“I…I don’t understand,” I said feebly. “Nature? What the hell is this?”
I wanted somebody to rush in and expose the trick. I needed to see a laughing crowd behind the curtain and know I’d been fooled by a clever illusion; that it was all made-up and everything I knew would be restored. I would laugh with them, if only for the relief that I’d been conned and there really is no such thing as magic, but no one appeared to stop the show and tell me it had been a carefully arranged, elaborate prank. Instead, Aline kept me close and stroked my wetted temples.
“Shhh,” she whispered. “None of this makes sense right now, I know, but there was no other way to show you so that you would see and understand. After a while, it will be easier as you adjust. Only a handful outside our numbers have ever seen and experienced it like this, Evan; give yourself some time.”
I sat forward with my face in my hands like a repentant partygoer recovering from an epic bender. There was no more pain but the unbelievable had turned in seconds to a harsh reality no one can prepare us to accept. Telekinesis and mind control? The inexplicable realm of the supernatural had all been a comic sideshow to me and never part of the normal world where we say “magic” in offhand ways to describe something wonderful. It isn’t real, and yet there I was in the aftermath of its grip, struggling to complete a singular, impossible transition.
“This isn’t happening,” I mumbled. “There has to be an explanation.”
Aline leaned her head to one side and positioned it directly in front of mine.
“You still don’t see?”
“I don’t know how you did this, but it’s not real, Aline—it can’t be. There’s something else going on here and just because I haven’t figured it out yet doesn’t mean I won’t!”
The pain was real and I wondered how I would hold on and function when the last of my doubts came down in a heap. I knew it was no skillful illusion and yet I fought with every bit of my strength to deny.
I was comfortable in my ignorance, safe inside a presumption created when those pieces of a known puzzle made in the image of mental illness waited patiently as my only rational explanation. Only those who can’t find a better answer hide behind mysticism and supernatural wonders because they have little choice. I was better than that and my belief systems were always subordinate to the reliable scientific method. Sometimes boring, and often the bringer of disappointment for some who need more, demonstrable truth was the single most important vehicle that delivered us from stone-tipped spears to excursions across the powdery surface of the moon.
I wish I could say only disbelief plagued me in the moment but that wasn’t true. Slight though it may have been, just the possibility it was real pressed hard against the walls we build to hold back those deepest, most terrifying sensations of vulnerability. When Aline began, a tiny fissure was opened and fear came through in waves.
“This can’t be happening,” I repeated, but it was only for my own comfort.
She nodded silently and lifted my chin to kiss me very gently.
“What do you need so that you’ll see and understand?” she asked softly. “We don’t do these things for show, Evan, but if you want more…”
“The fireplace,” I said suddenly. “When I went to your house the first time, it was empty and then it was alive. Was that part of this?”
Instead of answering, Aline turned and pointed to my own hearth where it lay void of logs. After a moment or two, tongues of beautiful blue flame appeared, growing straight up from the empty iron grate. I watched in dumbfounded silence as they swirled and danced and I could hear its muffled rumble. For a full minute, the fire intensified as I reached toward it to feel heat radiating outward, and in those final seconds there was nowhere left to hide.
She held my hand as the fire subsided into a flicker for a few seconds and then it was gone. Aline waited while I went through the last, maddening process of acceptance, and the weight of a revelation few have endured made of me a new and different man. I know she wanted only to protect me from my own doubts, and in an absurd gesture I somehow needed to make, I stood and stumbled awkwardly to my kitchen. In a drawer I found and retrieved a digital deep-fry thermometer, racing back to the fireplace with the last shreds of uncertainty pushing me onward like desperate voices in a distant past demanding to be heard. I remembered seeing the instrument in a drawer and the image it made in my mind of Damon’s amateur cooking dreams and the odd dishes he tried to prepare. On that day, it would register something much greater.
I knelt and placed the probe against the wrought iron grate, and when I read the LCD display it showed 154 degrees. I couldn’t speak and all I managed to do was stare. At last, the trial and emotional gauntlet I ran was complete; there was no longer any reasonable doubt, and I felt suddenly heavy where I sat in silence. She pulled me upright and steered me back to my couch.
I could hear her words but they came at me in echoes, louder this moment but muted in the next. She cradled my head softly in her palms and told me not to be afraid. She said she could never do anything to hurt me, but all I had was the thin lifeline of faith and a need to believe her. My hand tightened its grip on hers and I held onto it like a buoy in dark, pitching seas suddenly within reach.
She leaned close to my ear and whispered, “You will always be safe with me…always.”
I’d like to tell you the transition was long and tortuous, that I fought courageously against the attack on my common sense, but there was no use. In ten minutes I went from the firm ground where most of us live—comfortable with our place in the physical universe—to a minefield of uncertainty. After a while, it occurred to me my reaction was exactly as Aline knew it would be, but more than that, it was selfish and stupid when I realized she had been living with a secret all her life. The evidence we hold onto for explanations is always hiding beneath the surface and when we discover it, moments of fear or indecision are washed away and we smile in gratitude. The doctors in Scotland looked and listened and a hundred years of psychiatric research told them to find and treat a known disorder. It was precisely what anyone else in their position would do, but the stark reality glared at me like a flare in the night: they saw only what she had placed carefully before them.
Aline’s diminished mental state was never more than a disguise—a useful tool to deceive and redirect others. There was no emotional condition or malady corrupting her mind and her deliberate illusion became an insurance policy guaranteeing no one would be any the wiser. Like successive hammer blows, the realization I could never have envisioned pounded against the door of reason and I understood at last.
Claude Dumont watched the power of Aline’s hand but he too saw what he wanted (or needed) to see: God’s will only meters away and by it, salvation for an innocent and her child. Two men at a Glasgow bus stop felt her power in their turn but for different reasons and to terrible effect. Years later, Andre Renard’s best efforts followed his instincts and a path that pointed toward an insane killer. I know he thought a triumphant end to the journey was within reach but his sudden silence, and a struggle against untold fears, could only mean he also found himself a target within range. In a stunning conclusion, the inspector’s passionate search for truth and justice halted inexplicably and almost overnight.
I looked at her and even then, she waited patiently as those final moments passed.
“How long have you been able to do these things?” I whispered.
“A very long time,” she replied, but I was too consumed in the moment to understand what that really meant. She would complete the thought later, but for the moment, it was enough.
“Then he was on the right path,” I said with a sad smile. “Renard wasn’t chasing phantoms after all.”
“Yes,” she answered, “but he will never understand how or why.”
I was too tired and reeling from her stunning revelation to consider what that meant.
“Enough now,” she said. “I want you to lie down and rest. When you wake, all
this will make more sense, I promise.”
I DON’T REMEMBER much beyond a distant sound I knew was Aline tidying up in my kitchen until I woke in the dark. It was disorienting, and I struggled to clear my head, but she was beside me and propped on an elbow.
“It’s still early,” she whispered. “Go back to sleep.”
“What time is it?” I asked automatically, but my phone showed 6:36.
I slept through the night but I could see she was watching me carefully when I returned from the bathroom and dressed slowly. It was silent as we sat for a while and I wondered how long it would go before one of us spoke. There are few occasions when change comes to us more profoundly and without the possibility of a return to where we began. I stood beside her at the window, watching sunlight fight its way through the oaks in the solitude of our valley.
She asked me if I wanted to end it and walk away—if I was moved only by an assumed obligation to stay on—but I shook my head. I couldn’t tolerate the idea of being anywhere else, and when I told her so she seemed surprised. It wouldn’t be of any particular importance otherwise, but seeing her wait out my answer like the rest of us brings a strange sense of satisfaction and calm because today I know what it meant. Aline stayed deliberately outside my mind when she asked, leaving it for me to decide on my own.
SHE WENT HOME to answer messages and make sure a sale at the shop was underway as planned. When she returned midmorning, I waited in the kitchen as quietly as I could. A secret exposed (and truth of her power) shook me in ways I still can’t fully describe, but the result went far beyond my living room. Far away from our valley, in a place no one can access, a new problem festered in the files of a hidden government agency made suddenly aware of Renard’s failed play. Worse still, there was no way of knowing how much they knew and what they intended to do about it.
I thought I understood stress and the burden of dealing with fear, but those first hours in the swirl of a life changed forever left me drained simply knowing at last what we always regarded as the absurd was real, tangible, and perhaps dangerous. “They used to call it magic,” she had said, but that was little more than a name applied by people with no way to understand, driven by superstition in a time long before science could arrive and save the day. It didn’t matter as I paced in nervous anticipation until suddenly, the connections were made and I thought of Renard’s sudden, unexplained reversal when Aline returned.
“Feeling better?” she asked in a whisper.
“I don’t know what to feel,” I replied.
Before the debacle made by Renard’s accusations, she had become my reason and purpose; just a girl making her way out from understandable difficulties but dear to me and the face of my future where people love and live like any other. Now, she was something much more and the destroyer of common sense. I held on in desperation as the memories of sudden pain from the day before swirled around me like hornets daring me to disbelieve again.
“What did you do to Renard?”
The air seemed alive and crackling with energy, a strange effect like static electricity.
“I didn’t hurt him, Evan,” she replied softly. “I simply gave him a glimpse of his future and what it would bring if he didn’t forget this nonsense and go home to Belgium.”
“You went to see him before he left Wales?”
“Of course.”
I looked into her eyes but they showed nothing new. I thought there would be an expression of malevolence but she was unchanged.
“When he answered the phone,” I continued, “it was clear and I could hear it in his voice; he was terrified, Aline.”
“I should hope so,” she replied, and it was frightening to watch her move, so calm and unconcerned.
“Was it the same thing you did to me?”
“No,” she answered, “it was nothing like that. I just gave him a glimpse. It doesn’t matter, Evan; Renard understands now and he won’t be a problem for us anymore.”
“He showed them copies of those documents,” I said sadly. “Not the cops here, but he must’ve given those papers to somebody high up in the British government. They asked him why he came here and it’s just a matter of time before they figure it out.”
“They can ask all they like but I’m sure it’s the last thing Andre Renard will want to talk about for the rest of his life.”
It required little imagination for me to know what that meant and the horrors Renard must’ve seen when the images began to pour in and with them, the truth of what she could do. I guessed correctly Aline left no doubt as to her purpose and the thought gave me a chill when I realized there was no longer a fear of being found out. Instead, she wanted him to know and understand it was she who took him to a dark, horrifying place. With no hope of convincing others of so outrageous a tale, Renard was alone and exposed. The inevitable comparisons followed when I considered that truth.
A simple, harmless peek inside to convince her own boyfriend—the one she loves—sent me to my knees in agony. A more aggressive demonstration of her power to a man she dislikes could only have been a nightmare so real and terrifying his stability was torn from him and scattered into the night when the demons of Aline’s thoughts raced in to torment Renard in ways he could never have imagined. I didn’t mention it then but the irony was obvious: Claude Dumont looked at her and saw an angel acting as an extension of God’s hand; Renard looked and saw through a window into Hell.
Three more days passed but still there was no visit from the police. They made no connection to us because none existed; Renard hadn’t spoken with Jeremy’s neighbor and the extent of police involvement was confined to an exercise in cooperation with shadowy figures carrying heavy credentials. Inspector Renard was no longer part of the problem, perhaps, but officials with authority of the Crown to back them up most certainly were.
It’s amusing today, but when I told them of that moment during one of our breaks in the conversation, Burke and Halliwell watched and listened in reverent silence because they’d seen the result; they too had been taken to the edge when Aline’s defenses brought terrible and final consequences to those who push her. It’s not a nice thing to say, but it was fun watching them squirm, knowing how loudly a powerful, high-level bureaucrat like Gregory Hurd once scoffed at the notion and threatened the others with “pejorative reassignment” when he was briefed for the first time. They all listened but without the dismissive, self-assurance they once held. For them, the “power of nature” had been made all too clear.
In a surprising demonstration of his intuitive skills, Burke wondered if I experienced fear of her that day or if it had been instead a rising sensation of extended power available for me to use. Had I suddenly realized, he asked, she might become an instrument in my hands and one that could be aimed at anyone I wished? He seemed genuinely surprised when I shook my head. I saw a degree of callous disappointment in Burke’s expression, but Mo just smiled, reassured once more the best qualities of my character still held and guided me.
IT felt a bit like walking each moment across a thin sheet of ice covering a deep, freezing lake, and Aline waited with a patience I couldn’t appreciate until the questions rolled through my thoughts often enough that answers were needed. I wanted to avoid the topic and look toward the future, but the details in Renard’s stack of papers remained unexplained and with them, the missing pieces of her life now blended into my own. At last, I gave in and asked her if she would tell me about the truth inside a Belgian policeman’s misperceptions. She always knew the time would come and with it, an obligation to bring me closer. Another soft breeze through the valley welcomed a quiet Sunday and we set off on one of our customary walks in the trees.
Dumont’s unfortunate experience was the obvious starting point, but Renard’s notes on the night his friend called with a frantic declaration of a miracle witnessed were accurate. She described the moment Dumont lunged at her and the involuntary reaction that brought so terrible a result when blood vessels in his brain were quickly
(and inexplicably) shredded. It was sobering to hear, but she never claimed his death was an accident. Instead, she meant to harm him. It was too much, and she regretted reacting so violently, only because she hadn’t yet developed the control of a power her age and experience would bring later. Measured and appropriate response was not yet a skill well-polished, she said, but Dumont’s death became a lesson to her on the importance of knowing her own limits. It sounds cold and indifferent today, but I remember wondering if her matter-of-fact description was another peek through the veil and within, a look at the darker corners of her nature.
I listened to the words, but they became drowned out in the moment I thought of Damon’s odd behavior, suddenly demanding tangible assets as payment for his services, moving abruptly away from established and traditional electronic transfers into an ordinary bank. Like a siren blaring out its warning, the obvious conclusion blasted through and I felt a tug of uncertainty and anxious worry once more. There couldn’t be any doubt; Aline’s influence was written on the face of Damon’s sudden and unexplained requirement that left his clients surprised and confused. His “changes regarding a woman” were Aline and not Isolda Marquez. I had to understand, but I felt uneasy asking her. I know it sounds strange and absurd, but in that moment, the tiny barbs of caution brushed against me as though walking through a patch of nettles, and for the first time I felt the persistent, gnawing effect of fear.
She told me I would always be safe with her. I wanted to believe that but only because I needed to know she believed. Suddenly, her assurances were cast into doubt. It was inevitable the question would come up at some point, so I held my breath and hoped for the best.
The Seventh Life of Aline Lloyd Page 19
