Teasing Out Hypnosis
Chapter One
Steve leaned against the window of the train carriage, headphones firmly jammed into his ears as he blocked out the rest of the world. The countryside flashed by but he didn't pay much attention to it, rock music ringing through his head, although he wasn't even actually listening to that -- not that much, at least. His attention was on his music player, the tiny slip of a device that was jammed into the pocket rattling off tracks that he'd heard over and over again, even though technically only enough to skip over the tracks that had gone beyond simply being earworms.
His grandmother awaited him a train ride away, although it had not been his idea to go. Sighing, he pressed his lips together, staring at the faint gleam of his reflection in the window, heart tight in his chest. It didn't look like him, too pale and his brown hair in need of a trim -- just another thing that his grandmother would go on at him about. His mother had blonde hair and his grandmother forever liked to remind him of how different he looked to that side of the family, although it was not his fault. How could it be his fault just how he looked?
Times were not quiet between them and he had been sent there, previously, when his grades had slipped. He hadn't meant to let them slip, usually diligent, but so many things had seemed to get on top of him all at once and the only thing his mother had come to in order to get him back on the straight and narrow (he'd never veered off that track to begin with) had been to send him off with his ridiculously strict grandmother for an advanced pre-college course. It went without saying that his grades had once again stabilised but that was no thanks to his grandmother who picked and nipped at every last bit of his being until Steve wondered if there had been anything left of him at all to finish high-school and move on in life, taking other courses to beef up his resume before college.
Things had changed since he'd last seen his grandmother, in ways that no one else could have ever suspected. It wasn't something that was supposed to be able to happen, something that could be brought from the realm of fiction into reality, though Steve himself could not deny what he'd uncovered. He didn't linger on it too much, instead considering just how much he could push, what he could do with such knowledge, but he simply had not had time to explore the book that he'd found in his grandfather's belongings to the depth that he truly wanted to on his last visit.
A lick of the supernatural and a touch of something that could not be explained by science: a mean feat for a man like him to understand when his very course demanded that he look at things both objectively and pragmatically. That was just why it had been so difficult to consider that controlling the mind of another, particularly that of his grandmother, was at all possible. Yet his anger had gotten the better of him and he'd snarled out the word, a trigger word was what they called it, and his grandmother, cruelty shimmering in her eyes, her twisted scowl contorting her face.
And still...somehow...that had stopped her dead in her tracks. She'd stood there, slack-jawed ever so slightly, and he hadn't known what to do. His grandmother just hadn't seemed to realise what was going on, the world continuing on around her, and it was just as well that he had dug out the word to awaken her again, hardly believing what was going on before his very eyes, before she had been due to drive him back to the train station that time. His heart had hammered and he'd shoved the book into the bottom of his bag right as she returned to her usual snappy self, constantly picking fault in him, regardless of whether or not he actually had done something to deserve that fault.
Truth be told, he didn't deserve it. No one who fell under her wrath did but that was okay. Things would change as he explored just how twisted things could become with his strict grandmother, the world turning a little more in his favour.
Yet his train would pull in soon to the station in the city where his grandmother lived, even though she was not all that far out of the countryside and it was hardly a convenient place in which to live, and things would have to change. He would have to dig and he would have to investigate, slipping his hand into his bag as it sat on his lap, touching the book within with the frayed, curling pages, the one that could be the key to changing it all. Only testing it out would tell, heart turning over in his chest as even his palms sweated.
He would find out just what secrets that book had to spill.
His grandmother, Agatha, would not stand waiting at the station for him, despite there not being any kind of delays on the line that day. No, no, no: she had more important things to do with her time -- he should have known that! Stupid boy, idiotic boy. Others saw her harsh language simply as sternness but only Steve could say how they cut him through to the quick of his being, even though he was now an adult and should have well enough have been able to stand up to her in more conventional ways by this time. That did not matter, however, as he sighed and withdrew his phone from his bag, dialling the number that he didn't feel that he should have known by heart.
It rang.
"Yes?"
Her cranky tone wavered down the line as if Agatha had been interrupted in the middle of something very important but Steve could not find it in himself to be annoyed, dulled in a way but alive in others. His fingers tingled and he opened and closed his hands to and from fists reflexively, taking a breath.
"I'm nearly there," he tried, keeping his voice level and plain, just to see what would happen. "Are you busy?"
"Yes, well, son," she snipped, "I am always busy. What do you want?"
It couldn't be that hard for her to work out, considering that she knew that he was coming to stay that day, but Agatha still forced him to go through the rigmarole of asking, even begging, for the help that she had offered in the first place. Gritting his teeth together for some semblance of steadying himself, he exhaled a breath, lungs releasing, pinching the bridge of his nose.
This time...he was going to try not asking. Just another little thing to try, another thing that may or may not tell him what was happening with that book, whether it was real or...disappointingly...not.