His name is Derek. He is fifteen years old and he has just had the most astonishing day. Today he met his Teacher.
Tonight he dreams in shades of grey, grainy, fragmented but all too real visions of the past, the present and maybe the future. He's had it all his life, but today he's learnt a name for it. The Sight. He always finds it a bit frightful. She knew this. She had known he saw things.
She also knew about his nightmares. The terrors he'd been reliving since his father died ten days ago. The demon that had killed his father? She knew he didn't want to talk about that.
His father's colleagues – the members of The Legacy – had tried vainly to question him about the circumstances of his father's demise. He had not told it to anyone, not his mum, nor his sister, not yet. But Ville had known. From the moment she laid eyes on him, she knew the horror he'd witnessed in that Peruvian cave. She knew his fears, she knew his guilt, she knew his anger toward his father. He could feel electricity crawling along his skin until he looked into her eyes, saw the way she looked at him.
She asked him to walk with her. They strolled through the gardens of the Legacy's London house. She inquired politely about his education, his recent studies, his interests academic and otherwise – his music, his chess game, his friends, his schooling. Her questions reflected ease with his age and appreciation of his intelligence and opinions. She spoke to him as if he were already grown, an equal.
They paused in the gazebo at the edge of the pond. Quietly, without preamble, she asked about his visions. His lip stiffened and quivered momentarily. He regained his outward composure even though she wasn't looking. His eyes remained troubled, his mind clouded.
Gazing out over the waters, Ville relaxed her body and mind and opened herself passively to any stray thoughts of his. The human mind always had some leakage. Even with yogi masters, she could at least sense the texture of their concentration without active intervention. Like listening to a radio.
She reassured him, "I don't mean the awful dreams you've been having this past fortnight." She lowered her eyelids and turned her consciousness subtly toward his. "You've seen things before. Sometimes just flashes. You're never quite sure what it is that you've sensed. You used to think it was only imagination until you found you couldn't control it. You wanted it to stop. Now and then you wonder if you're going crazy. You wonder what's wrong with you. Why you? Should you tell someone? Who would believe you? You're afraid to tell. You feel like enough of a freak already. Especially now." She opened her eyes but continued to stare across the water, letting only her words roll across him. "How old were you?" she whispered.
He understood as if her unspoken words sprang fully formed into his mind. He desperately stared at the water himself and stammered, "I don't know. I can't remember ever not having it – or something…."
"Or something like it. Your mother's told you that you rarely cried as a wee babe."
"You know my mother?" Derek asked in confusion.
"No," Ville lifted her gaze into the distance. "When you first saw television or cinema?" she prompted him.
And again he knew what she wanted to know. "I remember thinking, they'd got it all wrong," he answered firmly, "it wasn't the same as in my head."
"When did it first become real to you?"
Derek didn't even to pause to remember, "It was after my grandfather's funeral. We were leaving the cemetery. My hand brushed against a headstone. There was a bright flash and an awful crash. I thought my heart stopped; I couldn't breathe. A woman was crossing a road. At night. It was raining. A motor car came round the corner too fast and struck her. There was another flash, I thought it might be lightning, but I saw her burial and I saw her weeping at her own graveside," his voice became plaintive. "I jerked my hand away and I knew that the woman I'd seen was buried there."
"But as frightening as that was, you couldn't just leave it alone."
Derek shook his head. "I had to know. When I finally worked up the courage, I searched for her obituary in the local paper. She'd been killed years before my parents were even born, before my grandfather had ever lived there. 'Hit and run.' The paper had her picture. She was wearing the same dress and coat I saw her wearing. I got sick to my stomach."
"You came home so pale, your mother kept you home from school the next day although your father disagreed."
"He said there was nothing wrong with me," Derek continued bitterly. "How could I tell them what I saw? Father wouldn't have believed me. Or worse, he simply wouldn't have listened."
"Fathers may listen, but they rarely hear," Ville murmured in sympathy.
Angry, Derek turned to her, "How do you know? How do you know about me? Have you spoken to my mother about me? Did you know my father when I was too young to remember?"
Ville turned her body toward him, leaning on the rail so her eyes would be level with his. "If I'd met you before, you'd remember me."
Derek felt this was the truth. "Who are you then?" he asked suspiciously.
"Don't you mean what am I?" Ville corrected him with a hint of mischief in her voice.
Derek blushed, then set his jaw and dared her to explain herself.
Ville smiled at him. "I've met many who see things other don't."
"You're one of them," Derek nodded towards the main house.
"No. I'm not allowed actually, but we do go back a ways."
"Oh." He almost sounded disappointed.
"I see things, too, Derek. I've learned not to be afraid to see or afraid of seeing, even when it's frightening, because it's always frightful. I teach others to see without being afraid, not for themselves, of course it's alright to be afraid for others. Especially if we see something bad's going to happen or has happened to them. I mean you no harm, Derek. If you want, I can teach you more about your sight. I can most definitely assure you, you're not a freak." She smiled warmly at him. He felt waves of reassurance coming off her, knowledge in her eyes, compassion in her voice. He'd been treading water in an unknown ocean. This strange woman offered him a lifeline, a hand to hold onto. With reservation, he reached out for it.
Tonight, he lay in his bed feeling a mixture of emotions – lonely, abandoned, homesick without the women in his life. His mother had returned to her home in Amsterdam. He prevailed upon her not to make him return to boarding school right away. Ville had assured his mother she would administer his studies as long as he chose to remain and what safer place could he be than at the Legacy house after all? He was thankful for that. But his sister Ingrid had gone as well, in more ways than one. She had followed through on her decision to enter a convent as a novice, a path she had been contemplating even before their father's mysterious death. The timing was devastating for Derek, but Ingrid had her path. He needed to find his.
To him, Ville seemed genuine, but ethereal in some way. She walked through the world and yet was of it at the same time. Her smiles were never empty. Her laughter was joyous, but never frivolous. That a person of such light should come into his life at what would seem to be his darkest, most dangerous moment overwhelmed him.
At least with her he didn't have to play the part of the Only Son of the Eminent Winston Rayne. She allowed him to be himself, even if he didn't fully know who that was yet. The stoic shell the adults in his world expected of him was severely cracked but not completely shattered. Ville streamed through those cracks, infiltrating his imagination. If he insisted on repairing that shell, he would end up shutting her out along with the pain and grief he wanted to banish.
Her teaching methods were insidious and somewhat maddening. In the guise of casual conversation, she interwove history, philosophy, anthropology, theology, human psychology and sociology with myth, physics and natural science in ways that never failed to amaze. He never felt she was talking completely over his head or feeding him new ideas too quickly. She didn't talk at him – she drew him out, encouraged him to speak aloud about his own formative beliefs. She didn't ask him what he wanted to do with his life…or what had happened to his father. Relieved, he found he could even briefly mention his father without inducing the reflexive, embarrassing outpouring of sympathy followed by the awkwardness everyone else seemed get a case of in his presence. Slowly he processed his grief while she kept him otherwise occupied.
'Ville. Ville.' She held her breath – who was this? When was this? Before she could take hold, it was swept away. She was left with only an impression of a man she may or may not have known, who had called her name.
"Ville?"
She breathed so loudly and suddenly, he was momentarily alarmed. "Ville, are you all right?"
As the vision let her go, she returned to the present. "What?"
"I asked if you were alright?" He took hold of her arm.
She turned to look at the young man, disoriented; her son's name almost slipped from her lips, but no, this wasn't he. "Derek," she finally said, although not to his relief. She said his name as if she weren't quite sure of herself. That was disturbing. For both of them.
Ville realised she was not with her old friend Dr. Derek Rayne, but with young Master Derek. She was back in the past – his past. Time to reorient herself five by five after such a transition always varied, the process made more difficult in this case by the fact that although she remembered meeting Derek as a young man, she had no idea what came immediately next. The Derek Rayne she had been most familiar with had sacrificed himself in the explosion that destroyed the Legacy house on Angel Island and sealed the portal to Hell for another millenium. The house that stood in the middle distance over young Derek's shoulder. She rubbed her temple and closed her eyes again for a moment. She hated it when things happened out of sequence.
"I'm a little dizzy is all. I'll be fine, Derek," she stated more confidently. She was always fine after a day at the most. Not the usual temporary amnesia this time, for that she could be grateful. "I just need to breathe – something took the wind out of me."
"You saw something. You had a vision just now, didn't you? What did you see?" he pressed her.
Ville shook her head. "No, I didn't see anything, rather – how long have we known each other now?"
Puzzled, he answered, "A month maybe. Why?" When she peered into his eyes, his heart nearly stopped.
"It seems like it's been over forty years since I first saw you, my dear friend," she sighed sadly and reached out to stroke his hair. The affection in her voice worried him. "What do you mean by that?" he asked in a suspicious tone.
"Never mind; it's nothing." She laughed quietly. "For a moment, you reminded me of my son."
"Get away – you're not old enough!"
That had her smiling warmly again. "You think you know how old I am?"
"Well, it's not polite to ask, but…."
"But nothing. What we were on about just now, before my little spell?"
Derek gave her an odd look. "Neural chemistry."
"Well, there you go, that'll do it every time, won't it?" she joked.
"Are you mocking me?" he asked patiently.
"No. Never," she answered seriously. "I was somewhere else just then, perhaps with my son, and then I was here again."
"What do you mean 'again'? We've sitting here talking all this time."
"As in this is the past, your past, my present. Like the idea that the past and the present and the future exist simultaneously. Like a roll of wound, exposed film. Perhaps sometimes different frames match up together and…"
"And you just move from one to the other? You can do that?" he was openly skeptical.
"Well, not voluntarily. Not I anyway," she concluded.
Derek decided this was quite enough and stood. "Perhaps we had better go inside; one of us has been in the sun too long," he teased her uncharacteristically.
"Well, that's putting a fine point on it! Alright, let's go have some lunch then."
He scowled, "We ate lunch two hours ago, Ville. Are you sure you're not alright?"
"Fine, something to drink, come on then." She sounded more firm and led the way back to the house. He walked along side her, occasionally stealing a glance. She ignored his knit brow. Bungled this one right nice, she thought to herself.