My tongue still felt like ground meat, and I hadn’t yet rid myself of the metallic tang that was invading my mouth. My head was continuing to throb with a dull ache, but other than that, the rest of my body’s agonies seemed to have fled as fast as they had arrived. That was both good and bad. Good, of course, because the pain was gone. Bad, because that meant they had been phantom pains. Oh, they had felt real enough at the time, but that was the extent of it. They only felt real. There were no wounds, abrasions, or bruises. There was no physical evidence to explain why they had been there to begin with. And, unfortunately, this lead me back to my earlier suspicion.

My stomach twisted into a knot once again, and I felt a brief spate of nausea come over me. This was exactly the kind of thing that happened whenever I was experiencing someone else’s physical pain. And for them, it was real pain, not imagined.

This had been a psychic episode, and it was all too familiar. Sometimes they were the same, and at other times they were vastly different. Usually they came in groups that were so similar as to not be able to tell them apart. But, no matter what, they maintained the common thread of blackouts and migraine-like headaches that seemed to linger forever. The types of phantom pains, odd tastes, auditory anomalies, or anything else always depended upon exactly what was being experienced by the other person.

The last episode I’d had like this one had actually been a series of them, but that had been something like four or five months ago. As abruptly as they had started, they had ended. I’d tried to forget about them, but I couldn’t. I knew then that it was only a matter of time before they would return.

The sickening part was that every time this sort of thing happened to me, somebody died. Worse yet, it was usually more than one somebody.