Michael Koryta - Last Words

The rope slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor and he opened his eyes and stared at it in horror, trying to remember the last time he had dropped a rope while tying a knot.

The snarl of rope lay there like a symbol of the mistake that he had made, and he understood that he should never have written to Novak, but it was too late to fix that. Whether it was too late to give up on Julianne, he wasn’t sure. He’d waited so long for someone like her and had nearly lost hope.

He wiped his hands dry on his jeans and went upstairs to his bookshelves, which were lined with studies on the power of the mind, from a 120-year-old volume on levitation to the latest neuroscience research. There was also a collection on jewelry and gemstones, and the highlighted portions all concerned the sapphire. If there was any topic Ridley would consider discussing with Blankenship — and he’d come close once, only to pull back at the last minute — it was the sapphire necklace. Ridley understood from the police reports that Blankenship had given the necklace to Diane Martin because it was her birthstone. A simple enough reason for a simple man, and Blankenship was nothing if not simple, but Ridley wondered if the stone might have been powerful enough to affect him nevertheless. The sapphire, Ridley had learned in his studies, provided spiritual enlightenment, inner peace, and — most critically — protection from harm. Whether Blankenship might have sensed a harm approaching the Martin household was something Ridley had long wondered.

Eastern cultures believed the stone warded off evil, but if you studied enough, you learned that the gemstone’s power was so mighty as to be selective and that it would protect its first wearer even if it was sold or given away to another. Ridley thought this might explain why it had failed Diane’s daughter, but Diane was dead now as well and there was no one left to ask about this except for Blankenship, who seemed too dull to receive the question properly.

And there was Julianne.

Ridley left the bookshelf untouched and went instead to the knee wall, pressed on the panel, and revealed the room hidden beyond. He retrieved the necklace with the broken chain and handled it carefully. The stone was small and unremarkable in color, but it was genuine. According to Persian legend, the entire earth rested on a core of sapphire, and the sky was blue because it reflected the color of that hidden core. According to Greek myth, Prometheus had been chained to a rock for stealing fire from the gods, and the rock was made of sapphire. Ridley believed both stories could be true. While he could not speak for the accuracy of all the sapphire’s reputed powers, he understood that they must be great because Trapdoor had presented it to him and allowed him to remove it from underground. The necklace, he’d come to realize, was the most sacred of all his possessions — so sacred that he had taken the risk of keeping it with him rather than placing it in the ground near his childhood home, so sacred that he had never shared it with anyone.

Now was the time.

The sun was high in a cloudless sky as he drove to Julianne’s, and, never a fan of bright light, he cursed the harsh white landscape, lowered the visors in the truck, and put on sunglasses. They dulled the glare some, but not enough. He was beginning to feel a real rage over the light when it occurred to him that the sky was sapphire blue and that this was perhaps a good sign. He would show Julianne the necklace and in this gesture of trust he believed her allegiance would be assured once more.

He felt renewed confidence as he turned onto the gravel road that led to Julianne’s, and he thought the small sapphire clutched in his palm had warmed ever so faintly, just enough to let him know that he was on the right course.

That was when he started to make the turn into her drive and saw that another car was already there.

He came to a stop and then moved to put the truck in park. When he reached for the gearshift, the necklace slipped from his hand and the sapphire fell to the filthy floor mat, its brilliant shine lost in Ridley’s own shadow.

The car was a new-model Ford SUV and while Ridley wanted to believe that it was not a rental and did not belong to Mark Novak, he couldn’t convince himself of that. He reached into the glove compartment and withdrew a small pair of binoculars that he carried with him in the field to study terrain. He focused them on the front window of the house and what he saw chilled his blood.

Julianne was seated in a chair beside the couch, and on the couch, his posture slumped, his head drooping, was Mark Novak.

He was in trance. She had promised Ridley she would have no more contact with the man until Ridley commanded otherwise, and not only had she broken that promise, but she’d shattered it in the most irrevocable way — she was working with him, guiding him in the way she had guided Ridley.

He sat in the idling truck for a long time, and then he reached down and fumbled around the dirty floor mat until he found the necklace with the broken chain. The gemstone’s power was not a lie. Whether it would grant him protection or not, Ridley couldn’t say, but it had guided him and allowed him to see things clearly again, and this was critical.

He put the necklace into his shirt pocket, close to his heart, and drove away knowing that the time had come to set right his mistakes. He had trusted in something outside of himself and should have known better.

Mark felt incredibly relaxed as he listened to Julianne count upward to ten, though he became aware of the progression only at around five or six. Then, when he opened his eyes at ten, he felt exposed. The room came into focus in a disorienting way, and his first clear thought was that the light on the floor had shifted to another area. Some time had passed, certainly. His mouth was dry and he wanted to talk just to reassure himself that he had control over his own voice, but no words came to mind. There was a sensation of pressure on his right hand, and he looked down and saw that his index finger and thumb were curled together in a perfect circle, like a basketball player signaling for three points.

You did that to join the past and the present, he thought, and though the purpose seemed crystal clear he couldn’t recall the specifics of the action or how long he’d held his hand in that fashion. He relaxed his fingers and flexed them, then looked up at Julianne Grossman. She was watching him with an expression of deep compassion, and he felt nothing but warmth for her in that moment.

“So,” Mark said, his voice a croak. He worked his tongue around his mouth, trying to rid it of that dry sensation. “So, how about that? How good was I?”

Julianne smiled. “How do you feel?”

“Odd,” he said. “And tired.”

“Would you like some water? Sometimes trance can cause a strong feeling of thirst.”

“I would love some water,” he said, the word trance lingering in his mind, bouncing around. He’d actually entered one. She’d hypnotized him. He wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

Julianne brought him a glass of water and didn’t speak while he drank. Outside, the trees moaned in a strong wind, and he wondered how he hadn’t heard them before.

“Okay,” he said. “Did we get anywhere? Or did I just talk about the cigar box the whole time?”

Julianne said, “That’s all you remember?”

He thought about it, and although he couldn’t recall the specifics beyond that, it wasn’t a troubling sensation.

“That’s all,” he said.

“You reached a state of somnambulistic trance,” she said. “That’s excellent, you know. For all of your initial resistance, in the end you made quite an effort.”