Free Patient Darkness: Brooding City Series Book 2 by Tom Shutt

He said the name again and frowned, but the staff became a cane once more and pleasant features quickly returned to his face. “It is a pleasure to make your acquaintance, Reader.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “You are a Reader,” Benjamin stated calmly. “I am a Pathfinder.”
    Alex dropped the copycat speech pattern. “No idea what you’re talking about, but you’re not who I was looking for.” She turned to leave.
    “If you leave now, you may never find peace. I know what torments you, and I know what will set you free.”
    “You do?”
    Benjamin pointed into his room with the cane. “Come inside and I will explain everything.”
    “You don’t know what my questions are.”
    “You do not know which questions are worth asking.”
    Alex looked toward the dark doorway with apprehension. She knew that the source of burning, naked hatred for Arthur Brennan lay somewhere in that darkness. “Fine,” she said. “Take me inside. I want to speak with whoever is in there.”
    Benjamin nodded. “He would like very much to be heard.”
    The old man turned sharply and walked back into the room, seemingly without need of his cane. Alex followed him, though she groped the wall until her hand found a light switch. It made sense that the room hadn’t been lit before; a blind man had no need for lights. But what of the other man?
    Inside the apartment, the furniture was identical to her own, though everything was arranged in a rather simpler layout. Glass end tables were pushed against walls or other furniture so that nothing stood out as an island, nothing directly in the way of a blind man’s meanderings. It gave the apartment a greater sense of openness. Without the lights on, it might have easily been a gaping cave shrouded in shadows.
    Two for two describing normal rooms with creepy imagery. Imagination, thy name is overactive.
    “In here,” Benjamin said. He stood outside the bedroom at the end of the hall and waited expectantly. Alex opened the door with the same enthusiasm that one might unveil a basket full of cobras. The interior was surprisingly underwhelming.
    It was dark inside, but not pitch black. A sliver was parted between the curtains, through which the light of the center city seeped in. A bed, smaller than hers, was pushed against the far wall and lay directly in the path of incoming light. Reclined on the bed was a man of average height and unimpressive features, and if not for the tubes connected to his arms he might have been resting peacefully. He was still at rest, but it looked more like the kind of repose that was reserved for coma patients and those near death.
    “He’s Fractured,” Alex said aloud. She immediately retreated behind the stone wall of her mental defenses. Fractured minds were hopeless to cure, far beyond the reach of modern medicine. She suddenly understood why the psychic shouting had been so singularly driven by one powerful emotion—the bedridden figure was, quite literally, a madman. He would obsess about this one fixed idea until the end of his days.
    “It is a terrible fate,” Benjamin said. “I would not wish this upon my worst enemy, nor even upon the person responsible for doing this.”
    “Arthur Brennan?”
    “You are familiar with him?”
    Alex shook her head. “No, but it’s kind of hard to keep him ”—she looked toward the bed—“from broadcasting it, and I’m the only one receiving.” She rubbed at her temples. “I didn’t realize someone could transmit thoughts like that.”
    Benjamin frowned. “You have already done this yourself,” he said, his tone perplexed.
    “You’re wrong. I read minds—when I want to, and even when I don’t—but nothing more.” She walked to the window and peered out through the crack in the curtains. “So who is Arthur Brennan?”
    “A Sleeper. A detective. The one I hold responsible for this man’s current state of mind.”
    Alex still had her eyebrow raised from the first in the list. “A Sleeper? They don’t