Black Cat Weekly #73

Chapter 5-1

byWhere to start? I’ve never attempted an article like this before, but they are, the Pre-eminent Organization on Psychic Phenomena Yearning to Clarify Our Clandestine Knowledge (“Poppycock,” for short), paying me two thousand quid, so I’ll start with my handle. My name is Gaylord Tuttle, and with that sort of tag you’d probably never guess that I was once the stuff of juicy gossip in the “Tabs.” Now I’m just stuff, like everyone else. Now that I’ve stopped thinking about murder, that is.

Oh, I don’t mean me whacking people with a blunt instrument, far from it. I mean other people killing other people—people just like yourself, for instance, though I’m not accusing anyone. Let me begin at the start and stop at the end.

I was hatched in a log incubator on a frozen loch smack in the icy heart of the Shetland Islands, raised from birth by a troupe of same-s*x harbor seals, my only playmates being sea urchins—

Ha, ha! And my wife says I have no sense of humor. Others would concur. But, to be honest, my life had been fairly mundane, dull really, up until my thirtieth birthday. I had a nice, clean job as a systems analyst at a nice, clean computer company, a small bungalow, my health, and a close, though not smothering, circle of friends and family. My life had a comfortable routine that I rather enjoyed, like the spin cycle in your dryer—warm and fuzzy, with just a hint of lint. That all changed, however, when I got the power!

It was on my birthday, my thirtieth birthday, as I said. It was as I was strolling home from my birthday party at my parent’s house that the power first came to me: the power of subconscious perception—in particular, the ability to hear murderous thoughts.

It was around ten in the evening, I believe, and the summer night was pleasant, the soft, warm air embracing me like a long-lost friend who owes a couple of quid, the trees twitching nervously as a breeze blew through them. (My editor suggested I add this atmospheric narrative, rather than having a straight-forward recitation of the facts, as I originally handed in to her, sixteen or seventeen times.)

I was ambling contentedly, sheep-like really, through the little park that lay directly between my parent’s humble abode and my own, and I was puzzling over my father’s obvious discontent during dinner—he had seemed nervous and unusually quiet for a jovial, flamboyant man given to speaking in high-volume soliloquies, a glass of stout customarily occupying his right hand, a cigar his left. He had seemed anxious to talk to me, alone, but never got the chance during the evening, what with all my friends being there, ribbing me unmercifully about the big “three-oh.” Ah well, I can remember thinking, I’ll see him in church on the day following.

It was as I was leisurely sojourning through the park, with the air embracing me while the trees twitched nervously at the sight, pondering life’s mysteries—i.e. pork or steak & kidney pies, which were more cracking?—when my head suddenly exploded with the thought of murder! b****y murder! My mind was suddenly consumed with thoughts of killing—violent, ugly thoughts that viciously elbowed pork and steak & kidney pies out of the way.

I stopped dead in my tracks and tried to listen to what my mind had to say: “I’m going to kill you!”, “I’m going to cut your throat!”, were the terrifying thoughts that reverberated throughout the sloshing cups inside my skull. As I stood there, I realized that I was thinking someone else’s thoughts! Or was I? My brain seemed to be overwhelmed by someone else’s monstrous musings, like a two-story tall, ice-cold, rolling ocean breaker overwhelms a hapless swimmer (another editorial edit): “Tonight you die, baby! You’ll never cheat on me again, you b***h!”

I didn’t think these were my own thoughts, because I would never have used language like that—I would have thought “you gaudy tramp,” or “you pasty-faced harlot”; something a little more literate, you see. And as I stood there, stock-still, my mind engulfed by this enveloping evil, I began to fear for my life. Even though I had never been called a “b***h” before, I was conscious of the fact that I was wearing a truly s******g pair of skin-tight cords, and who knows what perverted thoughts go through the mind of a murderer; except for me it seemed.

It was like I was listening to someone very close to me; someone in the park! Right, someone in that park was going to kill me! Or I was going to kill myself, or someone else!

I was riveted to the spot, terrified and confused. My body started to shake in a dead man’s lambada, and sweat filled my twitching hands. My mouth went as dry as my home-cooked meatloaf.

I heard a bush rustle! I nervously glanced in that direction. And saw, very indistinctly, a large shadow in the dark, a shadow that was slowly moving towards a park bench about a hundred feet in front of me. I stood there in the dark, like a trembling aspen rooted to the spot, watering itself. I thought I saw the glint of metal. Then, as luck would have it, the moon briefly poked its glowing orb from behind a cloud.

The whole ghastly scene lit up, like a stage when the houselights go on. A large man with a large knife (O.J., I thought to myself hysterically), was advancing with definite bad intentions upon a couple who were busily snogging on one of the park benches that lined the cedar chip path. The couple was too otherwise engaged to take heed of the evil shadow stealthily moving towards them like the angel of death. The shadow’s thoughts, for I realized now it was from him that my mental emanations were coming, filled my head, louder now as he got primed for the kill: “You *%$#*#@ b***h! You’ve cheated on me for the last time!”

The would-be killer had moved to a position six feet behind the amorous couple and was raising the ten inch cold-steel blade in his paw, cutting a deadly arc through the night air, which had become decidedly chill when I leapt into action. I accelerated down the path, piercing the sound barrier in the process, and administered a series of devastating head and body blows of the Aikido variety, with a little bareknuckles Jem Mace thrown in, all of which combined to render the monster comatose!

Okay, okay—that’s when I screamed.

As I screamed my high-pitched warning to the couple on the bench, pricking the ears of the local canine population in the process, they spun around and viewed the knife-wielder frozen behind them. All his deathly thoughts vanished from my mind as he realized the precarious predicament he was now in—the element of surprise was gone! He turned and fled, thoughtlessly littering the park with his instrument of havoc (the knife).

Well, as you have no doubt read about in the national fishwraps, or heard about on the telly, if the Royals haven’t already supplanted me in everyone’s short-term consciousness, I became something of a celebrity that frightening evening. The potential victims warmly thanked me, as did the police. While the would-be assassin, easily identified by his signature fingerprints on the knife, and the eyewitness identification at the scene by his adulterous wife, cursed me and vowed revenge. Not to worry, though, because he got seven years in the kip and a court order prohibiting him from using anything but plastic utensils in the future.

After I recounted my story to the police, I did what I now consider to be a terrible mistake, and that was recounting my story to a newspaper reporter who materialized on the scene so quickly it seemed he arrived via transporter beam. The next day I had been dubbed the “Psychic Sleuth,” the “Thought Policeman,” and the “Cranium Cop,” among other handles, and was well on my way to becoming a fifteen minute throw-away celebrity along the lines of Koo Stark and the guy who “swam” the Chunnel in a swimming pool carried on the back of a lorry.

The next day I also received a visit from my dad.

“Son,” he said, as he nervously stood on my stoop at ten a.m. the next morning, “we have to talk.”

Over a couple of steaming hot cups of tea and a fistful of stale scones, and with the phone off the rocker (it’d been jingling non-stop since my cerebral revelations of the previous evening), he recounted the amazing story of the stupendous mental powers of the man-Tuttles.

“Son,” he started, “I don’t know whether to call it a blessing or a curse, or maybe a ‘blurse,’”—we laughed at that one—Dad, because of his flat feet, had done a lot of stand-up comedy during the war, when all the really funny people had been sent to the front lines to entertain the troops—“but every Tuttle man since the dawn of time, and before, has had the prickly power of mental insight—the ability to telepathically hear the thoughts of others. Not all their thoughts, mind, only certain specific thoughts that are being thunk by a person at the specific time a Tuttle happens to be in the immediate area.”

“As I heard the murderous thoughts of that scoundrel in the park last night!?”

“Precisely!” Dad responded excitedly, scone shrapnel exploding out of his maw and peppering my nose. “Sorry, Son.” He picked the errant pieces of pastry off the floor and popped them into his mouth. Thus fortified, he continued, “If that dirty bugger had been thinking those same thoughts in another area of town, or another neighborhood, or had been wearing a lead cap—just kidding—you wouldn’t have heard them. The Tuttle thought-perception radius, you see, is only about a hundred yards, otherwise our noggins would be inundated with conflicting thoughts from over all over the place. For example, if you went to Detroit or Washington, DC, or any major city in the former colonies for that matter, you’d never have an original thought; the way they kill each other over there. By Gor, you’d have one whopper of a headache, my boy!”

“I’d still better stay out of the Middle East.”

“Got that right.”

“But how did the Tuttilians get this gift of psychic insight?”

“Right, good question, son. And I truly wish I had a good answer. We only know that it’s hereditary—like your big nose, weak eyes, and, uh, rather small endowment,”—I blushed at the thought of the small parcel of land in the Hebrides that was my inheritance—“but we don’t really know for sure how the first Tuttle man originally obtained the gift. Just a quirk of nature, I suppose, like Elton John.”

We exchanged solemn nods. I jammed some scone and crammed it into my mouth. Dad duplicated the procedure.

“But, laddy,” he continued, after a goodly swack of boisterous chewing, “I must warn you.” And here his voice assumed a tone of grave concern. “I must warn you, as my father warned me, that this gift only lasts a short while, and you can’t let it get the better of you.”

“How do you mean?”

“I mean, you can’t let it overwhelm you; let it take over your life. You can’t try to track down every potential killer and prevent every potential murder in town, for example. You must let it come naturally. You’re given the gift on your thirtieth birthday, and it’ll only be with you for a year or so. Thus, I wanted to warn you last night, before something happened and you started flapping your gums. The gift is something to be treasured, not to be broadcast—to a***e the power for personal gain is to run the risk of personal disaster.”