The Mirrors of Fate (29 page)

No
, was the response she gave to herself.
I don’t know him. I never did.

She eyed the man who wished to see her dead. “Kill me, David.”

David silently studied her.

“
Kill me. Kill me and get it over with. Whatever chess game you’re playing, make a move!”

He took a step forward. Oh God, but wait! She wanted him to know one thing before he did this. One thing she had to say if it weren’t for this fear clogging her throat because of the way he came toward her.

Get it out! Spit it out, Maria!

She shut her eyes. “I’m sorry about Emma.” She stood there for a few seconds, expecting and waiting to be assaulted. But when nothing happened after some time, she opened her eyes to mere slits and saw he had stopped. His body became rigid and his expression cold.

Trapped air escaped her lungs in an unseen breath of relief, relief not that she had spared herself trouble, but that she had freed her soul of guilt. What was to happen next? What would he do to her?

Everyone downstairs had by now heard the commotion. Scampering footsteps were coming up the staircase. What would he do now? They looked at each other. She waited to see how he would get himself out of this one.

But David had already figured it all out.

Maria’s bedroom door flew open. Mrs. Singh screamed at the sight of her bloody son and began shouting obscenities. Maria’s father, mother, and Aunt Seema were ready to yell, but before confusion and pandemonium had real time to develop, David lifted a hand and silenced them all.

* * * * *

CHAPTER TEN

Time is a force beyond the control of man. An element of constant progression, time cannot be manipulated to move backward, to the unseen future, or halted like in science fiction movies. She’d heard time described as a line; she’d heard it described as a dimension, similar to the dimensions of space. If one could somehow find a way to bend the elements of space to one’s will, then one could stop time as well, couldn’t one? If someone knew how to take that line—because he or she knew for sure it was a line—and somehow bend it, twist it, maybe tape two halves together after bending it and it broke, then that would be manipulating time, wouldn’t it? Then everything would be plausible. Isn’t that what happened in the room?

Maria tried to wrap her strange reasoning around the unexplainable predicament, desperate to find a relatively practical answer to the fine line crossed, where reality now met the impossible.

“
I’m so glad I left this world a long time ago,” David said, his irritation fading away with the newly added peace. “People here make far too much noise.”

Maria stared in trembling terror at the cold, unmoving statues of her family and the Singhs. It had happened so suddenly. One minute they were yelling at the top of their lungs, and now they were stuck in their formerly animated expressions and movements, resembling stiff wax figurines. Their motions had been halted as if someone had pressed a universal pause button.

It had to be a dream. The blinking of an eye was all it took for such transformation to occur. With the effortless and mere lifting of his hand, David had silenced them all, creating a thick stillness which only she and David were not a part of.

Maria’s gaze searched around the room, her brain trying to find explanation for this phenomenon. She had been holding back a scream for much too long now, and finally when she let one go from the depths of her diaphragm, it was loud, piercing, and terror-filled. In her confusion she stumbled backward, toppling over a frozen Louie who was still at her feet. Maria sat up slowly and gingerly touched his hard shell of a face.

“
What did you do to them? Did you do this? Tell me!”

“
Well, I can’t take all the credit,” he said.

Without thinking, Maria sprang to her feet with fists ready, but she threw a failed out-of-range punch which he easily avoided by tilting his head to the side and snatching her wrist in mid-air.

“
Maybe you should think about calming down,” he suggested with hard eyes.

“
What did you do?!” she shrieked. “Tell me!”

“
You really want answers, don’t you? Is that what you want?”

“
You sick maniac. Stop wasting my time!”

He looked at her seriously. “Come on then, if you think you can handle it.”

“
Will you tell me everything? Everything?”

“
If that’s what you want,” he said.

Together they left the bedroom and she soon found herself in front of him in the living room. She sat in his presence on the couch across from him, quiet, still and extremely observant of him. The living room table separated them, and on it, a single red folder. For a time he was silent, delicately flipping through it and sorting the papers inside with a sentimental slowness. When he had first revealed the folder hidden within the depths of his red jacket, she became fascinated by it as if it were some important historical artifact.

What secrets did this one thing hold? Could the folder explain his appearance, which even now as she looked right at him, still left her in complete awe because of its radical changes? Could it explain who he really was, who David Chin really was? Who could transform from looking so delicate, untouched and virgin, to wild, rough and stained? The scar etched into his face, deep and prominent now, gave him an untamed presence.

“
Who is Emma Chin, Maria?” He posed the question mechanically without looking at her.

Maria’s mind could not form an answer immediately. Her shoulders tensed with the start of his judgment and interrogation. The only thing she could do was yield to it and yield to him.

“
Emma is...Emma Chin was your little sister.”

“
Who
is Emma Chin, Maria.
To you.
”

He wanted an answer of more substance and somehow she had expected that. But what did he want her to say? Did it matter how she phrased it?

“
Emma was, she was, a little girl I used to visit when I did community service in school. She had been in an accident and lost all control of her legs. She was my...I don’t know what else to say. She and I spent a lot of time together when I used to see her. That’s all I can tell you, really.”

A twitch of the eye revealed the answer just barely satisfied him. “Two months after you left her,” David began, “Emma, my baby sister died. When I learned about it, I briefly came to White Crest. She was a perfectly healthy girl who died of circumstances deemed ‘mysterious’ and also ‘unexplainable’ by health officials and police.”

He took out a newspaper clipping and pushed it over to her on the table. She slowly took up the paper and looked at the bold writing: “YOUNG PATIENT AT WHITE CREST HOSPITAL DIES OF STRANGE NEW HEALTH CONDITION.”

“
Read it aloud,” he demanded, eyes on her.

She obeyed timidly. “A...A young patient at White Crest City Hospital...died mysteriously last night of what Dr. Grant Roberts says may be a new health condition that has them baffled. At 11:59 p.m. on July 30, a 7-yr-old girl, Emma Chin, who had made the hospital a home after being admitted following a car accident resulting in the deaths of her immediate family, was found in her room on the floor in a rigid state of paralysis and clutching her hand at her h-heart.” As she read, her throat tightened with dryness. “One patient, who wished to remain anonymous, said the girl’s eyes were ‘opened as wide as saucers. She looked like she had died of fright’? What is this?”

“
Keep reading, Maria.”

“
No, wait—”

“
Shut up and read, damn it!”

“
T-Through immediate autopsy, doctors were left in a state of shock when they discovered the girl’s condition was not the result of heart attack, seizure, or stroke, but that the girl’s body temperature was, without medical explanation, ‘unsurvivably low.’” Maria nearly dropped the paper. “W-What?”

“
Keep going. It gets even better.”

“
H-Her heart,” she stumbled back into reading, “and one third of her chest cavity and lungs were frozen, cutting blood and oxygen flow and killing her quickly. The icicles found surrounding her heart have doctors baffled. Dr. Kenneth Golding says there were no signs or symptoms that could have predicted or provided any explanation for this strange occurrence. Hospital administration wondered if this was a sign of a new epidemic. Religious hospital patients disagree with this theory. Many persons of Catholic and Evangelical faith in the hospital feel this has nothing to do with physical ailment, but something on a more supernatural level. One avid church-going nurse who tended to the girl said she had psychiatric problems accompanying her condition. She often spoke of her deceased brother in present tense and said she was anxious for the day she would get to see him again, not in reference to heaven or an after-life, and despite facts concluding all her family died in the accident. Pediatric nurse Nancy Jones who tended to the girl said she constantly had hallucinations, one in particular of a ‘strange, scary man dressed in a black cloak and hood’ who tried to get her at night. Jones said the girl’s death was of ‘no shock’ to her. ‘The young girl knew she was going to die. She was very scared of this man—or
thing
in a black coat that wanted to take her. It was the same thing that took her family, she would often say. I am a believer in Satan and demons, and I believe that’s what took the child. In the last days I tended to her, every day she just got sadder and’”—Maria felt her heart squeeze in her chest—“‘and more inhibited. It’s like she wasted away, and then this happened. I just hope she is in a better place now.’ Doctors deny any claims about the little girl’s psychiatric problems and are studying her body in hopes of discovering what killed this young victim.”

Maria’s fingers trembled as she placed the article in her lap. Too many emotions crept up on her and much too suddenly. How could this have happened to someone she knew? Talked with? Spent time with? The article sent violent chills coursing through her; hidden and forgotten things stirred up within her.

“
What’s the matter? Too much to stomach at once? Does isolated White Crest have you scared? Or was it the description of my sister that was troubling?”

Maria suddenly closed her eyes. Something sprang out of her—a memory. She remembered her last conversation with Emma.

Maria...I don’t want what got Mommy and Daddy to get me too.

Maria took a shaky breath. She had already dealt with the initial shock earlier that day of finding out Emma had died. Why this now? Two years ago that little girl had said someone was after her. But it was a hallucination. It had to be.

“
I didn’t know. I didn’t know any of this.”

“
You chose not to know.”

Her eyes lifted from the ground and watched him. “What?”

“
I, who was not in White Crest, came later and found this out. You, who were here in this small city all this time, did not know?”

She looked at him, fearing his judging eyes. “I...I didn’t know. I swear I didn’t know!”

Those deep pools of brown focused on her, tearing her apart. “Your swears mean nothing to me.”

Anguish threatened to rip her apart. She did not know. She had never known this! And yet...why? Why had she never seen this article before? Why had no one at school ever spoken of it? Why had a rumor never flown through the air? Never could anything have been printed about Emma like this!

“
I didn’t know she died like this! I didn’t!”

“
That’s the beauty of this place,” he said gravely. “Many things go unnoticed, or uncared about. It didn’t help either that they retracted the article and others just like it soon after. But what difference would it have made if you knew or not? Or even saw this article?” He posed the questions to her with the unleashing of deadly, reserved venom. “You probably wouldn’t have remembered who the person was, or cared for that matter. You would have looked it over as if it were nothing, as people usually do when reading about someone else’s pain.”

“
Of course I would have cared,” she defended with tears in her eyes. Her lip was quivering. “Anyone with a heart would care after reading something like this. Why are you showing me this? Do you think I...caused her death?”

His eyes were deep and penetrating when he said, “Not directly, but indirectly. And let me tell you, when you’ve dealt with as much shit as I have these past few years”—he laughed in spite of himself—“you’ll be quick to blame the slightest person with
any
involvement.”

His tone became quieter, more reflective when he continued. “Almost three years ago, my family and I were in a car crash.” He feathered his fingers down his scar. “And that’s how I got this. Along with the other on my back. My parents died instantly. My sister Emma became paralyzed. Emma was the
only
thing I had left in the world. She, on the other hand, had nothing. She lost everything dear to her, and all at once. She was so young to deal with it all, but she had to because neither I, nor our parents could be there for her anymore. Then she was sent away to White Crest City Hospital, a place where doctors care more about getting paid by your health insurance or good Samaritans rather than seeing a patient improve. She was all alone until you came along.”