by Cailyn Lloyd
“Two hundred!” Laura yelled.
As quickly as the bidding frenzy began, it died, leaving Laura standing, holding her number up.
“All right, I got two hundred. Who’ll give me two-twenty-five? Come on, let’s go two-twenty-five.” Perhaps sensing the bidding was over, the auctioneer brought the sale to a close.
“Sold! To number sixty-eight.” He rapped the gavel down and smiled.
As Laura sat down, Dana grabbed her arm and whispered, “What was that all about?”
“Uh, I don’t know exactly…okay if we go now?” Laura was shaking, adrenaline raising gooseflesh on her arms. What was that about? She didn’t know.
Looking concerned, Dana said, “You feel okay?”
“Yeah, why?”
“You’re as pale as a ghost.”
“I’m fine. Let’s go.”
Laura paid for her purchases and made arrangements to pick most of them up later but waited for the box of photo albums. She touched Dana’s shoulder, “Listen, can we keep this to ourselves for now?”
“Sure. Why?”
“Because…I don’t know. Just because.”
Laura didn’t know. While she couldn’t explain her compulsion to bid on the box, she was dying to rummage through it when they got home.
Why?
She didn’t know that either.
Eight
Nate MacKenzie slathered a glob of stucco onto the last stretch of wall on the north side of the house. Worked the wet plaster smooth with a trowel and finished with the arcing flourishes of a skip-trowel texture. Stood back and admired his work.
Perfect.
It was tedious work he could have given to a subcontractor, but few people had his skill in creating a meticulous finish. He snapped a dozen photos for the blog. Another job complete, every detail preserved and documented.
By all accounts, the project was a success so far. Their blog had several thousand followers and they had racked up almost a hundred thousand views on YouTube. Still, he worried closing his successful business in Illinois was a mistake. Felt the constant pressure of deadlines as the HGTV producer pushed him hard to finish. Nate had a great deal riding on this renovation and hoped he and Ashley would earn their own show in the end. If they didn’t…
He sent a text to Ashley to follow up with video. She was shopping, again. The woman loved buying clothes but he wondered where she’d wear them out here in the sticks. Shopping for more clothes? Probably. She had expensive tastes and he worried about keeping her happy. Though it was far from certain, Ashley seemed to feel having their own show was a foregone conclusion.
Maybe he worried too much, or not enough, he didn’t know.
Lighting a Cohiba Mini, he sat and stared out at the lake. The day was beautiful, hot but comfortable with a soft breeze. He drew a thin stream of smoke into his lungs, closed his eyes and enjoyed the forbidden pleasure. He’d quit cigarettes years ago, saw no harm in the occasional cigar, but Ashley was a virulent anti-smoker and would kill him if she caught him. Thank God she wasn’t a vegan as well.
The view was fabulous but Nate felt out of place here. Unlike Lucas, he didn’t hunt, didn’t fish, wasn’t much of an outdoorsman. He liked the city: the noise, the crowds, live music at midnight, and fifty great choices when they wanted to eat out. Nevertheless, fewer people wanted serious style these days, and he had grown tired of remodeling the shitty McMansions people in the Chicago suburbs favored. This project and the HGTV special were the gig of a lifetime.
For now, the challenge of the job was enough, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to live here after it was done.
Twenty minutes later, Nate cleaned his trowels and grabbed a bottle of Stone IPA from the fridge. It was too early to quit so he decided to pick off odd jobs until dinner. Nate walked up the stairs to the room across the landing, one of five bedrooms on the second level. He was inspecting the floors upstairs, tacking loose boards. Two of his guys from Illinois had sanded, stained, and finished the random-width oak floors with polyurethane, but many squeaky floorboards remained throughout the house. It was a simple task. He stepped on the edge of each board. If loose, a couple of finish nails would tack it down tight. It was nit-picking, but the TV people were insisting upon perfection.
Outdoors, the harsh buzz of Lucas’s chainsaw ravaged the otherwise quiet countryside.
He stepped down and frowned. Two short boards behind the door lifted slightly and fell closed. Nate pushed the edge again and whistled in surprise when the boards flipped opened in a half circle on a concealed hinge.
A trapdoor.
Not just any trapdoor. The edges were so finely sanded that when the door closed, it was invisible. Further, a peg locked the door in place so it wouldn’t open unless pushed in just the right spot behind the hinge. Nate spent a few moments examining and marveling at the contraption.
The space beneath was large but too dark to examine. Excited, Nate jumped up and ran downstairs for a flashlight. Old houses were famous for hidden nooks and crannies—places where people hid their money and valuables. Nobody trusted the banks in the old days. He had already devoted some idle time to combing the walls for hidden spaces in the house, but hadn’t considered the floors.
Shining the beam into the hole, he saw that the chamber—festooned with cobwebs—extended back under the hallway. It appeared to be empty though quite deep, almost two feet down to the dusty floor. He laid his head on the floor trying to peer into the corners and noticed a subtle bass vibration in the floorboards. Odd but not interesting. He gingerly reached down, swept the cobwebs away, and felt about in the carpet of dust. His fingers brushed over a different texture at the bottom of the space.
Brick.
The house had been built with timber, plaster, and stone. He hadn’t seen a brick in the entire structure, so why had they used brick here? It seemed odd. He peered deeper into the chamber. In the corner, a bulge in the dust caught his eye. He dug around and uncovered a metal object. Using the flashlight, he teased it closer and grabbed it from the dust.
A cross.
Simple in design, cast from a heavy metal—iron or lead perhaps—it was unadorned but for a circle of metal at the center of the cross. It was old, possibly valuable, but a letdown nevertheless. It wasn’t gold or silver. Nate set it back inside the chamber.
Pushing his head through the opening, he probed further but could find neither a break nor an opening in the brick. The chamber looked about three-by-four feet, and he assumed a similar, deeper space lay beneath the brick, a room with no obvious door or opening.
A secret hideaway. It had to be.
His pulse quickened as he imagined all manner of treasure inside. With childish glee, he decided this discovery was his alone. If Lucas knew, he’d step in and take over, so Nate would share the loot, but not the thrill of discovery.
As he peered into the corners one more time, the droning bass tone grew louder, vibrating the floor. A car with a subwoofer? Out here?
Suddenly, the chamber closed in on him, constricting, squeezing, throbbing in sync with the bass.
He couldn’t breathe; sweat beaded on his forehead. A cold and nameless anxiety grabbed him and held him until he twisted and jerked away from the opening.
He leaned back, panting, staring at the hole in shock.
Jesus! What the hell was that?
A panic attack? He hadn’t had one in years.
Outside, Lucas’s chainsaw made a growling sound like an angry beast snared in a trap, then revved in erratic pulses.
Over this din, Nate heard Lucas yelling, the cry of someone in mortal danger. “Nate! Nate! Jesus, Nate, get out here!”
That tone frightened Nate—who didn’t easily admit fright—nearly as much as the claustrophobic sensation in the chamber. He slammed the trapdoor shut, ran downstairs and out the door, expecting to find his brother minus a limb, spurting blood in looping arcs of red across the yard. As he turned the northeast corner of the house, he plowed into Lucas.
&
nbsp; “What the hell’s up with you?”
Lucas turned and pointed to a large maple about thirty feet from the house. Nate stared in shock, fear tickling his insides with spiky fingers. Lucas’s chainsaw was cutting slowly up the center of the trunk by itself.
“Jesus! What in the hell is happening?”
“No idea.” Lucas, mouth agape, was shaking his head.
The saw surged to the left, out of the trunk, and hurtled into the lower field like a football dropping toward a receiver hidden in the grass. It buzzed angrily for a moment and quit.
A loud crack echoed across the yard. Nate, recognizing the danger, grabbed his brother and threw him to the ground near the house as the bole of the tree crashed down right where they’d been standing.
Nate got up and dusted himself off. “Man, that’s the strangest fucking thing I’ve ever seen. How’d you do that?”
“I didn’t do anything,” Lucas said angrily. “The saw kicked back, threw me, and took off by itself. How did it do that?”
“I don’t know.” Nate looked at the trunk sprawled across the driveway. “Man. Lucky the car wasn’t there.”
“That fucking tree missed me by inches!” Lucas stood, wide-eyed, shaken.
“Oh, you’re welcome, by the way,” Nate said.
“For what?”
“Saving your dumb ass.” Nate said sarcastically, but he wasn’t smiling. It had been a close call.
Just then, Laura and Dana pulled into the drive and stopped short, gawking at the trunk in the driveway.
“Let’s go up to the car.” Lucas, still pale, pushed Nate forward. “Not a word about what just happened.”
Nate nudged him. “Kind of hard to hide the evidence, dude.”
“You know what I mean.”
* * *
Laura pulled in and stopped. As she looked at the fallen tree, a queasy feeling rose in her stomach along with an odd shift in consciousness, much like the sensation she’d felt at the auction hall.
“Mom, you okay?” Dana asked.
“Yeah, fine. Just a little tired.” As her anxiety ebbed, she tried to compose herself. She wasn’t tired, wasn’t sure she could explain it. Didn’t understand why this box of junk had knocked her off kilter. Couldn’t explain the crazy bidding spree either.
She felt certain the box was filled with worthless junk, but Laura suddenly realized she wasn’t looking inside it.
The box seemed to emanate sadness as if tormented spirits were locked within. It was an irrational thought, nonsensical even.
Enough!
She took back control in the usual manner, stared at herself in the rearview mirror with mindful resolve, and ended her funk with three unspoken words.
Shut up, Laura!
Nine
Shepherd tapped a key on his laptop and *pleu appeared on the overhead screen. Two dozen students were scattered about the stadium seating of the darkened classroom, taking notes. Some looked bored, others watched raptly.
“This Proto-Indo-European root means to flow. Some modern derivatives of this root include pulmonary, pneumonia, flutter, fluster, and fly.” He sipped from a water bottle.
“Let’s look at fly first. *pleu became the Germanic root *fleugan, which evolved to fleogan in Old English. The verb to fly is derived from flegan.”
With his exceptional hearing, he heard the faint pings of a text in progress. He surreptitiously glanced up at the students and saw the faint glow from a screen on Kyle Anderson’s face. Kyle then slurped on his coffee, evidently oblivious to the noise he was making. He had talked to the kid twice this week. Shepherd had no interest in the paperwork involved in a formal discipline. He’d love to throw this twit out of his class, but that wasn’t possible either. Instead, with an imperceptible flick of his forefinger, he tipped the Starbucks cup on Kyle’s desk into his lap.
Kyle jumped up, jeans covered in coffee. “Shit!”
A ripple of laughter crossed the room.
Shepherd waved a hand in his direction. “Go clean up, Mr. Anderson. You’ve disturbed class enough today. See you next week.”
With a slight chuckle, Shepherd pressed a key on his laptop, and a long list of words appeared on the screen.
“As you can see, *pleu is the root of a great many words…”
* * *
Later, Shepherd sat on his porch in a wicker rocker sipping tea, feeling melancholy.
His position at Milwaukee University lacked challenge. His undergraduates were average and there was tension in the staffroom. Professors whined about the quality and the temperament of the students, and complained about the insidious creep of political correctness. The students were overly sensitive and afraid of everything. Some of his colleagues called them snowflakes, but it was an overreaction. Some percentage of his students had always been snowflakes. A few were stellar and went on to great things. So it would be with this generation.
He wasn’t thrilled with Milwaukee, either. It lacked the allure of life in a major city, and having lived in London, New York, Paris, and Rome, it felt provincial. He had loved his tenure in Rome, but it had been time to leave. Questions were raised. A colleague noticed he hadn’t aged in yearly staff photos. A student found a ninety-year-old photo of him in an obscure journal. Some magic and glib talk defused the situation but his time there was over.
He sighed.
Truth was, he hated relocating and this move had been the hardest. Was it his age? Was he becoming an old curmudgeon?
When he thought about his age, he could no longer recall an exact number. He forever lied about it. His passport said sixty-six. In truth, he had been born during the reign of Charlemagne, but the date escaped him and timekeeping then was hardly an exact science. It may have been in July of 774 in the English Midlands, or Mercia as the territory was then known. Of Celtic descent—hence the name Kenric—he was the son of pagan parents, his father a renowned Anglo-Saxon shaman. He displayed an early talent for magic and sorcery and, recognized as a prodigy by his parents, trained under the esteemed wizard Godric. Even then, he preferred anonymity, so he practiced magic quietly behind the scenes, out of view. His name known to few, unknown to the rest of the medieval world.
Beyond good genes, luck, and a considerable skill in magic, he had no explanation for his longevity. There were others like him and they had crossed paths over the years, forming an elite but informal clique called the Aeldo or Elders. Those who remained alive met occasionally. All were skilled in the arts, but they considered him the best and most gifted of all. He had traveled around England and Europe for centuries performing sorcery. Much of it for good: healing the sick, bringing needed rain, protecting the villages and land of his friends. Some magic had been less than principled: working as a vigilante for hire when wars, conflicts, or personal feuds erupted. Over the years, his growing wisdom and experience had tempered his base urges and tribal instincts.
He had little use for magic now. It was outdated in a technical world. He couldn’t cast a spell to hinder terrorists or extremists, but he could frustrate their efforts with the internet, thwart their operations, siphon their funds away, which he then donated to charity.
Technology was global. Magic was strictly local. In theory, he could spite someone for cutting him off in traffic. In practice, the years had taught him toleration and mindfulness, and he shrugged off the small slights of life and moved on, the moment today with Kyle Anderson aside.
Much of his later life had been spent teaching, and he’d moved a great deal. He could spend only ten to twenty years in one place before it was necessary to move on. He aged so slowly that longer tenures were bound to raise questions. Occasionally, the questions were asked regardless. Then he used magic to obfuscate the inquiry. In the computer age, it was easier to cover his tracks and confuse the curious. As far as the world was concerned, he was just another in a long line of K. Shepherds. Still, he felt the weight of maintaining a facade increasingly tiresome.
He still had little understanding of his
purpose here. No further information had been forthcoming.
Not a hunch. Not an inkling. Nothing. He had all but stood on his head—which seldom worked anyway—trying to coax something from the ether.
Assuming the letters were an acronym, he googled B F E but the answer was confusing.
Bum Fuck Egypt?
Somehow, a nonsensical pejorative about places in the middle of nowhere and a faceless woman represented a threat?
He sighed. Maybe he was losing his mind.
Or going senile.
Ten
Sunset the following evening was a glorious event. Laura stood at the rear of the Great Hall watching the sun, blood-soaked and engorged, drifting behind the trees and horizon. A flat band of altocumulus to the west caught the final rays of the sun, glowing brilliant orange, then red, and finally maroon before the drab greys of twilight chased the color away. One by one, Lucas, Nate, and Ashley joined Laura and watched the brilliant spectacle until the room was nearly dark.
“Let’s start a fire,” Ashley said.
Nate glanced at her. “Why?”
“Why not? I think it would be neat.”
“So do I,” Laura said. Time to enjoy the house they’d labored so hard over. She sensed a collective sigh fall upon the room. September was slipping by, the first hints of autumn splashed in bright red daubs on the maples. This moment had seemed ages away when they first arrived; now much of the work on the house lay behind them. Though plenty of work remained, some invisible goal had been attained.
As Lucas built a fire, Nate said, “I hate to ruin the mood, but Zach and Hannah will be back tomorrow.”
Laura tensed and shook her head. The intrusions were unending.
Lucas groaned and said, “How much longer, Nate?”
“Come on,” Ashley said. “A couple more times. You guys agreed to this.”
“Really? This is what we agreed to?” Lucas stood rigid, eyes narrowed. “The constant invasion of privacy? And what about that wing-nut at the door this morning? I thought you were keeping our location secret for now.”