The voice she heard felt as if it came from someone else’s vocal cords, spoken through an ethereal being’s lips.
A frozen spear of pain greater than she’d ever known pierced her heart.
“Which one is dead?”
A part of her brain argued this was all a lie, but her heart began to contract with the acceptance of the truth. But hope is a strong emotion, hard to let go of.
“I’m so sorry, Honey. It’s both of them. Both of them are dead.”
The wind came to an abrupt halt, dropping its cargo on the ground. In the kitchen the tea kettle released the sound of an anguished scream, the way that Tori could not. The officer’s face blurred in her vision because of her tears before her sobs matured into wails of heartbreak.
* * *
It was a robot that extinguished all the lights in Sharon’s house and locked the door behind itself. Even the dog who was usually so excited at being outside that he’d run everywhere at full tilt, walked slowly with his mistress to her car.
Max rested his chin on her knee as Tori drove home. She didn’t even sense him staring up at her with sad brown eyes. Nor did she notice a dim light burning when she pulled into her driveway. A light she had not left on when she ran from the building in a fear she no longer felt. This emptiness, this blank canvas, this nothingness where you go when all hope is gone.
She held the door open for the dog then walked in behind him. Once again, she almost ran into his solid little body parked in her way. She frowned as she glared at him until she noticed he was staring with great concentration at the other side of the room.
It seemed to take an hour for her to turn her head so that she was facing the far wall. When her eyes reached the same sight Max was seeing, Tori’s knees turned to water. Just like that, she was brought back to reality when a needle of terror pierced her brain.
Her throat spasmed in fear and her stomach twisted into a knot of terror. Despite the chill in the air, she began to sweat. Clinching her teeth, she willed her body to move one foot backward. She tried to scream but could only force out a pitiful mewling, like an injured cat. An involuntary shudder passed through her.
Is this some sort of grief-induced hallucination or dementia?
Wisps of mist sailed across the floor punctuated by a soft glow that pulsed in counterpoint to her terrified heartbeat. Was it something too horrible to truly contemplate? Again, she told her limbs to move and again they refused. Then she heard him. The hair on the back of her neck rose in a fear as cold and deep as the Arctic Ocean. She knew within the space of a heartbeat that she was not alone. She saw the shape sharpen and take a more distinct form of a tall, dark man, and he stepped out of the mist, toward her. There was a sense of anticipation, an urgent expectancy of something or someone, wishing for her in her darkest hour.
Tori stared at him, compelled to watch him, as unable to look away as changing the ebb and flow of the tides. Even though her mind processed the image, informed her she was correct in what she was seeing, her heart stuttered, skipping several beats, threatening to stop if the man advanced closer to her.
Her gaze began at the top of his head, to his hair that brushed against the raised collar of his shirt, to the ice-blue eyes, down his patrician nose to his sculptured lips, parting into a smile that showcased his brilliant teeth. Downward to the wide shoulders, narrow hips and O God, don’t let your eyes linger there! to his muscled thighs, to the stockings covering his perfectly formed muscled calves, ending at the buckled shoes on his feet.
He was more handsome than even her imagination could have designed. His jet black hair shined blue in the light of the lamp and the compassion in his eyes did not detract from their beauty. He held his strong arms out to her, beseeching her to walk into his embrace.
Am I no longer able to separate reality from fantasy?
True, he seemed to lack the substance of a real, flesh and blood man. In the briefest flicker, he faded. She wished she’d at least seen a serpentine of smoke, as she imagined a ghost would appear, instead of “it” just simply vanishing like that. First it was there, the next it was gone. It didn’t fade or walk through a wall—it was just GONE.
Certain she had misinterpreted her own eyesight, she stepped backward, closer to the door. Then she realized the form, or whatever it was, hadn’t completely left.
What is this? Is this some sort of illusion lurking within a reality?
Just as placing an undeveloped photo into a pan of developer brings forth a picture, the man’s image became more solid, more detailed. It was as if someone had dialed up a rheostat and the apparition began to form into the shape of a man. He slowly, surely, without question, materialized into…
It’s his eyes. That’s how I know. That’s why I’m certain. But ohmygod, this isn’t possible. It’s insane! But those eyes, and the expression that I have mentally visualized thousands of times tells me that this is truly, inexplicably, undeniably HIM.
As she realized she could no longer see the wall behind him, Tori began to become light-headed.
He was luminous and she felt compelled to stare at him. His returning expression one of… love? His eyes held her hostage.
What’s next? Do I start believing in vampires and werewolves? Anything that goes bump in the night?
She had envisioned his eyes as the pure blue of the Arctic Ocean, but the sultriness there raised the temperature of the room.
He reached out his hand and the touch was so precise that it couldn’t be the wind, especially when no windows were open. Her astonishment and fear deepened into awe. Though still doubting her own sanity, her pulse settled into a fast rhythm and her head began to clear, but then he spoke.
“Victoria, my darling. Let me hold you and perhaps lighten the heavy burden upon your loving heart.”
She never heard or felt the soft thud as her body hit the carpet.
Chapter Seventeen
She didn’t immediately open her eyes when she awoke. Through the haze of the state between waking and sleeping, Tori had a nagging feeling that something was wrong, that something horrible had happened. Then it all came back to her in a flood of torment. She bit her lip and squeezed her eyes shut as tightly as possible, trying to force the nightmare sights and sounds from her memory.
The blankets were smothering, but she couldn’t make herself pull them from her head. When she felt a weight settle onto the side of the bed and gentle hands tugging at the confining cover, she suddenly remembered another shocking event of last night.
Inch by miniscule inch, Tori began to pull her head free of its confines. When the blanket reached her eyebrows, she stared with large, rounded green eyes as she jerked the comforter off her head. She knew her hair was wild and her mouth hung open but she wasn’t cognizant to the point she could correct those problems.
It appeared that she’d lost the power of speech, also. It didn’t help that he sat there, that amazing smile lighting up his face. He leaned forward to cup her face in his hands. Tori jerked away so hard she slammed the back of her head against the headboard. At once she reclaimed the power of speech.
“Ouch! Man, that’s gonna leave a mark!”
“Good morning, Victoria.”
His voice not only sounded familiar, it felt so gloriously right saying her name.
“Who are you? What are you doing in my house?”
“Darling, you know who I am.”
“This is not possible. No way, no how, nun-uh.”
“Yes, my love, it is, indeed, possible. It must be for I am here, am I not?”
“You are what I’ve felt, the thing that Max stares at. Oh! The one that knocks my things to the floor!”
“I apologize for that, darling. I was only trying to garner your attention.”
“How did you get here? O God, I can’t believe I’m talking to you. You’re not real and I’m crazy.”
“You are not crazy and I am real. At least I think I’m real. It’s so difficult to know, really.”
�
�What do you mean you don’t know? How the hell can you not know whether or not you’re real?”
“Well Victoria, you must admit this is an unusual set of circumstances, true?”
“Well—yeah.”
“I can only tell you how I came to be, at least in my own opinion. You may, perhaps, help me to better understand how it… I, came to be, here and now.”
She had to get away, had to think, and she couldn’t do that with him so close.
“Wait, I have to go to the bathroom. You know how it is when you first wake up… or maybe you don’t.”
I don’t know because I have no idea how close to human you could possibly be.
She cast her eyes sideways at him, pulling free of the blankets, tugging at her t-shirt, hotly aware of how her body reacted to the cold morning air in the bedroom. She crossed her arms across her chest and turned to slip past him. Her feet brushed against the side of his leg and she felt his calf muscle tense as her foot grazed him.
Nothing diaphanous there; it felt solid, real—manly.
“Well, I guess I should be grateful I still have all my clothes on.”
The look of utter shock on his chiseled face would have been funny if the entire situation wasn’t something straight out of an episode of The Twilight Zone.
“Victoria! I can’t believe you’d even consider that I’d…”
“Oh, keep your pantaloons on, I was kidding. It’s something I do when I’m nervous or scared.”
“Madame, I assure you, I don’t wear pantaloons.”
Tori touched the power button on a small radio she kept on top of her dresser. He may not like the sound of the music, but the bathroom was just on the other side of the thin wall separating it from her bedroom.
The tragic loss of the night before threatened to assault her heart, which would have crippled her to the point of unreasonableness. She took several deep breaths, promised herself she’d allow herself to deal with it later. She then blushed as she flushed, washed her hands, and walked quickly to the kitchen to lean against the wall, gulping air.
What the crap is going on here? Am I no longer able to separate reality from fantasy? Have I finally, at long last, checked into the Rubber Ramada where all the mattresses are nailed to the walls? It’s simply impossible that a fictional man, one created in my imagination, has been skulking in the background, then stepped through the shadows, slowly taking solid form! O God, I wonder if I can find a therapist who will take me in immediately.
She pulled a knife from the butcher block on the counter, held it at her side as she walked back into the bedroom. Bobby Darin’s hit “Dream Lover” was playing on the radio and she found Avery grinning at her as he listened to the song.
“I remember the night you sang this while you were holding some sort of brown paper tube in your hand…”
She raised an eyebrow at him and killed the power of the radio as she came back into the room.
Okay, I have enough to worry about to not remember that I was probably singing right before I got into the tub, which means I was nude. O God…
She nestled in the middle of the bed, knees bent, and legs across each other.
“Okay, tell me.”
Avery took her hand in his and Tori quickly pulled free of his grasp.
“Don’t touch me. Just tell me.”
He smiled and the deep dimples at his cheek elicited a small gasp before she caught it.
Yeah, there ya go, Stupid. Let him know that you’d like to kiss those dimples and…
“Why do you smile so damned much? I don’t have anything to smile about and you’re getting on my last nerve. So tell me how you came ‘to be.’ ”
Even though he’d dropped the smile and no longer held her hand, his pull was strong, magical.
“For you are the magnet and I am the steel.” Oh, for the love of Pete, Tori, stop thinking in song titles!
“I’ve seen you for many months. Not in the way that I see you now, but as if through a deep fog. At first it frightened me, as you can well imagine. I thought you were either a witch, a demon, or a goddess, and I didn’t want to truly find out which.
“I could see your face only, then slowly I could see the rest of your body, walking through the mist. After a bit I could make out some of your speech, some of it hard for me to understand, to know the meaning of it.
“Then you began to come closer, so close I could touch you, or the ghost of you. But whenever you saw me or felt me near you, you ran in fear. I regretted that for all I wanted to do was speak to you, to wipe the tears from your eyes.
“All of a sudden, for some reason, I began to be drawn here, to your world, your time. What I’d felt when I first saw your countenance was nothing compared to the fear I experienced when I came to this place.” He gestured with his hand to illustrate the room, the house, the world. “I was filled with wonder and terror.”
“Just like that, you popped into this world? For some weird reason you simply can’t fathom, you busted into this time frame—without knowing how you got here?”
“Yes, that is what I am saying.”
“You don’t recognize sarcasm, do you?”
His face was confused, his eyebrows surprised peaks on his forehead.
“Oh, Avery, that’s impossible. That is, if Avery is really your name.”
“What other name would I have, other than the one you gave me?”
Tori’s epiphany was obvious on her face.
“You’re the one who wrote those chapters of the book!”
A bright red crept over his face and he cast his eyes downward, the long dark lashes feathering against his cheeks.
“Yes, it was I. It wasn’t too difficult to work that machine after I watched you do so for several days. You are a good teacher.”
Tori’s jaw muscles were clinched so hard her words came out through her teeth.
“I had no idea I was teaching anyone anything. You actually stood behind me as I worked, you…”
Her eyes once again glared open.
“You’ve been there when I slept, when I took a shower, when I changed my clothes! O my God, you’ve seen everything, you bastard!”
Avery’s hands were moving frantically, his head shaking his negative response, his words pleading with Tori to please stop and listen to him.
“A gentleman would never do what you suggest I’ve done, Victoria!”
“Avery, hello! As you said, I created you and I know I made you a cad, a womanizer. I know what you are.”
“No Victoria. That is your concept of my character but it’s an untrue one. Now that I’ve gained solidity I make my own decisions, and I’ve decided I don’t much care for the character you created for me.”
“Are you honestly trying to tell me that you’re your own man now, in this time, in this world?”
“That is exactly what I’m telling you. Here and now, I am a gentleman.”
“Oh really? And pray tell, what other sentiments do you have to add?”
“I love you, Victoria. That is my only other sentiment.”
“Avery, that’s preposterous. You’re a fictional person, you don’t exist other than on the pages of a book!”
“How can you stand there, Victoria, look at me, and say that? Am I not solid? Can you not hear my voice, smell my scent…?”
Tori closed her eyes and inhaled deeply. The scent of him was heady and sexy.
He stepped closer and looked into her eyes. She saw the raw desire there. His lips claimed hers and Tori became faint with the feelings that kiss evoked. He released her lips and smiled into her eyes.
“Does not that kiss feel real to you, my love?”
When she could take a deep breath Tori frowned at him.
“Okay, granted I don’t know what’s going on here but I’ll eventually figure it out. If you’re not a full-blown apparition, you’re still… paranormal. So, until then, no terms of endearment and absolutely no physical contact of any kind!”
“I have a theory,
if you’d like to hear it, my… Victoria.”
Her sigh was deep and ragged.
“Sure, let’s talk it out. Maybe that’s the only way we’ll figure out the most mystifying thing that’s ever happened to me in my life.”
“It might be best, Victoria, if you would let me tell you, without interruption, how I feel this has happened. We can… how do they say that… rap about it when I’m done.”
Victoria couldn’t stop the grin that refused to be denied.
“Rap about it? You’ve been watching too much TV.”
A frown drew his eyebrows together.
“TV? What is that?”
Tori pointed to the television set across the room.
“Oh! The box with so many different people in it! I haven’t figured that one out just yet. I have so many questions, and not just about the… TV. But, please, tell me one thing, Victoria. Where do all those people go when you turn off the box? I’ve been so worried about them. They’re all so small that I don’t see how they can possibly take care of themselves. At first I was so concerned I couldn’t sleep but then when I watched the box the next day, there all of them were again, and they seemed to be fine. And why do these little women on TV behave so badly? Every day they have another man…” the blush rose from his collar to his forehead, “I just don’t understand so many things.”
“O Lord, you’ve been watching soap operas. No wonder you’re confused.” Tori began to chuckle and then laughed out loud before she could reel it in. “Avery, we have so many problems to work out. Let’s discuss TV, the little people on it, and scantily clad women later, okay?”
The laughter dried on her lips when she realized her amusement at his expense hurt him.
“I have a feeling this is going to be an epic story, the telling of your trip to this era. Why don’t I make us some coffee before we start?”
“Coffee? That’s very kind of you, but do you happen to have any tea?”
Tears jumped to the surface. “You stubborn Brits!” Then she smiled at him to take the sting from her words.
* * *
Avery settled himself into the cushions on the other side of the sofa. His heartbeat had slowed down to a frantic rhythm instead of galloping along at top speed, but all it took to get out of control was for Victoria to come back into the room. He wasn’t sure how this all came about, how he was now able to be seen and heard by her, he only knew he was so happy it had finally happened.
Through the Shadows Page 13
