The Truth of Yesterday

by Josh Aterovis

  Eventually, my mind wore itself out and I began to drift back to sleep. I was just at the threshold of slumber when I once again felt that tingly awareness that told me there was another presence in the room.

  “Seth,” I mumbled with a sigh and a pushed myself into a sitting position. “Aren't you going to let me get any sleep tonight?” But it wasn't Seth this time. Amalie now stood in the exact same spot where I'd last seen him. I felt my mouth drop open as the hairs stood up on the back of my neck.

  I'd never been able to understand why seeing Seth was so much easier for me that seeing Amalie. Every time I came face to face with her, I felt terror wash over me like ice water. There was just a very different quality about her, a different aura, one of despair and pain.

  She looked exactly the same as she had the first time I saw her, all in black, her hair pulled back, with an undeniable air of sadness about her. She stood there staring at me with a pleading expression on her incorporeal face.

  “What?” I rasped, responding to her expression. “What do you want?”

  For a moment, she seemed almost surprised that I had spoken to her. Then she turned and took a few quick steps towards the door. I noticed there was no sound of footsteps; they weren't needed at the moment. She paused and turned back, motioning me to follow her. Without hesitating, I slid from the bed a followed her. She turned once again and walked through the door...without opening it. Being at something of a disadvantage, with being solid and all, I had to open it to exit the room. She was standing in the hall, waiting expectantly.

  As soon as she saw me, she moved silently down the hall to the stairs. I hurried to keep up. On the first floor, she went directly to the cellar door, where she'd led me the last time I'd followed her.

  “We've been down there before,” I said, coming to a stop. I wasn't keen on going down there alone. It was dark, dirty and spooky, not to mention cold, and I was only wearing the boxers that I sleep in. Until that moment, it had never occurred to me that Seth's warning could have applied to anything except my case involving Fenton Black. Suddenly, I wondered if it was possible that he could have been warning me about Amalie instead. He'd warned me about her once before, telling me to be careful because she wasn't like him.

  When she realized I was no longer following her, she stopped and turned back to me. She motioned me to follow her again, this time, more emphatically.

  I sighed. I'd made a promise to find out what was going on and if that meant going down into the cellar in the middle of the night alone with a ghost, so be it. I'd have to take that risk. I started forward and Amalie melted through the door.

  I unlatched the safety lock and opened the door to reveal the pitch black stairwell stretching out before me like the throat of some giant monster waiting to swallow me whole. At least up here there had been enough reflected moonlight as well as a few nightlights that Steve left burning all night that I could see where I was going quite clearly. Down there, there were no windows and no nightlights. There was a light at the bottom of the stairs, but it was the kind with the chain that hangs down and you have to pull it to turn it on. Steve had been intending to change it for some time, but it just wasn't high on his list of priorities. Hardly anyone ever came down here anymore.

  I gritted my teeth and started down the wooden steps, carefully feeling my way along and hoping with all my heart that Amalie stayed well ahead of me. I'd never come into contact with her and I was quite sure I didn't want to start now. My progress could best be described as snail's pace. At last, my bare feet felt cold, slightly slimy dirt under them instead of the rough planks of the stairs. I began waving my hands around in the dark, trying to find the chain that turned the light on. I must have looked quite a sight, flailing my arms around like a blind man in a cave full of bats. I was glad it was dark so Amalie couldn't see me, although why I thought she couldn't see perfectly well in the dark or, more importantly, why I cared if she saw me is beyond me.

  I found the chain and gave it a tug. I gasped as light flooded the cellar. The bulb was very dim, barely enough to light the small room, but it was enough to temporarily blind me. When I'd blinked away the sunspots, Amalie stood waiting for me over by one of the walls. The cellar was of the old-fashioned root cellar variety. It had a plain dirt floor and brick walls covered with moss and mildew. It stunk of musty rot. Along one wall was a wooden bench-like structure that had once held vegetables and other perishables in the days before refrigeration. Overhead, pipes and wires ran between the rough-hewn beams that supported the floor of the house above.

  As soon as she was certain she had my attention, Amalie turned and walked directly into and through the wall.

  “Now what am I supposed to do?” I asked no one in particular. Somehow, I knew Amalie was gone. The feeling of her presence left as soon as she went through the wall. “You know,” I said to her anyway, “there's no door in that wall. I can't follow you. I'm not a ghost.”

  Maybe I should have enlisted Seth, I thought. He could have walked through walls if he wanted.

  I waited a few minutes, but it soon became obvious that she wasn't returning. Whatever she'd wanted me to see, she'd shown me. I decided it was time to wake Steve up-and put on some more clothes. I realized I was freezing in just my underwear. I slipped back up the stairs, leaving the light on at the bottom, and up to my room where I pulled on some clothes. Then I went and tapped softly on Steve and Adam's bedroom door. They must have been sleeping as lightly as I had been, because the door opened almost immediately.

  “What's wrong?” Adam asked in a tight voice.

  “I need to talk to Steve,” I whispered.

  “What's going on?” Steve asked, appearing over Adam's shoulder.

  “Amalie came back,” I said.

  “Should we call Judy?” Adam asked. Once upon a time, he'd been a skeptic when it came to Amalie and things supernatural, but he was a believer these days. Anyone who'd anything to do with Amalie was now a believer.

  “It's after three o'clock on the morning,” Steve said.

  “I think we should call her,” I voted. “If we don't, she'll be very unhappy in the morning.”

  Adam picked up the phone and dialed her number.

  “What happened?” Steve asked me while Adam talked to Judy.

  “I'll tell everyone at once when Judy gets here,” I told him.

  Adam hung up. “She's on her way. I don't think I even woke her up. Maybe she knew something was going to happen tonight.”

  That was possible, or maybe Jake just hadn't come home tonight.

  Judy must have broken land speed records driving to the B&B. She was there before Adam and Steve had barely had time to get dressed and meet me downstairs in the lobby. We let her inside and I quickly filled them in on Amalie's appearance and my subsequent adventure in the cellar.

  “You went down there alone?” Adam asked in horror.

  “I didn't see where I had much of a choice, and besides, she was pretty insistent.”

  “I'm really proud of you, Killian,” Judy said in a soft voice. It was obvious that she was really only half here with us.

  “Proud of him for risking him life?”

  “How did he risk his life?” Steve asked. “Amalie's never had a history of hurting anyone.”

  “There's a first time for everything.”

  “Why don't I show you where she went through the wall,” I offered, in an attempt to head off any hysterics. We all went down the stairs to the cellar and I pointed to the wall through which Amalie had made her dramatic exit.

  “Why would she walk through a wall?” Steve puzzled. “What could she be trying to tell us?”

  “Maybe there wasn't a wall there when she was alive,” Judy said, and we all turned to stare at her in surprise.

  She walked over to the wall and scraped at the moss growing on the bricks.

  “What do you mean there wasn't a wall there?” Steve asked.

  “Just what I said. If she walked through this wall, she did
it for a reason. There's something on the other side of it that she wants us to know about. Maybe the baby was never the reason for leading us down here in the first place, or at least not the only reason.”

  “But why would that make you think there wasn't a wall there when she was alive?”

  “Just a hunch. Aha! See?”

  “See what?” Steve and I asked in unison.

  “The outline of a door,” Adam answered for her.

  “So you see it too?” Judy asked.

  “Yes, it was bricked up some time after the wall was built. You can see the brick pattern is different inside the outline than the rest of the wall.”

  As he said this, I felt something shift inside me, for a moment I felt disoriented, as if the floor had vanished from underneath me, but before I had time to even stumble, everything stabilized. Only, instead of seeing the cellar as it had looked only seconds before I was seeing it as it must have looked in the 1850's. The wall we had all been studying was suddenly partially covered by floor to ceiling shelves, full of preserved vegetables in glass jars. Without being told, I somehow knew that the shelves were a cleverly disguised door and there was an opening behind them. I blinked and the shelves were gone, replaced with the blank brick wall once more.

  “It was part of the underground railroad,” I said.

  It was my turn to have everyone turn and stare at me in surprise. “Did you see that?” Judy asked with a quiet intensity.

  I nodded. “Just now.”

  “See what? How?” Adam demanded.

  “It's his Gifts,” Judy explained. “Sometimes he can see things from the past.”

  “There were shelves there,” I said. “Almost like a big bookcase. There were canned foods on the shelves, not like we have today, in jars like they used to can food at home.”

  “I still do it that way,” Judy said with a slightly amused smile on her face.

  “I don't know how I knew it,” I went on, “but I just knew that it was really a door and that behind it was a secret room or something.”

  “My house?” Steve said almost reverentially. “Part of the underground railroad?”

  “It still doesn't tell us why it was bricked up,” I pointed out, “Or why Amalie wanted us to know it was there.”

  Steve walked over and ran his hand over the bricks. “We'll have to open it up.”

  “Are you sure that's a good idea?” Adam asked.

  “It's a historic landmark,” Steve said with a frown.

  “Who knows what we'll find in there.”

  “Amalie knows,” Judy pointed out. “And she wants us to know too.”

  Adam pursed his lips. “Well, we're not going to find out tonight. I say we all go back to bed and try to get some sleep.”

  Steve nodded. “Adam's right. We can't do anything about this now and a little sleep sounds like a good idea.”

  I had to agree that sleep would be awful nice right about now. I'd gotten precious little that night. Judy nodded her agreement and we all climbed up the stairs, Steve coming last after he'd turned the light off.

  “I need to speak to Killian for a moment,” Judy said, once Steve had latched the door. I thought I knew what it was she needed to speak to me about. I agreed to let Judy out and Adam and Steve went upstairs to bed.

  As soon as they were gone, Judy turned to me with a concerned expression. “I barely know where to start,” she said.

  “Let me guess, I'm in danger?”

  She raised one eyebrow. “Yes.”

  “You're only the third person to tell me that tonight, and I knew it already on my own.”

  “Don't be flippant about this, Killian,” she warned.

  “I'm not, really. Trust me; I have a healthy amount of fear about all this. I'm just trying to not let it paralyze me.”

  “It has something to do with your investigations, including the one I asked you to do on Jake.” It was a statement, not a question, but I nodded anyway. “Jake is in danger too,” she continued. “I can feel it. It terrifies me because there isn't anything I can do about it. He didn't come home tonight.”

  I held a silent debate in my head about whether or not to tell her what I had discovered that night. I finally decided to just give her a capsulated version. “I saw Jake tonight at the Ball. He was with Fenton Black. Do you know who he is?”

  “I've heard of him,” she said in a monotone voice. From the look on her face, I thought it safe to assume what she'd heard wasn't good.

  “Apparently, Jake's been, for lack of a better word, dating Black.” Judy cringed. “It gets worse. He saw me at the Ball and dragged me into a hallway, where he proceeded to tear me limb from limb for investigating him behind his back. It seems I left a trail wide enough to drive an eighteen-wheeler through. He figured out that it was you who hired me. He was furious.”

  She sighed heavily. “I was afraid it was something like that.”

  “I'm sorry I messed things up so bad.”

  She patted my cheek. “You didn't mess anything up. I'm the one who hired you. And who knows, maybe something good will come out of this yet.” She didn't sound very convincing. She gave me a hug and turned to leave, but then stopped, her back still to me.

  “You know,” she said slowly, in a tired, worn voice, “there are times when I wish I wasn't Gifted, when I think it would be better to not know certain things. It would be nice to just live my life as ignorantly as everyone else for a change.” She turned deliberately and looked me in the eye. “There's death in the air, Killian. I don't know who, but someone is going to die, and soon.” With that, she was gone, leaving me alone with the chill that raced through my body at her words.

  Chapter 27

  With everything that had happened, I ended up getting a grand total of two and a half hours of sleep before I woke up at 6 AM, wide awake and inexplicably alert. I tried to fall back asleep but my body wasn't having any of it. I finally gave up and climbed wearily out of bed. My mind may have been bright-eyed and bushy-tailed but my body felt like dead weight. I took a shower in the hopes that it would revive me, but it failed miserably to achieve that goal. I dragged myself downstairs, ate a light breakfast, and then took a walk down by the creek in the brisk fall morning air. It was a morning designed to make you feel energized and alive, and yet, I still felt drained and weary.

  Considering how I felt and how much sleep I'd had the night before-or didn't have, as the case may be-I thought about not attempting the drive to DC. Intellectually, I knew it wasn't the best idea, but I felt like I was so close I just couldn't sit at home and do nothing. I felt a pressing urgency that I couldn't ignore.

  I forced myself to wait until nine, drank a soda high in caffeine, and set out on the road towards Washington DC. My car could just about drive there on autopilot at this point, which was a good thing the way I was feeling. I would be glad when this case was over so I didn't have to drive there so often.

  I made good time and arrived at Chris' just before noon. She answered the door at my knock.

  “Were you able to get me in to see the detective?” I asked before she even had time to say hello.

  “It's nice to see you too,” she said sarcastically, stepping aside to allow me in. A small black and white dog came barreling down the hallway and came skidding to a halt at my feet, looking up at me with enormous, expressive brown eyes. “Have you met Janie?” Chris asked.

  “I don't believe so,” I said, momentarily distracted.

  “She's a Boston terrier,” Chris said with all the pride of a dog owner, an amount usually reserved for parents of newborn children.

  “She's beautiful,” I said as I knelt down to rub her ears. Janie wriggled with pleasure. “Why'd you name her Janie?” I asked.

  Chris blushed slightly. “It's short for Janeway,” she said. “As in Captain Janeway.”

  “I didn't know you were a Trekkie.”

  “Sort of, I don't like the original series but I like the newer ones, especially Voyager. I had a huge crush on C
aptain Janeway.”

  I laughed and played with Janie for a few more seconds before returning back to business. “You never said if you were able to get me an appointment with the detective.”

  “Ye-e-e-s,” she said, dragging the word out to impossible lengths.

  I looked up at her suspiciously. “That doesn't sound good,” I said warily.

  “I managed to get you in; you're appointment is in a little over an hour. His name is Owen Evans.”