Endless (13 page)

Jenny was relieved when the train finally pulled into the Stony Creek station. She had spent the whole ride sure the monk was watching her, even though every time she turned around, he was in the exact same position, eyes still closed.

She followed Ben down the aisle as the train came to a halt amidst a squeal of brakes on hot metal. Bracing herself with the metal pole near the door, she looked down to see another hand doing the same. She glanced back, already sure it was the monk. No one had boarded their car the rest of the trip.

He looked different standing up. Taller and more imposing. She saw herself reflected in his dark brown eyes. He didn’t smile or acknowledge her in any way, and she turned around, weirded out all over again and mentally urging the doors to open.

Her gaze was pulled to the hand near hers, her eyes catching sight of a ring on the monk’s finger. It was silver with stars engraved on the band. But that wasn’t the thing that really got her attention. It was the large moon, the face of a watchful man etched into its center. There was something ominous and maybe even a little familiar about it.

She didn’t have time to figure it out. A moment later, the doors opened and Ben was on the concrete platform, looking at her like she’d lost it. She had no idea how long she’d stood there, her eyes fixed on the ring, paranoia seeping into her mind like a stain.

“You coming?” Ben asked.

She nodded, pulling her hand from the pole and stepping off the train. They made their way to the truck, Jenny forcing herself not to look back. Not to follow the monk with her eyes. She wondered if he had really been watching her or if she was just losing it. She felt a panicked kind of relief when she finally slid into the truck. The way she sometimes felt when she took the trash out at night and became sure someone was in the trees watching her. She would force herself to walk calmly to the kitchen door, but inside, she wanted to run.

“So … what now?” Jenny asked as Ben climbed into the driver’s seat.

Ben sighed, turning the key in the ignition. “I’m going to see if I can find out more about the uncle who left my mom the house. If Eben’s right, maybe the music box belonged to someone in my family. I’ll see if my mom knows anything about it.”

Jenny nodded. “If you want, I can do some research on hypnosis and stuff. We can compare … ” Her voice trailed off as a sleek black car made its way past them.

“We can compare … ?” Ben prodded. And then, when she didn’t answer right away, “Jenny?”

She shook her head, her eyes glued on the car. Not just the car. Not even the monks, the one from the train in the passenger seat and the one who was driving, visible behind the slightly tinted glass. It was the symbol on the side of the car. A moon with the face of a man, just like the one on the monk’s ring.

“That symbol … ”

Ben followed her gaze. “On the car?”

“I feel like I’ve seen it before,” Jenny said.

“Aren’t those the monks from that retreat center up on the mountain?” Ben put the truck into gear.

“I don’t know.” She faced forward again as the black car disappeared from view. “I guess so.”

“Maybe you’ve seen it around,” he suggested. “You know, when the monks come to town and stuff? I saw a couple at the General once.”

“Yeah, maybe … ” She took a deep breath, talking herself down. Ben was right. The monks had been around Stony Creek forever. She’d probably seen the symbol a million times and was only noticing it now because she was so freaked out about everything else.

Ben pulled out of the parking lot and onto the road. Jenny’s mind twisted and turned through everything that had happened in the past few days. All at once, her predictably weird life had stumbled into unpredictable territory. Her reaction to the symbol on the monk’s ring tipped everything into now-you’re-really-going-crazy territory.

She needed to get a grip. And the sooner, the better.

She rolled down the window a little more, letting the warm breeze hit her face along with the smell of fresh-cut grass and the moist fertile soil of the local farms. Glancing over at Ben, she was surprised to find him watching her. He smiled before turning his eyes back to the road. It made her feel normal. Like they were just regular teenagers out for a drive. She relaxed back into her seat, letting the tension leave her body.

They hit Main Street and passed through town without stopping. The people of Stony Creek were a catalog of Jenny’s visions. There was Bill Henderson from the hardware store who, in an effort to sell her a new tape measure, had reached for it at the same time as Jenny. In an instant, she’d seen him marching in a line of other men, tied to them with rope, people crying along the sides of the road.

And there were more. Miss Miller, Albert Rooney, Sarah Cryer, Megan Lee … Jenny had seen something with every one of them at one point or another.

So many people. So much sadness.

Their pain was etched indelibly on her soul. She could call up the visions she’d had when touching them with a moment’s notice, even though she’d seen some of them years and years before. Tiffany’s mom was right.

It was a burden.

“Hey.” Ben spoke quietly beside her as they left Main Street behind, heading toward the outskirts of town. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” She tried to smile. To get back the peace she’d had just a few minutes before. “I’m just tired.”

“I know what you mean,” he said, turning the truck onto the long road leading to Jenny’s house. “I’m beat.”

He pulled into Jenny’s drive. The trees on either side blocked out the late summer sun, turning everything darker with the lacy shade that filtered through the leaves. It made the familiar road seem menacing somehow.

Ben pulled up to the garage. Jenny felt a twinge of guilt when she saw her dad’s car. She hadn’t even texted him to let him know where she was going.

“Thanks for coming with me,” Ben said.

She turned to him. “No problem. I want to say I had fun,” she said, continuing, “but I’m not sure that’s the word I’m looking for.”

He laughed nervously, running a hand through his hair. “No kidding. Let’s just say it’s been interesting.”

She nodded. “‘Interesting’ works. So, you see what you can find out about the house, and I’ll check on the hypnosis stuff.”

“Yep,” he said. “I’ll text you.”

“Sounds good.” She got out of the truck and had already turned away when she heard his voice behind her.

“Jenny?”

She looked back. “Yeah?”

“Thanks.” He looked away for a second before turning back to her. “For listening on the train and everything.”

She smiled. “No problem. That’s what friends are for.”

She left before the moment could turn weird.

*

Her dad was standing in the foyer, holding a mug of what was probably coffee, when she walked into the house.

“Was that Ben Daulton?” he asked, peering through the sidelights near the door.

“It was.” She slipped off her shoes. “We went to the city.”

He turned to look at her. “Really?”

She nodded. “Ben hadn’t been in a long time, so I offered to show him around. Sorry I didn’t text you or something. I kind of forgot.”

She wasn’t even aware of formulating the lie before it slipped from her mouth.

“It’s okay. I would have called if it had gotten much later.” Her dad leaned against the frame of the door. “Did you have fun?”

“Yeah.”

She knew he was hoping for more information, but she wasn’t ready to talk about Ben or the real reason for the trip into the city. She was glad when he changed the subject.

“Good,” he said, heading into the kitchen. “I have some steaks marinating and a salad in the fridge. What do you say we sit out on the patio and enjoy the beginning of summer?”

She really wanted to go to her room and start digging around on the hypnosis stuff, but he looked so hopeful, so happy to see her. And he’d obviously been waiting for her.

She put her bag down. “Sounds good. I’m starving.”

*

Jenny sat in front of her laptop, trying to clarify what it was she and Ben needed to know. She’d spent a couple of hours hanging with her dad, eating and talking about everything from the weather to the Daulton renovation. She hadn’t even been tempted to tell him about everything that was going on. There was no way he’d get it.

Still, it had been nice. But now she needed to do the research she’d promised Ben.

She typed “hypnosis” into the search bar on her Internet browser, just to see if it gave her any idea how to narrow the field. She opted for an explanation of various theories on how it worked and proceeded to read a bunch of stuff about how it was a mental state or “imaginative role reenactment” and how some people believed it was even possible for someone to hypnotize themselves. But the part that got her attention was a description of a typical hypnotherapy session. In particular, the belief that people were actually awake during hypnosis. That they were even able to respond to the suggestions of people around them.

Which pretty much ruled out hypnosis as an explanation for what had happened in Ben’s attic, at least as far as she was concerned. She didn’t know about Ben, but she hadn’t felt remotely awake during their strange shared dream.

So much for hypnosis.

Jenny sighed, staring at the screen on her computer and thinking back to the paper Ben had read from when they had conducted their experiment in the attic. Sitting up straighter, she typed “mesmerization” into the search bar.

Clicking through the first three entries, she found that some guy named Franz Mesmer was responsible for the word “mesmerize,” except his theories seemed to have more to do with magnetism, or the belief that people were affected by some kind of magnetic force and that that force also affected things like the moon and planets like Earth. She got a little shiver when she came to that part. It made her think of the monk with the moon ring. But other than being weird, none of it connected with everything that had happened.

She slumped in her desk chair, thinking back over the course of events. First, there was Nikolai, both in her dream and, as crazy as it seemed, at the art show. She thought back to her encounter with the guy at the gallery. Was he really the same person in her dream? She’d been certain at the time, but now that a couple of days had passed, she couldn’t be sure that her mind hadn’t been playing tricks on her.

She pushed it aside, focusing instead on the stuff that had to do with her and Ben.

What did Ben, the music box, and the shared vision have in common? The music box had been found in the house Ben’s relatives owned. If anything, he was more connected to it than she was. But why, then, had they been in the same dream? And why was she so spooked by the monk?

The thought gave her a new idea, and she put her fingers on the keys of her laptop, typing “Celestial Retreat Center & Stony Creek & CT.” The site booted up with a moon graphic identical to the one on the monk’s ring. It made her feel strange even on the computer screen. Like the face in the moon knew her. Was watching her.

The screen flashed, changing to a black background, the moon symbol still at its center. It was a simple home page with a short message beneath the image of the moon: “Helping those out of time.” Jenny looked at the top of the screen for tabs to explore the site.

There was nothing.

She combed the sidebars. There had to be something. A history of the center, what their mission was, an event calendar.
Something.

But no. There was just the title of the center with an address that placed it in Stony Creek and the moon with the eerie face staring out from its center. That and the message underneath it.

She said it softly into the room. “Helping those out of time.”

Jenny ran through a list of possible meanings in her mind. It could be a hospice-type center. Just before her grandma on her dad’s side had died of cancer, they’d moved her to hospice to make her more “comfortable.” People who were dying could be considered out of time, she guessed, though it was kind of morbid when you thought about it that way.

She thought about other possible meanings. People who were in trouble with the law and about to be caught? People who … her brain scrambled for an explanation. For any play on the word “time” that could make sense in the context of the retreat center.

Nothing came. It was just … weird. “Helping those out of time”? And nothing else?

Not your typical promotional website.

She closed her laptop, drumming her fingers on top of it. Thinking. She’d never been up to the center. Had never been anywhere near it, now that she thought about it. No one in town seemed to mind the presence of the retreat center, but the monks kept to themselves and the residents of Stony Creek did the same.

Frustrated, she stood up and walked to her bed. She was on overload. Even the things that used to make sense no longer did. Maybe things would look clearer in the morning.

She lay on top of the sheets, the slight breeze from the open window drifting across the bare skin of her legs. She thought it would take her a long time to go to sleep. That the events of the day and everything she and Ben had learned would pick at her brain while she tossed and turned. Instead, she fell into sleep almost instantly.

And then she began to dream.

*

She felt his presence before she saw him.

She was walking amidst the icy landscape of her painting, the one from the vision she had had with little Hunter. But she wasn’t cold. When she looked down, she could see the tips of black boots peeking out from what looked like a skirt and long coat.

Gazing out across the fields, there was nothing but an endless stretch of white and the snow-covered trees that marked the beginning of the forest.

And even though she couldn’t see him, she knew he was there, a reassuring shadow in the periphery of her vision.

She walked toward the edge of the woods, directed by some inner compass that told her where to go. The snow crunched under her feet, the wind lifting her hair. She saw now that it was a darker brown than usual. She stopped at the edge of the field and peered into the forest. Safety awaited her in its leafy confines. She didn’t know how she knew it. She just did.