by C. L. Stone
“Just sit down for a moment.”
“I need to go home.” The pain in her head was worsening, and she still felt sick.
“We’ll walk you back in a few minutes,” Matt spoke up. “Just sit down for a moment first, Lily.”
She felt him put his hand on her arm and tug her gently to a fallen log. She sank down onto it, and hugged her arms around her knees, keeping her eyes on the toes of her boots.
“Lily, sweetheart, look at me.” She saw Nate crouch in front of her but she didn’t want to acknowledge any of them. There was too much going through her mind. She kept seeing the children by the water, hearing their screams. She shivered and closed her eyes, trying to banish the images but it just made them stronger. What was wrong with her?
“What happened, Lily?” She felt a warm body settle on each side of her, and two arms snaked around her waist. “Did you have a seizure?” It was Matt’s voice she heard; he had crouched next to Nate.
“I… think so.” She lifted a hand to rub her forehead and saw how badly she was shaking. “I think I hallucinated… or something.” It was the something that froze her heart in fear.
“Tell us what you saw,” Nate whispered. He placed his hand on her knee as Matt caught her shaking hand in his.
“I… I’ve seen the waterwheel before. On Monday, when I had the seizure.”
“And what did you see today when you saw the waterwheel?” Nate’s voice was low, calm, and it curled around her, relaxing her slightly. The body heat from the twins was helping, pressing into her tightly, arms around her waist. She was surrounded by them, and it helped centre her.
Lily drew in a shaky breath. “Two children. They fell in and were being sucked under the waterwheel.” She closed her eyes and dragged her hand from Matt’s to cover her face with both hands. She was terrified of what was happening to her now. Maybe there was a brain tumour that was causing her seizures to change. Dread made her break out in a cold sweat.
“Hey, it’s okay.” Josh lifted his hand and began rubbing circles on her back.
“No, it’s not okay. It’s not normal, you said it yourself,” she murmured. “Maybe there’s something wrong with my brain. I’ve had MRI scans and CAT scans. What if they missed something?”
“Lily.” Nate reached forward and drew her hands away from her face. He bent forward till she had to look at him. “I researched it, Lily. When I realised you had fits, I researched it in case you had one with us. We needed to know what to do. One of the things I read was that some people with epilepsy hallucinate.”
“Really?” She grasped his words, looking straight at him. It was almost dark but the blue of his eyes seemed to glow somehow. “They do?”
“Yes. I’m surprised no one told you.” He smiled at her. “The main thing is that you are alright. You’re fine, do you understand? You’re not going mad. You’re perfectly sane.”
“We didn’t mean it wasn’t normal,” Josh spoke up. “We just meant that we weren’t expecting…” He stopped when Nate looked at him, his head tilted slightly.
“Do you have a headache, Lily?” Matt asked softly, and she nodded. Relief flooded through her at Nate’s words. She didn’t know about hallucinating; she had never been told about it. But then nothing had happened before that would warrant any of the doctors telling her.
“Lily! Lily!”
Lily heard her mother calling her name, and she rubbed her hands over her face.
“Get a good sleep and you’ll be fine in the morning, Lily May. You’ll need it for swimming.”
“Are you sure you want to chance that?” She snorted, rubbing at her forehead. “I don’t seem to have a very good track record around you all.”
“I think we can handle whatever you throw at us.” Matt chuckled. “Life won’t be boring with you.”
She shook her head deprecatingly and got to her feet when she heard her mother call out again.
“Over here, Mrs Adair!” Nate called out and then turned to Lily. “Do you want her to know? Or will it just worry her?”
She frowned. She’d never hidden a seizure from her mother before, but that was because she was usually there when they happened, or was called to pick up the pieces when it happened when she was at school. But she also knew that if she told her now it would just worry her. It was unusual for her to have two seizures so close together. While Lily was sure it was just stress, she knew her mother would blame herself.
“I’ll tell her later,” Lily said. Nate smiled, and she had the impression that he was pleased with her decision.
“There you are, is everything okay?” Her mother came down the path, June with her.
“Hello, boys!” June gave a bright smile when she saw all of them.
“Aunt June, Mrs Adair, we were just showing Lily the waterwheel,” Nate said. He stepped towards her and kissed his aunt’s cheek, quickly followed by the twins.
“Lynda, these are my nephews; Nate, and the twins, Josh and Jake.” June introduced them to her mother. It gave Lily a few more minutes to gather her wits about her.
“Hello, boys. It’s nice to meet you.”
The boys introduced themselves, and her mother laughed when the twins bowed to her, big grins on their faces.
“How do people tell you apart?” she asked them.
“With difficulty,” June said dryly before they could reply. “I’ve known them since they were born, and I still get it wrong, don’t I boys?”
“Yes, you do, Aunty,” Josh said and Lynda laughed, shaking her head.
“We’d best be getting on. It was nice to meet you, Mrs Adair,” Nate said. “Pick you up after lunch tomorrow, Lily, okay?”
She nodded and regretted it when her head thumped painfully making her wince.
“Are you okay, Lily?” Her mother picked up on it instantly.
“Headache,” she murmured.
“We’d best get home, Lily. We’ve only just moved in, and it’s been a stressful few weeks, June.”
“I can imagine,” June agreed, and they began to walk back towards the manor.
It was almost dark under the trees and Lily couldn’t see well at all. The boys drew out flashlights, and it helped to pick out their way, but it seemed that every twig in the path was enough to cause Lily to stumble.
Matt moved into her side and put his arm around her waist. He bent to put his mouth to her ear.
“Lean on us, Lily. We’ll look after you, I promise.” His words seemed deeper than just leaning on him to stop herself from falling, but her head was too muddled to do anything but retreat into numbness.
By the time he helped her into the car, the others had disappeared and it was just him and his mother. She was dimly aware of him sliding his fingers across her forehead as he stepped back from the car. She sank into sleep before he’d even closed the car door.
***************
“Lily, sweetheart, I’m sorry. I can’t carry you in, darling. Not these days.”
Her mother’s voice in her ear woke her up. She opened her eyes, disorientated for a few seconds. The interior light illuminated the car enough for her to see her mother leaning towards her. She licked her lips and stretched. It felt like she’d been asleep for hours, when in reality it was probably only a few minutes.
“How’s your head? Take some paracetamol when you get in.”
Lily frowned. Her headache had gone completely, not even leaving the twinges she sometimes got after a seizure.
“It’s gone.” Relief flooded through her that she wouldn’t have to suffer through another migraine.
“Gone?” Her mother’s voice was confused. “How can it just go?”
“Maybe I slept it off.” Lily undid her belt and got out of the car.
“You did go out like a light,” she agreed. “Maybe it was the stress of your mother meeting your boyfriend, when you hadn’t even told her you had one,” she added slyly.
“What?” Lily hesitated in opening the door to look around at her mother. She grinned a
nd got out.
“Matthew.”
Lily jumped out, closed her door and glared over the roof at her mother as she locked the car. “He’s a friend, Mum. Just a friend.”
“Of course, dear. June is as happy as I am. She likes you.”
“Mum!”
“What?” Her mother swept up the path and unlocked the door, the little light above the front door lighting her way.
“He’s just a friend!”
“Of course he is, that’s the best way to start a relationship,” she called out, and went in laughing.
Lily rolled her eyes and shook her head as she started towards the cottage. There would be no convincing her mother.
“Lilith.”
Lily whirled, certain she’d heard her name. She looked up and down the badly illuminated lane; only one street light lit the area and that was further down towards the green. She could see no one.
“Come in and stop sulking,” her mother called out.
Lily shrugged, it must have been her mother. She stopped in her doorway and looked up and down the lane, but there was still no sign of anyone. She looked over at the cottages opposite. Lights were on in the windows at either end, but the one in the middle looked dark and unlived in. A movement caught her eye and she peered into the darkness of the door. A glow of red that disappeared seconds later startled her until she realised it was the end of a cigarette. Someone stood in the door smoking.
“Lilith! You’re letting in the cold air, shut the door!” her mother shouted. She saw the door open and whoever it was went inside.
She closed her own door and realised she still had Matt’s jacket on as well as his mother’s boots. She would return them tomorrow when he picked her up.
“Lily, are you okay?” Her mum stepped into the light of the hallway from the living room. “Are you sure it was just a headache tonight?”
This was her chance, she could tell her mother that her seizures were changing again. That hallucinations were now part of the deal. But something held her back from saying anything.
“Yeah, just a headache.” She shrugged out of his jacket. The moment she set it on the coat peg she missed the feel of it surrounding her, missed the smell that was particular to Matt.
“I think I’ll get an early night,” Lily murmured, and pried the boots off her feet. She kissed her mother goodnight and made her way upstairs.
Hallucinations. She didn’t know what to think of it yet, and it was one of the reasons she’d held back on telling her mother. If she shut her eyes, she could still hear the screams, see the boy try valiantly to reach the other child before falling in himself and being mercilessly pulled under the wheel by the flow of the water. She wasn’t sure how much she could take if her seizures started adding full technicolour drama like that.
But she still didn’t want to tell her mother just yet. When her seizures changed from absent seizures to tonic-clonic, her mother had been distraught for days. It had triggered a move as well. It was one of the rare times that her mother uprooted her mid school year.
Lily didn’t want to move again. She wanted to stay here, she wanted to stay with her friends. Friends, who not only accepted her seizures, but cared enough to find out what to do if she had one when she was with them. She’d never had friends who had done that before. So she would tell her mother only if she had to, and not before.
14
JONAS
None of them went home, instead they’d crept up to Matt’s room to wait for him to come up from saying goodbye to Lily.
“That wasn’t an epileptic fit,” Josh stated as soon as the door shut behind Matt.
“No, it wasn’t,” agreed Nate. He was sitting on the end of Matt’s bed. He leant forward, stretching his arms along his legs. “But if it wasn’t, what the hell was it?”
“Not to mention what she said she saw.” Jake shuddered.
“Just give me a moment. I remember something. I’ll be back in a minute.” Matt left the room, shutting the door behind him.
“She just went down,” Nate murmured, clasping his hands together, his hair falling into his face.
“She struggled to get free,” Jake said. “We weren’t expecting her to launch herself forward like that.” His worry showed clearly.
“She was trying to crawl across the ground like she was fucking possessed,” Josh agreed. He slung his arm around Jake’s neck, and they sat down on Matt’s window seat.
The door opened again, and Matt came in, his normally cheerful face was sombre and his eyes guarded.
“I think I know what she saw.” Matt shut the door behind him. He had a brown book in his hand that looked like an extremely old ledger.
“What?” Nate sat up as Matt crossed to the bed and set the book down on it.
“This is the diary of the last vicar that lived here, and these”—he brought forward a grainy photograph that was clearly Victorian in age—“are his children, Charles and Martha. There are several entries from the beginning of July 1888 and onwards that are sad. He had two children, these two. They both drowned by the mill, but it doesn’t give any details on how it happened, other than the children’s nanny found them slightly downstream. The vicar’s wife went into shock and never recovered. She was sent to an asylum four months later. My great-great grandfather saw an opportunity and took it, that’s how he got this place at half the normal sum from the church. I remembered reading this years ago.”
“So she’s not epileptic.” Nate rubbed his forehead, his breath leaving him on a sigh.
“Fucking hell.” Jake’s voice was hushed. “So what are we saying? She’s a Medium? She can see the fucking dead? Jesus Christ!”
“No.” Matt shook his head. “Or at least I don’t think so.” He looked at Nate for confirmation.
“So what the fuck are we saying?” Jake demanded.
“I think Lily may be a Seer,” Nate spoke up. He moved to push his glasses up his nose and gave a noise of disgust when he realised they weren’t there.
“A Seer?” Josh repeated the word as if he’d never heard it. “A Visionary? You think she’s getting visions?”
“I think we need to talk to Jonas.” Nate looked at Matt.
“Agreed,” Matt said quietly. “Now?”
“Now.” Nate nodded. “We need to be on top of this by the time we pick her up tomorrow.”
“And if he says we need to stay away from her?” Jake asked doubtfully.
“We tell him to go fuck himself,” Nate snapped. “She thinks she’s epileptic and she’s clearly not! She needs us.”
“Yes, she does,” Matt agreed.
“She’s ours now, whether she knows it or not, Jacob,” Josh said.
“Ours?” Matt looked at him, one eyebrow lifted. “You think you’re the only one with a connection to her? She’s not yours.”
“Not now.” Nate got to his feet. “Let’s just get to Jonas.”
***************
Nate rang the doorbell several times and then knocked impatiently. A light came on behind the frosted glass door, and it was opened by a sleepy looking man in his late forties who frowned, drawing his dressing gown around him tighter.
“What do you lot want?” he inquired. “And at this time of night?” He didn’t wait for a reply, he just turned and started to walk back into the house. They trooped in after him, Jake brought up the rear, locking the door behind him.
Jonas led them into his living room and slumped into his armchair. He rubbed at his face, watching as they collapsed down into the various sofas and armchairs that were around the room. Books and papers were stacked everywhere. They were on the floor, and on the coffee table which was set in front of an open, unlit fire. Bookcases lined three of the walls and were stuffed full of books and magazines. The house was Victorian, and although there was electricity, all the lights were still the old-fashioned gas lamps. Lamps which Jonas controlled with a snap of his fingers.
“Okay, who’s died?” he drawled and crossed his pyjama clad l
egs. His tartan slipper slid down his foot and dangled from the end of his toes, but he made no move to put it back on properly. His hair was a sandy blonde colour and all over the place from being asleep. Shrewd blue eyes, which caught more than they missed, watched the boys. His voice was a slow rumble that held people’s attention without him even trying.
“No one,” Nate said. “We have a question.”
“You do?” Jonas slapped his lips together and folded his arms. “If it’s to do with schoolwork, I’ll turn you all into toads. You do realise what time it is, don’t you?”
“It can’t wait,” Nate said and got up. He crossed to where a globe stood on the desk under the curtain covered window. He spun it gently, a frown between his eyes. “It’s about a girl.”
“A girl?” Jonas shook his head. “I’m thinking it must be more than hormones at question here. What’s she done?”
“We don’t know. She’s only just moved here and has epileptic fits, or at least she thinks she does.” Nate watched Jonas’s reaction and wasn’t surprised when he saw him sit forward slightly, uncrossing his legs. A cat slinked its way between Josh’s legs, and he bent to pick it up, scratching it behind its ears, making it purr contentedly.
“Start at the beginning,” Jonas commanded, and for the next twenty minutes they told him everything. He listened carefully, his eyes on the cat in Josh’s arms.
“By her own admission, her fits have changed,” Josh finished with a sigh. Jonas sat back in his seat and lit the fire with a casual flick of his fingers. He stared into the flames as he thought, not saying anything.
“She only saw colours before coming here, now she’s seeing actual events,” Matt spoke up.
“Is she seeing dead people?” Jake asked. “Well, we know she saw dead people, but is she a Seer or a Medium?”
“I’d like to meet her,” Jonas said quietly. “I’d say from what you’ve described she’s a Seer. Traditionally they don’t come into their full powers before they’re eighteen, but it sounds like she’s been having breakthroughs all these years without even knowing. When is she eighteen?”
