by Steven James
“That he went insane?”
“That’s what’s out there, on some of the websites.”
“But don’t you think that time passes like that for everyone? Sometimes it drags, sometimes it seems to fly by.”
“That’s pretty much where his research was going. Anyway, eventually, Dr. Waxford started experimenting with testing the way darkness, sleep deprivation and different medications affect how people experience the passage of time.”
“So what does that have to do with fish studies?”
“That is the question.”
After lunch, they went back online but didn’t really dig up anything earth-shattering. A few minutes after one o’clock Daniel got a text from Kyle that he was finished at work. He was wondering if they were still up for the movie.
Daniel figured that if he texted Kyle about what he and Nicole had found out, it was going to make for one really long text message. Instead he decided it’d be better to just explain it all in person when they met.
He replied that he wasn’t sure about the movie, but could they still get together? Maybe at Nicole’s?
Kyle texted back that he and Mia would be there as soon as they could.
After Daniel put away his phone, Nicole said, “I think you should tell them about the blurs, about the sleepwalking last night and the dream of the girl with the bloody tears.”
When she reminded him about the girl, Daniel thought again of how the blurs he’d experienced in the autumn had revealed stuff to him to help solve the mystery of Emily Jackson’s death.
So what was the girl in the nightgown trying to communicate to him? She’d told him that Madeline was waiting for him and that he needed to hurry before it happened again.
Before what?
The more he thought about it, the more he vaguely remembered that barn, not like something from a dream, but rather like a memory from real life, as if it were part of his past in the waking world, not just a fleeting image from a nightmare.
Maybe it has something to do with the facility or the wolves.
He couldn’t shake the thought that the barn was real. “I’m thinking it might be best to bail on the movie,” he said. “Remember I told you that the girl in the white nightgown led me to a barn?”
“Yes.”
“I’m curious if I might have been there before. If it actually is a real place, I want to know if it has anything to do with everything else that’s going on.”
“How would you know if you’ve been there before?”
“If we can find it, hopefully that’ll jar my memory.”
When Kyle and Mia showed up, Daniel filled them in on his dream involving the girl and how he also saw a blur of her during the game.
Then he told them about what he and Nicole had witnessed at the Traybor Institute: “One of the officers, or prison guards or whoever, was the man from last night—the one who’d driven into the snowbank.”
Kyle leaned forward. “You’re kidding me.”
“No. I don’t know how it’s all tied together, but one of the guys who works at the institute used to study ways to make it seem like time was passing faster or slower for people, using drugs, sensory deprivation, things like that.” He explained about the chronobiology studies.
Mia said, “I heard Einstein once said something like, ‘If you put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, it seems like an hour, but sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute. That’s relativity.’”
“Is that true, Daniel?” Nicole asked Daniel innocently. “The pretty girl part?”
“Absolutely.”
“That was the right answer.”
“That’s my answer too.” Kyle laid his hand on Mia’s knee.
“Good for you, Cowboy.”
He turned to Daniel. “But none of this chronobiology stuff has anything to do with fish management studies, does it?”
“No. At least I can’t imagine how it would.”
After a moment’s deliberation, he went ahead and shared what’d happened last night when he’d sleepwalked.
His friends listened in silence when he mentioned the hunting knife.
Finally, he summarized how he and Nicole had been nearby when the poacher shot the wolf. “We were there when it died.”
“Well,” said Mia, “you guys had a memorable day.”
“No kidding. Oh, and I’ve left a couple messages for my dad but he hasn’t called back yet. He’s usually pretty good about returning calls so I’m not sure what’s up. Anyway, I’m hoping we can find out if the other wolves that were shot were tagged too. If they were, it might help narrow down who’s killing them. In the meantime, I want to find out what that girl in the white nightgown wanted from me.”
“How?” Kyle asked.
“In the dream I followed her to a barn that was at the end of a barbed wire fence. There was a field of dead corn beside it.”
“I hate to tell you this, but you’ve just described half the state of Wisconsin in the fall.”
“I know, but from what happened with Emily—the blurs—I don’t think my mind is making these things up from nowhere. I’m wondering if sometime in my past I might’ve been there. There’s this fuzzy memory I have of visiting the barn but I can’t say for sure if my mind is just creating it based on the dream or if I’m remembering it actually happening.”
“So what are you suggesting?”
“I want to go look for it. If I have been there before, that would be the most likely place to search for some answers about what’s really going on here. I say we drive around a little, see if any of the farms I’m thinking of around here end up being the one from my dream. We can always go to that movie later on if we don’t find anything.”
Kyle nodded. “I’m game.”
The girls were too.
Daniel pulled out his keys. “Then let’s go. We only have a couple of hours before it gets dark.”
PART III
A BLADE IN
THE NIGHT
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
While Daniel drove, Kyle helped with navigation and planning out the best route they should take for saving time so they could get their search done before dusk.
Although they passed a few farms that looked promising at first, when Daniel concentrated on the one he’d dreamt about, he realized that none of the barns were quite right.
Nicole had the idea that, if they found the property, they might be able to figure out who owned it by checking public access county courthouse land deeds. So, although cell coverage was spotty out here in the countryside, she and Mia went online with their phones and looked for a way to pull up the information.
As the afternoon slipped away, Daniel became less and less convinced that this search was going to pay off.
“Okay.” His eyes were on the sun, low in the sky. “There’s one other property out on County Highway N, over near where my grandma used to live. We can check it out and if it’s nothing, we’ll just head to Superior. It’s on the way.”
When they arrived, they found a strip of farmland that lay beside a sprawling frozen-over marsh that separated it from the national forest.
A desolate, partially dilapidated barn crouched at the far end of a snow-covered field. Sporadic dead stalks of corn poked through the snow, but other than that the field looked untouched.
The barn’s wood was sun-bleached and weathered with the years. A section of the roof had collapsed. A crumbling silo stood nearby.
All that remained of the farmhouse beside it was the charred shell of a home that, based on the tangled and knotty thorn bushes that appeared to sprout from its remains, must have burned down years ago.
“You said your grandma used to live out here?” Kyle asked.
Daniel pointed. “Her house was maybe a quarter mile away, just on the oth
er side of those woods. My parents sold it after she died back when I was nine.”
“I remember when that farmhouse burned down,” Mia said. “Or at least hearing about it. It was, like, five or six years ago. I don’t think I’ve ever been out here, though.”
Daniel wondered if the burning girl in his blurs and the burnt-down house had anything to do with each other.
Have you been here before? Think, Daniel.
He traced his memories back, following them through flickering images of the past, and found that some of them did lead to this place. It’d been years, and he hadn’t thought of this barn in a long time, but he did recall it.
Yes.
He had been here.
Back when he and his parents visited his grandma.
Daniel parked the car. “This is the one.”
“Are you sure?” Mia asked.
“Yeah. This is the one from my dream.”
“So do we know whose property it is?” Kyle said.
Nicole checked the county records. “Someone named Hollister.”
Daniel’s hand was on the door handle but he paused. “Hollister?”
“Yeah. You heard of him?”
“There was a Hollister who used to hang out with Ty Bell back in the day—he killed someone, I think. Went to prison.”
“Prison? Wouldn’t he have been too young for that—I mean, if he was a friend of Ty’s?”
“He was older. In his twenties, I think. Maybe his family owns the land.” He pushed his door open and stepped outside. “Let’s go. I want to know why I dreamt about this place.”
As the sun dipped toward the top of the trees, the four of them started across the field.
CHAPTER
TWENTY
They followed the fencerow toward the barn.
The late afternoon was crisp, cold, and full of the stillness of winter.
Underfoot, the snow came halfway to their knees, but was piled deeper near trees and fence posts where the wind had swept it into drifts.
For as much as snow annoyed her, Mia did an admirable job of putting up with trudging through it without complaining.
The only sound came from the soft hush-crunch of their footsteps as they trekked toward the barn.
From being outdoors so much in the winter, Daniel had noticed it before—a quietness that’s so stark it becomes like a companion to you. Then, as if he were reading his mind, Kyle said, “‘Have you known The Great White Silence, not a snow-gemmed twig aquiver . . .’”
“What’s that from?” Nicole asked.
“A poem by Robert Service: ‘The Call of the Wild.’ He was a balladeer who wrote a lot about the Yukon. Probably his most famous poem is ‘The Cremation of Sam McGee.’ The guy rocks.”
“The Yukon has snow,” Mia said. “Do not like snow. Remind me not to move to the Yukon.”
When they were nearly to the barn, Nicole asked Daniel, “Do you have any idea what we’re actually looking for here?”
“Something to do with my past. That’s about all I can tell you.”
The hinges on the barn’s door creaked protestingly as Daniel and Kyle pushed it open.
Loosely strewn hay, along with narrow strips of windblown snow that had found its way in through the channels between the wallboards, covered the ground.
Where the roof had fallen in, the fading daylight made its way through the space high above them. A little light entered through the slits between the boards and, of course, through the open door, but most of the barn was held captive by a network of deep, cold shadows.
Daniel walked to a spot not far from the barn’s entrance. “This is where the girl’s nightgown burst into flames, where she . . . well . . . you know.”
Thinking that the location might hold some significance, they searched the area but found nothing.
A rusted John Deere tractor that must have been thirty or forty years old sat long-abandoned in the middle of the barn. Near the collapsed part of the roof was a pegboard and a workbench with decades-old hand tools.
A hayloft with a rickety-looking wooden ladder had been built on the other end of the barn. Even from Daniel’s vantage point he could see stacks of hay bales still on it.
The girl looked up there right before she burned up. She raised her arms toward that loft.
An old hay baler waited near the hayloft. It looked threatening with its spinning blades to chop up and draw in the hay before wrapping it into a bale.
“It doesn’t look like anyone’s been here in years,” Nicole said. “I wonder why it was abandoned.”
Mia gazed around the barn. “We’d better get looking if we’re gonna have time to finish up and get back to the car before it gets dark.”
Kyle and Mia offered to search the main part of the barn while Daniel and Nicole headed toward the hayloft.
He went up the ladder first to test the rungs and make sure they were safe.
As he climbed, he finally recalled the last time he’d been in this barn, or at least he thought it was the last time.
He’d been nine years old and the memory lingered right on the brink of his forgetfulness like so many memories from childhood do.
He’d walked over here from his grandmother’s house. It was only sixty-four days before she died.
Math.
It was hard to turn it off.
Even when he wanted to.
Daniel reached the top and hefted himself into the loft.
Satisfied that everything was safe, he motioned for Nicole to join him, and when she had, he took her hand and helped her up.
The sweet smell of hay lingered in the air and Daniel realized he knew that smell, that and the dry, gritty taste of hay dust, from the days when he was a kid and he would jump from the loft into the bales that’d been stacked up beneath it.
Yes, he was sure of it: he’d been here more than once, but only now that he was here again did it come back to him.
Memories crowded in on the moment.
Memories of landing.
Tumbling.
Rolling.
Here, here in this place.
Yes. Up until that last day. And then he’d been afraid to come here, even to his grandma’s house. Afraid that—
But if you spent that much time here as a kid, why didn’t you remember it before now? Why did you block that out of your memory?
Yes, maybe the memories of being here were blocked, or maybe, like with so many things, he just needed a spark to bring the past back to him.
Really, memories were weird things. Sometimes the harder you tried to forget something, the more you remembered it. And then there were those things that you wanted to remember, but the harder you tried to, the less you were able to. It was all backward.
“Anything?” Nicole asked him.
“I used to come up here to play in the loft.”
“With your friends?”
“By myself. It was a secret place. I’d sometimes sneak over when we visited Grandma. She was depressed a lot and it was kind of hard being around her. But I’m not sure what any of it means. It’s like I can tell there’s more, I just can’t quite remember it.”
Looking around, he took note of the birds’ nests high in the rafters. The thick, braided rope that he would sometimes use to swing from the hayloft hung from one of the ceiling beams and dangled nearby.
The rope.
The hay baler.
Fuzzy memories. Nothing clear.
But something happened.
And it was not something good.
Over the years people had carved words and phrases into the side of the barn. There were names and initials of couples with plus signs between them and cupid hearts and dates, all scratched into the wood. Some people had written their name followed by “was here,” and sometimes the year.<
br />
Some of the dates were from before Daniel had been born. He examined the carvings to see if any of them brought back anything specific and found himself calculating how many days ago those people had been here at the barn.
Seven of the names, even though they were different, looked like they’d been carved by the same person, like some guy had gotten carried away and done a bunch of them himself.
While Daniel looked them over, Nicole started working her way across the loft, brushing hay aside with her boot, looking for anything that might have been buried beneath it.
The longer Daniel was up here, the more memories came to the surface.
Summers.
Swinging down the rope.
But why did you stop coming here, Daniel?
Why would—
“Over here, Daniel.”
Nicole was tapping a loose board on top of a small enclosed bench at the far end of the hayloft.
While he was on his way toward her, he saw that demon again, the one she’d drawn in her sketchbook.
He stopped dead in his tracks.
The demon lurked just to her left, and even though sunlight from the collapsed portion of the roof was landing on it, the light seemed to be swallowed in the taut coil of darkness that encircled it.
The creature grinned hungrily at him, its mouth widening like a snake’s mouth, unhinging and opening larger than it ever should have been able to.
Then it swept forward, flying straight at him.
He instinctively ducked, but felt the rush of air as it passed. One of its wings scratched the back of his neck as it soared across the loft.
He turned to see where the demon would go from there, but it disappeared through the wall of the barn, through one of the phrases carved into the wood: Grady Planisek was here.
Wait . . . He knew that name.
“You’re seeing things again, aren’t you?” Nicole’s voice was tight with concern. “What did you see?”
Isn’t Grady that boy who disappeared when you were a kid?