"We're really back to square one," she said.
"I know," Jimmy said. "And I am not happy about it, but let's regroup and see what we can find."
Tabitha agreed. Jimmy led the way. On the way out, he knocked on the sheriff's door and gave him the skull. Tabitha and Jimmy explained what they were hoping to find out and the sheriff said he would get a state forensics team on it right away and do what he could to rush the results.
After that, Jimmy and Tabitha left the building, evil stares from the receptionist following in their wake. They headed to the car, and when Jimmy got in he laid his head back and closed his eyes. His head was pounding and he could still tell that Sapphire was agitated.
I stopped, he said to her in his mind.
I know, she replied. Thank you. I'm sorry that I don't know more, Jimmy. As I have said before, I'm not sure why things work this way here, but that's how it is.
I know, Jimmy said. I understand. I'm just tired. Our little act the other day really wore me out. Just using the little bit of this power in there has just about wiped me out again. I don't think the human body is built to manipulate things like this.
I'm sorry, Sapphire said. All of this is my fault.
No, Jimmy replied. It was meant to happen. Can't you feel that, too? That we were meant to find each other? That the power was always within us, and that it was only a matter of time before we connected and it was fully unleashed?
Yes, Sapphire said, but with sadness in her voice. I wish we had met before, well, you know.
I do, too. I wish none of this stuff had happened and we had had a nice normal relationship. Guess that wasn’t meant to be.
There was silence between the two of them for a moment. Then Jimmy heard a noise that he guessed was the otherworldly version of a sigh. Then he thought he heard a soft sob. He felt his heart clench.
Nothing about us is normal, he thought.
I know, Sapphire said. I think I need to go for a while.
Tabitha and I are heading back to the house, Jimmy thought. He was so tired now. I think I need to sleep. I'm exhausted. Then we need to figure out what to do next.
Sapphire did not reply. The buzzing in Jimmy's head just stopped, as if a switch had been thrown, and his thoughts were, once again, his own. It was amazing how he had gotten used to that buzzing in his head. It was like living next to the airport—you eventually got used to he sound of airplanes taking off and landing. Now, with the silence, save for his own thoughts, he realized how much he had missed the general quietness of thinking on his own. He loved Sapphire, but having someone inside your head was tiring.
"Everything OK?" Tabitha said as she rounded a corner.
Jimmy nodded. "Just having a discussion with Sapphire about how insane our relationship is. She's gone for the moment."
Tabitha looked over at Jimmy with concern. "You look exhausted."
"Yes," Jimmy replied. "I don't think the human body, or mind, is meant to have the kind of power that Sapphire and I share. Every time I use it, it wears me out. The other day, when George was shot, it nearly put me into a coma, I think. The small amount of energy I just used back there at the jail has worn me out."
"We'll get back home," Tabitha said, "and you can rest."
"Any bright ideas of where we should go next and what avenues to take?" Jimmy asked.
Tabitha shrugged. "Nothing yet. Just a few thoughts about maybe trying to find Sapphire's family. I think they should know what we've found, and they may need to provide DNA samples."
"All we've found is a skull that may or may not be their daughter's," Jimmy said. "If it turns out not to be, it would probably shatter them all over again. Plus, everything else we've found has been a dead end."
"Don't give up hope on me," Tabitha said. "We only have a few more days where we can get away with this, you know. At some point you actually are going to have to go back to school."
Jimmy groaned. "Great, then I can head back to school and everyone can either be afraid of me or hate me. I don't have a clue how I’m going to survive it without George there."
That put a damper on the rest of the conversation. They sat in silence as they drove the rest of the way home. Jimmy closed his eyes and said a silent prayer that when he slept, he would not dream.
His prayers, however, were not answered. This time, the dreams were not coherent. His mind jumped from one image and scene to another. Each time the dream started over, he was back in the car, driving, and something was behind them. Sapphire sat in the seat next to him; sometimes she was fearful, sometimes she was eager and excited, and sometimes she seemed to smile at him with a look that Jimmy could only define as evil. In the backseat was either Jesse or no one, except for one time, when he had looked in the rearview mirror and seen George, his face pale and blood running out of a hole in his chest.
In each case, the car would crash. He would sometimes be in the woods. Other times he would be stuck in the muddy banks of the river as if he had been thrown from the car and over the bridge. Sometimes he would awaken beside the road on his back, looking up at the blackness above him.
In each dream he staggered to his feet and heard Sapphire screaming. However, it varied who was holding Sapphire. Her dress was often torn and hanging off one shoulder. Sometimes she was bloody and beaten. Sometimes Devlin Little was holding her by her throat. Sometimes it was Stan Little. Sometimes it was a faceless creature that towered over both of them with bright red eyes and a mouth filled with sharp white teeth. Once, it was Jesse holding her and smiling at Jimmy, his face contorted into that of the monster with red eyes and rows and rows of sharp teeth.
"Sheep's clothing," the thing with Jesse's face said. "We're all just wolves in sheep's clothing, Jimmy. And all of us have teeth. Especially over here. All of us have teeth and all of us bite."
Then the thing with Jesse's face opened its huge mouth, its eyes glowing so brightly that Jimmy had to raise his hand and shield his eyes. The thing leaned in and took a huge bite out of Sapphire's neck. Sapphire screamed Jimmy's name, and then blackness engulfed the entire scene.
After that one, Jimmy awoke in his bedroom. He was completely wrapped in the blankets and the bed beneath him was drenched in sweat. His hair was plastered to the top of his head, and his heart was hammering like a fist on a door inside his chest. He was breathing hard.
He sat up in bed and looked at the window. It was late in the afternoon. He had slept for a couple of hours, he guessed. His mind felt wrung out and he was still exhausted. His skin looked pale when he looked down at his arms. The buzzing in his head was still gone, and he did not call out for Sapphire. He was, however, overwhelmed with one thought.
He needed to talk to Jesse.
Jesse was the one flaw in the story that they had pieced together. Sapphire felt that he was lying. Tabitha didn't buy the librarian's story, either. They hadn’t gotten a straight story from him. Jesse knew what had happened and had, apparently, fed them a line. With Devlin Little in jail, Jesse no longer had any reason be afraid. Jimmy needed to speak with the man who had been his friend and find out the truth.
Jimmy got dressed and grabbed a jacket, and then headed down the stairs. He could hear Tabitha in the kitchen. It sounded like she was on the telephone. Jimmy found his shoes near the door. However, when he bent over to tie his shoes, the floor creaked loudly. A moment later, Tabitha was in the doorway. One look at her and Jimmy forgot all about trying to sneak out, and he stared hard into Tabitha's eyes.
"What?" he asked.
Tabitha still held the phone receiver in her hand. Her face was pale and her mouth was drawn downward.
"Devlin Little," Tabitha said. Then her mouth opened and closed a bit and she shook her head.
"What?" Jimmy repeated.
"He's dead," Tabitha said, almost in a whisper. "He killed himself in his cell."
Jimmy shook his head as if he hadn’t heard her correctly. "What?"
"Stop saying 'what.'"
"But…how? I mean, h
ow does that happen?"
Tabitha sat down at the dining room table. "He somehow got hold of a pen. They found him in his cell with the pen embedded in his neck. They said the only fingerprints they found on the pen were Devlin's."
Jimmy sat down at the table near Tabitha. "What about the guy in the cell next to him?"
"What about him?"
"Didn't he hear him?" Jimmy asked. "I mean, if a guy stabs himself in the neck, wouldn't he be choking and stuff?"
Tabitha looked exasperatedly at Jimmy. "I have no idea. Why would you ask that?"
"If the guy made noise, why didn't the cell neighbor call someone? None of this whole story makes any sense."
Tabitha reached out and grabbed Jimmy's arm. "Jimmy, nothing here makes sense. Remember, this is beyond what's normal. The whole thing. I have no idea what happened to the guy in the cell next to him. I just know that the man who was our main suspect is now dead, and he appears to have killed himself. And that man was one of the most prominent men in town, and he had powerful friends."
Jimmy shook his head again.
"Jimmy," Tabitha said, pausing when she noticed that Jimmy had been putting on his shoes and was about to go out. "Where were you going?"
"Jesse," Jimmy said. "We need to talk to Jesse. Tabitha, he's the one person whose story hasn't added up and who has the real story about that night and he might be willing to talk now that Devlin is in jail."
He paused for a moment.
"Or dead."
"No,” Tabitha said, “You aren't going anywhere. No one is going anywhere right now. This is all moving too fast and it’s all too weird. People are dying left and right around here."
"I have to, Tabitha," Jimmy said.
"Your mother would never agree to this," Tabitha said. "She wouldn't let you go."
"You're not my mother," Jimmy said, his voice getting a bit too shrill even for his own comfort. "Besides, I was trying to sneak out."
"Were you going to steal a car?" Tabitha asked.
"I thought I saw a bicycle in the garage," Jimmy said. "I was going to take a bike."
Tabitha sighed. Then she shook her head again, holding one hand up to her head.
"I cannot let this happen," Tabitha said. "You cannot do this. I understand why you want to, but I cannot let that happen until I can go with you, and right now, I have a responsibility to the newspaper. And this is a big story."
With that, she got up and walked back into the kitchen. He heard the tones of the phone being dialed. After another moment, Jimmy heard her talking to someone on the other end. Jimmy guessed that it was a reporter.
Jimmy waited for a moment to see if she was going to come back. When it appeared that the phone calls were not going to stop and that Tabitha had gotten entirely lost in her work, forgetting all about Jimmy, he got up and snuck out the front door.
The cold air felt good on his skin. His brain was flying in a thousand different directions. He had the image of Devlin Little, jabbering away and begging for Jimmy to leave him alone, and then grabbing a pen out of his pants pocket. Did his jumpsuit have pockets? Jimmy could not remember. But he imagined Devlin raising the pen up to his own throat and then thrusting forward. Soon he would be gagging on his own blood and choking, clawing at the hole he had made. Jimmy shuddered.
He walked around to the side of the house and opened the side door to the garage. Inside, the space smelled dusty and old. In the corner was a rusty lawnmower, and there were other gardening implements scattered about. There was enough space for a car, but Jimmy had only seen Warren and Tabitha park in the driveway. Against one wall, behind what appeared to be a wheelbarrow, was a bicycle. It looked like a very ancient twelve-speed bike that had not been ridden in a while.
Jimmy walked across the cement floor of the garage, his feet crunching on things that he couldn’t see. He reached the bike and yanked; the bike came out with a bit of a groan. He noticed that, somehow, the tires were not flat. Perhaps Warren had gone for a ride sometime recently. There were some cobwebs amidst the spokes, but it was in good shape.
He wheeled the bike over to the side door. He opened the door and guided the bike out of the garage. He stood beside it for a moment, debating internally whether the idea was a good one or not. Then he thought about Sapphire, and decided that there really was no other choice. He had to do this. He got on the bike and rode off.
At first the bike was awkward and strange. He wasn’t used to a bike as big as this one. However, once he was about a mile away from the house, he had things going smoothly. He was shifting gears effortlessly, and dazzled at just how fast the bike could get going. The cool air blew through his hair, and he looked up into a crystal blue sky. It was a perfect day. Inside his head the buzzing had started again, but it was soft and far away.
Are you there? he thought.
There was no response. He could sense that she was there, almost hear her thoughts rushing around in whatever passed for a brain when she was not in corporeal form. Jimmy could sense fear and trepidation coming off of her in waves. Jimmy was afraid that he had frightened Sapphire when he wanted to push Devlin Little. His angry side was not something that he had wanted her to see. Hell, he wasn't even sure that he had an angry side until it came out in the jail.
"I'm sorry about that," Jimmy said aloud, sending the thought across the distance to where Sapphire was. "But remember, I did stab a guy with a fork and head-butt another when you were there."
It's different when you’re nearly destroying a man's mind completely, came the sudden reply. It was so sudden that Jimmy's bike veered toward the edge of the road for a moment.
He's dead now, Jimmy said.
I know, Sapphire said. I was around when he crossed over. He looked at me and shrank away in fear. Then, well, then bad things happened.
Jimmy was curious, and he still had a ways to go before he got to the library. "What things?"
Just…things, Sapphire said. Sometimes people move on to bigger and better things, and those who have spent their lives being selfish or doing wrong, I guess, go somewhere else.
Hell?
I don't think so. Not in any way that you would think of. Certainly not the Hell that I was taught about in Sunday school. But the unclean spirits are taken somewhere, and it is not pleasant.
There was a bit of silence for a while.
They always go screaming, Sapphire said softly.
Jimmy could sense her shivering at the thought.
Sounds like the afterlife can really suck, Jimmy thought as he rounded a bend, shifted gears, and started up a tall hill.
It's certainly not what I thought it would be, she said.
There was silence for some time.
What are you planning on doing with Jesse? Sapphire asked.
I don't know, but his story didn't add up to you, and that makes me wonder what really happened. I think with Devlin Little gone, maybe he'll tell me what happened. Maybe we can finally put some puzzle pieces together.
I'm scared. There's something wrong with him, Jimmy. I know he's your friend, but something about him worries me.
I guess we'll find out, Jimmy thought. But Jesse is one of the kindest people I know. I just feel like maybe he saw something that scared him that night. Well, of course he did; he saw you killed and he loved you. However, there was something more. Had I been there, nothing would have stopped me from going to the police. I would have been trying again and again, for the rest of my life, to get the person who killed the woman I loved arrested. The fact that he didn't do that bothers me.
Sapphire said nothing, and the buzzing in his head diminished. Jimmy kept pedaling, disturbed by how out of breath he felt. He was still exhausted and drained. How much longer could he keep this up? What would happen if he kept trying to do this—altering reality, talking to the dead? Would he just dry up and blow away?
He shrugged that off and shifted gears again. He was headed down a hill now. Up ahead he saw the turn that would lead him to the library. The su
n was starting to go down behind the trees and the sky was starting to look bruised with dazzling orange and pink near the horizon. It was beautiful, and Jimmy admired it for a moment before focusing on what he was doing. The road had been blissfully absent of traffic.
Jimmy rode the rest of the hill down and then banked left. He was riding at a speed that made his heart pound and caused adrenaline to surge through his body. He felt more awake now and he rounded the corner, shot up the sidewalk, and came to a squealing halt beside the library. The place had an ominous edge to it that Jimmy had never noticed before. Normally it appeared bright and inviting, but now there appeared to be lights off inside and Jimmy got his first real feeling of dread.
Jimmy leaned the bike up against the side of the library and dismounted. His legs felt a bit wobbly, but his heart was pounding crazily. He could feel the adrenaline still surging through him. His head buzzed both from Sapphire and from the adrenaline. He looked up at the brick side of the library. The bricks themselves seemed sinister.
"You are losing it," he said to himself. At the same time, he suddenly wished he were the type of guy who always carried a gun.
He walked around to the front of the library and mounted the stairs. His legs felt heavy as he did so, but he pushed on. The lights were on inside, but only at the front of the library. The back end was dark; Jimmy could tell that the lights were off when he looked in through the small rectangular window set in the front door. Jimmy pushed and the door opened with a creak that he had never noticed before, but now seemed impossibly loud.
Jimmy stepped inside. Once inside, only silence greeted him. Usually this late in the afternoon, Jesse would be listening to music on an old, battered vacuum tube infested radio that he kept on a shelf behind his desk. This time, there was nothing. Even Blackie didn’t come padding out from behind the desk to greet Jimmy. There was just the smell of old books and motes of dust floating lazily in the air, caught in the dimming shafts of fading sunlight through outside.
"Jesse?" Jimmy called. He hesitated, taking several steps inside before finally calling out. Alarm bells were going off in his head.
Sapphire: A Paranormal Romance Page 26
