A cold sweat replaced the perspiration she had earned. She swiped at her brow with a shaking hand. Her shorts and tank top clung to her small muscular body. An eerie silence took shelter in her eardrums as her vision dimmed, and an acidic taste settled in her mouth. Each breath became a fight for air. Her feet stopped moving. No! Not now! She closed her eyes and tried to will away the pressure in her head. There was no escape. She clenched her fists and brought them to her forehead, bracing herself for what she knew was happening. A fog enveloped her mind, and her legs became weak beneath her. A passerby, seeing her body shake and thrust, would have thought Molly was having a seizure. A passerby wouldn’t have been able to distinguish between a seizure and the Knowing. Molly could.
She cursed herself for allowing the Knowing to continue to control her, year after year, yet she had no power to stop it. She felt like a puppet on a string. Visions flashed in her mind: A cavern-like room surrounded by shadowy darkness; a young girl huddled in a corner, scared and shivering; the smell of rancid, wet earth.
Molly fell to the ground and cried out in fear and frustration, “No!” She lay there, amidst the dirt and gravel, too spent to move, her mind in turmoil. A war raged within her—a battle of fear and denial—fear for what the Knowing had shown her and her own denial to believe it. She held onto reality by a thin thread, her trachea refused to open, to breathe. She stood on shaking legs and staggered, grasping at her neck and trying desperately to take air into her lungs. She spun around, looking for anyone, anything that might help her. She finally gasped a breath, a tortured inhalation. Molly pushed on, trying to make it out of the secluded area, to the clearing around the corner. Her mind saw flashes of the little girl and instantly replaced the images with one she knew—Amanda. Tears ran down her cheeks, and a familiar weight bore into her gut.
Breathe, breathe, breathe. She stumbled forward. It’s not my fault, echoed in her head. The visions were now part of her. Molly scanned the edges of the forest; the mass of tangled branches and fallen trees were thick, the underbrush unforgiving. She couldn’t maintain her focus. Her mind was too foggy, her body too weak. Nothing made any sense.
She limped up the road in a stumbling jog. As she neared the bend of the road where White Ground ran into Old Bucklodge Lane, she found her footing, pushing forward, faster, trying to make it to Hannah’s before the Knowing disabled her once again.
Adrenaline coursed through her veins, and she ran faster than ever before. She ran up the hill and sprinted the last half mile to the old red farmhouse where Hannah lived. As if she had passed into another universe, the air lightened, birds chirped, horses gamboled in the pasture. Normalcy abounded. Hannah was outside with one of her many hunting dogs, a small beagle with floppy brown ears and a little tuft of brown fur in the center of its white and black body.
“Hey, Molly!” Hannah hollered, waving.
Molly grabbed her left side, kneading a stitch, her renewed energy left her as quickly as it had come. She lifted her arm in a limp wave and lowered herself to the grass of Hannah’s yard, her mind in a bubble of disbelief.
Hannah came running over, “Molly, are you all right? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.” She crouched next to Molly, reaching for her hand. “Molly?”
The feel of Hannah’s large calloused hand, hardened from years of farm work, brought comfort to Molly.
“Molly, what happened?” Hannah’s voice was hurried, concerned.
Molly longed to take refuge in Hannah’s arms, to feel the protection of another human being. How could she tell her that she’d reached beyond the tangible? The secret of the Knowing was excruciating. Fear and stress locked inside her like a rabid animal in quarantine, yearning for escape. Yet she would not speak of it. Molly had learned years ago that the Knowing was not something most people possessed, much less understood. They feared her ability to see into the lives of others or simply dismissed her visions and defined Molly as crazy or attention-starved. She’d lived with the ill-defined visions, the ability to be shown just enough details to drive her crazy, since she was a little girl. Some saw her visions as a gift. Molly felt imprisoned by her mind. The psychic ability was as much a part of her as her hazel eyes and the birthmark on her left thigh.
“Hard run,” she managed. In her mind she pleaded for the images to leave her. It was happening again, and she had no way to control it. She silently began her mantra, I’m okay. It’s not my fault.
“My goodness, Molly,” Hannah said, looking over Molly’s dirty legs and shirt.
“I tripped in a pothole,” Molly lied.
Hannah frowned, her brown hair, absent of the typical streaks of gray seen in other sixty-year-olds, swept her shoulders. Molly crawled to her knees, and Hannah helped lift her to her feet. “Molly, why don’t I take you back home? You can’t run in this condition. Is Cole home?”
“My car is at the church,” Molly said, distracted. “Cole’s at work.” Her body felt awkward, too heavy for her legs to carry.
Hannah guided her to her car and settled her in the passenger’s seat. “I’m headed to the church anyway.”
As Hannah drove, Molly could feel the pressure lift from her chest. Slowly, her mind became her own again. Her first rational thought was that Cole could check her out when he arrived home from work. There were definite advantages to being married to a doctor. Her second was that if she were losing her mind again, she didn’t want Cole to know.
When they turned onto White Ground Road, Molly was surprised to see a mass of cars. “What’s going on?” Molly squinted at the traffic jam. “Is there a funeral today?” The question was in contrast to the attire of the gathered crowd, none of whom were dressed to honor the passing of a loved one.
“Oh, Molly, if only. It’s much worse. I thought you knew,” Hannah’s face grew grim. “Celia and Mark Porter’s daughter, Tracey, went missing late yesterday from the Germantown Adventure Park. The community is gathering for a search party today. It’s awful, poor little thing.”
Comprehension hit Molly hard and brought with it a feeling of dread. Amanda. Panic grew in Molly’s chest, the hope she’d had of the visions being flashbacks was now crushed. The Knowing had wrapped its claws around her mind and now prickled her limbs, commanding her attention. Molly was terrified of going down the rabbit hole again, and equally as frightened not to.
Two
Tracey’s small body trembled. She grimaced as she pulled her knees, scraped and bruised, up to her chest. Her red hair, which was normally so carefully coifed, was thick with dirt and stuck to her forehead and cheeks. She tentatively lifted her hand and pushed the sticky strands away from her face—every careful movement a torturous reminder that she was not alone, magnifying her desperation and bringing more tears, which slipped silently over the newly-torn skin on her cheeks, stinging her face. She squeezed her eyes closed in an attempt to keep from making a sound but could not suppress the memory of the terror-filled night that had led her to the tiny chamber where she now huddled, shivering and scared, on a dirty, torn mattress.
She listened carefully to the slow and steady breathing of her captor, barely visible in the dark chamber. Tracey’s gaze shifted to a lone candle, standing sentinel on a crude table and casting scary shadows of jagged shapes across the room. The smell of the dank dirt floor lingered in the air, making her feel sick to her stomach. She suppressed the urge to gag and concentrated on her surroundings. She saw makeshift wooden shelves stocked with canned food, batteries, and something else that she could not identify. Her eyes settled on a warped piece of plywood resting cockeyed against the dirt wall, blocking her only escape—an escape that Tracey knew would be impossible. Even if she could escape the chamber, she could never find her way through the twisted, narrow passageways that had brought her there. Tracey also knew that at seven years old, she could not outrun an adult.