“The day I was attacked.”
“And did that not hurt you?”
Mark wet his lips and gave a grudging nod.
“Can we vocalize that, please?”
“Yes, it hurt me,” he said, and the admission was entirely unpleasant. Try, he told himself, you’ve got to try. Think about Lauren, damn it. What she said you couldn’t do. Do not show this woman scorn or contempt, and do not rule out the chance of something legitimate here.
He was in his most receptive mood when Julianne said, “Can you give those emotions a shape?”
“Excuse me?”
“Tell me what shape they have. Those feelings, those hurts. What shape?”
He knew then that it wouldn’t work. Not on him. “I do not have a shape for my emotions,” he said.
“Then we’ll start with a box,” she answered, unfazed. “I think that’s a fine shape for your emotions, Mark. I want you to imagine a box in the center of the room.”
Lauren, baby, I’m trying, I really am, but this…
“Right there where the light goes through the shadow, do you see that?” Julianne said.
“Yes.”
“Good. Imagine the box. When you’re ready, I want you to describe it for me.”
He stared at the place where the light met the shadow, and he tried like hell to imagine a box, to imagine there was anything there but weathered floorboards. He couldn’t, but he didn’t want to admit that, so he said, “It’s wooden,” simply because the floorboards were wood and that was the easiest visual to conjure up.
“What kind of wood?”
“Older,” he said. He still wasn’t visualizing anything. He just wanted to have an answer.
“A large box? Like a chest?”
“No.” He wasn’t sure why he sounded so damn confident about that, considering he was making it all up on the fly.
“So what size is it?”
“Um…maybe about a cigar-box size,” he said, and there was a flicker of an image then, neither real nor imagined, just some spark in the synapses that gave him a vague sense of the thing that he was attempting to describe to appease her. He understood what a cigar box was, of course, he could picture that, and so the image flickered through and was gone and the empty floor remained.
“Keep looking at it,” Julianne said. Her voice had gone lower and softer and he squinted at the floor intently and then thought of how he must look and felt torn between a desire to call the whole thing off and a desire to laugh wildly. Julianne’s voice came again, though, saying, “The box needs to hold all of your focus. Really try. I know it’s not easy, but I can see how hard you are trying. That is very good. That is excellent. Your focus is impressive. Keep your attention out there in the room. There’s a box on the floor, and it is old, and it is made of wood, and it is a cigar box, maybe, or at least it is of that size. Focus on it. Focus.”
Mark stared at the patch of light on the floor trying to imagine a cigar box and thought, This is going to take a while.
It did. There were times when he felt vaguely detached and removed, times when answering questions about an imaginary box seemed important, but then self-awareness would return and jar him, or his mind would simply wander, and thoughts of Florida and Jeff London would intrude, or images of Ridley Barnes on the video, speaking of the dark man. He’d say this for Julianne Grossman—she was patient. She was incredibly patient. Over and over she asked meaningless, silly questions and listened to his meaningless, silly answers, and not once did her energy diminish. She managed to sound fascinated by his descriptions of the stupid damn box, and her voice came on and on in waves that rose and fell and broke over him and then washed back across him, and he was impressed by both her steadiness and her bearing, because it couldn’t be easy. He knew that it was not easy. He’d conducted a lot of interviews. Controlling your focus and emotions was hard enough, but to keep that cadence, that rise and fall, rise and fall, the vocal equivalent of rocking a child, was impressive. He was curious how she did it and how much practice it took and wondered if she was aware of her breathing or if that became natural. She never took a breath at the wrong time, and he thought that was probably critical. Any disruption would break the spell. Although of course there was no spell, no trance. No hypnosis. He’d always been skeptical that it would work on him. He believed that it worked in some situations, the science and evidence seemed undeniable, but it wasn’t for him.
Still, the cadence was effective. He had to admit that. The cadence was relaxing, soothing, and the way she held his focus by asking these ridiculous questions kept the mind from wandering. The visualization technique was smart, too, because it demanded stillness and focus that was truly draining. His vision had begun to ripple along the periphery. Yes, all in all, he could see how her techniques might be effective in time, on the right person. He just wasn’t that person.
When he said, “I think it’s a cave,” he felt a sense of slipping, like he’d hit mental black ice. What question had she asked? He couldn’t remember, but he’d given the answer, and she seemed pleased by it. And the cave was where they were supposed to be going, wasn’t it?
“And what do you see?”
“Blackness,” he said, an automatic answer that seemed logical, but it was also confusing, because what had happened to the cigar box? That was what he was supposed to be imagining. Maybe he should try a little harder. He focused but couldn’t find the floor. He thought he heard distant drums. That didn’t make any sense. He needed to clear his head. Needed to—
“If you would like, you may close your eyes,” Julianne said, and he thought, Thank God, because he was so tired now, and the floor where that box was supposed to be had started to swim from the sheer effort of staring at it for so long. Shutting his fatigued eyes for just a moment sounded grand.
It’s working on me, he thought, and there was some true and deep fear to that realization.
But not enough to keep his eyes open.
44
Ridley should have gone underground after Julianne’s visit—he needed the solace—but he hadn’t. Instead, he had stayed in the house listening to the wind blow snow against the walls, and he debated whether he could still view Julianne as an ally.
Always, she had listened to his needs, and always, she had attended to them. Or so he’d thought. As the snow accumulated and the dark hours passed and were replaced by the light, he considered the evidence against Julianne’s integrity, and he was concerned.
There had been no shortage of people in Ridley’s life who believed they could manipulate him, but he’d not sought any of them out. Julianne was his own find; he’d gone to her for help and she had provided not only help but a sense of possibility. What Ridley had once believed was beyond his grasp, Julianne had convinced him was in fact a reasonable goal.
She had also convinced him that Mark Novak would be of assistance in achieving that goal. The problem, Ridley realized as he tied knots with hands that had gone slick with sweat, was that she had located Novak. Ridley had done the writing, Ridley had reached out, but Novak had not been his discovery. He belonged to Julianne.
That was beginning to feel like a problem.
The decision to trust him with a video of Ridley’s most vulnerable moment, an even greater problem.
The goal, as Julianne had always understood—or claimed to understand—was to grasp the full power of Trapdoor. She had been the only person who had listened to Ridley’s explanations of the cave and not recoiled. She was the only person who had enough wisdom to refer to Trapdoor with proper respect. For all of these reasons, he had felt certain that she was the only person the cave would permit to join Ridley in a quest that had been building for ten years.
The rope slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor and he opened his eyes and stared at it in horror, trying to remember the last time he had dropped a rope while tying a knot.
The snarl of rope lay there like a symbol of the mistake that he had made, and he understood that h
e should never have written to Novak, but it was too late to fix that. Whether it was too late to give up on Julianne, he wasn’t sure. He’d waited so long for someone like her and had nearly lost hope.
He wiped his hands dry on his jeans and went upstairs to his bookshelves, which were lined with studies on the power of the mind, from a 120-year-old volume on levitation to the latest neuroscience research. There was also a collection on jewelry and gemstones, and the highlighted portions all concerned the sapphire. If there was any topic Ridley would consider discussing with Blankenship—and he’d come close once, only to pull back at the last minute—it was the sapphire necklace. Ridley understood from the police reports that Blankenship had given the necklace to Diane Martin because it was her birthstone. A simple enough reason for a simple man, and Blankenship was nothing if not simple, but Ridley wondered if the stone might have been powerful enough to affect him nevertheless. The sapphire, Ridley had learned in his studies, provided spiritual enlightenment, inner peace, and—most critically—protection from harm. Whether Blankenship might have sensed a harm approaching the Martin household was something Ridley had long wondered.
Eastern cultures believed the stone warded off evil, but if you studied enough, you learned that the gemstone’s power was so mighty as to be selective and that it would protect its first wearer even if it was sold or given away to another. Ridley thought this might explain why it had failed Diane’s daughter, but Diane was dead now as well and there was no one left to ask about this except for Blankenship, who seemed too dull to receive the question properly.
And there was Julianne.
Ridley left the bookshelf untouched and went instead to the knee wall, pressed on the panel, and revealed the room hidden beyond. He retrieved the necklace with the broken chain and handled it carefully. The stone was small and unremarkable in color, but it was genuine. According to Persian legend, the entire earth rested on a core of sapphire, and the sky was blue because it reflected the color of that hidden core. According to Greek myth, Prometheus had been chained to a rock for stealing fire from the gods, and the rock was made of sapphire. Ridley believed both stories could be true. While he could not speak for the accuracy of all the sapphire’s reputed powers, he understood that they must be great because Trapdoor had presented it to him and allowed him to remove it from underground. The necklace, he’d come to realize, was the most sacred of all his possessions—so sacred that he had taken the risk of keeping it with him rather than placing it in the ground near his childhood home, so sacred that he had never shared it with anyone.
Now was the time.
The sun was high in a cloudless sky as he drove to Julianne’s, and, never a fan of bright light, he cursed the harsh white landscape, lowered the visors in the truck, and put on sunglasses. They dulled the glare some, but not enough. He was beginning to feel a real rage over the light when it occurred to him that the sky was sapphire blue and that this was perhaps a good sign. He would show Julianne the necklace and in this gesture of trust he believed her allegiance would be assured once more.
He felt renewed confidence as he turned onto the gravel road that led to Julianne’s, and he thought the small sapphire clutched in his palm had warmed ever so faintly, just enough to let him know that he was on the right course.
That was when he started to make the turn into her drive and saw that another car was already there.
He came to a stop and then moved to put the truck in park. When he reached for the gearshift, the necklace slipped from his hand and the sapphire fell to the filthy floor mat, its brilliant shine lost in Ridley’s own shadow.
The car was a new-model Ford SUV and while Ridley wanted to believe that it was not a rental and did not belong to Mark Novak, he couldn’t convince himself of that. He reached into the glove compartment and withdrew a small pair of binoculars that he carried with him in the field to study terrain. He focused them on the front window of the house and what he saw chilled his blood.
Julianne was seated in a chair beside the couch, and on the couch, his posture slumped, his head drooping, was Mark Novak.
He was in trance. She had promised Ridley she would have no more contact with the man until Ridley commanded otherwise, and not only had she broken that promise, but she’d shattered it in the most irrevocable way—she was working with him, guiding him in the way she had guided Ridley.
He sat in the idling truck for a long time, and then he reached down and fumbled around the dirty floor mat until he found the necklace with the broken chain. The gemstone’s power was not a lie. Whether it would grant him protection or not, Ridley couldn’t say, but it had guided him and allowed him to see things clearly again, and this was critical.
He put the necklace into his shirt pocket, close to his heart, and drove away knowing that the time had come to set right his mistakes. He had trusted in something outside of himself and should have known better.
45
Mark felt incredibly relaxed as he listened to Julianne count upward to ten, though he became aware of the progression only at around five or six. Then, when he opened his eyes at ten, he felt exposed. The room came into focus in a disorienting way, and his first clear thought was that the light on the floor had shifted to another area. Some time had passed, certainly. His mouth was dry and he wanted to talk just to reassure himself that he had control over his own voice, but no words came to mind. There was a sensation of pressure on his right hand, and he looked down and saw that his index finger and thumb were curled together in a perfect circle, like a basketball player signaling for three points.
You did that to join the past and the present, he thought, and though the purpose seemed crystal clear he couldn’t recall the specifics of the action or how long he’d held his hand in that fashion. He relaxed his fingers and flexed them, then looked up at Julianne Grossman. She was watching him with an expression of deep compassion, and he felt nothing but warmth for her in that moment.
“So,” Mark said, his voice a croak. He worked his tongue around his mouth, trying to rid it of that dry sensation. “So, how about that? How good was I?”
Julianne smiled. “How do you feel?”
“Odd,” he said. “And tired.”
“Would you like some water? Sometimes trance can cause a strong feeling of thirst.”
“I would love some water,” he said, the word trance lingering in his mind, bouncing around. He’d actually entered one. She’d hypnotized him. He wasn’t sure how to feel about that.
Julianne brought him a glass of water and didn’t speak while he drank. Outside, the trees moaned in a strong wind, and he wondered how he hadn’t heard them before.
“Okay,” he said. “Did we get anywhere? Or did I just talk about the cigar box the whole time?”
Julianne said, “That’s all you remember?”
He thought about it, and although he couldn’t recall the specifics beyond that, it wasn’t a troubling sensation.
“That’s all,” he said.
“You reached a state of somnambulistic trance,” she said. “That’s excellent, you know. For all of your initial resistance, in the end you made quite an effort.”
“So what did I remember?” Mark said.
“It’s all recorded on your phone, as you requested. But your descriptions of what happened on the road were…vivid. You talked about the way the men spoke, looked, and breathed. The way the wind felt. You said that you’d tried to make a trail of blood so that the police would have better clues than they’d had with your wife’s case. You didn’t want to make it hard on the police if you were killed.”
Mark turned away from her and looked out the window. The trees were weaving and at the top of the driveway the dog was patrolling, nose up, sniffing the wind.
“That’s right,” he said, and his voice was thick. He hadn’t remembered the attempt to leave a blood trail behind until now, and that seemed impossible. It had been so calculated; how could he have forgotten?
“After they put you i
n the van, they took you to another place,” Julianne continued. “A field. Your head was covered by some sort of a hood that you said smelled like horse feed.”
He nodded.
“At that point, you thought there was only one of them left. He was the one who cut you, the one who put a needle in your arm.” She paused and then said, “Maybe that blood test you keep talking about wouldn’t be a bad idea after all.”
“Did I remember going into the cave?”
“No. You said that this one man, the only one left, took you somewhere to ask more questions. You said that it was probably a house, you weren’t sure about that, but you knew that it was someplace where you couldn’t feel the wind, though it was still cold even without the wind. Your memory of getting inside involved walking a plank.”
“Walking a plank? They took me to a pirate ship? That ought to be easy to find.”
Julianne continued without pause at his sarcasm. “You didn’t remember much about the house except for a wall of boards that you said didn’t look right. At times you thought they were melting.”
This meant less to him. A vague sense of recollection, but not as clear as the blood trail.
“The questions this man asked you were mostly related to Ridley Barnes and the cave. He was very interested in the cave.”
Listening to a recap of his own words when he didn’t remember the words or the source of them was surreal.
“You don’t seem to have any memory at all of how you arrived in the cave. There’s a gap, which suggests that you were truly unconscious when you went from this place with the wall of boards to the darkness in the cave.” She paused, gazing at him with interest. “The recollections of the cave troubled you. That was the only time you displayed any real resistance to trance. You said you encountered people in the cave who did not belong there. You would not identify them to me because you said they were not real.”
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