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Eyes of Glass - Hearts of Stone

Chapter Forty-one

With the kids safely off to school, Lori phoned Maggie for permission to visit. A half hour later, the Volkswagen crept down the main street bisecting Jumer. Despite Carol's assurance that Trent would not be found at home during the mornings, she parked her Volkswagen behind Maggie's house and threaded her way through desiccated remains of what had been a lush garden of foliage earlier in the year. A vine covered fence hid her from view as she moved alongside the house to the front.

Maggie was waiting at the front door and led Lori through the quiet, musty house. The kitchen was a visit to the distant past, although the cast iron stove had been converted to gas from wood. Every piece of furniture and utensil in view was a heavily worn antique along with the faded wallpaper, the yellowed curtains, and the intricately textured ceiling of painted zinc sheeting. Only the warm glow of sixty-watt incandescent bulbs belonged to the current decade.

Maggie poured two cups of hot tea without bothering to offer cream or sugar. Her gaunt hands trembled. She looked painfully aged and frail and sat with utmost care in the seat across from Lori at the small kitchen table. She smiled primly. "I hope you don't mind the kitchen rather than the den. I find it far more cozy and informal. And much warmer. I have all the rooms upstairs sealed off during the winter."

"It's nice in here."

"I'm glad you came so quickly," Maggie said. "It's for the best, I assure you."

Lori set her cup aside and leaned forward. "Maggie, I wanted to talk to you about the drawings I showed you."

Maggie discarded her concern with a disdainful flutter of a hand. "None of that is important. We have other business to attend this morning."

Patience would be a virtue in dealing with the nervous old woman. Lori sipped her tea and tried to at least appear at ease. Once Maggie began talking, she'd know in an instant the kind of problem Maggie might pose and how best to deal with it.

"I wanted to tell you about Maude Whitney," Maggie said. "I think it's important for you to know about Maude and Laura, her daughter."

"Yes," Lori said with mild surprise. "I'd like to hear about them."

Maggie shook her head nervously. "You will not be tolerant of my story, not until you understand why it is important to you. It begins with Maude Whitney. Do you know anything about eighteenth-century spiritualism, my dear?"

"Séances and stuff like that?"

"Yes, exactly. You see, Maude fancied herself a spiritual medium. She channeled the dead. Or so she believed."

Lori suppressed a twinge of embarrassment. This is what she had feared would happen.

"Maude had a beautiful, hand-painted sign of the zodiac that hung from her front porch. She gave readings of various kinds, palms, tea leaves, crystal balls, the whole ball of wax. She was quite the student of the occult, and she had a devout following here in Jumer. And in Sorrel."

Lori smiled politely.

"I, on the other hand, taught comparative religion at Michigan State for twenty years. I bought this house when I retired."

The disclosure jolted her.  "You were a teacher?"

"I was a tenured professor, my dear, Dr. Margaret Shire. Given the opportunity to break impenetrable barriers of prejudice erected by the church in matters of gender, I fancy that I would have at one time become a Jesuit priest. I was, in fact, a practicing Catholic at the beginning of my career. By the time I retired, I was, as young people now-a-days say, burned out. Agnostic, at best. I wearied of the poor logic and emotional baggage of so many contradictory systems of belief. I came to view religion as the desire of the untrained mind to know our roots and our destinies, even to the extent of filling in gaps of ignorance and misunderstanding with imaginative guesswork. I developed far more respect for the disciplines of science."

Lori gave her a strained smile. She had assumed Maggie to be the widow of a local farmer.

"Maude and I used to get into some terrible arguments," Maggie said. "We dearly loved to argue. My challenge to the woman was, simply, put up or shut up. Can you guess what happened?"

Maggie smiled teasingly, forcing Lori to respond. "What happened?" Lori said softly.

"Maude convinced me that strange things do indeed happen in life."

Maggie chuckled at Lori's embarrassed discomfort. Lori couldn't quite hide a squirm of protest.

"Oh, it was nothing earth-shattering,” she continued. “She supposedly channeled my poor dead Randolph and came up with a fact or two I would have thought beyond guesswork. Her dreams seemed to be mildly precognitive. When I began recording my own dreams, I found about the same percentage contained material not easily dismissed as coincidence."

"Too much coincidence," Lori murmured. That, at least, she'd accept as demonstrable fact, if only the world would pay attention to such things.

"Maude and I used to bicker over how such things could be possible, or not possible. I convinced her of the fallacy of many of her beliefs, and she showed me in rather startling ways how little I really know about the world. Her mind was undisciplined and open to possibilities. Mine was set in concrete."

Lori finished her tea and waited for an opening to speak. She wanted nothing more than to press home her warning of more immediate dangers.

"In order for you to understand," Maggie said, "I must explain that Maude and I were motivated to think the way we did, and motivated to come to the conclusions that we did, by fear. Maude and I would have had no grounds for our discussions, no grounds for a friendship even, had it not been for Laura. The girl, my dear, was a witch, and she, my child, is the source of your dreams."

Lori sat transfixed by a woman who had changed before her very eyes from a dotting farm wife into a creature as sinister as a witch herself.

"Laura grew up an ordinary girl at first glance," Maggie said, "pretty and outgoing. Maude and her husband worshipped their daughter as a child. Laura terrified them as a young woman."

"Surely you don't mean a witch in a bad way," Lori said. She had seen Laura's smile in the photograph on the wall of his studio. Trent had never given her any indication of a problem with his young wife.

"I fear I do. Many children have an invisible playmate as a child. Laura had one that could knock over furniture."

Lori was suddenly very skeptical. "Were you convinced?"

"I saw for myself," Maggie said casually. "Laura was a young woman of many talents, few of which are thought to exist in reality. She could tell to one degree or another what other people were thinking. She thought it an intrusion upon her own privacy, and it annoyed her. She could tell what was going to happen during the course of a day or two. Sometimes she would have a gist of larger, historic events that would transpire."

"She could predict the future?"

"Laura claimed that we have many individual futures and that people pick and chose among them and make it impossible to say exactly what will happen in the larger course of events, but she claimed to be able to see fated events approaching. Laura said that fated events are rare, but unavoidable by those involved."

"That's all very interesting," Lori said in growing agitation. "It is hard to believe."

"Belief is irrelevant from my perspective. I suspect it is irrelevant from yours as well, if these dreams of yours are what I think they are. Nobody outside of Laura's family and a close circle of friends knew of her abilities. She met another like herself in Los Angeles, a woman named Darlene Roman, but Maude said that her daughter's talent was in itself partially responsible for her relationship with Trent Scarelli. There was something special about Trent. He was opaque to her, part of a larger fated event Laura could not foresee, and therefore could not avoid."

Lori eyed the tea pot on the stove, thinking that her mouth was dry than that she could use another cup. Maggie rose unbidden from her seat and refilled her cup.

"Laura had a special way of looking at the world," Maggie said when she had returned to her seat. "Maude thought it a supernatural power, but both Laura and myself were educated and somewhat familiar with the scientific view of things. When Laura told me that time and space are the way we structure information inside our minds, I understand that she was implying that we live in a universe much broader in scope than we perceive. Our three-dimensional model of the world lives inside us, but our mind transcends that world and, in fact, inhabits a multidimensional world we cannot directly perceive at all.”

Lori just stared at her.

"Laura was never critical or judgmental of the world around her. She once told me that everything in the world is exactly the way it is supposed to be, and it all makes sense from a higher perspective. To the casual eye, she was an ordinary girl who grew up and left home, but when she returned with Trent on her heels, she was very frightened."

"Trent frightened her?" Lori said dryly.

Maggie smiled patiently. "Not Trent the man. Trent the fated event. Laura said that a darkness was coming into her life, and that Trent was part of it, or would be a part of it. The thing that had attracted her to him became a thing to be feared.

"It was about that time that I learned of Laura's abilities. She was desperate for somebody to talk to. At first, I thought her a tad paranoid. Before I could be of use to her, she had to prove herself to me. I have never slept peacefully since that day. Laura did me no special favor demonstrating to me the true extent of my blindness to the larger environment. She was drowning, and floundering, and unwittingly dragging me with her into the terrible depths that lie beyond our ability to see or understand."

"Then you weren't able to help her," Lori said, reluctantly beginning to warm to the story.

"Of course not. I suggested she try to distance herself from her new husband as a last resort. She truly loved Trent and hadn't considered leaving him despite the tensions and misunderstandings rising between them. Darlene Roman, her friend, said it was a matter of life and death that she try. By the time Laura was willing to take our advice, it was too late."

Lori squirmed with unease. "What does my dream have to do with any of this?"

"The glass eye is the connection between the two of you," Maggie said bluntly. "Carol would not have been so specific about your dreams had she not been so concerned, but you see, my dear, you are not the only one who has dreamt of the glass eye."

Lori set her tea cup aside with a trembling hand. How had Maggie managed to pick up so fast on the glass eye? Carol had always been more concerned with the sexually lurid elements of the dream.

"According to Laura," Maggie said, "fated events involve groups of people, not individuals. There is no choice involved in these larger events, except within the confine of the event itself. Fated events cannot be foreseen, and they cannot be avoided."

"Laura knew she was going to die?"

"She told me so herself. After her disappearance, I began to have dreams of Trent's cameras. I saw images of a woman reflected in their lenses. Because of the distortion, or maybe because my subconscious refused to let me see, I could never quite tell what was happening. I had the first dream about six months after Laura disappeared and at intervals of two or three years thereafter. I have been having them again in recent weeks."

Lori looked up at Maggie in anguish. Was she accusing Trent of murdering his own wife?

"Trent became more active with his photography after her disappearance," Maggie said, again sensing her train of thought. "The one time I talked to him, he said that he felt closer to Laura when working with his cameras. He said he felt the need to reach out and help in some way, although he didn't understand how that was possible. In his own way, I suspect he has been having those dreams as well. They have motivated him. You could say they have haunted him."

"But what do they mean?" Lori cried, more in protest than in quest of an answer.

Maggie shook her head, and it alarmed Lori to see tears in her eyes. "I don't know what any of it means. I only know that Laura grieved for me, because she sensed that I would play a role in her fated event as well. I've taken it to mean that it will cost me my life in the end. At my age, death is no unwelcomed stranger, except that I would like to know what is happening before I die. I was hoping you would know more than I."

"I don't even know if anything at all is happening!" Lori protested. "All I have is drawings of four women I never met, a locked room in a basement, your ghost story, Karen and her ungodly pigs, and Trent telling me to move away! I don't know how any of it ties together!"

"My dear, you must find out. Your life is in danger and only you can end this nightmare before it swallows more innocent souls."

"I don't know what to do," Lori said, almost as a whimper.

"It is Laura's death that you dream about," Maggie said. "I don't think it was given to you entirely as a warning. It has provided information that has motivated you to seek out the source of the danger and perhaps expose it to the light of day where it can be dealt with in ordinary ways. It is my belief that Laura has reached from beyond the grave to stand at your side. Have some faith that you are not alone at this terrible hour."

Lori considered Maggie's fantastic story. She thought she saw a flaw in the logic of it's structure. "If Laura is trying to help us, why hasn't she shown us his face? What else would we need but a glimpse of his face?"

"She may not have seen his face, or known who he was."

Lori's anger only intensified. Maggie's story was filled with holes. "If we have had this dream, what about the others? Robin, Kim, and Melissa. They would have had the dream, too. Why hasn't it accomplished anything after all this time?"

"The young have too narrow a view of life," Maggie said bluntly. "They dismiss the dream, if they remember it at all, or they do not interpret it for what it is. You are a woman strengthened by maturity. You are open to more possibilities than you may have accepted in the past. You have the courage to face danger and to act to protect yourself.”

Memory of the night of the storm rose unbidden into her consciousness. Karen had intended to throw Ronnie into the path of the train. Her own focus on the crisis had been so narrow that she would have let the train take her life before allowing Ronnie to be murdered. Now, she could sense danger rushing upon her in the same manner, powerful and lethal, but roaring in from a direction that had nothing to do with time and space. This time around, there was nobody to save but herself, and she had no way to step out of its way. Despite Maggie's confidence in her ability to do something to protect herself, she was not a witch like Laura Scarelli, and she had no special power to protect anyone.

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