Michael Koryta - Last Words

“And did that not hurt you?”

Mark wet his lips and gave a grudging nod.

“Can we vocalize that, please?”

“Yes, it hurt me,” he said, and the admission was entirely unpleasant. Try, he told himself, you’ve got to try. Think about Lauren, damn it. What she said you couldn’t do. Do not show this woman scorn or contempt, and do not rule out the chance of something legitimate here.

He was in his most receptive mood when Julianne said, “Can you give those emotions a shape?”

“Excuse me?”

“Tell me what shape they have. Those feelings, those hurts. What shape?”

He knew then that it wouldn’t work. Not on him. “I do not have a shape for my emotions,” he said.

“Then we’ll start with a box,” she answered, unfazed. “I think that’s a fine shape for your emotions, Mark. I want you to imagine a box in the center of the room.”

Lauren, baby, I’m trying, I really am, but this...

“Right there where the light goes through the shadow, do you see that?” Julianne said.

“Yes.”

“Good. Imagine the box. When you’re ready, I want you to describe it for me.”

He stared at the place where the light met the shadow, and he tried like hell to imagine a box, to imagine there was anything there but weathered floorboards. He couldn’t, but he didn’t want to admit that, so he said, “It’s wooden,” simply because the floorboards were wood and that was the easiest visual to conjure up.

“What kind of wood?”

“Older,” he said. He still wasn’t visualizing anything. He just wanted to have an answer.

“A large box? Like a chest?”

“No.” He wasn’t sure why he sounded so damn confident about that, considering he was making it all up on the fly.

“So what size is it?”

“Um... maybe about a cigar-box size,” he said, and there was a flicker of an image then, neither real nor imagined, just some spark in the synapses that gave him a vague sense of the thing that he was attempting to describe to appease her. He understood what a cigar box was, of course, he could picture that, and so the image flickered through and was gone and the empty floor remained.

“Keep looking at it,” Julianne said. Her voice had gone lower and softer and he squinted at the floor intently and then thought of how he must look and felt torn between a desire to call the whole thing off and a desire to laugh wildly. Julianne’s voice came again, though, saying, “The box needs to hold all of your focus. Really try. I know it’s not easy, but I can see how hard you are trying. That is very good. That is excellent. Your focus is impressive. Keep your attention out there in the room. There’s a box on the floor, and it is old, and it is made of wood, and it is a cigar box, maybe, or at least it is of that size. Focus on it. Focus.”

Mark stared at the patch of light on the floor trying to imagine a cigar box and thought, This is going to take a while.

It did. There were times when he felt vaguely detached and removed, times when answering questions about an imaginary box seemed important, but then self-awareness would return and jar him, or his mind would simply wander, and thoughts of Florida and Jeff London would intrude, or images of Ridley Barnes on the video, speaking of the dark man. He’d say this for Julianne Grossman — she was patient. She was incredibly patient. Over and over she asked meaningless, silly questions and listened to his meaningless, silly answers, and not once did her energy diminish. She managed to sound fascinated by his descriptions of the stupid damn box, and her voice came on and on in waves that rose and fell and broke over him and then washed back across him, and he was impressed by both her steadiness and her bearing, because it couldn’t be easy. He knew that it was not easy. He’d conducted a lot of interviews. Controlling your focus and emotions was hard enough, but to keep that cadence, that rise and fall, rise and fall, the vocal equivalent of rocking a child, was impressive. He was curious how she did it and how much practice it took and wondered if she was aware of her breathing or if that became natural. She never took a breath at the wrong time, and he thought that was probably critical. Any disruption would break the spell. Although of course there was no spell, no trance. No hypnosis. He’d always been skeptical that it would work on him. He believed that it worked in some situations, the science and evidence seemed undeniable, but it wasn’t for him.

Still, the cadence was effective. He had to admit that. The cadence was relaxing, soothing, and the way she held his focus by asking these ridiculous questions kept the mind from wandering. The visualization technique was smart, too, because it demanded stillness and focus that was truly draining. His vision had begun to ripple along the periphery. Yes, all in all, he could see how her techniques might be effective in time, on the right person. He just wasn’t that person.

When he said, “I think it’s a cave,” he felt a sense of slipping, like he’d hit mental black ice. What question had she asked? He couldn’t remember, but he’d given the answer, and she seemed pleased by it. And the cave was where they were supposed to be going, wasn’t it?

“And what do you see?”

“Blackness,” he said, an automatic answer that seemed logical, but it was also confusing, because what had happened to the cigar box? That was what he was supposed to be imagining. Maybe he should try a little harder. He focused but couldn’t find the floor. He thought he heard distant drums. That didn’t make any sense. He needed to clear his head. Needed to—

“If you would like, you may close your eyes,” Julianne said, and he thought, Thank God, because he was so tired now, and the floor where that box was supposed to be had started to swim from the sheer effort of staring at it for so long. Shutting his fatigued eyes for just a moment sounded grand.

It’s working on me, he thought, and there was some true and deep fear to that realization.

But not enough to keep his eyes open.

Ridley should have gone underground after Julianne’s visit — he needed the solace — but he hadn’t. Instead, he had stayed in the house listening to the wind blow snow against the walls, and he debated whether he could still view Julianne as an ally.

Always, she had listened to his needs, and always, she had attended to them. Or so he’d thought. As the snow accumulated and the dark hours passed and were replaced by the light, he considered the evidence against Julianne’s integrity, and he was concerned.

There had been no shortage of people in Ridley’s life who believed they could manipulate him, but he’d not sought any of them out. Julianne was his own find; he’d gone to her for help and she had provided not only help but a sense of possibility. What Ridley had once believed was beyond his grasp, Julianne had convinced him was in fact a reasonable goal.

She had also convinced him that Mark Novak would be of assistance in achieving that goal. The problem, Ridley realized as he tied knots with hands that had gone slick with sweat, was that she had located Novak. Ridley had done the writing, Ridley had reached out, but Novak had not been his discovery. He belonged to Julianne.

That was beginning to feel like a problem.

The decision to trust him with a video of Ridley’s most vulnerable moment, an even greater problem.

The goal, as Julianne had always understood — or claimed to understand — was to grasp the full power of Trapdoor. She had been the only person who had listened to Ridley’s explanations of the cave and not recoiled. She was the only person who had enough wisdom to refer to Trapdoor with proper respect. For all of these reasons, he had felt certain that she was the only person the cave would permit to join Ridley in a quest that had been building for ten years.