Downfall

  Chapter 7: Reconciliation

  When Jude dropped me home, Albion’s worried face was at the front window. I headed straight for my bedroom but he pursued, catching my arm in the hall.

  “Are you all right?” he exploded.

  “Of course.” I gave him a saucy grin.

  “Jesus, Frankie.” He sagged against the doorframe with relief. “What was that last night?”

  I poked him. “Nosy.”

  “Come on, girl ...”

  “Albion, please.” I turned away. “Thanks for getting rid of Davy and Tara. Did you take them home?”

  “Yeah. None of us felt much like doing anything after that dramatic little episode. Tara kept wondering if you were in danger and suggested I call the police.”

  “Oh, shit.”

  “So I told her I knew all those people. She was too drunk to see the holes in my story.”

  “Thank you. Weren’t you worried at all?”

  He rolled his eyes. “Of course I was frickin’ worried! But I could see you just wanted us out of there.” He glared. “If you don’t tell me what’s going on in your life, Frankie, I’m gonna―” He stopped.

  I grinned. “What? What are you going to do, Alby? Impose a curfew? Kick me out of home?”

  “No, I won’t kick you out.” He couldn’t help a smile at my attitude. “And I seriously doubt this new Francesca would stick to any curfew I tried to impose. But could you be a bit more normal, please? Maybe have a night off from your bizarre new friends, sometimes?”

  “I don’t want a night off anymore.”

  Albion did a double-take at that but let it slide. “Come, sit. I’ll make you breakfast.”

  He cooked for me and kept me awake with questions I mostly dodged. When I just about nodded off in the kitchen chair he finally let me go to bed. I skipped my classes and slept all day―a peaceful, dead-to-the-world sleep―before driving back out to Gaunt House in the afternoon. Clouds had rolled in during the day, making the air cool and damp, but when I sat on the sofa next to Cain I felt summer air again. That, combined with his smile, got me warm enough to peel off my jacket. Only Liz was there besides Cain and she was busy tidying up. His eyes examined every inch of me and, after those long weeks of him avoiding looking at me, I loved it. Today he would tell me the secret. I was ready to hear the truth.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello.”

  He had a cigarette in his hand but I now realized the smoke was like a mirage. Purely visual, with none of the choking stink. I couldn’t help experimenting again. I came close, sniffing deeply. Nothing. Just that summery smell of warm, clean air.

  “Was it when you had your accident?” I blurted.

  “Was what?”

  “Did the accident make you ... different?”

  He seemed to comprehend. “Yes and no. That was when I became aware of the reason ...” Cain trailed off and bit his lip.

  “For?” I prompted.

  “There’s no point starting the story there.”

  “Why not?”

  “There’s too much before that.”

  “Well, tell me.”

  Cain ground out the cigarette while I shifted around to sit opposite him so I could see his face properly. He took my hand and I suppressed a grimace. These repeated violent reactions couldn’t be good for my heart. But I needed to concentrate on his story so I fought to stay out of the black tunnel.

  “Over the last few years I became aware that I was seeing things other people weren’t,” he said.

  “Like?”

  “Nothing extraordinary. In fact, the things I saw were mostly so everyday, so trivial, that I honestly gave no thought to questioning them. I thought everyone else could see what I was seeing.”

  “I don’t get it. You need to give me an example.”

  “For example,” he said, “one thing I saw was a little girl standing beside her mother at the train station.”

  “That’s all?” He nodded. “But how did you know other people couldn’t see it, too?”

  “It’s hard to explain but the colors were kind of ... wrong. This little girl, for instance, was wearing a red coat and a woolen hat. But the red was uncanny―vivid, fire engine red―and she and her mother were almost gray in comparison. When people walked by them, it was like the people went out of focus or disappeared into the background.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “Okay. I can see how you’d know that was out of the ordinary.”

  “No, that wasn’t it. You see, I was seeing these pictures all the time. Sometimes several times in one day. Not the same pictures but often related. None of them was especially surprising for its context. I was so used to it I never even consciously wondered about it.”

  “Then how did you know other people couldn’t see them, too?”

  “There was a trigger that made me start to question what I was seeing, but even then it took me a long time to work it out. The trigger was a TV documentary about the 1930s Depression. It came on a day or so after I’d seen the girl in the red coat. Lots of black and white footage of people lining up for food and suffering malnutrition, illness and poverty. And there in the middle of the film was this little girl.” I was shocked but didn’t speak. “She was in hospital with tuberculosis.”

  “Wearing the red coat?”

  He shook his head. “It was black and white footage. She was just sitting there in a hospital gown, very sick. Just one scene of her being treated by a nurse in 1936.”

  “You can see ghosts?” As I said it I felt ridiculous.

  Cain gave me a small smile. “No. As I said, that was what drew my attention to it but I just wrote it off as a coincidence. Okay, it looked exactly like her, but that was bound to happen from time to time through history; two kids, generations apart who looked so much alike they could be mistaken for the same child. For all I knew she may have been a descendent of the tuberculosis girl’s family. Or maybe I remembered the train station kid wrong and she didn’t look that much like the one in the documentary, after all.” He paused to light another cigarette and took a drag. “So I wrote it off as coincidence but it made me pay closer attention the next time I saw one of the visions. For the first time I noticed how strange and vivid the colors were, and how people around the vision seemed to fade away. It happened again a couple of days later. This time it was a teenager wearing a blue baseball cap. Vivid, neon blue. And the rest of him was kind of grayed out again. I looked at him hard because he seemed upset. He was walking on the side of the road while I was stopped at a traffic light. And on the very next lamp post I drove past there was a picture of him pasted to it with the words ‘Missing Person’ printed under his photo.” Cain looked down at his cigarette. “I pulled over straight away to run back to him and ... I don’t know, grab him ... turn him in to the cops, or something. I hadn’t exactly thought that bit through. But it didn’t matter because he was gone. And he hadn’t run away or hidden, or anything. He was just completely gone, as though I hadn’t even seen him in the first place.”

  He didn’t look at my face while he told me this. Was he embarrassed? Okay, it was weird, but I’d experienced uncanny things about Cain already so it wasn’t wholly unexpected. I’d felt how his touch made me feel warm and safe, and I’d seen him literally glowing under moonlight. But as he explained his gift he looked uneasy. Maybe he thought I might not believe him.

  “Now these visions really had my attention,” he went on. “Next time I saw one I was with a friend. It was an old man walking a dog by an ornamental pond. This time the color was yellow; the dog’s collar was iridescent yellow while the man and dog itself were almost gray. He seemed unsteady on his feet and dog was young and untrained, straining at its lead. I thought once or twice the dog was going to pull him over as he walked alongside the pond. One of my friends asked me what I was staring at and I pointed out the old guy. That’s when I had to accept I was the only one seeing these visions. She was looking right at the edge of the pond where I was pointing an
d couldn’t see him. All she could see was a couple of swans and a kid riding by on a bike.” He paused to take another drag on his smoke.

  “When did you see the old man again?”

  Cain kept his eyes down. “His photo was on the news a week later. He’d toppled into the pond and knocked himself out. By the time someone found him he’d already drowned.”

  My skin prickled. “A week after you saw him at the park?”

  He nodded. “I reasoned with myself that of course, he probably walked his dog that way every day. What I saw a week earlier was an accident waiting to happen. But the fact that my friend hadn’t been able to see him unsettled me. I couldn’t make any sense of it, so I found out when his funeral was being held. I pretended to be an acquaintance. While I was there I overheard people talking about the circumstances of his death. The guy was retired, living in a town a few hours away from the city. He’d been visiting his daughter at her new house. The day he died she was trying to get the baby to sleep and their young dog kept barking so he offered to walk it for her. That’s when it happened. But as far as I could find out the guy had never been to that park before. He’d never even seen their dog before, let alone walked it. That’s how I knew for sure that the man and dog I saw at the park were not actually there that day. The whole event hadn’t even happened yet.”

  Finally, Cain looked at me. He forgot his cigarette, his expression concerned. “Does that disturb you?”

  I didn’t know how to answer. Of course it was disturbing but why did he want me to confirm it? Or did he want me to lie and say it was fine?

  “What happened next?” I asked, my mouth dry.

  “Well, it disturbed me. I didn’t know what to think. I started to wonder if I was going crazy. And the same thing kept happening. I’d see people or situations. Sometimes it was the same person in different situations, or even a bunch of situations that didn’t seem linked at all. And then within a week or so I might find out that something bad had happened to a person I’d seen. Not always. Just a handful of the people I saw in visions ended up making the news. Most of the visions went unexplained. I got obsessed. I subscribed to every newspaper and media site I could. When I saw something that didn’t turn up in the news I’d search archives, birth and death records, anything I could to try and understand what I’d seen. I realized some of them related to the future and some to the past.

  “Then a while later―a long while later―I saw a vision while I was riding on my bike. Up ahead of me on the road I saw a truck with a bright yellow indicator flashing, changing lanes. But it was too close to a guy on a motorbike and clipped the bike. The bike flipped out from under the guy and he hit the ground, skidding along the road before smashing into a rail.” He smiled at me. “One guess what happened next.”

  “A truck changed lanes and hit you?” I said slowly.

  Cain inclined his head with a rueful look. He shifted so he could lift his shirt to show me a scar up one side of his abdomen. I’d felt that scar the night before but now I found it hard to look away from his bare skin, for more reasons than just the silky white weal.

  “Broken ribs, punctured lung, and damage to one of my kidneys.”

  “What happened during your surgery?” I asked. “You told me before that you heard voices.” A reflexive shudder went through me, which I tried to suppress, but Cain noticed. I adjusted my face to what I hoped looked like polite interest instead of desperate, breathless impatience for the next part of the story. Too late. I’d blown it.

  He shook his head. “I’ve talked enough for both of us today! The guys are here now, anyway.”

  He was right. Creaks sounded above us and I was filled with disappointment. I’d been able to forget Liz was even there as she scurried around putting rubbish in bin bags and washing sticky patches on the floor where soft drink had spilled, but there was no way I’d be able to ignore all three of them. Dammit. Hmm, surely I had time to steal another kiss before they came into the room? I lunged at him and at first Cain was still under my lips, but then his arm slipped round my waist and crushed me close against him for a few blissful seconds. He pushed me away an instant before Jude and Owen opened the door and filed in.