by K. F. Baugh
Liddy eyed the two for a moment. “Well, the Honey Festival starts tomorrow. Guess you could disguise yourselves as tourists and sneak around some during the shindig. I’ve got a box or two in the crawl space full of forgotten clothes from old guests. You’re welcome to use anything you find.”
“Thanks,” Sage smiled. “We’ll do that.”
“Well, disguise or no, you two better be careful,” Liddy said as she walked back to the door. “Like I said, your pictures are splashed everywhere. Flyers, newspaper, TV. Better make sure no one sees an ex-priest and a mountain girl, or you’ll be arrested faster than you can blink. Even though that Officer Olson is as shady as the day is long, he seems determined to make some of these crazy charges stick.”
“Don’t worry about us,” Sage said, following Liddy to the front door.
“I will worry about you, sweetie,” the older woman said and pulled Sage into another tight hug. “I always do. And you too preacher man,” she turned to Tim and stuck out her hand. “Guess if Sage trusts you then I do too.”
“Thanks,” Tim said as he shook her hand. “I’ll do my best.”
“You do that, sonny. I’d better get going. I’m pretty sure Olson is having me followed. Dodged a guy down by the bridge, but I don’t want to take any chances of leading them in your direction.”
Sage followed her to the truck and allowed herself to be enveloped in one more comforting hug.
“Put that lantern outside again if you need anything,” Liddy whispered into her hair. “Don’t have this cabin reserved for the rest of the summer so you’re safe here for now.” The older woman pulled back and wiped her eyes. “We’ll figure this out, honey. Everyone knows that Olson is a shady character. I’m just praying the two of you get this sorted soon.”
Sage nodded, swallowing down the lump in her throat. She waved as the truck pulled away and waited until long after the red tail lights had faded in the distance.
Chapter Nineteen
Back pressed against rough rock, Sage stood under the convex curve of the cliff. It was twilight, but she could just make out a group of women and children that surrounded her. Together, they were all huddled just inside the cave entrance. One of the children cried out, and a woman hushed him urgently, pulling the child to her shoulder and glancing wildly around the clearing.
The women and children were dressed strangely. Most wore long blankets and furs over animal hide clothes and boots. Some of the boys wore dark pants and button up shirts, but many were dressed in skins as well.
Where am I? Sage wondered. Confused thoughts rattled around her brain. Whoever these people were, they seemed terrified.
Sage sniffed the air and caught the acrid scent of ashes and decay. It grew stronger. She peered to her left, past the muddy pond, through the dim forest. Her eyes strained for a glimpse of something in the darkening woods.
There. She caught a movement in the trees opposite them. Another flash of a white shirt and light hair.
A loud shriek erupted from one of the women, and she pointed toward the forest while clasping her child in terror. Other cries joined hers as half a dozen figures crept from the shadows, slinking through the darkness and forming a silent line opposite the women and children.
Collectively, the aggressors turned back toward the woods and the one who was their leader. He gave a sharp, guttural sound, and the group let out an answering shriek. As one, they turned and advanced upon the women and children, slashing at them with hatchets and knives.
Cries of terror and agony rent the air. Sage turned to help the sobbing woman next to her, but suddenly she found her arms were pinned behind her in a vice-like grip. Whimpering, she turned and found herself inches from the wolf-like form of the yee naaldlooshii. Its tongue flicked out of its mouth and licked lips curled in pleasure.
Sage tried to wrestle free, but its hold on her was too strong. It pulled her closer, and its coarse hair stung her cheek.
The fetid breath was suffocating as it whispered in her ear, “Watch well the doom I have brought upon these little ones.” Sage saw a man with a hatchet first attack a mother and then her weeping child. She tried to close her eyes against the gore, but found her eyelids pulled open.
“Now they will destroy the bodies, Broken One. These ones will find no peace, even in their afterlife. For who could mend such destruction done upon a body?”
Staining the snow like a river of blood, the carnage before Sage was incomprehensible. Once vibrant lives hacked apart on the banks of the muddy pool.
Sage’s subconscious railed against the horror surrounding her. This didn’t make sense. It couldn’t be real. “This is just a dream,” she screamed over her shoulder. “You can’t kill them! You can’t kill me!”
The creature spun her roughly until she faced its hideous, glowing red eyes. “Are you so sure?” It smiled, and rows of razor sharp teeth gleamed at her. The mouth opened wider and wider and then swallowed her whole. Sage screamed as she felt herself being consumed, sinking into darkness.
“Sage!” she heard a voice yell in the distance. “Sage!” It was insistent, but her attention remained focused on the darkness. Brief snatches of light illuminated pale, unseeing faces.
Shaun and Tabitha appeared, along with others she didn’t know. Then came a bedraggled face that she struggled to place. Why did he look so familiar?
Recognition finally came. “Hank?” she whispered. There was no reply.
“Sage, Sage! Wake up!”
She reached out to touch Hank, but then something grabbed and shook her. She lost her hold, and Hank’s face disappeared.
“Please, Sage, please God. Wake UP!” The voice shouted, forcing her awake. She was back in the cabin in her cot with Tim’s hands at her shoulders. His anxious face peered down at her, illuminated by the silvery moonlight.
“What? Where am I?” She choked out, her throat hoarse and painful.
“Are you awake?” he demanded.
“Yes, yes.” She tried to pull away from his hands, but he wouldn’t let go. “Calm down, I’m fine.”
“Calm down? You’ve been screaming for help for the last ten minutes!”
“Ten minutes?” Sage swallowed, the raw, lacerated ribbons of her larynx suddenly making sense. Gus, on the other side of her cot, whined and leaned up to lick her face.
“Yeah.” Tim released her shoulders and ran a trembling hand through his hair. “I couldn’t wake you. I didn’t know what to do.”
“I was back at the … mine,” Sage began, suddenly knowing it was true as the words came, “but it wasn’t from our time. It was a cave and with a huge pool in front of it. There were people dressed in animal skins. Women and children. They were terrified.” Silent tears streaked down her face.
She continued, not shying away from any detail, no matter how horrific, telling Tim everything she remembered. When she got to the part with the creature pinning her arms and then swallowing her whole, a sob began to build in her throat. Tim wrapped a strong arm around her shoulders, and Sage gulped down the tears before quickly finishing her story.
Tim remained quiet so long, she wondered if he’d fallen asleep, but then his voice broke the silence. “Do you think those were real people? Did that really happen?”
Sage considered the question for a moment. “Yes.”
“Wouldn’t we know about it?” Tim asked. “Massacres usually grab a lot of attention. Have there been any around here?”
Sage shrugged, her head pounding with emotion and fatigue. “Maybe there weren’t any survivors to tell the story.”
“What about the men?” Tim argued. “There had to be fathers with all those children. Some of those women had to be wives.”
“I don’t know.” A tear slipped down Sage’s cheek, and she brushed it away, but not before Tim saw.
“How are you?” he asked, his voice gentle.
“Fine.”
He leaned closer. “Here’s the thing, I know about nightmares, Sage.” She felt the brush of h
is fingertip trace the path of the tear down her cheek. “I told you that before, right?”
Sage nodded. “You still get them?”
“Yes.” Tim nodded. “And they still feel real, every time.”
Sage gulped.
“But you’re safe. You’re with me, with Gus, and we have the Wind. It’s always protected you hasn’t it?”
“From some things, yes.”
“Gus, hop up here with Sage.” He patted the space near her feet, and Sage felt the dog jump and settle there. “Why don’t you try to fall back asleep. Gus and I will keep watch for a bit.” He shifted his weight from the edge of her cot and settled on the ground next to her.
“You don’t need to do that.”
“No, I want to. I want to puzzle through that dream a bit more before I fall asleep.”
“But I’m fi—,” the rest of her reply was cut by an earsplitting yawn.
“Just go to sleep, Sage.” Tim’s voice dropped to a comforting rumble in the darkness. “And let me think about that dream. Why would they go to the mine? Or cave, or whatever it was? That’s a terrible place to go if you think you’re going to get attacked. Why not stay in a town. A defensible town? Or hide in the woods?”
She felt herself relaxing, lulled by the soft cadence of Tim’s wondering and the warm weight of Gus at her feet. It helped to know Tim was trying to figure out what the dream meant, if anything. Usually post nightmare, she was too keyed up to fall back asleep, but Tim’s voice was almost hypnotic, and Gus’s presence always comforted her like a warm blanket. Sage forced the last of the nightmare’s images away and finally drifted off to sleep.
Chapter Twenty
The next morning Sage awoke to the smell of brewing coffee and the clatter of kitchen tools. She dressed quickly and descended from the loft to find Tim preparing a breakfast from Liddy’s supplies. Gus woofed a gentle greeting, and once Sage sat down at the rickety table, the dog extended an upraised paw to her knee. Sage buried her face in the fur around Gus’s neck, thankful for his reassuring presence.
“How are you feeling?”
Sage looked up. “Okay, I guess.”
Tim had moved away from the eggs he was scrambling. He poured a cup of coffee and handed it to her. “Did you sleep better, after—”
“Yes,” Sage stood abruptly and sloshed the coffee over her legs. Flinching, she walked to the window. “Any thoughts on disguises?”
“Disguises?”
“Yeah, so we can go to the Honey Festival. Remember?” She took a gulp of coffee. It burned her raw throat, and she spluttered.
Sage turned around, and Tim offered her the cardboard container of milk. “Do you think it’s a good idea come out of hiding while we’re still in the dark about everything?”
“I don’t know what other option we have.” Sage poured some milk into her coffee. She took another sip. Much better.
“But Black Mills isn’t hosting the Honey Festival this year. Oriel is. I remember reading about it in the newspaper. The county fairgrounds got destroyed by the spring flood, so they changed the location to a large tract of BLM land that runs up against OBRS. Storm and the gang were not impressed, but the land doesn’t belong to them, so the BLM ignored their complaints.” Back at the stove, Tim scooped the eggs into a chipped bowl and set it on the rickety table. After the two sat down, he offered some to Sage, but she shook her head.
“Oriel’s not a safe area for us, is it?” He asked after several bites.
“No, it’s not.” Sage drummed her fingers against her cup. “That’s where the creature seems to be centered. But I’ve been thinking, with all the festivities going on, there would be safety in numbers. It’s hardly going to attack us in the middle of a crowd. That’s not the way they tend to operate.
“Plus, it might be interesting to see what we can discover in Oriel. Evidently Storm has accused me of stealing a bunch of expensive equipment from the Research Laboratory. Why on earth would he do that?” Sage shook her head. “Out of everything Liddy told us, that’s the thing that confuses me the most.”
“Do you know Storm?”
“I’ve met him once or twice,” Sage answered, remembering the most recent time in the gift shop. “Mostly when he and his students are out studying their marmots or whatever it is they do. Then I get the you’re on Oriel’s private property with a dog and need to get off ASAP speech.”
“Oriel, the Shelton Reservoir, that whole valley in fact, has always given me a pretty evil vibe.” Tim finished the last of his eggs.
“Vibe? I didn’t think priests believed in vibes.”
“I say vibe, but what I mean is a presence,” Tim said and straightened in his chair. “I noticed from the first time I visited, way before all this started.”
Sage let out a deep breath, “I know what you mean. I’ve never liked it there either. I usually avoid it if I can.”
Tim laced his hands behind his head and leaned back. The old chair groaned under his weight. “There’s a lot of really good climbs in the Oriel Valley. When I first moved here, I tried few of them, but whenever I was in that valley, I felt like I was being watched. And that it wasn’t safe for me to stay.” Tim shook his head. “My radar told me to get the heck out of there.”
“All paths seem to be leading to it, though,” Sage sighed. “I think there’s some old mountain bikes in the shed out back. If we use them, we could probably be in Oriel in a couple of hours. Plus, I don’t think anyone will expect us to go there.”
“But what are we going to do once we get there?” Tim stood and gathered his dishes from the table. “We don’t even know what to look for.”
“The Wind will show us what to do. It’s always shown me before. Plus, it did tell you to listen, remember?”
“I remember,” Tim nodded. He set the dishes in a basin and filled it with hot water from the kettle. He walked over to the window and leaned against the pane. “And believe me, I’ve been trying. Before you woke up this morning, I sat out behind the cabin, listening. For over an hour. But all I get are a jumble of words and images. A red bird. A sign with the word Rand. A woman crying in front of a computer.”
“What does that mean?” Sage asked.
“That’s the point!” Tim smacked his hand against the counter. “I don’t know what any of it means. Everything’s moving so fast. But listening takes time. And quiet.”
“I guess you’ll have to listen while we’re on the bikes,” Sage said. “If we want to get to the Honey Festival, we have to find some disguises. Now.”
A short while later Tim stood before her, now bald, courtesy of Sage and a razor she’d found in the bathroom; however, she left the three day’s scruffy growth on his chin. Tim had changed into his jeans, dusty from their time at camp, a white T-shirt, and dark boots. Black marker tattoos, which didn’t look too bad from a distance, covered his upper arms. Most of the cast-offs from Liddy’s crawl space were moldy and unusable, but Sage had found Tim a pair of wrap-around sunglasses and a rugged denim vest to complete his scruffy look.
“I don’t suppose we could quickly pierce your ear,” Sage said as she walked around Tim, surveying the overall effect.
“No, we couldn’t,” he said.
“Everyone will recognize your type but none of them will look too closely at the details.”
For her transformation, Sage had cut a pair of her own pants into tiny, ragged shorts. In Liddy’s box, she found a black bra that nearly fit and paired it with a sheer white tank top she normally used as a base layer and not a fashion statement. Tim’s first aid kit had come in handy yet again; Sage repaired a large pair of broken sunglasses with some athletic tape, which she then colored with the black marker. She had also rubbed iodine all over her face to copy the look of orangey foundation. A liberal application of shockingly red lipstick she found in the kitchen junk drawer was the final touch.
“I’m not sure about you,” Tim shot back, carefully keeping his eyes on her face. “I think your details will attract
some serious attention.”
“Yeah, but no one will notice my face, Tim. That’s the point. The guys will want me, and the girls will judge me. It’s the easiest way to make yourself invisible. You’re just some forgettable, faceless slut.” She walked to the mirror and pulled her hair into a messy bun.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
Sage turned from the mirror. “For what?”
“For whatever it is you’ve gone through.” Tim watched her with sad eyes. “Growing up in the foster system, I know that’s not easy.”
You couldn’t imagine, not even in your worst nightmares. The look of compassion in Tim’s eyes unlocked something. Dark memories, moments of pain and humiliation rolled through Sage. She bit her cheek until she tasted blood. This had to stop. Now.
“Whatever, Tim.” She turned away from him and walked toward Gus. “We need to get going.”
Sage knelt beside the dog and pulled him into her arms. His reassuring warmth calmed the panicked beat of her heart. “You’re going to have to stay here, buddy.” Sage murmured into his ear. “You’re just too beautiful to disguise.”
Gus whined and pleaded with soulful brown eyes, but Sage forced herself to give him one last squeeze and step away. “It’s okay. We’ll be back soon,” she said, attempting to block the dog from her mind, but she knew Gus wasn’t fooled.
The dog tried to bolt out when she opened the door, and Sage had to shove him back in before she could close it. The eerie sound of Gus’s crying howl followed them for several hundred yards as they walked the bikes through the woods.
“Is that normal?” Tim finally asked, breaking their tense silence.
“No,” Sage answered. It wasn’t.
Oriel Meadow opened up before Sage and Tim as they came to the edge of the woods a few hours later. Sage was relieved to see a massive crowd of revelers. The visitors snaked their way through the merchant tents and milled around the large stage that would host several bands later in the day and into the evening.