Premonition Beginning

Premonition




Chapter 1

Kristen

When I started the eighth grade, I found myself a complete social pariah. On the first day of the school year, I sat down in the lunchroom near a group of my peers whom I'd known mainly through my classmate Lisa, my one-time BFF who'd moved away at the end of seventh grade. I'd gotten along tolerably well with this set of girls before rumors of my hallucinations became Carter Middle School's most salacious gossip item.
My mother, Mary Abbott, was murdered on Christmas Eve. On that night in 1989, someone cut her throat before she could get back to her car in the alley where she'd parked. Doctors pulled me from her womb right after she passed away. The police conveyed to 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, from that point forward, never cease to alter the diurnal course of my existence. It's hard for me to recall a time in my life before I started playing over and over in my mind anecdotes about my mother's experiences prior to her murder. These tales of the events leading up to her death, most of which I'd heard through my father or my sister, always felt like puzzles sitting in my own head with pieces that never quite fit together. Sometimes images that these stories conjured up in my cerebellum would visit me at night, or in a deja vu. However, these impressions were like anything but a kind of sweet cookie I once savored in my youth. My Madeleines almost always tasted of blood.
The coterie of teens at the table all but ignored my greetings as well as my later attempts to participate in the lunchtime conversation. My classmates had treated me with such derision ever since my walk home with Lisa and Amy the previous year.
"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 my tablemates 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."
On top of my fear of alleys that had spread after a walk home from school with Lisa and Amy Norquist, the class busybody, during which I'd avoided following my classmates on an urban detour, many of the girls in my grade also knew about my tomboyish side, particularly my zealotry for woodworking. My interest in hammers and nails had developed out of a tremendous sense of sororial jealousy. For years I'd harbored the persistent notion that my older 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 father's affection in which I saw myself as an also-ran.
"That's right," chimed in a Guess sweater-clad girl as she pointed her fork at me. "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 cafeteria. After exiting the lunchroom, I headed for a secluded spot under a stairwell, where I sat drenching my long sleeve V-neck shirt with my tears.
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 the isolation she'd already seen me impose on myself, earned me a mandatory appointment with the school psychologist.
Well, rather than improve life for me among my peers, my compulsory meeting with Carter's guidance counselor made things worse than before. The psychologist advised me that the most effective way to work through my incessant anxiety was to face my fears head on. She suggested that to address my phobias, I should verbally confront the ghosts that terrorized me.
So, on a day when I was walking down an empty hall outside my earth science room past a model of seed germination and I began to have a flashback to the night of my mother's murder, I started saying loudly, "You're not real. I'm not afraid of you."
Just at this moment, one of the most popular girls in the school, Samantha Dunbar, along with her friend Alicia, happened to be walking out of a social studies classroom door ten feet behind me. Overhearing me advising myself on exactly how to exorcise my demons, she gave her companion a knowing look--and smiled.
A few days 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 half-walked and half-skipped towards my table until they stood right in front of 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 then 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, taking sips only intermittently from my chocolate milk container. I was surprised at how much effort Samantha's clique 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'd telegraphically crushed on him for the whole year, but I was still surprised that he mentioned me.
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 her didactic pyscho-babble. Retreating into a shell because of a few of my peers' snide comments was a bit extreme even for someone as supposedly far towards the "disorder spectrum" red bar as I was.
Meanwhile, Halloween was approaching, and this year I dreaded the holiday that had once been my favorite. Lisa and I'd trick-or-treated together for the previous four 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 stirred my apple cobbler with my spoon as I attempted to feign indifference. "I was just planning on staying home this year and handing out candy."
"You should come with us!" she insisted, her eyes widening and her voice rising an entire octave.
No sooner had I accepted the offer, when 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 Blue 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 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.
The moment I'd spun around, I recoiled in fear at a tall figure in a hooded sweatshirt standing right in front of me holding a knife. I screamed so loudly that residents on the top story of the pre-war switched on their lights and leaned their heads out their window to see who'd been killed. I began convulsing as I darted towards a door at the end of the pathway and started frantically pulling at the handle. Moments later I felt a warm liquid trickling down my leg. When I turned back around, all three of the girls stood in front of me laughing right next my attacker, the now uncloaked Brett Lauer. A closer look at my mock assailant also revealed that the weapon I'd seen him holding was nothing but a standard, Williams-Sonoma butter knife. My three new faux friends started to buckle over in hysterics when they caught sight of the large yellow puddle that'd begun to stain the pavement under my feet.
When she was able to actually catch her breath, Samantha finally spoke. "You did it, Kristen, you can be part of the club now!"
She and her three partners in crime then picked up their bags and started heading back towards the main street. As they walked down the alley, leaning on one another for physical support, their laughter continued to echo throughout the cavernous urban inlet.
When word reached school administrators of what Samantha and her two cronies had done, each of them received a day's suspension on the grounds that they'd hatched their plot on school property. This did little to erase the emotional scars of the incident for me. The trauma associated with the prank continued to linger, and I now found myself avoiding the cafeteria altogether. When I did eat in the lunchroom, I made sure to sit on the opposite side of room from wherever Samantha and her friends had chosen to dine.


Chapter 2


Luckily for me, incidents like the Halloween prank were simply the miseries of middle school. When I entered high school, I was able to find other misfits like myself with personal baggage and stories as strange as mine if not stranger. I'd also graduated from Jane Austen to the books shelved in the mysteries section of my school's library. I grew fixated by stories of grisly murders and spent days at a time engrossed in the tales of Agatha Christie and Steven King. Outcasts as they were, even my new companions found my morbid infatuation with such gory reading material somewhat disturbing. As I progressed from pre-teen outcast to adolescent horror-fiend, the images that once visited me in my dreams as a child appeared to be returning with renewed vehemence. They impressions that passed through the transom of my mind continued to have weren't always scary. Sometimes they were just of different men approaching my mother from behind. Once it was even my father holding a bouquet of flowers. Nevertheless, the memories were no longer just nocturnal visions that would be gone by morning. The flashbacks began to visit me throughout the day as well. My father blamed my taste in books. However, even when I refrained from indulging in the gruesome escapades of serial killers and vampires, the nightmares didn't appear to be abating.
My dad finally took me to the Wallburton Psychiatric Hospital for observation. He told the doctors there about the night terrors that I'd been experiencing. After assessing my condition, the doctors collectively determined that my "psychic instability" represented an evolving mental illness that required immediate medical attention.
I was put on Zoloft. Doctors also recommended that I be admitted to Wallburton for treatment. On my first night as an inpatient at the clinic, I woke up screaming, and hospital staff were required to rush in and hit me with 2 mg of Ativan. The doctors interviewed me daily to attempt to establish exactly what had brought on the rash of terrifying images that seemed now to be haunting my every dream. Unable to find any obvious solution to their patient's psychic trauma, the staff began to query physicians at other hospitals about the situation. Nobody they spoke to felt qualified to speculate on the psychic impact that being in a woman's womb while she was stabbed to death might have on a fetus. Since no one had ever heard of such an unusual condition before, they could offer no help to the Wallburton physicians. The clinic doctors continued to search, in vain, for remedies that might assuage some of my fixation with the imaginary attacker who terrified me at night.
An orderly named Ralph brought me my meds every morning. He had long floppy black hair and dark horn-rimmed glasses.
"Hello," he said one morning as he put the pills on my nightstand.
"Hello," I responded propping myself up on my elbows and looking at the clock.
"Wow, I've really slept late," I said rubbing my eyes.
"Don't worry, all the girls do. It's the meds."
"Hi, I'm Ralph," the staff member said.
"I'm Kristen."
"I know," he said smiling. "Your name's all over your charts."
As my days as an in-patient turned into weeks, Ralph and I developed a friendly rapport. The diet that my doctors put me on labelled artificial sugars strictly off limits. Whenever he could, Ralph would sneak me cookies from the cafeteria.
On a few nights, after Ralph was done with his rounds, he'd stop by my room and check in on me. Sometimes he'd stay for a while sitting on the tough wooden chair in my room. He insisted that this piece of furniture was specially chosen to discourage visitors from lingering the way they would in a regular clinical setting. On these nights, I'd lie in bed staring up at the ceiling and chronicling for my guest the many details of the trauma I was battling with. Sometimes I'd even forget who I was talking to until the sound of the PA paging a doctor would interrupt the flow of my narrative. At such moments, Ralph would explain that his parents might start to worry if he didn't make it back home soon. He'd then slip out of my ward without letting the door bang behind him.
One particular night at Wallburton, I awoke with the strange feeling that someone was standing outside my room. I got up and began to make my way towards to the window. The drapes were hanging open and I peered over from the side. In the corner of my eye, I saw what I believed was a man's face. I turned away immediately. I stood frozen with my back against the wall. I began to wonder if I really had caught sight of a voyeur. Perhaps I was imagining things, I thought to myself. There was a drain that ran along the building exterior just outside my window. I'd seen strange reflections created by the hall light bouncing off the pipe's aluminum casing.
As I got back into bed, I recognized that I was probably just seeing things. Why would anyone be stalking me? I began to think that the whole idea was ridiculous. Attempting to convince myself of this, however, proved futile. I lay in bed shaking for almost an entire hour before finally falling back asleep.
As it became clear that the medicine the doctors had prescribed to me was reducing the intensity of the night terrors, I was eventually released from the hospital. Returning to school carried with it no end of humiliation for me. When word got around where I'd been for three weeks, my stay at "The Cuckoo's Nest" became the source of a great deal of gossip. Many of my classmates began whispering behind my back about "The Freak." The indignity of once again being regarded as a psychiatric case rekindled memories of former ridicule I'd thought were long behind me.
Though I felt less anxiety, I'd still have relapses of the impressions that would jolt me out of sleep at night. I knew that banishing these associations from my mind for good required not just ignoring my fears but actually confronting them. In spite of the trauma associated with the "hazing incident" of my middle school years, I realized that I wouldn't ever be truly free of my demons until I faced one of my worst phobias, my fear of dark enclosures. This, I felt, I could only achieve by returning to the scene of the crime itself. Something in the back of my mind led me to surmise that if I could tap into the emotions that were perpetuating my fixation, I might be able to actually relive the fear my mother had experienced. I wanted to believe that if I could do this, I might, in fact, exorcise forever the monsters that haunted my subconscious.
One cold winter afternoon, I took the T to the area of Boston where my mother was killed. I remembered the exact location because there was a Gap clothing outlet that Deb had heard about from one of her friends right near it. My sister mentioned the store and even said she'd let me come along with her if I could convince our dad to take us. With only a little persuasion, we were able to get our father to drive to the touted boutique. When we approached the location of the store, our dad pulled the car over and stopped the vehicle abruptly on the side of the road.
"Sorry, I don't drive on this street," he said.
"How come?" Deborah asked in irritation.
"It's where your mother was killed," he replied.
Deb and I exchanged glances, but neither of us said a word.
The next day, my curiosity got the better of me. I woke up at the crack of dawn and left the house before either Deborah or my father was awake. I travelled to the street at the edge of "no-man's land" and stood there for a few moments. I then began walking down the block until I found an alleyway. It was nestled between a candy store and a Colonial Georgian apartment building. I checked to make sure it was the only one on the block. Satisfying myself that it was, I walked back towards the passageway opening. Signs flapped loudly above me in what felt like a choreographed reproval of my morbid curiosity. I hadn't dared go in but I made sure to mark the location so that if I ever developed the courage to revisit the forbidden locale, I'd know exactly where to find it.
As I sat on the subway, I wondered if I felt any less fear at the process of walking down the long dark corridor than I did at the age of nine. Before I could begin to ponder the question in more depth, the train reached my stop.
I disembarked from the T car and made my way along the cold Boston sidewalks until I'd finally arrived at the opening to "nightmare" alley. I checked the name of the intersection I'd written down in my fourth-grade handwriting. I wanted to make sure I'd reached the urban recess I'd catalogued, unique among all the unimportant enclosures that sat quietly among the city's ongoing flux. In spite of the daylight, the corridor was still relatively dark. I took a deep breath and began making my way down the narrow path between the two buildings. I knew I'd be able to locate the exact spot where my mother was actually killed because my sister had once told me that she was murdered right outside the back exit of a restaurant. I walked down the alleyway until I saw a door with a dim light above it. I decided that must be the place. I slowly approached the spot just outside the diner's rear exit before stopping and looking down at the pavement as if I was expecting to see faint hints of the chalk outlining where my mother's body had once lain. I even closed my eyes, but contrary to my long-held hopes, standing in the very place where my mom was murdered did not cause images of a knife-wielding assailant to come flooding back to me. In spite of all my efforts, I wasn't able to muster any personal association whatsoever with the cold, empty space. I began to feel ridiculous about the entire pilgrimage. Sadly, I started to recognize that only time would free me from the memories that tormented me at night. I took one last look at the uneven pavement that my mother's blood had once stained before starting to turn around. As I did so, I suddenly heard what struck my ears as a bottled liquid. The sound appeared to be coming from somewhere along the path back in the direction of the entrance. The strange acoustics created by the narrow space made it difficult to identify the exact source of the sound. I scanned the enclosure though saw nothing but a discarded television set and a dumpster just opposite from it. I started walking again. No sooner had I passed the edge of the trash receptacle when five cold fingers holding a cloth were slapped over my nose and mouth.


Chapter 3


Mary


The events of 33 years ago will make little sense without a small window into the untoward circumstances surrounding my death. First of all, I would be the first to admit that my nature itself had a good deal to do with the tragedy of my demise. Of course, I don't know anything for sure. However, it's impossible to deny that my penchant for uncovering facts effected the series of events that would spur on my daughter's dangerous inquiries. Not only this, but my background was no less an accessory to my death than my insatiable curiosity.
You see, when I was young, I had everything a little girl could ever want. I grew up in the wealthy suburb of Newton, Massachusetts as the only child of my father, Stuart Tilworth, a successful lawyer and my mother, Edna Tilworth. My family's ancestors had been among the first men and women ever to set foot on Plymouth Rock. Little did I know that I, the legacy of revolutionary forefathers who'd stained the early roads of Boston with their blood, would also take my last breath prostrate along those same cobblestoned streets.
The problems I encountered with my husband John, a man who'd himself come of age in the working-class suburbs of Boston, began and ended with my blue-blood pedigree. Kristen's story may have given you a one-sided image of my husband, John. He wasn't a bad husband, or a bad father. However, there were two distinct sides to him and one of them very few people ever saw. I did, though. And witnessing that part of my spouse taught me something about flirtations between a young woman like myself, the daughter of socialites, and a man from the "streets of Southie." That when it comes to long-term partners, people will sooner learn to live without the thrill of a "Lady and the Tramp" liaison, than stray very far from their own side of the tracks.
John and I met at a skating rink one winter afternoon during my Junior year at Wellesley. He rescued me after a pack of ballistic skaters sent me hurling to the ice. From that day on, I never questioned our compatibility as he told me stories of his adolescence in the Dorchester Heights section of Boston and regaled me with tales of his work grinding malt in a beer distillery. I only wanted to hear more, more of a world beyond that of my own sheltered Newton existence--a social sphere my father saw as the only environment from which his daughter's future husband would someday hale.
The way my dad's voice would slur John's name when he mentioned him was what first clued me in to his disgust at the fact I'd chosen beneath my station. At the time, John was studying engineering, training for work in housing construction. "Are there any other fellows at BU or Boston College who you might also consider getting to know?" he'd ask me. It had once been Harvard and M.I.T. He'd progressively lowered his standards for the academic institutions my suitors attended as long as they could produce a son-in-law not training for union labor.
The night I returned home after final exams my senior year, I announced to my parents after we'd finished eating dinner that I had something to tell them. Bracing myself for a slew of objections, I conveyed to them the fact that John had officially proposed to me. My mom smiled encouragingly, avoiding making eye contact with my father. She wanted to revel in the news some mothers wait the whole latter half of their lifetime to hear for as long as possible. My father said nothing for at least ten seconds. Finally, he stood up. Both my mother and I watched him leave the dining room and head towards the cellar door. He returned from the basement five minutes later with a bottle of wine.
"This is a 1945 Chianti. I've been saving it to celebrate a special occasion. Tonight's announcement seems as good as any. A toast, to my daughter's engagement," he said before pouring himself a glass and drinking it in one swill. The next occasion upon which he'd imbibe that much alcohol at once was the evening he was put on standby to identify my blood-caked body. That fateful night, he'd throw down a sifter of bourbon after hanging up the phone with the police. Then trying to steady himself, he would knock my mother's favorite vase off our fireplace mantle. He never could hold his liquor.