Read Vision for Free Online Page A

explanation.
    Although she had no good reason to disagree with Alan, she knew that his explanation was inadequate.
    Maybe the madman had known her because he’d had his first (and necessarily last) telepathic experience in the instant that death seized him.
    Or perhaps there was a meaning to the incident that couldn’t be defined in rational terms. When she recalled the madman’s demonic face, one thought circled through her mind: He’s a messenger from Hell, a messenger from Hell.... She didn’t know what that meant. But she didn’t dismiss the thought simply because it had a supernatural ring to it.
    Through her extensive travels, through her many conversations with clairvoyants like Peter Hurkos and Gerard Croiset, through her conversations and correspondence with other psychically gifted people, she had come to think anything was possible. She’d been in homes where poltergeists were active, where dishes and paintings and bric-a-brac and heavy furniture sailed through the air and exploded against walls when no one had touched them or been near them. She hadn’t decided whether she’d seen ghosts at work or, instead, the unconscious telekinetic powers of someone in the house ; but she did know that something was there. She had seen Ted Serios create his famous psychic photographs, which Time and Popular Photography and many other national publications had tried unsuccessfully to debunk. He projected his thoughts onto unexposed film, and he did so under the intense scrutiny of skeptical scientists. She had seen an Indian mystic—a fakir but not a faker—do the impossible. He planted a seed in a pot of earth, covered it with a light muslin sheet, then went into a deep trance. Within five hours, while Mary watched, the seed germinated, the plant grew, and fruit appeared—several tiny mangoes. As a result of two decades of contact with the extraordinary in life, she scoffed at nothing. Until someone proved beyond doubt that all psychic and supernatural phenomena were pieces of a hoax (which no one ever would), she would put as much faith in the unnatural, supernatural, and suprarational as she did in what more dogmatic people believed to be the one, true, natural, and only world.
    ... messenger from Hell.
    Although she was half convinced that life existed after death, she didn’t believe that it was accurately described by the Judeo-Christian myths. She didn’t accept the reality of Heaven and Hell. That was too simplistic. Yet, if she didn’t believe, why this unshakable certainty that the madman was a satanic omen? Why phrase the premonition in religious terms?
    She shuddered. She was cold to her bones.
    She returned to the bedroom but left on the bathroom light. She was uneasy in the dark. She put on her robe.
    Max snored peacefully. She stroked his cheek with her fingertips.
    He was instantly awake. “What’s the matter?”
    “I’m scared. I need to talk. I can’t stand to be alone.”
    He closed his hand around her wrist. “I’m here.”
    “I saw something awful ... horrible.” She shuddered again.
    He sat up, switched on the lamp, looked around the room.
    “Visions,” she said.
    Still holding her wrist, he pulled her down to the bed.
    “They started when I was asleep,” she said, “and went on after I woke up.”
    “Started when you were sleeping? That’s never happened before, has it?”
    “Never.”
    “So maybe it was a dream.”
    “I know the difference.”
    He let go of her wrist, pushed his hair back from his forehead. “A vision of what?”
    “Dead people.”
    “An accident?”
    “Murder. Beaten and stabbed.”
    “Where?”
    “Quite a distance from here.”
    “Name of the town?”
    “It’s south of us.”
    “That’s all you’ve got?”
    “I think it’s in Orange County. Maybe Santa Ana. Or Newport Beach. Laguna Beach. Anaheim. Someplace like that.”
    “How many dead?”
    “A lot. Four or five women. All in one place. And...”
    “And what?”
    “They’re the