Chapter Twenty-Six

I slumped in the chair by the telephone motionless after Jim’s call. I’d known it was bad news before I’d lifted the receiver. When it rings like that in the middle of the night, I never want to answer it. What else can it be but bad news?

I couldn’t believe what he’d told me. No, that was wrong, I could believe it. It made sense. Jim was coming home because it wanted him here. Come home or die. It was as simple as that.

Neither one of us could escape any longer. Time was up.

I held my hands tightly together in my lap, staring at nothing. I hadn’t had a vision in a while. I’d been fooled into believing we were normal people in a normal world again.

So much for fantasies.

Thank God Jim was unharmed, except for bruises and sore legs. Thank God he was coming home. “Our only hope is in our strength. Our strength,” I whispered to no one.

It was morning. I looked over at where Jeremy was curled up sleeping on the couch, and wondered as I had when I’d run down to answer the ringing phone, what he was doing sleeping down here. I perched on the edge of the sofa and looked down at him. It was too early to wake him and he must be in a deep sleep if the phone failed to bring him to.

I sunk into the couch, careful not to disturb my son. I’d ask him why he was on the couch when he woke.

It could wait.

I closed my eyes, my hand light on Jeremy’s shoulder as if I could protect him and fell asleep, too. It wasn’t only that I was tired, though the call had taken a lot out of me, it was my way of escaping.

“Mom?” Jeremy’s voice was waking me. A small hand was shaking my shoulder insistently. “Wake up, Mom, who was on the phone?”

With much effort, I forced my eyes open. The sunlight was blinding. “Jeremy?”

“Mom, who was on the phone?” His eyes were level with my own. There was a worried frown on his lips.

I wasn’t fully awake. “What phone? Who?” I mumbled. The clouds lifted. “Oh. The phone. It was Jim. He’s coming home.” I sat up, rubbing my eyes and yawning.

“Then he’s all right!” Was that a sigh of relief I heard?

I sat up. “How did you know I had a phone call? You were asleep.”

“I know.” He had a look on his face of someone who was wiser than you and mystified that you couldn’t see it. His face was not a child’s face. He seemed to be weighing something in his mind. “I know a lot more than you think I do. I know Uncle Jim’s been hurt.” Then in a low voice. “Charlie told me he was hurt, but he’d be okay. Or at least he told me he was.” His child’s face was clouded with thought.

I didn’t know what to say, my heart thumped in my chest. Bells were going off in my head. I felt sick to my stomach. Charlie! I found my tongue.

“Charlie?” I pronounced the word carefully, as if by uttering the name, I would call up the dead child himself. God help me.

Jeremy rotated his head away. His face was rosy from sleep and his hair was wispy in disarray. He was only a child.

“You know, your brother Charlie. The one that’s dead.” His eyes were huge. I took him wordlessly into my arms and stroked his hair. I loved my son so much but how could I protect, or save him from what was going to happen? It could happen anyway no matter what I did or didn’t do.

“Tell me about it. All of it.”

As he told me about Charlie I was astounded. Alarmed, to hear the evil was so close to my son. Jeremy had seen a ghost, talked to a ghost, it meant only one thing. I hadn’t seen what was in Jeremy before. I hadn’t seen one of my own kind. If, truly, that’s what he was. I couldn’t be positive. I was afraid to be. And, God, how I pitied him if he were.

What did Charlie want? What was he up to? “Does this sort of thing happen often, Jeremy?” I asked him, needing to know.

“No. It never did until we moved here. You did say Uncle Jim was all right, he’s coming home?”

“Yes. Uncle Jim’s coming home.” I smiled, seeing how cleverly he’d avoided completely answering my question. He wasn’t ready yet. “Come on, I’ll take you back to bed. It’s Sunday and only six-thirty.” I ushered him up the stairs.

“When Uncle Jim gets home can we all go fishing?” he asked sleepily as I tucked him into bed.

Outside the windows the distant woods waited, as did Charlie, our old home and all those other dead children. I didn’t hear my son the first time he asked it, but I did the second. I pulled myself back to the present.

“Yes, we’ll go fishing when Uncle Jim gets here.” It was a strange request but I was too tired to wonder about it and Jeremy was already slipping into dreamland.

I could see Jim far away, climbing on a bus and waving at us. Charlie was there, too. I shook my head to dissolve the vision and looked down at Jeremy’s innocent face.

I couldn’t believe I hadn’t seen it sooner.

Jeremy had the gift. Jeremy had the curse.

I stood up to leave and something caught my eye outside the window. I moved closer to investigate. A scrap of bright cloth was caught on a twig and was fluttering like a banner against the skies.

That was all it took to trigger the memories.

* * * *

I was plummeting in reverse through the years. How many I couldn’t be sure. I was a spectator, but I was also part of what was unfolding before my eyes, as I looked outside the window. It was like a mirror into another world, another time.

There was only wilderness out there, the kind of wilderness this country must have known over a hundred and fifty years ago. There were no houses or towns, only desolation. In my vision I was down there among the trees that lined the creek. It was night, or soon before dawn. I was walking towards the wagons, and the campfires that illuminated them.

There were seven of them, tattered covered wagons like the pioneers used to travel west in. They hunkered around in a circle. I’d seen plenty of movies and pictures of the rugged men and women who lived in these traveling homes out on the prairies, but this was different. I was touching these; they were as close to me as my own hand. I could see the grain of the wood and count the spokes of the mammoth wheels. I could hear the fear in the voices of the people who crowded around the blazing campfires.

I hid behind the nearest wagon, confused. I knew who I was and yet I was afraid they might see me and I could never in a lifetime explain myself. Since I’d returned to Suncrest it was alarming, how vivid my psychic experiences had become.

This sort of thing had happened before, so I knew eventually I’d be able to return to my own time. The campfires were crackling and far off in the woods, there were wolves baying at the moon. I was seeing something I couldn’t be seeing. What was I doing here?

Shivering, I stared down at my feet. There was snow on the ground and they were covered in some sort of fur boots. I was no longer dressed as myself. I wore a long baggy skirt covered with a thick, worn shawl. I was cold.

The dream was too real and I was afraid I’d actually been pulled into another time and wouldn’t be able to ever find my way back. Was I trapped there? I ached to turn and run home, but home didn’t exist anymore.

I pressed myself against the wagon as tightly as I could and when I’d found my courage, I became aware of the people on the other side. If I was here and I couldn’t get back for a time, then I’d better become familiar with the situation. There was a reason, I calmed myself, I was here so I should find out what it was. It might be the key that would release me.

Of the five people huddled around the campfire, three were children. One was a very young one of about six and the other two were older. Two boys and a girl, there was also an old woman and another man who appeared to be her son.

One of the children, the girl, was crying.

They were terrified of something and at first I thought it might be Indians. There were three arrow shafts sunk deeply into the side of one wagon, the feathers brightly colored in the firelight. The other two wagons were partially burned.

Behind me I could hear low-pitched voices at one of the other campfires, but I was drawn to the family crouched before me. I could smell their fear, as the wind snapped at the trees.

I edged closer to hear what they were saying.

“It’ll get us like it got Edward! It’ll get us.” The girl was weeping. Her eyes were glazed and wide. She appeared to be in shock and her tears were silent as they rolled down her thin face. The older boy patted her on the back to comfort her and all of them jumped, at the sound of a branch crackling somewhere out in the dark. They were afraid of something out in the woods—and it wasn’t Indians.

“Hush, Becky!” the old woman warned. Her eyes shifted nervously among the shadows. Her face was wrinkled and she was shrunken into a lump of bones hovering above the warm fire. When she spoke her voice was the croak of a night frog out in the marshes. “It will hear you. It’ll get you,” she crackled down at the child. Even this far away, I could see the child jerk.

The older man threw the crone a warning look and walked over to take the small girl in his arms. “It’ll be fine. You’ll see. Tomorrow morning we’ll be away from this cursed place. Tomorrow we’ll leave.” He stared out at the darkness; stared right at me and I saw the light glitter in his eyes. “Soon as we bury Edward,” he finished coldly.

The girl hid her face in her hands and her shoulders heaved.

Who was Edward? What had happened to him?

The wind howled around me and threw the wet snow up into my face. It was one of those frigid winter nights when your breath freezes almost before it gets out of your mouth. Shaking with the cold, I glanced over my shoulder at where my home should have been and there was nothing but the wilderness and the winter sky.

When my eyes returned to the people I felt as if time had slid forward unobserved. The children were huddled together before the dying fire. The old woman was building it up and licking her lips before the flames. They were waiting. They weren’t going to sleep in the wagons. What were they afraid of?

It was then he saw me.

“Mandy? Is that you out there, girl?” He turned in the firelight and for a moment my heart lurched. He was a young version of my own father. Was he really seeing me?

I ordered my body not to move an inch. Why didn’t I wake up! What was this?

“Mandy!” he whispered loudly and strode towards me in that particular lumbering gait of his. Like my father’s.

He was close enough to touch when he stopped. I wanted to cringe, but didn’t.

“Mandy?” I repeated dumbly like a pet parrot. He could see me and he’d mistaken me for someone else.

“You ran off and we’ve been looking everywhere for you. Thomas said you would come back. He did. He said, Mandy knows the woods like the back of her hand. Nothing can hurt her in the woods. Why, that’s her second home. Animals love her. That’s what he said. Are you unharmed?” There was concern in his voice and something else—a wariness.

I stared at him.

“Well, leastways,” he smiled crookedly as if I should know him, “you’re back safe. Come over to the fire and warm yourself a spell. Your brother’s worried sick over you. Gave us all a fright, you did. You surely did.”

“I don’t…” The words hung suspended in the air as I said them, because he grabbed my wrist and gently dragged me out of the dark and into the firelight. When his hand touched mine it was colder than ice. He grinned and his teeth were stained. His eyes narrowed as a spark seemed to jump between us at his touch. I didn’t finish what I was going to say, though I had no idea what I could have said. I didn’t belong here. I’d be sent back to my own time any moment, so what did it matter anyway? I only had to play the game a little longer. Stall.

The scream ripped his hand from mine. The woods were alive with that terrible laughter I remembered so well. The man dropped my hand and ran towards the children around the fire. It was out there and it was moving closer.

I watched as it came into the dying light and eyed its prey. In a panic I screamed, too, as it snatched the smallest girl and slammed her against a tree. She fell to the snow-covered ground in a heap, not to move again.

I tried to go to her, but already it was useless, everything, even the screams, were melting into the past. I felt the cold leaving my cheeks as I ran towards the people. I had to help fight it, I had to stop it! But I couldn’t because I was tumbling back to my own time, becoming a shadow. Even as a shadow, I was forced to watch.

It had turned on the boy and he cowered before it, not trying to fight or escape the huge hulking thing that was all fangs and fire. Its laughter echoed through the woods—the devilish howl of a banshee, and it changed shapes as it tore at the doomed boy. Blood flowed and colored the snow. His cries mingled with the wolves howling in the night.

As the boy fought he turned pleading eyes to me for help. Jimmy’s eyes. Jimmy’s face. I screamed a scream no one could hear.

The creature released the boy and spun around to me, and I felt fangs sink into my shadow arm. The pain was so great, I only saw the boy fleeing through the trees in a pain-filled haze.

He was running away, leaving us, to save himself and I was to die in his place.

I shut my eyes and felt the claws digging into my neck and, suddenly, I didn’t feel anything. Things were shifting, breaking up like clouds. Was this what death was like?

I no longer felt the snow on my face as I was thrown to the ground and I remembered what it was like. Dying. The agony, the blood and the final surrender. Then the peace.

I’d died so many, many times before in nearly the same way.

Above me it laughed hideously, eyes pieces of burning coal. Like the clinkers Jimmy and I used to shovel out of the old furnace, I thought.

This has happened before. Why was I reliving it?

Then everything faded away into the night. The creature, the bleeding children in the snow around the old wagons and the night itself fused into twilight and then daylight again. Jimmy’s pain-filled eyes were all that was left to haunt me.

I awoke in my bed, soaked with sweat and fear. How I’d gotten there from Jeremy’s room I’ll never know. I don’t want to know. Bright sunlight was streaming across my bed and I was so happy to be back I cried. I was always weak after a vision, but later, as I dragged myself downstairs to the kitchen to make tea, I knew it had not been a usual vision. It’d been a message, a warning, of some kind. As I heated the water, I knew tea wasn’t what I needed. I needed help.

I don’t know what made me look, but I did. There, vividly red and fresh on my upper right arm were claw marks, already healing scars, but there. I traced them with my fingers and cringed. They’d never been there before.