The Hidden Gift

by Ian Somers

  ‘What’s with me?’ she said. ‘Ross, you’re really starting to bug me with that ball. You’ve been bouncing it off the wall for five hours straight. Do you realise how annoying it is?’

  ‘Oh, I didn’t think you could actually hear it from downstairs.’

  ‘I would hear that racket all the way down the street! Are you that bored?’

  ‘Not exactly.’

  ‘We haven’t seen each other in months and we’re in the same house yet you decide to stay in your room all day, bouncing a damned golf ball off the wall. I don’t understand you sometimes.’

  ‘Exactly.’ I climbed off the floor and walked to her and kissed her on the tip of her nose. ‘It’s a misunderstanding. I’m not doing this out of boredom. It’s a training technique. Mr Williams gave me some extracts from a book on psychokinesis and told me I should start practising. And you know me, if I start something I rarely stop until I finish it.’

  ‘I don’t see how bouncing a ball is training.’

  ‘It’s complicated, but someday it might save my life.’ I gave her the puppy-dog eyes. ‘Isn’t my life important to you?’

  ‘Don’t give me that look,’ Cathy said, trying to hide her smile. ‘And you shouldn’t be making jokes about you dying. Not after everything that’s happened lately, and after Sarah’s predictions!’

  ‘You’re right.’ I kissed her again. ‘Where is Sarah anyway?’

  ‘Asleep on the couch in the sitting room. We were watching a movie together and she drifted off, despite putting up a heroic effort to stay awake.’

  ‘Seems like you’ve found a little sister.’

  ‘Yeah. I’ve always wanted one actually, but her timing is deplorable.’ She leaned in close to me and kissed my neck. ‘I don’t want anything to come in the way of us spending time together.’

  I used a slight burst of power to nudge the door shut behind her. Then I carefully used my gift to unzip her hoodie and to peel it off her shoulders.

  ‘Hey, you snake!’ She gave me a playful slap across the chest. ‘You’re sneaky, Bentley. Real sneaky.’

  ‘I’m sneaky! You’re the one who switched your mind into a dog just so you could watch me getting undressed.’

  ‘That was not intentional!’

  ‘Yes, it was. And it was rather disturbing too!’

  She suddenly pushed forward and I fell back onto the bed with her in my arms and we shared a long and passionate kiss. It became very heated between us until we both drew back at the same time then stared into each other’s eyes.

  ‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’ she asked with an excited nod.

  ‘I am if you’re thinking that Sarah’s left her diary unattended.’

  ‘That’s what I’m thinking.’

  ‘Me too. Shall we?’

  ‘Should we?’

  ‘Shouldn’t we?’

  ‘I dunno. Seems wrong.’

  ‘Wouldn’t it be wrong not to look through it?’

  ‘It’s not exactly right to do it either.’

  ‘Could be something important in it.’

  ‘Might be nothing important in it.’

  ‘In that case there’s no reason not to look.’

  ‘OK.’ Cathy bounced off the bed and zipped her hoodie. ‘We’ll just have a quick look through it. Hurry, I don’t want her to catch us, not now that she thinks of me as her best friend.’

  She took me by the hand and we tiptoed across the landing to the room that Sarah had moved into. I used my gift to switch the bedside lamp on as we stepped inside and we stealthily began our search for the precious diary. It didn’t take us very long to uncover it; she’d kept it tucked inside the pillow case.

  ‘I feel awful for doing this,’ Cathy moaned. She brought it to the lamp, but resisted turning the first page. ‘It’s like betraying her.’

  ‘Cathy, what if there’s something in there that could save our lives? Or anyone’s life for that matter?’

  ‘I know, I know,’ she sighed. ‘I’m sure she trusts me and I feel bad breaking that trust.’

  ‘She’ll never know.’

  I opened the diary and flicked to the first entry which was almost indecipherable. It was nothing but scribbles and doodles, and neither of us could make any sense of it. We went from one page to another and I was starting to think Hunter was right about it being the simple notebook of a troubled child. There wasn’t any indication that what she had written were premonitions. Some of it was simple descriptions of houses or people, and a lot of it was illegible.

  ‘Her handwriting is atrocious,’ Cathy pointed out as we sifted through the pages.

  ‘I know. How did she get away with this in school?’

  ‘She’s been moved around a lot, remember? Probably hasn’t spent any length of time in one school, or with one teacher.’

  We went on and on until we found some notes about a bus crash. There were nine pages all dedicated to this one event and I recalled the newspaper article that had led us to her in the first place. It said she had predicted a school bus colliding with a car. A few people had died and this seemed to be a perfect description of it.

  ‘I’m not convinced by this,’ I told Cathy. ‘There’s no evidence that this was written before the crash took place.’

  ‘Keep turning the pages. Perhaps we’ll find something that might prove that her gift is genuine.’

  We went on and there were more erratic notes on various subjects that had little relevance. Soon enough, though, we came across the second disaster that was mentioned in the newspaper article. We identified sixteen pages full of notes and even a sketch relating to a fishing trawler that sank in the North Sea. Again there was no concrete proof that these notes were made before the ship actually went down. But I felt there was something to this prediction. It didn’t seem like a clever fake because one of the notes was written from the perspective of a crew member, and this person had become trapped in the engine room after he injured his back. We took the diary to Cathy’s room and looked up the stories on the internet about the tragedy and there was some mention of this man, but no details of how he died.

  ‘Still doesn’t prove anything,’ I sighed. I walked away from the laptop and rubbed my eyes. ‘Maybe we should leave this to Mr Williams. We can’t tell from this diary if she has the true gift of prophecy.’

  ‘Maybe you’re right.’ Cathy continued turning pages. ‘Hey, have there been any volcanic eruptions recently?’

  ‘One in Iceland a couple of years ago.’

  ‘I mean one that killed a whole load of people.’

  ‘Not that I know of,’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Don’t think there’s been one like that for over a decade.’

  ‘Come here and look at this,’ she said, waving her hand frantically through the air. ‘Does any of this look familiar?’

  I looked over Cathy’s shoulder and saw a very dramatic drawing of a volcano exploding with fire, and black smoke surrounding it like a vaporous wreath. There was some text alongside the sketch but it was cryptic and neither of us could understand it properly. Cathy turned to the next page and there was more on this volcano. This time though the drawings were more detailed, the writing remained mysterious. There were also some odd diagrams. They were line drawings and looked like a fried egg to me, but Cathy caught on much quicker than I did.

  ‘You know what these drawings are?’ I asked.

  ‘They’re aerial maps. This is an island from above and it appears the volcano is so powerful that it breaks the land-mass in two.’

  ‘There definitely hasn’t been any volcano like that recently so this still doesn’t give us anything to go on. She might simply have an over-active imagination.’

  We sifted through the erratic entries until we finally found a drawing that Cathy recognised straight away. It was the silhouette of a man standing in front of a terrible blaze and wielding a long, swirling whip of fire.

  ‘That’s Edward Zalech. Jesus, this is very odd.’

  ‘Obviously
.’

  ‘No, I mean that this is how I saw Zalech, just before I attacked him. It’s almost as if Sarah had seen this happen through my eyes.’

  ‘Maybe that’s how premonitions work. If I remember correctly, it’s the emotions that people experience during a traumatic event that trigger the whole thing. The person’s emotions travel through time because they’re so potent.’

  ‘Yes, and part of the imagery and thought processes travel with the emotion. Prophets are the only ones who can catch these time-travelling memories. Only the skilled ones can interpret them clearly.’

  ‘I think Sarah did quite a good job on this considering her age.’

  Cathy flipped the page and there was a long note about the fire-girl fighting with gifted soldiers. I read through it and there was no doubt this was an account of my battle with Ania Zalech.

  ‘I think her gift is genuine,’ Cathy said. She handed the diary to me and shut down her laptop. ‘That would mean the tin-man may be coming to kill us all.’

  I took her hand and gave it a reassuring squeeze. ‘It might also have been a nightmare – a bad dream that’s not connected to her gift.’

  ‘I hope you’re right.’

  I looked through the last few pages of the book then stopped when I saw a series of drawings. Each depicted a man in a long coat killing a different person. The words ‘Tin-man’ were scribbled under each. There was no doubt in my mind that this murderous individual did exist. I had a strong feeling that we would meet him very soon.

  I decided not to show Cathy the drawings. She had been through too much in the last few days and I didn’t want to upset her with this. I continued flicking pages as if I hadn’t noticed anything important.

  I paused when I saw a simple drawing. Something about it caught my attention and I took a closer look at it. The sketch was a stick man wearing a top hat, and he was leaning on a walking stick. There were two lines of text scribbled above the rudimentary portrait.

  He stands tall and his shadow remains on the world.

  He waits for the other shadows to rise.

  This seemed to be what Sarah was talking about in the car the previous day, but it was like so many of the entries; it was cryptic and virtually impossible to know what it meant – if it meant anything at all.

  Just as I was about to close the diary I spied a word just beneath the drawing of the man. The writing was tiny and I had to lift the diary close to my face just to read it.

  ‘What is it?’ Cathy asked.

  I said nothing. I could not draw my eyes away from the word.

  KEMATIAN

  This was one little detail that I could not keep from her.

  We sat facing each other at the kitchen table. Cathy clung to a glass of white wine while my hands were clasped around a mug of black coffee. We had tried to find out if Sarah had a gift and it had been confirmed to us. She was a prophet and that meant all the trouble we had gone to was not in vain. We had snatched her from the clutches of evil so that her visions of future events could not be manipulated by our enemies. That all sounded great; it also meant that we had to deal with what she was seeing, and that was becoming more and more disturbing by the day. I was beginning to think we’d be better off not knowing what was coming.

  She had spoken of the threat to our lives. This tin man that she dreamed about had us all on edge but that had now faded into the background. Such a threat paled in comparison to the one that James Barkley represented. He was known by many as the Kematian – Indonesian for ‘death’. I had very little knowledge of the actual man, and the story behind him, but I knew enough to be frightened. Cathy went white as a sheet when I showed her the word written in the diary and only now was the colour seeping back to her face.

  ‘His shadow remains on the world,’ she recited the first line from the prophecy. ‘You know, the more I think of it, that doesn’t really mean he’s alive. It could be that his reputation, and his crimes, remains enshrined in our memory. Like it’s a scar that will last for a long time.’

  ‘He waits for the other shadows to rise,’ I replied. That was the second line of the prophecy and the one that had me worried so much. ‘That would seem to indicate that he is alive and that he’s waiting for something, or someone. Do you know much about Barkley?’

  ‘Not a great deal.’ She took a sip of wine and swept her red hair back over her shoulder. ‘I know that he supposedly achieved the sixteenth gift. I know that he killed a lot of people. I know that he disappeared.’

  ‘Didn’t your mum or Romand ever talk about what happened to him?’

  ‘Mum never really mentioned him. Romand did say a few things from time to time but nothing that expanded on the story that we both know. I do recall that he and Hunter, and a couple of others, were constantly looking for Barkley. They travelled the globe over the years, following up on any leads that came to the Guild’s attention. But that was a long time ago and then the search stopped all of a sudden. About ten years ago it came to a stop and there was a release of the tension that they were all under. It seemed as though they’d gotten some news, maybe his death was confirmed, I don’t know … They never went looking for him again after that.’

  ‘I wonder what happened …’ I muttered. I took a gulp of coffee and shook my head. ‘Why is the Guild always so bloody secretive?’

  ‘They’ve survived for a very long time because they keep their secrets to themselves.’

  ‘Well, we can’t keep this to ourselves. We’ll have to tell them what we’ve learned.’

  ‘I’ll ring Peter.’ Cathy reached for her phone. ‘He’ll know what to do.’

  She made the call from her mobile and put it on loudspeaker so we could both hear what he had to say. Cathy told him we’d looked at Sarah’s diary and that she was confident the girl had the gift and then told him about the entry concerning the Kematian. There was a long silence on the other end after she mentioned that word.

  He went on by saying this was most unexpected and that it made no sense at all. But he was flustered by the news and said that he and some other senior members of the Guild would come to the house the next day. Mr Williams also told us that Hunter had left the Palatium some hours earlier and that we would probably arrive at any minute. This gave me some comfort, and Cathy was visibly relieved to hear it. I never thought I’d be dying to see Hunter; I’d been only to happy to get away from him for a while and now I was counting the seconds to his arrival. There was an air of fear in the house and we’d both feel better once he returned.

  I carried Sarah from the couch to her bed and she didn’t even stir. I carried her in my arms and didn’t use my gift, like I often did. I felt the same as Cathy; we’d betrayed her trust by looking in the diary, and I wouldn’t betray her again. We were meant to look after her. I suppose I started seeing her as a little sister, not just a disturbed child that I didn’t want any contact with. She needed support. It was bad enough reading her prophecies, but she actually experienced them. She never even knew when the next one was coming. I couldn’t imagine the agony that would cause. Especially for someone so young.

  It was way past midnight when Hunter pushed open the hall door and stomped into the hallway with a mist of cigar smoke in his wake. Cathy and I were waiting for him in the kitchen. I had a fresh mug of coffee in my hand and Cathy was drinking another glass of wine and was starting to tire.

  ‘What are you two doing up?’ Hunter asked, with a frown. ‘Look like you’ve seen a ghost or something.’

  Cathy told him about the diary, but Hunter didn’t seem too perturbed by the news. ‘You don’t have to worry about Barkley,’ he said. He pulled a chair from under the table sat with us. ‘He’s long gone. But the story of the Kematian is not well known. Only members of the Guild and the higher ranking folks in some other groups know of it. If this girl is aware of who and what Barkley was, it would mean she is a prophet. And if she is, then that would mean there is someone out there hell bent on killing us all.’

  ‘The t
in man,’ I said.

  ‘Yeah,’ Hunter nodded. ‘I wonder who he is.’

  ‘I can’t make any sense of it.’

  ‘It probably does make perfect sense,’ Cathy added, ‘but Sarah is too young to explain clearly what she saw.’

  ‘Hopefully Williams might be able to figure out what she saw. I’d like to be prepared for what’s coming after us. I don’t like the sound of it.’

  ‘What the hell is that?’ I said as I leaped from my chair.

  There was banging and shouting coming from upstairs.

  ‘It’s Sarah!’

  The three of us raced through the hallway and up the staircase to find her thrashing under the covers. Hunter held me back when I tried to wake her and Cathy paced the room frantically. He wanted to allow her to fully experience the prophecy and let her wake by herself. It was the right thing to do, it was nonetheless disturbing to watch.

  Sarah woke with a start and almost fell out of the bed. Cathy went to her and held her tight while asking her what the nightmare was about.

  ‘The tin man is going to hunt us down. He is looking for one of us!’

  ‘Who is he looking for?’ I asked.

  ‘He’s looking for …’ Sarah paused and stared right into my eyes. ‘You!’

  I woke to see the nurse adjusting the drip. She did not dare look at me and took her clipboard and quickly shuffled across the room to the door. She must have increased the amount of sedative and within seconds I felt the effects of it. I struggled to keep my eyes open and I felt a strange floating sensation.

  Before I lost consciousness I noticed a stack of pages on the table near the windows. Next to them was a white envelope. I used my gift to lift the pages but I was too weak and they fell and scattered across the floor. I focused on the envelope and was strong enough to make it float across the room and to open it when it landed on the bed. The page unfolded and was lifted into the air. There was one short line of text typed on it.

  Somewhere beneath the calm waves of sedative was a storm of anger. Somewhere within the storm was a breeze of contentment.