Enthralled: Paranormal Diversions (24 page)

He didn’t stop to think about what this meant. He pushed the door and it opened silently as he slipped inside, setting his backpack on the floor. The air was still—stale—and once again, Rafe sifted through the mental images that had come to him in his sleep, flashing like unwelcome memories that didn’t belong to him.

Sophie’s dad showing up without warning.

Connie screaming at him to leave them alone as she positioned herself between him and the kids, Sophie and Jacob, yelling for them to run. To hide.

His fists. Relentless. Beating Connie until her face was bloodied and unrecognizable.

Sophie dragging her little brother out the back door.
But to where? Rafe couldn’t be certain; they were no longer a part of the pictures in his head.

And then:
the knife
. Rafe hadn’t seen where it had come from. Had Sophie’s father found it in the kitchen, or had it been with him all along? But its appearance, even in his dream, had made Rafe shiver with icy warning and had given him a purpose:
Get to Sophie. Save her!

That was all he had; that was where his dream had ended, when he awoke drenched in sweat and foreboding. He’d gathered a few items into his backpack, along with some cash and that fugly doll, and he’d left without telling his aunt where he was going. Or when he might be back. He hadn’t known the answer to either question.

Now, standing inside the darkened kitchen with the lights still off, he no longer measured his steps by distance but by weight, each one pulling him down, drawing him deeper into despair.

One
. On the other side of the couch, he could see a limp hand on the floor, white even in the shadows of the stark room.

Two. Three
. It was Connie, her face pale and her eyes wide as a crimson puddle of her own blood crusted around her.

Four, five, six.
More blood. Everywhere, blood.

Now was the time Rafe should call out for her—for Sophie— but his voice felt thick, his airway too tight to find enough space for it to pass. Nausea gripped him, making him suddenly dizzy. He wasn’t ready to know if Sophie could answer.

But it didn’t matter what he wanted.

Twelve
. He slipped past Sophie’s mother, lying in the small living area, as he scanned the house, looking inside the tiny bathroom with a dirty tub and chipped porcelain sink, a linen closet housing an ancient hot water heater and only a handful of towels. Until he came to a closed door.

Blood rushed past his ears, and his heart hammered against the walls of his chest.

He squeezed his eyes shut as he pushed open the door. He didn’t know if he could do this, if he could handle what might be inside.

As he opened them again, he released a heavy breath. The sparsely furnished bedroom was empty.

Outside
, he thought in a rush.
They must still be outside
.

He told himself not to look as he passed the dead woman in the living room, but it was impossible not to. He might not even have realized it was Connie, save for the bleached blond hair that was now matted with clumps of her own flesh and bones and blood.

At the back door, he hesitated again, listening to the night, hoping for a clue but picking up nothing. He strained against the godforsaken blackness, even darker back here than out at the road, where there was at least a break in the trees to allow the light from the moon overhead. But after a moment, once his eyes adjusted, he could see a break here too. Ahead, a small clearing had been carved out for a rickety-looking shed that stood beneath the towering trees, clutched in the grasp of barbed blackberry vines that threatened to consume it.

Rafe froze, suddenly unable to take another forward step. He was still unsure where Sophie’s father might be, and he’d already witnessed what the man was capable of. His lungs felt brittle, like they were made from crisp parchment and were no longer capable of true function. He waited there, trying to decide which need would cause him to move first: his need to breathe or this new, all-consuming fear that gripped him.

He had known death, and understood it; the dreams had helped with that. When his mother had gotten sick, when the cancer had metastasized, spreading violently throughout her body—unstoppable—he had known. He had seen what it had done to her, even when she’d tried her best to hide it . . . tried to keep it a secret from him.

He’d watched her while he slept—in his dreams—seeing what the drugs were doing to her as she cried and vomited, whimpered and pulled clumps of her own hair from her head. He’d watched night after night, seeing her lose the battle to the disease, along with her will to fight.

All the while, her brave front never faltered. She smiled and squeezed his hand whenever he came into the room, and he pretended not to notice when her fingers no longer had the strength to curl around his. Instead, he squeezed hard enough for the both of them.

And when he knew she couldn’t do it for herself, he gave her permission, whispering softly against the sharp bones of her too-thin cheek, “It’s okay, Mom. I’ll be all right, I promise. Aunt Jenny will take good care of me.”

He had been there when she’d taken her last shuddering breath, releasing it on a ghastly sigh.

But he had never considered the possibility of his own death before this very moment, standing here beneath the dark Montana sky. He had never entertained the notion that he wasn’t indestructible. Until now. Now he felt differently. Now, after seeing the bloodied body of Sophie’s mother, he
knew
differently.

His dreams could be dangerous.
He
could be in danger.

He gasped for air, no longer able to sustain himself on sheer will alone.

That moment freed him and he found his stride again as his desire to find her—to find Sophie—was renewed.

His boots dug into the earth beneath his feet as he searched everywhere.

“Sophie!” He finally yelled, no longer able to stop himself. Desperation was clear as his voice cracked. “Sophie! Answer me, Sophie!”

He almost didn’t notice the soft scrape beneath his boot, the metallic scuff that he felt more than heard. It could easily have been a coin, dropped carelessly in the soil, but Rafe didn’t think so, and as he bent down to get a better look, his stomach revolted.

It was hers. The necklace. The ring he’d put on a chain for her to wear.

His hand hovered just above it. He was afraid to touch it, afraid to let his fingers close around it.

If he touched it, if his skin made contact with it, he would know for sure.

But time was running out, and behind him the far-off drone of sirens wailed, setting an eerie mood for what he was about to do.

He glanced up, to make certain he was still alone, and, closing his eyes, curled his hand around the ring, lifting it to his heart and clutching it there.

Electrical impulses caused him to convulse, like tremors coursing along every muscle fiber in his body. His eyes opened, rolling back in his head as the images began flashing inside his mind.

Flash.
Sophie and Jacob, hiding in the shed. Cowering. Trying not to cry.

Flash.
Their father splintering the door to get to them. The gun in his hand.

Flash.
Sophie—the same way her mother had done—standing bravely between her little brother and her father.

Flash.
Jacob running away, searching for cover beneath the canopy of the trees.

Then:
the gunshot.

Rafe’s body jerked, as the sound from the borrowed memory exploded within him. He tried to loosen his fingers, to pry them apart, away from the ring, but it was too late, the images had come too fast, and he’d already seen them.

The siren screamed, louder now, almost upon him. He was suddenly grateful for an overprotective aunt like Jenny. And grateful that he’d already called Sara. He’d known, of course, that she would trace the call, and he’d expected her to send backup. It was what she did.

He knew, too, that when the police arrived, they would arrest him; they would have to when they witnessed the gruesome scene inside the house. He was the only one here, after all, and they had to blame someone.

Rafe would let them, staying silent, explaining nothing.

It wouldn’t be until Sara got there that things would get straightened out, that he’d tell her everything, about his dreams and what he saw in them. She was the only one who would understand.

Rafe clutched the ring, the images still assaulting him.

And he would tell Sara exactly where she could find Sophie’s father: hiding out at a cheap motel just off the interstate, less than twenty miles from this very spot.

But even without Rafe to tell them where the bodies were, the local police would have already found Sophie. And Jacob.

They’d never stood a chance against their father.

He tried to keep the images from flashing, again and again, but they kept coming, faster and faster now.

Flash.
Sophie hiding the necklace in her hand, squeezing it and rubbing the steel furiously with her thumb, her eyes wide as she faced her father.

Flash.
Sophie turning to run, stumbling. Trying to get away as her father raised his gun. Coldly. Unemotionally.

Flash.
Sophie, her body going stiff. The necklace falling from her hands as she reached up to touch the wound that had opened up on her chest, where the bullet had ripped right through her. The disbelief on her face as she stared down at the blood glistening on her fingertips.

Flash.
Sophie falling forward. Her eyes glazed and empty
.

Rafe dropped to his knees as he heard car doors slamming and saw the flash of lights split the dark sky behind him. He hadn’t cried when his mother died or when Sophie had left, and he couldn’t seem to do it now either. But something in him was forever changed, he knew. Something in him had died along with the both of them.

He felt cold and bare. Exposed and abandoned.

He uncurled his fingers and looked down at the steel ring in his hand, not sure why he wanted to keep it. He half thought he should just chuck it into the woods and forget it—
forget her
—forever.

Instead, he slipped the chain around his neck. And as he heard the voices shouting, screaming at him to
get down on the ground
, he tucked it inside his shirt, against the hollow space where his heart should be.

Leaving
by Ally Condie

efore my father left for good, he put the small glass sphere down on the table in the three-room apartment where we lived. The sphere rolled a little and I had to catch it before it fell. “It’s a globe,” he told me, not exactly meeting my eyes. He looked at me, in my direction, but his gaze stopped somewhere just short of mine. “A
full
globe,” he added.

He meant unlike the Globe we live in, which is a curved half sphere above the earth. The Globe protects us and encases us, our apartment buildings, our grid of transports. Our cities. There are other shapes—Cubes, Pyramids—that enclose other people and other places. “We live in half a world,” my father said sometimes. He said it then, before he left.

I’m walking down the hall at school when this memory comes back to me, brought to my mind by the light glancing off the perfect circle of a girl’s earring as she stands next to a window. Once, I would have pushed away any memory of my father’s leaving. I used to try not to think about when and how he left, but now that I’m planning to follow I think about it all the time.

I picked up the globe and looked to see what was inside. Something swirling, white but clear, lit from within.

“I’ll leave it behind for you,” he said. “If anything goes wrong, use it if you can. If you can’t use it, break it.” I looked at him, at his graying hair and his eyes that seemed to be graying too. The expression on his face wasn’t quite an expression of happiness or satisfaction, but maybe a little of the hope of those things. But most of what I saw on his face could be summarized in a single word: purpose.

Someone bumps up against me and then pulls away as if I’ve burned them. I look up. It’s a girl I don’t know, younger than me. “Sorry,” she says. She seems embarrassed and I don’t know if she’s apologizing for bumping into me or for pulling away.

No one should have to pull away anymore.

But they all do. It started because of my father, and it continues now because of me.

I turn away from the girl and keep walking, listening. The people around me only discuss one thing. The Heavens Dance. Tonight.

I won’t be there.

Everyone in the school knows it and I know it and I move around Mia Turner in the hall, around her long silver-blond hair and her bright silver clothes and her voice and her laughter and her group and her big blue eyes staring right at me.

“Sora,” she says behind me, just as I’ve passed.

What does she want? I turn to look at her. She was a friend, last year, as they all were. Before my father left. Before I became Untouchable for those two weeks that changed everything. Them. Me.

“The assembly is this way,” she says, pointing toward the doors of the auditorium. The stage floats a few feet above the ground, and the chairs have been arranged in rows for us. She smiles. She’s standing right next to me. And then she reaches out to me.

For a moment, my heart almost stops. Not in fear, though I’ve seen what Mia Turner can do. But because with her hand outstretched and her eyes wide open like that, she looks like one of them. One of the Beautiful People from the Beautiful Time. The time we always try to recapture, here in the Globe, with our hair, our clothes, our music, the way we talk. We all wish we could have lived then, just before the Burn and the making of the Shapes. We’ve tried to recreate the era, but we’re missing the most important element of all: the Beautiful People themselves.

Bad things happened even in the Beautiful Time, but Beautiful People always came to the rescue. I’ve seen video footage of a giant wave, of an earthquake. All those devastated citizens, all that ruined land, and then a Beautiful Person came in and made everything fine. You could see it by the way the people smiled and reached out to touch the hands of the visitor.

I don’t say anything. But then Mia moves, impatient, and pulls back her hand. She’s not a Beautiful Person, not that kind anyway. She can’t heal anyone.

Fifteenth century
, I think to myself, standing in the doorway, feeling perversely amused by the fact that people have to move around me so carefully in this tiny space. They’re moving around Mia as well, afraid to touch her too, but not for the same reasons.
Maybe that’s the right century. Maybe that’s the time for me. They worked and went to church and ate and slept. They wouldn’t have had time for school like this
. I imagine I can feel all the heavy weight of woolen skirts and long hair piled on my head or braided down my back.
That’s a time when people like Mia would be called witches.

Which she is. A witch, and worse.

But wouldn’t I get hanged myself the minute I appeared there? In most eras, my clothes might get me stared at, laughed at, noticed, but I’d rather not get killed.

Not the fifteenth century, then.

“Go,” Mia says, shoving me a little, and I stumble forward toward the auditorium. I can feel exactly where she pushed me. Someone else behind her laughs nervously at her bravery at touching me. I don’t look back but I stand up straight. I won’t be here forever. They don’t know that, but I do.

I might even leave tonight.

I walk right through the auditorium and back out the door on the other side. I don’t know if Mia sees me leave. I don’t know why she tried to get me to go to the assembly, but I’m not going to do it. I’m going home. The crowning of the sun and moon and stars for the Heavens Dance happens every year. I’ve seen it before. Last year, before my father left, when things were still bad but he wasn’t gone, I sat there with friends and watched the students a year older than me get chosen. The most handsome boy: the sun. The prettiest girl: the moon. A handful of others—three boys, three girls—as the stars.

My father said you could only go backward, not forward. I wonder if he was right? Maybe I could go a hundred years from now. Maybe by then the Outside would be clean again and the trees would be growing and we could live beyond the Shapes. But maybe the air would be gone, even though the president says that we have plenty of everything if we just stay inside. Maybe the Globes would be empty of life and full of dead people.

There are plenty of little transports lined up in front of the school. The assembly isn’t mandatory, and it doesn’t matter if I don’t go. I climb inside a transport and punch in the coordinates of my apartment. The transport slides up along the metal gridwork that webs through our city. Other transports, more solid and secure than these intracity ones, go outside our Globe to the other Shapes. But only politicians, transport workers, and other approved citizens are permitted to leave, and even they are never truly Outside.

I lean my head against the plastic windowpane and look out at our tiny, tight world.

My father also said this: It’s probably best not to go back in your own life.

But if I could, I would go back in my own life to three years ago, before my father was really gone. I would go back to the day when Elio Morrow and I were with the rest of the class at the weather center for a field trip, and they chose the two of us to stay inside and make it rain. The weather center director showed us which buttons to push. We sat side by side with our arms brushing each other as we took turns. Elio didn’t flinch away. This was before I was Untouchable, of course, but I still noticed.

“What color should we make it rain?” the director asked, and Elio and I answered at the same time. We both said, “Orange,” and we looked at each other in surprise, and the director was surprised too. “We don’t do that often,” he said. “Everyone likes clear, or blue.”

Elio and I stood inside. We watched our classmates looking up to see what we would do. When the drops started to fall, everyone started to laugh, including Mia Turner. And Elio and I ran out together to join them, and everyone acted like we were kids, not thirteen and mostly grown, and it was one of the last times and one of the first times and certainly one of the best times.

But. Even if I could go back in my own life, I would still arrive, eventually, back at today.

In my apartment—a two-room—now that I live alone, I take off my shoes and sit down on the rug from the old apartment, right in the spot where my father vanished.

I know I’m leaving tonight, but it’s not time now. Instead, I place the glass sphere on the patterned rug. Its reds and oranges and browns are as familiar to me as the backs of my own hands. Soon, one of the other single females who live in this block of apartments will come to make sure I’m all right. I have to wait until after that visit before I start to leave.

My father vanished so completely that they think he must have left the Globe and died out there in the Middle. That’s why I was an Untouchable: I vowed that I’d seen him go, that we’d stolen a transport and gone out of the Globe, where he climbed out and died. It took two weeks before all the tests were finished and they were sure I was clean. Two weeks of being an Untouchable. It wasn’t long, in some ways.

But it was long enough.

When I think of their version of how he left, I picture him stepping out of the transport and into the black, dead landscape and then sizzling up, just like that.

When really he left so much more carefully. When really it took so long.

“I’m going to go find one of the Beautiful People,” he said. He pointed to a picture of a woman with huge eyes and red lips and long, luscious hair. In the picture, she reached down to a child of another color. The child reached up, smiling. “That one, if I can. It might be a long time, but I’m going to try to bring her back.”

I nodded.

“We can’t keep living like this,” he said.

What he meant was, “I can’t keep living like this.” Without my mother, he meant. She died when I was born. I don’t remember her at all.

But my father did.

I think he stayed as long as he could.

“Don’t touch me when I leave,” he warned me. “I don’t know what could happen.”

So I didn’t.

He sat down and I watched him go.

He got darker, and darker, and more solid, more real. He didn’t fade; he condensed. Smaller, smaller, sharper, sharper, until I realized with surprise that he was tiny, that I’d been watching him for hours. My vision had narrowed until all I saw was him. There he was, and then he wasn’t. And he was gone and his glass sphere sat alone in the center of the rug.

I knew right away that if I could focus as long and as well as he did, that I might be able to do it too. But for those first shocked days and weeks, I didn’t want to think about leaving.

And then, after I realized that I would forever be Untouchable, it became the only thing I wanted to think about.

There’s a knock on the door.

Laura from upstairs stands there, smiling, an excited look on her face. “How are you doing today?” she asks, stepping inside. She’s much older than I am, probably thirty. She lives alone.

“I’m doing well,” I say. Laura is kind. She stays at arm’s length, always, but I hear genuine warmth in her voice.

Laura beams at me, and for a moment, I think she’s going to hug me. But of course she doesn’t. I’m imagining things. “I got a message from your school,” she says.

“You did?” My heart races a little. Since I don’t have parents, Laura is the one who gets any news from the school about me, but usually there is no news to receive because I don’t cause any trouble.

“About the dance,” she says, waiting for me to say something.

“I didn’t go to the assembly,” I admit, worried. Could that really matter? Suddenly I feel nervous.
No. No complications. I have to leave tonight
. “But it’s not mandatory.”

“They voted you as one of the stars!” Laura says, beaming.

“That can’t be right,” I say.

“It is,” she tells me. “You have to go to the dance. They’re saving your crown for you.”

A joke. It has to be. The opening line is perfect:
What happens when an Untouchable comes to a dance?

I can see myself now, standing in the middle of the room, burning too hot to touch, a star with nothing in orbit and black empty space around her.