Stealing Childhood Read online

“Pick one or two of the culprits and create some dreams, bad ones. You’ve done that before, Dad. You know how. Both worlds. Remember the crack in the window? They’ll aim their own shamans toward themselves to try and stop the dreams.”

  “I thought no one was supposed to be hurt this time. I’m trying to be more careful.”

  “What do you mean hurt?” Cora asked. “Careful about what? What have you done?”

  “Dad can cause, let’s say, discomfort to people when he wants to,” Jason said.

  Dan took a breath. The fact that Jason was suggesting he engage in such work bothered him. That’s not how he wanted to be known or remembered. “I don’t like doing that sort of thing. There’s something about it that’s uncomfortable. But maybe I can adjust their attitudes?” He didn’t mention breaking the train window to Jason. He hadn’t mentioned that to anyone. That door had already been opened. Was it serendipitous? That wasn’t a real question, because nothing’s ever serendipitous.

  Jason started talking during the silence. “You can’t do it alone, Dad. Now that both Mindy and Koko know what’s up, you’re going to be vulnerable if you go it alone.”

  “You want to be part of this?”

  Cora reached over and placed her hand on Dan’s forearm. When he looked at her, she said, “Good idea.”

  “Glad you think so, Agent Rafsky,” Jason said, “but Dad has to agree. We do nothing without full approval—in one sense or another.”

  “We have help, this time,” Dan said. There was a long silence from Jason’s side. “Richard.”

  “I thought you said he wasn’t—”

  “Talked him into it. Just this once. He wasn’t very happy with Koko pretending she was Sarah. Said he couldn’t have that shit going on.”

  “This is a crazy mess,” Jason said. “A nest of confusion all based on people taking different names, on businesses not being what they seem, and on people pretending to be something they’re not. A lot of deception.”

  “That’s how these operations are,” Cora said. “Welcome to our world.”

  “You got that,” Blake said.

  “Something you said, though,” Dan said. “About a nest of confusion. I hate to go back to the mirrors, but nothing is as it seems.”

  “Again, our world,” Blake said.

  “More than that. Once we get on the other side of just one of them, they’re all exposed. It is a nest, and they’re all in it together.” Dan was still thinking things through, doing it out loud. He had a hand in the air and his eyes closed.

  “Dad’s thinking, isn’t he,” Jason whispered.

  Cora whispered back, “Something like that.”

  “We know who everyone is and can start there. All we need is for one of them to start to cave. We can also follow them to find out how they get into the building. They must have figured we’d find our way in eventually, so we’ll have to be careful. And they have lawyers. I’ll bet this whole thing is tied up pretty tightly.”

  “How’d we get into this mess without knowing it?” Jason said.

  “Doesn’t matter. It’s time to get out. I want you out of there.”

  “And the girls,” Jason said.

  Cora nodded approvingly.

  Dan was proud that Jason’s heart was in the right place. “In an hour. I’ll let Richard know. He will step into Koko’s world to keep her busy. I’ve met Richard Dunst and will go for him. Doctors must have some pretty bad dreams they’re keeping at bay. Since you’ve met Chuck O, you work on him. The only person left is Mindy, and I’m not so sure she will know what’s going on.” He glanced over at Cora. “Have your guys keep her busy talking, even if she has to answer the same questions over and over again for a half hour.

  “She messed with you before,” Cora said. “Can you keep her out that easily?”

  “We were touching,” Dan said.

  “Oh, shit. Really, Dad? I wouldn’t have anticipated you’d do that.”

  “I know.”

  “What do you mean, touching?” Cora asked. “Sounds inappropriate.”

  Jason explained, “When you’re working with another person, you can make a tighter contact if you’re touching in some way. Usually it’s by holding hands or touching feet, something like that. Because they were touching, she had better access, so to speak, and was able to step into Dad’s journey easier.”

  “We were in the same exact place,” Dan said.

  “She’s better than she looks,” Jason said.

  Dan ignored his comment. “The idea is to create something uncomfortable for each of these people we’re going to work on.”

  “They could react several different ways, but most likely they’ll either go along with whatever we push through, or they’ll fight back,” Jason said. “I suspect that Koko might fight back. Can Richard handle that while we’re dealing with the others?”

  “I’m counting on it. He was always a natural. It was his grandfather who taught us, after all.” Dan shrugged. “Besides, this work is like riding a bike. You never truly forget.”

  “Let’s hope you’re right,” Jason said.

  “We’ll take ten to fifteen minutes to do our damage, then regroup about twenty after. And Jason, be careful. You are in the most precarious position in all this.”

  “Then you and Richard need to be careful, too” he said. “I don’t need you two fucking this up for me.”

  Dan laughed.

  Cora looked confused and finally asked, “How do you mess with their dreams if they’re not sleeping?”

  “You want to explain that one, Dad?”

  “Let’s say that everyone goes in and out of a dreamlike state throughout the day. And, let’s say we enter that state, while still close to the physical world…” He cocked his head.

  “You mean reality,” Cora said.

  Jason said, “It’s all reality, but that’s for another day.”

  “Daydreaming, then?” Cora asked.

  “Not quite,” Jason said. “We’re in an altered state. They’re not. They are still mostly in the physical realm. Sorry, Dad.”

  “That’s okay, you know how this works as well as I do. I’m glad to have you explain it this time.”

  Cora still appeared to be a little confused. She looked at Agent Blake. “You understand all this?”

  “Starting to,” Blake said.

  Back at Dan, Cora asked the question that was obviously on her mind. “You’re able to mess with people’s real lives without them knowing about it?”

  Dan knew where she was coming from. “I would never…” He stopped. He didn’t have to explain. This was what he did. He met her eyes. “Only for work. For the moment, you can think of it as a back door.”

  “I don’t like to think of it at all,” she said.

  Chapter 25

  Dan rested in his room. His coffee sat precariously on the arm of the stuffed chair as he collected his rattle. He thought to take Rattlesnake with him. Since his opponents, as he saw them, used Rattlesnake in the physical world, then they might be familiar with the energy. He had convinced the FBI team that he needed to be away from any sounds that Jason might make, and that he needed to be alone. Their energies were starting to interfere with his work—Cora’s approval or disapproval, their lack of belief and understanding, their general interest in controlling everything. He had to get away. He grabbed the coffee and took a long, slow drink, draining the last of it, then threw the cup into the trash next to the desk.

  He contemplated the job he was about to do, how he thought of it as a job and how un-job-like it truly was, how utterly otherworldly he operated from one moment to the next, how the physical world wasn’t even the larger half of his reality any longer, and how he was forcing his son into the same life, dragging Jason into the strange world Dan had lived in for so many years. Out the window, gulls flew by and landed in the parking lot looking for food. Did they live in two worlds? Crows did, but what about gulls? He glanced at his watch. Enough stalling, there was work to be done.
r />   Dan closed his eyes and began shaking his rattle. Richard Dunst, alias Roger D’s image came to him. The doctor appeared nervous the last time he’d seen him. Dan heard the rattle and thought of the rattlesnake a second time. That’s what it was. The good doctor had snake medicine, the rattle was his nervousness, and the striking out was his attitude toward the world. He felt attacked.

  Dan was very familiar with snake medicine. He had used it often, and Jason had lived with it—though not so welcomingly—for a long time. But did he need a guide? Either way, he’d stay open to a guide if one showed up. He sunk deeper into the journey, found himself at the base of a thick, yet unfamiliar, tree trunk, nothing unusual there until he realized it wasn’t a tree but a giant milkweed plant. But it wasn’t a giant plant. He was small. He glanced around, waiting for Cockroach to show up, and it did.

  “I’m looking for Dr. Dunst,” Dan said.

  Cockroach lowered its antennae and said, “Wait here.” It quickly scurried up the side of the milkweed stalk, out on some leaves, and near a half open pod. It worked there for only a moment, and the pod fell to Dan’s feet, where it popped partially open. He bent down and pulled the seedpod open enough for him to fit through, removed some of the fluff attached to the seeds, and climbed inside where he entered a laboratory at a hospital. Dr. Dunst leaned against a bench covered with a series of incubators, but inside were embryos, human embryos. Dan didn’t know how that information arrived but accepted it as true. Leaning against the walls of the lab stood milkweed seeds connected to long plumes of fluff, their parachutes. Dan observed as Dr. Dunst attached an embryo to each seed, which had become a small basket attached to the fluff. When he opened a window along the wall, the parachutes of fluff with embryos attached caught in the breeze, lifted from the floor, were pulled out the window, and floated away, in all directions. There were still hundreds of seeds left. When Dan turned back to Dr. Dunst, he was crouched down on the floor crying.

  Dan asked what was wrong, but the doctor couldn’t hear him. He rushed toward where he’d come into the room and yelled for Cockroach. When Cockroach appeared, Dan asked what was going on. But it was Richard Dunst who answered from behind him.

  “I’m saving lives,” he said.

  “Then why are you crying?” Dan asked, confused as to why the doctor could hear him now.

  “I’m evil,” the doctor said. Then he turned into a rattlesnake.

  Dan jumped back, glanced around the room, and before his eyes all the seedpods had embryos hanging from them and were lifting off and flying out the window one by one. For a moment, all the fluff obscured the Dr. Dunst rattlesnake and Dan lost sight of him.

  He had to take control.

  “I came here to scare you, not the other way around,” Dan said as he scoured the floor for the snake. He backed into the center of the lab so that he could see bare floor all around him. As the room emptied of its seed pods, he looked up and Dr. Dunst was inserting more embryos into yet a new batch of seedpods. Was the snake gone? Dan didn’t know. Anything could happen in a journey.

  Dan turned toward Cockroach, but knew there were no answers there. He rushed over to Dr. Dunst and looked into the closest incubator. There were thousands and thousands of embryos. “Where’d these all come from?” he asked, but he also knew.

  The doctor did not answer.

  Dan moved the incubator aside and found the electrical cord and unplugged it. Instantly, the embryos began to wither and die.

  Dr. Dunst screamed and brought his hands to his face. “Too many, too many will parish.” He continued to wail.

  Dan stood back. Everything in the room was charged with mixed emotions. Each embryo seemed to be feeling something different.

  Dr. Dunst was sending the embryos away and obviously hated doing it, but yet he said he was saving lives. Whose lives? Dan knew not to hold onto questions inside a journey and quickly let go of his inquiries to see where the journey was leading. He had done what he came to do, scare the man, but at what cost? He backed away and toward the doorway. Cockroach was already through the opening. His own hand, in the physical world, automatically, gave him the signal to return. He turned back, and Dr. Dunst looked tormented with elation and grief, happiness and despair. Dan couldn’t understand the emotions, but he had to leave, he had to go back.

  One last thing, though. He looked for broken glass, a mirror, anything, but found nothing. He shook his head and rushed back through the door he’d arrived through, opened a place through the fluff of the seedpod, and walked out into the light. He let the rattle complete the return, then opened his eyes, rushed to the desk, and wrote everything down.

  He breathed heavily, as though he’d been running. When finished writing, he put his pen down, folded the notebook closed, held it close, and left the room. He glanced at his watch. Plenty of time to regroup. He walked into the surveillance room, the door unlocked, and heard a tapping coming from the speakers. Cora and Agent Blake sat quietly listening while Jason tapped on something to keep him on his journey. Dan didn’t say anything. He knew not to. He just nodded and sat down near the others. Mercer wasn’t around.

  After the return call, Jason took a deep breath. In a moment he said, “No paper here. My notebook’s in the room with Dad.” He sounded calm, with only a slight edge to his voice.

  “What happened?” Dan asked.

  “Huh, Dad. You’re done already?”

  “Just finished.”

  “Chuck O wasn’t happy,” Jason said. “He’s a bully. He’s behind this whole thing. I just know it.”

  “He can’t do it without the others,” Dan said.

  “It was awful being with him this way. I don’t know what happened in his physical life, but in the journey, I shoved him around a bit. I’ve never done that before. It wasn’t like me. It felt weird, wrong in some way.”

  “Maybe it is wrong,” Cora said. “This feels so violating to me.”

  Dan didn’t like the interruption. Her opinion didn’t matter. Only the work mattered. “Remember Jason, only you can make the determination as to whether it’s right or wrong. But you have to make it. Don’t let it sit there and not get resolved. You’ll attract all kinds of shit you don’t want. Once we’re finished talking, find your space and own it. For now, though, what happened next?”

  “His emotions exploded. At dinner, he was the most boisterous. I hadn’t noticed that night, but now I realize the others were scared of him. He has something on them.”

  “The journey, Jason. Let’s stick with that. I don’t want to get too confused with your interpretations unless they happened inside the journey.” Dan had his notebook open and in front of him, taking notes.

  “But it is confusing. What we do, this job we’re in, the whole thing from the start. Have you ever wondered if we’re the ones being worked?”

  “Jason! Focus on the issue at hand. What did Chuck do when you shoved him?”

  “Threw a few fists at me. He fought back. Nonetheless, I think I got to him.”

  Blake’s phone buzzed quietly, and he stood to step away from the intercom to talk. He whispered to Dan, “It’s Richard.”

  “Tell him I’ll call in a minute,” Dan said. Then back at Jason, he said, “You have to give me all the details. You don’t have your notebook. We have to get everything down.”

  “There’s not much else. He fought back for a while, but I was able to continue shoving him. His anger got in his way. What about you, Dad?”

  Dan turned back to his own notes. “Strangest thing. It was more like a fact-finding mission for me. I had little contact with Dr. Dunst, which is fine, but I felt like an observer more than a participator.”

  “Nothing wrong with that. What happened?”

  Dan explained and while doing so, Jason interjected ideas. “The seeds flying off in every direction could be the girls getting sold. They’re young, embryonic,” he said.

  “I was looking for a mirror before leaving the journey. You didn’t mention one either.”


  “None. But you had an open window,” Jason said. “Even better than a cracked one, if you ask me.”

  “The big question is, what did I let in while he was letting things out?” Dan asked.

  Jason answered, “We’ll most likely find out.” There was a pause and then Jason said, “Okay, what’s all this mean? Dr. Dunst obviously thinks he’s doing this, whatever it is, for a good reason—saving lives. Money didn’t come up anywhere. And the milkweed? I read recently that we’re losing those plants, and it’s affecting our Monarch butterfly population. Butterflies are transformative. In fact, their chrysalises look similar to the milkweed seedpod. A connection? Is there something transformative going on here?”

  “Good questions. I’m going to see what happened with Richard and Koko. I’ll get back to you shortly.”

  Agent Blake flipped a switch so Jason couldn’t listen in. “We got other news,” he said.

  Dan raised his eyebrows in response.

  “You talk with Richard. Get all your notes, and we’ll tell you what we found out,” Blake said.

  “You’re making me wait? Is this suspense?”

  “We just want you to get the information you need,” Cora said. She snapped her fingers. “Let’s get to it.”

  Dan called Richard back and was told an interesting story about mirrors that Richard brought with him into the journey. The mirrors had been set up all around the room. Then he called for Sarah. When she showed up the mirrors were moved into place. “A nudge here, a pull there. By the time she noticed, she didn’t know which way was out.”

  “How did you remember the way out?” Dan asked.

  “Foot in the door. That’s all you need for now. What’s important is that she’s really not very good at any of this. I’m surprised you didn’t see her coming. She’s loud and clumsy. But she must have them snowed, the people who hired her.”

  “Maybe they didn’t hire her, but that’s another question,” Dan said. “And if they did hire her, they probably don’t understand any of the work.”

  “Well, she quickly begged me to let her go.”

  “And?”

  “I didn’t. Not yet. I’ll go back when this is over and let her loose.”