Part 4: A Discovery

Devi had left for a moment to go give the daughter her condolences so they could leave. But she’d clearly missed her, as said daughter shortly entered the casket room where Chris, Sarah and Aderyn were still sitting.

She cleared her throat to make an announcement. “I know that some of you are getting ready to leave, so I’d like to say a quick thanks to everyone for being here. Though I may not know all of you, knowing that you cared about her helps me a great deal.”

Aderyn tried not to say anything.

“Anyway,” the woman continued, “The contents of this house have been willed to me. Since I really have no use for everything, and don’t want to see all of her things go to charity, feel free to take something on your way out. To remember her by.” Though there was the barest hint of disappointment in her voice, she was surprisingly stoic about the topic she was discussing.

She left the room, apparently to go tell the same thing to the other guests. Aderyn fleetingly wondered why the woman didn’t just tell everything to everyone at the same time. It would save her a lot of trouble.

“Should we go?” Chris asked her, standing up. Apparently he assumed the answer would be yes. He was right.

“Yeah. Help me up?”

Chris held out his hand and used it to anchor Aderyn as she stood. He did the same for Sarah.

They saw Devi in the main room talking to the daughter, having finally caught up with her.

“Wait,” Aderyn said suddenly as they had just gotten to the door and were about to exit. Chris and Sarah stood there looking confused as she went back to the item that had caught her eye. The heart necklace. She picked it up and placed it around her neck.

“Okay, we can go.”

“Why–“ Chris started to ask.

Aderyn cut him off. “Because I like it. Now let’s go.”

~~~~~

Once Chris and Sarah’s respective parents had come to Aderyn’s house to pick them up, she was alone. Devi, sensing that Aderyn didn’t feel like talking, was sitting in another room of their house watching TV.

She fingered the pendant that hung on her neck. Despite what she told Chris, she actually didn’t like it at all. It was rather spooky. Not so much anymore without the strange shadows, but still a little...off...all the same. No, the reason she’d picked it up was because it had called out to her. Again, she couldn’t exactly explain it.

She spent the rest of the day wallowing in self-pity from the recurring images of her mother’s death that now insisted on constantly replaying themselves. She attempted to will them out of her mind, and tried not to cry all the same. There was just so much blood....

When night arrived, she eagerly snuggled into bed so she could sleep and perhaps push all of it out of her mind. No such luck.

Everything was chaos.

Her daddy had come home early from work, and her sister from a friend’s house that she’d gone to after school. Devi was 16, and allowed to do such things. They were both crying in the living room. But they’d always been close to each other. Aderyn was alone. She loved them both, but they weren’t her mommy.

When the paramedics came and declared her mommy dead, Aderyn went into shock. The tears wouldn’t come anymore. Everything was distant, cold, and numb.

They were just now taking away the body. She couldn’t even think of it as her mommy anymore. Her mommy was gone. The way her empty eyes had looked up at her when she first walked into the room right after school told her that. It felt so long ago. Like she’d been gone for days already.

Aderyn walked back into the room once they’d cleared it. There were still spatterings of blood dotting the floor. But they’d gotten the worst of it already, the part that had pooled where the body was. She went over and sat in the spot, curling herself into a little ball with her knees touching her chin, just as she’d done after the phone call. From where she was sitting, she saw a piece of paper lying on the floor, just peeking out from the dust ruffle on the bed.

In a sort-of trance, she reached over and picked it up. It was folded in half. For some reason, she brought it back into the living room with her.

The sobbing to her side was distant; she stared at the note as if it created its own separate universe just for the words it held.

“Catch me. I can’t help myself.”

The scream reverberated everywhere, filling the room with noise and drowning out the insignificant cries of sorrow. Such an awful noise....

But then the little girl realized it was her own.

She sat up in her bed, a cold sweat coating her body. So that was it. The dream she’d been having. Intuitively, she wrapped her fingers around the heart necklace that she was still wearing from earlier that day.

Devi had already appeared at the entrance to her room, just like every other night Aderyn had woken up screaming. Before she could talk, Aderyn cut in. “Just another nightmare. I’m fine. Go back to sleep,”

Devi glanced at her sister’s preoccupied face, not quite believing the ‘fine’ part, but allowing the subject to be dropped for now.

Aderyn guiltily looked away as Devi left the room. She’d never kept something this big from her before. Well, at least not intentionally.

~~~~~

They’d known it was a murder. The rather large knife wound through her mother’s torso explained that much. But they hadn’t had much else to go on. Several thorough searches of the apartment had the detectives come up with nothing.

Aderyn had never said anything to anyone about the note. She’d forgotten about it. Literally blocked it out. She had only recognized its existence long enough to hide it. And then it was just gone from her mind.

It was all coming back to her quite suddenly. The blow of the information to her brain was rather similar to what one would imagine getting run over by a semi-truck was like.

Something in her seven-year-old self hadn’t wanted to deal with the meaning of that note. So she’d gotten rid of it. If she remembered correctly, it had gone into the center of one of her teddy bear with a tear in the side. To hide the rip from all the policemen looking around, she had taken it to Sarah’s mother one day and asked her to sew the hole closed.

Her eyes widened as she realized she still had that stuffed animal. Everything seemingly in slow motion, she walked over to her closet and pulled the bear from its top shelf. Her fingers ran unhurriedly over the line of stitches that covered the tear. In a trance-like motion, she grabbed for the scissors that she always kept in the nearby desk drawer. She slid the drawer closed when she had them. Taking a deep breath, she carefully snipped the first stitch apart. One by one, she cut down the line until the rip was open again. Reaching inside, her hand was at first met only by stuffing. But then she felt the edge of something different. A piece of paper. She pulled it out, careful not to tear it. After all, it had been sitting there for nine years. She gasped as she saw the words in neat, careful script:

“Catch me. I can’t help it.”

The shaking came involuntarily. She suddenly threw the note to the floor, as if it burned her. ‘Why now?,’ she thought in a panic.

“Because now you’re ready,” a distant voice whispered.

Completely ignoring that fact that she was probably crazy if she was hearing random voices, she thought a reply. ‘No, I’m not.’

“But you are. It was too much for you when you were seven. So I took it away.”

‘Maybe it’s still too much for me. Did you not see all the fainting?’ she thought.

“That’s just normal. It didn’t matter when I gave it back. That was inevitable.”

Coming to her senses a little, she thought, ‘Wait a minute. Who the hell are you?’

“Someone who’s been watching over you.”

‘What the hell do you mean, ‘watching over me?’”

“Hostile, aren’t we?”

‘Let’s see: I’ve just remembered that I found a haunting little memento from mother’s murder when I was seven, I am stressed from the funeral that I went to today--the first one since hers, I might add--and I am sitting here talking to a disembodied voice in my mind that has apparently been watching over me. Yes, dammit, I am hostile!’

The voice laughed a little. “You really are fiery. No wonder you were ready so soon. Most can’t handle anything like this until their twenties. But your spirit and stubbornness will help you a great deal as you work through it.”

‘I don’t want to work through it! I want to forget it again!’

“I’m sorry, but you can’t do that.”

‘I don’t care. I will forget what I want. If you want me to even consider thinking about what you are saying, then kindly let me know who the hell I’d be listening to.’

“Let’s just say I’m a guardian angel.”

‘Aren’t they supposed to make me feel better?’

“Not always, hon. We’re here to help, guide, and protect.”

‘Oh, really? If you were here to help, guide, protect, and all that crap, then what were you doing nine years ago?’

“Didn’t I already say this? Ah well, I suppose I can repeat myself. I was wiping your memory. That’s what you needed back then.”

‘Fine then. I still don’t understand why you need to ‘un-wipe’ it.’

“Because now is the time.”

‘Well, thank you for being so un-vague about it. Everything is perfectly clear now,’ Aderyn thought sarcastically, rolling her eyes.

“Though you’re ready for the memory, you’re not ready for the details yet. I cannot tell you why now is the time, nor can I tell you more than the fact that I am here to help. You just need to trust.”

‘Bugger that. I’m going to sleep. Tomorrow I shall wake up and this will all be one hell of a fucked up dream.’

The voice sounded wistful. “I wish it were a dream. But it’s not.” A pause. “Have a good sleep.”

A rush of air moved through the room as Aderyn made her way back to her position under the covers. It was not long before her eyes drooped shut.

~~~~~

She stumbled down to the kitchen around one the next day having spent the majority of the time from 3 to 4 a.m. talking to some random ghost.

“Ready to go to church?” Devi asked brightly, peeking her head out slightly from behind the newspaper she was reading.

“Are you kidding me?” Aderyn growled. “I am not going back to one of those until I die and have my own funeral, and even then I may be able to talk some people into holding it outside.”

“Of course I’m kidding. You are so gullible when you’re tired. We missed all of the respectable services anyway. Why are you getting up so late?”

“Didn’t sleep much.after the nightmare.” That was the truth. This whole thing really was one hell of a trippy nightmare.

Devi folded her paper closed, ceasing to pretend to be reading it. “What was this nightmare about? Is it the same one from all the other times?” She looked concerned.

Aderyn tried to plaster a nice little smile on her face. “I don’t think so. Besides, I don’t even remember it anymore. I’m sure it’s fine.” She finished with a wave of her hand and walked to the cupboard to get a bowl for her cereal.

“Lunch is sitting on the counter,” Devi said absentmindedly, noticing what her sister was doing.

Aderyn replaced the bowl on its shelf and pulled out a plate instead. She filled it with the sandwich her sister had made and promptly shut herself back into her room. Dealing with the world was not something she felt like doing today.

~~~~~

“Aderyn,” Sarah whispered, interrupting her friend from the verb worksheet she was filling out. “Why are you actually doing your work?”

Mr. Junker, crabby as ever, shot Sarah a glare. They were supposed to be doing the worksheets quietly and independently.

Rolling her eyes, Sarah pulled out a piece of paper and jotted what she’d just said onto the surface. So Aderyn couldn’t ignore it, she placed it directly on top of the worksheet.

Sighing, Aderyn stopped filling in the blanks with the proper conjugations and turned her pen to the note.

I just felt like doing something today, she wrote in reply.

Since when have you taken interest in ‘doing something’ during Spanish? Sarah asked her, looking confused.

No idea. I just have. Once the paper had been passed back, Aderyn looked intently towards her verbs.

Sensing that Aderyn was not in a talking mood, Sarah abandoned the note and started filling in her own worksheet. There would definitely be an inquiry later.