Fifteen
"Hello, David."
The sound of her voice turned him to stone. It was
late, very late, but he could never have fallen asleep with Jackie's
promise still echoing among his thoughts. “I have been thinking about
how I will reward you for helping me. It will be a very great reward.”
He sat at his computer desk with his mother's
favorite china doll placed before him. At the sound of her voice, he
jammed his eyes closed, stuffed his hands in his lap, and wept quietly so
that his father would not hear.
"Jackie promised," Marlene Hartman said. "Has she
done well?"
David took all the time he needed before he looked
around at her. He knew she wouldn't be real, but he knew as well that it
was going to be a shock regardless.
He looked. And it wasn't so much of a shock after
all. It was as if everything that had happened since the accident and the
funeral just melted away. It had all been a bad dream.
She wore her favorite dress with the blue flowers and
ribbons to tie her long hair back. David got up from his chair shaking
terribly, wanting more than anything in the world to rush to her, to throw
himself into her arms and to embrace her. And to bury his face in her
hair.
She shook her head sadly. "There may be a way.
There must be a way. But not at this time.”
"But I touched you before!"
"You were dreaming then. Now, you must be awake for
me."
So, she was just a ghost like Jackie Kahl and the
hawk and other animals. It was just a trick. Tears came to his eyes.
"You look nice," he said, sobbing so hard that it was hard to get the
words out. "You really look and sound just like her."
"We have more to work with now," she said. "We have
almost everything we need."
David didn't try to figure out what she meant by
that. He gazed up at her, constantly reminding himself that it would be a
grave error to confuse the image for his dead mother, but knowing he'd
fall prey regardless. There was nothing to be done about it. It had to
have a name. He couldn't call the face of his own mother Jackie Kahl, or
whoever else had fallen victim to the mirror by now.
"You never liked Jackie very well anyhow," his mother
said, wrinkling her nose and smiling.
David stared to protest, to say that at least Jackie
Kahl had been more real, but was that the case? The thing on the slope
was not a person. It wasn't Jackie Kahl and it wasn't his dead mother.
It was anything that went into it, human or animal, and anything it could
take out of the mind of a human being and turn to its own advantage. It
had its own agenda.
"I'm afraid of you," David said. "I don't know what
you are. I don't know what you want."
"I want to grow and learn," Marlene Hartman said,
brimming with enthusiasm. "I need to know how everything works!"
"You want to swallow up everything!" David cried,
because it was still his greatest fear, that he would be tricked into
helping it empty the world until only he was left, and then it would want
him, too.
His mother smiled at his foolishness. "Do you
destroy a thing to learn about it, David? Do you tear out the pages of a
book as you read, or set fire to your school before you go inside?"
"I'd like to sometimes," he said petulantly.
She came close and dropped to her knees at his side.
She whispered in his ear, and if he closed his eyes, he could almost feel
her warm breath against his cheek and smell her hair. "Nobody can know
about me," she said. "You are my hands and you are my eyes, but I can
protect you now."
"You won't hurt my dad?"
Lingering silence made David uncomfortable. "It will
be difficult for you to keep our secret from your father," she said.
David didn't like the sound of his heart pounding
away in his chest. His moistened his lips with his tongue, suspecting he
was being tricked again. "Leave my father alone," he said. "You
promised."
"I have promised, but if he notices a difference in
your behavior, you will have to explain to him what is happening, or he
will think you are sick. He is already very afraid for you."
"But I am sick," David said.
"Do you remember what you have already told him about
me?"
"About the green egg?"
"And the rest," she said grimly.
“Jackie is trying to get me to go outside! It's a
trick, Dad! She's not real, just like the hawk and the cats!”
"I remember," David said, knowing that even as he
confessed, he was being manipulated.
"You father thinks that you have confused dreams for
reality."
"But I haven't!"
Her face filled his field of vision. She glowed as
if with a light from within, and her beauty soothed his fear. "Don't
worry about that for now. Tell me about your computer and books, David.
What have you been doing since I've been gone?"
"But you bought me..."
He caught his momentary slip of the tongue.
"Mom bought all this stuff for me. Even Dad is
learning how to use a computer now. He writes magazine articles. Like
you did. Like Mom did."
But he didn't want to hurt her feelings. He
hurriedly picked up a plastic caddie, opened it, and held up a CD-ROM
disc. He turned it in the dim light so that it showed the colors of the
rainbow on the shiny side. "I use mine to learn about things and do my
schoolwork. I already know how to touch type, and I can read and write a
lot better than most kids my age."
She hovered close. David basked in the light and
warmth of her. "Do you want to see how much I've learned?"
It was a trick of his own. Maybe it would keep her
with him for the whole of the night. If she left now, he had no guarantee
he would ever see her again.
"Show me," she said gently. "Show me everything you
have learned."
