CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
“What are you doing here, Jake?” she demanded. She looked around behind him. There was no one on the walking path.
Jake was looking behind her. “Me? What are you doing here? Are you alone?”
Ellie quickly pushed Jake backwards and closed the door behind her. She wasn’t going to let him in the house. “Are you following me now? I’ve got a restraining order, Jake. You’d better leave.”
“I know about the restraining order, which is ridiculous, Ellie. I’d never do anything to hurt you,” Jake said gruffly. “These are for you. I wanted to apologize.” He nodded his head toward the flower bouquet.
“I don’t need flowers or an apology from you, Jake. I just need you to leave me alone,” Ellie said. She was at a loss. Jake’s behavior was completely out of control. She was scared to death of what that blackness surrounding him meant, but he wasn’t drunk or making any overt gestures that indicated he intended to harm her.
“I asked you to hear me out.” Jake stared at the patio. “I think you owe me that much after all the time we had together.”
“And I thought you owed me love, fidelity, and a sense of safety, Jake. That didn’t happen either,” Ellie said, crossing her arms in front of her. She was starting to feel the chill from the cool November air.
“I can’t do anything about all of that now,” Jake said. The hurt was evident in his voice. “I’m not looking to win you back or anything like that. I swear. I just want to make sure that you are safe.”
“I’m fine, Jake. I don’t know what I can do to convince you of that. My life, all parts of it, are not your responsibility or concern any longer,” Ellie said. She refused to be pulled into any further discussion. She ignored the flowers and opened the door, intending to slam it in Jake’s face.
“Ellie.” The strangled way that Jake said her name caused her turn. She looked into his face and saw haunted eyes staring back at her. “Please. Things have gotten a lot worse. I don’t know what it all means, but I know that you are in danger.”
“The only threatening thing in my life right now is you, Jake,” she said. “You are scaring me.”
“I don’t want to scare you. I want to warn you. Make sure that you are looking after yourself. I want to make sure you are keeping your eyes open, that you aren’t being caught unaware.” It was the naked fear in his voice that finally convinced Ellie. That and the fact that his aura had washed out to a dirty gray.
“All right, Jake. I’ll hear you out. But then you’ll leave me alone? For good?” she asked.
“Yes, of course. I promise,” he said quickly, seeing his opportunity.
“Fine, come in,” she said. “It’s cold out here. But I’ve got my phone right here and I’ll call the cops if you act crazy.” She moved aside and let Jake into the house.
“Let’s go in the kitchen. I’ll make some coffee,” she said. She started down the hallway, Jake at her heels.
“So what’s up with this house?” Jake asked, looking around in awe.
“I’m house-sitting for a friend,” she said. She had no reason to elaborate.
“I need more friends like yours,” Jake said with a touch of sarcasm. At Ellie’s sharp glance he looked away sheepishly. “Sorry.”
“You aren’t here to talk about my friends, and frankly I’m not really comfortable sharing a lot of details of my life right now, if you don’t mind.”
Jake’s shoulders slumped as he sat down on one of the kitchen stools. Ellie moved around the kitchen, finding coffee filters in one cupboard and coffee beans in another. If nothing else, she knew how to make a good cup of coffee. Ellie allowed the silence to continue as she prepared the coffee for brewing. Then she sat at the counter across from Jake.
“C’mon, Jake. Time to talk,” she said.
He sighed. “I told you about the dream I’ve been having. I’ve been having it almost every night for a few weeks now. I don’t know, I guess I felt like it was a result of the drinking or something.” He glanced up and saw Ellie’s disapproving look.
“I know you didn’t approve of my drinking when we were married, and then the other stuff happened. I know that was part of the reason we split up. But I guess I realized a few months ago that I had other things going on with me that I needed to deal with. Things that affected how I treated you, and how I treated myself. I haven’t been honest with you, Ellie, and I think you deserve to know the truth.”
Ellie was shocked. This confession wasn’t at all what she had expected.
“I’ve had an…ability…ever since I was little,” Jake continued. “It really doesn’t matter to me if you believe me or not, but I’m telling this so maybe you’ll start to understand why I’ve dealt with things the way I have." He stopped and looked in Ellie’s direction.
Ellie felt a knot in her stomach. “What do you mean, Jake? What kind of ability?”
Jake paused, and then the words tore from his throat. “I see people who aren’t there. I know they aren’t there because I’m the only one who can see them. God, I see them everywhere.” Jake dropped his head into his hands.
When Ellie didn’t react, he continued on without meeting her eyes. “When I drink, it’s easier to forget they’re there. They just kind of blend in with the background and I don’t really even see them. When I’m sober, it’s harder. So when I quit going to my therapist, I went online and looked around to see if there were other people like me, and there were. I just wanted to feel like there was someone I could talk to who understood what I was going through and didn't think it was all something that I made up in my head.”
Ellie heard the coffeemaker beep that the coffee was ready. She got up stiffly and went to the cupboard and took out two mugs. She couldn’t make any sense of what Jake was telling her. She didn’t want to make any sense of it. She wanted to reject it and throw him out, but how do you kick someone out who is baring their soul?
“I’m explaining all of this because I want you to know that I don’t blame you for what happened when we split up. These people that I met, well, let’s just say that talking to them and doing some of the things they talked about made things worse. A whole lot worse.”
That’s when the memory that had been floating around her consciousness came back to her in a flash. She remembered waking up groggy in the middle of the night. The clock next to the bed read three a.m. in stark white letters. And Jake was sitting on the floor next to her bed whispering in the darkness.
The mug that was in her hand slipped and fell to the floor with a crash. Jake rushed to her side and she almost shrieked when he touched her arm.
“Ellie!” he said.
“I remember you chanting over me,” she said, pushing back against the counter. “Somehow you got me to go back to sleep and forget. But you were. You were saying things. Horrible things.”
Jake’s aura lit up like a Christmas tree in dancing yellows, oranges, and reds. “Ellie, I swear there was nothing horrible in that. It was a safety spell. It was stupid, like I said. These people didn’t know what they were talking about and I was just desperate. I never wanted anything bad to happen to you.”
“Jake,” she whispered, “there was something behind you in the room that night.”
Jake’s eyes widened. “What are you talking about, Ellie?”
“It was right behind you. And it was dark and black and wasn’t human. But it had blood red eyes,” Ellie moaned. “I remember the eyes staring at me.” She could see that Jake wanted to touch her but he didn’t dare.
He put up his hands and took a deep breath. “Ellie, I swear that what I was doing wasn’t a bad thing. I wanted to protect you.”
“Protect me from what, Jake?” she said softly.
His eyes fell. “I’m glad you left me when you did, Ellie. I won’t lie. There were things swirling around me that were bad. That made me act badly. Like the night you left,” he said.
Ellie suddenly remembered Jake staring over her shoulder that night. “When you told me t
o pack my stuff and get out. You saw something in the house.”
He nodded, and she felt sick. “Jake, what have you pulled me into?”
He looked up in alarm. “Nothing, Ellie. This was all me. And I got everything under control after we split. These last few months have been really good. I’ve been moving on. And I know this sounds hard to believe the way I’ve been acting the last few weeks, but it hasn’t been some elaborate plan to get you back.”
Ellie felt like her brain was short-circuited. She couldn’t process anything else, and she was so scared that she couldn’t even feel it anymore. She knelt down and started cleaning up the shards of the mug. Jake knelt down to help her. She didn’t want him to say anything else, but he did.
“I hadn’t seen anything in a long time and that’s when I started dreaming about you. It started out real simple. You were just there in my dream. Then it started getting a bit more scary when I’d see you trapped in that dark place. A few nights later I started seeing the hands reaching out, and then last week is when it started getting really freaky, with the hands grabbing you and hurting you. I’m not proud of the fact that I fell off the wagon, but I thought the liquor would help. That was pretty dumb. Really I just needed to know that you were okay.”
She dropped the mug remnants in the garbage and went to pull another mug from the cabinet. Her hands were shaking badly. Jake reached in front of her and took the cup out, setting it on the counter.
“So let me see if I have this straight,” she said, bracing her hands on the counter. “You see people that aren’t there, which I guess makes you psychic or something. We were together for over eight years and you never bothered to tell me that. Instead, you drank to the point where you did a lot of stupid stuff. Then you got in with some psychic cult that pulled you into some even worse voodoo that even caused you to try casting a spell on me, but explains the weird stuff I found in the basement before I decided to leave. Then we split up and for some reason you suddenly found peace. And now you are dreaming that I’m going to die.” The words came out more and more forcefully. It sounded ridiculous, but she could see that Jake completely believed everything that he had told her.
“I’m sorry I couldn’t have been a grown-up sooner, Ellie,” he said. “I’m not proud of myself. But contrary to popular belief, I do still care about you, Ellie. I don’t want to ever see anything bad happen to you.”
“Okay, Jake,” she said. “So you started having these increasingly bad dreams and you got scared. So you started calling me again.”
“Exactly,” he said. He poured them both a cup of coffee and handed one of the mugs to her. “And then I didn’t hear anything back from you. I’d call, then I’d have a drink, then I’d have the dream again. Always just a little bit worse than the time before. All’s I wanted to know was if you were all right.”
“Some of your messages sounded pretty angry,” Ellie said. “Did you ever think that I wasn’t calling you back because of that?”
Jake ran his hand through his hair. “Maybe a few times I’d call when I’d been drinking. That was probably a bad idea.”
Ellie was suddenly tired. It was all too overwhelming. “Then you came to the coffee shop yesterday morning,” she said, pushing him along.
“Well, you wouldn’t call me back, and I had no idea if something may have actually happened to you or not. So I decided to check in on you. Try to talk to you. Tell you what I was dreaming and see if you might understand what it meant,” Jake replied. He took a sip of his coffee, and then just held the mug in his hands, appearing deep in thought.
“You acted like a crazy person at the store yesterday. Then again yesterday afternoon,” Ellie said.
“Dammit, Ellie. These dreams have me all turned around and then on top of it I’m seeing things again. Things out of the corner of my eye when I’m awake that I can’t explain. I think I’m going crazy in my head. Just when I thought I had everything sorted out, then this weird crap starts happening. And you wouldn’t listen to me. You just kept acting like I was the bad guy. I understand you being angry with me over how everything went down with us, but I just wanted you to hear me out, and you wouldn’t even give me that opportunity.”
As reproachful as his tone was, she refused to feel guilty. “Jake, you’ve given me little reason in the entire time I’ve known you to think that at some point we’d be able to sit down and have a logical and unemotional conversation about anything. Not to mention one of the last conversations we had resulted in what I thought may have been a concussion,” she said with a touch of anger in her voice.
Jake raised his hands in a sign of surrender. “I know that I screwed that up really bad. All’s I can say is that wasn’t me. You know me. And what was going on in my head then was poisonous stuff. You were right to leave me.”
Ellie struggled to put all of it together. Jake seemed sincere and had been nothing but in complete control of himself the entire time. “I really have no desire to dwell on any of that. That’s over and done with. Why don’t you tell me why you risked being arrested to follow me here?”
Jake sighed again. “After I left your place yesterday I went home and had a few drinks. I was pretty angry and I had decided to write you off, especially after the cops showed up with that restraining order. I don’t need that kind of aggravation in my life. I just wanted things for me to go back to the way they had been. I tried to will the dreams away. I went to sleep, and then woke up this morning screaming. Jenny had to calm me down because she said I was hysterical.”
He looked at Ellie with a sidelong glance. She pursed her lips with a smirk, but held her tongue. Jennifer Marks was but one of the women that she knew Jake had been seeing while they were still married. Apparently that tryst had continued.
Seeing that Ellie was not going to say anything, Jake pressed on. “She asked me what my dream was about. She knows that I’ve been having nightmares, but I haven’t told her about any of them because I didn’t want her to get upset that I was dreaming about you. Things have gotten a little serious there.”
“Jake, I have no interest in your love life,” Ellie said sourly. “Tell me about your dream.”
“This time it was different. You were sitting in the sunlight outside on a bench next to a lake. You looked happy. I think in my dream I was relieved. I thought that I had finally gotten rid of the bad stuff. Then it seemed to change. In all of the dreams I’d had before I’m just watching from the outside. So the sun went behind a cloud, and then this mist started to appear. The mist surrounded you, but you couldn’t see it. You didn’t seem to notice. Then in the mist, I could see a black shape that I knew was evil. It was what I saw that night you left.”
Jake’s belief in his words was so evident that Ellie felt chills start to run down her spine.
“I tried calling to you, to tell you to move away and get out of there. But by the time you realized that something was wrong, it was too late.” Jake’s voice lowered to a whisper. “The black shape formed a man. I was too far away to see what he looked like. You looked up at him, and it seemed like you knew him. But your face changed from recognition to fear. Then he grabbed you, and you were gone.”
“Gone?” Ellie questioned.
“Gone,” Jake answered. “Then I was there in the dream. I was standing right there by that bench you had been sitting on. I started running around looking for you. Then I finally found you.” Jake paused and he winced. “Or at least, I found part of you.”
Ellie started pacing the length of the countertop, rubbing her arms. She didn’t want to hear the rest, but she knew that Jake wasn’t going to stop now.
“I knelt down and touched your face. My hands came away bloody, and somehow I realized that you weren’t quite dead yet. Your eyes opened and you focused on me for a second, then they got real wide. You were struggling to tell me something, and I leaned closer to hear you. I heard you say ‘You’re next.’ Then I felt a searing pain in my throat. My hands came up, and then I saw that my bloo
d was mingled with yours.”
Jake was holding his hands out in front of him, as if he could see the blood from the dream on his hands. He looked at Ellie. “Whoever had killed you killed me too. I fell on top of you, and could feel my life draining away. That’s when I woke up. I thank God I woke up, because I’ve heard that if you die in your dreams, you die for real.”
Ellie realized she was shaking. “I can’t help you, Jake. I don’t know why, but sounds like you’ve been having some really graphic dreams and there is probably something really wrong with you right now. I really wish these dreams didn’t involve me.”
“Me too.” Jake’s head fell into his hands. “I’m sorry, Ellie. I’m not trying to scare you. These dreams have scared me too. I don’t know why I’m having them, and I want them to stop too. “
Ellie tried to ignore the goose bumps on her arms. “Jake, I’m fine. There’s nothing remotely scary going on in my life. I’m smart enough to take care of myself and I’m certain these dreams you’re having are just the by-product of something else that is going on in your head. I don’t believe in this ‘ability’ that you say you have, but I know you do and so I think it’s beyond time for you to start thinking about going back to your therapist.”
Jake looked up at her. “You were always the strong one, Ellie. I didn’t deserve you. I don’t want anything to happen to you.”
Jake’s aura had turned a dark purple, and Ellie sensed nothing but sadness and regret from him. For the first time that Ellie could remember in a long time, she felt warmth toward Jake. He truly was worried about her. For that, she felt like she could finally find the closure over the whole situation. She surprised both of them by giving him a hug. After a few seconds, she felt him hug her back.
As he pulled away she felt a sharp twinge run up her arm like static electricity. She saw that Jake had felt it too and he laughed awkwardly.
“Okay. If you say you are okay, then I’m going to trust you. Thanks for hearing me out. Maybe that’s all I needed to be able to stop having these crazy dreams, you know?”
Ellie nodded. “I hope so too.”
“I’d probably better get back,” Jake said, looking at his watch. “Jenny is going to start worrying. She doesn’t know what is going on with me, and I think she’s starting to worry that I’m messing around on her.”
“I hope that you find happiness too, Jake. I really do,” Ellie said.
“I wish that for you too, Ellie,” he said with a soft smile. Ellie saw a tenderness that hadn’t existed in Jake’s eyes before. She wondered if it was the divorce, or this new relationship that had put that there. Either way, she didn’t begrudge it. She had moved on, and so had he. It was a time for new beginnings. She thought of David, and she couldn’t wait to see him.
She walked Jake to the door. With each step he seemed lighter. As he stepped out the door, he turned slightly. “I know this may sound corny, or maybe even a little out of line considering where we are now, but if you need me, just call, okay? I’d like us to keep in touch.”
Ellie was again touched by Jake’s thoughtfulness. It crossed her mind that if he had always been like this, things may have been different between them. “Thanks, I’ll remember that.”
They exchanged shy smiles and then Jake walked away. Ellie closed the door and leaned back against it. Her life had taken a completely unexpected turn in the last forty-five minutes. She wished she hadn’t remembered about the chanting and the strange figure in their room, though. Ellie assumed that it was some kind of suggestive thing that her mind had done in an attempt to comprehend Jake’s strange behavior. She wondered what he had done to make her forget. It was frightening to think of the implications of that, but Jake was gone and she didn’t think she’d hear from him again.
Jake had moved on and so had she. She looked around the front hall and felt enveloped by that sense of warmth and peace that quickly spun all of those bad memories away. She headed back to the kitchen humming a wordless tune. It was like Jake’s visit had never happened.