Remember Me (21 page)

I was not cautious enough.

I fainted and began to dream myself....

The parlor was dimly lit. Dull buff-colored curtains had taken the place of the walls, and if I'd looked up I knew I wouldn't have cared to see the ceiling. The furniture was Victorian, old and splintered, and the forlorn statues that haunted the four corners were dismembered remnants from forgotten places.

At the far end of the room, propped up in an overstuffed rocking chair in front of a large crystal ball, sat the witch.

It was Jo, clothed in a stained and ragged black gown, an ancient Jo of many wrinkles and aching bones, who had seen the best years of her life wither away with the burden of the knowledge that she had lost everything of value in her youth.

Her expression was a mask of deep secrets, but I recognized it for the lie it was and was not afraid. She knew nothing of significance. She didn't even remember my name, although I remembered her clearly. She raised a bony finger and bid me approach. I was there to have my fortune read.

"Have a seat, child," she said in a tired voice, making an effort at a smile but coming up short. I sat before her on a low brown stool. Two squat red candles stood on either side of her crystal ball, their smoky flames watching each other through a prism of polished glass. The woman regarded me with flat hazel eyes.

"What concerns you?" she asked.

I had die question prepared and already knew its answer it was part of a play.

"I want to know if I will live a long and happy life," I said.

She thought it was a silly question for one as young as myself. She leaned toward me, and now she smiled. "Yes."

"You're sure?"

"Yes, child, you have no need to worry." She held out her left hand. "Ten dollars, please."

"Look in your crystal ball," I said.

"It is not necessary. I can see your destiny in your face."

"But I want you to."

She cocked her head to the side. "What is your name?"

"My name is not important," I said, doing my best not to sound rude. I gestured to her ball, feeling my confidence grow. "I've heard your magic is very powerful."

She withdrew her money-seeking hand and nodded. "You have heard correctly."

"Friends of mine said you told them exactly what was going to happen to them.

And it happened."

"Who are these people?" she asked.

"Just friends. They had great respect for you. You told one of them he would live to an old age and be miserable all his life. And he did."

She started to get suspicious. "But you are young. How is it that you have old friends?"

I shrugged. "I get around. I've met many interesting people. I once knew this extraordinary girl. She was in a state of pure joy all the time." I added, "Pure bliss. She came to you for a reading."

The old lady sat back uneasily. "I remember no such person."

"I can understand how you might have forgotten. Actually, she wasn't that happy. She was as miserable as my other friend. I think you were a little off on her reading. Are you sure you don't remember seeing her?"

"No."

"You gave her a nickname," I said.

"What nickname?"

"It was—oh, I've forgotten. It doesn't matter." I pointed to the glass ball again.

"Please, tell me my fortune."

"I've already told you."

"But you haven't looked in the crystal. Come on, I'll pay you double. Twenty dollars."

She was undecided. Twenty dollars was obviously a lot of money to her. "Why did all your friends come to see me?"

"They didn't. You came to them."

"Tell me some of their names," she said.

"What for? They're all dead now."

"How did they die?" she asked.

"You know. You told them how they would die. They were old like you are. They died of old age."

She clasped her hands together to keep them from shaking and glanced down at the dry and cracked flesh of her fingers.

She was beginning to remember. "Who are you?" she whispered.

I smiled. "A friend."

She closed her eyes. "I've never met you before."

"Look in the crystal." I put my hand over hers and squeezed gently. "I'll pay you triple."

"What do you want to know?" There was fear in her voice.

"How I'm going to die." I squeezed harder. "Open your eyes, old woman. Look in the crystal."

She looked. She had to. I moved my grip on her frail hands to the top of her brittle skull and forced her to look. I was through playing with her. I lowered my gaze and peered through the other side, seeing her lifeless hazel eyes, poor imitations of my clear green eyes, and her tired parched mouth, pressed to the surface of the ball so tightly that I wondered if she were able to breathe, if I wasn't in fact smothering her. I wanted to kill her right then, but I also realized that it would be a mistake to do so before I learned what I had come for. I loosened my grip on her head slightly, expecting her to pull her lips off the glass and catch her breath.

It didn't happen that way.

Things started to get confused. Suddenly, I couldn't tell what I was holding on to. I worried that I had shifted my hands too far forward. The rough scalp of sparse hair had disappeared beneath my fingers. Now I was touching glass. I was holding on to the crystal ball.

The old woman was inside it.

She was dead. I had killed her. A long time ago. She was dead and now decayed beyond recognition. Staring into the glass, I saw a white skull that a swarm of insects could have picked clean. But the top of the skull was badly cracked, and somehow that didn't fit. Jo had never been shoved off a balcony.

It was I who had died that way.

All of a sudden, I was very afraid and in terrible pain. I couldn't get my hands off the damn ball. Somehow, the candles had become attached to the side of the glass, heating the crystal to an intolerable level, and the flesh of my fingers was melting and sticking, and no matter how hard I pulled, I couldn't get them off.

I began to scream.

I still didn't know how bad it could get.

What happened next— It wasn't good. I began to lurch about the parlor, trying to knock the crystal ball with the old woman's skull inside it out of my dissolving hands. It was almost, but not quite, like burning in hell. To be there, I thought, I would have had to be inside the ball.

I should never have considered the possibility.

It happened next. I don't know who put me inside. I guess it was myself. Events were unfolding with perverse irony.

People had always said that Jo and I looked like sisters. And when I had peered through the crystal ball and seen the old face on the other side, it had been like looking into another mirror. I had seen myself as I would have appeared if I'd lived to an old age.

I hadn't lived, though, and my dream wasn't an ordinary dream a mortal girl could have survived with her sanity intact. I found myself careening wildly around the parlor, surrounded by flames, with my hands locked on top of my cracked skull. The dance went on forever and a moment. I heard devils applauding.

Then I heard Jo cry out to her mother.

I came to on the floor beside Jo's bed. A bundle of typed sheets lay scattered around my knees, the pages of Peter's story about the girl who could videotape the future. They had been sitting in a neat pile on Jo's nightstand when I entered the room. Jo must have knocked them down. It couldn't have been me; I was no poltergeist, and besides, my hands were clamped to the top of my head. I practically had to pry them loose. I thanked God I was awake.

Jo was sitting up in bed crying. Her mother was by her side, holding on to her.

Jo was close to hysterics.

"Shari says I killed her!" she raved. "She blames me for pushing her off the balcony! But I didn't, Mom. I swear I didn't!"

“Jo.”

"She thinks I murdered her!"

"Shh, honey, no." Mrs. Foulton hugged her daughter to her chest. "Shari was your friend.

She couldn't blame you."

"She does! She came back to tell me she does! She grabbed my head and tried to stick me in a crystal ball! It was horrible! There was a skull grinning at me, and I was burning!"

"Jo, it was only a bad dream."

"No, it was real! She was really here! I kept telling her, I didn't kill you! I didn't kill you!

I told her a thousand times! Why wouldn't she listen to me?" Her head collapsed on her mother's shoulder, and she moaned softly. "I wouldn't have hurt her for anything. I loved her."

Mrs. Fbulton held her at arm's length, staring into her face. Jo was not calming down. Her nightgown was soaked with sweat. I kept waiting for Mrs. Foulton to say something, to reassure Jo some more. But in the end, all she did was hug her daughter again and say, "You were the lucky one. She knew how you felt."

My guilt was a miserable thing. I understood more clearly why Peter had insisted I leave the living alone. I was becoming a nightmare for all of them. I don't know how I could have suspected Jo.

But if she hadn't killed me, if none of them had killed me, then that must mean that I had

...

I couldn't say it; I couldn't even think it.

I was standing to leave, to jump out the open window headfirst if that would have helped to get away from it all, when I heard the desperate cry. It came to me through my mind, not my ears. It was still loud and clear.

"Shari! Help me! It's after me!"

It was Peter.

JL FOUND HIM not four blocks away, cowering at the end of an alley behind a trash can. His call had led me to him like a cosmic homing beacon. I had run the whole way. But when he saw me, he waved frantically for me to stand back.

"Don't move," he cried.

I froze, knowing he must be talking about the Shadow. Yet I saw nothing. Even more important, I sensed nothing.

Always before, the Shadow had announced its arrival by filling me with dread.

"Where is it?" I whispered.

He nodded in the direction of a green garbage bin that stood between us against a grimy brick wall, his eyes wide with fright. I could actually hear his rapid breathing.

But there was nothing there.

"Peter?" I said.

He put his finger to his lips to silence me and began to creep toward the wall that blocked the rear of the alley. He obviously was going to try to make a run for it, and this was a guy who could beam himself to the top of the Himalayas at a moment's notice.

He was halfway up the wall when I grabbed his foot. That was a mistake.

Letting out a yelp, he kicked me in the face and scampered over the wall out of sight. I went after him, clearing the wall with far more ease than he had.

"Peter!" I cried.

It took me less than a block to catch up with him. It amazed me; in real life he could have easily outrun me. And as an experienced dead person, he had far more powers to draw on than I had. It was as if he was suddenly handicapped.

"Would you stop!" I said, grabbing hold of him in much the same way he had grabbed me after my flight from the cemetery. He fought me off.

"It's coming."

"No," I said.

"We've got to keep going!"

I had said the very same words. Leaping onto his back, I tried to slow him down. "There's nothing there!" I yelled.

He threw me off, and I landed on my butt on top of a manhole cover. But a glance over his shoulder made him pause. "Where is it?"

"God knows," I replied. He continued to search the street for a full minute.

Finally, though, he drew in a deep breath and relaxed.

"It's gone," he said.

"It was never there," I said.

He looked down at me. "How would you know?"

"I knew before. What gives?"

He turned away. "Never mind."

I jumped up. "No, tell me. Why is it I couldn't see it just now? And why couldn't you see it in the cemetery?"

He stopped. "You don't want to know."

"Why do you call it the Shadow? Is there a different one for each of us?"

He closed his eyes briefly at my question, and I believed it scared him almost as much as the thing he imagined had been chasing him. "Yes," he said finally.

I let go of his arm and sat down on the curb. We were near the corner of Baker and Third.

A memory of the place tugged at a corner of my mind, but I forced it back. I had more pressing concerns. "What is it?" I asked.

He sat beside me. He wouldn't look at me, only up at the sky. It was as if he wished he could get up there and far from all earthly concerns. Although the sun couldn't have been far away, the stars were very bright, the colors pretty.

"It is the worst thing we could ever have to face," he said.

"It is ourselves."

"I don't understand."

He smiled at the remark, a weary smile; he could have been running from it since the day he died. "I would give you a long, involved explanation if I knew one, Shari. Maybe it would cover up what I don't understand, or how I lied to you about it in the first place."

"Peter?"

He kept his focus upward. "There is a different Shadow for each of us. While we live in the world, it is with us all the time. It colors our thoughts, how we feel, how we see others, and even how others see us. But it is not different from us.

It is a part of us. It is with us from birth. We simply add to it as we grow. It is the product of our experience on earth. It is the sum of our thoughts and feelings."

"Then why is it so horrible?" I asked.

"It is not horrible in and of itself. It is only horrible to the person it belongs to.

When you come face to face with it, you see yourself as you really are."

"But I wasn't that rotten a person while I was alive." I thought of what Daniel had started to tell me before the memory of my cracked head had made him sick. "Was I?"

"No, you were fine. But like most people, you refused to accept yourself as fine.

In the presence of the Shadow, any judgment you hold against yourself is magnified a million fold."

"Is that why I felt such hatred from it when it was near?"

"Yes," he said.

"But you've said that if I go into the light, I will escape from it. How can I escape from myself?"