Falling into Forever (7 page)

“You're just not used to being around so much nature, city girl,” Alexandra offered as her eyes were drawn to the attic window under the roof. She thought it best not to mention the rustling attic curtains to Taylor as the car pulled up to the house.

In front of the porch, brown and red cobblestones paved a circular roundabout where a long, white Cadillac sedan sat parked. From a rocker on the wide front porch, Granny June waved at the girls.

“Look, Ian. They're back,” she said to her visitor.

“Who is that?” Taylor whispered in Alexandra's ear as she skipped past her and up the porch steps, her right hand extended to greet him. Damp and exhausted, Alexandra trudged behind, mustering a smile.

“What happened to you?” Granny June asked as she patted Alexandra's tangled hair.

“She decided to go for a swim,” Taylor said, giggling.

“Goodness gracious,” said Granny June as she sat back down in the white wooden rocker. “You remember Ian, don't you, Alex? He knew my brother.”

“Of course,” said Alexandra. “It's nice to see you again.”

The white-haired man in a light-blue seersucker suit removed his straw hat and held it to his chest as he shook her hand. “You grow lovelier every time I see you,” he said in a lilting British accent as he cupped his left hand over their joined palms. “And you must be Miss Woodward,” he said, turning to Taylor.

“It's a pleasure,” she said, shaking his hand.

“Captain Brad invited us to a beach party tonight,” Alexandra announced to her grandmother as she inched toward the front door.

“That sounds lovely,” said Granny June.

“Are you feeling all right?” asked Ian, gazing on Alexandra's face. She noticed the look of concern that flashed in his gray eyes.

“Ian is a retired doctor,” explained Granny June.

“I know,” said Alexandra. “I think I need to lie down for a little while. That's all,” she said, pushing her shoulder against the faded-red front door.

“'Bye,” chirped Taylor as she followed Alexandra into the house.

“What do you think?” June asked as Ian sat back down beside her.

“She is only seventeen, June,” Ian noted, sipping his glass of iced tea. “That makes it difficult to decipher what powers she may be aware of at this point.”

“Yes,” nodded June. “I remember that just before Jonathan left on the plane for Frankfurt, he called me and said there was all the time in the world to worry about the future. He felt that Alexandra was still too young— that maybe it would take years for her to grow into her powers, if she had them at all.”

“We really don't know yet,” Ian agreed.

“In the woods today, I saw Jasmine,” June said.

“Stop it, June,” he scoffed. “I don't know why you give any credence to what that crazy old voodoo witch says.

She's only still here because you allow it.”

June rocked her chair furiously against the wooden porch. “I know,” she told him. “But she scares me,” she said, picking up her glass of sweet tea from the low table beside her and taking another sip. “You know, the night before Joseph left here for West Point, he told me that he was frightened. He knew there would be a war, and he guessed that he might not make it out of that war alive.

“That was the night he decided to tell me he could see things that happened a long time ago. Good things—but sometimes bad things, too. I asked him if it happened when he did this.”

June put down her glass, reached out, and pressed her hand against Ian's palm.

“Joey told me yes, and he asked me how I knew. I told him that it was the same with me, and that nanny Jasmine considered it a gift. He also revealed to me that our dad had told him once about having his palm read by a gypsy.”

Ian leaned forward, curious. “What did the gypsy see in Charles's palm?”

“Well,” said June, “it wasn't your run-of-the-mill fortune. She said to our dad, ‘Your family will be hunted for their souls. Be kind or reap the price. Their children will have eyes, as will their children and their children's children. A man is waiting—an old man—for them to be born, and a witch is waiting for them to die.'”

June paused and looked for a moment at the ocean. “My brother said that he didn't want to see things, but that the visions collapsed upon him”—she motioned to the beach—“like waves breaking on the shore.”

Ian nodded.

“I told him that nanny Jasmine did not want me to say anything to Momma and Poppa about this gift, so we never did.”

The two sat quietly, watching the silent trees, still hand in hand.

Upstairs, Taylor stretched herself across her bed while she typed furiously on her cell's keyboard.

In her own room, Alexandra stripped off her damp clothes and climbed into a hot shower, hoping to wash away the cold shivers quaking through her body from her unplanned swim. Frazzled, she closed her eyes tightly as the water poured over her head. Again, she tried to relax and think about something else. She tried to picture the dolphin swimming next to the sailboat. But all she could remember was the frightening image that she saw before she fell: the reflection of a strange man's figure standing over her shoulder.

The shower warmed her skin, and she put on a tee and jeans before throwing herself across the bed. But she was too frayed to sleep. Tossing and turning, she gave up and slipped on a pair of pink rubber flip-flops that she dug out from the bottom of her duffel. There was one thing she was curious about, that she just had to check out. As she cracked open her door a bit, it squeaked. She peeked both ways down the deserted hallway. Slipping quietly from her doorway, she stepped lightly toward the attic at the end of the corridor. The doorknob did not turn when she tried it.

“Locked,” she said to herself, her toes curling in a blast of cool air flowing from underneath the attic door.

Slipping to the floor on her belly, she laid herself flat against the smooth wooden planks and peeked underneath the door. Her heart thumped when she noticed something pressed up against the other side of the door. When her fingers could not stretch far enough under the door, she took off her right flip-flop and pushed the curious object out into the hallway.

She held the thin wooden picture frame up to her eyes to see the faces through the cracked glass. It was a black-and-white photograph of a young woman holding an infant as she stood next to a man in a US Army dress uniform. Alexandra's fingers struggled to unclasp the back of the frame. Sitting at the doorway, she turned the picture over in her hands. Yanking it gently out of the fragile frame, she read the names handwritten in fading, smeared ink:
Joseph, June, and Baby Jonathan, October 1950
. She flipped the photograph back over to look at the infant cradled in her grandmother's arms.

“Boo!” Taylor squealed behind Alexandra as she tapped her on the shoulder. Startled by her friend, Alexandra dropped the frame to the floor where it clanked against the hardwood planks. “What's that?” asked Taylor, peeking at the photograph still clutched in Alexandra's trembling hand.

“I found it,” said Alexandra, slumped against the attic door.

Taylor reached around her and tried the doorknob. “Wait here,” she said, running down the hallway to her room. In seconds, she scampered back, waving a bobby pin in the air. “Watch this,” she said as she pried open the lock.

A squeak echoed through the attic stairway as Taylor pushed open the door. “Where did you learn how to do that?” asked Alexandra.

“I read about it on the internet, duh,” she answered. “My evil stepmother Krystal tried to padlock me out of her closet full of Louboutin heels, but I showed her,” Taylor revealed triumphantly, hissing the name of her father's second wife. The girls tiptoed up the steep stairwell to the attic.

When they reached the top of the steps, a blast of wind from the open window above the mattress hit their faces. The breeze swirled around the tight room and stirred its musty, rotten smell into their noses. Spotting a dangling cord in the middle of the room, Taylor yanked it until a bare bulb came alive above their heads.

“It's gone,” said Taylor, pointing enigmatically at the mattress under the window. “The doll, I mean,” she explained. “Where's the doll?” She looked around the cramped place. “Maybe it's under here,” she said, picking up the blanket lying atop the mattress. She shook it in the air, dust scattering throughout the room.

In the corner across from the mattress, Alexandra knelt to the floor as she rubbed her fingers across the lid of a large metal chest with the name
J. Peyton
scratched into the surface.

“Look,” exclaimed Taylor, staring at the floor underneath where she had shaken out the blanket. “I told you,” she announced, holding a sharp tooth up to the light. “What do you think it belonged to, Alex?”

“Probably to a rabid poodle,” teased Alexandra, her hands fumbling with the padlock on the footlocker.

“I can take care of that,” said Taylor confidently, pocketing the tooth as she once more waved the bobby pin in the air and sat down at the box.

Alexandra hovered over Taylor's shoulder as Taylor shoved the metal pin into the lock and whipped the pin violently back and forth. As Alexandra patiently observed Taylor work, a howl from deep in the woods beyond the house shot through the open window.

“Did you hear that?” Taylor asked as she popped open the lid of the chest.

“Yeah,” said Alexandra, staring at the opened front of the rusted metal box.

“Perhaps it's Dixie,” Taylor said jokingly. “Maybe something is eating that stupid dog somewhere out in the woods.”

Alexandra rifled through the chest and delicately retrieved the treasures, one at a time. Inside she found an army uniform adorned with metals and ribbons, a pair of boots, and an army officer's dress hat. At the bottom of the chest, she spotted a leather-bound journal and grabbed it anxiously.

The pages began with scribbled diary entries dating to 1944, the year her Uncle Joseph had spent in combat against the Germans in the final days of World War II. There wasn't too much detail that Alexandra knew about her uncle, only the little that Granny June had told her. Flipping further through the book, Alexandra saw the handwriting grow shaky and the words dwindle to one per page. “Horror. Madman. Fire,” she read aloud. On the final page, she stared at a drawing: a man with wings growing from his back and spewing fire from his mouth.

“That's freaky,” shuddered Taylor as she peeked over Alexandra's shoulder at the illustration.

Suddenly, Granny June's voice bellowed behind them, “What are you two doing?” she demanded. They turned and saw her at the top of the attic steps.

“Nothing,” said Alexandra as she quickly shoved the journal back into the chest. Her face flushed red.

“Those things belonged to my brother Joseph,” Granny June said. She stepped toward the girls. Taylor swiftly removed the officer's cap from her head.

“I'm sorry, Granny,” Alexandra admitted anxiously, her heart pounding. “I didn't mean to disturb anything.”

“I've told you about him, have I not?” Granny June said. “He was an army officer, handsome and brilliant.” Granny June was frowning.

“So why don't you talk about him?” Alexandra asked innocently. “I think it's cool. My uncle, the war hero.”

Granny June stared at the round window as its curtains billowed in the sea breeze. “He was never the same after the war, Alex. He never told me what happened to him in the conflict, and I learned after a time not to ask. I just accepted that my dear brother would have a troubled soul.”

“What happened to him after he came home?” asked Taylor.

“He died in a hunting accident out in the woods,” said Granny June, gazing toward the window. “Joseph was hunting with our dad early one morning not long after that picture was taken. They were determined to find the fox that was killing and eating our chickens.” She paused for a moment, looked at the girls, and then she continued. “That was a few months after your dad was born, Alexandra. I was hanging the laundry out on the line when I heard my dad crashing out of the forest, yelling that Joseph was dead. It felt like time stood still. When the deputies arrived, they all went back into the forest to get the body. They carried him out of the woods, and I saw a hole in his chest where his heart should have been.”

“Gross,” Taylor said.

Granny June placed her hand on the girl's shoulder and looked her in the eyes. “My brother would not want his things disturbed,” she said softly. “Please put them back in his footlocker.” Then she turned toward the attic steps.

Alexandra deftly placed the journal on the floor at the side of the box. She helped Taylor fold the uniform and place the boots and cap back into the metal box. “I think I'm going to be sick,” she said to Taylor as she stood, hiding the journal behind her back.

“You do look a little green. Why don't you go lie down?” Taylor suggested as they walked down the narrow attic steps together. “Get some rest. Remember, we are so not going to miss the party tonight.”

“Wake me up in a bit,” Alexandra told Taylor as she shut the door to her room behind her.

Alone in her bedroom, Alexandra pulled the curtains shut and laid down on the bed with her eyes closed tight, but her stomach rocked back and forth as it had on the sailboat. Dragging herself to the bathroom, she stood over the sink and stared at her eyes, puffy from the salt water. She clung to the sink pedestal as her legs swayed beneath her, but her grip failed, and she collapsed to the tile floor.

She had succumbed to an infinite blackness. Yet she could see a man floating in front of her. A dark robe clung to his body. He pulled the hood back from his head to reveal fangs in his gaping mouth. He pursed his lips and spit. A ball of fire flew toward her. She flung up her hands to shield her face, but the flames engulfed her body.