Chapter 21 #4
“She was so upset and distressed over my mother’s death, or potential death, that she became even more unhinged and irrational as time went on.”
Stefan, his tone sharp, spoke up again. “Do you remember what she told you to do? It’s important, Eden.”
“She said that people were weakest in the hospital, and, although it wasn’t a great source of energy, any energy that could be captured for my mother to heal was energy being put to a much better use.
I didn’t understand what she meant. I guess I still don’t really understand, and it was very difficult because she would rant and rave at me every time I came back out, telling me it wasn’t enough and to go back in. I hated it in there. It was scary.”
Stefan remained quiet, hoping she would go on.
“It was dark. Sometimes a bit of light shone in my world, but, for the most part, Grandmother became completely unhinged, telling me that I had to stay in there and do more.”
“It’s the do more part that I find interesting,” Stefan noted, “because it seems she expected you to heal.”
“Yes, and for the longest time I was,” she noted. “I was able to heal. I tried to avoid getting into those situations, but it was hard for me to not help somebody when I could see that they needed it.”
At that, Eric spun and looked at her. “The waitress.”
“And it isn’t that easy once everything’s been … fired up. It takes a while to fire up, and it takes me a long time to shut down,” she shared. “So that’s just the way it is.”
“Now you’re starting to make sense,” Stefan stated.
“I’m glad you think so,” she quipped, “because I don’t have a fucking clue. I don’t see how I’m making any sense at all,” she muttered. “Let’s just say that, no matter what I was told to do, I tried hard to do it, but then as the instructions got wilder and wilder, I really struggled.”
“You’ve got to remember all that you can.”
“I was little. I was six, going on seven, and all that time that I was working at saving my mother, that was my life. I didn’t go to school. I didn’t do anything. I was supposedly being homeschooled at the hospital.”
“Were you really?”
“I was taught some. My mother always fought to send me out, to send me back to school, but my grandmother would never let me leave, and every time my mother would open her eyes, there I would be. My grandmother was always telling me that I needed to spend every moment with her and that we were connected.”
“You were connected because you were mother and daughter.”
“Yes, but that wasn’t enough for Grandmother,” Eden replied.
Stefan continued. “I’m getting a lot of this, but I feel as if you aren’t telling me something. You need to remember that to break this.”
She sighed. “There’s a lot I’m not telling you,” she snapped, “because there’s a lot that I don’t know for shit.
And how could I tell people the reason my mother lived as long as she did?
No matter how much I fought doing it, if I didn’t obey, my life became more and more hellish, until it seemed as if I just couldn’t do anything anymore.
Sometimes the nurses would come and would take me away, and my grandmother would collapse in grief.
Everybody would just put it down to her grief over my mother. ”
“Which, in many cases, would have been exactly that.”
“In many cases, yes, it absolutely would have been.”
“But not all?” Eric asked.
“No,” she whispered, “not all. Grandmother was obsessed, and I get it. It was my mother after all,” she whispered, “but that obsession became almost impossible to live with. If I didn’t do everything exactly as Grandmother decreed, it became almost impossible to get away from her.”
“And yet you managed … to get away, I mean.”
“I would say that my mother put a stop to it,” she clarified, “and, by then, I also had an idea of what was going on.”
“How so?”
“On the last day, my mother pulled me close and whispered that it was time to stop and that the only way to do that was if she could stop it. I wasn’t even sure what she was talking about or that she even knew what was going on, though I presumed she did because it was all about her mother.
Somewhere along the line, she must have known what my grandmother was doing, what she was making me do.
… So, when my grandmother came in that afternoon, she had a little bit of food for me, not much, mostly because she thought I worked better if I wasn’t eating, so I was always hungry, almost starving.
Sometimes the nurses would bring me extra food because, well, I was a child, and it wasn’t really in them to see me suffer.
Yet lots of looks came in my direction. That part was difficult for me,” she shared.
“I mean, how do you explain to people that you’re not allowed to leave until you can heal your mother fully, and I knew I wasn’t able to heal her fully. ”
“And why is that?” Eric asked. “I mean, if you were in there and you were healing and all?”
Eden looked at him with sad eyes. “When you take energy from others, and it’s good, pure, clean energy, there’s still a limit to how it can be used, and my mother did not want to be healed in that way. She would never want to hurt another person.”
“I don’t understand,” Eric replied. When she didn’t respond, he felt as if he’d had enough of the games, his frustration bubbling over. “What are you not saying? How exactly did you heal her?”
“I healed her with the energy I took from all the other sick people,” she explained. “Because they were sick, the energy didn’t go far, but it was as far as I could reach, and, for my grandmother, it wasn’t nearly enough.”
He stared at her, not sure he wanted to understand, but what she was saying spoke volumes. “So, in order for you to heal your mother, other people had to die?”
“I tried not to take enough to kill them,” she whispered, tears rolling down her face. “I tried hard to leave people so they could have their loved ones too, but, if my grandmother thought that I wasn’t making a full effort, then, well, let’s just say the beatings got worse.”
Eric sat back and stared at her in shock.
She shrugged. “See? I’m not the person you think I am, and I know that you really don’t want anything to do with me,” she added, with a sad smile, “because why would you? Why would anyone? I mean, for all you know, you’ll go to sleep one night, and I’ll whisk in there and take your energy for someone else,” she said in a mocking tone.
“That’s not—”
“Don’t bother. … I can see it already in your face.”
“No,” he declared, “you can’t see shit in my face because that’s not there. What you said is not true.”
She stared at him as he went on.
“Am I surprised? Am I shocked that this was even possible? Hell yes, I’m stunned. The fact that your grandmother treated you like that boggles my mind. You were a child.”
“You don’t understand—”
“Don’t understand what?” he asked. “What possible reason could explain that abuse of her own granddaughter?”
She smiled. “It’s the most understandable reason in the entire world,” she began, “a mother’s love. Mothers all over would cheerfully sacrifice every other person on this planet, … if it would save their beloved child.”
*
For a long time after they returned to their suite, Eric didn’t even know what to say. Absolutely nothing he had heard or had seen in the last hour made any sense to him, and yet obviously it had happened. He just couldn’t understand the driving forces behind it all.
He was still reeling over what Eden had gone through and everything that had happened today, and somewhere along the line, while he’d still been stunned, she’d gotten up and announced she would go lie down. As he sat on the couch, his mind still spinning, Stefan contacted him.
Are you okay?
“Sure,” he muttered bitterly, “I guess, but that was way too real. That little boy was screaming in so much pain and terror. Can we go back in time and help these people?”
If that day ever comes, Stefan offered, I would be the first to make the attempt, but, so far, I haven’t even heard of anything like that.
“And yet isn’t there something about dimensional travel and all that good stuff?”
Yeah, and we are working with some of that, he confirmed. There are always consequences to our actions, and we don’t always know what they are until they happen.
“But what are the repercussions of going back and not having that fire start in the first place? All those people would have lived, right?”
Stefan replied as gently as he could. And what happens then?
I mean, that’s how many more souls who lived, who would have reproduced, who would have carried on.
Yet other people might not have been born.
How much would all of that have changed the world?
I mean, at what point in time does messing with any of this make changes in our world that aren’t acceptable?
Eric knew what Stefan was saying, but it was all just so frustrating. “I get it. I can’t believe how exhausted all that left me, you know?” he muttered.
I do, and you need to rest, recuperate, and cleanse your system of all that energy so you’re not carrying it forward.
“Right now, I don’t even know that I want to release it. I just feel so close to that little boy and so grief-stricken.”
That’s another reason why you need to let that energy go. Because that little boy, regardless of what you saw and how much pain he was in, is long gone, and you don’t want to hang on to that energy.
“But he’s in there, Stefan. He’s in that portal.”
I know, Stefan said. And we might need a little more help to release him and the others. For whatever reason, and maybe that’s the part that’s so important here, but, for whatever reason, they have been kept in that portal.
“So, what then? How do we save them? How do we get them out of there?” he cried out. “That’s just so wrong.”
I agree with you. It is wrong. But we are also still trying to sort it all out.
He groaned at that.