Premonition

Premonition - Synopsis


After doctors pull Kristen Abbott from the womb of her mother, Mary Abbott, moments after she is stabbed to death, associations with Mary’s murder continue to torment Kristen throughout her childhood and adolescence. Callous schoolmates add to Kristen’s trauma when they use her fixations as ammunition to terrorize the emotionally scarred adolescent. After the young woman’s psychic instability leads to her hospitalization at the Wallburton Clinic, Kristen experiences a series of strange events including the appearance of a mysterious stalker who hides amidst the shadows outside her window at night.
Through Mary’s voice, we discover that she herself was a society writer from a well-to-do Massachusetts family who was married to Kristen’s father, John Abbott, an occasionally violent manual laborer. Mary casts suspicion on her husband when she chronicles John’s increasing envy as he becomes progressively convinced that she’d sought out the company of a man whose background she found more in concert with her own. Mary then presents a competing narrative, one detailing a medical scandal, which took place at the time of her attack, that potentially implicates members of the hospital staff in her death.
We then progress 18 years from the harrowing events of her young adulthood. Kristen has become a scientific journalist, who is gathering information for a story on the science of epigenetics. Her research for the article introduces her to experimentation in which a mouse that’s exposed to the smell of a cherry blossom and then shocked produces offspring that display adverse reactions to this particular odor. Kristen’s exploration of this phenomenon leads her to discover the source of her recurrent psychological impressions of her mother’s killing. After Kristen insists the investigation be reopened, she soon finds her interest in the case is putting her own life in jeopardy. In order discover the truth and save herself, she must untangle a web of clues related to her mother’s death.





Chapter 1

Kristen

When I started eighth grade, I found myself a complete social pariah. On the first day of the school year, I sat down in the cafeteria near the group of my classmates I’d known mainly through my friend Melinda, who’d moved away at the end of seventh grade. I’d gotten along tolerably well with this set of girls before rumors of the hallucinations I’d been having started to circulate. My mother, Mary Abbott, was murdered on Christmas Eve while returning to the car she’d parked in an alley. Doctors pulled me from her womb the night she was killed. The police told my dad, John Abbott, that my mom had told them she wanted me to be named Kristen. In fact, those were her dying words. Because of the night I was born—maybe. Or perhaps it was something more. Something only she herself had believed about what occurred that evening—events preceding my conscious mind’s very inception that would nonetheless, from that point forward, never cease to alter the diurnal course of my life.
The coterie of teens at the table all but ignored my greetings as well as my later attempts I made to participate in the lunchtime conversation. I’d been treated this way ever since an incident the previous year. One day a few of my classmates including Melinda and I were returning home from school. Melinda suggested that we could save a lot of time if we cut through an alleyway. I was immediately hesitant and began twisting the strings on my seersucker coat.
“That’s okay, I’ll just go around,” I said.
“Why?” Melinda asked.
“I don’t like alleys.”
“Oh, because of what happened to your mom?”
“Uhuh,” I said nodding my head.
Among the other girls with us that day was the class busybody Amy Norquist, Overhearing our exchange, Amy asked Melinda, now trailing behind me, what I was talking about. Melinda explained in hushed tones the set of circumstances surrounding my tragic nativity.
Well, the young lady endowed with the gift of gab made no exception for the unspeakable nature of my birth. By 10:00 am the next morning, nearly everyone in the grade knew not only about my mother’s death, but the fact that I believed I could actually remember the man who killed her. Now my classmates were only aware of my strange phobias, like my unwillingness to participate in “Mother-May-I,” a childhood game that involved being tagged from behind, but the creepy source of my repeated paranoid delusions. Within a few days, Amy’s bulletin had managed to label me a certifiable psycho.
“So how was your summer, Kristen?” one of the girls at the table finally asked out of an abundance of charity.
“It was fun,” I replied, jumping at the chance to join the conversation. “I read a lot and my dad and I built a cabinet.”
“You should take shop class,” another one of the girl’s table companions suggested. “It’d be an easy A if you don’t mind having to watch Mr. Clydeman’s beer-belly bouncing up and down while he saws.”
Many of the girls in my grade also knew about my tomboyish side, particularly my zealotry for woodworking. My interest in saws and hammers had developed out of the tremendous sense of jealousy I’d felt over my older sister’s relationship with our father. I harbored the persistent notion that my sister Deborah was our dad’s favorite. Much of this was due to the fact that I saw myself as the embodiment of my mother’s loss. Becoming his assistant was one way of snagging some points in the competition for our dad’s affection in which I saw myself as an also-ran.
“That’s right,” chimed in another girl at the table with a stylish Guess sweater. “You can teach everyone about how to use power tools. You know a lot of about how to handle “tools” don’t you, Kristen?”
The group of girls all squealed at the innuendo. I turned bright red. I picked up the rest of my uneaten meal and threw it away as I rushed out of the lunchroom. After exiting the cafeteria, I headed for a secluded spot under a stairwell. There I sat drenching my long sleeve V-neck shirt with my tears as I thought about tales about my mom’s life. I frequently played over and over in my mind anecdotes about her experiences prior to her death I’d heard through my father or my sister, stories that always felt like puzzles sitting in my own head with pieces that never quite fit together. Sometimes images that these reminiscences conjured up in my cerebellum would visit me at night, or in a déjà vu. However, these impressions were like anything but a kind of sweet cookie I once savored in my early youth. My Madeleines almost always tasted of blood.
After my experience in the cafeteria that day, I’d sat at the end of a table alone during most lunch periods. Occasionally I would get a pass to go to the library while everyone else went out for recess. There, hidden in the stacks, I would eat sandwiches I’d carried in illegally while I sought companionship from other introverts like Tess Durbeyfield and Fanny Price. When my homeroom teacher finally asked me about my frequent lunchtime efforts to ignore socializing with my peers, I provided her a limited window into the dark interstices of my past. The few impressions of my mother’s existence I shared with her, along with a description of my peer interactions up to that point in the school year earned me a one-way ticket to the school psychologist.
I was reluctant to share much with Mr. Abrams, the Hollins Middle School guidance counselor. I’d already had a bad experience with a child psychologist my father had arranged for me to speak to when I was very young. I remained closed off during our entire meeting, refusing to believe this woman would be able to offer much further insight into the source of my traumatic recollections than the last doctor. Hence, rather than protest about what I believed I could remember, or why I thought I was somehow in danger, I just agreed with every diagnosis she offered. My mom’s killer was stalking me? Crazy! I conveyed to her. Hiding from my classmates? How stupid; I had nothing to be ashamed of. To make my compliance appear even more genuine, I promised the counselor I’d try one of the techniques she’d advised me I should use for dealing with my incessant anxiety—that I should verbally confront the ghosts that haunted me. And so, after two more sessions in which I nodded at every opinion Ms. Abrams offered, I was designated “cured,” relieved of any further requirements to listen to Ms. Abram’s pedantic prognoses about my episodic “delusions.”
And once the psychologist gave me a clean bill of health, I even made good on my promise to follow the psychologist’s prescribed mantra. On a day when I was walking down an empty hall just outside my homeroom past a model of seed germination and began to have a flashback to the night of my mother’s murder, I began saying out loud, “You’re not real. I’m not afraid of you.” As luck would have it, just at this moment, one of the most popular girls in the school, Samantha Dunbar, happened to be walking out of another classroom door ten feet behind me with her friend Alicia. Overhearing me advising myself on exactly how to exorcise my demons, she gave her companion a knowing look—and smiled.
A few weeks later, I was sitting alone as usual in the cafeteria. While I munched on peanut butter and celery exploring the world of Wuthering Heights, Samantha and Alicia approached me.
“Hi Kristen,” Samantha said with a suspicious degree of enthusiasm.
“Hi,” I responded.
“Why are you sitting here all by yourself?” she then asked.
I shrugged my shoulders. No one had ever asked me to explain my social alienation before. I’d become so accustomed to eating alone that it no longer seemed unusual.
“Nobody wants to sit with me,” I replied matter-of-factly.
“That’s not true…everybody thinks that you don’t want to sit with them,” she said motioning towards a group of girls eating their lunch.
This idea had never entered my mind before.
“Come join us,” Samantha said tilting her head towards her companions.
Slowly I stood up, picked up my lunch and made my way towards Ms. Dunbar’s and her friends’ table. I took a seat right in the middle of the set of girls, but I kept my eyes on my food as I ate and sipped my chocolate milk quietly. I was surprised at how much effort they expended trying to draw me out. They bombarded me with queries about my classes and where I’d purchased the blouse I was wearing. One of them asked me what I thought of Devin Lauer, a boy from my math section, who’d told Samantha he knew me. I’d taken art with Devin in the seventh grade. I sat next to him for the whole year, but I was surprised that he mentioned me. No doubt he realized how big a crush I had on him at the time.
The next day on the lunch line, Samantha invited me to sit with her and her cadre of friends again. During the next few days I joined their group every day in the cafeteria. I began to recognize that Ms. Abrams wasn’t as far off as I’d thought she was with regard to the way that I’d retreated into my shell after a single interactions with my classmates’. I started to feel like an idiot for having shut myself off completely from my peers just because of a few snide comments.
Meanwhile, Halloween was approaching, and this year I dreaded the holiday that had once been my favorite. Melinda and I’d trick-or-treated together for the previous three years and this time around I had no one to go out with. I hardly felt close enough to my new set of friends to invite myself along for the evening. However, Samantha and her lunchtime companions had been so warm in their efforts to make me feel included that I thought they might not mind me tagging along for the night. Luckily for me, my new friends relieved me of any need to broach the issue on my own. One day at lunch, Samantha asked me point blank who I was going trick-or-treating with. I made lines in my mashed potatoes with my fork as I attempted to feign indifference. “I was just planning on staying home that year and handing out candy,” I responded.
“You should come with us!” she insisted, her eyes widening and her voice rising an entire octave.
I eagerly accepted the offer, and Samantha began detailing their plans for the night. She explained that all of them were going to take me to Beacon Hill where people gave out tons of candy.
On Halloween Eve, I boarded the Red Line T downtown wearing a Cyndi Lauper costume to meet Samantha and her friends. One of the girls would be wearing a Gloria Estefan getup and another was going as Courtney Love. Samantha herself was planning to dress as Madonna. When I finally arrived at the MGH stop where my friends waited for me, the entire coterie complimented my purple hair and bangle earrings the moment I stepped off the train car. I hadn’t thought much of the jewelry I’d bought. However, when no one was watching, I cupped one of the dangling silver circles nearly touching my shoulder to remind myself which of my accoutrements the group of tweens had gushed over so effusively.
As we started ringing doorbells, I began to realize how much I was enjoying myself. I didn’t speculate as to why Samantha and her friends had suddenly decided to take me under their collective wing like they had, but I was glad to finally feel accepted. Going through two months of dreadful loneliness sucked…big time!
As we all walked together along the steep cobblestoned streets, Samantha put her arm around me.
“Having fun?” she asked.
I nodded my head.
“We’ve been talking and we decided that we want you to be part of our club.”
“What club?”
“I can’t tell you what it’s called until you’re a member. Are you interested?”
“Sure,” I replied turning my head far enough to meet Samantha’s eyes.
“Great! To join, there’s just one thing you have to do,” she told me.
“What?” I asked.
“You have to accept a dare,” she said. “You have to confront what you fear the most.” Samantha pointed at Valerie, the member of the gaggle who sported a blond wig and an off the shoulder dress. “Valerie here’s afraid of spiders. We told her that she had to lie down and let her brother’s tarantula crawl over her for a whole minute.”
Valerie nodded with pursed lips.
“So, will you accept your dare?” Samantha continued.
“What is it?” I asked.
Samantha looked at her friends for a second and then back at me. “I’ll show you,” she said. “Come on.” She led me about 20 feet down the sidewalk until we came to the opening of a long, dark alley between a pre-war apartment and a contemporary office high rise. She then pointed down the tunnel between the two buildings. “You have to walk through that alleyway and stand at the end for a whole minute.”
I grew hesitant the moment I looked down the deserted passageway. There was absolutely no light except for the flecks of illumination from the streetlamp beside me dotting the narrow pathway. However, it was just a minute, I thought to myself. What could possibly happen in 60 seconds? I desperately wanted to prove to my friends that I was “normal.”
“Okay,” I heard myself saying.
“Awesome,” Samantha shrieked. “I’m gonna’ time you on my watch.”
I nodded my head. I began walking down the alleyway and stopped. I looked back, and Samantha brushed her hand forward with her palm turned in. I swung around and kept moving.
I was only 15 steps from the end of the alley when I looked behind me one last time. I could no longer make out the other girls’ forms in the darkness that enveloped the street. I felt the urge to run back welling up inside me but refused to give in to my fear. I stopped walking just beneath a faint light emitting from a second-floor apartment, having declared myself to have gone as far as was necessary to prove my temerity to the audience waiting 100 feet behind me. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine something upbeat. I decided that the time would feel less interminable if I could think of a pleasant situation as I cowered in the shadows between the two buildings.
I counted in my mind until 45 seconds had elapsed. I began to dismiss the fear of dark enclosures I’d developed in the first place as tantamount to my phobia that a predator remained perpetually at my back ready to slit my throat.
“Fifty-seven, fifty-eight, fifty-nine, Sixty!” I counted to myself. I opened my eyes and smiled at the thought of returning to my friends in triumph. I took a deep breath as I started to whirl back towards the alley entrance.