by J M Fraser
This nightmare idea had a real bad feel to it. Like downloading an email file attachment from Nigerian scammers, only a thousand time worse. If the moment had ever come to hit control-alt-delete, this was it. Brian shouted through the barrier. “Don’t do it, Rebecca!”
But no one in Salem could hear him this time, not even her.
Rebecca lifted her gaze to the starlit sky and moved her lips in silence. Then she turned to the two girls beside her. “Hear this poem, and let thy dreams take ye where they may.”
“Burning twigs and leaves, a bonfire in the square,
the smoke
swirled high into the sky.
’Twas a dark-haired lass who saw a presence there,
a wraith
with menace in his eyes.
“Orbs as black as coal, a creature with no soul,
gray shroud,
the specter dark and grim,
followed not his will but that of one so old,
the beast
who had control of him.”
Betty shuddered. “Hold my hand?”
“Enough,” Rebecca said. “I’ll cast no nightmares on you.”
“Yes, you will.” Abigail’s teeth and eyes gleamed white in the darkness. “Or shall all of Salem learn thy true nature?”
Another staring contest. Betty shrank even deeper into the blanket.
Rebecca broke eye contact with Abigail. She took Betty’s hand and looked up at the sky again.
“Rising from the flames he floated high above,
the wraith
searched for a fallen one.
Catching sight of her, a lass who scorned all love,
he pounced.
And she began to run.
“’This has just begun, from me you’ll never hide,’
he warned
when he had cornered her.
Gazing at this ghost, this shadow of the night,
she begged,
‘I’m innocent, please, sir.’
“‘Black your soul is, lass, and dark shall be your fate,’
he growled,
cold eyes engulfing hers.
‘Feeling pricks of pins, you’ll scream and twitches make
then crawl
beneath the furniture.’”
That last verse was a body blow. Rebecca had just described the exact signs of possession triggering the Salem witch hysteria.
Brian followed her gaze to a moon gone blood-red. It darted across the sky—first up, then down on an angle, up again, and over—leaving an incandescent green pentacle in its wake. On the porch beneath, Abigail and Betty had closed their eyes. Sleeping, or worse?
“What did you do?” he shouted.
Rebecca looked across at him. “Ah, ’tis Brian!”
Great. His voice pierced the barrier. But too late. “How could you curse them like that? You don’t know what you started.”
“I didn’t curse them.” She ran a hand through Betty’s hair, then moved the girl off her lap, setting her next to Abigail. “This little dove will dream without a care in the world. As for the imp, ’tis a well-deserved nightmare she’ll suffer, nothing more. For one hour.”
Bile burned the back of Brian’s throat. “The hysteria lasted for weeks, not an hour.”
“Hysteria?” Rebecca scrunched her forehead as if he’d thrown the square root of negative one at her. “’Tis a simple, harmless spell.”
“On who, Rebecca? Abigail isn’t crawling around bellowing.”
She shook her head. “The imp shall dream about crawling. Do you think me so cruel I would curse her waking life?”
“She isn’t an imp, Rebecca. She’s a—”
Flash.
“No, not yet!” Brian tried to grab something.
Anything.
To keep from being swept.
Away.
Chapter 34
A light breeze caressed Brian’s face like a gentle hand.
The wind whispered his name. “Brian.”
He moaned.
A gust ruffled his hair and tweaked his nose. “Wake up, sleepyhead.”
He cracked an eye open.
Rebecca’s smile warmed him like a blazing sun.
Over her shoulder, the antique full-length mirror, the bookshelf, and a view of the snow-covered hills out the window had the proper coordinates stamped all over them. The dueling mirrors in the condo must have finally figured out where to deposit him.
Nebraska.
Brian shot off the couch and went for a bear hug. By dropping in on Rebecca rather than the other way around, he spared her the price of a visit—a noose around her neck.
His throat got scratchy just from the thought of a hanging. He eased his grip around her. Let his arms fall to his sides. “Next time I find Salem, I’m doing whatever I can to change the past.”
“You can’t.”
“Why not?”
Rebecca turned to the window. Her boundary line cut across the hills out there. Twenty furlongs but never more, the circle at the edge and the cabin at the core. One foot farther meant a hanging. The pendulum clock on the bookshelf ticked for all it was worth. Time kept moving forward. More than three centuries had come and gone. But whatever happened in Salem still cast a shadow over her.
“I’m taking the nooses out of your life, Rebecca.”
“That’s impossible.”
“No, it isn’t. Your poem in Salem started all of this, right?”
She started to speak. Stopped. Tears welled in her eyes. “You’ve gone back to Salem?”
“Uh-huh. And next time I’ll show up early enough to keep you away from any and all clowns.”
She averted her gaze to the floor. “Always the white knight, aren’t you?”
“Think of me as a malware sweeper.”
“A…?”
“Trouble stopper.”
“Oh, Brian.” A tear stained a path down her cheek. “Anyone who tries changing the past discovers he’s been part of it all along.”
“No way. I didn’t do a thing over there. That’s the whole problem.”
“Yes, you did. Don’t you see?” Rebecca took his hands, then broke away, pacing from the window to the mirror and back. She paused and retraced the circuit, stopping to stare out at the snowy hills. “By bursting into my life, you proved the prophecy to me. Then you made a promise you’d always be there for me when I finally came looking. So I figured things out and I made certain choices…” Her voice trailed off.
Brian’s stomach clenched. How could he protect Rebecca from a mystery he still didn’t understand? Time had dragged something forward—something that happened in colonial Salem—copying the collective sadness of a creepy settlement and pasting it into her eyes.
Did her downcast stare reveal an element of guilt, too?
“Rebecca, an hour after you finished reciting the poem, those two girls woke up normal like you promised, right?”
“Fit as a fiddle.” She turned from the window and stood with hands at her sides. “Or so I thought…at first.”
Outside, in the snowy landscape, the wind blew the branches of a tree from north to south. A tree that should have been blocked by Rebecca, who stood right in front of him. The image still showed in shadowy form, as if incompletely hidden behind a thin white veil.
“What’s happening?” he said.
“You’re fading out of sight, Brian.”
No. She was the one who’d started shimmering like a mirage. He snatched the coin out of his pocket.
Warm.
Gold.
“Am I sleeping?”
“I think you might be.” Rebecca came close. Touched his cheek. “Do you feel that?”
“Uh-huh.” He placed his hand over hers.
She’d have to fight him to get it back.
“I almost can’t feel you, Brian. You’re bouncing from one reality to the next.”
“Bouncing?”
Rebecca nodded. Eyes solemn. “Dream-walking. You might disapp
ear at any moment.”
Brian grabbed her hand. “Fine. Bounce with me, then.”
“I don’t think I can. Not without spending a coin.”
He cringed at the thought of dipping into Rebecca’s store of metaphorical coins. How many had she used already? Six? Eight? He tried counting backward from her most recent visit but got stuck in the math. “The night you hanged yourself on the stage at that weird club, visited me at the condo, mixed it up with Sharon, and then came back to me…were we talking four nooses?”
“I was muddled that night.” Rebecca fixed him with a thousand-mile stare. “Four coins would be too high a price to pay. Let’s call it three.”
“Wait. You’re under a spell or something, but you get to define its limits?”
Rebecca flinched. “Not now I don’t. You’re fading worse than ever, Brian. Try to focus.”
A flash of light swept her out of his arms.
* * *
Brian wobbled and almost fell to the asphalt pavement at his feet.
Weathered fencing off to the side stretched in an endless line from one horizon to the other. A nearby railroad ran parallel to the road, and a tumbling line of telephone poles hugged the gravel of the track bed.
The season had changed from winter to summer. A mosquito buzzed his ear. Blue and white wildflowers sprouted in clumps amid the scrub brush on the side of a hill.
He knew this time and place. Back in August, his Kia stalled right here.
Beyond the first hill lay another one.
And another after that.
A taller bluff loomed in the distance.
Somewhere just out of sight, an oak tree stretched its gnarled limbs to the sky.
He got off the road and took a step toward the hills. The cosmos could bounce him around all it wanted. He’d never stop boomeranging back to Rebecca’s cabin.
“Wait.” A girl’s sudden voice spurred a small flock of sparrows into hasty flight.
Brian’s heart almost leapt out of his throat and took to the sky with the birds. He turned to the same ponytailed, dark-eyed terror he’d seen outside Hal’s boarded-up gas station. Abigail’s ally.
The girl flashed a smile. “I’m Gabriella, remember?”
“Yep. Go away.”
If only. She didn’t move. “You don’t belong here, Brian.”
He balled his fists. Started to head for the cabin.
Behind him, an engine roared.
Gabriella gasped. “Not him now, too.”
“Who?” Brian swung around. He followed her gaze to a vintage pickup truck approaching from the south.
Gabriella faded.
Dimmed.
And disappeared.
The truck slowed to a stop beside him.
Didn’t matter who he’d find inside.
The enemy of an enemy had to be his friend.
Chapter 35
An old-timey pickup truck rattled to the side of the road, kicking gravel and dust onto Brian’s shoes. All soft curves, shiny chrome, and bright paint, the handsomely crafted, red-and-black machine bore no resemblance to the squared clones clogging the modern-day highways. This vehicle had a personality. The hood tapered to a snout, and the headlamps resembled beady eyes.
A wave of déjà vu sent Brian backtracking to an early childhood moment when he recognized the carved clawed feet of a dining-room table for what they were. He ran to his mom with the breathtaking news he’d found a petrified lion in the house.
She must have laughed. He couldn’t remember. But her words now leapt out of his deepest store of memory. “Take your surroundings with a grain of salt. Reality, illusions, and dreams are different shades of the same color.”
Wow. He should have picked up on her little hints from the beginning. Even in his earliest years, she’d been trying to tell him the waking world was only one part of the universe.
She never came out and said so directly, of course. Witches followed a code. They celebrated misdirection.
They turned him upside down.
The ache for Rebecca had never been stronger. Brian started toward the hills.
“Hey, son.” A familiar voice graveled out of the truck. “You need a ride?”
“Huh?” Something was going down here. Gabriella had vanished the instant she saw this guy coming. Brian peered into the cab. The enemy of an enemy lurked inside.
But who would be afraid of this guy? “Hal?”
The Sidney gas jockey came dressed in his dorky duck-blind best this time, throwing Gulf cap and jeans aside in favor of a winter hat with flaps hanging over his ears, a plaid hunter’s vest, and suspender overalls. He looked Brian up and down. Nodded. Flashed a grin. “Hop aboard, son.”
Brian barely registered the man’s words. That long-forgotten claw-footed table triggered the weirdest association. He’d mistaken a heavy piece of mahogany furniture for a petrified lion that day, but the carving could just as easily have represented the paw of a cat.
A cat with nine lives.
So when does a cat become just like a man?
Brian gasped.
He knew the solution to the sorcerer’s riddle.
After a cat spends its first eight lives, it become just like a man, each having only one life remaining.
The ugly math buckled his knees. His vision swam. He grabbed the door handle to keep from falling.
Back in August, when all of this started, Rebecca had only nine coins in that imaginary purse of hers. Nine opportunities to stray beyond the oak tree and visit him. Why else would Stoddard pop up in the middle of the snowstorm to throw this massive clue at him?
How many times had she strayed beyond the twenty-furlong marker of her cabin already? Six? Seven? She might have no more than two visits left. What then? They’d only meet in dreams?
His eyes watered.
“Go ahead and cry, son. Ain’t nobody gonna know but these silent hills.”
Brian averted his face. “I never cry.”
“Speck of dust in your eye then?” The old guy leaned over and extended his hand toward the open passenger window.
Brian reached inside and shook.
Hal gripped tight, eyed him, winked. “You and I oughta deadhead to Sidney now, son.”
“No way. I’m staying.”
“Fine by me.” Hal released his grip and roared the engine. “Just one thing, though. You been on the side of this here road before, ain’tcha?”
“What of it?”
“You’ll find it again, I reckon. So come on. I found something down the road she’ll want you to see.”
She? Brian wasn’t sure he and Hal were speaking the same language anymore. “Who are you talking about?”
“Rebecca.” Hal revved the engine again. “Let’s go.”
Brian couldn’t get inside fast enough.
The truck roared to life, throwing him against the seatback. The g-forces, a fresh, new-car aroma, and the glint of shiny chrome on the polished-wood dashboard were almost enough to fool him. But not quite. He grabbed the coin out of his pocket for verification.
Saint Brigit was warm.
And gold.
He was dreaming. “Stop the truck.”
“Whatever for?” Hal took a curve too fast, lurching Brian against the passenger door.
Dream versus reality…who could tell the difference? Better yet, who’d remember? “Hal, what’s the point in seeing whatever you want to show? I’ll forget it when I wake up.”
Hal clucked his tongue and shook his head like he was dealing with the village idiot. “Ain’t you learned nothing yet? Forgetting don’t make a thing less real, son.”
He took another curve on two wheels, then steadied the truck down the open road. “Besides, maybe you’re special, boy. Could be you recollect things no one else can.”
Could he? Brian had shared dozens of dreams with Rebecca since August. He did remember some details. Not all, but some. A smile. A kiss. A glimpse at the void in a graveyard. A whispered suggestion to look for mirrors. �
�You know Rebecca, don’t you?”
“Yup. Met a girl goes by that name a month ago. I got caught in a blizzard up in them hills back there. She put me up for the night. Right fine girl, that Rebecca.”
“Did she talk about anything weird, like a prophecy?”
Hal rubbed his chin for a moment. “Nope. Can’t say she did.”
“Did she read a poem to you?”
“I can read to myself, I reckon. Fell upon her place a little late for that, anyway. We chewed the fat some and turned in. I headed out at daybreak.”
Brian racked his brains for a reason Rebecca would have hooked up with Hal. Came up empty. “What year are we talking about. Nineteen forty-five?”
“There it is!” Hal slammed the brakes and pulled the truck onto the shoulder.
A snow-covered field separated the road from a forest. Something flashed at the tree line, like sun reflecting against metal.
Brian held his breath. Bursts of light had been volleying him from one reality to the next lately.
“You’re looking kinda pale, son.” Hal opened his door and started out of the truck. “It ain’t hunting season. We won’t get shot at.”
“How do you know? Seriously, do you even know what year it is?”
“Depends which side of the trees you’re on.”
Yeah. Like that made a lot of sense. Brian followed Hal, trudging all the way across the snowy field with him until they reached a gap cutting into the woods. The narrow path funneled wide about a hundred yards in, spilling into a broader clearing, where Salem’s crescent-shaped cluster of cabins lurked in the distance, illuminated by a full moon.
Oh.
No flash of light, but they’d been transported all the same.
Hal let out a low whistle. “Ain’t that something?”
Brian’s heart pounded. The way time had been bouncing around, this Salem visit might have happened before Stoddard, Abigail, and Betsy came to town. If so, he’d have a chance to lead Rebecca away, over to the next village or wherever, before the local scene turned witch-hangy.
He tried to hurry with Hal, but every step got heavier, like a climb up a steep hill. The forest canopy twirled above. The ground wobbled below. Or did his knees wobble? Didn’t matter. No way was he going to stop.
