by Amanda Gray
Their pain was etched indelibly on her soul. She could call up the visions she’d had when touching them with a moment’s notice, even though she’d seen some of them years and years before. Tiffany’s mom was right.
It was a burden.
“Hey.” Ben spoke quietly beside her as they left Main Street behind, heading toward the outskirts of town. “You okay?”
“Yeah.” She tried to smile. To get back the peace she’d had just a few minutes before. “I’m just tired.”
“I know what you mean,” he said, turning the truck onto the long road leading to Jenny’s house. “I’m beat.”
He pulled into Jenny’s drive. The trees on either side blocked out the late summer sun, turning everything darker with the lacy shade that filtered through the leaves. It made the familiar road seem menacing somehow.
Ben pulled up to the garage. Jenny felt a twinge of guilt when she saw her dad’s car. She hadn’t even texted him to let him know where she was going.
“Thanks for coming with me,” Ben said.
She turned to him. “No problem. I want to say I had fun,” she said, continuing, “but I’m not sure that’s the word I’m looking for.”
He laughed nervously, running a hand through his hair. “No kidding. Let’s just say it’s been interesting.”
She nodded. “‘Interesting’ works. So, you see what you can find out about the house, and I’ll check on the hypnosis stuff.”
“Yep,” he said. “I’ll text you.”
“Sounds good.” She got out of the truck and had already turned away when she heard his voice behind her.
“Jenny?”
She looked back. “Yeah?”
“Thanks.” He looked away for a second before turning back to her. “For listening on the train and everything.”
She smiled. “No problem. That’s what friends are for.”
She left before the moment could turn weird.
* * *
Her dad was standing in the foyer, holding a mug of what was probably coffee, when she walked into the house.
“Was that Ben Daulton?” he asked, peering through the sidelights near the door.
“It was.” She slipped off her shoes. “We went to the city.”
He turned to look at her. “Really?”
She nodded. “Ben hadn’t been in a long time, so I offered to show him around. Sorry I didn’t text you or something. I kind of forgot.”
She wasn’t even aware of formulating the lie before it slipped from her mouth.
“It’s okay. I would have called if it had gotten much later.” Her dad leaned against the frame of the door. “Did you have fun?”
“Yeah.”
She knew he was hoping for more information, but she wasn’t ready to talk about Ben or the real reason for the trip into the city. She was glad when he changed the subject.
“Good,” he said, heading into the kitchen. “I have some steaks marinating and a salad in the fridge. What do you say we sit out on the patio and enjoy the beginning of summer?”
She really wanted to go to her room and start digging around on the hypnosis stuff, but he looked so hopeful, so happy to see her. And he’d obviously been waiting for her.
She put her bag down. “Sounds good. I’m starving.”
* * *
Jenny sat in front of her laptop, trying to clarify what it was she and Ben needed to know. She’d spent a couple of hours hanging with her dad, eating and talking about everything from the weather to the Daulton renovation. She hadn’t even been tempted to tell him about everything that was going on. There was no way he’d get it.
Still, it had been nice. But now she needed to do the research she’d promised Ben.
She typed “hypnosis” into the search bar on her Internet browser, just to see if it gave her any idea how to narrow the field. She opted for an explanation of various theories on how it worked and proceeded to read a bunch of stuff about how it was a mental state or “imaginative role reenactment” and how some people believed it was even possible for someone to hypnotize themselves. But the part that got her attention was a description of a typical hypnotherapy session. In particular, the belief that people were actually awake during hypnosis. That they were even able to respond to the suggestions of people around them.
Which pretty much ruled out hypnosis as an explanation for what had happened in Ben’s attic, at least as far as she was concerned. She didn’t know about Ben, but she hadn’t felt remotely awake during their strange shared dream.
So much for hypnosis.
Jenny sighed, staring at the screen on her computer and thinking back to the paper Ben had read from when they had conducted their experiment in the attic. Sitting up straighter, she typed “mesmerization” into the search bar.
Clicking through the first three entries, she found that some guy named Franz Mesmer was responsible for the word “mesmerize,” except his theories seemed to have more to do with magnetism, or the belief that people were affected by some kind of magnetic force and that that force also affected things like the moon and planets like Earth. She got a little shiver when she came to that part. It made her think of the monk with the moon ring. But other than being weird, none of it connected with everything that had happened.
She slumped in her desk chair, thinking back over the course of events. First, there was Nikolai, both in her dream and, as crazy as it seemed, at the art show. She thought back to her encounter with the guy at the gallery. Was he really the same person in her dream? She’d been certain at the time, but now that a couple of days had passed, she couldn’t be sure that her mind hadn’t been playing tricks on her.
She pushed it aside, focusing instead on the stuff that had to do with her and Ben.
What did Ben, the music box, and the shared vision have in common? The music box had been found in the house Ben’s relatives owned. If anything, he was more connected to it than she was. But why, then, had they been in the same dream? And why was she so spooked by the monk?
The thought gave her a new idea, and she put her fingers on the keys of her laptop, typing “Celestial Retreat Center & Stony Creek & CT.” The site booted up with a moon graphic identical to the one on the monk’s ring. It made her feel strange even on the computer screen. Like the face in the moon knew her. Was watching her.
The screen flashed, changing to a black background, the moon symbol still at its center. It was a simple home page with a short message beneath the image of the moon: “Helping those out of time.” Jenny looked at the top of the screen for tabs to explore the site.
There was nothing.
She combed the sidebars. There had to be something. A history of the center, what their mission was, an event calendar. Something.
But no. There was just the title of the center with an address that placed it in Stony Creek and the moon with the eerie face staring out from its center. That and the message underneath it.
She said it softly into the room. “Helping those out of time.”
Jenny ran through a list of possible meanings in her mind. It could be a hospice-type center. Just before her grandma on her dad’s side had died of cancer, they’d moved her to hospice to make her more “comfortable.” People who were dying could be considered out of time, she guessed, though it was kind of morbid when you thought about it that way.
She thought about other possible meanings. People who were in trouble with the law and about to be caught? People who … her brain scrambled for an explanation. For any play on the word “time” that could make sense in the context of the retreat center.
Nothing came. It was just … weird. “Helping those out of time”? And nothing else?
Not your typical promotional website.
She closed her laptop, drumming her fingers on top of it. Thinking. She’d never been up to the center. Had never been anywhere near it, now that she thought about it. No one in town seemed to mind the presence of the retreat center, but the monks kept to themselves and the resid
ents of Stony Creek did the same.
Frustrated, she stood up and walked to her bed. She was on overload. Even the things that used to make sense no longer did. Maybe things would look clearer in the morning.
She lay on top of the sheets, the slight breeze from the open window drifting across the bare skin of her legs. She thought it would take her a long time to go to sleep. That the events of the day and everything she and Ben had learned would pick at her brain while she tossed and turned. Instead, she fell into sleep almost instantly.
And then she began to dream.
* * *
She felt his presence before she saw him.
She was walking amidst the icy landscape of her painting, the one from the vision she had had with little Hunter. But she wasn’t cold. When she looked down, she could see the tips of black boots peeking out from what looked like a skirt and long coat.
Gazing out across the fields, there was nothing but an endless stretch of white and the snow-covered trees that marked the beginning of the forest.
And even though she couldn’t see him, she knew he was there, a reassuring shadow in the periphery of her vision.
She walked toward the edge of the woods, directed by some inner compass that told her where to go. The snow crunched under her feet, the wind lifting her hair. She saw now that it was a darker brown than usual. She stopped at the edge of the field and peered into the forest. Safety awaited her in its leafy confines. She didn’t know how she knew it. She just did.
Stepping into it was like stepping across the threshold to another world. Everything was quieter. Even the snow under her boots was muffled as she made her way deeper into the forest, looking for him, guided by his presence somewhere in the distance.
She continued, making her way farther into the woods until, when she looked back, she could no longer find the end of it. Could no longer see the light leaking in from the open field beyond. But she was somehow unafraid.
A couple of minutes later, she understood why.
He stood, hands in his coat pockets, near a tree up ahead and to the right. His ready posture and watchful eyes told her he had been waiting for her.
She crossed the ground between them, slowly at first and then faster. She knew him. He was the Nikolai from her dream, from the vision she’d shared with Ben. But he was more than that, too.
She had known him forever and ever. Had waited for him as he had waited for her.
She started walking faster, faster and faster until she was running toward him, flying across the snow-covered floor of the forest. As the distance shortened between them, he stepped forward, opening his arms. When she flew into them, he breathed only one word.
“Maria.”
It didn’t seem strange that he should call her by that name. Not here. She breathed in the scent of him, that crisp smell that was also the forest laced with something earthy and a little bitter. His face was in her hair. He was breathing her in just as she was breathing him.
It was a long moment before he lifted his head, pulling away and reaching into his pocket. When he looked up, she gazed into his eyes, as deeply green as the snow-covered boughs around them.
“I’ve waited,” he said, his voice gruff. “I’ve waited so long.”
He took her hand. She felt something cold touch her finger, and when she looked down, she was not even surprised to find that it was a ring. And not just any ring.
The same ring the monk had worn—in what seemed another lifetime—on the train.
A ring with stars around its band and a watchful moon at its center.
It came to a stop at her knuckle.
“You have to remember,” he said, his voice urgent. “Do you understand?”
And then she was tugged away, her hands grasping his, trying to hold on. But it was no use. She was yanked from his grasp, pulled back and back through the forest and then the fields.
She heard him call to her, not just across the landscape of her dreams but in her mind.
“Don’t worry. I’ve found you.”
FOURTEEN
She sat up in bed with a start, the words echoing through her mind.
I’ve found you.
And she had felt found during those few moments in her dream when she’d been with Nikolai. Had felt discovered, even though she hadn’t known she was lost.
More than that, the ring from her dream—the ring he had placed on her finger—teased her memory. She had seen it before, and not just on the monk, the car at the train station, or the retreat’s website.
She heard Nikolai’s voice on the wind of memory: You have to remember.
She let herself drift back to the dream, seeing and feeling the ring on her finger, willing her mind to find the connection. A minute later, she thought she had it.
It made her think of her mother.
She jumped out of bed and padded on bare feet to the closet, reaching behind a bunch of stuff to the box on the top shelf. She hadn’t looked at the box in a long time—years, really—but she still felt a pang as it came into view. Careful not to let it swing open on the way down, she sat on the floor, bracing herself before lifting the hinged lid.
The first thing she saw was the photograph. She vaguely remembered it, though she didn’t know why she’d put it in the box instead of on display in her room like the other photo of her mother. The one on the bookshelf showed Jenny, just four years old, with her mother in a field of daisies. They were lying on a blanket, and Jenny had always wondered if they had been having a picnic. In the photograph, her mother gazed at Jenny with naked adoration. It was impossible to doubt that her mother had loved her deeply when looking at it.
The picture in the box was different.
It was just her mother, sitting alone in the wicker chair on the porch. She looked younger than she did in the other photograph. Jenny wondered if she’d even been born when the picture was taken. Her mother gazed out across the fields, a faraway look in her eyes, something sad and pensive in the set of her face and the way she held the blanket around her shoulders.
Jenny set the photo aside. Beneath it was an odd assortment of things. A couple of small rocks (did Jenny give them to her mother?), some stick figure drawings. Dried autumn leaves, brittle and crumbling with age, and a sloppy birthday card adorned with stiff glitter.
And underneath it all. A ring.
A silver ring. Identical to the one the monk wore but slightly tarnished. The stars trailing across the band were darker than they had been on the monk’s. But there was the moon, its eerie face staring back at her.
She shook her head at the empty room. It didn’t make sense. Why would her mother have a ring like the monk’s? A ring with the symbol of the retreat at its center?
She was still sitting there, trying to figure it out, when her cell phone chirped from the bedside table. It took her a couple of seconds to mobilize herself, but then she got up, still holding onto the ring.
A twist of nerves hit her stomach when she saw Ben’s name on the screen. She wished she’d had more time to process what she’d just discovered, but maybe Ben had news.
She hit the “Talk” button. “Hey.” Her voice was shakier than she would have liked.
“Hey,” he said on the other end of the line. “I decided to call. It would take five hundred texts to tell you everything.”
“Great,” she said, sitting down on the edge of the bed and looking at the ring in the palm of her hand. “I have stuff to tell you, too.”
“What did you find out?” His voice was different on the phone. Deeper and more mature.
“You first.” She wasn’t quite ready to explain what she’d discovered.
“Okay.”
She could almost see him nodding on the other side of the phone. “So I asked my mom about the house and everything? About the uncle who owned it?”
“Yeah,” Jenny prompted.
“It turns out my parents are Russian.” He sounded surprised, like he couldn’t quite believe it.
“Wait … Both of them?”
“Not first generation, but yeah. My dad’s family only immigrated here in the 1960s, but my mom’s came over earlier,” he explained. “Somewhere around 1920, she thought. Their families were friends. That’s how she met my dad.”
“And you never knew?” Jenny asked.
“We don’t talk about my dad much. We don’t talk about anything much anymore, to be honest.”
“I know the feeling,” Jenny said softly. “Well, that explains the music box.”
“Except, I didn’t ask her about it specifically.” She heard him sigh through the phone. “I don’t know why.”
Jenny flopped backwards onto her bed, the ring held tightly in her palm as she stared up at the ceiling. “It’s okay. I’m glad you didn’t. I know it sounds crazy, but I have this feeling we found the music box for a reason. Like we’re supposed to do something with it, or something.”
“It doesn’t sound crazy. I have the same feeling.” Silence sat comfortably between them before Ben spoke again. “What about you? What did you find out?”
“A few things. I just don’t know what any of it means yet.” She explained what she’d discovered about hypnosis and mesmerization.
“So you’re sort of awake when you’re hypnotized?” Ben asked when she’d finished.
“Basically.”
“I didn’t feel awake,” he said. “More like dead to the world. This one, at least.”
“I felt the same way. And I think it’s safe to assume the whole mesmerization/magnetism thing doesn’t apply either. I did find something interesting, though.”
“What?”
“I know you’re going to think it’s dumb, but I also looked up the retreat.”
“The one with the monks we saw yesterday?”
She felt stupid admitting it, especially after she’d gotten so freaked out leaving the train, but there was no going back now. “Yep.”
“I don’t see what this has to do with the music box, but go ahead.”
“Well, it’s just an empty website for the most part. I mean, there’s the name—Celestial Retreat Center—and the moon symbol I saw on the monk’s ring and on the car they were driving, but there’s nothing else. No explanation of what they do, no directions, no photos. Nothing but a … saying.”