Timeless (7 page)

“Why not? It might be fun,” he said. “But
I’ll have to talk to my parents first. I’ll tell Mr. Dean tomorrow.
I never realized you were so interested in history,” he finished,
laughing as he put my books in the locker beside his.

“Me either,” I answered, laughing too.

We held hands as we walked to sixth period.
Ben had Spanish, while Annie and I had French down the hall.

“See you after,” I said, turning to go
inside.

Before I could, though, Ben pulled me around,
turning my head and finding my lips.

Mrs. Anderson had hall duty and cleared her
throat. “Mr. Harmon, Ms. St. Clair,” she warned.

We broke apart, and Ben smiled at me.

“Sorry,” I mumbled to her, not a little
surprised by Ben, who usually hated public displays like that.

Everyone in class was staring at me when I
entered French class. I was the last one to take my seat.

“Bonjour, Mademoiselle Emily,” Madame Renalt
said, smirking in that oh-so-French way I really hated.

“Bonjour, Madame,” I muttered, looking away
from everyone. I knew my face was beet red. I hoped that she’d
ignore me instead of making some smart comment in French. She had
an unfortunately wicked sense of humor. A small perk, I guess, for
being a high school teacher.

“Tu t’amuse?” she asked. As if I was having
fun, I thought, now really embarrassed.

Everyone laughed. I could feel my cheeks
growing hotter under everyone’s watchful eyes. I wondered if they
could spontaneously combust.

I took my seat, opened my book, and looked
down at my desk, burying my nose in the book as far as I could.
Angela had this class with me, and while I was happy for her to see
how much Ben loved me, I didn’t relish the idea of being the center
of attention again today. I’d had enough of that recently.

Annie passed me a note: You okay?

I didn’t want to risk getting caught, so I
just nodded.

She scribbled on the back of her notebook:
Wow!!

I shrugged. Angela was watching me, her eyes
shooting daggers at my back. I had the incredible urge to turn
around and stick my tongue out at her, but Madame Renalt was
looking straight at me. It was going to be a long hour.

****

When I got home that afternoon, I began
reading about the history of England from my textbook, and I didn’t
stop until Aunt Jo called me down for dinner. I still had the
strange feeling that the past was just that—not just something I’d
read but something I’d lived. The sections on “everyday life”
especially interested me, and I felt a kinship with the women
depicted in the segments on “domestic life.” Like me, they had
spent much of their time with a needle in their hands.

I was most intrigued by the idea of “courtly
love” between a knight and his lady and the “knight’s life,”
including his preparations for battle, often to fight in
tournaments and the Crusades. A knight trained for years in the
household of a noble lord before he was given his knighthood in a
special ceremony. They trained for the joust when they were not on
the field of battle, and their armor often weighed as much as they
did. I could see in my mind the charging horses, the shining armor,
the cheers from the spectators. It was as though I knew what it
felt like to watch them.

It was not surprising, then, that I had the
dream again that night. The details were the same, but this time I
knew who my protector was. I called out his name: Damien. It was
the last word I screamed before I awoke in the middle of the night,
again in a cold sweat. This time, the dream seemed even more vivid,
if that was possible. Frightened, I went down the hall to the
bathroom, though I didn’t dare to turn on the cold water.

I looked at myself in the mirror, almost
afraid of what or who I’d see there. My eyes, which looked wild and
distracted, stared back at me. Curiously, my arms had scratches,
several of which bled, and small, dark bruises, as though someone
had frantically tried to pull me through the woods.

Could I have done that in my sleep? Wouldn’t
it have awoken Aunt Jo?

I stumbled back to my bedroom, wishing that
it wasn’t three o’clock in the morning. I wanted to talk to
someone, to understand what was happening to me. But I didn’t know
who could help.

Since I couldn’t sleep, I went to my
desk—another antique that had belonged to my great-grandfather—and
turned on my laptop. Deciding to see what I could find online, I
typed “Damien, 1216,” just to see if anything would appear. If I
only knew where we were in my dream, I thought. I felt fairly
certain of the date and that we were in England, but I needed more.
I sat back in frustration. I wasn’t even sure what I was searching
for, only that I needed to find out more about him.

I tried another term, “Sir Damien,” and found
a registry of all knights of the realm prior to 1500 AD from the
British Museum. My heart began to beat erratically. I had to remind
myself that was only a listing, nothing more, and yet I knew it was
the one I needed. The date corresponded to the one in my dream. In
my excitement, I nearly didn’t see the tiny asterisk by his name. I
quickly scrolled down, anxious to see what history had remembered
about the knight I was certain was mine.

Sir Damien reputedly grew legendary as the
Black Knight of Montavere, defender of the medieval castle held by
the Lords of Montavere, a strategic stronghold that came under
attack sometime in the 1480s, when the last Lord of Montavere died
in the final battle of the Wars of the Roses. The castle was
eventually destroyed.

This was it! I could feel it inside. Frantic
to know more, I printed the entry and read it several more times. I
wanted to find the listing’s author, which took several minutes of
wading through the material at the beginning. The Foreword listed
no author for the entry; it must have been an anonymous submission.
According to the general editor, whoever wrote the entry had done
so during the 1730s, and I wondered if anyone living knew anything
about the Lords of Montavere, their castle, or the famous knight
who had once defended it.

I tried to discover more, using the keywords
from the paragraph as my search terms. But I found nothing more.
That couldn’t be all, I thought, frustrated that it was the middle
of the night. I couldn’t learn anything more on the internet about
my Black Knight. I wondered why he’d been called that. I was
certain it wasn’t because he had a black character; he’d shielded
me in my dream from danger. I decided to try to find out more from
Mr. Dean, if I could, about how knights acquired their names.

Frustrated I couldn’t turn up anything new
about Damien, I turned my attention to the other, more frightening
parts of my dream. I knew that the knights coming for me thought I
was a witch, so I decided to search online under the term “witch.”
After pages of information I didn’t need about the Salem witch
trials, I finally found a page on witches in England during the
Middle Ages. Bingo.

I was reasonably suspicious about most of the
stuff I found on the web, but this site looked fairly credible. At
least it didn’t have cartoon witches flying around on
broomsticks.

Someone had linked an article that looked
helpful. According to it, witches in England were sometimes called
“wise women.” They had extensive knowledge of herbs and sometimes
helped as midwives in delivering babies. Often, however, the “wise
woman,” intending good, was the scapegoat for unexplained crop
failures or disease. She was often treated as an evil witch, who
held a “Witch’s Sabbath,” reportedly ate children, and copulated
with the devil. Though the “witch hunt” mania didn’t begin until
after the Black Death, reaching a peak in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries, persecutors accused and tormented suspected
witches in the centuries before the mass witch hunts began.

This was getting interesting. Was I actually
a “wise woman” in my dream? I scrolled down until I found a section
called “The Ordeal.” The “ordeal by water,” a test to see if the
accused was a witch, was widespread only during periods after the
thirteenth century. Then that couldn’t be it, I thought,
frustrated. I was sure I’d identified a link between my fear of
water and my dream.

I scrolled down the page and saw a footnote
to the article. It noted the likelihood of events happening before
recorded history actually documented such cases. So it could have
happened, I thought, scrolling back up to finish reading the
article. I wanted to know about the ordeal in case it did link to
my fear of water.

I read that if the accused woman was
suspected of witchcraft, they just threw her into water. If she
floated, she was a witch. If she sank, often drowning, she was
innocent. I shuddered. Those weren’t such good odds since the poor
woman would likely end up dead either way.

I sat staring at the screen, trying to piece
together the fragments of the dream I’d had. I thought I knew why
they came for me. They were going to test me through the ordeal. I
could feel myself panic, the same response I had when my head was
submerged, and I began to shiver, as though I was actually beneath
the water. I couldn’t breathe for several seconds. When I felt my
hands starting to shake, I focused on the photograph by the
computer of me with Mom when I was younger, remembering a happier
memory of us at the park to combat the anxiety that threatened to
overtake me.

Calm down, I told myself. It’s just a dream.
You’re freaking out for nothing. It worked. I quickly shut off the
computer and climbed back into bed, but sleep eluded me.

****

The next day was Saturday. I helped Aunt Jo
finish painting the dining room in the morning. Having the
afternoon free, I decided to do a little research in the library.
Just as I suspected, there was nothing there about Damien,
Montavere Castle, or the Black Knight; I thought it more likely
that I’d have to go to England for that.

I considered researching witches, but part of
me didn’t want to know anymore about what they’d done to them long
ago. It somehow seemed too real for me. I asked the librarian to
direct me to the section on psychology. I had decided to look up
dreams and their meanings. If I couldn’t understand what I was
dreaming about, perhaps I could try to find out why I had these
nightmares. I also considered that, if I could unlock my mind, I
could discover more about the people in my dreams. It was
frustrating to think that everything I wanted to know was already
buried somewhere in my mind, if only I could access it.

The first book I found explained the history
of dreams, using terms from Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud that were
interesting but not exactly what I was looking for. I didn’t think
my dreams were about a traumatic childhood experience, but I did
think that my subconscious was definitely playing a large role in
what I saw. I scanned the shelves, letting my hand trail the book
bindings until I came across one title, Paranormal Hypnosis:
Uncovering Your Past Life. I stopped there.

Intrigued, I pulled the book from the shelf,
not entirely sure if this was what I wanted. I didn’t think it
could hurt just to see what it said.

I flipped through the chapters and finally
turned to look through the index in the back. I let my finger trace
the topics until I saw it: “Dreams and Past Life Experiences,”
pages 200-238. Okay, this looked interesting. Maybe I’d been
reincarnated from some former life. It was creative, at least.

The chapter opened by explaining that the
patient under hypnosis often remembers his or her past life through
dreams. I read one intriguing paragraph twice.

****

Patients become more agitated and easily
distracted by their recurrent dreams, which intensify until the
patient seeks help, often through hypnosis, when they remember
their past life. Through hypnosis, patients can resolve conflicting
events or emotions from their past or redress wrongs. They can
access loved ones, even from hundreds of years ago. Because their
past life hinders their present one, they must settle whatever
happened to progress in their present lives.

****

I was intent on reading the rest of the
chapter when I heard my name being called.

Through the space between the stacks, I could
see Zack and Annie with two students from our history class.

“Hi,” I whispered, waving to them. Annie was
getting up to come over, and I hastily shoved the book back on the
shelf, a little self-conscious.

“What are you up to?” she asked.

“Oh, not too much, just doing a little
research for our history project,” I answered, not looking in the
direction of the book I’d been reading.

My answer was not entirely false. We did have
a history project coming up, and I was considering doing one on the
Middle Ages, realizing as I said this that I wasn’t looking at
history books. I wasn’t even in the history section.Fortunately, no
one was paying attention that closely.

“Didn’t sound like you needed to do too much
research in class,” I heard Zack say through the stacks.

I blushed.

“Just ignore him,” Annie said, rolling her
eyes.

“Seriously though, why don’t you come sit
with us?”she offered.

“What are you guys up to?” I asked.

“The usual. Zack’s pretending to study.
Jessica’s copying Eric’s homework, and I’m trying to decide whether
to stay or get a burger,” she answered, sounding bored. “I’m
leaning pretty heavily towards the burger,” she said, yawning.
“Wanna come?” she asked.

I decided to take her up on the offer. I was
tired of keeping this to myself. I knew I’d sound crazy, but I
wanted to talk to somebody. And Annie believed most anything.

Annie happened to glance down and noticed my
hand.

“Hey, nice ring! Did I miss your birthday or
something?”