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

by Joanna Bell

  And with the realization that Caistley existed in another time came the dawning acceptance that my experience was – or appeared to be, anyway – unique. Other people weren't just traveling to different times the way they traveled to the next town over, the way I had once assumed they were. I stopped talking about it so much then, especially to grown-ups, and began to understand just how strange I must have made myself to my peers, with all my talk of traveling through trees and villages where no one owned cars and everyone was dirty all the time.

  It was too late for my social life, though. I was already the designated 'weird kid.' Even when I stopped initiating conversation about Willa and Eadgar or Caistley itself, some of my crueler classmates would ask me about them, faking an interest they didn't feel. And I, naive and outcast as I was, would answer in good faith, excitedly telling them about the bonfire Eadgar and I had built in a clearing, or the rabbit we roasted over the coals, or the fact that Willa was starting to talk about one of the boys in Caistley a lot more than she talked about anyone else. It all came to a head one spring day in fourth grade, when the most popular girl in class cornered me outside the gym.

  "Hi," I said, not realizing what was happening at first, but noticing she had her three little handmaidens with her, all of them eying me with an air of malevolent anticipation.

  "Hi," Kayla replied, mimicking my tone of voice.

  I felt my cheeks begin to heat up. "What's up?"

  "What's up?" She sing-songed back to me and I gave up trying to make conversation.

  We were 9 years old. Kayla was wearing a pink velour Juicy Couture hoodie, of the kind I could only dream of being able to own, and she flicked her blonde hair over her shoulder as she looked at me, radiating impatience even as she was the one forcing me to continue with the interaction.

  "So," she started, when she realized I wasn't playing anymore. "Have you been to Caistley lately, Paige? Have you seen Willa? Or Edgar?"

  She emphasized the words 'Caistley' and 'Willa' and 'Edgar' the way you might if you were talking to a toddler. It made me want to punch her in the face, even as I knew that doing so would be the end of whatever slim chance I had of ever fitting in.

  "It's Eadgar," I replied. "Not Edgar."

  "Whatever. Edgar is a stupid name anyway. So have you seen them or what?"

  I nodded. "Yes."

  "And you went through the tree to get to them? Is that the story you're sticking with, Paige?"

  Wow. I really did not like Kayla Foster. I didn't quite know how to respond, either. She knew as well as I did that I'd been talking about Caistley – and how I got there – for years at that point, the way the other kids talked about their ski trips to Colorado or their summer vacations to Disneyworld with their grandparents. Lying and telling her it was a normal place wasn't an option, and neither was pretending to admit I'd made it all up, which I sensed was what she wanted to happen.

  "It's not a story." I said quietly.

  Kayla snapped her gum. "Yes it is, Paige. Everyone knows it. We're not in kindergarten anymore, you know. We're old enough to know you're lying. You probably still believe in Santa, too!"

  "I don't!" I snapped. "I don't believe in Santa!"

  Kayla and her friends looked down their noses at me. "Whatever you say," she replied haughtily. "But if you think you're ever going to get a boyfriend while you still believe in dumb kid stuff like magical trees, I'm sorry to say but you're wrong."

  I said something, then, that I shouldn't have said. Kayla Foster's 'boyfriend' (the word is in quotes because in fourth grade having a boyfriend mostly meant eating lunch with him and sometimes, at the bus top, ostentatiously holding hands with him so all your friends could see he was your boyfriend) had dumped her the previous week, a juicy scandal for all. I'd even heard rumors that someone had seen Kayla crying in the girl's bathroom in the C hallway.

  "Maybe I won't," I said calmly, before sticking the knife in. "But I bet if I do he won't tell all my friends that kissing me is like making out with a vacuum cleaner."

  I didn't even understand the vacuum cleaner comment, nor did I know if Chris Ward – the erstwhile boyfriend – had even said it, but I did know Kayla was well aware that it was being passed around as truth. I enjoyed the way the smugness drained out of her expression when I said it, though, even as I knew I was going to be made to pay.

  "Bitch," she sneered, glancing around first to make sure there were no teachers nearby to hear. "You're such a stupid bitch, Paige. Nobody likes you. Everybody knows you're just making it all up about Caistley to make it seem like you actually have friends."

  My hand itched to slap Kayla Foster as she got right up in my face, breathing her lip gloss-scented breath all over me and pushing me back against the wall. And as I considered it, weighing the look of hurt and surprise on her face if I allowed myself to do it against the years of even worse social torment than I was currently suffering, an idea popped into my head. A mean, irresistible idea.

  When Kayla backed off I looked her in the eye. "It is real. I could take you."

  She scoffed. "Yeah right."

  "No," I insisted. "I mean it. Right now. I could take you right now. What – are you scared?"

  "No!" She replied hurriedly. "Of course I'm not scared, you dumbass. I mean, fine, sure, let's go."

  The best part was that she thought she was calling my bluff when, in reality, it was just the opposite.

  Chapter 4

  21st Century

  Some instinct inside me told me to blindfold Kayla Foster before leading her down to the woods. Maybe it wasn't an instinct, maybe it was just latent control freakery, I don't know. What I did know is that I definitely did not want her to know how to get to Caistley herself, even if I wasn't sure it would even work if she was alone.

  When we got to the tree and I pulled the blindfold off over Kayla's head, she scowled at me.

  "Well?"

  "I just wanted to make sure you really want to do this," I said, shrugging.

  "Do what?" She asked. "Stand in the woods with you while literally nothing happens?"

  She was so sure of herself, so perfectly certain that I was lying, and that she was going to be the one to finally inform everyone of that fact, to great social acclaim. I, on the other hand, was doing everything I could to hide the fact that I was dying to get Kayla through the tree to Caistley, because some part of me knew that she was going to lose it and I wanted to see the look on her face when she did.

  "Here," I instructed. "You have to put your hands on the tree."

  Kayla rolled her eyes and leaned forward and just as she did, the sound of a pig or some other animal rustling through the undergrowth came to us. Kayla jerked up, looking around, and I saw the confusion in her eyes when she realized there was no animal. Of course, I knew we were hearing something in Caistley, but as far as Kayla was concerned she was experiencing auditory hallucinations.

  "What was that?" She barked at me, irritated. "What are you doing, Paige? What was that sound?"

  Behind the usual blustery bravado of her tone I sensed it – fear. Kayla was frightened, a little, and she was trying to cover it.

  "It's just the wind." I told her. "We can go back to the house if you want. If you're too scared, I mean."

  That did the trick. Kayla stuck her hands out again so they were touching the tree, scoffing the whole time, and I laid my own next to hers.

  Even in the brief, airless blackness before Caistley, I could hear Kayla panting with terror and I realized, at the moment it was too late to turn back, that I had probably just screwed up very badly.

  When we arrived she sat there, unmoving and unblinking, at the base of the tree.

  "See?" I said, pleased with myself. "I told you Caistley existed. I told you –"

  "Take me back! Oh my God, Paige, you – you crazy witch! WHERE ARE WE?! TAKE ME BACK!"

  I watched, horrified, as Kayla's words dissolved into hysterical tears and she began to hyperventilate.

  "Wait," I said
a few seconds later, reaching out to touch her. She shrank away. "Wait. You said you wanted to come here, Kayla. You said –"

  "TAKE ME BAAAACK!"

  "But," I stammered, totally thrown off by her response. "Don't you want to see anything? Don't you want to meet Eadgar or –"

  "AHHHHH!"

  She was just screaming by then, and doing it loud enough that I began to worry someone from the village might hear it. To hear Willa and Eadgar talk, the woods we played in regularly were infested with outlaws – not to mention demons and evil spirits – and the sound of a child screaming her head off would certainly bring the men of Caistley to investigate.

  "Shut up!" I hissed. "Kayla shut up. Someone will hear us!"

  But Kayla did not shut up. She kept up her wailing and eventually closed her eyes, refusing to open them again. It soon became clear that there was not going to be any exploring on that day and I stepped forward to guide her hands back to the tree and take us both back to River Forks.

  ***

  That little stunt with Kayla Foster nearly cost me my place at River Forks Elementary. Of course none of the grown-ups believed her when she started babbling nonsense about traveling through trees and floating in blackness but they knew one thing, and that was that Kayla was neither faking nor exaggerating her terror when she got back to her parent's house that day. Something bad had happened in the woods at the bottom of my backyard, everyone accepted that. Something I was at fault for. I told everyone I could that Kayla wanted it to happen, that she practically dared me to do it, but nobody wanted to hear it. Her parents, both lawyers, lobbied hard to have me permanently expelled from school and the only reason I wasn't is because a) there was nowhere else for me to go and b) no one could actually establish what it was, exactly, that I had 'done' to Kayla in the woods, and they therefore couldn't expel me for it.

  They did manage to get my father on the hook for Kayla's therapy, though. And the way I was treated at school after the incident began to make my previous outcast status look like a walk in the park. As I said, the grown-ups didn't believe anything out of the ordinary had happened in the woods. I'd just played a trick on Kayla to scare her. But the other kids, they weren't so sure. Within days I was finding the word 'witch' scrawled across my locker and hearing loud whispers wherever I went. Even the other outcasts wanted nothing to do with me then, and I was truly alone.

  It was during dinner one night soon after the incident with Kayla Foster that my dad made his way downstairs to the kitchen while I sat silently, eating a tuna sandwich. I looked up when I heard the floor creek, shocked. He hadn't been downstairs for months.

  "Dad," I said, standing up. "Do you – I brought you a sandwich but I can microwave some soup for you if you want. Or – I bought some ice-cream, I can –"

  My dad put his hand up. "No need, Paige, I'm not hungry."

  If I showed you a photo of my father before my mother died, and another one taken that night, you would not believe they were the same person. The handsome, smiling twenty-something in all the photos was gone, replaced with a grizzled wraith who looked to be at least 50, his hair shot through with grey and his youthful strength wasted away. And he wouldn't eat. I was always trying to get him to eat, but no one had ever taught me how to cook or shop and so we lived on sandwiches, canned soup, apples, bananas, anything I could think of that was healthy-ish and easy to prepare.

  I sat back down. "Are you sure? There's some apples in the –"

  "No, Paige, I'm really not hungry. I just came down here to talk to you."

  "Oh," I said, very quietly. "I'm sorry, Dad. I'm sorry about what happened with Kayla Foster and –"

  My dad waved his hand in front of his face, a gesture of dismissal I was very familiar with by that time. It was as if someone had drained all the energy right out of him, as if even speaking left him as exhausted as a person who has just run a marathon. I know now that it was depression, of the deepest and blackest kind, but at 9 – how could I have understood?

  "I want you to go and talk to someone," he said, and I leaned forward because his voice was so low I could barely hear it. "Like you did before, after your mother died. You can't talk to me, we both know that – I'm useless. So you need to talk to someone else. A professional."

  I didn't want to talk to a professional. I most certainly did not want to waste any effort trying to come up with a way to talk about Caistley and Eadgar and Willa in such a way as to honestly portray my experiences without getting myself locked into some kind of institution for delusional little girls. But I did want my dad to be happy, and so far I seemed to be doing very badly at that. Maybe talking to someone would help him? Maybe if I did as he asked he would see that I cared, that I wanted him to approve of me and be proud of me?

  "Ok," I said, taking another bite of tuna sandwich. "I'll go talk to someone."

  So that's what I did, to try to make my dad happy. River Forks was a half hour drive from a larger town, and the school nurse found a doctor who worked with children in that town. Once a week I would take a taxi to talk to this person – Dr. Whittington – and to try to leave out anything to do with Caistley.

  ***

  Dr. Whittington was younger than Dr. Hansen and I liked him better, although I was obviously very suspicious. He didn't make me talk about anything in particular, though. Sometimes we talked about how I was doing at school and other times about how I felt about my dad, or how I missed my mom, what I might say to her if she was there with me. Mostly, Dr. Whittington asked me questions. And one day, after I'd been seeing him for a couple of months, he asked me if I was holding anything back.

  I shook my head and looked out the window, eager to avoid eye contact lest it give away the fact that I was lying through my teeth.

  So once again, therapy became more of a social hour than anything psychologically constructive. I kept going, because Dr. Whittington was one of the few people on earth who seemed interested in me or how my life was going – and also to stop my father from worrying. Which didn't work, because he knew even better than I did that he wasn't up to the task of raising me.

  It was around that time that my friendship with Eadgar and Willa deepened, the way friendships do at that age, ripening from shared activities and play into deeper connections, real knowledge of another person, real concern for their wellbeing. Their father died that summer, kicked in the gut by an ox. Eadgar relayed the story to me, and neither of them shed a single tear as they described the way their dad's belly had swollen up and turned a deep purple and how he had spent days in agony, unable to sleep or find any relief from the pain.

  "Are you sad?" I asked tentatively when the story had been told and Willa had matter-of-factly informed me that they had buried him in the field just north of the village. It was, admittedly, a stupid question. And when Willa turned on me, her eyes aflame, I knew it.

  "What?" She shouted. "Our father is dead and you ask if we're sad!?"

  "I didn't mean that you didn't seem sad," I replied awkwardly, and in spite of the fact that that was exactly what I'd meant. "You just, um, you don't – you two don't really seem as, uh, you don't seem –"

  I was trying to express that although I knew they experienced emotions as strongly as I did, they seemed less willing to show them. I'd never seen Willa cry, for instance, and she had seen me cry countless times by then, usually as I told them some story or another of being bullied at school, or fearing that what my dad was actually doing up there in his dark, airless bedroom, apart from being very sad, was dying.

  "Because we're not spilling tears, you mean? What use are tears, Paige? Will they bring my father back? Will they plough the land and plant the seeds and harvest the grain?"

  Willa's tone was harsh and unfamiliar. I sat back, chastised and guilty. "I didn't mean it like that," I whispered, looking down. "I meant to insult myself, not you or Eadgar. I cry all the time, but the two of you seem so strong. Nothing ever seems to leave you in your beds, unable to get up."

  "She does
n't mean to be cruel," Eadgar said, putting one arm around my shoulder. "But you're different to us. You live in a big estate with servants and a big garden to grow all your food in. We don't stay in our beds because we can't – we'll starve if we do. My mother is outside this afternoon, cutting the wheat with the others, because if she doesn't do that we won't have any bread this winter."

  I never really told Willa and Eadgar I lived on a big estate with servants and a garden, apart from that initial meeting when I had confirmed that yes, I lived in a 'big house.' They came to the natural conclusion that I did, based rationally on the fact that I always appeared healthy, never underweight, that my fingernails were always clean, my hands un-roughened by manual labor. I didn't see any point in telling them otherwise, either, because it helped all three of us put the larger mystery – of what exactly it was that a girl from a big estate was doing showing up in the woods outside Caistley day after day, and then year after year – aside.

  As I sat on the old fallen tree in the woods, with the dappled sunlight falling on my head, Willa suddenly collapsed in on herself and began to weep. Shocked, and terrified that I was probably responsible, I wrapped my arms around her as her brother did the same, from the other side.

  "It's OK," I whispered. "I'm sorry, Willa. I didn't mean to upset –"

  "Oh Paige!" She cried, turning to me. "The reason I don't cry is because if I started, I would never stop! You never talk about any of the things that happen to us. You never say oh, my aunt's baby died for lack of food, your belly never growls, and I never ask about any of it because in truth I don't understand but life is hard for us, Paige. It's hard for us in a way I'm not sure you know. We haven't eaten a proper meal since my father left this world, we're hungry and scared but most of all we miss him and we don't know what to do without him. My mother has a look in her eye like she's half gone to the next world, too. I fear we will all be dead by this time next year."