Tess: Book One

By Kay Sellers

She tests the door. Locked. Jannet has wandered off the guided tour. This is at El Museo de Ciencias Naturales en Madrid De Espaa. She has made frequent attempts to dial 112, the primary emergency telephone number in the Eurozone, but her cellphone seems to not want to work.

Tess is the first book in a new fiction series. The story is part travelogue, part police procedural, and part coming-of-age as it focuses on an American woman who possess special psychic talents. Tess is not the main protagonist in this bookthat would be Jannet, Jannet Russmanbut she does serve as an extraordinary teacher and guide to our adventurous American traveler.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 21, 2018
• ISBN: 9781984536099

Kay Sellers

The author is a writer, poet, teacher, and school/business administrator. In recent years, there has been an emphasis on prose writing – that is, fiction and non-fiction. This has primarily focused on research, reflection, and writing on the themes of spiritual growth and human potential. There has been considerable poetry writing, as well, since 2011 which has been influenced by emerging prose poetry and flash-fiction styles. The author has traveled extensively, especially in South America and the United States. Current residence is the Southwest USA and this follows a long tenure in the Pacific Northwest. A marvelous fiction novel, Tess (Book One), was published in the summer of 2018.

Book preview

T E S S

BOOK ONE

KAY SELLERS

Copyright © 2018 by Kay Sellers.

Library of Congress Control Number      2018907238

ISBN:                  Hardcover                             978-1-9845-3611-2

                           Softcover                               978-1-9845-3610-5

                           eBook                                     978-1-9845-3609-9

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted

in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system,

without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the

product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance

to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Rev. date: 06/21/2018

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Contents

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she will continue to be

dutiful and kindness

as she should be, must be,

because you are what she was

as she is what you will become

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1

SHE TESTS THE DOOR. LOCKED. JANNET HAS WANDERED off the guided tour. This is at El Museo de Ciencias Naturales en Madrid de España. This inconvenient incident occurs because initially, she wanted to investigate a partially opened door that did lead into a very large and well-stocked storeroom. Naturally, the heavy door closes behind her, and she is now momentarily trapped. But soon, an initially short period transitions into several minutes; therefore, she decides to be content with exploring the fascinating contents of the storeroom. Primarily, she encounters many rows of sturdy open-faced shelving, which contain a seemingly endless variety of items for the various exhibitions and displays related to the official areas of the natural science museum.

Jannet—full name Janneta Luna Russman—is a resident of Portland, Oregon, USA, but she is currently residing for several weeks in a comfortable apartment hotel in the Embajadores sector of Madrid, more specifically in the Hotel Atico Embajadores, which is a self-service establishment. She received good instructions from the desk clerk at her hotel on transiting to the museum, utilizing the metro.

Inside the locked storeroom, Jannet would return every few minutes to the extremely solid entry door and knock and shout for help. Then she would resume her explorations within the storeroom. She has made frequent attempts to dial 112, the primary emergency telephone number in the Eurozone, but her cellphone seems to not want to work.

She occupies herself with a deeper tour of the large storage room. The items on the shelves are similar, she images, to a storeroom in a film studio production’s lot or the back areas of an active theater company. In fact, she does not entirely regret her present predicament. But she does begin to register internally, nonetheless, a perception of some form of another presence somewhere within the confines of the bulky storeroom. In one distant corner of the vast room, she images she sees a human-shaped two-dimensional silhouette that is darkly drawn. The apparition is not fully formed, with no two-dimensional feet or hands, and it is floating, but she is prevented from a closer inspection. She suddenly becomes distracted from the visage by a faraway clinking sound. She detects a distant though clear entry into the storeroom by at least two individuals. They are conversing in Castilian Spanish about locating a particular parcel number, and the sound of their footsteps resounds on the poured concrete floor.

Jannet swivels to look again for the floating silhouette. It has vanished, leaving her to wonder if it was indeed ever present. Jannet strides very quickly toward the front area and to a waiting and opened storage room door. She surprises the two museum staffers as she exits. She suddenly stops, nearly colliding with an official-looking guard within a few feet from the storeroom entrance, in a smallish gallery of unusual geological displays. It is a Sunday, a free admission day; therefore, the museum is swarming with patrons. She immediately produces a copy of her visa and an explanation; apparently, she explains, she became lost and entered the storeroom by accident. The guard quickly waves her away, especially in light of the large amount of patrons that he has to shepherd today.

Jannet walks nonchalantly out of the museum and carefully to the metro. It is a cold day in November 2013. She cancels her plans for a bit of exploring along the palatial Paseo de la Castellana, and instead, she returns to the apartment hotel for a quiet afternoon. Her apartment hotel is only several miles east of the museum on Calle Embajadores. The experience in the storeroom in the natural science museum haunts her.

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Jannet makes an entry into her daily electronic diary: It is the rising of the rising wind. This city is in the center of the country. It is a political, cultural, and economic center. There is a river, the Manzanares. The city’s urbanity includes extended suburbs and urban villages. While it possesses a healthy modernistic infrastructure, it has maintained the traditional occurrences of historic streets, buildings, and neighborhoods. When one is walking, scale and spatiality assert themselves. There are large numbers of museums, churches, outdoor sculptures, and monuments. Among the grand streets, two famous ones of many that are admired are the Gran Via and the Paseo del Prado.

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The Embajadores sector of Madrid, its El Rastro barrio or its La Lavídes neighborhood in particular, is a diverse area with a broad range of residents, a combination of classic Spanish architecture, an endless variety of bars, restaurants, cafés, bookstores, and so on. There is a stimulating juxtaposition of the best and, at times, the worst of Madrid. So there can be times when it is prudent to watch out for pickpockets, sleazy characters, and shady alleyways. Mostly, it is a magnificent sector, except for some occasional pockets of edginess.

Jannet is nearly halfway through her seven weeks in Madrid. She spends nearly every day walking or drifting through the streets, mostly in the Embajadores sector, randomly taking a different direction on each sojourn. One day she did take a rather longer metro ride to north Madrid; she was following a recommendation to visit Plaza de Castillo. There is a convenient metro stop there. It is a vast circular open area, the plaza, which is a gateway to the Puerta de Europa twin towers. That particular day, Jannet experienced a few minutes of sensorial overload, which would be understandable considering her unique capabilities and considering the setting. The twin towers of Puerta de Europa are each twenty-six stories high, and they lean toward each other at an intoxicating and mystifying fifteen-degree incline.

On another day, following the advice and careful directions from the apartment hotel manager, Adaluz, Jannet took a metro and then a bus to the far northwest of Madrid. The destination is famous outlet mall Las Rozas Village, which has a unique urban village design and a vast array of shopping options. That day did become a perfectly diverting day.

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Jannet faithfully maintains an electronic journal on her laptop computer, and she has developed another habit, an uncommon habit, during her tenure in Madrid. Once a week, she types and then prints out on her wireless printer an anonymous letter that she then addresses to Policía Municipal de Madrid, Policía General, with attention to the office of general investigations. She uses Google Translate for translation from English to standard Spanish rather than the more common Castilian Spanish, and she puts the letter in an envelope with no return address, and she takes care to mail each week’s letter from a different postal office and to avoid cameras at these different postal sites. She takes care to wear latex gloves inside her rooms when handling the letters and more fashionable gloves on her way to each random postal location.

The letters provide details on unsolved crimes, recent and not-so-recent crimes. Each letter begins with a brief generalized description of the crime, the location, and the date of the crime. Then the letter adds other copious details that are presently unknown to the authorities. Some of the unknown details include the type of clothing worn by the individual or individuals, their physical descriptions, and other details. Sometimes she provides in the letters names or partial names of the suspects and/or streets and locations where they live. She also includes some form of visual representation of the crime scene; the representations are her handmade detailed pointillist pen drawings based upon her intuitive understanding of a crime scene.

2

JANNET IS AN EMPATH. SHE HAS HYPERSENSITIVITY TO places and to people. Jannet is also a synesthete. Synesthesia is a condition or capability of cross-sensorial processing. One sensory experience can trigger another different sensory experience: seeing colors when listening to a conversation, hearing sounds while reading words, experiencing tactile responses when listening to music, and many other types of cross-sensorial experiences. Her empathic hypersensitivity and her sensory crossover experience have slowly but surely increased during the past several years, and this combination has resulted in a greatly heightened psychic capacity. In the streets, during her daily walks, on some occasions, Jannet sometimes will intrinsically enable a form of protection shield. She visualizes it as a thin-paned window that will serve as a barrier for particularly intense sensory experiences. Regarding intense sensory experiences on rare outings, in the streets of Madrid—the Embajadores sector, usually—she might elect to open up herself as an experiment, with care, or to open herself completely to past or recently past experiences, which may have a strong lingering residual presence.

Usually, it is normative for her, when walking about, to just simply experience everyday sounds, sights, impressions, and sensations in her unique fashion—but usually with some amount of filtering or detachment.

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Three police investigators are huddled at a table in a large room. This room is regarded as a situation room for an investigative unit that is tasked with working cold cases for the Madrid police department, Policía General. In less than four weeks, the three have been the recipients of four anonymous computer-typed letters. The letters consist of no return address and no signer and no traceable prints or DNA. The letters have caused a flurry of activity within their team of seven or eight members because these letters are responsible for providing new leads that have sparked new searches for evidence regarding specific cold cases. The new evidential searches are yielding results. There is, obviously, a keen interest in the sender of the letters, but a search for the sender has been deemed too elusive—for now. Even though there has been a tentative review of surveillance camera footage from the locations of the posted letters, this process has turned out to be a time-consuming and useless one, and any further search for the sender of the letters has been abandoned for now.

There is more concern about the contents of each of the four letters. Some of the details, which are presented about the cold cases, are new information. There is also mystification about the unusual photographic-like visual depictions of the original crime scenes from the past that is imprinted at the bottom of each of the four letters. The visual perspective is unusual although beneficial. It is a view of the crime scene hovering from above, a view from a position on the ceiling, looking straight down upon the scene. The three primary investigators, two men and a woman, are equally impressed and perplexed.

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Jannet’s tenure in Madrid has occurred through a series of circuitous paces. The American woman has wanted to spend time overseas, in South America or Europe, for the past several years. But she was entangled in a looping cycle when it came to making a definitive decision about her various options; in other words, she never really finalized a choice. Initially, most of the options involved spending time in one of various possible South American countries. She wanted to visit a Spanish-speaking nation because she does have a serviceable competency of Spanish, with speaking and listening, because of her upbringing. Her late father was Hispanic, and he was fluent in Spanish.

The end result of her procrastination was that Jannet had not traveled anywhere outside of the United States. This dilemma was solved one day, earlier this year, when she was browsing in her favorite bookstore on West Burnside in downtown Portland. She experienced a sudden urge to visit the travel section. When she arrived in the travel section, she discovered a travel book casually mislaid on the aisle floor. The subject of the travel book was Madrid, Spain.

On her current visit to Spain, Jannet elects to have a blend of a tourist and a nontourist experience. She has booked rooms in an apartment hotel in La Embajadores, and she concentrates on getting to know this particular sector of the city as much as possible. She walks, she takes buses or the metro, she patronizes the area businesses, she enjoys the parks, she frequents the bars and restaurants and cinemas, and so on as if she actually is a resident and not only a tourist. She does enjoy indulging in some of the more touristy sites, but overall, she dearly treasures her ordinary everyday experiences of Madrid. She has also specifically made time for a few visits to the LGBT-friendly neighborhoods of Chueca and Justicia, which are easily accessed by the metro.

Jannet had allowed herself the luxury of access to an internally generated holographic language-translation capability during her first week in Madrid. The English translation would simply and invisibly float in front of the person speaking Spanish. Jannet also intuited that the translation capability would work for any language. However, Jannet did eventually suppress the capability because it did not allow her to improve her own natural Spanish speaking, listening, and comprehension abilities. She is still nonetheless surprised and a little dismayed at her frequent struggles with the language despite growing up with Spanish in her home and despite her studies in school.

Jannet developed a habit of avoiding areas during her lifetime in which she perceives the presence of a particularly intense jolt of heavy energy, as she characterizes it. This presence of heavy energy, from her perspective, could initiate the onset of an intense and complex mix of sensorial responses on her part. In Portland, she can instantly become aware when she is nearby or when she is approaching a particularly traumatic energy zone or area. These areas tend to be locations where a traumatic human and/or natural event has occurred, and Jannet can detect a massive residual effect emanating from such areas, so she normally avoids those areas. Frequently, her initial contact is in the form of a visual projection that will form in front of her. This projection is usually in the image of a Stop sign or a warning sign. These holographic advisories allow her the option to bypass the potentially provocative scene/location.

It was somewhat regular during her first week of explorations in Madrid and during her first ever trip outside of the States that she would encounter holographic advisory signs. Naturally, it would be outside her usual norms if she elected to bypass the advisories and to investigate. Nonetheless, she did tentatively decide to investigate on a few occasions. This happened because she posed questions to herself. What is it like to actually be present in such distressing situations or locations? And what might be discovered?

Jannet experiments spontaneously one day in the La Lavídes neighborhood. She takes an incorrect street on the way to an ethnic restaurant, which she is curious about, and she encounters a holographic Stop sign. Her natural instinct is to turn around, but she elects to move forward. This assertion leads her to an alleyway, and that leads her to the rear of a seemingly abandoned building. She seamlessly closes her eyes and allows herself to be present in the location that she is standing behind. This process involves a form of psychological stepping back, and she simultaneously erects a large holographic glass window as a membrane between her and the experience of this location. The initial edge of the experience has a bitter metallic taste, and the atmospheric pressure around her thickens. There are random amplified urban and human sounds, and there is then a crystal-clear vibrant visual of a scene from the past. When she wonders about the when, the where, and the why of this scene, the information is provided; it is floating in the air in large block letters.

Jannet has several of these distressing but illuminating experiences during her tenure in Madrid, and she journals about them. She discovers that if she desires visuals to accompany the texts, she can enter a light trance state, and she can involve herself in an automatic writing/drawing episode. So far, she has elected to send four of these entries in the form of letters to the Madrid police because she felt that the contents of the four particular journal entries did potentially illustrate circumstances of a serious commission of a crime.

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On the second-to-last day of her last week in Madrid, Jannet is startled. She is at the bathroom mirror in her room, dreaming of a frittata and café con leche for breakfast at a nearby café, when she sees in the mirror a dark silhouette floating behind her. She quickly turns, but there is no one and nothing behind her. She searches her rooms; there is no one and nothing to be found. So back to mirror for some final cosmetic touches before departing—and there is the figure again. Floating. It is composed of a dark, dark hue. This is a silhouette of a human figure, very similar to the one floating figure that she saw days ago in the storeroom at the Museo de Ciencias Naturales. This figure is more complete and has some amount of dimensionality or depth, although not much, and it moves in its upper-body regions in a similar fashion to that of a breathing, living person. She turns quickly behind herself again, and there is emptiness behind her, and then she turns back to the mirror, and the figure is there again visually. But soon afterward, it starts to fade. She watches it fade to nothingness. She watches this unusual process in the bathroom mirror.

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On the last day of her last week in Madrid, Jannet is frantic. During the seven weeks in her exquisite apartment hotel room, she developed a smooth routine with the anonymous letters; there were four sent to date. However, there is a fifth letter. It is sourced from an especially vivid experiential walkabout near a strange residence a few blocks from the Plaza de Santa Ana in the Huertas District and not far from the popular Plaza Mayor and Puerta del Sol locales. But today, her last day, she has misplaced the fifth and final letter, and she reasons that it has to be somewhere in her room. She does scour her room several times but no luck. Then her phone sounds.

Senorita Russman? a thick voice is inquiring.

Si, soy yo, she replies in a breathy voice.

I also can speak English. This is the carrier for DHL. I am here for the parcels.

Can you up to my room?

Yes. The room number is …

I am in room 319 at the end of hallway. And thanks.

Jannet has three parcels ready for pickup; they are items purchased in Spain. She has two bags for the airport, a carry-on and one large rolling bag that will be checked into baggage. She also has her large over-the-shoulder purse. Her technology equipment is tucked into the carry-on. But Jannet is frantic. She has to deal with the DHL man, and then soon after, she must catch the van shuttle to the airport; and still, there is no sign of the errant letter.

The process with the DHL man is rapid despite the number of forms to sign. He places the parcels in his two-wheel handcart, bids goodbye, and leaves. As soon as he leaves, her phone rings again.

Senorita Russman? This is the hotel manager, Adaluz, inquiring.

Yes. Hi, Adaluz.

The airport van is here. A bit early, que no?

She does speak English but slowly and very deliberately. No hay de que. I will be down in ten minutes.

Muy bien. I will inform the van driver. And do you need help with your baggage?

No. Wait. Actually, Adaluz, I think that I would like some help.

Okay. Right away. Gracias.

There is time for one more hasty sweep of the rooms in the apartment hotel, and it yields the same results—that is, no final letter to be found. She reluctantly rationalizes that the letter must have been included accidentally in one of the three parcels that she packed and sealed for shipment back to the states. She chastises herself for not quickly reopening the three parcels when she had an earlier opportunity prior to the arrival of the DHL man.

Despite the rationalization, Jannet obsesses over the matter in the elevator to the lobby with the porter and her baggage. After she has perused and paid the final hotel billing and tipped the baggage helper, she offers a thoughtful goodbye, a strong embrace, and thanks to a gracious Adaluz, who is the manager and the adult daughter of one of the owners of the apartment hotel. She obsesses again about the missing letter on the drive in the van to the airport and again in the sluggish long customs line at the airport. She must have appeared nervous to the official there because she was chosen to have her bags thoroughly searched. Subsequently after she has completed the process at the ticket desk and checked her large bag and because her mind is distracted, she then neatly slips and falls on her way to sit down in the waiting area. She is not hurt, although slightly embarrassed, and she is actually more dismayed