I groan and lean back against the tree. “It’s gonna be a long night then.”
Chapter 32
Yawning, I enter the computer room, feeling the cell phone in my pocket against my leg as I walk. I charged it overnight and took it with me before I came here.
I head over to the computer near the window, but it’s already on. On the screen is some sort of pixel farm and farmhouse. The little character is moving around and the mouse on the table is moving and clicking too.
“It’s me,” Darius says from the seemingly empty chair in front of the computer.
“Oh, right,” I say. “I sort of forgot about you.”
“No worries. I’m easily forgettable.”
I sit down at the computer next to him and turn it on. “When did you get here? It’s five in the morning.”
“Been here since dinner last night. Sorry I can’t turn visible right now. Exhausted.”
“You’ve been up all night playing a farming game?”
“Yep.”
I try to look at Darius to see his facial expressions or his body language, but of course there’s nothing. He’s still tapping on the keyboard and using the mouse so I take it he isn’t even looking at me as we talk.
Still, I keep looking over in his direction. “I thought you’d more so be into—I don’t know, like those fighting games and stuff.”
“Nah, I’m more of a casual gamer.”
“Playing a game all night long is anything but casual.”
“Shrug,” he says.
I chuckle. “Shrug?”
“Yeah, you can’t see me shrugging so I’m letting you know I’m shrugging.”
“Thanks, that’s useful I guess.”
“Any time.”
The bland way Darius always seems to speak is kind of off-putting. Knowing that I can’t see him, I wish he’d speak with more expression.
The character on his screen leaves the farm and goes to some sort of town. He walks around talking to people.
“So why are you here at 5 AM?” he says.
“Well, I couldn’t fall back asleep so I thought I’d just come do some research.”
“On what?”
“A gift. Dreams.”
“Oh, you’re talking about that psychologist, right? Madeline Taylor?”
“Yeah, you know about her?”
“Sure. I wrote a ten page essay on her last semester.”
“Here, at camp?”
“Yeah. You’re lucky you came during the summer. Otherwise you would’ve had to jump straight into the classes.”
Darius is talking about it like it’s a bad thing, but I actually like the sound of taking classes like that. I’ve never known any classes in normal schools to have any content about gifts. History textbooks don’t mention it at all.
“What do you want to know?” Darius says. “I can probably save you some time. Her stuff is pretty hard to find. The best source is a password-protected website, but I’m pretty sure mine doesn’t work anymore. She gave me a temporary password.”
“Well, I sort of need to know… everything. I haven’t even heard about her until recently. All I know is she tried to treat her patients with dreams.”
“Oh, that was just a small part of what she did. Madeline’s main interest was trying to understand her gift and its limitations. She ran multiple experiments on herself and wrote everything down in journals. Recently, one of her grandkids found all the journals and typed them all up and put them online—on that website I was talking about. I think I only managed to read through, like, less than a quarter of it.”
He yawns, making me yawn too.
“Anyway, Madeline was one of the OGs,” he continues.
“OG?” I say.
“Yeah, the originals? The first ones? Don’t you know about that?”
“Oh, yeah. I do.”
The originals were the first known gifted. The oldest records of gifts anyone can find dates to 1900—about babies who could do strange things. No one knows where exactly the gifts came from but all we know is they haven’t always been around, unless they were well hidden back in the day. And many of them were killed at a young age, hunted by many thinking they were demons. Then, people noticed the exact same powers were showing up in other babies, and eventually one of them was born to a preacher, who claimed they weren’t demons, but gifted. He did a lot of work to publicize the term and his message that the gifted were blessings. The term stuck around, but not really the message.
“Madeline was born in 1900 exactly,” Darius says. “She started keeping the journals in the 1930s, up until her death in the ‘60s. That’s thirty years of content to wade through. Took her granddaughter a decade just to type them all up.”
“So, did she do any experiments on her range?”
The character on his screen stops moving and there are no more taps or clicks. “She did. Her range was amazing.” Darius’s voice goes from that flat, lazy monotone to a quicker, more excited tone as he talks. “Most of her tests were done in Ireland, since that’s where she was from, but at some point one of her friends moved to America, and she could still enter her dreams.”
“From Ireland to America?”
“Yeah. Amazing, right? But it seems like she had two ranges. One for people she didn’t know, and one for people she did. If she knew you, seemed like she could reach you from just about anywhere. But if you were a stranger—someone she’s never met or spoken to—then she could only reach you if you were within a hundred-mile radius.”
“Still, a hundred miles is huge.”
“For sure. Her gift is extremely powerful. Sometimes, I like to think that all of us have equally powerful gifts but maybe we just haven’t unlocked our potential yet. Like with Madeline, maybe she could have reached farther eventually. When she first started out, it was only a twenty-mile radius. But she kept pushing her limits and improving her capabilities.”
“So you think that you can improve yours?” I turn away from him and lean back in the chair, staring at the log-in screen on my computer.
“I know I can. When I was young, I could barely stay visible for an hour. But these days, I can stay visible all day if I’m well-rested. Also, I wasn’t able to turn other things invisible at first, but I can do that with small things now.”
“So that’s something you practice a lot?”
“Hmm, well I used to. But these days I mostly just play games. It’s mindless. Practicing is hard work, and draining too.”
I think about Vic Blanchet and how he used his gift all the time, but never seemed to have expanded his capabilities. But then again, he never tried to. He was satisfied with the bare minimum—a touch to the skin and dead.
“Do you know who used to have your gift?” I ask.
“Sort of? I don’t know who exactly he was, like his name or anything, but I dream about him sometimes.”
So Darius has the dreams too.
The chair where Darius is scrapes back on the floor. I look over to see that he has shut down the computer.
“I’m gonna head to bed now,” he says. “Is there anything else you wanted to know about Madeline?”
Maybe Noah’s range wasn’t as good as Madeline’s, but it’s probably still likely that he can reach the dreams of anyone he knows from anywhere in the world. I shudder at the thought. That means that Carl can reach me too. And I won’t be able to get much sleep from now on, knowing that Carl is just waiting for me to dream.
“Did she have anything in her journals about how to block her gift?” I ask.
“Block it? I don’t think so. At least, it wasn’t in the entries I read. I was mostly interested in her range and how she improved since that’s what my paper was about. The website does have a search function though, so you might be able to find something. It’s madelinetaylordreams.com. You can call
a number and ask for the password.”
“Okay, thanks,” I say.
After a moment, the door opens and then closes. He’s gone now, I assume.
I log into the computer and go to the website he told me about. The entire screen is black with a white box in the middle that says, “Please enter the password.” Below that is a small textbox, and below that is some tiny text that says, “To get one day access, please call us.”
I pull out my phone from my pocket and punch in the number. It rings until voicemail. I hang up.
It is still pretty early so whoever usually answers that phone probably isn’t up yet.
But just to be safe, I call again.
It rings a couple times and just before I think it’s going to go to voicemail again, a sleepy man’s voice says, “Hello?”
“Hi,” I say, sitting up straight. It’s been a long time since I’ve talked on the phone. “I’m, uh, looking for one day access to the Madeline Taylor Dreams website.”
A deep inhale and then exhale. I hear shuffling. Finally, the man says, “Is it usually possible for a gifted person to use their gift on themselves?”
“Uh, no.”
“Can you give me an example?”
“Like, if you can see the future, then you can’t see your own future or anything involving you in other people’s futures.”
“Are you gifted?”
“Yes…”
“What is your gift?”
I pause. Should I tell him the truth? I probably should, right?
“I can kill people?” I say.
“Are you asking me?” he says.
I sigh. “No. I can kill people with a touch.”
“Chrys?”
My stomach drops. This voice doesn’t sound familiar at all.
“Who is this?” I ask, a little bit of panic seeping into my voice.
“Your password is 875G4J.”
The line goes dead.
A ding. There’s a text message from that number saying, “875G4J.”
I consider calling back but decide not to. As much as I want to know who that person is, it’s also possible that I don’t know him, and it’s just his gift or something.
Looking at the text message, I enter the password on the website.
The webpage has a search bar at the top and then a long list of dates grouped by year and month, each date a link. I type into the search bar, “block” and press enter.
No results.
I rack my brain for alternatives. I search for “prevent.”
There are a lot of search results, each one showing a snippet of the text where the keyword was used. I scan through the first page. They’re all related to her patients, saying things like, “I wish I could prevent another episode,” or “It appears as though prevention will be difficult due to the seriousness of this case.”
I go back to the search bar and look up “prevent from enter.”
No results.
“Prevent dream.”
Nothing.
“Stop dream.”
A couple. These are about stopping one of her patient’s recurring nightmares.
I slump back in my chair, hands on my lap. She probably never tested that. It seemed like she was interested in seeing how much she can do, so maybe she wouldn’t have thought to develop a method to block her gift.
If I can’t block it, then what can I do? The only other way I’d be able to feel comfortable sleeping again is if Carl had no way to use Noah’s gift anymore or if Carl himself were somehow out of the picture.
The latter thing is very unlikely to happen so the next best way would be to get rid of that laptop or whatever he’s using. I should call Ron but I don’t want to get her involved anymore. Besides, she probably doesn’t even want to talk to me because of what I’ve done to Iris.
I sigh.
Maybe the next best thing is to just stop sleeping.
I spend hours and hours reading through Madeline’s journal entries. Not sure what exactly to look for, I decide to just read them in chronological order. All of her early entries discuss how she used dreams to treat her patients. She can manipulate any aspect of the dreamscape—changing the location or the characters in it or anything really. She can also request a specific dream and have the patient’s mind do the legwork. For example, one of her patients was agoraphobic and she requested to see the reason why he feared going outside. His mind showed her.
That would explain Valeria’s dream. Maybe he specifically looked for something that would upset her and convince her to hurt herself.
It wasn’t until a year after she started keeping journals that she decided to test the limits of her gift. Then, I read about pretty much everything Darius told me about.
Before I know it, it’s the start of brunch time, 10 AM. I want to keep reading, not only because this could be useful in dealing with Carl, but also because it’s just so fascinating. But I can hardly keep my eyes open and my stomach is grumbling.
I turn off the computer and get up with a stretch and a yawn. I head out of the Main House and to the kitchen. Today’s menu is spinach quiche, a salad with balsamic vinaigrette and Belgium waffles with a blueberry compote. I take a bit of everything and go outside.
The tables are mostly empty, but Valeria is sitting at one by herself. I go over to her.
“I haven’t seen you since… you know,” I say, sitting down.
“Yeah, I feel really bad for what I did to Ana Maria,” she answers. “It took a long time to heal, and I know it was painful too.”
“She seems okay now, though. I mean, she’s used to healing things so maybe the pain wasn’t as bad for her as it was for you.”
I take a bite of the quiche. It could use a little more salt, but apart from that it’s pretty good.
Valeria sighs. “I hope so. Anyway, you look like you haven’t slept at all.”
“I got a couple hours. Carl or Noah, I don’t really know which, attacked me last night.”
“Well Noah is dead so it’s probably Carl.” She cuts off a piece of her waffle and eats it.
“Wait a minute. Valeria, how do the blind spots of your gift work? You said you can only see things that don’t involve you. Does that mean like even things that you helped create or is it only for things where you are actually there?”
“I just can’t see scenes where I’m present or mentioned in some way, but if I did something and it had an effect that isn’t related to me directly then I’d be able to see that.”
“Then wouldn’t that mean that you’ve known this whole time about Carl and Noah? I mean, I’ve told Li, Hunter and my friend Ron about it. I don’t think I mentioned you, at least when I told Ron, I’m pretty sure I didn’t mention you.”
She shrugs. “Yeah, I knew that part. I just didn’t know how it all connected—the dreams.”
“So you also know that I’ve… killed someone?” My heart still feels heavy when I think about Iris, but at least I’m able to think about her and face what I’ve done now.
She nods. “I really wanted to tell you but, the way I see it, she was bound to die somehow, and you were bound to kill someone somehow. If I told you, and you avoided it, then she’d probably still die—and in an even worse way—and you’d probably just have killed someone else, making the body count two instead of one.”
Having finished the quiche, I move on to the salad. “You know, I’ve been kind of thinking about that. I mean, earlier I was talking to Darius and he thinks we’re all capable of improving our powers somehow. Madeline Taylor, the original one who had Noah’s gift, improved her abilities by leaps and bounds. So, maybe there’s a way to improve yours too somehow. Maybe there’s a way to use your gift and change the future for the better, not the worse.”
“Yeah, and maybe there’s a way to improve yours and make you
more deadly, but are you really willing to play around with that? I’m not.”
“My gift is different. Its only application is death. But for you, death is a potential consequence, not a given. There must be a way to avoid it.”
“Maybe, but I don’t know. Honestly, I’m fine with the way things are right now. My gift is basically useless but I don’t think I have the right to try and change the future. I’m just a dumb teenage girl, not some wise old crone.”
I chuckle. “I don’t think the girl who knows almost everything could be considered dumb, but okay. If you say so.”
“You know, I was snooping through your timeline, and you taught me something useful. That thing with Hunter, about focusing, it really helps cut down on the noise in my head too.”
“Oh great, don’t tell me you’re focusing on me too now.”
She clears the last bit of waffle from her plate. “Nah, I’ve been focusing on someone else.”
“What does focusing for you mean? For Hunter, it just means he’s constantly hyper aware of my emotions but I don’t really get how it helps you.”
“If I focus on one person’s timeline, it sort of pushes away all the others. I guess I should have realized that, I mean, I usually do that when I’m sifting through new information, but I never thought about doing it all the time, just seeing one person’s life all day.”
“Timeline—why do you keep using that word? Why not just say future?”
“Because that’s not the only thing I see.” She sighs. “I can see your whole life, from beginning to end.”
“Wow, that’s a gift? Seems like a lot, if you ask me.”
She looks down at her plate, scraping around a piece of lettuce she left behind. “I’ll tell you the secret, but you have to promise not to tell anyone.”
“Who would I tell?”
“There are tons of people you could possibly tell. Your cabinmates, for one. Li. Your friend. Shikoba or—”
“Okay, okay. I won’t tell anyone, I promise.”
“You’ve had the dreams, right? About the guy who passed on his gift to you?”
Gift of Death (Gifted Book 1) Page 21