by C.L. Bevill
* * *
I woke, and it was still dark. The stars still twinkled above me. Far and away, the distant light of massive suns had died away millions of years before their light reached the place where I could look on them. It was a symbol of how life persevered. Although the stars had died away so long ago, something of them still existed here and now.
The pixies stirred to life as I did. Some of them had snuggled against me for warmth. Others patrolled the forest looking for signs of Tate or Elan. Packing quickly, I got moving again, heading west for the coast. The pixies flew about me, slightly sluggish but keen to make progress. My exigency had rubbed off on them.
The trail was well established but months of disuse had brought up dozens of sprouts. The trees and bushes would reclaim the narrow stretch of pathway before a year or two had passed. In five years, because of rain, erosion, and new growth, there would be little left to show that anyone had come this way. Certainly, there was no sign that two people had come this way before I had.
It didn’t mean anything. There were dozens of trails that led to the ocean from Highway 101 from the Redwood National Forest. There were dozens of roads, some paved, more not, that people had used to explore the section of wilderness that had been set aside for preservation. Tate could have used any of them.
Spring was riding on my head, holding on to some of my hair as if she was riding a horse and holding its mane. I sang to her, “Go and rest, Spring. Take the sisters with you so that they will be able to help me tonight.”
Hesitating as she still held onto my hair, Spring was silent for a moment. “Soophee should avoid the old places of the forest, the places where humans once worked,” she sang to me, the caveat blatantly obvious in her tone.
I grimaced. More information, please. Don’t hold out on me now, girlfriend. I need your help more than ever. “What kind of old places, Spring?”
The pixies returned to me in an agitated swarm. They chattered nervously. I supposed they wanted me to realize the urgency of Spring’s message. “The before-places,” Spring called to me. “Soophee asks about the before and the sisters only know of the now and the after-now, but it is the before-place that we see as the dangerous place, the place where Soophee will be most at risk.”
At risk. At risk was better than the pixies foreseeing Soophee at death.
Oh, but I had options. I could call on the pixies to guide the group to me, to help me, if they would do that. I believed they would fight to protect Elan, perhaps they would even kill the Burned Man, or the man who might have been the Burned Man, Tate. But it was those people I didn’t want to put in more jeopardy. I had no premonitions about myself or about Zach or Kara. It was only Elan who figured in my mental portents.
Then there was the fact that half of the group didn’t believe in the abilities that the others possessed. They wouldn’t believe that I could lead them to Elan. Convincing them would take more precious time.
I knew that I was better by myself. I had beaten the Burned Man before, and now I was in better condition. I could beat him again. And I could beat Tate, whoever he was.
“Spring,” I sang. “Go and rest. I’ll follow the path that leads to Elan.”
“This is the proper direction,” she sang to me. “We feel Little-Man-With-Big-Eyes-And-Hurt-Smile. He is very sad but thus far is unhurt. He’s not far from Soophee. The sisters will stay with Soophee.”
Sighing, I nodded. Not far for the pixies could mean anything from three feet to a walk of several days. Several of the pixies landed on my head and my shoulders. Some of them descended on the pack. They would conserve their strength. I tried to question them about the before-places and what that meant, but it was next to impossible to understand their answers. Almost everything was before to them. They lived for the now. The redwoods and the humans who lived near them were now. Everything else was before.
A before-building could be a 7-Eleven store or a hundred-year-old cabin. It might not even be a building, but something that had been built, like a bridge. The more information I tried to get out of the more, the more indescribable their answers became. They were tired as was I and doubtless hungry, too. I had water, but I hadn’t planned on a long trip. I don’t know what I was thinking when I packed. (I knew that Elan was in horrible danger, and I packed weapons with which to defend him.)
“Food,” I said to Spring. “I need food.”
Spring moved on my head. It felt like she perked right up at the mention of food. “The sisters know a wonderful insect that has the most bittersweet taste. We’re certain that Soophee would enjoy this one. We believe the humans call it a butterfly. It’s crunchy on the outside and soft on the inside.” Then she made a yummy sound that nearly made me groan.
“I don’t think we could find enough butterflies to feed me,” I sang back, trying to keep the dryness out of my tone.
“Oh,” she responded.
“But don’t let that stop you from eating,” I added helpfully.
The pixies decided that was a great idea and went to find a meadow.
Twenty minutes later I came across a campsite. Someone had pitched a small tent off the path. The red walls caught my eye. The packs were still present, hanging on a tree branch in order to deter predators that might find the food smells interesting. I didn’t want to look inside the windblown tent that was rapidly tearing into tatters. If it hadn’t been staked to the ground it would have blown away long before. I could see the two sleeping bags inside. If there had been a shape to them once, it was gone with the rain and critters who had wandered through. But they had left a cache of granola bars inside a waterproof bag inside one of the packs, and that was good enough for me.
I came to the perpendicular trail a few minutes later. There was a sign that revealed it was a section of the old highway. Highway 1 had once coursed from the southern part of California, hugging the coastline, to the northern part of the state. Much of it had changed over to Highway 101 although obsolete sections had been left to rot like this one. People walked the remnants of what was a major structural accomplishment for the early part of the 20th century. (At least that was what the sign told me.) A hundred yards beyond were the cliffs above the beaches. I could smell the sea spray and could hear the cry of seagulls.
Turning south, I found the button ten minutes after that. It was large and blue, the size of a quarter. It was from Elan’s coat. The buttons were on the outside; there was a zipper on the interior of the coat. A down coat, it was designed to keep the snow out while a child was building snowmen or sledding down the bunny slope. Amanda had gotten one of the scavengers to pick it up in the correct size for Elan in preparation for the impending winter. I left the button in the middle of the trail because I knew that Zach and Kara would be coming after Elan and me.
A mile later I found a broken branch. It was fresh, and the branch was still flexible. Then a few miles later there was another button. Then a tiger’s eye marble. Then there was a pencil with ghosts and black cats on it. It hadn’t been sharpened yet. Elan was cleaning out his pockets. Clever little boy.
I stopped in mid-afternoon to rest. I leaned against a broad redwood tree between the enormous roots and looked up at the blue sky. Only a few puffy clouds marred the color. I was wondering what I was going to do with the Japanese broadsword when I fell asleep again. I hadn’t meant to, but the dreams started right away.
Gideon was talking to Ethan. “Follow them. They know where to go. She knows what’s going to happen to Elan. We have to trust that she’s right and trying to prevent it.”
Ethan scowled. “But you’re certain that Lulu is telling the truth.”
“She’s sorry for what she did. She doesn’t want Elan to die. Or Sophie for that matter.”
“I have volunteers,” Ethan said. “We’ll go at first light. Maybe we can catch up with Zach and Kara before too long.”
Gideon’s eyes glimmered. “I don’t think there’s a hope of that. Something else is going to happen. We need to prepare fo
r that. I can see it coming, but I don’t know what it is.”
Ethan started to sneer, but the expression melted from his face. “Something’s going to happen? Something bad? Do we need to leave this place?”
Nodding solemnly, Gideon said, “We’re all going to have to leave. It was just a matter of time anyway.”
Then Zach was there. He was sleeping next to Kara, both in sleeping bags on the ground. Their faces were cut with lines of exhaustion. He was dreaming of his son. His name had been Daniel, and he had been nearly three years old. A toddler, not a baby as in the photograph. He had been a bundle of energy and talked more as if he had been four or five years old. Zach had been teaching him how to play soccer and football. He had wanted to play T-Ball the following summer.
Then Zach was dreaming of me. The powerful emotions that he felt for me were both overwhelming and endearing. I didn’t understand how he could have these feelings for me so closely after his wife’s vanishing, but the feelings were there all the same. He would wait as long as it took for me to get over my skittishness, and he was prepared to wait a very long time. After all, we were both relatively young.
Then his wife was there in his dreams, and she was screaming at him, angry with his inability to understand her restlessness. They had married too young. They had been neighbors, childhood sweethearts. Both families had expected them to be together, and they had been. They had decided not to wait until after college but to marry first and support each other while they went to their collective classes. Daniel had been a happy accident and never unwanted.
Lila had been her name. She had married too young, far too young. She had missed the life of a teenager. She had disliked the feeling of being tied down with a husband and a young child when all of her friends were attending college and having fun. She had wanted more, and unwilling to wait, she had went out and gotten more.
The dream switched again. Zach was dreaming that it was I who was screaming. I wasn’t arguing with someone. I wasn’t having a fit or trying to make myself heard. I was screaming because someone was killing me, and the pain was devastating. Zach reached for me in the dream, but he was all too helpless. Like his son before, there was nothing he could do about it.
Then he woke up screaming, as well.
My eyes snapped open, and I found something crawling up my leg.
I didn’t remember withdrawing the broadsword, but there was a swish of noise and a blur of motion that was my right hand and arm moving in determined purpose. The blade flashed in a solitary ray of sunlight and then it was plunged into the ground between my legs.
Looking down I noticed two things. The first thing I saw was my hand on the vibrating handle. The weapon was twitching from the potent execution it had undergone. The second item was that the thing that had been crawling up my leg was impaled by the blade into the ground not an inch from my jean-clad legs.
It was a spider the size of an orange not including the length of its legs. It had a greenish back that resembled a turtle’s shell and eight black, lightly furred legs. Its red eyes stared sightlessly at me. Blackish venom dripped from impressive looking pincer-like mouthparts. The blade had pierced the slight indentation of its shell, where I supposed it would be most vulnerable.
“What the bleep?” I said and leapt to my feet. There were more of them on the path, spread out, moving crab-like toward me. I didn’t immediately feel the threat, but I could remember Zach’s words. “They looked like a cross between spiders and turtles. They had eight legs. There was an entire area that was covered with cobwebs, and we avoided it because there were a few oversized cobweb-covered lumps that were animals they had snared. Some were as big as rabbits.”
I knew that they were trouble. I didn’t actually remember pulling the sword from the creature stuck to the ground, but abruptly, it was in my hand again, and there was a haze of activity. I moved, leaped, and jumped. When I looked behind me there was a dozen dead spiders lying on the trail, and the rest were fleeing into the brush. “Did I do that?” I asked with a little bit of trepidation combined with wonder. I remembered my dreams about fighting with a sword and knew that all the stick fighting preparatory work hadn’t done this for me.
Spring and her happy horde of pixies buzzed in on my note of awed reflection. They held sticks formed like tiny spears. When they got close enough to identify the spiders, there was a fierce hiss that came from them in a combined tone. Some of the pixies took off after the fleeing spiders with a terrible cry of anger.
I glanced down at the sword in my hand. Suddenly, it was heavy. My arm drooped. Then I noticed I was breathing heavily. I didn’t know how I had done what I had done, but the power was there all the same. Here was the awkward teenager who couldn’t hit the practice dummy with the sticks but suddenly was killing spiders with gleeful abandon. Samurai Sophie. Whoo-hoo!
Spring landed on my shoulder and sang, “Told you so,” except what she actually said was, “The sisters knew it would be thus.” She sounded incredibly smug for something that was less than two inches tall.
There was another premonition that filled my head. Elan was standing at the edge of a bluff. Tate was beside him, his face warped with dread and rage and loathing. Suddenly, the older man shoved the boy, and Elan went over the edge.
I didn’t take the time to say anything to the pixies. I turned south and ran. The old road dipped into a hollow, and a wooden bridge crossed a largish stream. In the clearing ahead of me was an old rock-walled building. It had no windows left nor did it have a roof, but it sat beside the stream, and the remnants of an old waterwheel were left there. Greenish wood that had long-since splintered was left beside the stream, and the remnants of an old waterwheel were left there. Rotting bucket boards attached to a pair of rusting circles had been the exterior part of the wheel was all that was left.
Spring held onto my hair and hissed urgently in my ear. “A before-place,” she sang hauntingly. “This is the before-place to beware, Soophee.”
I came up short at the open doors. I could see inside. Shadows stretched out in the interior. Supports for the walls had been constructed in the recent past. They were built from steel struts and ran up the walls of the three-storied building. Ivy and vines crept up the walls, concealing the mortar that held the rock walls together. It was an empty place, a building that once held working men, but now held…something very bad.
“What did you see, Spring?” I sang insistently. “Tell me.”
“Soophee goes into the building and she falls screaming,” Spring told me, and her voice held a note of fear.
Premonitions were wonderful things if one had time to do something about them. If one had time to make a rational decision. I held the sword at the midlevel position, not too far in the air, not too low, and thought that I didn’t have any time to prevent Elan from being thrown from the cliffs.
The original premonition had been that Elan had been fed to the spiders as Tate had promised them. But I had caught up to them, and events in the future had changed infinitesimally. It meant that just because I went into the building, I wasn’t necessarily going to fall screaming to my death or to even worse.
So what did I do? I heard Elan cry out my name in such a terrified tone that my spine was immediately frozen with ice. I stepped into the building and into the darkness.