by Kim Hornsby
The boat almost tipped over as if shaken by a huge wave and I heard a splash. Laughter followed. Had they tossed Caspian into the cold ocean. My legs were beginning to lose feeling, but I ventured out further. “Hey there!” I yelled as loud as my voice would go. “What’s going on?”
Was Caspian sinking? I took off. The swim was about seventy feet from where the boat was bobbing on the waves. I might not make it myself. Had Caspian sunk to the bottom already or was he buoyant on the surface? I had no idea, but I had to see.
My arms crashed on the water’s surface and my numb legs kicked me further out. If this was a premonition, I had no idea if I’d die or wake up. The rowboat turned to come back and as I swam near, an oar almost hit my head. I kept silent in case they decided to kill me too. When I got to where I believed Caspian had been thrown over, my arms searched to make contact with something solid. He wasn’t on the surface. Was he just below? My body was numb with the cold and I didn’t know how much longer I had before I drowned. “Caspian? Help!” I felt something against my foot and dove under, my arms searching in an arcing pattern. Hair. I felt hair and grabbed it with both hands. My lungs were going to burst if I didn’t get to the air soon. I kicked as hard as I could, pulling Caspian to the surface with me.
Gasping as I came up, I made sure his face was out of the water. Was he breathing? He didn’t gasp like me, taking in a breath of air. No! I had to get Caspian to shore. The ship was closer. Not by much but closer. I sealed my mouth across his, kicking to stay on the surface and gave him a big breath, hoping it might save his life. I saw a ladder on the side of the ship that met the water and as I pulled Caspian by his hair, careful to keep his face above the water line, I kept stopping to give him a breath. “Help!” I yelled. “Someone help us!” We had only forty feet to go when a man appeared at the railing with a lantern.
“Help!” I yelled. “The captain went overboard.” I was close to going under myself, holding on to Caspian around the neck, willing him to breathe. With my lips on his, I gave him four stacked breaths. “Please Caspian,” I said letting go of my pinch on his nose.
Someone yelled on deck and I heard excitement and scurrying. “Captain Cortez is in the water!”
“The captain,” someone shouted. “And a woman.” Orders were barked and a man scurried down the ladder. Footsteps scuffled above me on the ship’s deck. The young man reached for me first, but I shook my head. “Get the captain. He’s unconscious,” I said. “You’ll need to hoist him up.” Although the man looked extremely strong with beefy arms, I doubted he could carry Caspian up the ladder.
He reached for Caspian’s coat just as a rope was lowered. “Is he dead?” the man asked.
“I certainly hope not!”
As the rope was fixed under Caspian’s arms, the man gave a signal and from above us, the cargo was hoisted upwards. I watched Caspian’s dangling body disappear and worried that the men on board might not know CPR. I scurried up the ladder behind the sailor, his drips hitting me square in the face.
Commands were called to go for Ten Tooth. “He’ll know what to do.”
“Is the captain dead?” someone asked what we were all thinking as I rushed to Caspian’s body, now lying prone on the deck.
“Now, now, m ’lady,” a burly sailor said, resting a hand on my shoulder. “There’s nothing you can do now.”
I ignored his words and shrugged off his hand as I felt for a carotid pulse. Nothing. I put my ear next to Caspian’s mouth and didn’t feel breath. Desperately trying to recall how to do CPR, I knew even if I screwed up, whatever I could manage was better than nothing. “I’m a doctor,” I lied, then wondered if women doctors had been invented yet.
The men gathered around us murmuring something like “that’s impossible” but I ignored them. I sealed my mouth across Caspian’s and stacked a few breaths to fill his lungs, then turned my attention to his broad chest. Was this how he died? Did I have my answer in this moment of panic? I didn’t want to know it.
Regardless, I found the area of chest I thought would house Caspian’s heart and straightened my arms to begins compressions. “One and two and three and four and breathe,” I said, then pinched his nose and bent to give him another breath. The men around me stood helplessly while I continued compressions. In less than a minute of this Caspian coughed and spit up sea water. I turned his head to let the water run out to the deck.
Oh. My. God.
He was alive. Caspian coughed up a lot of water, heaving on the deck as I patted his back. If this wasn’t a dream, what was it?
I’d been standing at the edge of the beach when everything changed. The most likely explanation if there was such a thing, was that I was having a premonition of how Caspian had died. Either that or I’d gone back in time and changed the course of the whole world by interfering. I wasn’t usually a participant in my premonitions. This was completely different.
As I shivered and continued to help Caspian regain consciousness, someone threw a scratchy heavy coat across my shoulders. It smelled like unwashed sailor but was warm and appreciated. Caspian tried to sit up, men rushing in to help him.
“Witch,” someone said, fearfully.
I looked up to see the men on deck staring at me as if I’d brought a dead man back to life, which to them, I probably had. Technically, that’s what CPR is but the lifesaving action wouldn’t be discovered for another century.
“Or love’s true kiss,” a small man muttered behind me.
“I’m not a witch,” I said to them. “I told you. I’m a doctor.” I tried to say this last part with as much authority as I thought necessary, and wondered what century Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman, the TV show, took place in.
“Make way for Ten Tooth,” the small man said.
Caspian was dazed and still fighting to cough out the sea water as a man with a grizzled beard and an eye patch, moved in to help him to his feet.
“You fell into the drink,” Ten Tooth said.
“No,” I interrupted. “He was unconscious in a row boat when two men threw him over.” I needed them to know Caspian had a price on his head. “See the gash on his head? They did that.”
“I told you not to go ashore,” Ten Tooth said. “Yer a fool.”
It was then that Caspian finally locked eyes with me. What I saw in his face, changed the game and made my mouth drop open.
He knew me. It was the mid 1800’s and this version of Caspian knew me. It was then I saw the ring. The lion ring Caspian gave me when I first met him. That night we’d made a deal to help each other and in an act of faith had exchanged something. Caspian gave me his gold ring with a lion’s emblem, and I’d taken off a cheap costume bracelet with a gold ghost charm. And now he wore the ring on his right hand. I looked to my hands to see I did not wear the ring, something I had not taken off since we’d met.
“I believe I owe you my life,” he said extending his hand. “I’m Captain Cortez and this is my ship.”
I didn’t know what to say. Why was he pretending that he didn’t know me when I was sure he did? If, for some weird and wonderful and mystical reason, I’d gone back in time to the night Caspian was supposed to die and prevented that from happening, I didn’t want to be blamed for changing the course of the whole world.
“I’m Rachel Primrose.”
Chapter 11
I woke dry and warm in my Cove House bed. At least I believed it was Cove House from the smell of woodsmoke and the lavender pillow spray I’d taken to using. That and the fact that the sounds in this bedroom were very different from Floatville, where a hum of passing boats and cars kept the room from achieving total silence.
I sat up in bed. Nothing hurt. Hodor’s weight was against my legs.
“Bryndle?” my mother said from the side of the bed. “You’re awake.” She wasn’t in the bed but was standing beside the bed.
“What the hell?” I turned towards my mother even though I couldn’t see a damn thing and hoped she saw the confusion on my face. “I had
the strangest dream.” I was too dazed to say anything snarky to her. I struggled to remember my last conscious moment.
Rachel took my hand and sat on the side of the bed, forcing me to scoot over a bit. “I was kind of worried about you.”
“Why?”
“You’ve been asleep for a long time.”
At what point did the dream begin? I remembered going to the beach with Hodor and trying to summon something about Caspian’s death, then falling into a trance-like state. “I was at the beach. It was night.”
“You were there this afternoon,” Rachel interrupted.
“Just listen, Mother,” I said. “The water was dark. Someone threw Caspian over the side of a boat. I swam the bay and found him. I took him to the ship and saved his life.”
Eve’s footsteps sounded outside my open bedroom door and she entered the room.
“Is she still saying that she saved Caspian’s life?” Eve came over to my bedside. “Bryn what happened on the beach?”
“Where did you find me?” I felt my clothes to realize I was still wearing the sweater I had on when I went to the beach. My jeans were off as well as my shoes. My sweater wasn’t wet or even damp.
“You were asleep in your bed,” Rachel said.
“Where are my jeans and boots?”
“I don’t know,” Eve said moving away from the bed. “In here,” she called from the bathroom. “Wet.”
Did I walk back here with wet jeans and boots, remove them in the bathroom, then get in bed without remembering anything? I felt for Hodor, who was dry and warm on the bed.
Eve returned and sat on the other side of the bed from Rachel. “I helped you go down to the beach and was waiting to hear if you wanted help getting back up. You’d been there an hour, so first, I phoned you. When you didn’t answer, I went to the beach and you were gone. Hodor too. We searched the house and when Rachel noticed your door open, she found you in bed.”
“You were asleep, like you’d come back to the house exhausted,” Rachel added. “I kept checking on you.”
“I must’ve gotten myself back up those cliffside stairs,” I whispered. “I don’t remember that. What time is it?” I wondered how much time I’d lost.
“It’s just after seven.”
“P.m.?” I wasn’t sure if I’d slept the day and night away.
“Affirmative,” Eve answered.
“Five hours,” I whispered. “What time did you find me in here, Mother?”
“About four hours ago.” Rachel sounded concerned. “I didn’t want to wake you, but we were just getting ready to do it.”
Eve said. “You can be a heavy sleeper and I didn’t think it was entirely unusual. I wasn’t sure what to do.”
“I had a weird dream.” My head felt like it was stuffed with cotton, my mouth was dry. “I need water,” I said.
Eve went to get a glass of water and when she returned, told me that I must’ve returned from the beach, built a fire, and gone to bed.
“I built a fire in this fireplace?” I nodded across the room. No wonder I smelled woodsmoke. “I’m not supposed to light one on my own and I know that.”
“Well, you did, and the house didn’t burn down,” Eve said. “What happened on the beach? You look like you do after an inhabitation.”
I didn’t know what happened in the last few hours but proceeded to tell them everything I did know, speaking as if I’d been in a trance. “The last thing I remember is Caspian telling his men he was taking me to shore. I was given brandy, I think. A sailor named Ten Tooth came with us.” I recalled the sloshing of the night’s waves against the side of the dinghy as Ten Tooth rowed us in, Caspian and I huddled together for warmth. “Caspian told Ten Tooth he knew me and the sailor looked like he didn’t approve. I don’t remember when we got to the beach.”
Eve had settled on the bed and was patting Hodor. “A premonition?”
“Yes, but I was in it.” My words even scared me.
“I don’t think she got in bed on her own,” Rachel added as if she was trying to piece together the strangeness of the afternoon. “When I came looking for her, the first thing I saw was a fire in the fireplace and then I looked over and thought I saw the shape of someone standing beside Bryndle’s bed. It wasn’t her there because when I turned on the light, she was in bed, asleep with no one else in the room except Hodor. He was on the bed with her.”
“Did he look like Caspian?” My mind was racing with all the strange possibilities of what might have occurred over the hours I couldn’t account for. “I know this sounds absolutely cray cray but what if Caspian rowed me in to the beach from the ship and brought me upstairs?” I didn’t know where I was going with this. If saving Caspian’s life was a premonition, then how did I figure into this strange scenario? I wasn’t alive back then. And this house wouldn’t have been the same in those days. How did Caspian cross over from the 1800’s, to Cove House in 2019? I couldn’t piece together what had happened and my head hurt even more with the strange thoughts racing around inside my brain. “Is the fire out now?”
“Yes,” Eve said.
Caspian had a particular way of making a fire. I’d noticed his method on that first night we’d stayed up talking until morning. “Eve? Can you check the fire? Is it all burned down to ash or can you see if the wood looks like a log cabin formation?”
Eve moved to the other side of the room. “It’s not all ash.”
I swung my legs to the side of the bed, wanting to go look myself. “Is there anything to suggest the structure of the fire?” I held my breath in anticipation.
“It looks like it might have been four sides, four thick sticks high,” Eve said.
Caspian had brought me back from the beach and built a fire.
***
The night’s investigation was postponed. I was exhausted and troubled by my afternoon’s field trip to a ship in the 1850’s. Instead, I asked Eve to bring me a dinner tray (I’d missed lunch and my tummy was growling like a grizzly) and spent the evening nursing a whopper of a headache and confused about what had happened today. I wanted to stay in my room for another reason. I hoped Caspian would reappear. As I tinkered away on my laptop, a thought came to me that had a freezing chill run up my spine.
“Remember me,” Caspian had said.
He’d said that ten days ago, the meaning not clear then. And if my dream at the hotel was a visit from Caspian, like I now believed, he might have said those words because he was not sure if he’d ever return to me. Tonight, they had new meaning.
If Caspian knew me before I came to Cove House as a child to do a reading, had it been because I’d somehow saved his life a century ago? Then, when Rachel and an eight-year-old child arrived, and Caspian heard my mother’s name, did he think Rachel was the one who saved his life back then? She looked a lot like I do now. This was all so confusing and made my already jumbled and painful head want to empty out and think mundane thoughts like what to have for breakfast.
Instead, I put on some soft music and closed my eyes. Eventually, Eve came to collect my dinner tray and I asked her to listen to my new and improved but highly strange theory. “I need to bounce ideas off you, if you have thirty minutes.”
“Sure,” she said with fake enthusiasm.
“I know you want to get back to Jimmy, but I need your good brain right now, Evie.”
“No secrets from you,” she said. “Let me just text him that I’ll be down within the hour.”
Eve was newly in love and I didn’t want to keep her from Jimmy but I did want someone to talk to and she had always been my listener about all this freaky ghost stuff. Rachel was the direct opposite of that, and I didn’t want her coming in to hear any of this just because I was desperate for a listener.
“Somehow, on the beach today, I went back in time and saved Caspian. That’s one theory,” I said. “Or, I remembered that I actually did save Caspian by going back in time at some other point in my life. But, for the second theory, I must’ve done it as a g
rown adult with knowledge of Caspian because I knew he was in the rowboat and knew what he looked like. I didn’t just enter the water not knowing who I was trying to save. When I grabbed his hair underwater, I knew it was Caspian’s long dark hair.”
“He looks exactly the same now as he did twenty years ago, right?”
“Right. But in this scenario, I’m an adult. I saw my grown hands when I was giving CPR. I didn’t learn CPR until high school so whatever this was today, it happened when I grew up. Or it happened today.” I was leaning towards the theory that I saved his life today by going back in time but if that were true, why had Caspian said, ‘remember me’ a week ago if I hadn’t saved his life yet and needed to remember just that?
“Are you hoping Caspian turns up tonight and you can ask him?”
“Understatement of the century,” I said. “I am desperate for him to come through to answer my questions. I’m going to stay up all night trying to summon him.”
“I like the version where you are on the beach this afternoon, trying to see what happened all those years ago and actually enter a premonition where you are able to save Caspian’s life.” Eve sounded so matter-of-fact, I wondered how she could talk about this weirdness with a normal voice. “Then, he rowed you in to shore to deposit you back on dry land, but on the beach, you passed out as you entered 2019, and he became the modern day Caspian ghost. He carried you up to the house which by now had turned into the Cove House of today with a coffee maker in the kitchen. Then, Caspian put you to bed.”
“But I was sure he knew me on the ship. Absolutely sure. He was shocked to see me standing on the deck of his ship.” I took a deep breath hoping for clarity that did not come. “So you’re saying that when we reached the beach, we broke through from the 1850’s to now?” Hodor sensed my unease and stood to move towards me. I had to get ready for big, wet, sloppy kisses by putting my hands up to shield my face. “S’OK, Hodor,” I said, gently pushing his muzzle away from my cheek. “Mommy’s going crazy and taking a ghost with her.”