in the build-out stage. He had very specific requirements regarding the materials to be used, and special features to be added. He told the contractors that he wanted his office to be fully shielded so that clients could not be distracted by cell signals or WiFi. The contractor considered this reasonable for psychological counseling and built the Faraday cage-like structure around his entire office. The only access to the outside world was a wired internet connection and a landline phone.

The other thing that happened at that time, and was the reason he was able to afford the extraordinary adjustments to his office, was his inheritance. A rich old aunt had passed away and when all was said and done, Kenton discovered he was the sole heir to both her fortune and her property.

The property was a historical residence and he was able to update the interior, but was forbidden from altering the appearance of the property in any way. He did all the modifications internally, hiring subcontractors to follow his plans.

He wondered why there was only spotty cell phone service in the old buildings when it was fine and strong outside. His discovery was that the original lath and plaster walls were covered in chicken wire to help hold the plaster. It created a natural Faraday cage and inspired Kenton to enhance that feature throughout the renovation.

Only the upgrades to electrical and plumbing lines and the heating system needed to be permitted and inspected. And he had plenty of money and time to get things done over the course of a few years. Soon now, he would have his refuge of absolute silence where he could both study his subjects and be free of spying by the government’s microwaves.

Jaime and Mrs. Chapman

For Jaime, third grade was an important year of self-discovery. He learned arithmetic, conducted science experiments, read interesting stories, used a keyboard, and learned to read maps. With his best friends still in his class, he learned more sign language, Spanish, and handwriting.