Читать книгу Dark Matter - Cameron Cruise - Страница 7

Gia Moon woke to the sound of screaming.

It took her a moment to understand she was actually awake. Screaming was a normal part of Gia’s sleep; her dreams were often filled with the hideous imagery of bloodied body parts and faces contorted in pain. It didn’t necessarily mean anything. It didn’t have to be real, portents of things to come.

Only, tonight was different. Tonight the screams weren’t Gia’s.

She glanced at the digital clock on the nightstand: 3:07 a.m.

More screams. This time, she registered the source. The sounds clearly emanated from her daughter’s room.

“Stella,” she said, throwing back the covers.

Gia raced for the door and careened into the hall. She stumbled across the living room, bumping into the coffee table with her knee and sending last night’s board game crashing to the floor.

Not so long ago, her daughter slept right alongside Gia in her king-size bed. Only recently had Stella started to flex her newly minted teen muscle, choosing to sleep in her own room. After a lifetime curled up next to her mother, her daughter had proclaimed her independence shortly after her thirteenth birthday.

“Stella?” Gia cried, pushing open the bedroom door.

She found Stella sitting upright in bed. She looked like a puppet, her arms stiff at her sides and her legs sticking out like two planks of wood. In the dim glow of the nightlight, Gia could see the sheets and quilt bunched at Stella’s feet. She imagined her daughter kicking the covers aside as she swam up to the surface of her dreams.

Even with her eyes wide open, Stella kept screaming.

Gia swept her daughter up in her arms and held her tight. She made soft soothing sounds intended to help Stella transition out of her nightmare. Stella eventually quieted down, but her eyes remained fixed on something across the room.

Gia followed her daughter’s gaze. She was staring at the stool in front of the Queen Anne vanity as if someone were sitting there.

“What is it, baby?” Gia whispered. “What do you see?”

But instead of answering, Stella buried her face in her mother’s neck.

In a normal family, waking up screaming in the middle of the night might be explained as a simple night terror. No big deal. Any cause for concern would be temporary, nothing a kiss or a cup of hot cocoa couldn’t fix. But normal didn’t describe the lives of Gia and Stella Moon.

Gia felt her daughter trembling against her. Stella was small for her age, her tiny size a contrast to her great spirit. Stella had been born an old soul, not prone to hysterics. Waking up in the middle of the night, that would be Gia, the woman haunted by her gifts.

“I’m okay,” Stella told her, all too soon pushing Gia away. “It was just a nightmare—a real nightmare,” she assured her mother. “The normal kind.”

The normal kind.

Not a vision, Gia thought with some relief.

Her daughter crawled back under the covers, pulling the quilt up to her chin. Tucked in her bed, her inky curls and vibrant blue eyes contrasted dramatically with her flawless white skin. Lying there, Stella presented a virtual Renaissance painting. Gia’s artistic sensibilities appended the dewy full lips and cheeks, heightened in color from the nightmare. The antique sleigh bed with its starburst-pattern quilt in shades of blue was a fitting background. It wasn’t quite chiaroscuro in the glow of the nightlight, but close.

Gia brushed back a curl from Stella’s face. There was this perceived resemblance between mother and daughter. Goodness, Gia, she’s a mirror image. A clone.

But Gia knew better. The dramatic coloring—black hair, blue eyes, translucent skin—deceived. Those curls, that delicate nose and dimpled chin, these were all Stella…Stella and Gia’s mother, Estelle.

“Geez, Mom, you’re freaking out for no reason, okay?” Stella added.

Gia hesitated, knowing when she was being dismissed. Suspicious of just that.

Sealing it, Stella closed her eyes and turned onto her side, giving her mother her back. “Don’t be weird. I’m fine.”

Which meant she was hiding something.

It happened more and more often these days: Stella shutting her out. Gia knew it was a normal part of growing up. She’d read all the books; teenagers needed space.

But tonight felt different. Secretive. And not in a good way.

She glanced back at the empty stool in front of the vanity. Only Gia and her daughter atop the sleigh bed reflected back in the mirror.

There wasn’t even a glimmer of a presence.

Gia nodded toward the opened door and the hallway beyond. “Sure you don’t want to crawl into bed with me? I could use the company.”

Stella rolled her eyes, giving her a mental puhleeze! She settled deeper under the covers. “I just want to go back to sleep, okay?”

Once again, Stella gave her mother her back, but not before Gia caught her daughter’s nervous glance toward the vanity and the empty stool.

Gia took a breath and held it. But in the end, she rose to her feet and stepped away from the bed. “All right, sweetie.”

Out in the hall, Gia felt torn between her desire to run back into Stella’s room or allow her daughter to set the pace for her revelations.

She knew Stella was lying. The question was why?

She froze at the entrance to the living room, her hand on the light switch, trying to shake off her fears. That look Stella had given the empty stool…there’d been a presence there. A presence Gia couldn’t see.

Gia Moon, psychic artist and mother to one very precocious teenager, hadn’t seen a damn thing.

She hit the light switch. The floor lamp glowed to life, spotlighting the Scrabble tiles scattered across the Navajo rug under the coffee table and the oak floor boards beyond.

The living room showcased her eclectic tastes. The top of the coffee table, a mosaic of broken pieces of china, served as a foil to the green papier-mâché leaves sprouting from the arms of the burgundy cloth sofa. The leaves crept up the wall behind as if some wayward philodendron had managed to take root and thrive in the darkened room.

Opposite the sofa stood a love seat covered in Mexican serape cloth. There was quite a bit of religious art—a hand-painted crucifix with the bleeding heart, a Greek icon of the virgin, a statue of the elephant-headed Ganesha, the wise and gentle Hindu god known for removing obstacles.

But to Gia’s eye, the focus as always was on her daughter. There were drawings, from stick figures to watercolors, matted and framed like great works of art. And photographs, each documenting cherished moments, snapshots of the tiny miracle that was Stella.

On her hands and knees, Gia picked up the lettered tiles and tossed them back into their box. She told herself she’d talk to Stella first thing in the morning. She’d learned the dangers of keeping secrets and she’d remind her daughter of just that. Gia suspected she knew what was bothering her daughter—Stella was just the right age. Gia needed to convince her that whatever changes Stella faced, they’d face them together.

That’s what she’d been thinking—tomorrow, I’ll lay down the law, no secrets—when she stopped herself in the act of scooping up the game pieces.

On the rug under the coffee table she saw five tiles from the Scrabble set. The game pieces formed a perfect half circle. She stared, realizing the letters spelled a word.

Seven. Just like the number.

Gia frowned. She reached for the S.

As her hand reached for the tiles, a static charge like the snap of a rubber band shocked her fingers. She sat back on her heels, stunned.

Seven.

“Don’t,” she told herself, grabbing the Scrabble pieces in a sweep of her hand and throwing them into the game box with the others.

Back in her room, she dropped onto the bed and stared at the phone on the nightstand. The last two months, the desire to call him had been a dull ache inside her. Like a toothache, she’d learned to ignore the pain—part and parcel of a past that had trained her well to deal with regrets.

But now, that desire burned in her chest. She rubbed her hand, recalling the shock of static electricity.

She glanced at the clock: 3:17 a.m.

When she’d first heard Stella screaming, she’d checked the hour, as well. The time had been 3:07.

Seven, Seven, Seven.

She shut her eyes. “No,” she said out loud.

She shoved aside the covers and massaged her pillow into a ball before settling in. She told herself her gift didn’t work like that, cute little signs that could easily be mistaken for coincidence. That’s how the heart worked; it looked for meaning where there was none.

She’d had a scare tonight. Of course, she’d think of the man who had once saved her life.

Gia woke up three more times that night. Each and every time—by coincidence—the digital clock showed the number seven.

When the door shut behind her mother, Stella threw back her bedcovers and sat up in bed.

“Go away,” she hissed at the boy sitting on the vanity stool.

She recognized him from her dream. She’d seen him so clearly during that horrible nightmare that waking up had been this weird business: the image in her head seemed to crash into her dimly lit bedroom.

The whole thing reminded her of one of those overhead projection sheets her geometry teacher sometimes flashed on the wall. You had to stare at it awhile before anything made sense.

The dream had been a bad one, like nothing she’d ever had before. The kid sitting on the vanity: she was pretty sure that, in her dream, someone was torturing him.

She could still remember the cold bite of the handcuffs on her wrist. She’d even caught the scent of shadow-man’s cologne as he’d bent over the boy.

When the guy stuck the needle in the boy’s neck, she’d felt that, too.

The pain of that needle, she’d felt it as if it were happening to her. Not the boy, but her. That’s why she’d woken up screaming, bringing her mother running.

Only now, the kid—she guessed he was about her age, tall, maybe as tall as five feet eleven, with gray eyes and dark blond hair—was sitting on her vanity stool, the nightlight shining at his feet. To Stella, he looked completely real, the living breathing version of the boy in her dream.

Of course, she knew he wasn’t really there. He couldn’t be. No live kid was sitting in her room, creepy eyes watching her.

He was a ghost.

And Mom hadn’t seen him.

Mom—the lady who talked to ghosts, who painted portraits in order to pass along messages to loved ones left behind—hadn’t even known he was there.

In Stella’s life, it was Mom who did the woo-woo thing. Her mother had these dreams. Visions. A lot of times, the awful stuff her mother saw came true.

“Go away!” she said, louder this time.

The ghost just stared back at her.

She told herself she wasn’t like her mother. Sure, she’d get a weird vibe every once in a while, mostly about her mother’s paintings. But the really scary stuff, like waking up in the middle of the night and seeing someone who wasn’t there, that was Mom’s gig.

“Please,” she whispered. “I can’t help you. Just leave me alone, okay?”

Stella slipped back under the covers, tucking the sheets and quilt under her chin, using them like a protective shield. She concentrated on a giant sunflower painted on the wall across from her, part of a mural her mother had painted in Stella’s room, turning it into a kind of English garden. She tried to forget that awful basement and the sound of the boy’s screams.

When looking at the flower didn’t work, she squeezed her eyes shut. What did people do to fall asleep? Count sheep?

Suddenly, she felt a cold touch on her neck. She opened her eyes.

The kid, he was right there, standing next to the bed.

“Get out!” she said.

She pulled the covers over her head, breathing hard. How many times had her mom told Stella how to banish a bad spirit? Why hadn’t she paid attention?

Get a grip, Stella! She tried to even her breathing, telling herself that if she’d had anything to do with bringing him here—some weakness a loose spirit might glom onto—she should have the strength to make him disappear.

After a few minutes, she lifted the sheet, scared of what she’d find.

He was gone.

She let out the breath she’d been holding. She knew her mother could get in touch with some pretty gnarly things. She’d heard Mom explain it once, how the really bad spirits were drawn to powerful psychics. And that’s what her mother was. A superpsychic. Last year, she’d even helped the police catch two serial killers, a woman and her son who’d targeted other psychics.

Her mom had a very powerful gift—the kind of gift Stella didn’t need.

The only thing Stella wanted was to be normal.

She glanced back at the stool in front of the vanity. It was still empty.

He was really gone.

Stella lay back on her pillow, staring at the ceiling. Funny how that fact didn’t make her feel better.