Twenty-Nine Years Ago
“The lady’s crying. He’s hurting her. Somebody stop him!”
Gretchen Babbitt awoke from a deep sleep as a child cried out from the next room. It took her a moment to get her bearings. She wasn’t in her own cottage up on the mountain, but in a cream-colored bedroom, in a bed twice the size of her own at home.
“Sue’s house,” she said, remembering she’d arrived for a visit just yesterday. Her eighty-five year old mind might be a bit slow waking up, but once it got going, she could recall her p’s and q’s all right. Not to mention her ex’s and long-ago-but-still-appreciated O’s.
Popping in her false teeth, she reached for her thick glasses and looked out the window. Still dark. But there was the faintest tinge of pink on the horizon that said it was almost dawn.
She wasn’t a bit surprised. It was the lightening hour, when folks like her were most vulnerable to their abilities. And, she was convinced, folks like her great-grandson.
“No, don’t do that, mister!” he cried.
Slipping out of the bed in the guest room that she used whenever she came to visit her granddaughter and the girl’s stupid husband, she hurried as fast as her creaky bones would take her. So far, the child hadn’t awakened his parents, which was just as well. Although she couldn’t be sure he wasn’t just having a bad dream, she doubted it.
No, dreams could no longer be used as an excuse. But if it was what she suspected, she already knew how his straight-laced father was going to react to the news.
Not well.
“Don’t hurt her no more, please!”
“Shh, angel,” she crooned as she made her way to his twin bed, with its cartoon Transformers spread. The room was filled with comic book heroes and baseball stars. They were typical little boy things that said just how much his parents—mainly his father—wanted him to be completely normal. Whether the boy liked it or not.
He probably didn’t. Because she seriously doubted this boy was normal. She’d seen the signs—the caul over his face at birth, the way, as an infant, he would stare at nothing anyone else could see and whimper. The night terrors that had plagued him since before he was old enough to verbalize what was wrong. Poor little mite.
Her granddaughter had tried to hide these things, the evidence of her son’s unique gifts, but Gretchen had a way of knowing. That was why she’d come here yesterday, somehow certain she had to. It was time for the child to understand and receive some empathy, and training to deal with his powers. If his parents would give him neither, by golly, his great-granny would.
“Her bones is breaking! Crunching!”
Whose? She felt so sorry for the woman, who was probably known by the boy. For him to react this strongly, he must have touched the person who was, somewhere, being abused.
“It’s all right. Granny’s here,” she said as she sat beside his small form. She lifted a hand that had tenderly touched nine babies of her own, and countless grandchildren, now gnarled and arthritic. Brushing his dark, sweaty hair from his brow, she could feel the hot slickness of his skin. He had been drained by it, this psychic awakening to someone else’s pain.
“Granny,” he whimpered, fully awake, “he was hurting the lady.”
“What lady, sweet’ums? Were you having a nightmare?”
He shook his head vehemently. “No, no, it wasn’t a bad dream! I waked up and I could still hear her screaming. You gotta believe me.”
“I do believe you.” Although his parents wouldn’t thank her for it, the child was old enough for the truth. He would go crazy if he didn’t get some relief from these invasions into his brain. She was the only one who could teach him how to handle them. “I know what’s happening to you, because you’re just like me. I can do what you do. I see things, hear things, even smell them sometimes though I’m far away. Not when I’m asleep, but when I’m awake.”
His eyes widened in shock. “You mean it?”
“I do. It’s called the sight, and I have it too.”
He appeared wondering, and then managed a tiny smile. “That means I’m not bad.”
Her jaw fell; she was lucky her dentures didn’t tumble out. “Why would you say that?”
“Because I know you’re not bad. So if I’m like you, I can’t be neither.”
She bent down and drew him into her arms. “No, darling, you are not in any way, shape or form bad.” She made a mental note to give his father a piece of her mind, having absolutely no doubt he’d been the one who’d said something like that to his son.
Men like him . . . what they couldn’t understand, they tried to destroy.
“So can you help the lady, Granny? The man was so mean. He hitted her a lot with a metal stick from his car.”
Good lord, a tire iron? She recalled the way the boy had cried, “Crunch,” and realized they weren’t just talking about a woman being abused here. She was being murdered.
This was no longer just about helping her great-grandson deal with the psychic abilities he’d inherited from her. There was a life at stake.
Letting him go, she sat up, terrified. “Do you know who she is? Who the lady is?”
“I couldn’t see her. I don’t usually see, just sometimes. But even with my hands over my ears I heard her and him. He sounded all growly and mad and she . . . she . . .”
“Never mind dear,” she said, putting a palm to his cheek. “You just forget all about it.”
But she couldn’t. Not when someone might be being beaten to death right now.
Because Gretchen would never put the boy through the anguish of mentally connecting to someone so desperate again, she tried herself. Closing her eyes, she began searching, listening for screams, hoping to be drawn to the violence that had to be somewhere close by for this little child to have shared in it. She tried hard, so hard, feeling her seeking mind creep like a thief in the night through people’s homes, on the streets of the small Arkansas town.
Nothing. She couldn’t see, hear, smell or feel a thing. Either she’d simply never had any interaction with the woman, and therefore had no way to know where to begin to look for her . . . or her great-grandson’s abilities were far greater than her own.
She slowly—regretfully—opened her eyes, anticipating the moment when she would read about this tragedy in the paper or hear it on the TV.
“Granny?” he whispered. “Can you help the lady?”
A tear ran down her cheek. “No honey. I can’t find her.”
He began to cry, too. Sniffling, he covered his face with his hands, trying to be a big boy, probably told by his father that he shouldn’t cry. That asshole.
The sun was rising now, the shadows in his room disappearing. By rights, her great-grandson’s life should be filled with brightness. It was too hard for such a small one to have to see and hear the things he saw and heard. She should know—her childhood had been much like his. Only, at least she’d had parents who still accepted some unexplainable things, and didn’t turn up their noses at the old ways and superstitions. This boy would not have that luxury.
Yes, he will. Because I’ll be there. If I have to give up my ice cream and stop driving to make sure I live long enough to see him into adulthood, I’ll do it!
Her great-grandson was going to need her. Desperately.
“Will you stay with me?”
“Of course, darlin’. Granny’s not going anywhere,” she said, making it a vow.
If she knew more, she would have left to make an anonymous call to the police. But as it was, what could she tell them? That somewhere, some random woman was being, or had been, murdered with a crowbar? They’d call the men in the white coats.
“Promise you’ll stay?” he asked, his voice shaky.
“I’ll stay right here until you fall back to sleep.”
He shook his head slowly. “Not going back to sleep. Hold my hand, ’kay?”
His fingers gripped hers. It took her a moment, and then she realized what he was saying. What he was doing. She sat bolt upright on the bed. “No, honey, don’t!”
But it was too late. She could see the moment he threw his consciousness out of himself, searching for the woman in trouble. He acted as though he’d done this time and again—perhaps he had, not even being aware of what he was doing.
He held on tight to her hand as his face went slack. His mouth fell open and his eyes rolled back. It was as if all the things that made him the special little person he was had gone out of him. Every ounce of focus and concentration he had was on helping someone in need.
God bless his soul. She didn’t think she’d ever seen anyone stronger.
Especially not someone who was only five years old.
He began to whimper. She squeezed his hand.
He stiffened, rolled in the bed. She lay back down next to him and took him in her arms.
He cried out. She kissed his temple.
Finally, he gasped, opened his eyes. “It’s Miss Marcy! Miss Marcy’s hurt in her house. A bad man hurted her! Go call the 911!” he begged.
“Honey, who’s Miss Marcy?”
“From church. She teaches my church class!”
His Sunday School teacher. No wonder he’d been able to connect with her when Gretchen had not. He knew her; had, in fact, gone to church yesterday with his parents, shortly after Gretchen had arrived. She hadn’t gone with them. She hadn’t set foot in a church since a preacher had tried to beat the demons out of her as a child.
Her Daddy had been the one who’d done the beating that day. And it hadn’t been of her.
“Go, Granny, go!”
She got up, hurrying toward the door. She had no idea where Miss Marcy lived, but she had no doubt her granddaughter and grandson-in-law would know how to get the information. If she had to find the strength to tip them out of their bed onto their stubborn heads, she would find out Miss Marcy’s address and call emergency services.
“I don’t think she’s dead yet, Granny. But she will be soon,” he whispered from his bed.
Gretchen looked over her shoulder at him, that brave little boy, so mature for his years, having shouldered the kind of burden that would break most adults.
“We’ll save her, Aidan. I promise you, we’ll save her.”
Gretchen Babbitt would see to that, even if she had to march to Miss Marcy’s house herself. It was the least she could do for her great-grandson.
After all, her long journey bearing this heavy load was almost over.
His was only just beginning.