The Haunting of the Gemini by Jackie Barrett Read Free Book Online

ran. The mirrors started to dissolve, exposing that other side. I was running for my life. I could not let myself get stuck in hell. I ran. He yelled my name. I slipped and fell in a puddle and scrambled up. I could see home.
    I ran through my front gate and found my front door wide open. I ran into my bathroom and locked the door behind me before I looked down at myself. I was covered in blood. I ripped off my pajamas, panting in fear. I was under attack, and I couldn’t breathe. I grabbed a washcloth and began frantically scrubbing my arms and legs with soap and hot water.
    After a while, I looked around my bathroom, puzzled and confused. My skin was raw from scrubbing with the washcloth, but there was no blood anywhere. The door was still locked, but now I could hear my cats right outside, meowing hungrily. I threw open the door and stomped into the kitchen. The coffee pot was off, and their food bowls were empty. How was this possible? I had done all of this already. I was on the verge of losing it.
    â€œWhat do you want? What is it?” I yelled, waving my arms in the air. The room began to spin out of control. Or maybe it was just me. This tall man in black said he was the Gemini, that the astrological sign lived and breathed somehow. I knew that now. And he was after me. If I was the one who always helps others, who would save me? The room spun faster. I yelled for God, but that man answered.
    â€œNow, open the door and let’s play fair.”
    I wouldn’t. I couldn’t open my front door again.
    â€œJackie, I will blow this door in. Here I come. You can’t run. You’re in me. Open the fucking door!”
    I screamed and sat up in bed. Wracked with pain, I leaned over the side and began to vomit. The whole thing had been a vision. My husband rushed in.
    â€œWhat’s wrong?” Will looked worriedly at the soiled floor and me huddled in pain. I asked him what time it was. “It’s 7:30 a.m.,” he answered. “I was going to let you sleep. It seems like you’ve been out working all night. Where were you?”
    â€œI don’t know. I don’t know.”
    He asked if the doorbell had awoken me. I stared at him. Who was there?
    â€œJust some old lady spreading the Good Word, I guess. You know, all the Lord stuff.”
    I exploded. “You didn’t let her in, did you?”
    â€œNo, I didn’t,” he said, trying to calm me. “Come on. I’ll get you some coffee.”
    More coffee. My God. I could no longer distinguish between what was real and what was not. My waking hours and my dreams were intertwining. And there was nothing I could do to stop it.
    God help me.

FOUR

    Just like any other kind of business, my psychic profession includes paperwork, filing, scheduling, and lots of other logistical duties. These things are, shall we say, not my areas of expertise. So I have an assistant who performs wondrous feats—like finding room on my calendar for all the clients who want to see me, booking the right travel arrangements, and scheduling my television and radio appearances. She is the first person anyone talks to when they try to reach me. She is my right hand, and I would never get any work done without her.
    But the absolutely best thing about her? She’s my daughter, Joanne. I am so lucky to get to work with her every day. And as I sat and thought about my recent visions, I knew she was just the one to help me with my latest project. We needed to figure out who Patricia Fonti was. Joanne tracks and monitors all of the paperwork for my cold cases, homicides no one has been able to solve, and she knows how important they are—she prioritizes homicide and missing-person cases when she does my scheduling. For Patricia’s case, all I knew, from that headline in the newspaper that had drifted through the subway in my vision, was that she had been found dead at age thirty-nine on August 10, 1992. That seemed enough to start