***
Her mother screamed as the car skidded off the road. Jane had been dozing gently and woke up as she felt the ground disappear beneath them. The car began to fly. In her young mind, Jane thought the idea of a flying car was fun, but she was also afraid. Then, as the car started to fall, she felt something rise up inside her: a dark shadow warping her awareness, coming up through her with tremendous velocity.
“Mom, I’m slipping,” she heard herself say, for that’s what it felt like. The world around her was fading from view, and the other thing in her mind…the power…was taking over. It had never done this before. She had always used it. Now it was using her.
She felt the power work through her, from a depth of consciousness Jane had no understanding of at all. The car froze; she felt it catch in the hands of this presence that had come out of her, as though an adult were standing behind her, towering over her, grasping a toy car in its hands. The small her—her body and simple awareness—felt the car come to a sudden stop. From below, she heard herself groan as she was thrown against her safety harness.
There was little of her conscious awareness left now, and it seemed as though blackness was beginning to form at the corners of her eyes. Still, she could make out the interior of the car and her parents, who were making distant sounds from the front seat. A beat of panic rose in her as her father began to move. He was getting out of his chair; she wanted him to stop.
Daddy, no! she thought as she saw him move. She reached out to stop him, but there was no power left to use; the well was dry. He unhooked his seatbelt and turned to look at her as he placed his foot on the dashboard. She knew what was coming before it happened. His foot slipped, and she watched in horror as he fell against the windshield. It broke beneath him, and he fell straight through it. She heard her mother scream as she reached out her arms again and grasped at him with the invisible hands, but they could hold only so much.
She grabbed onto him and he stopped in mid-air. The car lurched forward violently and both Jane and her mother were thrown against their seatbelts. Nora groaned and her head fell forward. Mom, Jane thought desperately as her mother lost consciousness.
Jane had her hands stretched out in front of her as he looked back from the growing dark only twenty feet away. She was holding onto him, but the deeper, darker, cloudy presence that seemed to surround her was also holding onto the car. Now there was a vicious struggle growing between the two. She pulled him back towards her; the car lurched again. She felt the deeper presence scream around her at the strain.
Her father looked at her; she knew what was coming.
“Jane…let go of me.”
“No, Daddy.”
“Jane, let go of me now.”
“NO!!”
“Please. Please let go.”
The car lurched again, sending the sounds of groaning metal into the endless, dark night.
“I don’t want to.”
“If you don’t, we’ll all die.” He looked at her, and it was his eyes that opened the final cracks on the dam. “You’re mine, Jane. You’ll always be mine. Do this one last thing for me. Just let me go and save yourself.”
The car lurched one last time and she screamed as she felt a sharp pain streak through her chest. There was a teddy bear she had sequestered at the back window; it fell over her head now and out through the open space where the windshield had been. It sailed past her father into the dark.
She looked at his face, through a field of vision that had become desperately narrow, and her body felt as though it had turned to steel as the world lit up around her in a blaze of light. For a moment—just a moment—her mind opened wide to a power cosmic. She was looking down at herself and the car. She was looking at her father from below. She could see her mother through the broken passenger window. She could see the trees blowing in the wind behind them, as though bearing witness. Out beyond, she could see the mountains. For a second she went farther, to the stars and the galaxies and out beyond them too, to other places of immense beauty that she had no understanding of and would forget quickly.
The car began to move back up towards the road. Her father rose from below and moved into his chair. The seatbelt moved around his torso and was guided into the clasp. Although she was elsewhere, she heard the car slam down on the road above them in the distance. She returned to her body then and saw her parents standing over her. She saw the look of petrification on her father’s face and recoiled from it.
“Sorry,” was all she could manage, for feeling a guilt she couldn’t understand. She retreated inside—the surface Jane—and the dam was built there and then: a child playing innocently with sand like concrete. She would remain only barely aware of its existence for a long, long time. She only ever associated the teddy bear with guilt, so she never allowed herself to think about it…and she could never understand the association.
Until now.