Flashback

Dedication

To the humane amidst the humans who consider life to be a precious thing, and are concerned with the preservation of it. Maybe one day there will be no more war.

Chapter One

The keen blade of the knife entered her midsection with a clarity of movement and efficiency that left her coughing with incredulous surprise and pain. The heat of the day pounded into her skin and her shirt stuck to her back. Now her shirt was sticking to her front as well, and her eyes looked in mute accusation at the wiry, foreign looking man that crouched menacingly in front of her. He looked so odd, but then so did the rest of the countryside, all green and brown and strange, as her blank, uncomprehending gaze slowly passed over it all. Then, just as slowly, she started to topple forward to collapse in a crumpled heap on the ground.

Her hand went to her stomach, groping, bunched into a tight, huge fist, which she stuffed into the wound with a grunt of pain to keep from bleeding to death right then and there. Dark red liquid oozed all over, on her hand, on the ground in front of her, and a trickle of salty sweat ran down the side of her face as half was pressed into the dirt. Pain, rage, despair. The incredible, strong will to survive. She would survive.

Then rough hands were flipping her over and yanking her hand away to determine the extent of the damage done, and she started to go hazy around the edges of her consciousness, jerking rigid at a sharp sting of fire-like pain. And then the cloudiness around the periphery of her vision started to darken, and the whole world blacked out into a monstrous nothing.

And the nothingness was part of the dream, and she couldn’t wake up, or escape from it. She drifted a while, in a fog of pain.

Dana woke then, finally, her chest heaving in great, gasping sobs, sweat dampening herself and the sheet pulled over her slim, shivering body. A slight breeze moved a curtain at the open window, stirring her hair slightly. With the sickness of the horrible nightmare still gripping her, she took a shuddering breath, passed her hands over her eyes, and sat up.

The middle of the night is the blackest and most terrible time of all, when nightmares are real, even though they’re insane, and despair is so hard to shake. The despair was gripping her now, and it was in its own way worse than the nightmare for it was reality, simple, inescapable. She moved like an old woman to the light switch on the wall and flipped it on with shaking fingers. Then, jerking up her nightshirt hastily, she stared down at her stomach with a half hopeful, half horrified look in her dark brown eyes.

The creamy skin was unmarred by any mark whatsoever.

She stood up, still with that strange, stiff movement that bespoke of an immense old age, and she started for the stairs at the end of the hall. If only she could get out of this head of hers and never have to worry about anything ever again! If only she knew for sure that she wasn’t going totally, irrevocably, bizarrely insane…

“Dana?” her mother’s sleepy, worried voice wafted down the hall to her. “Sweetheart, are you all right?” A feeling of weary worry reached Dana, who knew that it was from her mother. She paused at the head of the stairs, unwilling to say anything, and her mother sighed through the open door, “It was another nightmare, wasn’t it, darling?”

“Yes, Mom,” she said raggedly. Two great tears spilled down her cheeks. “Don’t worry, I’m all right. I’m just going to read for a while downstairs, since I’m not very sleepy. You go on back to sleep.”

Something moving in the night air. Wind sighing. Silence, a distant creaking of bedsprings. Then her mother’s weary voice again, wafting like the night breeze to the slim figure hovering indecisively. “All right, dear. Though I wish you’d go to see Doctor Freedman and get some sleeping pills. This insomnia is going to push you to a collapse, if you aren’t careful…” Her words trailed off, and Dana headed on down the stairs. She knew her mother wasn’t going to say any more. She’d known what her mother was going to say before she’d said it.

The house was much too hot and stifling. She crept upstairs to dress in jeans, a thin summer top, and sneakers, pulling back her chestnut hair and tying it with a ribbon, for comfort. Minutes later she was slipping out through the back door, needing desperately a chance to breathe fresh, cool air. There was no possibility of that, though, for outside it was as hot and as muggy as the house had been. The night sky was clear, the darkness clean and cutting to the senses, the dark purple sky awash with brilliant white flashing stars. There was no moon. The huge pines to the right of the house moaned and sighed as they bent first one way and then another in the restless wind. Dana walked listlessly, her feet automatically finding her way, knowing the area so well. But no matter how far she went she could never run from the nightmare that was herself.

She’d always tenaciously clung to the fact that she was, though definitely strange, undeniably sane down inside and fundamentally sound. But now, after the past several nights when she’d dreamt of a life she’d never even lived, she was becoming frighteningly convinced that she was going mad.

She was utterly terrified. This was something dark and new, something totally outside the realm of her experience. As a young girl, her parents had gradually come to the realization that she was something special, something extraordinary. It began when they had noticed that whenever someone close to her had been hurt, she would cry silently, tears rolling down her small face, and she would cradle the part of her body that had been injured on the other person. She didn’t have to be told of the other person’s injury. She never had to be told. She always knew.

When asked about it, she never could adequately describe in words what it was that she really experienced. In fact as she grew older, she had been simply astounded to find out that other people had no experience of that which she had taken for granted as a simple part of life. She could not believe that other people couldn’t hear the unspoken messages that were fairly screamed at her.

Her parents had watched her respond to commands that were never uttered, wincing with a parent’s pain at the shaking puddle of nervous hysteria that was Dana who had come home early from her first day of school, As they had become more and more aware of her peculiar talent, they’d decided to do their best to shelter her. They’d taken her out of the public school system and her mother, a qualified teacher, had retired early to teach Dana herself. No mention of oddity or strangeness had ever been allowed to reach her young ears, but then again, she knew what was being thought.

Now, in the darkness of the cloaking night, she had to smile a little at her parents’ unquestioning support. They could have so easily looked at her as if she was a monster or a freak. But all she had ever received from them was that constant flow of their love and steady support.

As she’d grown older, she had done a little research and had finally labeled herself as a telepath. Picking up only certain people’s emotions and thoughts and not others, never able to control it, never able to transmit her own thoughts and feelings, she had retired more and more into herself. She was always a loner, always shying away from personal contact like a frightened rabbit. She walked now through the iron veil of darkness, quietly crying. No matter how she had tried, she’d never found a way to shield herself from other people. She always picked up their emotions and upheavals like radar, with an unerring sense, and it was sometimes enough to make her scream with anger and frustration at her utter lack of privacy. Though she was only twenty, she felt like she’d lived forever.

She’d always held on to that feeling of reality, though. She’d always been able to trace her feelings to something that made sense. Mrs. Reardon’s fearful spurts of intense rage that Dana had sensed, her mind feeling scorched as if from a fiery blast, had been caused because she’d known her husband was cheating on her with the girl who worked at the post office. That screaming, horrifying wrench of death that had hit her, three years ago, had been her father, smashed out of life almost instantly in an accident at the mill where he worked. It still made her break out in a cold sweat to remember that. When the message had come from sympathetic neighbours that Jerry Haslow had been killed, she had been rocking in silent grief beside her stunned and stricken mother.

But these queer, frightening nightmares made no sense whatsoever. She’d tried and tried, and she couldn’t make any kind of continuity mesh between them and the world as she knew it. They were coming from no one she knew. She was completely, despondently alone in the madness.

The wind howled overhead. The night rustled, whispering softly to itself. Her head lifted, blindly seeking. She wasn’t quite so alone. She found her voice and spoke out, “Hello? Who’s there?”

No answer. Pine rustle. The silent sound of stars twinkling. The wind caught at the grass and made it ripple, unseen. There was someone, a large black shadow that was the huge tree’s shadow and not part of it, unmoving. She said abruptly, feeling alarmed, “I know you’re there, so there’s no use in hiding. Who is it?” Her voice echoed queerly in the open space.

A low, masculine voice came back to her, slightly harsh, hostile. “You’re trespassing, whoever you are. For God’s sake, it’s four in the morning and hardly the time to be walking blithely about!” The black shadow moved, materialised into the shape of a man. He came nearer.

She felt that hostility like a silent snarl, and she reacted confusedly, backing up a few steps. “H-hello, you must be the fellow renting the Cessler house, M-Mr. Raymond. I’m your neighbour, Dana Haslow. I walk over the property quite a bit. Mrs. Cessler never minds.” Her mind was working on several levels. She’d spoken almost absently, barely paying attention, for she was inwardly wondering if one day she might become dangerous to other people if she really was insane. Would she be able to hide it, or would she have to be committed? Could she cover up this great appalling rent in her personality? She wondered irrelevantly whether the food was good in a mental institution, and also why in the world this strange man was out of bed and abroad at four in the morning.

He had apparently come to the same conclusion, for after an obvious hesitation, that shadow that was a man came yet closer and said, dryly, “It’s—er—a bit late for wandering safely in the woods don’t you think, Miss Haslow? If you were injured in an accident, it would be some time before anyone could find you.”

“I know the area well,” she said shortly. “There would be no accident.” The whispering passage of a night owl overhead, and a sudden distant scream from a field mouse. She backed up again. He was sounding more friendly and at ease, but she still felt his hostility beat at her temples, and it alarmed her more than she cared to admit.

“Oh, but there might have easily been an accident just now,” he said pleasantly, and her throat tightened. He took a few more steps. He was too close. “You see, as I didn’t know your identity in the dark, I could have very easily hurt you, thinking that you were perhaps an intruder, maybe a thief come to break into the house—”

“Come off it, Mr. Raymond,” she said, tension making her terse, and uncaring that she was so. “This is such a small place that we don’t even lock our doors at night. You’re just trying to get me off this land, aren’t you? But Mrs. Cessler told me specifically that she was going to make sure you knew of me and that I was to be able to roam the property at will. You won’t get rid of me so easily.” She didn’t care what this person thought of her, knowing full well that she was considered to be a bit odd by just about everyone in the small town. Such a young girl keeping so stubbornly off to herself was bound to make someone talk. If they knew only the half of it, she thought.

“Not bad, for four in the morning. As a matter of fact, she did mention to me in passing that you had a habit of wandering around and that I should be lenient, as you’d done so all your life.” That male voice was fully mature and would be quite attractive, she thought idly, if it didn’t have that thread of mockery running through it. He moved, became more well defined. He was big. He must be just over six feet tall, she mused, but there was solidity to the bulk that gave her an impression of a brick wall. The hostility had lessened somewhat, but there was a certain quality of tenseness about him that made her want to squirm. He was radiating as much nervous tension as she’d felt from the beginning, and the combination of both his emotions and her own had her nearly out of her head with the need to do something. She shifted, like a skittish colt. “Tell me, Miss Haslow, are you in the habit of wandering around in the dead of night?” She sensed his sharp curiosity underneath the casual sounding words.

“I have insomnia,” she replied briefly, “and am in the habit of roaming around all over the place, whenever the mood strikes me.”