Eirik: A Time Travel Romance (Mists of Albion Book 1)

by Joanna Bell

  There was also Caistley. I had Caistley. My father did not.

  Within a month of my mother's funeral, the visits from neighbors and friends lessened considerably in frequency. They had their own lives to get on with, and my dad had already begun to withdraw. The first thing I noticed was his face. He began to grow a beard, and I can remember sitting on his lap, running my fingers over the stubble, marveling at how sharp it felt as his eyes stared blankly ahead.

  Our property was large and I was almost entirely unsupervised. The spring came early that year, taunting my father and I with its warm breezes and promises of life and renewal as our psychic landscapes remained bleak and dark. I began to wander further from the house than I ever had before. We had a farm, over five-hundred acres, but my mother had always cautioned me to stay in the yard. As well as cautioning me she had watched me, though, and now there was no longer anyone watching. I put my rubber boots on one day and headed out after finding my dad fast asleep in his darkened room at one o'clock in the afternoon.

  The sound of water was everywhere that day, dripping from branches as ice melted and flowing in rivulets down to the little creek that ran dry every summer. There was warmth, too, of the kind only people who have known a cold winter can fully appreciate. I stood in the woods and turned my face up to the weak sunshine, drinking it in like a flower taken out of the shade.

  And then I turned, suddenly, as someone whispered behind me – but there was no one there. It was mid-afternoon and the whisper had sounded friendly, almost like a stifled giggle. I wasn't afraid, but I was curious. I wandered over to the big tree that grew along the bank of the creek, where the voice seemed to come from. To my surprise, I heard it again – not a whisper this time but a distinct laugh. A child's laugh, like my own. I clambered up the hill – the tree's trunk was very large, and the roots spread over a large area – but there was no one on the other side, either. Was someone playing a trick on me? Was one of my classmates from school hiding in one of the hollows beneath the tree's massive roots?

  I was getting overheated in my winter parka so I shucked it off and continued exploring, pausing every now and again to cock my head slightly and try to pick up the voice once more. And it was there, still – two voices, maybe. More giggling, more whispering. I looked briefly back through the woods towards the house, aware on some level that I shouldn't have wandered so far, but too curious to leave by then. And then I climbed over one of the thick, gnarled roots and in doing so put my palms flat against the tree.

  In an instant the trees were gone, the light was gone, the warm spring air was gone. I clutched at my throat, gasping for air as it suddenly became difficult to breath and then, just as quickly as it had happened, I was once again in the woods. Not the same woods I had been playing in mere seconds before, though. No, these new woods were thicker and much darker and I couldn't understand how I'd gotten to where I was. Had there been a tornado? I knew what tornados were. I knew that sometimes they picked people up and carried them miles away. I knew that sometimes these people even lived. But there were no tornados in New York state – I knew that because my mother told me as much, when I had asked her what we were to do if one blew over our farm. So how had I gotten from the little stand of trees at the bottom of my yard to this other, darker and – now that I realized it – quite badly smelling place?

  I sat up, trying to figure out whether or not it was time to be afraid, and two figures appeared out of the gloom.

  They stood there, the two of them – a girl who looked to be about my age and a smaller boy – staring at me, while I sat and stared right back. They were both filthy, dressed in rags, and they made me think of Halloween. Did they think it was Halloween? Is that why they were dressed so strangely? Had their mothers marked their faces with stage make-up the way my own had last year, when I wanted to be a scary, green-skinned witch to go trick-or-treating?

  "Why are you dressed like that?" I asked eventually, when it became clear that the two strangers weren't going to speak first.

  The girl looked down at her clothes, confused, and the boy just kept staring at me. "Dressed like what?" The girl asked. "It's our clothing, isn't it?"

  She sounded strange. The words came out of her mouth in an odd rhythm, almost like she was half singing them. And why was she asking me if her clothing was her clothing? Who was this weird girl?

  "Was that you?" I asked, making a second attempt. "I heard someone laughing. Was it you?"

  "Probably," she replied. "There's no one else in these woods but us. Maybe some pigs, but pigs don't laugh."

  I laughed at that, at the idea of a pig laughing. And then the girl laughed and so did the little boy. I liked that.

  "My names Eadgar," the boy announced, not making any move to shake my hand.

  "I'm Paige," I responded before turning to the girl. "What's yours?"

  "Willa. Are you from the big house?"

  I didn't know what Willa was talking about, but I knew my house was close by and that it was quite big, so it seemed reasonable to assume that was the 'big house' she was speaking of.

  "Yes," I told her. "I'm 5."

  There was a pause while Willa stared at me suspiciously and then she threw her head back, giggling. "Half-ten? You? You're not half-ten! I reckon you're older than me!"

  "How old are you?"

  "Ten even."

  Ten? There was no way. I laughed right back at her and told her it was a good joke. She was scarcely bigger than me, and much paler and skinnier. Her collarbones jutted out against her bone-white flesh and her wrists looked so thin and delicate that I imaged they would snap like twigs if she fell over and tried to catch herself.

  "You're not ten," I told her, a little annoyed that she thought I was stupid enough to fall for such an obvious lie. If she'd said 6 or 7 then maybe, maybe I would have believed her. But not 10. "What grade are you in?"

  Willa looked at me, confused. "What?"

  "What grade are you in?" I repeated, grinning because I knew I'd caught her now. And sure enough, she pretended she didn't know what I was talking about. Not that it mattered too much, because I was happy to meet Willa and Eadgar and they seemed happy to meet me, too. There were no other kids who lived close to me, so if two had moved in nearby, I was pleased to have them.

  "We're playing pig-and-acorns!" Eadgar announced and, when he saw that I didn't know what he meant, he explained. "I'm the pig and Willa is the acorn. She has to hide and then I try to find her. Or Willa is the pig and I'm the acorn – we take turns."

  Hide-and-seek. That's what they were talking about. I was definitely up for a game of hide-and-seek.

  "I'll be the pig!" I told them, excited, before Willa shut me down in her kind but firm way.

  "No I'm the pig. You two go hide, you can be the pig later."

  So we played in the woods for who knows how long – hours, I think. Eventually the two of them seemed to trust me enough to allow me to take on the status-heavy role of 'pig' in the game of pig-and-acorns and I did as I always did during hide-and-seek and crouched down to cover my eyes while they hid. But in doing this I toppled over sideways and had to catch myself by putting my hands against the tree I had first emerged into this place next to.

  At once the airless darkness sucked me back in and I opened my eyes in the waning sunshine of afternoon in the woods at the bottom of my yard. Willa and Eadgar were nowhere to be found. I looked around, half-wondering if I'd been dreaming. But I hadn't been, I knew that. I looked down at my hands, smeared with the dirt of that other, darker forest, and couldn't figure out what had happened.

  But I was 5 years old then, and I was also hungry from the adventures of the afternoon, so I headed back to the house with my parka under one arm and a thought to making myself a honey and peanut butter sandwich if my dad wasn't up yet.

  Chapter 3

  21st Century

  I went back to the 'other place' – as I was still calling it then, before I heard Willa and Eadgar referring to it as 'Caistley' �
� a few days later, after school on one of the afternoons my father could not be roused from bed. Willa and Eadgar were not there the second time so I didn't stay for long, not daring to explore very far from the tree (which I had now figured out, in both places, was the key to getting from one to the other) and then frightened by the sudden appearance of a big, red, hairy animal that made a grunting sound at me before disappearing into the undergrowth.

  The third time, though, my new friends were there, and they both fell over laughing when I asked them about the hairy creature.

  "A pig!" Willa giggled. "You don't even know what a pig is, Paige?"

  I laughed too, because I was starting to understand that there were some big differences not just between the woods at the bottom of my garden and the forest where Willa and Eadgar played, but in our lives as well – differences that ran a lot deeper than clothing. If they said the animal was a pig, I believed them. Maybe it was a pig? It sounded like a pig, that's for sure. Maybe it was a different kind of pig?

  "What's that?" Eadgar asked that time, running his hands over the glittery unicorn appliqué on my t-shirt.

  "What?" I asked, not realizing he was probably asking about the glitter effect itself. "It's a t-shirt."

  Willa and Eadgar didn't wear t-shirts, that was one of the differences between us. They didn't wear pants, either. Both of them wore thin, cream-colored tunics that stopped at the knees. When I told Eadgar it was a t-shirt he repeated the word back to me, obviously hearing it for the first time.

  And it's not like I didn't wonder why they didn't know what a t-shirt was, or why what I thought was a pig was different to what they thought was a pig, or why they both kept insisting they were 10 and 6, despite their small sizes – I did. But I was also 5. At 5, most of us still believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and that the grown-ups know everything and will always do right by us. If a fat man on a magic flying sleigh delivered presents all over the world every Christmas night, then it didn't seem outside the realm of possibility that a tree in the woods at the bottom of my garden somehow took me to another place, and that in that other place I had two friends who always looked like they needed a good bath.

  I even talked about Caistley openly back then, regaling my sleepy, grunting father or my teachers with tales of what I'd gotten up to with Willa and Eadgar. All of them listened – well, maybe my dad didn't listen all the time, but I understood in my childlike way that he wasn't trying to be rude, he was just very sad. I kept talking about Caistley, too, as kindergarten turned into the first grade, and then the second, and I began to spend more time there as my father retreated further and further into himself.

  It was just before my eighth birthday that I was pulled out of class one day by the school nurse, who took me into her small, antiseptic-scented office and introduced me to a man with short, curly gray hair and a sweater with patches on the elbows.

  Dr. Hansen wanted to talk to me, the nurse said, and I was pleased because other than Willa and Eadgar, no one seemed to want to talk to me very much. I thought it was because my mother was dead, because her death had marked me somehow, made people afraid of me. And it was about that – but not only that.

  I began to see Dr. Hansen twice a week, and I enjoyed it very much at first because he seemed quite interested in me and what I thought about everything – and Caistley. He was very interested in Caistley. Sometimes he would take notes and peer at me as I told him about a trip to the beach with Willa and Eadgar, detailing to him how they taught me to distinguish between the edible seaweed and the stuff that would give you a sore belly.

  "Extraordinary," he would whisper sometimes, as he scribbled on his note pad. "Amazing."

  I thought he was talking about me. I thought I was extraordinary and amazing. My mother was dead, I was 7 years old, I was starved for attention – can you blame me? But it soon became clear that Dr. Hansen's interest wasn't in me, specifically. It was related to me, I knew that, but it wasn't entirely about me. One time, he went to the bathroom during our session and I grabbed his notepad, skimming the first few scribbled lines before I got too afraid he would catch me and put it back. I don't remember precisely what it said, but I do remember the word 'fantasist.' I went home that night and searched the internet, on our dust-caked family computer, for its meaning.

  fantasist

  noun

  someone who often has fantasies, or confuses fantasy for what is real

  I sat back in my chair, wounded. I knew what fantasy meant. Dr. Hansen, who I had thought my friend, thought I was making it all up? About Caistley and Willa and Eadgar? Is that why he was always asking me for details?

  The betrayal cut deep, and I stopped talking about Caistley so much. Eventually I stopped talking about it altogether and Dr. Hansen informed me one day, with a big smile on his face, that he thought I was going to do "just fine."

  Just fine? What did that mean? How was I not 'fine' before? I wanted to protest. I wanted to inform him that Caistley and my friends there were as real as the desk between us, and the notepad full of scribbles and the clock ticking on the wall. I didn't, though. Dr. Hansen seemed pleased with me, approving. I had stopped talking about Caistley and somehow that had made him happy.

  To my great disappointment, I didn't see him anymore after that – although sometimes I would pass him in the halls and he would nod, the way my dad used to do when we drove past someone he knew on the road.

  Once, when I had been sent to the staff room on some errand or another, I almost ran into Dr. Hansen as he talked to a woman I didn't recognize, but managed to stop myself just in time when I heard my own name spoken aloud.

  "...the detail was amazing. She even talked about the seaweeds, which ones were edible and so on. I've never met a child with such a rich fantasy life."

  "Did you look it up?" The woman asked, chuckling softly. "Who knows, maybe she really does have a magic tree in her backyard?"

  ***

  I can't say when it became clear to me that Caistley was more than a different place, the way Chicago or Australia or Germany were different places. It didn't happen in a single moment of revelation, either – I didn't suddenly realize what was going on. No, it was more gradual. You have to understand how normal it all seemed to me. As far as I was concerned and for all practical purposes, it was the same as Chicago. It wasn't River Forks, it wasn't the place where I lived, but it was somewhere real, somewhere that existed at the same time as River Forks, somewhere that could be reached with a car or a train – or a tree.

  And even as I say it was normal to me – and it was – I must admit there was something that all three of us understood, some strangeness that we acknowledged silently, seeing no need to discuss it. Willa and Eadgar never actually brought me into their village, for one thing. We stayed in the woods outside and sometimes near the shoreline a short walk away, playing games and making up silly little songs that we would sing to each other as we tramped through the forest. And I knew, partly from Eadgar's reaction to my glittery t-shirt and partly just through a kind of intuition, that there were certain things I couldn't do, certain things I couldn't talk about or items I couldn't bring with me when I visited.

  I screwed up once, forgetting to leave my cell phone behind and watching as Eadgar picked it up, fascinated, after it slipped out of my pocket. His fingers crept over the buttons until one caused the small screen to light up and he dropped it, screaming with fear and scrambling away from it – and me – so fast he fell over. Willa wasn't there that day, and I don't know if Eadgar ever told her about my terrifying gadget, but he was skittish around me for days afterwards, glancing at me out of the corner of his eye and shying away when I went to put my arm around him or give him a playful shove. I was more careful after that, even going so far as to take a little plastic storage container from the house and keep it near the base of the tree so I could put whatever items I thought Willa and Eadgar would not understand into it before I visited them.

  It wasn't just technology, e
ither – it was almost everything. Even the buttons on my blue-jeans caused wide-eyed stares and whispered comments. Eventually I took to wearing a plain white cotton nightgown and nothing else – not even any shoes – so as to avoid the suspicions and curiosities of my two friends and to look as much like they did as possible.

  Sometimes, Eadgar and Willa weren't in the forest. They had work to do, I understood that, the kind of work that in my life only adults did. Willa had to help with her younger siblings and both of them seemed to be involved in a lot of agricultural tasks. So when I came through the tree and found myself alone, I eventually built up the courage to explore farther, creeping down the narrow paths that ran through the undergrowth until I could see – and smell – the village itself. It smelled like wood smoke and, well – poop, if I'm to be perfectly honest. Even from a distance I would often catch myself pulling my dress up over my nose and gagging a little.

  I suppose it was the village itself that first got me to thinking about whether or not Caistley might be something more than a different place – like Chicago or Australia or Germany. The buildings were not like any buildings I had ever seen before. Where River Forks had structures made out of concrete and brick Caistley seemed to be constructed almost entirely of mud and straw. I'd never seen anything like it – not until I saw something similar in an educational documentary about the Middle Ages we watched in the fourth grade. There were no cars in Caistley, no trucks, nothing at all that seemed mechanical. The people moved their goods around in wooden carts on paths that turned into muddy quagmires when it rained (which seemed to be often).

  By the time I was 9 or 10 I knew Caistley wasn't just a different place, but a different time. And once again, because the realization came so slowly and naturally, there was no single moment of shock. I'd been going there since I was 5, I always knew it was different, and now I knew why. It made sense. I didn't understand quite how I was getting there, that's true, but I didn't understand how airplanes stayed in the air, either, and they didn't strike me as particularly mysterious.