by Dale Mayer
“Doesn’t matter why,” he said. “We just have to make sure that, if you’re hungry, you get food.”
Her face lit up when he brought over the plates. “I really appreciate this,” she said warmly. “I don’t know how much food you have here for the next couple days until we can get back to the mainland, but I don’t want you to run short.”
“We won’t run short of dry goods,” he said. “There’s always rice, beans, canned goods, things like that. It’s the fresh fruit and veggies we’ll run out of.”
“Right,” she said. “We can certainly do something that requires those dry ingredients, like a chili.”
He nodded thoughtfully. “That might work. I have to see what I have for ground beef.”
“Later, when you’re not eating, because this is absolutely divine. You definitely don’t want to take time out right now.”
It was hard to understand her because she mumbled around her mouthful. He chuckled. “You’re like a child.”
She wrinkled her nose up at him. “I’m hungry,” she said. “Manners be damned.” Then she stopped, looked up at him. “Unless you object. I wouldn’t want to insult my host.”
“Eat,” he said with a wave of his hand. “Much better you eat and eat well and enjoy the food I prepared.”
“My thoughts exactly,” she said.
It was a good ten minutes before she said anything else. He watched as she tucked away her food at an incredible rate. She’d consumed four pieces of toast and had already eaten her share of eggs, emptying her plate, and now eyed the extra slices of toast.
He nudged the small plate toward her. “I can make more.”
He watched in amazement as she didn’t need any more urging but scoffed the two pieces of toast. Wanting some for himself, he sliced more bread and put them in the toaster.
“Are one of those for me?” she asked.
“It can be,” he said. “I hadn’t expected you to be this hungry.”
She frowned. “I’m not sure why I am because I’ve been eating every meal.”
“Not really,” he said. “You’ve been eating but not tons.” Inside he wondered if it had some specific significance, this appetite of hers.
At that, he heard his brother’s voice calling in his head. It’s me.
“I have to go to my office for a moment. Will you excuse me, please?” He walked into his lab.
At the window with his voice low, he said, “What are you talking about?”
I’m using her energy-her memories-to get the information we need, his brother said in exasperation. If you hadn’t brought me back here, where I was dosed so heavily before, I could think clearer and could better portion my reserves. You need to come get me.
“I’ll be there in another day,” he said. “Hold on until then. And make sure you don’t bloody lose it because I can’t have you hurting anyone again.”
I don’t understand what happened there, Jamie said. You know it has never happened before.
“No,” Samson said. “I don’t know that. Unfortunately I think it’s happened way too often. And I can’t let you around people if you’re going to hurt them.”
I’m trying to control it, he said, his voice tired, the fatigue rolling through each word. I have to go now. I’ll try not to use too much more of her energy, but I had to fight off the medications. You could ask Stefan for help.
“What am I supposed to ask Stefan to do?” Samson asked. “Help to do what?” But his brother was gone.
Samson groaned, dropped his forehead on the glass pane and wondered how life had gotten so bananas. From the doorway he heard a quiet voice.
“Can I help?”
“No.” He didn’t turn around. “There isn’t anything anybody can do.” He could feel the awkward pause behind him. Probably wondering what she should say. He just waved at her. “Go on. Go rest.”
“I will,” she said with a note of asperity in her voice. “But, just so you know, I’m not a dog. I could hear you talking to someone. You don’t have Bluetooth. And I heard you earlier talking to someone as well. I don’t know if you have some weird telepathic communication abilities that I don’t know about—hell, that the world doesn’t know about—or if something else is going on. Maybe you’re just talking to yourself, and that’s all right too because God knows I’ve done it plenty of times myself.”
At that, he gave a bark of laughter. “Really?” he asked. “You talk to yourself?”
“I always talk to my father,” she said. “He’s been gone for twenty years, but you never really lose that connection with somebody. We used to talk all the time about things that were important. And, since he’s been gone, it’s been hard. So I started talking to him again.”
“Do you ever see him?” Samson turned slowly to study her.
She looked at him curiously. “You mean, see his ghost?”
Samson shrugged. “Okay, sure. We’ll use that term. Do you ever see his ghost?” When she looked at the floor, he realized she was withholding something. He walked toward her slowly. “What is it you have seen?”
Her lips twitched. “For the longest time I thought I saw him. It made me happy to think I could see him. But everybody around me said he wasn’t there. Just a figment of my imagination.”
“I think that’s what people always say when they don’t understand something,” he said slowly. He took two steps toward her. “What did you see when you thought you saw him?”
Startled, she looked up, her gaze clear. “I thought I saw him in person. I thought he was there as clear as day. Right at my side, a hand on my shoulder, telling me to go forth to do what I wanted to do, to believe in myself. I needed to hear the message at the time, which is why my mother told me that I had dreamed it, that I had been so needy.” She twisted her lips. “That I was willing to believe anything. That he was a figment of my imagination.”
“Ouch,” he said.
She shrugged. “That’s what people do when they don’t like what you’re saying, isn’t it? They give you explanations that match what they believe in. It doesn’t matter if it matches what you believe in.”
“Yes, I can see that,” he said.
“Is it Jamie?”
Startled, he stared at her. “Why would you ask that?”
She waved an arm. “Talking to yourself, speaking of ghosts, asking if I’ve seen ghosts.” Her lips twisted again. “It would make sense because obviously Jamie was the one who lived in that white room. And maybe he was ill. Maybe you looked after him until he died, and then it was hard to let him go.”
“You’re close,” he said. “But not a hundred percent.”
“So Jamie is alive?”
“Yes. I said he was. He’s living in Woodrow House in Seattle,” he admitted. “He had an episode when he was here, a second one to go along with an ugly one last August. The first was more violent and the second was against the caretakers who were here at the time checking up on him. I only had medical permission for so long before I had to return him but after that he was taken back immediately. I’m almost certain the attack was in protest to them wanting to take him back at the time, but his behavior was enough for them to put their foot down. I was in the lab so didn’t see the attack but they were adamant that he was a danger.” Samson stopped speaking. “I didn’t know what to do …”
“Ouch. But of course, when the medical personnel came to run a check on Jamie, he acted out. It’s his way of protesting that anybody else could stop him from being here,” she said with surprising insight. “They took that as a sign of him being out of control, an episodic session, and took him back, correct?”
He stared at her. “How could you know that?”
“My sister, Marion,” she said. “That was how my mother, the doctors, the therapists treated my sister. For two years I kept taking her out of the rehab home, where she and the others got to live mostly normal lives. But she was heavily medicated all the time. I fought that decision and had a never-ending war with my sister’s med
ical team and even my mother.”
“Did they do house visits when you had your sister away from the rehab home?”
She hesitated. He wondered why.
And then she gave a clipped nod. “Somebody called on me and said I wasn’t treating my sister nicely.” Her voice was harsh. “To this day I’m not sure who did that, but it had the impact of somebody coming for a house visit. My sister took one look and threw a fit. And, of course, the doctor wasn’t prepared to concede that his presence had caused the upset, instead of Marion being at my home. The home visits were stopped at that point.”
He sucked in his breath, thinking about the pain of that. “I’m sorry,” he said in a low voice. “It’s hard. You want to trust the professionals, but, at the same time, you know they’re wrong in so many aspects.”
“They kept her quite heavily medicated for a long time after that,” she said slowly. “Almost as if to help her forget the trauma and, therefore, forget the visit with her sister.”
“Do you still see her?”
She shook her head. “She passed away about sixteen months ago, no eighteen months now.” She stared at her fingers as if looking at her nails.
But he knew she could see something totally different in her mind’s eye.
“So I do understand,” she said, looking up again. “I hope you have better luck with your brother than I did with my sister.”
“Not so far,” he said. “But I keep trying. He wants to come back here.”
“Can you make that happen?” She looked around the main room. “How could this not be an absolutely gorgeous place for him? The stimulation is Mother Nature, which is healing. You’ve got space. You’ve got communication, if he runs into trouble. You’ve got everything he could need. But, more than that, he would have you.”
He gave her a small smile. “I used all those arguments last time. It’s not something the medical people are particularly interested in listening to again.”
“Of course not,” she said drily. “It puts them out. It makes them more involved than they want to be. Not to mention they see dollar signs slipping away.”
“True,” he said, “but, at the same time, it’s also hard for me to change their medical opinion.”
“Get another doctor in,” she said. “Somebody who might understand how Jamie’s energy, for the lack of a better word, would benefit from being here.”
“Energy?” He watched her, fascinated. Behind her, he could see the glowing globe as Stefan appeared. Samson winced. “I’m not sure energy is quite the right term.”
“You know what I mean,” she said with a shrug. She turned and walked back toward the door. The globe moved out of the way, but, because she had focused on Samson, she wouldn’t have seen it anyway. “I’m going back to the warmth of the fire. Along with being hugely hungry all the time, now I’m always cold.”
“That’s the drain on your resources again,” Samson said.
She walked out of the door and then stopped, took several steps backward and stared directly at the spot in the room where Stefan stood.
Stefan didn’t move, but she stared at him and asked, “Samson, what am I seeing?”
He could hear the strangled tone of her voice.
He groaned. “Stefan,” he said for lack of a better answer. “Stefan, maybe you should say something.”
Chapter 8
A warm caring … energy … rolled over her, smoothly through her mind, through her body, maybe even into her heart. She wasn’t sure, but she felt a soul connection like she hadn’t ever before. Then this vision in front of her spoke.
“Hi, my name is Stefan,” he said. “I’m not a ghost. I’m astral-projecting so that Samson and I can talk. He’s being stubborn and won’t talk telepathically.”
His humor was so evident, his tone so clear, his words so damn confusing. She sagged against the wall of Samson’s office and turned to look at Samson. “And you can hear that?”
Samson nodded. “When you thought you heard me talking to myself earlier, I was talking to Stefan.”
Confused, she shook her head.
“The first time you asked, not the second time.” He raised his eyebrow at her and waited.
“Got it,” she said. “Jamie talks to you telepathically too. You can’t talk back that way, so you speak out loud. So, for me, I only heard you talk, making it sound like you’re off your rocker.”
“Have you heard yourself lately?” Samson asked, chuckling.
But she wasn’t looking at him anymore. Instead she stared at the entity in front of her that had called himself Stefan. “Astral-projecting?”
“Yes,” he said. “Thank you for not freaking out.”
“There’s been a lot happening lately,” she said, her tone slightly harsh. “It’s hard to freak out too many times in a row. It’s exhausting.”
Stefan’s chuckle rippled through her like warm waves. She reached out a hand, palm up, and asked, “How is it I can feel you inside? When you laugh, it’s like waves running through me.”
As she watched, there was a change in Stefan’s energy. From the glowing ghostly form, the form of a man clearly stood out clear. Beautiful blond hair, sculpted face, tall, slim, with love evident in his eyes.
She looked at him in shock. “Are you for real?”
He nodded, but, with the movement of his head, waves of golden energy flowed outward.
“I’ve never seen auras before in my life,” she said, “but every move you make is like seeing energy ripple outward from your form. I’m not exactly sure what I see.” She knew she sounded a little dazed. “But it’s incredible.” She looked to Samson, then back at Stefan. “Samson, do you see that too?”
“Yes,” he said. “And, yes, I feel it too.”
“How is it you have the ability to affect people on a soul level like that?” she asked Stefan quietly.
She didn’t want to let them know, but she was shaken to her very core. She felt Stefan’s smile. It was hard to see as he faded. But she could feel it as it moved from him toward her, encompassing the space between them, enlarging and building upon what they had so it encompassed Samson yet again.
She shook her head in amazement. “It’s the most bizarre feeling,” she murmured. “And yet, somehow it’s also so very familiar.”
“So it should be,” Stefan said. “We are not just a physical body. We are a soul that’s come here for a journey.” His voice was low, not really distinct, and yet, clear at the same time.
“You’re talking about reincarnation,” she said.
“If you want,” he said. “But you need to understand that you’re not your physical body. You’re much more than that, as I am more than my physical body. As you can see—I’m standing here in front of you without my body.”
She blinked at that. “In this context, yes,” she said, “that’s true. I’m not sure how that works though. I’ve never known myself to be out of my body.”
“You probably go out on a regular basis,” he said smoothly, “when you’re asleep, when you’re in the middle of a nightmare.” His tone became specific.
She frowned. “Did you deliberately mean to say nightmare? Do you know how painful and terrifying my nightmares are?”
“I do,” he said. “But the fear makes them terrifying. Knowledge would make them easier.”
“Knowledge of what?” she asked, bewildered. “I’m caught up in a nightmare. I’m asleep. I don’t even know what’s going on. You’re saying that I’m leaving my body and that this is something that should happen? Something that always happens?”
“Not always but often,” he said.
She stole a glance at Samson. “I presume Samson told you all about my nightmares?”
“He did, and Jamie did,” Stefan said. “That energy is a very important part of the ecosystem, and Jamie is very in tune with that same system.”
“Jamie, … as in Samson’s brother?” she hazarded a guess, not at all sure about this sudden turn of events. “Okay, you
know this is getting more bizarre, right?”
“Tell me about your nightmares,” Stefan said.
She shuddered, wrapping her arms around her chest and stomach. “Why would I want to relive those horrifying moments?”
“Because I might be able to help,” he said.
“I don’t know in what way.” She hated that her tone was curt, but the last thing she wanted to do was go over those nightmares.
“You’re drowning,” he said, “over and over again? Correct?”
She nodded. “And sometimes it feels like I’m being pressed downward. Yet sometimes it feels like I’m being pushed upward.”
“What’s pushing you down?”
“Water,” she said. “Just miles and miles of water forcing me down deeper and deeper into the ocean.”
“And what’s pushing you up?”
She swallowed hard, opened her mouth to speak, but the words wouldn’t come out.
“What is it that’s pushing you up?” he asked again, his voice insistent.
There was something about him, something about his voice that said she had to answer, as if he’d given her a truth serum of some kind.
“Something large,” she said. “Something soft but firm, silky but hard,” she tried to explain. “It slipped under my hand. I didn’t feel anything except this huge monstrous thing underneath me, but, every time I could feel it, I was moving upward toward the surface. I tried at first to get away from it. Only then I realized it was helping me. And it was moving faster than I was. When I tried to jump up and away, it would come up higher and push me farther.” The words ripped out of her throat. “I don’t know what it is,” she murmured. “But it was big. It was so damn big.”
“Whales are big,” Stefan said calmly. “Dolphins are big. Manatees are big. Any number of other critters in that body of water are big. We’ve heard stories time and time again about how they’ve helped drowning sailors reach the shore.”
She nodded. “I know that, and that wouldn’t be so bad, except for the words.”
Stefan’s form and his energy both sharpened, and Samson took two broad strides toward her side. “What words?” Samson asked. “You never said anything to me about words before. It spoke to you?”
