Stealing Childhood Read online

  He opened his eyes, and Mindy looked scared. He got up and looked around. “What?”

  Mindy swallowed. “I fell asleep and was trapped in a train. Some kind of vine was wrapped around both doors at either end of the car.”

  “You fell asleep?”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Were you touching me?”

  Her lips tightened as she nodded.

  “It’s unusual that you’d be there with me, but not totally out of the question. What else do you remember?”

  “I was scared. I don’t like being trapped. This alley freaks me out.”

  “What kind of vine was it? Honeysuckle?”

  “How’d you know?”

  “Told you. You were in my journey. Damn you.” He paced in a small space, within the cedar circle.

  “Me?”

  “They got in through you. But Honeysuckle should have something to do with legalities.” He stopped. “Oh, of course. It’s what you do, who you are. You work for lawyers.” He snapped his fingers and reached toward her. “Get up, I need my notebook.”

  She took his hand and stood near him.

  Dan retrieved his notebook and opened it but couldn’t read the page. “Shit.” He tried to remember names, symbols. “You know any lawyers with the initials CO? Any doctors with LS?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing. Don’t worry about it.” He stuffed his notebook back into the pack. “We’re going back in. This time you’re not touching me. I have to see what’s up.”

  Her eyes widened again. “Not yet, you aren’t.”

  Dan swung around. Agents Mercer and Blake were heading his way.

  Chapter 21

  On the walk back to their hotel, Dan asked if Mercer had found out who the players were.

  “Not for you to know right now. Cora is pissed that you took off the way you did…and to take her with you.” He shook his head in disgust, like Dan had done something wrong.

  “I didn’t take Mindy,” he said.

  “My own volition,” she said.

  Agent Mercer said, “Don’t care. And I’m sure Cora won’t care either. What were you doing anyway? I thought you could do your work anywhere.”

  “You’d think that, wouldn’t you,” Dan said with a laugh.

  “You can’t?” Agent Blake asked.

  “I don’t know. I do what I feel I have to do and don’t question it. I can’t explain what happens. It’s about being in a different space, closer, stranger, who knows?”

  “So, you felt like you had to sit down in an alley next to their building?” Agent Mercer asked. “You didn’t think that was dangerous or anything?”

  Dan nodded and shrugged. “Pretty much.”

  At the hotel, Dan walked to the side of the front desk and poured himself a cup of complimentary coffee.

  “I could use some, too,” Mindy said as she sidled up next to him. “We need to talk,” she whispered.

  “I’m bushed,” Dan told the agents once he turned around.

  “We all are.” Agent Blake was slumped in a chair, bags under his eyes.

  “Who’s watching the farm?” Dan asked. “Is Jason okay?”

  “He’s sleeping. Cora’s listening in.”

  “What about the translators?” Dan asked.

  Agent Mercer shook his head. “Haven’t needed them, so they’re probably all sleeping.”

  “Well, me too,” Mindy said with a wave of her hand.

  They all headed for the elevator and stepped inside together. At their floor, Mindy and Dan walked ahead of the agents. First Mindy said goodnight and opened her door, then Dan did the same at the next door. He turned at the last minute. “You’ll contact me the moment something happens.”

  “Of course,” Agent Blake said. “You don’t have to worry about that. I’m sure Cora will want to discuss what you did while away, too. Maybe after you get some shut-eye.”

  Dan slipped into his room and dropped his backpack next to his artifact suitcase. He removed the rattle and his notebook. He hadn’t noticed, but suspected that Mindy still had the praying man, probably in her jacket pocket. He walked into the bathroom to wash his hands when a quiet knock came to his door. He let Mindy inside, then went back to the sink.

  She stood near the doorway. There was a bulge in her jacket pocket.

  “You have more information,” he said.

  “We need to get out of the trap,” she said. “I’m not crazy about what happened back there while dreaming.”

  “What are you proposing?”

  “Right here, right now.”

  Dan raised his eyebrows.

  “I’m serious.”

  “You are not experienced at this. Bad enough that you were involved. That’s unusual in itself. Going back in could be dangerous.”

  “Bullshit,” she said. “We’ll be sitting next to each other in a hotel room.”

  Dan blinked while considering her request. He did a body scan on himself to get a balanced state, then performed one on Mindy. Her whole body seemed on board with her suggestion, a little vibrating energy near her throat, but that could be because she felt odd voicing the idea. “All right.”

  She hesitated. “All right?”

  “We’ll lie on the bed together, hold hands or touch feet or something. Contact matters. He grabbed his cell phone from the desk. I have a drumming tape on my playlist. If I place the phone between us, near our heads, we should both be able to hear it.”

  She nodded and walked to the side of the bed and sat down, looked around at Dan, and lay down.

  “I’ll say this one time,” he said. “Don’t try to force anything. Do whatever comes up, whatever seems natural. It doesn’t matter if I’m in your journey or not. We’ll compare notes once it’s over.” He reached over and touched her arm. A jolt, like nerve pain, ran up his arm, but he didn’t recognize what it was. “You understand?”

  “I can do this,” she said.

  “I’m sure you can.” Dan took his position on the bed beside Mindy and reached for her hand. Her skin was soft, her grip light but committed. With the phone in his other hand, he used his thumb to start the drumming, then placed the phone near their ears. “Here we go. Take three long, slow breaths in through your nose and out your mouth. You’ll drop into a theta brain state.” He squeezed her hand. “We’re off.”

  Dan sat in the window seat of the train car, looking out over fields of grass hay that appeared to go on forever. He wondered, briefly, about all the other journeys associated with this one situation: the crows, the moose, the cockroach and rats, the honeysuckle, and the mirror image. And then there was the rattlesnake and the cracked window, Richard’s warning about other shamans involved. Although he seldom sat and thought while in a journey, it all felt natural to him at the moment.

  A rustling behind him, brought him back into the journey, and he turned around. Mindy stood at the rear door pulling at the honeysuckle, long strands of the vine around her feet. The odor of the plant filled the car. “We need to get to the engine,” he yelled back at her.

  “I just need to get out any way I can. I can’t be here. I don’t belong here.”

  That was probably true. Dan climbed from the seat and into the aisle. “Then we get to the engine and stop the train so you can get off.”

  She glared at him as though she didn’t understand.

  He waited for a response.

  “I can’t move.”

  Sure enough, the vines had wrapped around her legs, and she couldn’t pull them loose. “You can’t legally help us,” Dan said.

  “What?”

  “Never mind.” He looked around the car and decided his only recourse would be to take over. Why he had sat there thinking while Mindy controlled the shared journey he had no idea. Maybe he needed to see what was up with her. “Honeysuckle, you can let her go now.”

  Mindy glanced down at her legs as Honeysuckle loosened and released her. “How’d you do that?”

  “You’r
e right, you don’t belong here. In fact, you can’t be here any longer.” Dan waved his hand, knowing that Honeysuckle would pull back and release the door. “Go on,” he said to her. “That’s the dining car. Sit down and have some coffee for the rest of the trip. Or wake up, it’s up to you. I’ll go it alone from here.”

  Mindy looked confused.

  “Just go into the dining car,” Dan said. He didn’t wait for her to leave. He turned around and walked to the other end of the car. He waved his hand in front of him again and released Honeysuckle from its hold, then walked through to the next car, then all the way through two more cars to the engine, which was loud and thrumming, almost deafening. He glanced around for a guide, but none appeared. Once again, he was on his own. The whole engine compartment vibrated as though it were about to break apart. He climbed a few stairs and, in the driver’s seat, sat a five-headed ladybug. He didn’t miss the connection. They were dealing with five high-end operators.

  Dan asked Ladybug where it was going, but all five faces smiled and turned away, staring off in different directions. Ladybug pushed the throttle forward, and the engine noise got unbearably loud as the train sped up. Dan stumbled back down the stairs and through the door into the first car. The sound died down, but still resounded throughout the car. When he turned back to look at the engine through the door window, its form shifted and wavered. He thought it might be disappearing, but it just wavered like the surface of a lake touched by a small breeze. The car he stood inside began to warp and shift shape. “Not good, not good,” he said as he ran toward the far door. By the time he got there, it was warped too much to open. The train made another leap forward, and he fell against the door.

  He knew he’d lost control but didn’t know how or why. There was one way to change the dynamic, and he wasn’t sure he wanted to do it. But when the train car changed shape again, the seats twisting, and the floor warping up and down, Dan slammed his fist into a side window, not to break it, but to crack it. Then he punched the corner out completely. “Let’s go!” he yelled. “You wanted in.”

  A moment later, the car turned dark. Dan’s eyes needed to adjust. He closed them until he felt something else enter the room. It was a figure, but nothing he recognized, nothing he understood or could make out in detail. He called for a guide, but had been abandoned there. The figure laughed nonverbally inside Dan’s head. He worried about Mindy for a second then considered his own situation.

  He had gone to his emotional body recently, so he knew the pathway might still be open. The trip felt easy, but there was more death than he wanted to believe. He couldn’t count the number of sensations of shriveling, aging, starving, deaths.

  Dan didn’t believe in using any more power than was absolutely necessary. Wielding power was a dangerous thing, but he was in the presence of a shaman, maybe more than one working together, and had to pull as much strength from all his realms as he could. After all, he broke the glass and let them in.

  Inside the journey, Dan closed his eyes and called on all the strength and power of every guide he’d had that week—one step at a time. Rubbing his hands together, he created an energy barrier between him and the shaman in the car with him, visualized a ball of light, and shoved it toward the figure. At first, it didn’t appear to have done anything, then the figure began to dissipate. Dan pulled from his realms again and shoved the energy forward a second time. More of the figure dispersed. Dan’s arms were tiring. His hands were hot. He couldn’t rub them together any longer or the skin would come off. He could only imagine how that might translate in the physical world. So, he waved his hands in the air. Another laugh came. But a third push of energy caused the figure to disappear. Dan slumped and fell to the floor in exhaustion. He heard the drumming in his ears. It had replaced the thrumming of the locomotive engine. The drumming stopped. The return was near, and Dan rushed toward the dining car.

  Chapter 22

  Mindy jumped into a sitting position. “Did you take care of it?”

  Dan placed hot hands to his face for the coolness. “What do you mean?”

  “You sent me to the dining car for coffee, but all they had was tea. But before that, how did you just wave your hands and get the honeysuckle to go away?”

  “You saw that?”

  “We were in the same journey, weren’t we?”

  “Not like that. Not literally.”

  “We were on a train, and the doors were blocked by Honeysuckle. I couldn’t get it to come off the door, then my legs got tangled and I panicked. You came over and waved your hands and the Honeysuckle retreated.”

  “I know,” Dan said.

  She continued to explain how he yelled for her to go into the dining car and wait, then ran off to deal with the other door. “You did the same wave of the hand thing there then walked through.” She told him that she waited in the dining car and heard all kinds of noise before the train sped up several times in big jolts. How she heard whooshing noises. “After the drumming stopped, you popped your head into the car and said it was okay to leave.”

  Dan didn’t say a word.

  “Isn’t that what happened?”

  He stared as in disbelief. She was actually there and not just in her own journey but in his. “It doesn’t work that way. We should have different journeys and see how they match up symbolically. I don’t think I’ve ever had this happen. Similar sometimes, but not exact.”

  Mindy began to cry. “Oh my God, oh my God.”

  Dan rolled to her side of the bed and stood in front of her. He reached out, and she fell into his arms. “It’s okay. Just because it’s never happened, doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it. Maybe your openness was so broad that it let everything in.”

  “I believed you,” she said into his shoulder.

  Dan smiled and patted her back before loosening his hold on her. She stood back and looked at him as he gripped her forearms. “Your belief changed everything.”

  “Now what? In my dream you said something about legal problems.”

  Dan walked past her and over to the window. “You did get everything.” He turned around. “What I meant was that there is some legal matter that stops you from participating. I don’t know what it is, but you shouldn’t have to go to jail because you’re working with us.”

  “Are you asking me to quit? Now?”

  “It may be best.”

  She cocked her head. “Legal?”

  “It’s the honeysuckle. Maybe you’re getting entwined in things you shouldn’t be entwined in. This whole thing is getting complicated. I sent you away for a reason.”

  “I don’t know how I feel about that.” She gave him a quick, short smile and turned around. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the praying man and tried to hand it to him. “You forgot this.”

  “Keep it. I have a feeling you might need it for a while.”

  “Yeah,” she put it back into her pocket, “maybe I will.”

  Dan looked her in the eye. “You might want to get some rest. Go back to your own room until I figure this out.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Take a walk.” He glanced out the window. “Sun should be coming up soon.”

  “You haven’t slept. Don’t you need to sleep more than I do? I napped earlier, but you’ve been up this whole time. What happens to your—I don’t know—your powers if you get tired?”

  “I’ll be okay. Jason’s inside that building, and I have to get him out before something bad happens to him. But you, as I said, might want to stay back and let us handle the rest of this.”

  “What about translations?”

  “You already did that. I have a feeling that might be it for now. You did what you were supposed to do. Translated my journeys. Sometimes it’s not as much as you’d like, sometimes it’s more than you bargained for. Now, come on. I have to walk.” He guided her toward the door and made sure she went into her own room before he continued down the hall to the stairs. He couldn’t keep her in her
room, but he could be sure that she was there when he left.

  He knew the street wasn’t the safest when it was dark, but early morning was commuter time. The streets were busy, and the air had a calm to it. A Starbucks would be open now that it was after 5:30. The sky was already brightening, and the traffic gained in volume by the minute. At Starbucks, he ordered an Americano with room and poured half-and-half to the brim, then pushed a lit on the cup. There were people stopping by, but they were all heading back out as soon as they got their coffees; the chairs were all empty except for one old guy who needed a bath. Dan wondered briefly what happened to some people, why they didn’t find their way. Was it that they didn’t want to? Were they too lazy? Somehow made a wrong turn and could never find their way home again? He sat with his coffee and pulled out his notebook to read through what had been going on the last few days. It seemed impossible that he’d journeyed as often as he had. Not that that wasn’t normal for him, but none of it had gotten him very far. Then he caved and let Jason pretend to be one of the Herders, to go to work for them as something he wasn’t even trained to do. Maybe Mindy should have gone instead of Jason, or one of Cora’s add-ons. None of it made sense. They were all in a fog. He jotted down his last journey along with notes about how involved Mindy had been.

  Who is she? he wrote along the margin. Then he flipped back a few pages to the beginnings of his trip when he first journeyed while in the first motel.

  “Keep flippin’,” someone said.

  When Dan glanced up from his page, the bum stood near him.

  “Just saying that sometimes you have to go back further than you think.” After saying that, the bum walked out the door.

  “What the hell?” Dan said to himself as he flipped back to the very first time he journeyed about the crows. He heard a bang on the window and looked over to see the bum lowering his hand after knocking on the glass. Dan paged back one more page. The very beginning. The gremlin.