Books : The Unspoken : Excerpts

1 DREAMCATCHER

The bright red blood on Allison's pillow reminds her of "Snow White" -- not the watered-down Disney version with magic kisses, dwarfs named Dopey, and singing animals. The older story with a hateful queen who wants to eat a young girl's lung and liver. The one that ends when the queen is tortured to death in red-hot iron slippers.

Now, that's a good story, Allison thinks with a sly smile. Better than the image that woke her -- a boy being swallowed by black green waters. Mouth open. Bubbles where a scream would be.

As she sits up, the sickly-sweet taste of blood fills her mouth, and she can feel the bumpy surface of her tongue. She must have bitten it in her sleep, she realizes. Her eyes are stinging bad, and her forehead pounds like the drum set that her pimply foster brother plays in the garage every afternoon.

She looks back at the red stain on the pillow, trying to remember if she took her medication yesterday. She has some kind of seizure every few weeks now. They're so common that they don't faze her much anymore. Sometimes she's surprised how much a person can get used to. How much pain and fear and heartbreak.

But that dream was different. She hasn't had one like that for years.

Since right before the fire.

Of course, she probably wouldn't be sick anymore if Jacob hadn't taken away her pills back then. He thought the medication would interfere with her dreams, so he kept it from her.

"Dying might interfere with them too," she always wanted to say, but Allison was too afraid of Jacob for that. Jacob had ways of punishing that stayed with you.

Mostly, Jacob thought the seizures made her dreams more vivid, more prophetic -- a word he used lots to explain away the things that folks didn't like about the Divine Path. Allison could never remember anything after a seizure anyway, but sometimes when she came to, an image would flash before her eyes, like the way a lightbulb flares up before it burns out forever. That's what happened when she was first diagnosed with epilepsy -- seven days before her sister's murder. She was sitting at the kitchen table, flicking milky Cheerios at Mel's face, when her body went cold and hard.

Later, Daddy told her how she suddenly fell to the floor and let out a cry. "Like someone was squeezing the air right out of you," he said. "Then you started shaking something fierce."

Allison doesn't remember any of those things. But she does remember Doc Hillerman coming over to see her. That made her nervous. Doctors never come to your house -- even in a small town where the nearest hospital is thirty miles away. Besides, she didn't want anyone around, let alone Doc Hillerman, who always smelled like olives, but it wasn't up for discussion, Ma said.

Doc Hillerman got there quick, and he didn't waste any time chitchatting, either. He walked right over to Daddy's leather chair in the living room, where Allison was sitting, and he asked her how she was doing. That made her nervous too because Doc Hillerman usually liked to play around first -- pretending that he couldn't remember her name or giving her candy for medicine. But instead of trying to make her laugh, he took out his stethoscope and leaned in close to listen to her heart. She could smell the olives on his body, and it made her stomach turn. Then he flashed a little white light in her eyes.

That's when it happened. In an instant she saw a picture of her sister lying in bed, black blood covering her throat like a scarf.

Allison screamed so loud that Doc Hillerman dropped his penlight.

She didn't care, though. She was convinced that something terrible had happened to Melanie. Struggling to get off the soft cushions that seemed to be swallowing her, Allison blurted out her sister's name -- "Mel!"

"Where's...," she started to say, still trying to push herself away from the chair, but before she could finish, her sister came running into the room with Ma.

She was just fine...for seven more days.

"Allison," her foster mother calls up the stairs. "You're going to be late for school. Hurry up."

The voice startles her, as if someone has just shaken her awake, and Allison looks at the clock on her bedside table: 7:14.

"Crap," she mutters. Math class is first period, and her precalculus teacher, Mrs. Jenkins, has the patience of a rabid pit bull. Allison won't just get detention for being tardy. That would be too easy. She is going to get another lecture on personal responsibility and God knows what else. "There are two types of people in the world, Miss Burke" -- Mrs. Jenkins always begins the same way, her narrow glasses perched at the tip of her nose and a silver pendant of the Virgin Mother dangling between her freckled breasts -- "those who show up and those who don't...."

Blah, blah, blah, Allison thinks as she gets out of bed and stumbles toward the bathroom. Her tongue throbs, and her head is still spinning from the seizure and from the memories of her sister. She needs her medication. She needs to not be thinking about Mel right now. Sometimes it feels like too much, Allison admits to herself. Melanie and Daddy. Ma. Jacob and the terrible things that happened back then. All of these memories feel like a weight that's too heavy for one person to carry.

In the bathroom the cold tile floor stings Allison's feet as she stands in front of the medicine cabinet and grabs the pills from the top shelf. Standing here, she also looks at her reflection in the mirror -- the brown, shoulder-length hair, the green eyes, and, of course, a new spot of acne above her upper lip.

"Double crap," she says, before popping the pill into her mouth and chasing it with a handful of water from the faucet.

Stepping back into the bedroom, she glances down at her slender body and long white legs. Some of the guys at school stare at her on the days she wears skirts and tight jeans, but they mostly seem to notice the strange mark across her neck. She hasn't gone out without necklaces or scarves in five years. But they don't always cover everything. Sure, she can tell when people at school are whispering about it. But she doesn't care what they think.

Just Bo.

Bo is the boy she has been seeing for about a month now. Six days ago he gave her a silk scarf. He called it a "just-because gift." That's the first time she really let him see her scar. He even ran his fingertips across it that night, while they were making out in the front seat of his father's Mercedes. His touch sent goose bumps down Allison's body.

She wonders what her neck felt like to him. Yeah, she has touched it a thousand times, but your own body never feels the same to someone else. That's what makes being touched so nice. Your flaws disappear, for a while at least, and your body tingles -- not just from the feeling, but from knowing that someone else wants to touch you.

"Allison?" her foster mother calls out again.

"Okay," she hollers back. "I'm coming."

Allison doesn't want to say anything about her seizure. She doesn't want to involve her foster parents at all. This illness is part of her and her past -- the part she wants to control and forget. She can handle it on her own.

In truth, she doesn't really mind her foster parents much. They're nice enough -- though they won't win an award for Parents of the Year anytime soon. Like the day Mrs. Packer set fire to the kitchen while trying to kill a cockroach with hair spray. She was screaming and spraying the roach as it scurried across the gas stove, where she was boiling water. Allison isn't sure if Mrs. Packer killed the roach that day, but half the stove and the wall behind it are still black with scorch marks from the flaming hair spray. Or the time Mr. Packer ran the lawn mower over his own foot. He only lost his small left toe, but before going to the emergency room, he insisted on finishing the lawn. "Heck, there was only one more row to cut," he enjoys saying when he retells the story. "And nobody wants to see an unkempt lawn."

"Especially with human toes in it," Allison always wants to add, but she knows better.

Mr. Packer takes lawn maintenance very seriously.

Yeah, they're nice enough, but crazy things happen in the Packer house about once a week. This doesn't bother Allison much. It's kind of entertaining, actually, and most of the time Mr. and Mrs. Packer are too busy managing their own chaotic lives to give much notice to Allison. Which is fine with her. Now, if she could just get eleven-year-old Brutus Packer Jr. to stop practicing the drums...

Allison plops down in front of her desk and turns on the computer. Her day doesn't begin until she's checked e-mail. Like coffee or a cold shower, it's the thing that kick-starts every morning.

The connection is molasses slow as usual, but Allison doesn't mind so much today. She feels better sitting down -- the dizziness stops, and her head doesn't pound so hard. She looks at the rest of her desk, which is an absolute disaster. Random stacks of CDs. Her cell phone. School textbooks and folders that look like they were just poured out of a bucket. And a can of Diet Coke that's at least five days old.

A dreamcatcher hangs above it all from the desk lamp, and she touches it with her fingers. The circle of yellow and orange cloth reminds Allison of a bright summer day and the orangehaired boy who gave it to her just over five years ago -- Ike Dempsey. He had a crush on her, and though Allison liked him, she didn't like him like that. She wanted quiet David Holloway, the boy who always lowered his eyes when he smiled, to notice her. She almost kissed David one night in the old tree house -- but as Brutus Packer Jr. is fond of saying, "almost" only counts with hand grenades and nuclear war.

The Internet connection finally goes through. Only one message is waiting in her in-box, but she doesn't recognize the e-mail address. The subject line reads: "A Voice from the Past." Allison opens the message and finds a forwarded newspaper article with today's date.

Meridian Herald
Mystery Surrounds the Drowning
of a Teenage Boy
by Marcum Shale

The bizarre circumstances surrounding the death of Harold Crawley, a seventeen-year-old boy found in a tobacco field off Route 78, has local authorities baffled. According to Sheriff Cooper of the Meridian Police Department, an anonymous phone call alerted him to the body two days ago. The cause of death was not immediately apparent, but the county coroner's preliminary findings suggest that Harold Crawley drowned -- even though he was found more than thirty miles from the nearest body of water, Lake Haverton. "Five liters of fluid were found in his lungs," Sheriff Cooper told reporters this morning. "But that doesn't prove anything. This may or may not be a homicide. Right now we have no crime scene and no concrete evidence of foul play." Sheriff Cooper refused to comment on Harold Crawley's link to the infamous cult the Divine Path, which was founded in Meridian, North Carolina, about seven years ago. Harold was the only son of the cult's leader, Jacob Crawley, and in the summer of 2002 he was one of six children who survived the fire that claimed the lives of Jacob and the other adult members of the Divine Path. Harold's legal guardian, Ms. Janet Wilton, reported him missing several days ago from their home in Atlanta, Georgia. According to the director of Cicely's Funeral Home, Ms. Wilton has decided to bury Harold in Meridian, where Mr. Crawley purchased a plot for his son a few months before the fire. A brief memorial service will be held tomorrow at five in the afternoon.

Allison pushes away from her desk with a jolt. Goose bumps run down her spine, and she can feel her stomach dropping away.

"Oh, my God," she mutters.

Allison scans the message again, then studies the user name of the sender: lazarus6. "Lazarus," she says to herself. Like the guy in the Bible that Jesus raised from the dead?

Allison tries to figure out who would send this article. Someone from school? Not likely. She has worked hard to keep her past a secret. When she first moved in with the Packers, her teachers were told that Allison's real parents had died in a car accident, and that story has been around long enough to pass for truth. But if no one from school sent it, who did? Someone from Meridian? Someone who knew about the Divine Path back then? The possibilities make her uneasy. She can tell that the message has been forwarded to several undisclosed recipients. And she wonders if the rest of her old friends have gotten it too. If Ike and David might be reading it right now. If Jade Rowan and Emma Caulder have seen it. If all of them are remembering Jacob's promise.

Allison pictures Harold's face on the night of the fire -- his cheeks flushed bright red from the heat. Then she remembers something she hasn't thought of in years. Trees. Harold loved to climb trees. He could scramble up the tallest trunk in the blink of an eye and without ever getting a scratch on his body. Some of the other kids called him Monkey Boy, but that didn't seem to bother him. Allison always thought that he liked being able to get away from time to time. To go where Jacob couldn't find him.

But something is missing from this article. Something that a reporter and the police would never know: Harold couldn't swim. In fact, he was terrified of the water.

A wave of dizziness makes the room shift out of focus, and Allison has to close her eyes to feel steady again. When she opens them, everything is back in focus. She can see the glowing computer screen. The chaotic mess on her desk. The Diet Coke. And the dreamcatcher, which sways slightly from her lamp. She takes it in her hand.

That's what Jacob tried to do -- to catch their dreams. Not to keep them safe or to protect them from nightmares. He wanted them to see ugly, horrible things and, more than that, to be afraid. It was fear that fueled his prophecies about the end of the world, about his promise that they would all die from their worst fears.

She wonders if the drowning is just a coincidence, if the thing that Harold was most afraid of killed him. Then Allison recalls the sound of Jacob's voice when he told her that she would die in five years.

"Your greatest fear will consume you. It will rob you of your last breath," he said with a kind of cold pleasure, each word harsh, like metal scraping against cement. The memory makes her shiver.

"Let's get a move on up there," Mrs. Packer says loudly, and Allison looks at the clock again: 7:26.

She is going to be way late for school now, but she doesn't care. She has more important things on her mind. She gets up from the chair slowly, and her entire body feels unsteady and off balance.

What if it's true? Allison asks herself. She glances around her room, unsure of what to do next. She tries to stay calm, to clear her head, but Jacob's promise keeps pressing in around her. She wants to go back to Meridian but is afraid -- afraid that Jacob could be right and that all of them are about to die.

But she has to go, she thinks. She needs to see her old friends again. They are the only ones who understand what's about to happen.