Still, the cadence was effective. He had to admit that. The cadence was relaxing, soothing, and the way she held his focus by asking these ridiculous questions kept the mind from wandering. The visualization technique was smart, too, because it demanded stillness and focus that was truly draining. His vision had begun to ripple along the periphery. Yes, all in all, he could see how her techniques might be effective in time, on the right person. He just wasn’t that person.
When he said, “I think it’s a cave,” he felt a sense of slipping, like he’d hit mental black ice. What question had she asked? He couldn’t remember, but he’d given the answer, and she seemed pleased by it. And the cave was where they were supposed to be going, wasn’t it?
“And what do you see?”
“Blackness,” he said, an automatic answer that seemed logical, but it was also confusing, because what had happened to the cigar box? That was what he was supposed to be imagining. Maybe he should try a little harder. He focused but couldn’t find the floor. He thought he heard distant drums. That didn’t make any sense. He needed to clear his head. Needed to—
“If you would like, you may close your eyes,” Julianne said, and he thought, Thank God, because he was so tired now, and the floor where that box was supposed to be had started to swim from the sheer effort of staring at it for so long. Shutting his fatigued eyes for just a moment sounded grand.
It’s working on me, he thought, and there was some true and deep fear to that realization.
But not enough to keep his eyes open.
44
Ridley should have gone underground after Julianne’s visit — he needed the solace — but he hadn’t. Instead, he had stayed in the house listening to the wind blow snow against the walls, and he debated whether he could still view Julianne as an ally.
Always, she had listened to his needs, and always, she had attended to them. Or so he’d thought. As the snow accumulated and the dark hours passed and were replaced by the light, he considered the evidence against Julianne’s integrity, and he was concerned.
There had been no shortage of people in Ridley’s life who believed they could manipulate him, but he’d not sought any of them out. Julianne was his own find; he’d gone to her for help and she had provided not only help but a sense of possibility. What Ridley had once believed was beyond his grasp, Julianne had convinced him was in fact a reasonable goal.
She had also convinced him that Mark Novak would be of assistance in achieving that goal. The problem, Ridley realized as he tied knots with hands that had gone slick with sweat, was that she had located Novak. Ridley had done the writing, Ridley had reached out, but Novak had not been his discovery. He belonged to Julianne.
That was beginning to feel like a problem.
The decision to trust him with a video of Ridley’s most vulnerable moment, an even greater problem.
The goal, as Julianne had always understood — or claimed to understand — was to grasp the full power of Trapdoor. She had been the only person who had listened to Ridley’s explanations of the cave and not recoiled. She was the only person who had enough wisdom to refer to Trapdoor with proper respect. For all of these reasons, he had felt certain that she was the only person the cave would permit to join Ridley in a quest that had been building for ten years.
The rope slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor and he opened his eyes and stared at it in horror, trying to remember the last time he had dropped a rope while tying a knot.
The snarl of rope lay there like a symbol of the mistake that he had made, and he understood that he should never have written to Novak, but it was too late to fix that. Whether it was too late to give up on Julianne, he wasn’t sure. He’d waited so long for someone like her and had nearly lost hope.
He wiped his hands dry on his jeans and went upstairs to his bookshelves, which were lined with studies on the power of the mind, from a 120-year-old volume on levitation to the latest neuroscience research. There was also a collection on jewelry and gemstones, and the highlighted portions all concerned the sapphire. If there was any topic Ridley would consider discussing with Blankenship — and he’d come close once, only to pull back at the last minute — it was the sapphire necklace. Ridley understood from the police reports that Blankenship had given the necklace to Diane Martin because it was her birthstone. A simple enough reason for a simple man, and Blankenship was nothing if not simple, but Ridley wondered if the stone might have been powerful enough to affect him nevertheless. The sapphire, Ridley had learned in his studies, provided spiritual enlightenment, inner peace, and — most critically — protection from harm. Whether Blankenship might have sensed a harm approaching the Martin household was something Ridley had long wondered.
Eastern cultures believed the stone warded off evil, but if you studied enough, you learned that the gemstone’s power was so mighty as to be selective and that it would protect its first wearer even if it was sold or given away to another. Ridley thought this might explain why it had failed Diane’s daughter, but Diane was dead now as well and there was no one left to ask about this except for Blankenship, who seemed too dull to receive the question properly.
And there was Julianne.
Ridley left the bookshelf untouched and went instead to the knee wall, pressed on the panel, and revealed the room hidden beyond. He retrieved the necklace with the broken chain and handled it carefully. The stone was small and unremarkable in color, but it was genuine. According to Persian legend, the entire earth rested on a core of sapphire, and the sky was blue because it reflected the color of that hidden core. According to Greek myth, Prometheus had been chained to a rock for stealing fire from the gods, and the rock was made of sapphire. Ridley believed both stories could be true. While he could not speak for the accuracy of all the sapphire’s reputed powers, he understood that they must be great because Trapdoor had presented it to him and allowed him to remove it from underground. The necklace, he’d come to realize, was the most sacred of all his possessions — so sacred that he had taken the risk of keeping it with him rather than placing it in the ground near his childhood home, so sacred that he had never shared it with anyone.
Now was the time.
The sun was high in a cloudless sky as he drove to Julianne’s, and, never a fan of bright light, he cursed the harsh white landscape, lowered the visors in the truck, and put on sunglasses. They dulled the glare some, but not enough. He was beginning to feel a real rage over the light when it occurred to him that the sky was sapphire blue and that this was perhaps a good sign. He would show Julianne the necklace and in this gesture of trust he believed her allegiance would be assured once more.
He felt renewed confidence as he turned onto the gravel road that led to Julianne’s, and he thought the small sapphire clutched in his palm had warmed ever so faintly, just enough to let him know that he was on the right course.