(a Medium origin)
By Shuvcat © 2005
Written December 2004, rated PG-13
The first time was over breakfast. She didn't know it at the time, of course.
She'd been getting milk out of the fridge, and had just happened to look over at the small TV in the living room, and her stomach had turned. At seven forty five AM, instead of the usual cartoons or morning traffic reports VPM usually broadcast, the blood gushing from the throat of the howling pig was startlingly, sickeningly out of the norm. The noise was deafening; she bet people in the next apartment could hear it.
"That's gross," seventeen-year-old Allison Burkett remarked numbly. "Why are they showin' something like that this early for?"
"Hm?" At the table, her father was only passingly listening to what his daughter was saying. "What's that, princess?"
Allison didn't want to look at it, yet somehow she was having trouble looking away. "That," she said to her father, pulling her gaze away to glance at him. "I mean, there's little kids watching TV at this hour. People having breakfast." She looked down at her own plate of steaming hot, pink bacon, which suddenly turned her stomach. "You'd think they'd--" She turned back to see the screen—
The image that had been there, the blood, the squealing—it was gone. Fat Albert was talking to his cartoon friends on the animated streets of Philadelphia.
Allison frowned. "That's weird," she said. "They were showing—it looked like someone cutting off a pig's head. While it was still alive." She shuddered.
Her father remained impassive, lost in his company's employee manual. "Oh, well," he spoke absently. "I missed it."
"You're lucky." Allison looked down at her plate of bacon and eggs. And suddenly she had the sense that she had seen, precisely, how the meat in her hands had gotten there.
She set it down upon the tabletop. "I don't think I'm hungry," she said.
"I don't wanna be a fortune teller," Allison whined.
"Allison, you have to!" Her best friend Debra pulled a pout. "C'mon, it's for a good cause. We gotta have a new attraction at this year's UNICEF fundraiser. Nobody wants to come see the same old junk we've done the past three years."
"Yeah, but…" Allison shifted her books from one arm to the other, glancing down the hallway. "You know all that's a load. Nobody believes in palm reading, it's just an urban legend. I can't tell people's fortunes for real."
"Nobody says you have to. Look, just hold their hands and make up some junk. We've gone to school with these people for most of our lives Al; you've gotta know something about what they'd wanna hear."
"Yeah." Allison glanced at Carly Jose, the most stuck up girl in school. "Tell Carly she's going to go to prom with Rob Shuly. She probably is." The girls giggled.
"We've got the costume already. A cape and a cool, Mardi-Gras type mask. C'mon, say you'll do it, pleeeze??" Debra pleaded.
"Okay, but no mask." Allison resigned herself. "I'll be there."
The first customer Allison saw in her makeshift fortune teller's booth that afternoon, ironically enough, was Carly Jose. The popular senior made a big show out of sitting down at Allison's booth and gushing on and on about her current phase of total belief in the paranormal. "I'm soooo into it. Like crystal gazing and stuff? And astronomy?" Carly had an annoying false Cali-girl accent that made everything she said sound like a question. "Are you sure you're really psychic?" Carly asked bubbily.
"Oh sure," Allison said with a smile. "I'm totally psychic, totally." She mentally wished she were wearing gloves so she wouldn't have to touch icky Carly's smooth hands. "Let's see what the future has in store for you." Unwillingly, she outstretched her hand and took Carly's in her own. She was trying to think of something to say that sounded "real", something a legitimate psychic would say. "Okay," Allison spoke, trying to make her voice sound spooky, which it never did. "See this line… this is your, uh… tryptophonic line. This is… what shows you whooo you will gooo to the prom with." Ugh, she felt stupid. "And thiiiis line is your life--"
The explosion of light was like a bulb popping, sparks flying. Instantly, Allison felt as though she had been transported to her living room, was sitting in front of her television set, watching TV on a Saturday afternoon. On the screen, she could see Carly's face—in black and white, which didn't make the blood any less dark or real. It didn't hide the image of Carly's face, caught in an almost look of surprise and all too horribly clear pain, and it didn't hide that the top of her skull had been completely shorn off by her own car's hood.
"Ouch!!" Carly's shout of pain cut through the stark image of her scalped head, providing awful accompaniment to Allison's vision. "What are you—let go!!"
Allison blinked, suddenly in the booth at the school again. She looked down at Carly's palm, into which her own fingernails were digging, hard. Bright red blood—for some reason this was even worse than the gallons of black, colorless blood in her vision—was lining the creases in her palm that Allison was supposed to be reading. In that instant Allison knew—she knew that what she had seen, somehow just by grasping Carly's hand— she had had a vision of Carly's future. And she knew also that it was unavoidable. Carly was going to die.
Allison looked at the girl's face, lively and peach colored and tinged with rose blush—and curved in a frown with the pain Allison was inflicting on her. "Let go of my hand, you freak!!" Carly snapped, yanking her hand violently out of Allison's grip. "What the hell's wrong with you?? You're supposed to read my palm, not tear it off!!" With a disgusted sneer, Carly got up from her seat.
Allison couldn't answer. She was still too stunned; too numb from the gruesome image she'd just seem splashed across her inner eye. She hadn't been trying to see Carly's future-- she didn't even believe in that stuff. Where the sudden image had come from, she couldn't possibly have said. She looked down at her hand, as Carly stomped away to the next booth.
Red smears of blood which she'd inadvertently drawn when she'd clenched Carly's hand in horror were lining her own palm, in a red M. Blood on her hands.
"Carly."
"Go away, Allison."
"Carly, wait up. I have something I've gotta tell you."
"What?!" Carly finally stopped and spun around, glaring Allison in the eye. "What is it already?"
Allison wasn't sure what to say, now that she was here. "I saw--" Nothing she ran through in her mind sounded believable. Yet, Carly did say she was a believer in stuff like this. Maybe—
"I saw something," Allison began, limply. "When I touched your hand, I saw--" She looked up into Carly's face, pleading. "I saw you—hurt. Bleeding."
For a moment Carly seemed like she was cooled down, was going to listen. Then she held up her hand, with the three fresh red crescent moons in the bottom of her palm. "No kidding," she sneered. "And you figured, if you made it come true, it counts as telling my future, right?"
And without another word, Carly turned on heel and moved swiftly down the hallway, done with Allison.
After school that day Allison was scheduled to babysit Nancy Brukowski's son, Greg.
The sky was overcast as Allison rode her bicycle down the wet street, past rows and rows of trailers in Sunnybrook Trailer Park. The Brukowskis weren't poor, but they were down on their luck after Nancy's boyfriend had suddenly up and left his girl and son. Nancy was bravely trying to keep it together, working two jobs to support them, and she and Greg were both nice people, no different than Allison and her own father. As Allison neared the long white trailer they lived in, she was still trying to get the image of the bloody wounds she'd inflicted on Carly at the fortune telling booth out of her mind. At the same time she was almost trapped into focusing on them, because if she didn't think about that, she was forced to think about the other, much bloodier image she had seen--
Taking a deep breath, trying to push it all to the back of her mind, Allison set the kickstand on her bike and walked up the small metal porch to knock on the trailer's door. Maybe it had been a fluke. Maybe she hadn't seen anything at all. That stuff wasn't real. Nobody could see the future just by grabbing someone's hand, and there was no way Carly was going to die this young. It couldn't happen.
"Hey Allison!" Nancy smiled as she opened the door wide, letting the younger girl into her small, cramped living room. "Just bear with me, the house is a mess; I'm trying to get things in order before I take off today. Thanks for coming by to stay with Greg; I don't know where he is. GREG!!" Nancy was a weary but strong chatterbox as she moved through her kitchen, picking things up and moving things aside at random. She was dressed in her work clothes and looked rather out of place among the unfortunately shabby surroundings. But the trailer was warm, and the toys and kids clothes scattered around set a feeling of calm in Allison's mind. She smiled as Nancy tossed the handful of things she'd collected into the spare room and shut the door. "Ugh. Don't go in there. Greg!!"
"I was afraid I was gonna be late." Allison stood on tiptoe, trying to peek out the living room window and see if she could glimpse Greg playing outside. "I was… at the fundraiser at the school for a while today. I remembered at the last minute I promised I'd come here."
"I'm sorry, did they need you there? I could maybe call my sister—"
"No--" Allison held up her hand, almost for protection. "No, I don't want to—I wanted to come here. They, uh, they didn't need any more kids there." Firmly refusing to think about the fortune telling booth, Allison's eyes fell upon Greg's Sylvester the Cat doll, which at some point he'd torn the black strip that constituted its mouth clean off of. The doll was lying on the sofa with its rumpled blanket of crocheted yellow and black zigzags. Something was strange suddenly; Allison couldn't help feeling as she unconsciously reached out and straightened up the sofa, filing magazines in a pile and putting them to one side. Something about the air in the living room of the trailer, the way it suddenly seemed dimmer than it should be. Her eyes fell upon the black screen of the TV set underneath the picture window at the side of the room, the screen dark, since it wasn't on. Just then the sun came out from behind the persistent cloud cover outside and a sheath of yellow but not particularly warm light filtered through the torn, coffee stained white curtains. A large yellow square of light appeared on the dirty carpet directly before the TV set.
"I don't know where he is." Nancy had grabbed her purse off the coffee table, peering out the window no the other side of the living room. "He's been playing with that cat all day."
Allison didn't answer. She was frowning at the screen of the TV set—which had come on, as if Nancy had hit the remote from behind her. Somehow though, Allison knew she hadn't. The image looked at first like something from a nature show on public television. It was the extreme closeup of a cat's face, calico, and Allison was creeped by how still it was. No blinking, no moving around. The cat just hovered there, staring out of the screen at her. No voiceover could be heard explaining anything. Just the cat's face.
"He found a cat last week," Nancy's voice was coming, behind her. "Gosh, I hate to leave when I don't know where he's at. I told him we can't afford to have a cat, but you know how cats are. You feed them once and you can't get rid of them? Well, this one comes around every day of course, since Greg feeds it his baloney sandwiches. I guess it could be worse, it could be a dog—"
Allison didn't want to look, but as with the image of the slaughtered pig she'd seen at home on her own TV, she didn't have a choice. She watched with a sinking feeling as one brown paw appeared in the camera's view. The paw rose to the top of the cat's face, as if it were washing itself—and a bright red smear of blood appeared on the furry face as the paw drew itself down to the bottom. Another paw appeared, this one white, and a second, horizontal smear of blood—this time going over the feline's eyes—slid across the screen.
"I think you might have to get him another one," Allison heard her own weak, weary voice speak.
There was silence behind her in the trailer, and Nancy was probably about to ask what she'd meant, but it was interrupted just then by the sounds of crying from outside. The front door of the trailer burst open, the curtains flying as Nancy's young son crashed through the living room, dark hair rumpled, face red as the tears streaked down his face. "My cat!!" Greg whined, his young voice peeling loudly off the too-close walls of the trailer. "Mommy, my cat!!"
"I saw her die."
Allison was sitting in the police station's front hall, eyes downturned as she spoke to the officer who had come out to talk to her. "She came into my booth at the school fundraiser—I was playing a fortune teller. I can't really—I'm not really a fortune teller, I don't even believe in this stuff. But when I touched her hand, I saw…." She didn't know how to say it. It sounded insane even to her, and she had experienced it. She knew she had seen Carly's future, had seen what ended up happening to her the very next weekend. She had seen it all.
The cop didn't believe it either. "You saw your friend getting in a car accident," he spoke in the removed tone of one who's not buying it for a minute.
"No." Allison shook her head, trying to keep it straight in her own mind. "No—it was like, I saw what the end result of… her path… would be." She wished she could describe it better, that feeling she had had when she'd gripped Carly's hand for the last time. The sense that in a way, even though Carly's hand was warm and alive, that Allison was already gripping the hand of a corpse. Allison had wanted to forget the whole thing, but the image of the cat on the Brukowskis' television that afternoon had scared her. It seemed like a warning—as if something was trying to tell her that the vision she'd had about Carly had not been a fluke. It had been the real thing.
She shifted now, in the seat. "And there's something else. This isn't the first time this has happened. I saw--" She shifted again; she felt stupid telling this cop that she'd intuitively picked up on her breakfast bacon's last squealing moments. "I've been seeing things… on television screens. It's like it only works when I'm looking at a blank screen, and then it's like something shows up there… that… only I can see. Like…." She was flailing, trying to make it sound like it made some sense. But it didn't—not even to her. "It's like--"
"You see visions on your TV set," the cop repeated, boredly. He was probably already thinking of any number of drug addled psychos in lock up who'd claimed to get instructions from their dogs, or their alphabet soup. "Okay…. Miss Burkett, let me tell you what I see here. I see a young girl who's read one too many Stephen King books, and who's got it into her head that some fantasy she had about her best friend makes her the next Carrie or Firestarter--"
"Carly's not my friend," Allison was about to retort, but the cop held up a hand, cutting her off. "—and I think you should consider yourself lucky that I think this, because if I thought you and your friend were setting up some kind of prank, I'd have to charge you for wasting the time of a police officer. Now you tell me, missy--" his tone had become acutely impatient, "—which is it gonna be?"
Allison was young, but she didn't appreciate being talked to like she was six years old. "Look," she tossed back, in a tone which she hoped this guy wasn't going to file under 'resisting an officer' or whatever, "I wasn't gonna come here. And Carly is NOT my friend. I don't even like her enough to talk to her, but even she doesn't deserve to get her head crushed in a car wreck! I came because I wanted to stop it from happening--"
"Okay--" the cop held up his hands. "All right then, fine. Saying I did believe you, Allison--" he shrugged, and the condescending smirk on his face let Allison know she wasn't being believed, even now, "—what exactly do you expect me to do? Arrest her car?" He waited. "Did you happen to 'magically see' the number of the guy who's supposedly going to hit her? Do you even know when this awful event's supposedly going to take place?"
Allison had to admit, he had her there. "No," she finally confessed, her throat dry. She didn't have any of those answers. Coming here had seemed like the obvious, right thing to do. She hadn't even thought about that—what the police could actually do about it. "No… no I don't," she mumbled.
The police officer sent her home with a warning. Allison wished it was the last warning she would get.
She didn't understand. She didn't see why, if the warning were real, why it hadn't let her have a little more information. When was it going to happen? Where? What was Carly going to die crashing her car into? As much as Allison tried to remember, tried to recall every sensation, every image she'd seen in the few seconds she'd held Carly's hand, she could not come up with any new clues.
She passed a store with a pile of televisions in the display window. Keeping her head down, Allison made an extreme point of staring at the dirty pavement until she'd gotten well past the window, away from the many blank, sinister screens.
There had to be some reason. She'd been told because she was supposed to prevent it; that seemed obvious. Only thing was, Allison didn't have the first clue as to how to go about saving Carly's life. It seemed hopeless. Why get a warning unless she knew what to do to change the end results?
"Hey! I'm talking to you!"
Allison slowed up, reining back her bike a little as she realized the voice she had been hearing for some time was being directed at her. "Hey!" She planted her sandals' toes on the sidewalk and looked up at the boy who was jogging toward her. "Hey there," the fellow greeted breathlessly, smiling at her.
Allison smiled back. He had to be a student at the school, but she'd sure never seen him before. His dark eyes and shaggy red hair put her in mind of a jock, but his arms were lanky, rather than muscled. "Hey there," she greeted back.
The boy scratched the side of his head, as if not sure where to begin. "Sorry—I saw you coming out of the police station… well actually, I was in there when you were talking to… officer McSnarky in there." His sarcastic tone showed he wasn't fond of the officer, maybe even knew him personally. "I couldn't help hearing what you told him—about your fr—the girl," he recanted at the look on Allison's face at Carly being called a friend of hers. "I'm sorry, guess that counts as eavesdropping, but I was just wondering…" he dropped his voice, even though no one was on the sidewalk to hear them "—did you really have a vision? Are you really… psychic?"
Allison's initial flush at how cute the strange guy was was now fast fading with the revelation of what he really wanted. "I don't know," she answered truthfully, since it was all she knew how to do. "I'm not sure what I am. I know what I saw, though." She drew in a deep sigh, trying to sort out how much this stranger might want to hear. "I just thought… maybe if I told the cops, but… he was right. There's nothing they can do when I don't even know when or how it's gonna happen."
"Yeah, that's tough." The boy's dark eyes were sympathetic. "No time codes on a vision, huh? I mean, that must make you feel kind of… helpless."
"Yeah, it does." Allison shifted on the bike. She didn't want to say just how helpless it did make her feel. "There has to be some way to stop it, but I don't know how. What's the point of seeing how someone died if you can't do anything about it?"
"Yeah." Now the fellow seemed to be losing interest, if the tone of his voice was anything to go by. "Listen—that cop's a loser, I knew him when he went to school. He's my dad's co-worker's son; all through senior year he was barkin' about how he was going to go into the police academy and take the training and get to carry a gun, all that. Don't pay any attention to him." The boy licked his lips, as if weighing what to say next. "Look—my name's Jeffrey, by the way."
"Allison," she returned graciously.
"Nice to meet you." He seemed to look her over a minute. "Can I be honest with you?"
"I wish you would."
"I wasn't before. I…" Jeffrey chuckled. "I really came after you because… I think you're real cute. I haven't seen you around before. You go to Jefferson?"
"Only school in town," Allison returned, hoping the heat in her cheeks wasn't showing too much.
"Yeah, I guess." Jeffrey shifted on the sidewalk. "Look—would you like to go get something to eat? Together? Uh, right now?"
Allison couldn't help the smile that was breaking over her face. Looked like this day was finally beginning to pay off. "Sure," was all she could say.
"This is my aunt's house," said Jeffrey.
The large, Victorian building had long had a rep in town as being the tallest house in the city limits. It could be seen from any part of town, towering over it like Cinderella's castle. Allison gazed up at it; feeling split over Jeffrey's suggestion that they have their lunch there. She'd always wanted to see the inside of the old place, yeah; but… "Are you sure your aunt doesn't mind?"
"Oh… no, no, she won't mind. I mean—usually she doesn't like people around, but she'll like you. She's, uh, always telling me to bring friends home." This sounded as though he weren't quite telling the whole truth. "C'mon, let's go in."
As Allison climbed the steps, she could feel the sparkly wash she'd been feeling only a few minutes before start to subside. She had been excited by the prospect of meeting somebody new, and getting to see the inside of the Grant house was a nice perk, but… the closer she got to the front door, the darker her mood became. She was tired, after this long day, with all the stress over Carly, and the creepy visions on the TV, and the snotty attitude of the cop. All she wanted to do was go home and go to bed, but she had to go into this house and keep up a smiling façade—
Jeffrey opened the front door and stepped aside to let her enter first. "Now, do you like lemonade?" he asked Allison, and she thought his voice was a little too perky, as if trying to make an ordinary situation more exciting than it really was. "My aunt has this thing about buying stuff natural, made from real lemons, you know? She says it makes the place more 'homey', whatever that means--"
"Wait," Allison had barely put a foot through the front door, and already she felt as though she were suffocating deep inside the basement of some ancient crypt. "Jeff--"
"What's the matter?" Jeffrey was looking closely at her, as if he were trying to find something in her face. It was almost as if he had been waiting for something like this to happen. "What is it, Allison? Are you getting something?"
Allison knew, distantly, that she had been had; she'd been brought here precisely because Jeffrey thought she might feel something about his aunt's house. Her initial outrage at being used, though, was being smothered by the overwhelming sensations of grief, grief and sorrow, nothing but years of tears and pain that she felt flooding over her standing in the foyer. "Sorry," she muttered, holding both hands against her temples, wishing the ache would go away. "It's sorry it happened," was all she could say. "It's sad, feels all the sad things that happened here. It's sad because they were sad."
Jeffrey was standing there with a gawp of amazement on his young face. Suddenly he looked less like a lanky cute guy and more like an awed little kid. "Shit," he moaned. "You really are one. You gotta be, I didn't tell you--"
"Jeffrey!"
Allison jumped, and the aching in her head flared, painfully. Blindly she flailed an arm out for the doorknob; she had to get out of here. "Sorry," she muttered to Jeffrey, who had begun to look as though he'd rather not be there. "I gotta get out; my head's killing me--"
"Hold it right there."
Allison turned to look where the voice was coming from. Standing in the hallway to what she guessed was the dining room a stately woman with jet black hair piled on her head was glaring at both Jeffrey and Allison—but mostly at the boy. Allison knew, without needing any kind of psychic vision, that this was Jeffrey's aunt.
Jeffrey had jumped at the sight of her, too. "Whoa—Aunt Clare! Uh, I just--"
The woman shook her head, not pleased at all with what Allison gathered was becoming an all too familiar scenario. "What in the world are you up to now??" she snapped.
"I don't believe in you."
The older woman had brought Allison into what she guessed the used to call a tea room; complete with ornate plush chairs and little tea tables with expensive looking china cups and plates on doilies. Twin white jewels that might actually have been diamonds dangled from the woman's ears, and they matched a sparkling but not completely flashy necklace around her spotted neck. She was not unattractive, what Allison thought they would call elegant, looking like she belonged on old reruns of Falcon Crest or Dynasty. She gave Allison a disapproving look, as if it had been Allison's idea to come up to Jeffrey's home uninvited. "I don't like to place any stock in things of the occult. My view is, if you believe in things not of God's making, it gives the devil power in your life. The best way to keep him out is just not to believe in anything like that, you understand?"
Allison was trying hard to pretend she was paying attention to Mrs. Grant's advice. She was trying hard not to look at the television set in the corner of the room, which had just made the faint static "snap" one does when it's been switched on. Allison was trying to keep her eyes from being drawn to the image that she could see was forming on the formerly dark screen; maybe Mrs. Grant was right, if she didn't look at it maybe it would go away—if she had faith, maybe it would leave her alone—
"But my nephew, bless him, seems to think your… power… is some kind of blessing." Mrs. Grant's tone of voice gave away that she herself didn't. "He's going through a bit of a phase, I think; he's spent the last few years trying to solve our family mystery—a disappearance that took place back at the turn of the century. The 1900's—not this century," she elaborated, as if Allison, being a kid, was going to be dense enough to actually think otherwise.
Allison still did not answer, because she had given up—if it was good enough for Mrs. Grant, there was hardly any hope for her to do otherwise. She had given in to looking straight at the black and white flickering image that had fully materialized on the TV screen. It looked like footage from the early days of the silent movie era; like one of the newsreels Allison had heard they used to run in movie theatres, before the start of the actual film. She thought she could even hear music—although it was too modern, too moody to ever have been the soundtrack to an ancient newsreel. She felt like she was watching a video on MTV.
The airplane was swooping and soaring lazily in the grey sky, its double wings wobbling and antiquated landing gear exposed beneath the cockpit. It looked like a shot of Charles Lindberg crossing the Atlantic, but the name of the aircraft was clearly painted under the cockpit's rim, in Victorian lettering: Helios.
The image changed suddenly. It was an instantly heartbreaking scene of a plump little boy's face, little cheeks wrinkled with the force of his crying. He was wearing a little pair of aviator goggles over his thatch of sepia-colored hair, and dressed in an outdated little pilot's jacket, with outlined lapels and huge round buttons. He was adorable, like a little caricature in a long-out-of-print book, and yet looking at him brought a wave of anguishing sorrow—and unexpectedly, a gutting surge of fear—in Allison's chest. Something horrible would happen, had already happened, so many decades ago that it was beyond too late to stop it—
There were at least a dozen witnesses there; a group of people in long flowing dresses and stiff starched suits. The men had handlebar mustaches and the ladies all wore elaborate hats, and all of them were weeping. They were all there to see the little child off, but none of them were happy about it. One lady in the foreground—Allison got the impression it was the child's mother—was crying into her handkerchief with a helpless, heartbroken agony. A sacrifice was about to take place. There was nothing that could be done.
"Go away," Allison whispered to the image, hoping against hope that it would.
The image changed back to the little boy in the goggles and suit. The sobbing little apple-cheeked face suddenly warped, as if the film had been set to a flame. With a sinking heart Allison watched as the child's adorable face suddenly mutated, every line arcing upward, twisting as the eyes bulged and took on a near-feline form. Forked black eyes goggled at her, and the mouth that had been baby teeth was now a sharply upturned V of hissing hate.
"All right--" Allison was cringing in her seat, wanting to jerk her gaze away, and somehow unable to keep from staring straight into the screen. "All right, I'll tell her—I'll tell them all, just go away!!"
The TV cracked softly again. The image vanished, having been turned off.
"Allison?" That was Mrs. Grant's voice, undeniably questioning. Allison could only hear her, since she'd resorted to finally squeezing her eyes shut against the images. "What on earth is the matter with you?"
Allison opened her eyes, tentatively. She let out a shaky, settling breath. "It was your great-grandmother who did it," she spoke with unmitigated certainty. "The baby that was kidnapped, and they never found the body? They all thought a stranger kidnapped the baby? She did it." She took another breath, telling what the apparition had told her. "And the reason's because the baby wasn't your great-grandfather's. Your great-grandmother had a tryst with a transient your family hired to work on the farm." She heard Mrs. Grant's gasp of disgust, but Allison kept going, doomed to speak the truth. "She told everyone it was your great-grandfather's, but every time she looked at the boy, she was so ashamed. She knew she'd committed a mortal sin by committing adultery, and she felt any baby born of a mortal sin could only grow up to be evil, so she finally k-killed him by locking him in the toy trunk. She let him suffocate in there." Allison's eyes were brimming, a tear streaked down her face. She'd never seen anything this awful before. "Then she loaded the trunk on a plane your great-grandfather owned, the one that was sending scrap iron to the war effort, in Tucson. The plane crashed halfway there. Everything burned up… they never found the body." Allison licked her lips, winded by what she'd just told.
She would have expected Mrs. Grant, given the shocked reaction before, to throw her right out of the house. Instead, after a long silence Allison looked up at the older woman, and was surprised to see that tears were spilling down the woman's face as well. "It's true," she gasped, with the voice of a true believer. "He was right—you are gifted. God in heaven--" Mrs. Grant put a hand to her mouth, stunned in the wake of proof in what she couldn't believe. Her hand lowered, and Mrs. Grant tried hard to get it together. "My dear—you're right, every bit of it's true. You have to be the real thing, there's no way you could have known any of it otherwise."
Allison couldn't believe what she was hearing, though part of her felt she should have known Mrs. Grant was in on it, already. "You knew??" she got out, still sickened by what she'd been witness to.
Mrs. Grant shook her head. "Not about the… out-of-wedlock birth." She too drew in a long, unsettled sigh. "Good Lord, when cousin Claudette finds out about this. God forbid she ever finds out!!" She shook her head. "No, dear, but the disappearance, the son that was kidnapped from the Banning house—that was almost as widely known as the Lindbergh baby. My God, perhaps that's even what gave her the idea to do it." Fresh tears came to Mrs. Grant's eyes. "They searched for months, interrogated everyone who'd come in contact with the Banning household back then. They finally gave up after it became clear… they weren't going to find the baby." She shook her head, appalled at the idea. "God… how could any mother do that to her own child??"
Allison didn't know, and didn't want to. Although she was relieved to see that Mrs. Grant, her upper-crustness aside, was at least as horrified by her great-grandmother's overzealousness as Allison was.
Sniffing mightily, Mrs. Grant put up her hands, as if pushing it away. She gazed entreatingly at Allison, and her gaze was filled with new respect—and with new hope. "My dear girl… can you see that poor boy, wherever he is now? Tell me, please. Is he happy in the next life? Is he in a better place? Is he free?"
Allison remembered, against her will, the starkly colorless image, the hideous face grinning out at her from the television. She didn't want to look at Mrs. Grant.
She didn't want to tell her.
"Well, I guess you solved the mystery."
Jeffrey's face was pallid, and his voice was not like it had been before on the street, when he'd invited Allison to his house. He looked to her like he was almost embarrassed now, certainly not as warm and sweet as he'd been before. "Yeah," Allison said, trying for the joke, "if it weren't for me and my meddling dog…."
She left off; it was clear that it wasn't a joking matter to him. Not anymore. "So…. I guess I'll see you at school Monday?" she grasped at straws.
"Yeah, maybe." Jeffrey sure didn't look as though he were counting the days. "Only one in town, an' all." If he could have been looking down at his shuffling feet, like the illustrations in old books, he would have. "So… I guess you're gonna get home? You said before you didn't want to stay and all." There was unmistakable hope in his tone.
Allison hated this. The crushing sad aura of Grant house had been pushing her away before, but now the empty emotionlessness, the distinct sense that she wasn't exactly unwelcome, just not really needed or wanted, was almost as bad. "Okay, what's the deal?" she couldn't help bursting out. "If that's all you brought me up for, to see if I could solve your ghost mystery for you, can't you at least be up front about it??"
"Sorry--" Jeffrey was the one muttering now. "I'm sorry you had to do all that. It was a long shot. I just happened to overhear you, at the station--"
Allison had always thought other girls were so stupid for falling for guys who were obviously using them. She had always been sure she was never going to be that stupid. "You said I was cute," she heard her own weak, silly-sounding voice saying. Right on schedule. She felt like she ought to be seeing a Lifetime TV logo in the corner of her eyesight.
Jeffrey's face was still pale, and he clearly didn't want to look her in the eyes. He almost looked as if he were afraid of her. "I didn't—I didn't think you'd be for REAL," he grumbled, as if it were her fault for actually doing what he'd tricked her into.
And then, since no more words were to be said, he turned around and retreated into the recesses of his huge haunted house. Slam.
When Allison got home that evening, her television was on. For real. The news was running the death of a local high school senior as a throwaway news extra. They didn't even mention Carly's name.
Allison sat in the cold kitchen, watching the TV numbly, no longer caring if she saw some gory echo of her leather sandals' final moments on earth. She didn't see a point to any of it. What good was this power she found herself cursed with? What good was it to anyone? She hadn't been able to save Carly. She couldn't possibly have done anything to help Mrs. Grant's great-grandfather's son. She couldn't do anything for Greg's kitty, and she sure as hell couldn't have done anything for her pork or her genuine cow skin shoes. Her supernatural ability hadn't even gotten her the boy, like in the movies.
What was the point?
She felt as though she had seen another vision. But unlike the others, this one was directed solely at herself. This power was real; there was no doubt anymore. For whatever reason, she was stuck seeing the last moments of people she could not save. She didn't know if it would go away someday. She hoped it would, but she had the sinking feeling that she shouldn't count on it.
She felt doomed. As surely as Carly had been doomed. There was no way out; not for Allison, not for however many more people she was going to envision the last moments of. They were going to die, and she was going to see it. The best she could hope for was to help the police—if anyone believed her—to tie up whatever loose ends were left behind.
Somehow, that seemed like a damn small consolation.
The End.
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