This time the explosion was real. Her fingers closed convulsively around it, almost tight enough to bend the thin metal. She saw . . . smoky half darkness, men clustered around, holding beer steins. Looking down at something . . . someone on the floor. In her—his?—hand was a gun, smoke rising from it. The man on the floor was bleeding and looked . . . dead? And all the other men turned to stare at her . . .
She didn’t know she had screamed; she knew she was fighting, but who was she fighting? The men in the dark room? I have to get away. I didn’t mean to do it. I have to get out of here. She was trapped; someone was holding her down. Someone pried the watch from her hand and wrapped her in a bear hug. Ned.
She was sobbing, tears running down her face. Tears running onto his shirt. She couldn’t seem to stop, and she kept fighting, until he laid a hand on her chin and turned her face to his. “Abby.” His voice seemed to come from somewhere far away. “Abby, what is it?”
She tore herself away from him, turned her back, trying to regain some control. Her body still shook with sobs, now turning into hiccups. But now she knew . . .
“What did you see, Abby?” Ned asked softly, keeping his distance.
Without turning, she said, “I know why my great-grandfather left.” She took a few deep breaths. Good, the sobs were slowing. “He killed a man. In a bar. He shot him. He didn’t mean for it to happen. He must have told my great-grandmother, and that’s why I could hear him. And then he went away.”
“I’m sorry, Abby. I didn’t want anything like this to happen to you.”
“This isn’t your fault,” Abby said. “This happened to me.”
“But all this didn’t happen until we met. Maybe this thing is contagious, or maybe I somehow boosted your ability.”
Now she could turn to face him. “No! I’m not going to make excuses. My great-grandfather was a murderer, and his wife knew, because when he left, she refused to speak of him. She was angry and ashamed. It wasn’t the death of her son, or the Depression—it was the idea of being married to a killer that she couldn’t accept. Oh, God, why did I ever come here? I could have gone through my whole life without ever running into another damn relative, and instead, Brad drags me here and dumps me in the middle of them all. What am I supposed to do now?”
He came a step closer, and another one, until he was nearly touching her. Then he took her face in both hands and kissed her.
The intensity of the contact shook her, and she nearly pulled away. But she didn’t, she held on. She had to do this, had to find out, had to know. And then things steadied and she began to be able to focus, despite the whirling chaos in her head. She was here, she was real, and so was Ned, but there was so much more. For a terrifying moment, she felt as though she was inside him, looking out, at herself, and then in a strange seesaw, she felt him inside her head. The feelings were completely inarticulate, purely sensate—and overwhelming. She clutched at the shards of her identity and tried to look at him. See him. Not just as nice Ned, the mild-mannered geek who helped her with her research, but as the unique conscious identity that was linked to her in ways she couldn’t even begin to explain, more intimately than she had ever thought possible.
He broke off the kiss and pulled back slightly, and Abby suddenly felt adrift in a cold and empty sea. “Ned?” she whispered, plaintively.
He looked as shaken as she felt. “That’s what I was afraid of. Think you can handle this?”
She could only nod. This time, he reached out and pulled her close, and kissed her again, and she kissed him back and any sort of rational thought fled.
Several eternities later, he pulled back again, without letting her go. “Abby?”
“Yes,” she gasped. “Downstairs.” Reluctantly she put an inch, then two, between them. She felt an almost physical pain at the separation.
“Abby? We can slow this down.” His human voice came from a great distance.
“Why would we do that?” She couldn’t seem to get her breath.
“Because . . . because . . . hell, I don’t know. I don’t want you to get hurt.”
“Believe me, this doesn’t hurt.” She pulled at him, but still he resisted. Abby made a huge effort to pull herself together and faced him squarely. “Ned, whatever it is we’ve got here, we’ve been building up to this since we first met, and I don’t want to stop. Are you telling me you do?”
He shook his head vehemently. “God, no. I just want you to be sure . . .”
“I have never been so sure of anything in my life.” And she reached out her hand and led him downstairs.
She didn’t turn on any lights. They didn’t need light; Abby was guided by some inner vision she didn’t know she had. They fumbled briefly with the mundane impediments of buttons and zippers, and then they were skin to skin, together. How silly it was to worry about nakedness, Abby thought, when they could see right through each other. It was her last conscious thought for some time.
If her responses were not conscious, they were nonetheless memorable. Later, when she had returned to some approximation of coherent thought, Abby would reflect that if what she had had up until now had been sex, then she and Ned needed to invent a whole new terminology. Before had been kindergarten, a happy physical romp; this was graduate school in astrophysics. This was cosmic harmony, the music of the spheres. This was beyond words, beyond time, beyond reason.
Sometime later Abby came back to herself, in stages. She was here in her bed in Concord. It was the same day. It was dark. And she was more at peace than she had been for a long time.
29
She rolled over to face Ned, hardly surprised to find he was awake and watching her.
“Do you want something to eat? Drink? Coffee, or something stronger?”
“Coffee’s fine. I think I’d prefer to keep a clear head right now. Abby, we need to talk about . . . all of this, starting with what just happened.”
Here we go. Abby took a deep breath. “I know. And it happened before, didn’t it? On Halloween, when you brought me home, you took my hand, and I guess I got a flash of it, and it scared me. That’s why I ducked inside so fast. And then I wondered if you thought I was afraid you were hitting on me and didn’t know how to say no.”
“I wasn’t sure. I thought there was something, but it went so quickly.”
“You’ve never had that happen with someone else? Someone living?”
“No. Never.”
Abby smiled. “All right, then we’ll talk. Upstairs.” She crawled out of bed, pulled on a bathrobe, and headed for the kitchen, where she put a kettle on to boil. Ned followed more slowly and appeared wearing his shirt, with a towel wrapped around his waist.
“Sit down.” She gestured at the table in the kitchen as she concentrated on measuring coffee beans, grinding them, transferring them to the filter in the carafe. Simple, ordinary tasks. Things she knew she could handle, as though the world hadn’t suddenly turned upside down. She stared at the gas flames under the kettle, waiting. When the water finally boiled, she poured it carefully over the coffee, and while it dripped, she looked for mugs in the cabinet; she filled them and carried them over to the table, and then went back for sugar. “Do you want milk?”
“No, Abby. Just sit down.” He sounded impatient.
Armed with the sugar bowl and spoons, she went back to the table and took the chair opposite Ned, so she could watch him. He looked the same, but different. Or was she seeing him differently now? She added sugar to her mug and then wrapped her hands around it. “All right. We’ll talk.”
“Let me work through this, if you don’t mind,” he said, looking down at his cup. “I’ve been living with this a lot longer than you have—most of my life. And I spent a lot of time ignoring some of the things I heard, or saw, or felt. They didn’t make sense to me, and nobody else talked about anything like that, so I sort of shut them out. Then after a long time, I started thinking about them again. I don’t want to sound New Agey or anything like that, but I do think our culture
downplays a lot of intangible things, and that’s our loss. So I decided to try to combine both worlds—apply a rational analytic process to something that was irrational and intangible. I started looking at my family history and matching that up with the odd things I saw or felt. And what I found was that there was one line that cropped up consistently, one chain of descent, that led from Phineas to me. So, to test this, I did what we’ve been doing lately: I started deliberately looking for my ancestors. Places they’d been, places they were buried.”
“And what did you find?”
“The data confirmed the hypothesis. The only people I connected to were the ones from the Reed line.”
“So what did you do?”
“Unfortunately, not much. I had satisfied my own curiosity, but I felt funny talking about it to other people, because they’d think I was a nut job. And it wasn’t a major part of my life, just sort of a hobby. I mean, since my childhood buddy, I haven’t had a lot of face-to-face encounters, just bits and pieces. It was kind of interesting, but it didn’t seem very important. Until you came along.”
She nodded. “At the Flagg house. But you didn’t have any reason to think that was anything to do with that other business, did you?”
He laughed briefly. “No, I just thought you were a damsel in distress. A very attractive one at that.”
She stared at him. “That’s what you were thinking? When did it occur to you that I might be . . . have . . .”
“This psychic connection thing? Not for a while. I figured it couldn’t hurt if you found out a bit more about the Flaggs. And then you confirmed that it was William Flagg that you saw in your . . . event. Well, I thought, that’s interesting. But I didn’t know that he had married a Reed—my line branched off long before that, and for all the time I’ve spent in that house, I never sensed anything there. But you’re a direct descendant, and you did as soon as you walked in. And then you picked up something at the cemetery at the Flagg grave, so I figured it couldn’t just be a coincidence.”
“Wait a minute,” Abby interrupted. “I saw Elizabeth at the cemetery. I was seeing what Olivia saw?”
“Most likely, since she was your lineal ancestor.”
“All right. Go on.”
Ned sat back in his chair, warming to his subject. “After that cemetery episode, you and I got together again. We went to Concord, and you stumbled on the Reed tombstone there.”
Abby interrupted him again. “Back up a minute. We got together after my first trip to the library, when I found the stuff on William Flagg. Why?”
He looked down at his coffee and smiled. “Abby, you told me the first time we met that you had a boyfriend. Normally I would have kept my distance. But I admit it, I was interested—in you, and not just as a new addition to my psychic phenomena folder.”
“Oh,” Abby said in a small voice. “But you thought there was something about what happened to me in that house, something that you recognized?”
“Yes. I was fascinated by whatever it was you were channeling, and I wanted to follow through. Besides, I’d have to say you were sending kind of mixed signals.”
“What do you mean?” Abby said indignantly.
“Well, you kept calling me, for one thing.”
“But you met Brad! You came to our place. You knew we were . . . together.”
“Abby,” Ned said patiently, “forgive me for saying this, but I really didn’t think you two were right for each other.”
Abby didn’t know whether to be mad or amused. “You decided that based on a three-minute conversation with him? What makes you an expert on relationships? Have you even been involved with anyone since Leslie?”
Her comment had found its mark, and he looked pained. “Abby, let’s not get into this—at least, not yet. I’m sorry, I just didn’t like Brad. I know his type. And I didn’t like the way he treated you.”
“You never even saw us together!” Abby sputtered.
“I got the feeling that he wasn’t really paying any attention to you. I know, I didn’t watch you two together, but he kept going off and doing his own thing a lot, from what you said. Abby, how long was it before you told him about these experiences you were having? From my viewpoint, it looked like you were pretty shook up about them, at least at first. Did you share any of that with Brad?”
He’d certainly gotten that right. “Not for a while, and then he wouldn’t listen.”
“That’s what I figured. I didn’t think you two had any real emotional connection. And if you couldn’t open up with him about something that was important to you . . . Well, I didn’t think it was going to last.”
“So you just hung around, hoping?”
“Abby,” he began, then stopped. “Listen, can we sort through this ancestor thing first? Then we can figure out what we feel about each other.”
That brought Abby up short. The two seemed inextricably intertwined, but she supposed he had a point. Maybe understanding the psychic side would help her get a handle on the strange thing that was going on between them. And just what are you upset about, Abigail? That he took one look at your lover of two years and decided that he wasn’t the man for you? That he was right and you didn’t even see it? Abby struggled to calm her roiling emotions. “All right. Where were we?”
Ned resumed his exposition. “You figured out who the Flaggs were, but you didn’t know why you were seeing them. Then you got that chair and you had another vision, but again you couldn’t figure out why. And then we went to Sleepy Hollow and you found the Reeds, and then in Wellesley you got sucked into the cemetery and found more Reeds. Okay, that established a consistent Reed link.”
“And that’s when you knew we were related somehow?”
He nodded. “And then you dragged me into the house in Weston. Abby, I didn’t tell you then, but I know that house, who built it, who lived there.”
“And you already knew it was a Reed, right?”
He nodded again.
“Why didn’t you say anything then?”
“Look, maybe you don’t think I was being fair or honest, but the scientist in me wanted to carry on the experiment, see what you came up with, without my interference.”
Abby stood up abruptly. “More coffee?” She took his mug and hers and went back to the stove to fill them. She wanted time to let the pieces settle into place—who had known what, when. She wanted to review what he had said to her in the past—and what he hadn’t said. And she wanted to figure out how she felt about it, once she got over feeling like a lab rat he’d been experimenting with. Pouring two cups of coffee wasn’t going to buy her nearly enough time, but it was a start.
She passed his mug to him and sat down again. “Okay, somewhere in there I got the job in Concord—thanks to you. Were you trying to keep an eye on me? And then Brad starts acting strange, picking fights with me, disappearing a lot on weekends. I finally figure out about Shanna, and we have this blowup and I walk out.”
“Abby, if I may . . . don’t you think you already knew there was something wrong between the two of you, if you could walk away that easily?”
She considered protesting, but what was the point? “All right, yes. I think I probably had had doubts for a while, but I didn’t know what to do about them, so I just followed Brad’s script for us. I thought maybe the move up here would help bring us closer, move us forward, but it just made things worse.”
“Well, if you want a silver lining, maybe all the stresses—moving, breaking up—made you that much more receptive to these other things.”
“My relationship goes to hell, I have no place to live, I’m in a strange place where I have no connections and no friends, and I’m supposed to be happy that I start seeing ghosts?”
He smiled wryly. “Well, your karma’s not all bad. You’ve got a job you like, right? And you lucked into this place, which isn’t too shabby—and it gives you time to sort things out and decide what you want to do next.”
He was right—the pluses did kind of balance
the minuses. “Do you have some sort of theory about what this channeling thing that we share actually is?”
“I have a working hypothesis. If I have to define it, right now, I’d say that you got it more or less right in Cohasset: some of the descendants of Phineas Reed share some sort of ability to both leave some psychic residue and to recognize it when they find it. It appears to be hereditary, because it’s passed on from generation to generation. I think you came to the same conclusion—you just described it differently.”
“Like a gene for paranormal sensitivity.” Abby thought about it for a moment. “But what is it that people are leaving and finding?”
“I think you and I would agree that we aren’t seeing people, we aren’t being visited by ghosts, according to the traditional interpretation. Right?”
Abby nodded.
“I think—and this is pure speculation—that our people generate a particular kind of energy in moments of emotional intensity—births, deaths, maybe other events like what happened to your great-grandfather, even if he wasn’t a Reed—that lingers, attached to tangible objects, like tombstones, or that watch.”
“Or the Reed house, in Weston,” Abby interrupted. “When I touched the wall, I saw . . . someone, or more than one person. Generations.”
Ned went on. “And again, the people with the gene, or the trait, or whatever it is, are capable of picking up this energy, after the fact.”
“Assuming that’s true, is it a one-shot thing? Like a single download? Because, well, take the case of the chair. The first time I sat in it, I was overwhelmed. The next time the effect was a lot fainter.”
“Maybe. Or maybe the second time you were expecting it, were ready for it, so it felt different. That’s the sort of thing I was worried about if I told you what I thought was going on—that you’d close down and that would alter the experience. As for the larger picture, I’m not sure. For one thing, I don’t know how many of us there are. Think about Phineas’s tombstone, for example. You felt something, right?”
Relatively Dead Page 22
