Serrita didn't talk to Dorothy for two years. Then one day she suddenly appeared on Dorothy's doorstep. "Dorothy, can I talk to you for a minute?" she asked.
"Sure, sweetheart. Come on in. You look wonderful." Dorothy took her hand and led her into the kitchen. She could see Serrita was uncomfortable. Tears filled Serrita's eyes as she began to speak.
"I have something very hard to say," she told Dorothy.
Dorothy held her breath, knowing what the words would be.
"You were right about the robbery. Jack did steal the jewelry. For two years I've never said a word to anyone. Two awful years, and now I know it's true." She stopped to catch her breath. "Last night we had a fight and I told the bastard I knew he stole the ring and money. The truth was in his face. He couldn't believe I knew. He said nothing to me about it. He just left the house, and I don't know where he is."
"He's fine," Dorothy reassured her. "He's just drunk. Now you have to decide if you want him back. He's going to call you tomorrow."
Serrita looked at Dorothy with a big smile washed with tears. She didn't question what Dorothy said. She sipped her soda and asked about Justine, Dorothy's newest arrival.
In the following years all that Appolonia had foretold came to pass. Dorothy's marriage to Richard ended two years after the birth of her third child, Paul. The majority of her sisters and brothers were aghast over the divorce, but over the years reason and good sense prevailed. Three years later Dorothy, a strong-willed mother with determination for her children and herself, married Bob Allison, a contracting engineer. Together they moved away from all the surroundings and hardships associated with Dorothy's early years to Nutley, New Jersey, a quiet neighborhood community north of where Dorothy was born.
~~~~~~~
Chapter 3
Sunday, December 3, 1967, 5:56 A.M., Nutley, New Jersey
The first glimmer of morning, like the onset of first dreams, was just discernible in the cloudy sky. And just as dreams give way before the impression of a new day, so the brilliance of the stars yielded to the light of the sun.
In her bed Dorothy stirred under the blankets. Her whole body moved, doubling over, then straightening and quieting. Her breathing was heavy; muttered words escaped her lips in half whispers. Thought and energy, images and reactions, swirled in a strange mental dance.
The sequence of fragmented pictures now pulsating through her consciousness had a force and life unlike most dreams. At first a shock of light glared in her vision. As the brilliant illumination diminished, an image of a small boy began to pulsate through.
"A little boy," she whispered. "Oh, my God, it's a little boy." He faded into the light. Her forehead wrinkled from the intensity of the illumination.
Once again the light began to change: first into a yellow brightness, then swirling into a cloudiness, a murkiness. The yellow gave way to the boy's image.
She saw his face, the face of a beautiful child, but with an unnatural, eerie pallor. Slowly the image floated toward her, moving in a stream of deep blue water. His flesh glistened. A haunting light was reflected in the boy's face.
"Eyes. I see his eyes," Dorothy cried. And his hands, clasped in front of him, looked black, as if charred.
In slow motion the little boy floated in her consciousness, without gravitation or weight. The blue liquid oozed and bubbled, then it quieted for a moment, only to gush forth with a force that caused Dorothy to writhe.
"His shoes are on the wrong feet. Poor child," she groaned. "Water. It's water. He's drowning," she half screamed. Her stomach and pelvis bolted forward.
The little body flashed before her: his flat blond hair was parted far over on the right side; she saw his green snowsuit, striped shirt, and a religious medal pinned underneath; his tiny shoes were on the wrong feet.
"My God. Who are you? Answer me, dear God," she pleaded. "Tell me where I can find you?" She heaved uncontrollably.
Faces of children populated her vision. Her grandchildren, her children, nieces, nephews, little boys, girls, strangers, faces familiar, faces unknown.
Who is this child? echoed through her mind. She strained to face the child, thinking that identifying him might prevent something from happening.
In desperation she willed her being in search of the child. With spiritlike speed she passed down a dark street, rain pouring all around. Warehouses loomed on the side. Gold letters flashed before her from the front of a building. She moved forward effortlessly, following some instinct, some power that propelled her into movement that was neither walking, nor running, nor flying, but sheer motion.
She passed piles of lumber stacked high in the darkness. A school. The number eight appeared. She glided beside the school building. A large cyclone fence glistened in the rain, surrounding the school yard. Behind the school, behind the fence, she came to a precipice.
The rain washed down the hill. The boy, she felt, was down below in the darkness. Down the hill she made her way over three large slats of wood and through dense underbrush.
Through the pitch, rain glistened on the water. "The boy is in the water," she gasped. She felt a rushing in her body; she felt the darkness, the vastness.
Water was everywhere. Dorothy's body was soaked. She saw the child's dead body passing freely through pipes. She felt him inside her.
Suddenly he stopped. Solid. Stuck. Dorothy's pelvis moved. She tried to help him, straining to relieve him. He wouldn't budge. Her forehead tightened, her temple throbbed. Electricity raced eellike through her being; water rushed around the boy. She groaned loudly.
In an instant the waters swirled backward, and the body receded into the darkness, disappearing totally in the wide cavernous darkness of a pipe.
The images flowed in her mind. For an uncontrollable instant Dorothy was suspended in space as she rode between two worlds; she was seeing and recording the images, and beginning to realize their significance at the same time.
Dorothy's eyes opened. Her breathing was rough. She put her hand on her stomach; her abdomen was tight with pain. Her flannel nightgown stuck to her wet body. She sat up at the side of her bed.
"Dreams ... I've had dreams, but dear Lord, this is incredible." The image of the little boy beat strongly through her temples. Her right eye throbbed mercilessly. "Who is he? Where is he?" She pushed at her husband. "Wake up!"
Her husband's eyes barely opened. He exhibited little awareness of the world.
"Listen," Dorothy pleaded. "I just had a dream. I think I can help this kid," she said.
Dorothy ran to her dresser and jotted down on a piece of paper, "6:00 A.M. Nightmare," and underlined it several times. Next she went to the bathroom, washed her face with warm water, and massaged her temples. Her head pounded.
She looked in the mirror. "Oh, my God," she screamed. "Look at my eye!" Her right eye was a deep bloody red.
"This has never happened before," she yelled at her husband. "I'm telling you, something is going on here. My eye is bleeding, and some kid is drowning."
"You're just having a dream," her husband mumbled.
"You're wrong. I am telling you now that you're wrong. I know I've had dreams before, but this one is somehow part of me. I can't explain it, but I know this is different. If I can get to the park, I can help the kid."
"Dorothy," her husband mumbled, "it's only six in the morning. People will think you're crazy. You aren't making much sense."
Dorothy sat on the edge of the bed. "This is what I saw. Listen to my dream." She wrapped herself in a blanket, took a deep breath, and recounted her dream. As she recalled the ghastly, haunting image of the little boy, she cried.
"I know I can help him, save him. I should go to the park," she implored.
"Dorothy, do you know which park?" Bob asked.
"No, I'm not even sure it is a park. But there's no place in this area that has trees like that except for a park."
The thought suddenly occurred to Dorothy that it was possible her dream was not local, that the boy was a
total stranger. She knew, however, that he was real. His identity was the mystery.
Not since the death of her father, more than twenty years before, had she suffered a vision with such physical intensity. This vision, however, ran deeper through her being, emanating from a source never before felt, a place in her body she had never before detected. Only in labor had she felt such physical intensity and pain. Never before had the connection between her dreams and her body been one: what she saw, she felt.
She looked at her husband. He was asleep. She pulled on her robe and went downstairs to the kitchen. It was still dark outside, and a cold morning rain pelted against the window. She had thought it was going to be a clear day.
Dorothy felt that some explanation might be achieved astrologically. In the early fifties, she had discovered the world of astrology from drugstore periodicals. She soon read and absorbed many books on the subject, becoming a fine, highly regarded astrologer.
In her Eighth House, known as the House of Death, Saturn (or Father Time) and Scorpio ruled supreme. The influence of the two stars gave her the extraordinary ability to sense death in any time period whether past, present, or future.
The child inside Dorothy cried out for help. She saw him floating somewhere, but did he drown yesterday, did she see it as it happened, or would he drown tomorrow, and could she prevent it? Her heart battled with the deep frustration and total helplessness that overwhelmed her.
A child. She had raised three children, done everything possible, often battling obstacles with superhuman energy and tenacity, to give them the advantages she never had as a child. She looked around her kitchen; it contained as much space as her brothers had had in the bedroom they all shared, and she felt rich in her own way, having a house in Nutley, New Jersey, with a yard in front and back, with a garage and with neighbors who had chosen the quiet, green community for its charm.
She wanted desperately to find the little boy and protect him. Tears came to her eyes as she thought of the little boy's mother, crying somewhere in fear that her son had disappeared, perhaps never to be found.
The clock over the refrigerator read 7:00. One hour had passed since her vision. Her body ached from the tension; she was exhausted. Soon Justine and Paul would awaken, and she would have to decide whether or not to pursue her vision.
She opened the refrigerator, pulled out a bowl of pancake batter, slid it across the counter toward the stove, and removed the orange-juice bottle, shaking it up and down. As she filled the kettle with water for coffee, she again saw the blond-haired boy, his blue eyes reaching out to her as if he were still vibrantly alive.
She called her brother, Tony. Tony was a skeptic. He did not adhere to Dorothy's astrological beliefs; nor could he explain her knack of predicting the future. But they had been very close as children, and Dorothy respected their differences, making sure her charts were off the dining-room table when Tony and bis wife came to visit.
"This is different, Tony," she told him. "A kid's life is at stake. I've got to find out who the little boy is."
"Dorothy," Tony's strong but gentle voice began, "listen to me. You can't figure on knowing who the kid is. He might be thousands of miles from here, or he could be a combination of several kids you've seen lately. He could be someone you passed at the store." His voice got louder. "If he's real, he could be anyone and anyplace!"
"You're wrong!" Dorothy snapped. "Tony, answer me this. Why did my eye blow up and why does my stomach feel like I ate lead?"
"It may be some time before you find put his identity. You're going to have to relax until then."
"Relax?" Dorothy shrieked. "Me relax? When I got a house to run? And people floating around in my brain? How am I supposed to relax?"
Tony tried to assuage her. "You've been having dreams for years. Maybe not quite like this one, true," he hesitated for a second. "But you've had enough of these psychic experiences in your lifetime to know that answers don't come easy."
"Psychic? Is that what I am? You're smarter than I am, tell me if there are psychic doctors who can help me?" Dorothy pursued the word, tumbling it around in her mind, wondering what exactly it meant to "be psychic."
"I really don't know. I can't tell you because I've never met any psychics. Sometimes they show up on Johnny Carson's show," Tony's voice was teasing. "If I hear about any lost little boys, I'll call you right away. Okay?"
Dorothy put the phone down without hearing Tony's last words. The word "psychic" reverberated in her mind. She knew that Uranus, planet of intuition and the unexpected, ruled the world of the psychic, and that the remote star was high in her aspects. Now, it seemed, the time had come for Uranus, in the Twelfth House of Private Matters, to connect with Karma, their union bringing to a peak her visionary experience. As interpretation, Dorothy felt it was sound, and this helped her to accept the extraordinary phenomenon. Somehow, in astrological terms, she grappled with the notion that she was unique among men and women in the world.
"Mother!" Justine, Dorothy's sixteen-year-old daughter, suddenly stood before her. "What in God's name happened to your eye? Are you all right?"
Justine sat at her mother's side and held fast to her hand.
"I've had an awful night," Dorothy said. "But I'm okay. I'm just tired. I'm going to call the eye doctor and find out what this is about," she reassured Justine. "It really doesn't hurt. It just looks sinful."
Dorothy looked at her daughter who was taller than herself and had the eyes of her own mother. She was appreciative of her concern, but she didn't want to upset her.
"Is there anything I can do, Ma?" Justine asked.
"Make sure your brother wears rubbers. It's raining outside," Dorothy instructed her daughter.
"No, it's not raining anymore, Ma," fourteen-year-old Paul bellowed from the kitchen, overhearing their conversation.
"It's not raining?" Dorothy inquired. "Well, that's good news." If it clears, Dorothy thought to herself, I can walk down to the park and see if the kid is there.
Dorothy never went to the park that day. The entire day she stayed home, depressed and confused. The child's image haunted her. She made a few phone calls, checking those relatives and neighbors who had children the age of her little victim. Everything in her immediate society seemed totally in order: no children were missing.
For one month Dorothy questioned family, friends, and people who came over to have their charts read. Her vigilance was constant. Often she awakened in the early morning hours, her stomach knotted and cramped, the boy's image in her sight, her jaw clamped down, smashing her molars against each other as she tried to relieve the little boy and allow him to move. Already many years of subconscious but powerful dreams had severely damaged her jawbone. Eventually she would have to undergo several operations to build up the bone and muscle that had deteriorated from stress.
The boy, however, remained stuck. As Dorothy vacuumed the living room a few days, later, she was suddenly struck by a stomach cramp. She sat down to catch her breath.
The image of the little boy came to life before her. His body moved in a solid, tightly bound manner, as if it had been preserved in a gel. Slowly, bathed in an eerie blue silence, he gyrated in circles, as if being drawn backward by an invisible force.
Her stomach ached. She pounded her jaw tightly and suddenly loosened it again. The boy moved through the water freely. He moved, he turned, he grided through her consciousness. What seemed like miles of movement wisped quickly through her mind. Seconds later the comet figure stopped abruptly. He was stuck again.
"Oh, no," she cried. "Not again. What can I do for this poor little boy? How can I help him?"
Dorothy climbed upstairs to wash her face and calm down. She had resolved to seek help.
Nutley, New Jersey, is a conservative, tucked-away community twenty-five minutes from Manhattan's George Washington Bridge. It is one of many towns in northern New Jersey to which ethnic families have escaped from the density of their early ghettos. It is predominantly Italian, I
rish, and German.
The town's most evident landmarks are the enormous office compounds of two gigantic companies: pharmaceutical giant Hoffman La Roche and the defense research division of ITT.
Apart from the encircling highways and the two industries, Nutley is a quiet, green community. In its center is Booth Park, which meanders through the heart of the community neighborhoods. Approximately a hundred yards wide, Booth Park is five miles of serpentine land, with a lively stream running through its center. Little Japanese footbridges mark its path.
The stream branches out in several places, disappearing underground through an intricate system of pipes, all running under various parts of the ITT complex and finally coming together at a point known as Bleachery Pond, which is in the adjoining town of Clifton, directly across the highway from ITT. From here, water pours into the Passaic River, eventually finding its way into Newark Bay and the grand Hudson River.
Dorothy Allison - A Psychic Story Page 3