Monarch Falls (The Four Quarters of Imagination Book 1)

by Lumen Reese

  And Dorothy had been right; if there was a trail it was hidden to me, between the thick blanket of snow and the similarity of the trees. Henry though, knew exactly where he was going as he took the lead again.

  “So if we find this guy, today, what are you going to do with your reward?”

  “Pay taxes,” I said.

  “That’s boring. If I know Jericho at all, he’ll pay you more than fairly. What else are you gonna do with it?”

  “I don’t know. I guess I’ll blow it all at a strip club.”

  “Ha-ha !” he mused, “that sounds more like it. Really, though. You must have plans for something, even if it’s just a really nice steak?”

  He looked back. I shook my head. “Sorry. I just want to be secure and responsible.”

  “Wow. That’s the most boring thing I’ve ever heard in my life. I’m gonna pretend you were serious about the strippers.”

  “You do that.”

  Up ahead a long ways, the ground wasn’t flat anymore, it seemed to dip, so I could see only the crest of it on the horizon and a large rock formation rising up to a point.

  “Is that the cave?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  We kept trudging toward it in silence for a minute.

  “So did you get an ‘A’ on your exam?” I asked, to satiate my curiosity. “Is that why you know Jericho?”

  He heaved out a big sigh. “I’ve been around since before they even had those tests. The first quarter is the first quarter because it was the first to open, twelve years ago. As long as this place has been here, I’ve been here. I knew Jericho even before that, we lived in the same building when he first came to America. I consider him a friend, I know he feels the same way. I finally did take that test, a few years ago, though, just for fun. I’d been one of the main attractions of this place for a decade, I’d been a huge player in almost every storyline to come through this place, I’ve had return customers who came back just for me… And I got a fucking ‘B’.”

  I found myself grinning, and he was grinning, too. “That sucks,” I said. “Don’t feel too bad, I got a ‘B’, too.”

  His eyes narrowed but his smile didn’t die. “ You took it?”

  “Yeah. I was considering signing up, when they found some information about me, and Jericho offered me this job.”

  “What did you answer for the locked door question?”

  I wondered at how I was still talking to him, and not thinking too much about what I was saying. “I said I’d tunnel my way out.”

  “Good answer. They look for unique answers, they like ingenuity, Jericho told me afterward. The top three answers,” he counted off on his fingers, “break it down, call for help, pick the lock.”

  “And what did you say?”

  “I said I’d break it down. Luckily I had another good answer. ‘What animal would you be?’”

  “You must’ve said a wolf.”

  “No. Said if I could be any animal, I’d be Godzilla and I’d be terrorizing Tokyo instead of answering stupid questions.”

  “They are stupid, aren’t they?”

  “So stupid,” he agreed. “The bulk of your results have to come from the brain scanning they do. What they get from your subconscious has to be more reliable.”

  “I didn’t hold the results in very high regard, they got quite a bit wrong about me.”

  He watched me, turning all the way around and walking backward for a moment so he could do it. “Maybe you’re the one who’s wrong about you.”

  “Hm.”

  He turned and we kept walking in silence.

  It was a few minutes before he spoke again.

  “So what’s your impression of the whole place? We get a bad rap out there, I know. It’s been a few years since I’ve gone out, but Jericho tells me it’s getting worse.”

  “Wait, you get to leave?”

  “Yeah,” he said, and he might as well have been saying ‘duh’. “You build up vacation time, the longer you’re in, the higher your grade and your importance to the whole place. ‘A’ levels can buy their way out completely after five years. ‘B’ levels, after ten years, and so on…”

  “I didn’t know that.”

  “We’re not slaves.”

  “Just indentured servants,” I shot back. “So you, you could buy your way out, now?”

  “I could, but I have no desire to do that, and I spend my salary elsewhere.”

  I barely stopped myself from asking how he managed to spend a salary without visiting the outside world, remembering we were almost perfect strangers.

  “You didn’t answer my question,” he said. “What do you think of it?”

  “Okay. It’s not as bad as it seems, maybe. But it’s still sort of crazy, isn’t it? You all came in here, and now it’s like you’re living in denial, feeding other people’s denial, too. You are literally living in a fantasy world.” The answer was so brutally honest it shocked me that I had managed to say it out loud. I wondered if, once I was back in the outside world, I would be able to maintain this new, bolder version of myself.

  He pressed his lips together as he mulled over my answer, but he was still smiling just a bit, watching the woods in front of him for a minute. “Okay. I get that it seems kind of silly. But Jericho and the others are doing good things with the money they make, and there isn’t anything realer than that. You were about to sign up, when this job fell into your lap. You were broke. You were starving.” His eyes on me suddenly feel very invasive, I realized I had given away more of myself than I cared to, damn that new, bolder me. “It’s not your fault, obviously. Out there, you can’t catch a break. You had to come in here for even the chance to get a grip on your own life. So how am I the delusional one?”

  The words were so harsh but his tone was so gentle, that even though I was embarrassed, I did not feel judged. I could only nod at the truth of what he had said, and we walked on in a not uncomfortable silence until we reached the place about a mile in where the horizon had ended. At that point we were looking down on a steep drop, with only a slender ledge, ten feet below that held along the cliff’s face to reach the massive opening of the cave in the grey stone. Below, way down, at least a hundred feet, was a lake, frozen over and still. It made me feel ill just looking out over it, and the fear was back in me with the cave so close.

  “How do we get down?” I asked.

  “We don’t.” Henry knelt, very near the edge. “I can lower you down, and help you back up.”

  “No,” I said instantly.

  “It’s that or we go all the way around, down the hill on that side-,” he gestured, “and climb the whole way up the cliff’s face, which I promise you is much more dangerous and will cost you half the day.”

  I looked at him, then looked out over the edge again. He looked strong; the shape of him was an inverted triangle of an impressive build. But when he offered his hand to me every bit of me was shrinking from it.

  Still I grabbed his hand. Shutting my mind off completely I knelt, worked one leg out so that one foot backed off of the ledge. My mind screaming wordlessly, my chest locked up and I had to force every breath through a clenched throat. Henry wrapped his other hand around mine, I did the same, holding on with all my might. Lowering himself to his elbows in the snow, he waited just the moment it took me to suck in a breath and force my other leg back so that I hung onto only him and had both feet scrambling on the rock.

  I inadvertently made a little noise in the back of my throat. My arms were so tense I thought they would snap, as Henry was grunting and lowering me down as far as he could.

  “You’ll have to drop,” he said, as gently as he could manage, while holding me up.

  I didn’t think I could possibly make that decision, and, craning my neck around, I realized, “I can’t see…”

  “The ground is right there,” he wheezed, his arms were beginning to shake, his face scrunched as he gasped, “It’s maybe… half a foot below you.”

  “No.”
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br />   “You can do it. Just let-.”

  Before he could say it I let go, just so I wouldn’t have to hear his coddling tone. And at the same time I didn’t think I had consciously decided it. That my body had done it for me. Henry let my hands slip out of his, or maybe didn’t have to because I was already gone, and the next instant the ground smashed hard into my feet, sending spasms up my ankles and knees and back and I was flinging myself forward to press as tightly to the rock wall as I could on the slender ledge.

  “Good job,” Henry said, catching his breath.

  “Thanks,” I murmured, with my face buried in the cold rocks and eyes closed tightly.

  “Go check out the cave,” he prompted, and I forced myself to look up at him. “You’re okay . The wolf is incapable of hurting you. It won’t even wake up for you.”

  I nodded.

  “Get going. I’m gonna go take a leak behind that tree.”

  And his face disappeared beneath my sight line. I forced myself to look, not down, but sideways, at the mouth of the cave, and inched my feet along, one by one, going toward it with a death grip on the rocky cliff side. A gust of wind stopped me in place. When it let up, I pushed on. My hand fumbled in the emptiness of the cave opening before I knew it was next to me.

  Peering around the bend, I saw only darkness inside. A slight warmth seeped out of it, and on it, a musky smell that put a deep fear in me. It was soundless in there.

  In my bag, I remembered, I had a lantern.

  It fit in the palm of my hand, but when I switched it on, and the light which cast a flickering glow as if from real fire threw itself all over the walls and back, to where the cave dipped down and was swallowed in darkness again.

  I took the first step, and felt sure I wouldn’t be taking another. That was all of it. All of my courage. I could feel it, too, that the fugitive was not lurking down there in the depths. I didn’t know how I could know but I did. He had not found what he had been looking for in the cellars of the Hollow, and would have moved on somewhere new, but possibly he had already been here, and checked this place out, too. And I had put myself in the position of it being my job to investigate that possibility.

  I managed another step, thinking only about Joey and the kids.

  A rustle inside the cave stopped me and tightened all the screws in me in the instant of a single pump of my heart. A tiny whimper bounded out of my throat, there was no stopping it. Inside the dark the flash of my lantern’s light reflecting off of a pair of eyes was the only warning I had before the thing’s paws clicked on a bounding leap toward me. My legs collapsed rather than help me turn or go back. I hit the ground. It hit me, as big as a bear, its body wide and massive with shaggy grey fur and those teeth bearing down on me. It brought with it the certainty of death that settled in my bones and in that moment all that I could do was flinch.

  I had brought an arm up over my face without realizing, and the wolf’s teeth closed on that instead. Its growl reverberating from my wrist to elbow forced me to open my eyes, then it whipped its head side to side and the bones it had in its jaws, the ones that made up my forearm, popped as they were crushed.

  I was screaming and slamming my free hand into the cave’s floor, fumbling for the satchel beside me. The gun. It was in there, hard and square at the grip, and I had it, but the wolf had dropped my mangled arm and was baring down again, going for my throat, faster than I could even wince, this time. But the gun boomed just as I felt the warm breath of the wolf at my throat, as I expected the warm blood pounding just under the skin there to go rushing out. I squeezed the trigger again and again, and the wolf gave lurches as the bullets pelted it, and I felt myself splattered with more warmth as it crumbled into a heap on top of me.

  My gasping breaths puffing out in mist in front of me, I realized I was still alive. My arm, for how much it hurt, might not be there anymore, but I was alive. My heart was pounding, even crushed beneath the carcass as I was.

  In the commotion I had dropped my lantern and it was broken. The light I was lying in was from the day outside, the mouth of the cave was right there, within my reach. Pieces of glass were scattered at my side, and I saw my arm laying there, too. Everything was still attached; my fingers wiggled on command, but the thing was bright red and throbbing and dripping out more blood as it throbbed. I needed help. I needed the wolf off of me, first. With a few hard shoves, I tipped the thing and it thudded to its side.

  I heard my own name, the call getting louder and I knew Henry had heard the gunshots. I crawled toward the cave’s mouth, out onto the ledge, on my knees and one hand, with my arm pulled tight to my chest.

  “Stella!” Henry was directly above me, then.

  I couldn’t answer. My throat was raw from screaming. Instead of standing, or even just leaning back to glance up at Henry, I flopped down onto my side in the snow so I could see him out of one eye. I was aching all over and so tired that my body felt like it weighed a ton.

  “What happened? Stella, are you okay?”

  I shut my eyes for just a moment and it must have worried him because he shouted my name again.

  “Stella!”

  “He’s not in there,” I managed, barely whispering.

  “What?”

  “He’s not in there.”

  “Can you stand up? I need you to reach for me.”

  I shut my eyes for another second, and this time he waited. After a few deep breaths, I pushed myself onto my front, then struggled to move my knees underneath me, though they felt like cinder blocks. The snow was soaked red beneath me. From there I felt along the cliff with my good hand and managed to get up to one foot, then the other, then I straightened and reached, aching the whole time, feeling like I was losing all the warmth in my body, like all the joy I would ever have was leaking out, too.

  Henry leaned far out over the edge of the cliff and reached. Our fingers touched when I stood on my toes. Henry sighed, inched further out, and I grabbed onto his hand and let him pull me up with a gargantuan groan.

  I collapsed into the snow again, and he caught his breath while rubbing one shoulder.

  “We need to get you back into town, to the doctor.” His voice was gentle. “Can you walk?”

  I was hunched over and just wanted him to leave me alone. But I nodded.

  Chapter Seven

  I found myself in a hospital-like room once again, late that morning. A white-haired doctor had placed my mangled arm on a flat table, then swung a massive white arm of a machine over the top of it. It had a broad, flat sort of camera attached, which he pressed a button on. Images of my skeleton appeared on a panel on the wall beside us. A nurse also watched quietly to one side.

  For a moment, the old man just stared at them.

  Henry paced the other side of the room, having just come inside from having put in a call to headquarters. His face was contorted with worry, sort of angry looking.

  “Well?” he finally burst out.

  The doctor, whose name was Parnell, said, “It’s not as bad as it looks. Several fractures, yes. But the breaks are clean. We’ll straighten you out and patch up these punctures from the teeth, put you in a cast for six weeks and you’ll be good as new.” He had a cheerful manner that even got me smiling for a moment.

  Henry said, “Jericho’s on his way. I’m sure he’ll tell you himself, but he’s sorry for what happened. It shouldn’t have been possible. And I’m sorry, too. I should have gone down there with you.”

  “No,” I said. “You couldn’t have.”

  “Anyway, Jericho says he understands if you want to go home.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” I said, maybe a bit too intensely.

  “We’ll put you under with morphine to set your arm,” Dr. Parnell said. “And Mr. Sullivan will be here when you wake up. You can discuss it further, then.”

  “-No,” I declared.

  He glanced at the nurse. “It’s a painful procedure, you’ll want to be asleep.”

  “No.”

&nb
sp; “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Alright… we can inject some anesthetic into the sight of the fracture, at least. It will hurt, though…”

  My stomach was squirming with worry once again, and I felt somewhat relieved. My lack of feeling at all had been beginning to worry me. The doctor collected a vial from a locked cabinet on the wall, along with a very long, very large syringe. I sat up straighter, pressing my lips together tightly and breathing through my nose. I didn’t want the needle in my arm, but at least I wouldn’t have to be unconscious.

  “I’ll need you on my side, Belinda,” Dr. Parnell said, and the woman hurried to join him on my left. “Muscles,” he added, addressing Henry, “she could probably use a hand.”

  At first I thought he was being recruited to help twist and force my arm back into line, but he came around to my other side and offered me his hand. Watching the syringe fill with clear liquid, and the nurse beginning to wipe down my arm with a sponge, leaving strong, clean-smelling brown liquid behind, I reached out and grabbed onto him.

  He gave me a squeeze. “Don’t watch.”

  The nurse latched onto my upper arm and elbow, holding me still.

  *

  The cast that they put on my left arm -after another x-ray to make sure the bones had been lined up again-was a fabric sleeve, then a moistened wrap of some kind that hardened like plaster, then another final layer of bandages that looked suited to the time period the Hollow was imitating. I had rolled my eyes at that but was too tired to say anything. My legs were wobbling as I left the makeshift hospital, which on the outside was simply the largest cabin in the Hollow. Henry was on my heels, walking with me as I started down the street.

  “I’m hungry and tired and it will be hours before Jericho gets here. So I’m going back to the inn. When he does, I’ll figure out the next step. But the fugitive isn’t here anymore, I’m sure of it.”