Almost Remembered

by Marilyn Tracy

  Allison heard the tapping in her sleep. In her dream, it came from an enormous grandfather clock, one she knew, in that strange way of dreams, was really her father. Only instead of the hours of the day on his face, he had the months of the year neatly marked out. The hands were pointing to November.

  Tock...tock...tick-tock.

  “It’s time, Allison,” the father-grandfather clock said, speaking in her father’s voice. “It’s time to bury the past.” The clock that had once been her father handed her a large shovel and pointed a long, spindly arm at a flat expanse of bared earth. Farm workers dug in the ground far beyond this place, their dark heads bent down as if praying.

  She couldn’t disobey her father-clock and the insistence of his tock-tocking. She took the heavy shovel into her hands and wrapped her hands around the wooden handle. She could feel the coarse grain digging into her palms. She rammed the shovel against the earth, hearing it making a sound much like her father-clock, though somewhat muted. It went in easily, and she began digging the hole, a grave for the past.

  Tock...tock...tick-tock. “Keep digging, Allison,” her father’s voice said. When the hole seemed enormous, a maw yawning up at her, she reached beyond the huge mound of displaced earth and picked up a small strongbox with two handles on either side. The top was marked Yesterday, and in the dream, she knew what lay inside, however impossible. She began to cry.

  Tock...tock...tick-tock. “Do it, Allison.”

  She couldn’t. She couldn’t lay that precious little dream into that dark, dark grave. She turned to run away from the hole, from the father-clock and his November demands, and tripped over the shovel. The box flew from her hands, and she was flung from the dream, her hands stretched out to catch the precious box, tears running down her face.

  Awake now, in the darkened bedroom of Taylor’s home, she sat in her bed, upright, chest heaving from the strange nightmarish dream, pulling her hands back to her chest, to clench them against her breasts.

  Tock...tock...tick-tock.

  She whirled toward the bedroom window, swiping at her wet face, her eyes clear of tears now, wide with sharp fear.

  Something hung outside her window, something that dangled into the gap revealed by the partially opened curtains. For a moment of pure shock, she saw what it was and denied it with equal swiftness.

  In that one second of awareness and rejection, she slipped back in time. She lay on the cooling asphalt, her vision blurred. She could smell the burned rubber from the tires. And she could smell the sharp, coppery tang of blood. Could taste it as well. She could see Susie sprawled not five feet away, still, not moving. And she could see Susie’s hand, stretched out and curled, as if beckoning her, pleading for her cousin’s help. It was only after she reached for her cousin that she understood that Susie still lay in the car.

  And in the window of the bedroom now, fifteen years later, she could easily make out the details of a hand. Disembodied, tapping at the window. A hand. A human hand.

  She gasped and frantically scooted back on the bed without any conscious thought. Her back pressed sharply against the headboard, though she scarcely felt the bite of the wood against her skin. A gargling precursor to a scream caught in her throat and fought for freedom.

  A thousand possible explanations flitted through her mind—she was still asleep and dreaming, the triplets were playing some joke on her, she was having one of her “spells” and was really seeing something far different than a severed hand—but none of the possibilities could stern the scream that built in her throat, the shriek of terror demanding immediate release.

  The boys, her mind reminded her. Don’t wake the boys. Don’t scare them.

  But the scream didn’t care about children or quiet, sleeping townsfolk nearby. The scream had a life of its own and fought free, ripping the peace of the night, drowning out the horrific tock...tock...tick-tock of the lifeless fingers against the window.

  She lost all sense of time, thought or anything else but the scream and the hand.

  Her bedroom door flew open, and four sets of wide, frightened eyes met hers as her nephews and Chas’s son flipped on the overhead light.

  Her scream still echoed, and her mouth was still open, trying to sustain the terrible sound.

  Four voices, three high-pitched, one low, demanded to know what was wrong. But she couldn’t answer, only point to the window and follow their gazes as they all looked at the window. The overhead light had blackened the window so that only the curtains and a narrow swath of black were visible.

  “What was it?” Billy asked, his voice cracking with fear and adrenaline.

  “Was somebody out there?” one of the triplets asked.

  “Creepy,” another affirmed, but more as if he were excited than scared.

  “I’m going to turn off the light,” Billy announced, and did so.

  One of the boys swore.

  But not because he was seeing what his aunt had screamed about, for there was nothing at all in the window now. No hand, no dead fingers. Nothing at all.

  Just like all the other times in the past few months. Terror, visions, strange memory losses...and nothing.

  “I don’t see anything,” one of the boys said.

  “Me, either,” another affirmed.

  Billy turned the light back on. “You guys stay here, I’m going to go check outside.”

  “No!” Allison all but yelled.

  The four sets of eyes turned in her direction for a second time.

  “What did you see?” Billy asked.

  “Yeah, what was out there?”

  “Like, was it a man or something?”

  “She can’t talk with everybody talking.”

  “So what’d you see, Aunt Allison?”

  She was struck by being called “aunt” so naturally and so easily when she’d woken them from deep sleeps by her screaming.

  “A h-hand,” she managed to say. Her throat was dry and scratchy, painful from her scream.

  “Whoa! Like just a hand?”

  “Awesome!”

  The triplets dashed to the window before she could utter a protest. They crowded into the windowpane, jostling each other, cupping hands around their faces to block out the light.

  “I don’t see anything, do you?”

  “Was it, like, just floating there or what?”

  “I’ll bet it was a tree branch or something.”

  “Doofus, we don’t have any trees by the window.”

  “Well, she musta seen something normal, right, Billy?”

  Billy was looking at her with a closed expression, something rather like a cross between concern and doubt. “Yeah, Josh, something.” Then to her, he said, “I think I should call Dad.”

  “No,” Allison stated again, too forcefully and too swiftly. Billy looked startled and the triplets turned from their contemplation of the window to stare at her. “No. I don’t want...I was probably just having a nightmare...I’m fine now.”

  She ran a wildly shaking hand through her hair and drew a deep breath, looking from the triplets to Billy. The mere thought of waking Chas up in the middle of the night, of having him rush over to rescue her from another hallucination, was just the medicine she needed. It was the cold glass of water thrown squarely into her flushed face.

  “What time is it, anyway?” she asked.

  She received four differing answers, but all attesting to the earliness of the hour.

  “I’m fine now. Sorry I woke you guys up. Must have been a n-nightmare.”

  Four murmurs of acceptance rippled through the room, but their eyes were still wide with residual startlement. Two of them began telling her about nightmares they had endured.

  “Will you be able to get back to sleep?” she asked finally, when the nightmare stories wound down.

  Four heads nodded. Three carried identical expressions of total doubt on their faces. Billy looked worried.

  Allison, as reluctant to turn out the light and be alone again as the boys apparent
ly were, asked for her robe, slipped it on and rose from her bed to stand on shaky legs. “Since I woke you all up in the middle of the night, what do you say I make us all some hot chocolate or something?”

  She thought it was Josh who came up to put his arms around her. And Jason who led the march from the bedroom to the kitchen. But it was definitely Billy who turned on the porch lights and peered out the windows at the still night.

  “The dogs are all still asleep,” he said.

  “Yeah, they didn’t even wake up when Aunt Allison screamed.”

  “I thought someone was getting killed. Like, really!”

  “Boy, you can scream really loud, Aunt Allison. I about wet my pants!”

  “How come the dogs didn’t bark, Billy? Don’t ya think that’s weird?”

  Chapter 6

  Chas snatched up the receiver and barked his name on the second ring. His eyes couldn’t seem to focus on the clock on his bedside table.

  “Something weird’s going on, Dad,” Billy said on the other end of the phone.

  The sound of his son’s voice in the middle of the night and the hushed words slapped Chas instantly awake, and he was on his feet before he even thought.

  At his father’s demand and in a swift, breathless recitation, Billy described Allison’s supposed nightmare and the scream that had woken the boys.

  “But the thing is, Dad, something is wrong with the dogs. Like they won’t wake up. They’re still breathing and everything. I mean I can see their chests moving and all, but it’s like they’re drugged or something.”

  “Stay put, Billy. Don’t go outside!”

  “I won’t. I was too scared. I mean, like scared of messing up evidence or something.”

  Chas closed his eyes in sharp relief. Thank God there was still a boy left in the young man. He’d still been young enough to be scared to go outside, and old enough to know the wisdom of not doing so. And his son had been practically raised in the clinic, so he could be relied on to know enough to recognize a drugged animal and to understand the simple fact that anyone aside from a vet who would want to drug one had some ulterior motive in mind.

  Chas asked after Allison and the boys, and Billy told him they had all gone back to bed. Frowning heavily, he asked why Billy hadn’t called him sooner.

  “Allison didn’t want me to. She was pretty adamant about that, Dad. Like she almost yelled for me not to call you. But she was upset, you know?”

  Chas felt himself wince at this last statement, but managed to summon praise to Billy for calling him and told him a second time to stay inside. “Make sure the doors are all locked. And check the windows. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  And he was, not even having taken the time for socks or his boots, just shoving his feet in a pair of garden tennis shoes. Billy met him at the door and, for a second time, recounted the night’s events in a hushed whisper.

  One professional look at the dogs and he knew his son had been right; they’d been drugged. He was relieved to discover that their heartbeats were neither too rapid nor too slow. He did take three blood samples, one from each of them, to analyze once back at the clinic. In the meantime, he’d have to hope that the boys’ dogs would revive quickly enough with the small doses of epinephrine he administered to each of them. After that, they would simply have to sleep off the effects of whatever drug they’d been given, because he wasn’t going to leave the house.

  Chas wanted to take his flashlight and check for footprints outside Allison’s bedroom, but didn’t want to frighten her any more than she already had been that night.

  Billy had told she claimed to have seen a disembodied hand tapping at her window. Sounded like something right out of a nightmare, and he would have believed exactly that had occurred but for the evidence of the sleeping dogs.

  He wondered if someone from Steve’s past might not be pulling a little grotesque harassment of the Texas Ranger, but discounted the thought nearly as soon as it crossed his mind. And he was relatively certain the targets weren’t Billy or the triplets. Teenage pranks didn’t usually extend to drugging pets. It was almost an unwritten rule that pets remained untouched. In that respect, the Golden Rule always seemed to apply.

  And if someone wasn’t out to harm the boys, that only left Allison. A woman who had nearly run from her own sister’s wedding, who started at each little sound. Who looked caught between confusion and fear, exhaustion and despair every time he saw her.

  He paused in the act of examining the window locks. There had been one time since her return that the look of fear had been absent from her lovely face...when he’d held her in his arms. For that blissful moment, when her body relaxed and she’d melted against him, she hadn’t been frightened. He would have bet his life on it.

  But what was scaring her so? Why would she assume she’d had a nightmare instead of believing her own eyes? Contrary to popular belief, he knew that people more often did believe their senses, no matter how bizarre or outlandish.

  “You go on to bed now, Bill,” he said, unaware he’d shortened his son’s name to its more adult status until his son gave him a startled, then pleased grin.

  He smiled back. “You did just the right thing tonight, son.”

  Billy’s grin broadened. “Thanks, Dad. I...I’m glad you’re here now, though.”

  “Me, too,” Chas said. He gave Billy a rough hug and propelled him toward the hallway.

  Once Billy was gone, he went out onto the porch to check the dogs again. Still sleeping, still drugged, but now, after the epinephrine injection, moving a bit and thankfully very much alive. He peered out into the darkness beyond the yard, hoping to catch a glimpse of the creep who would drug children’s dogs and do something as hideous as frighten a sleeping woman and children.

  But just as he couldn’t fathom the kind of mind that would allow someone to terrorize women and children, he couldn’t see anything out of the ordinary, either.

  He went back inside, locked the door carefully and was turning to go check the back door when he heard a gasp behind him and whirled to face Allison.

  Her hand on was on her chest, and her eyes were wide with startlement and fear.

  “It’s okay,” he said quickly. “It’s only me.”

  “W-what are you doing here?” she demanded in a thready voice.

  “Billy called me,” he said. He held up a hand to forestall what he assumed would be her protest. “He had to, Allison. He was pretty sure the dogs had been drugged.”

  Impossibly her eyes widened even more and cut from his to the window flanking him. “Drugged?”

  “Yeah. He was right. I don’t know what drug was administered, but they’re still out even after the epinephrine I gave them. They should be coming around any time now.”

  “There was someone out there?”

  Chas thought she was unaware she’d backed up a pace until her back was against the corner of the hallway. Confounding him, what he read on her face wasn’t anything like fear or puzzlement, but a staggering look of pure and simple relief.

  “Allison?” he asked.

  “Oh, thank God,” she said.

  Chas caught her before she slid down the wall to the floor.

  He told himself that he held her in his arms for comfort, nothing more. He assured himself that pressing her face to his chest, stroking her flushed face and smoothing her tousled hair were strictly in the name of solace. He was a noble friend, a guardian for the night.

  He was a damned liar.

  He was holding her tightly to his body because it felt right to keep her there. He stroked her hair because it was a magnet to his hand. His lips pressed against her forehead because he wanted to kiss her, to tell her everything in his heart, however confused and uncertain.

  She, on the other hand, merely rested against him, neither hugging nor clinging, responsive at the lowest of levels, the way a sister would respond to an older brother.

  “Allison?” he murmured after a few moments, when her breathing was steadie
r, her muscles relaxed somewhat.

  “Mmm?”

  “What’s going on?”

  She shook her head against his chest. Her hand fluttered at his waist.

  “Tell me.”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Honestly. I don’t know what’s happening to me.”

  “But something is.”

  “Something...yes.”

  “Tell me,” he urged.

  She stirred in his arms, and he was sorry he’d asked any questions when she pushed away from him slightly and ran her hands through the hair he’d imperfectly straightened. She flicked him a somewhat embarrassed look.

  “Do you suppose Taylor would keep any alcohol in this house?” she asked.

  He smiled. “If she doesn’t, I’m sure Steve does. I’ve never met a policeman yet who didn’t have a bottle of bourbon around somewhere.”

  Allison wrinkled her nose but turned toward the kitchen. Following her, Chas noticed that she knotted her robe tightly around her waist after pulling it sedately closed. She might be treating him like a brother at the moment, but she wasn’t unaware of him. Not at all. And that thought made him feel a universe better.

  He divided his time between a careful watch of the opened curtains and Allison as she rummaged through the cabinets for the cache surely hidden somewhere. The night was dark and still, and Allison found the liquor in the fourth cabinet she opened.

  He drew the curtains, fighting the sense of being watched and knowing it wasn’t true. Together they selected a Napoleon brandy, and she searched a few more cabinets seeking snifters. Finding none, she poured them each a small amount in juice glasses.

  Without waiting for a toast, she tossed hers back with what seemed a practiced flick of her wrist, but actually revealed her ignorance of the alcohol. She choked violently, and Chas held back a chuckle as he supported her while spasms racked her unprepared body.

  He led her to the table and pushed her into a chair. He sat down opposite her and waited until she regained her breath to ask her again what was going on.

  She gave him a rather watery glance, then wiped her eyes. “I wasn’t kidding when I said I didn’t know. I really don’t.”