by Кей Хупер
"No, just — " It was Diana's turn to frown. "Just... a pull."
"Pull?"
"Yeah. As if something — or someone, I suppose — had been calling me, drawing me toward them."
"Where were you headed?"
"I was so shaken up by it I hardly noticed where I was."
"Think. Try to remember."
"It's important?"
"Maybe."
Concentrating, Diana tried to push past the remembered terror and panic and recall more than emotions. What had she done? Slowed the car, looking for a sign, her hands cold and sweaty on the steering wheel and her heart pounding. In the darkness before dawn, everything had looked alien, and she had felt so alone there weren't even words for it.
"I was on an interstate highway," she remembered as a sign flashed through her memories. "Heading south. Took me more than an hour to find a phone and call my father. He was... not happy. As scared as I was, or so it seemed to me." She paused, then added, "There was a new clinic the next week. A new doctor. A new treatment."
"I'm sorry, Diana."
She looked at him. "That was one time I was more than willing to try whatever treatment the doctors offered. I was fourteen years old, Quentin, and I woke up on an interstate highway at five o'clock in the morning driving my father's Jaguar at nearly eighty miles an hour. I was afraid I'd been trying to kill myself. I think my father was afraid of the same thing."
"And the doctors?"
"Did they believe I was suicidal?" Her shoulders lifted and fell. "Over the years, some did, I'm sure. But I never did any of the things suicidal patients were supposed to do. Never tried to slit my wrists or hurt myself in any other way. If you discount the blackout experiences, of course. I never tried to hoard medications. Never talked about killing myself, never drew pictures to indicate suicide was on — or under — my mind."
"What about the blackouts? Frequent?"
"There haven't been that many, really. Maybe two a year, and mostly I come out of them in my bed or just sitting in a chair. Like I've been asleep. Dreaming dreams I can never remember."
"The subconscious tends to be a good guardian, and protects us from what we can't or don't need to endure," Quentin said. "I wouldn't be surprised if realizing you're psychic now doesn't open a few doors for you, though. You may begin to remember those dreams. And those experiences."
That was a scary possibility, Diana thought. Maybe even more scary than not remembering anything. She said, "One of my doctors became convinced that the blackouts were caused by an adverse reaction to one or more of the drugs prescribed for me. That was almost a year ago."
"He took you off everything?"
She nodded. "The first couple of months were... hell. It was a supervised withdrawal, so I had to be hospitalized. Watched. So many of the medications had been prescribed to quiet my mind and keep me calm."
"Sedatives," Quentin said. "Antianxiety meds. Antidepressants."
"Yeah. When all those were taken away from me, even gradually, it was like I went into hyperdrive. I lost twenty pounds because I couldn't be still. I talked so fast no one could understand what I was saying. I couldn't sleep, and nothing could hold my attention more than a few minutes at a time. My father wanted them to put me back on the meds because of the state I was in. But the doctor, bless him, held firm. And after the first weeks, my mind was finally clear enough so I could be firm too."
After a moment, Quentin asked, "How long had it been since you'd been completely off medications?"
Diana didn't really want to tell him, but finally said, "The first medications were prescribed when I was eleven. From that point on, there was always something, usually more than one drug at a time. But always something. I'm thirty-three now. You do the math."
"More than twenty years. You've spent two-thirds of your life drugged."
"Just about into oblivion," she agreed.
CHAPTER 8
Madison said, "I don't think this is such a good idea."
"Why not?" Becca wanted to know. "We have to do something, and we don't have much time. Trust me, you don't want to be here when it comes back."
"Are you sure it will come back?"
"Of course I'm sure. It always comes back."
"Maybe this time—"
Becca shook her head. "It's going to keep coming until they stop it. And they won't be able to stop it until they know. Until they understand."
Madison hesitated, then said unhappily, "But she looked so scared. When he left her alone a little while ago, and she locked the door behind him. Even if she is a grownup. She looked so scared."
"I know. But she can change things here, or at least she might be able to try. She's the one we've been waiting for, I'm sure of it. She saw Jeremy, and that's what matters most, what we have to remember. I think she's seen Missy too, so—"
"Who's Missy?"
"You haven't met her yet," Becca said. "She's been here even longer than Jeremy was. She usually stays in the gray time, though, and doesn't come out much, even when somebody opens the door."
"Why not? Isn't she lonely there?"
"I expect so. But she's more afraid of what happens out here. I expect that's because she knew what it would do to her even before it did."
"Really?"
"Uh-huh. She was special, like you are. I expect she's trying really hard to find a way to stop it this time."
"So she can leave The Lodge?"
"I expect so."
Suddenly irritated, Madison said, "Well, I expect it won't be easy, or she could have done it by now."
Becca chuckled. "Does it get on your nerves, me saying 'expect' so much? My mama always said it. Used to get on my nerves too. But now I like to say it, I s'pose because it reminds me of her."
Her ready sympathy stirred, Madison said, "Your mama isn't here?"
"Not here at The Lodge. She's on this side of the door, but I can't see her, of course. Can't talk to her. We were just supposed to stay here a little while, her and my brother and me. They stayed a long time, looking for me. They stayed longer than they meant to, looking for me. But they couldn't find me, of course. They had to go home, sooner or later. So they did."
"And left you here?"
"Well, they couldn't take me with them. They couldn't see me. And even if they had, I didn't have any bones to show them, not like Jeremy."
Madison eyed her new friend uneasily. "I'm glad you don't have any bones, Becca, 'cause I'd just as soon not see them."
"Fraidy cat."
Staunchly, Madison said, "Yes, I am. I don't like bugs, either, or snakes, or anything gross." She bent down and picked up Angelo, who had begun to whine a bit, telling herself the action was to comfort him rather than her.
"Well," Becca said, "all I can say is that you'd better help us try to stop it when it comes back this time. Because if we can't..."
Madison waited, watching as Becca turned frowning eyes toward the cottage several yards away.
"If we can't," Becca continued softly, "there'll be more than bones for them to find. For them to see. A lot more."
Quentin paced the sitting room of his suite, restless and more than a little uneasy. Diana had closed down immediately after telling him about spending most of her life medicated, her face without expression and eyes going shuttered, and after the day she'd had he hadn't dared push her to continue talking.
Not yet, at least.
He was, truthfully, grateful for the time to try to sort through what she had told him so far. He wanted to help her, needed to, and he had nothing to go on except the instincts that urged him to probe carefully, to ask questions when she seemed ready to talk and to offer bits of information about the paranormal as she seemed able to accept it. It was all he had to guide him, that and what she told him about her life and experiences.
A horror story if he'd ever heard one.
Two-thirds of her life spent medicated.
Jesus.
Quentin found it hard not to blame her doctors, and es
pecially her father, for not being open-minded enough to at least consider the possibility that there had been nothing wrong with Diana from the beginning. But they hadn't. Faced with the inexplicable, with experiences and behaviors they didn't understand and were frightened by, they had acted swiftly, with all the supposed knowledge of modern-day medicine, to "fix" her "problems."
Even before she hit puberty, for Christ's sake.
And they had left her only half alive. A pale, colorless, vague, and passionless copy of the Diana she was meant to be.
Christ, no wonder she looked out on the world with wary, suspicious eyes. Finally off all the mind-numbing medications, Diana was clearheaded for the first time since childhood. Truly aware for the first time of the world around her. And not just aware, but painfully alert, with the raw-nerved sensitivity of most psychics.
She knew, now. No matter what she was willing to admit aloud or even consciously, she knew now that she had been kept half alive, less than that. Knew that those she had trusted most had betrayed that trust, even if they had done it in the name of love and concern and with all good intentions. They hadn't kept her safe, they had kept her doped up and compliant. They had sought to hammer away all the sharp, unique edges that made her Diana.
So she could be healthy. Like everybody else.
It had been in her voice when she'd told him, a haunted awareness of all she'd lost.
"I'm thirty-three now. You do the math."
He thought it must have been like waking from a coma or a hazy dream to find that everything that had gone before had not been real. The world had turned, time had moved on... and Diana had lost years.
Years.
Quentin paced a while longer, more rather than less restless as time passed. He found himself, finally, in his dark bedroom, standing at the window, looking out on the night. And it was only then that he realized he could see Diana's cottage from here, his third-floor suite high enough to overlook the shrubbery and ornamental trees between The Lodge and her cottage.
Watch.
He went still, holding his breath as he tried to concentrate, to hear the faint whisper in his mind.
You have to watch tonight.
Long moments passed, and he allowed himself to breathe again as he realized there would be no more. Just the realization, the understanding. That he had to stand watch tonight, for Diana's sake.
Perhaps for her safety.
He could see both the front door and the private little patio door from here, clearly visible because the doors of all the cottages were well lit, just as the paths linking them to The Lodge were well lit. For convenience as well as security.
Without even making the conscious decision to do so, Quentin focused, concentrated. Everything went fuzzy for an instant, and then the cottage stood out in sharp relief from the landscaping around it. The door seemed so close it was as if he could have reached out and turned the handle.
Since he needed to enhance only his vision, his other senses more or less went dormant. He heard only silence. Smelled nothing. When he leaned a shoulder against the window frame, he wasn't aware of the contact. His mind was quiet and still.
Bishop had warned him not to do this. Enhancing only one sense at the expense of all the others would exact a price, a painful one. Quentin knew. He knew if he kept this up for hours he'd have a pounding headache tomorrow, that his senses of smell and taste and touch and hearing would be muffled, maybe for the entire day. He knew his eyes would ache and be sensitive to the light, strained by being forced to work harder right now.
There was also a danger, Bishop believed, of losing the capability entirely. Pouring extra energy into one's senses to enhance them was one thing; totally shutting down one or more of those senses for an extended period of time was something else again. Balance. It was all about balance.
Quentin knew. He also didn't care.
He needed to watch Diana, so that's what he did. Leaning against the window frame, no longer even conscious of the room he was in, he watched.
And waited.
"If he didn't think so before, the man certainly thinks you're nuts by now," Diana muttered to herself as she got out of the shower and dried off. "Way to go, telling him all the gory details. Everybody knows they don't keep you drugged to the gills for a couple of decades if you don't have a lot of problems."
The worst thing was, Diana wasn't at all sure what Quentin's gut-level reaction had been. Oh, he'd been all compassion and understanding on the surface, saying all the right things, insisting that being medicated for most of her life didn't mean she was sick. Just that the doctors hadn't understood.
Oh, yeah, she believed that. Probably about as much as he really believed it. But she couldn't tell what he thought, not for certain. She didn't think she was very good at reading people's expressions, due mostly to a lack of practice; drifting through life on her medicated cloud, what other people thought or felt hadn't seemed, very often, to matter.
It mattered now. She didn't know why, or at least didn't want to admit it to herself, but it mattered to her what Quentin thought of her. And he undoubtedly thought she was hopelessly damaged goods. It shouldn't have hurt, that, because she'd always known it.
Now he knew it too.
Angry at herself and so tired that her thoughts were going in even more circles than usual, Diana pulled on a pair of silky pa-jama bottoms and a matching camisole. It was still fairly early, but she needed sleep and she needed it badly.
She went into her lamplit bedroom and turned down the bed, then sat on the edge and hesitated for only an instant before opening the nightstand drawer. The prescription bottle rolled a bit with the movement of the drawer, then stilled. She picked it up reluctantly.
This medication remained in her system only a few hours, only long enough to allow her to sleep. Her doctor had promised that, had sworn it, and since he was the one who had taken her off all the other medications, she believed him.
Still... the bottle was full.
Diana resisted taking as much as an aspirin now. Even with the scattered, restless thoughts and inability to focus on anything for very long, the raw emotions and almost painfully sharp senses, she preferred this state to what had gone before.
She had, mostly, drifted through more than twenty years of her life. She didn't want to drift anymore.
But she needed desperately to sleep, and she was afraid of what might happen if she didn't. So she shook a couple of pills into her hand and took them, washing them down with a sip of water from the bottle on her nightstand.
She got into bed and turned off the lamp, then lay back on the pillow. She felt an impulse to go to the window as she had so many nights before, but with an effort ignored it.
Sleep. She needed sleep. All this would make sense to her if she could only sleep.
Her mind continued to chase itself in circles for some time — she refused to look at the nightstand clock to see just how long it went on — but eventually quieted.
And, finally, she slept.
Diana opened her eyes and sat up in bed, oddly unsurprised to find herself in the gray time.
She knew it was still night, even though her bedroom was lit with that oddly flat, colorless twilight she recognized. It was always the same, in the gray time. Never darkness or light, just... gray.
She thought she had slept for hours, but didn't bother looking at the clock on the nightstand. It wouldn't show her anything. One of the truly spooky traits of the gray time was that there was no time there. Here. Clocks, whether digital or not, were faceless, featureless.
Wherever this place existed, it lay somewhere outside time; Diana had figured out that much. Yet she also had the sense that it was a place of movement, a place between the living world she knew and whatever came after it.
Not the spirit realm Quentin had spoken of, not exactly. More like the doorway, the corridor, connecting the two worlds.
She threw back the covers and got out of bed, aware of the chill of the room, a chill
that even seeped upward through the plush carpet so that her feet felt like ice. She knew she should find her slippers or shoes, find a jacket or at least a robe, but didn't bother. It wouldn't make a difference, she knew that. It was always cold in the gray time. Cold to the bone.
Diana left her bedroom, vaguely interested to see how featureless the cottage seemed without color or shadows, but not interested enough to stop. There was somewhere else she had to be.
She left the cottage, stopping on the path that led from her door. Waiting. The lights out here looked strange and dull, not bright but merely a paler shade of gray. The shrubbery and flowers planted in pots and beds all around the cottage were eerily still and held that same one-dimensional appearance, like a grayish copy of a picture that had once held vivid color.
Not a breath of air stirred the cold twilight, though a faint, slightly unpleasant smell lingered. It wasn't something Diana had ever been able to identify, though it was somehow familiar. There were no night sounds, no pulse of life. There never was.
"Diana."
She turned slightly and looked at the little girl standing several feet away. A pretty child, with what seemed, in the colorless gray-ness, to be very fair hair surrounding a heart-shaped face.
"Hello." Diana noted the hollow sound of her own voice, the almost-echo. Different from the child's voice, which was perfectly clear. That, also, was normal for the gray time.
"You have to come with me," the little girl said.
Diana shook her head slightly, not negation but impatience. "The last time I followed one of you, it was to a grave."
The little girl frowned. "But Jeremy was on the other side. Your side. You know the difference. And you know the rules."
Diana did know, and quite clearly. In the gray time, her memory was perfect, her understanding absolute. For all its eerie strangeness, the gray time was a place in which she felt in control. But she also knew the dangers involved.
"I know this is not a safe place for me to be, in between two times. Two worlds."
"You can't stay long," the little girl agreed. "Keeping the door open is dangerous, that's one of the rules. And if you close it while you're still inside, you'll be trapped here. I don't expect you'd like that."