I wouldn’t exactly call the photos “spiritual,” but she is referring to the two images that Prichard either destroyed or purposely misfiled. To suggest wrongdoing on his part would look like I had an ax to grind with my superior. You can’t win when the evidence to support a claim is nowhere to be found.
“I was initially sent here because of what I saw in those photos as well as the gunshot wound,” I remind her. “I brought a different photo for you to review carefully. It is very similar to the photos I had mentioned that never turned up.”
I hand her the photo of the dead woman in front of the beach. I stand alongside Bridget and point out how the woman holding the umbrella in the reflection is not actually standing on the beach. The agitated tapping of her right knee seems to be evidence that she finds the image puzzling.
“Once again, you are making a right turn when you should be making a left,” she says, scolding me like a redheaded stepchild. “We seem to be covering old ground again. Why did you feel it was necessary to bring along a prop? It’s not ‘show and tell’ day.”
She must be a barrel of laughs at a party. “Just look at the picture for one minute, and I’ll put it away. Do you see a reflection in the water of a woman holding an umbrella?”
“I see something in the water, but the slight ripples make it impossible to be certain.” She looks up, takes a deep breath, and shakes her head affirmatively. “I’ll concede that the object reflected does look like an umbrella. You must have searched high and low to prove your point.”
“It’s not like that,” I explain. “A friend of mine has been working on a historical book and had this photo in a pile of images. I just happened to notice the reflection in the water without a matching body standing on the beach. The reflection in the mirror of the photo from the bank wasn’t much different than what is seen here—it also had an umbrella.”
“I’ll have to take your word for those images since they were never revealed to me.”
“I’m telling you the truth. The photos looked very similar.”
Bridget needs to acknowledge that this photo validates that I’m not imagining umbrellas and invisible people. Not that an event that occurred in 1947 is necessarily related to what I saw at the bank, but my claim suddenly has some credibility.
“Mr. Delaney, there are probably countless reasons why reflections occasionally show up in photographs. Back in those days, cameras, lenses, and film were much different than today.”
“I will agree that cameras can be unpredictable, but an umbrella only showing up in a reflection seems worth discussing. The girl arrested swore the woman in the park was carrying an umbrella.”
“Lots of women carry umbrellas, not to mention some are partial to parasols.”
“But would they carry one on a cloudless night in a park? I’m not losing my mind, Bridget. What happened at the bank is somehow connected. Can you at least consider the possibility of a powerful entity escorting a woman through time using the aid of an umbrella?”
“Mr. Delaney, what I’m primarily hearing is that you have some fascination with umbrellas that borders on fetishism. You should use that slant in one of your novels.”
She talks as if I’m already an established author. I remind her, “You told me that you enjoy science fiction. In a story, would you believe a witch could grant wishes and slow down time? I’m using ‘could’ in that sentence, speaking in the hypothetical sense.”
“The likelihood is about the same as elves packing gifts at the North Pole,” she says, crushing my argument by using a silly example. “Anything is possible, but much of what you want to believe has to do with a very overactive imagination. It amazes me what you are willing to accept as reality.”
She occasionally drives me crazy professing to know me without really knowing me. We’ve only had four sessions. How well can you know anyone inside of a four-hour collective period? Yet, she has a way of hitting me directly in the gut with her insights.
After spinning for another ten minutes about Mandi, the tale of Bethalyn, and even what I read about the Society of Franklin, Bridget looks agitated. I often wear people down when I begin to theorize, but it’s frustrating when my point isn’t getting across. At the same time, it’s peculiar how the subject of time travel is so disconcerting to women.
Bridget slaps her hands on her knees. “Mr. Delaney, I think we need to do an exercise.”
“Hypnosis again?” I ask, defeated. Bridget’s definition of exercise equates to hypnosis. She resorts to this technique whenever my thoughts are too random.
“Yes, Mr. Delaney, hypnosis will pinpoint where your energy is focused—even if misdirected. We need to center on what is truly troubling you. I don’t really feel it’s all umbrellas, girls dashing through time, and having daydreams about dark rooms.”
As from our previous hypnosis sessions, Bridget has me stare into this square box with a circular object that keeps spinning slowly. I’m never comfortable going under, but she might actually bring light to whatever I reveal while in that state of mind. At first, my body does everything to fight the sleep. Before I realize it, my eyes begin getting heavy, and everything slips into blackness.
I find myself in a sedative consciousness within a darkened room illuminated by a single burning torch in the corner—the same darkened room from my daydream. I am looking through the eyes of a child and experiencing all of their senses. From the shape of the child’s tiny fingers, I am most definitely inside a girl. This feels like going through the portal in Being John Malkovich while seeing through the subject’s eyes. I can sense the cold floor and smell the rank air. The conditions within the stone cell are revolting. I notice a closed iron gate as the only passageway from the room. These quarters are no place for a child; this is where you’d expect a hardened criminal to be held after attempting numerous escapes.
Distant footsteps approach as if she’s trapped inside a sinister virtual reality game. Her head turns to focus on the iron door in the corner of the room. A metal key jiggles loudly in the lock. Seconds later, the sturdy door is aggressively yanked open. An old man with long gray hair and a white robe walks in carrying two copper kettles. This hypnotic journey just got very uncomfortable. A sizeable bearded oppressor in a dark robe follows. He’s holding a long metal rod in his hand. He is acting like a zookeeper about to feed an agitated grizzly bear.
“Stay right there and do not move,” the bearded man at the door instructs in a raspy voice. “I do not want any problems, young lady. You are aware of what will happen. You do not want to experience such punishment again.”
The other guard is pouring water into a ceramic dish on the floor—much like he’s preparing to feed a dog. The man pours soup from the matching kettle into the second dish. All at once, the thick liquid seems to be defying gravity; the cut vegetables hang in the air like in a three-dimensional image. What I’m seeing is precisely how Mandi described the state of her ex-boyfriend while in the repose.
The girl gets to her bare feet and bends to navigate around the man in front of the doorway. Although I’m looking through her eyes, it’s more like getting a piggyback ride through what feels like a two-century trip back in time. She climbs a rock staircase towards an opened doorway. I can hear the whispery mumbling of a young girl’s voice. She glances down at her dirty scraped knees—evidence that she rarely gets cleaned up.
Upon walking through another doorway, she enters a massive cathedral. She catches her reflection in a tall mirror. Behind the grimy four-year-old face is that of an innocent brunette that looks to be criminally undernourished. Although I’m trying to stay neutral during my hypnosis, my heart is breaking all the same. The girl’s loneliness and despair show through her anguished expression.
She walks outside where everything remains still. After exiting through the black gate around the church, motionless kids are on the dirt path in front of the fence. As she glides through the stationary children, each kid resembles lifelike wax museum props. Everyone remains perfec
tly still as she maneuvers around them. A few children were playing with a ball that hangs a foot in the air as if a string is keeping it elevated.
She reaches down and puts her hand on the arm of a girl that is frozen in place. Her touch signifies a level of bitter loneliness that only the forlorn can feel. She must want to have fun with a girl her size but is quite aware that attempting to blend in with even one of these children would be detrimental.
The girl doesn’t seem to understand the reasons she isn’t allowed to enjoy life’s simple pleasures like these other children. She continues walking up the street, stopping in front of a house where a pie is cooling on a windowsill. She reaches up, grabs the pan, and dips her dirty fingers into the crust. I can feel the wetness of the apples. When she begins to chew, I taste the sweet apples and the flaky crust. The chewing is quite surreal even though she devours it like an animal. Without being taught manners, this must be her method of surviving. After finishing the pie, she returns the empty pan and continues investigating.
When the repose commenced, a man happened to be walking out of a dwelling. His position has him holding his front door ajar. With just enough room to pass through, she squeezes around his body, entering what seems to be a primitive living room. What is weird about this hypnosis is that I cannot do anything to change what is happening. In a typical dream, I’ve occasionally had some control over the outcome.
While in the living room, she climbs on a wooden rocking chair and laughs while swaying back and forth. While she’s oscillating, a framed black and white drawing catches her attention. She climbs from the chair and walks over to the picture. For several minutes, she studies the illustration of a young boy tossing a coin into a wishing well. Her lack of movement makes me feel as if she is suddenly a stationary victim trapped in this cessation. Although this memory has sights, smells, tastes, and sounds, it lacks any inner thoughts. I wish I could understand why she finds this particular picture fascinating. After all the focus on the wishing well, it seems connected.
After tiring of looking at the framed picture, she walks outside. Continuing down a dirt path, she stops before a boy and pulls a small leather ball from his hand. She then enters an area hidden behind a cluster of thick hedges to the right of the church. In this tiny area, three wooden crosses are stuck in the ground. Carved into the wood of each marker is “Mother,” “Child 1,” and “Child 2.” They didn’t even mark these graves with given names. She touches each marker as tears run slide down her cheeks. Lying at the base of the first marker is a lightning rod partially covered in dirt.
Although anyone may argue, this is beginning to feel as if I’m inside the girl’s memory that was pulled from the womb after 87 minutes. She reaches down and wraps her small fingers tightly around the lightning rod. A surge of energy races through her body, causing her vision to become fuzzy like a television channel with lousy reception. If I had to guess, she is gaining additional power from whatever energy remains in the lightning rod.
After 30 seconds, the distorted vision clears up. She pulls open the large wooden front door of the church. After exiting the chapel, she walks back down the stone steps and wanders through the corridor toward the dark room where she is held captive. Why is she returning to such a horrible place? The man guarding the door appears to be in the same stiff position as when we left the room. She crawls under his massive body and sits in the exact spot on the floor. She claps her hands together, returning everything to full motion. After the hot stew fills the bowl, the man in white backs up nervously toward the door.
“Good girl,” the bearded man mumbles, condescendingly. “We shall return at nightfall. Behave yourself or receive no rations until sunrise.”
Once the door is sealed behind her, she rolls the stolen ball across the floor. She stands up and chases after it. The darkness of the room fades back to the present, and I’m looking across the room at Bridget. I feel a bit fuzzy. The detailed vision has me bewildered.
“I didn’t quite catch everything you were mumbling during hypnosis,” she says. “What did you see exactly?”
“It was the weirdest thing. I was looking through the eyes of a young girl held captive in an underground room similar to a prison cell. By pausing time, she wandered through a little town that felt centuries old. The vision felt real. I could feel all of her senses, but I wasn’t able to pick up a single thought.”
“Derek, what you saw was merely a manifestation caused by the materials your friend showed you in that folder. The more you visualized, the more your subconscious began generating images about what happened to those people back in Wilkinson Creek. Someone highly creative, like yourself, would naturally begin to do that.”
“It felt more real than simplifying it like that,” I argue. “This felt like a memory that was fed to me from somewhere—maybe channeled in.” Channeling has to sound crazy, but lots of weird things have been happening today. “My friend found this information about the Society of Franklin and the sketch of that prototype just this morning. Doesn’t a finding like that seem more than just by chance? Even a woman in your position can acknowledge that.”
“Mr. Delaney, I’m not here to guide your belief system. What I do know about Wilkinson Creek is that its ancestors displayed the most offensive behavior in human beings. Bluff Ridge, on the other hand, was formed from less-appalling origins. It’s pointless to spend your time bothering with a place like Wilkinson Creek.”
“My interest lies solely in hearing testimony from a resident of that town.”
“When you saw through a girl’s eyes in the vision, it was a message that your artistic side is trapped inside like a prisoner. The concept of time being ‘suspended’ may have to do with your reluctance to leave behind a steady paycheck. You may have an outstanding performance record, but I believe you were not put on this planet to hand out speeding tickets and to deliver divorce papers. Your printed words may influence far more lives than you ever will touch with that silver badge. During our previous hypnosis session, you mentioned your hesitation to leave law enforcement is due to a fear of starting a new life. Most people don’t want to abandon their comforts to dare the unknown. Chasing criminals and women claiming to travel through time is not the life for you. Your concentration should be centered on writing stories about these subjects.”
“That is easy to say from your side of the conversation. I have lots to risk.”
“I’m still an avid reader, and people are waiting for a literary voice that tears at the fabric of reality. You have such an active imagination that you will write some interesting novels. Your limiting beliefs keep holding you back.”
She keeps interrupting by redirecting the conversation. “I hear what you are saying about being a writer; I do appreciate all of the support. But I’m positive the vision I had before was about the ‘Abbey’ I was told about. Don’t you find that just a little odd that I had a vision about a girl that was locked in an underground room back when they used torches? It was a gift from somewhere.”
“Derek, let me get to the guts of this,” Bridget states, slightly rolling her eyes from frustration. She’s usually cool as a cucumber on the surface, but she is slightly unraveling. “The girl last night may have been using the legend of Abellina as a smoke screen. Naturally, she knew that you probably had never heard this story. It was a clever way to throw you off the scent. At the same time, her story seems to have awakened creative places within you that were lying dormant.”
“You know about Abellina too!” That was less of a question and more of a statement. “Am I the only damn person in this county that hasn’t heard about this witch?” I was always ahead of all my friends relating to the supernatural, so I can’t believe a cool story like this cruised past my ears.
“It doesn’t surprise me that you haven’t heard it. Most young girls around this area have been introduced to the legend of Abellina,” she says as if this declaration is that of public knowledge. It’s been a long time since I’ve been a child, but I
do recall most creepy stories spun during those days. “At your first slumber party, girls gather together in their sleeping bags while whispering about Abellina. It’s a widely-known story about an oppressed girl locked away in a dungeon during her formative years. Whenever you are grounded, you are supposed to whisper her name seven times, and she will spring you from your caged room.”
“Like Bloody Mary?”
“Similar to that,” she confirms, “but you outgrow the hope of her showing up by the time you are thirteen or so.”
“Are you verifying that someone named Abellina was once real?”
“Some believe that all to be true. At the same time, I’ve never heard of a single girl that was ever liberated from a grounding by reciting her name, so I highly doubt the Abellina from the stories was summoned last night to wave a magic wand.”
“Wouldn’t you agree that if the real Abellina had been locked away by some terrible people in Wilkinson Creek, she would have quite the score to settle? She’d be within her rights to wage revenge on the ancestors that took away her family.”
“By that logic, she might as well be letting the people that make wishes do the bidding to get her revenge,” Bridget offers. “After all, many people today would be from the original bloodline of her oppressors. The girl from last night might be using subtext to play that angle. Don’t get too caught up in any woman’s little game.”
“That might not be too far off,” I say, ruminating on the logic of her words. “There have been lots of unexplainable deaths; one that I know involved the wishing well.”
“Derek, these thoughts are coming from the deepest recesses of your paranoia. I was just hypothesizing. Chances are good that the girl in the park was using this little folklore as a way to sidestep whatever she was truly up to. It’s very clever abbreviating Abellina’s name, but I think she had a different objective.”
“Wait a second,” I interrupt. “Carmen told me this information about a baby that survived in a womb for 87 minutes after enduring the energy of multiple lightning strikes. That is the same amount of time that this woman claims to have traveled back in time. Don’t you find that a bit suspicious? Details regarding a death like that would be a hidden secret.”
In Dark Places Page 28