“I’m Imogen,” I told her, even though she’d already seen my ID when I checked in. “No nickname. Everyone calls me Imogen.”
Except Detective Hightower,I thought again, then quickly shoved all thoughts of him away.
“It’s great to have you with us, Imogen. I’ll get out of your hair, now. You must be tired. But if you need anything, just holler!” Gigi chirped at me. “I’m only a floor away and these walls are thin as paper!”
She said this as though it was a selling point.
Shutting the door with a wink and a wave, Gigi disappeared. Calling a weak goodnight after her, I dropped my duffle and shoebox on the floor and promptly collapsed face-first on the bed. It wasn’t the most comfortable mattress, but there were no mystery stains anywhere to be seen on the faded blue duvet and the sheets smelled freshly laundered. I laid there for a while, wondering what deity I’d offended in my previous life to find myself here — down on my luck in another cheap hotel room in another random town that I’d have to leave in my rearview ASAP, because the townsfolk were alarmingly friendly and prone to sticking their noses where they didn’t belong. I figured I must’ve done something pretty awful in my previous incarnation.
Car salesman, maybe? Con artist? Person who never returned their cart in the grocery store parking lot? The cruel, wicked stepmother to a girl locked in a tower?
The possibilities were endless.
After about ten minutes, I forced myself to stop wallowing and take a shower. In my experience, if I allowed a pity party to drag on longer than ten minutes, it became something more nefarious. A pity soiree. A pity gala. A pity jamboree, if you will. And I had it on good authority that no one in the history of mankind ever had a good time at a jamboree.
The water pressure was spotty at best and the tap ran cold far too soon for my liking, but I still felt markedly better when I stepped out. A mellow calm had settled in my bones as I reached for the folded towel on the wall-mounted rack. I’d sleep well, tonight. In fact, I was already fantasizing about the moment I’d finally slide into bed, so caught up in my thoughts I didn’t see the tiny wooden figurine sitting on the shelf beside the towels until it was too late. My bare fingers collided with the carving and it tumbled toward the floor.
I never heard it hit the tile.
The moment my fingertips grazed the figurine, the vision slammed into me with the force of a sledgehammer. I stumbled back into the water-beaded shower wall. Purple sparks erupted on the peripheral of my visual field, then closed in as striped bathroom wallpaper and porcelain fixtures were swapped for a different scene entirely.
The campground is dark.
The night is cold.
So cold, the man’s breath fogs the air as he bends closer over the tiny wood block in his hands. The flick of his knife is rhythmic as he whittles his design one sliver at a time. His focus never shifts except in the brief moment he pauses to throw another log on the campfire, sending a shower of sparks into the shadows.
Tears stream down his face as he works. Tears he does not bother to wipe away, but lets fall from his chin and onto the fabric of his hunting coat.
More purple flashed like a firework display across my eyes as the vision changed, shifting with disorienting speed.
The sun is bright overhead, bleaching the hilltop cemetery of color. In the distance, a harbor is visible. Old wooden schooners bob at moorings and glide down a central channel.
The man’s tears are gone. He stands over a fresh grave. The grass has not yet grown in and the tombstone is too pristine to have spent much time in the elements. The name chiseled on the front readsPORTER. There is a death date —APRIL 19, 1775— along with a series of words.
BELOVED SON, HONORED SOLDIER, ETERNAL PATRIOT
The man reaches forward and traces three of the chiseled letters with reverence.
SON.
This is his son’s grave.
He is stoic in the face of his grief, but his hand shakes a bit as he places a figurine — carved in the shape of a soldier, with a tricorn hat and extended musket — at the base of the tombstone. The man begins to speak, but his words are inaudible. There is only the sound of the wind, a mournful wail off the water. And then?—
As quickly as I’d left it, I was back in the bathroom at The Sea Witch, slumped naked against the damp tile wall. My skin was clammy. My lungs were screaming for air. I dragged a shaky breath into them as the last of the purple sparks dissipated from my eyes with a few hard blinks.
It had never seemed fair — how snapping into a vision took less than a heartbeat but coming back to reality took ages. I knew from experience that even after I caught my breath and regained my composure, the effects would linger, the chill of the vision clinging to me like an invisible film for the rest of the evening.
The fluorescent vanity light over the mirror hummed faintly as I stepped out of the tub, wrapped a towel around myself, and tried to shake off the shivery sensation sliding up and down my spine. Only moments before, I’d been warm and relaxed from my shower. Now, I felt as windswept and grief-stricken as that woodcarver in the seaside graveyard.
I eyed the fallen soldier figurine, which had clattered to a stop beside the sink pedestal. It had deteriorated a bit with time, but looked remarkably well preserved given its age. How had it ended up here, of all places, as bathroom decor at a rundown B&B? Had someone picked it up one day, thinking it no more than a lost trinket, and brought it home with them? Had it been passed down through generations, only to be sold at some musty estate sale decades later?
I didn’t allow myself to dwell too much on these questions. There was no point. Not when I’d never know the answers. That was the tough thing about the visions: they offered me a snapshot, not a full storyline, rarely lasting long enough to sate my curiosity or give me any true insight. Most of the time they were more frustrating than illuminating — which was one of the reasons I preferred to avoid them whenever possible. My gloves provided a much-needed barrier of protection against unwanted triggers and allowed me to live a (relatively) normal life.
Of course, not every object I touched sparked a vision. Most things were just that: things. Only the rarest of objects were imbued with enough emotion to send me spiraling into someone’s memories. Take the soldier figurine, for instance. With each flick of his knife, that father had embedded a bit more of his grief into the wood, until his devastation was as much a part of the design as the shape of the hat or the slope of the musket barrel. Until the trace of his sadness was so strong, it persisted even after all this time. An eerie emotional echo.
It was just rotten luck that I’d happened to touch it; that it happened to be in this room in the first place. For every thousand objects I took into my palms, perhaps only one would result in that dreaded starburst of purple sparks. The problem was, there was no way to tell a harmless knickknack from something that would catapult me into the past without warning.