Between Time

by Bond, Carolyn

  “I don’t know. I haven’t thought that far out.” She said. “Maybe I could find a summer job. Maybe something in Yosemite. I know they take on summer help and have dorms you can live in. That would be awesome. My friend, Kay and I visited some of her friends there last month and it didn’t look too bad. It would be fun!”

  “Yeah. That might be fun. I’ll need to go back home for a few weeks and visit my family over the summer. I’m not sure I could take a summer job if I’m going to be gone a while. I’m also not too excited about not seeing you for that long. Some hippy rock climber might catch your eye and you’d forget all about me.”

  “Well I don’t think that’ll happen, but I would die a slow death of depression from missing you. I spend every minute with you now. I don’t want to imagine life without you here. You’re more than a boyfriend. You’re my best friend.” She said.

  Allen looked down at the dirt trail strewn with little bundles of pines needles. His eyebrows creased. His warm brown eyes looked thoughtful showing his internal struggle. “Well, I have thought about it for a while and wondered if you wanted to come with me back to Kentucky and you could stay at my mom and dad’s. I don’t know if you have any family in Louisville you’d want to visit, but we could if you did. It would put a crunch on making any income for the summer, but you wouldn’t need to worry about a place to stay or food.” He said.

  She thought about it. It would sure be nice to stay with him all summer. She hadn’t been back to Kentucky since her family moved away when she was nine. Frankly, she wasn’t sure where Winchester, Kentucky even was. When she was a kid, it seemed to her the whole state was either Louisville, farmland or woods. She figured Winchester must fit in the farmland category.

  “Hm. Well, that would be fun. I’d love to meet your family. Do you think they would like me?” She said.

  “Sure, they would. They are pretty nice people.”

  “Well, would they think I’m a crazy Californian? A lot of people think Californians are kind of ‘out there,’ you know?”

  “As long as you’re nice, which you are, they will love you,” he said.

  “Well, I know how the farther east of Louisville you get, how people kind of have a whole other way of relating to each other. What if I said something wrong or didn’t say something that they thought I should? I don’t even know what normal is there,” said Marie.

  They came around a curve in the trail and found themselves on the edge of a small reservoir. The mist was rising from the surface of the water. It looked so peaceful. They stopped for a minute to take in the scene. The reservoir was about 50 yards across. The far other side had a shallower bank and this side had a pile of small boulders as its edge. Marie could see little air bubbles seeping up near them in the water. She stepped to the edge to look closer and see if she could see a fish. There was some movement below the surface. It was too deep to see the bottom right there. It would have made a great fishing spot. She was sure there were some good size fish lurking down in the dark depths. A swishing of the water below caught her eye.

  As she leaned in, some pebbles on the boulder she stood on slid her feet, throwing her off-balance, and before she could catch herself, she was falling forward toward the icy water. Allen lurched forward to catch her arm, but before he could grasp her fingers. She was too far away from him. Horror hit them both. The water was surely frigid. They were out here alone. There would be no way to get help in an emergency. A stream of thoughts flashed in both their minds in an instant.

  Marie tumbled in a near complete somersault before she splashed into the water. The icy water took her breath away, paralyzing her lungs. The cold of the water felt like a thousand tiny knives all at once. His chest contracted and any air in her lungs escaped. Her boots filled with water and her soaked clothes felt like dead weights. She frantically tried to scramble upward, but the weight of her clothes and the ineffective movement cancelled each other out. She could see Allen on the edge looking at her, his eyes wide with terror as he stood there alone. All at once she saw him dive in after her, but then he seem to disappear. Her lungs were screaming in pain. The depth of the water was not too deep, maybe 20 feet, but more than her ears could handle. The pressure was like being boxed in the ears. The water got darker and darker, but she could still see a few feet in the murky depths. Then she saw a dark movement in front of her. Terrified, she thought she saw a woman in the darkness with long curly hair. She couldn’t make out a face. It was too dark. She knew it was what she’d seen from the surface. She felt long arms wrapping around her and closing in. Then she blacked out.

  CHAPTER 4 – THINGS IN THE SHADOWS

  Ben was in the reservoir as fast as Marie was. He saw the shadows in the water taunting her. He knew what they were. They were not fish. He found her on the bottom in the center of the swirling shapes. He pushed her up toward the surface away from the shadows. Allen was searching, but the shock of the cold water was more than his senses could override. Jacob already was welling the water up around him trying to keep him near the surface and away from the depths.

  Marie’s body came close enough to the surface for Allen to see her and he used his junior life guard training to reach across her body to pull her next to him along his side while he did a scissor kick to get to the edge. Ben and Jacob were underneath them both giving them added buoyancy and kicking away the dark fingers trying to pull them down.

  Allen reached the edge and pushed her graceful body up onto the boulders. He had to scramble up and heave her over the top onto the trail. His body was screaming in protest because of the cold water. His muscles were contracting and his breathing was fast and shallow. Ben used the force of his mind to lift her body off the rocks ever so slightly to aid Allen’s progress. Jacob had his arms around Allen’s waist holding him so he didn’t tumble back into the water. The dark souls in the water were seething mad at losing the near gain. They swirled up through the water and up into the air. They were not ready to give up so easily. Ben looked back just in time to see a woman with loose, long curly auburn hair grasping at Marie’s heels, her eyes determined and full of hate. The woman faded into dark mist, disappearing when she saw Ben and Jacob.

  Jacob, seeing this, decided he had better stay and protect Marie and Allen while Ben went for help. He knew Ben didn’t have the experience to fight such wicked beings. Ben flashed out of view and determined the nearest help was a man who lived nearby, just minutes away. The man suddenly had the urge to go down to the reservoir. He picked up his walkie-talkie for the forest service and his coat and set out at a brisk pace. Even on this trail, the dark arms clutched at the man through the smooth trunks of the manzanita trees. Their red branches contrasting with the dark, bony arms and fingers. Ben beat them away.

  The man could hear someone crying out near the lake and began to run. The anguished cries of, “MARIE! Can you hear me? Please MARIE! Open your eyes! BREATHE!” tore at him and he started sprinting. At last he came around the corner and saw Allen bent over Marie, alternating crying and pleading and giving mouth to mouth resuscitation. Marie’s sopping clothes clung to her young frame. Wet, dark locks of hair stuck to her cheeks.

  Allen saw the man and yelled, “Help me! She’s not breathing!” The man pulled out his walkie-talkie.

  ***

  Marie woke up in Calaveras County Medical Center emergency room. She had an IV, an oxygen mask, and lots of warm blankets on her. Allen was right there looking calm on the outside, but in his wide eyes, he was near hysterical. He was the first to notice she was starting to stir. The nurse, whose back was turned, was busily writing notes on a chart on a clipboard at the foot of the bed.

  “Marie! Wake up, baby!” said Allen.

  The nurse turned around to look and saw the monitor showing Marie’s pulse going up. She stepped over and pulled up Marie’s eyelids and jotted down a note about the look of her pupils. “Looks like she’s coming back among the living!”

  Marie sleepily fluttered her eyes open. The room seeme
d to spin. She really just wanted to go back to sleep. It was so peaceful and quiet before, like another world. The glaring lights and beeps of the IV intruded on her peace of mind.

  “Wake up, Marie! I know you’re there. Come back to me,” said Allen.

  She opened her eyes more and saw where they were. Allen was hovering and looking into her eyes smiling. His eyes crinkled up when he smiled and he had a dimple on one side. She smiled back at him. She looked around the room and saw the nurse, a young man with dark hair and hazel eyes smiling at her and another man that leered at her. He had a mop in the corner and was slowly backing away. He didn’t seem to fit in the room and for some reason looked mad at her. She turned back to Allen who was talking to her.

  “Are you ok?” he asked.

  She nodded. Her body still felt cold. He offered her a sip of water from the cup with a straw. She looked around again and only Allen and the nurse were there now. She wondered who those other two men were, but they were gone now.

  CHAPTER 5 – AFTER EFFECTS

  Back at the dorm room later that afternoon, Allen was making her some hot chocolate and buffeting her with several blankets. Marie was trying to figure out what happened. It was such a crazy blur. She remembered slipping and thinking she was going to die for sure. The next thing she remembered was waking up in the hospital. She had no idea how Allen managed to get her there.

  “Tell me again what happened. I can’t remember,” she said holding her head in her hands and rubbing her temples. The whole incident was making her feel her anxiety rising. She had a foreboding feeling, like something important happened and she couldn’t catch the thought in her mind. A shape would come to mind and she knew it had to be important and just as she started to see it, it faded into darkness.

  “Did they give me a sedative or anything in the ER? I feel like I can’t think straight. Things don’t seem to make sense!” said Marie.

  “No, in fact you were pretty sedated from the cold water. They were trying to get your heartbeat higher and warm you up. But, there was one point, at the reservoir, where you stopped breathing. I did mouth-to-mouth until the paramedics got there and they gave you oxygen. Maybe the time when you stopped breathing affected your head some? They tested your brain activity at the hospital and said you shouldn’t have any lasting effects, though,” Allen told her.

  She thought about all that a minute. She didn’t realize she’d stopped breathing. Maybe that would explain why she thought she saw crazy things in the water. It was all just a hallucination. That would make the most sense. Anything else couldn’t be real.

  Allen looked at her with his brows knitted together. “So what do you remember? What is confusing you?”

  She didn’t want to tell him. He’d think she was crazy. She closed her eyes and tried to remember what she could. “Let me think,” she said mostly to herself. She saw herself slipping and tumbling. The water enveloped her like a freezing hug. She shuddered remembering. Then it got harder to remember. She could see Allen’s face looking down at her from the bank, horror stricken, and then him jumping toward her. But then she felt alone. But no, she wasn’t alone. Was there someone else there?

  “Was there someone else there?” she asked.

  “Well, yeah,” he said. “This guy showed up out of nowhere. He just came running up. He had a walkie-talkie and contacted the forest service and helped me. We wrapped you in our coats.”

  “Huh. But, no. I mean was someone else in the water with me. I saw you jump in before I sank so far I couldn’t see, but then I didn’t see you. But, there was someone else there when I was on the bottom. I thought maybe someone else jumped in.” She couldn’t believe what she was even saying.

  “Uh, no.” He just looked at her with a look of fear. She knew he was worried she was imagining things. Frankly, so was she.

  “Well, who knows,” she said. “Like you said. I stopped breathing, so my mind was probably going off on a crazy tangent. That was really nice of that guy to stop. So, who was he?”

  “I don’t know! He was just running up the path. He must have heard me yelling. After the paramedics came, I lost track of him. I ran back to the Jeep and hustled to the ER. I don’t even know who he was. It was a miracle though. I was panicking. I don’t think you would have made it if I’d had to run to find help or if I’d had to carry you back to the car.

  “Without the mouth to mouth, you probably would have had brain damage from lack of oxygen.” The whole thing was overwhelming him. He couldn’t bear to think of losing her or how close he’d come to that. She was such a part of his life now. In the last few weeks he had thought about the idea of making their relationship more permanent. He daydreamed about proposing to her next summer if things kept going well.

  He got up and asked her if she was hungry. “No, not really. In fact, I’m a little nauseous,” she said. “I think I just want to sleep for a while. Is that ok? Would you mind?”

  “No, not at all. I would imagine you must be tired. I’ll just do some reading for class. I’ll be right here,” he said. He gave her a thin-lipped half smile where just the corners of his mouth turned up. She knew that was a mask to cover his concern. She could see in his sweet eyes how much he loved her.

  “I love you,” she told him and hunkered down into the couch pillows and closed her eyes. Her hair was a fluffy, matted mess from drying on the hospital bed.

  He watched her a minute. What on earth was she talking about? There was nothing in that lake, but muck and water plants. He was really worried about the state of her head, but maybe she was right, maybe some sleep was in order. He decided he’d just watch her closely for a while. He was also kicking himself for not catching her or for not seeing what was happening sooner. Surely there was something he could have done to prevent this from ever happening. Of course, that didn’t matter now, but he still felt like part of this was his fault. What caused her to lean so far over the side anyway? That was a stupid thing to do.

  CHAPTER 6 – BEN’S DE-BRIEFING

  Ben and Jacob were sitting at the kitchen table of the dorm room. Ben was nearly unhinged with despair.

  “Oh my God, Jacob! She nearly died! And did you see the dark souls clamoring for her. It was all I could do to keep them away! Tom is going to kill me, well, if I wasn’t already dead!” Ben said.

  “Yeah, that was a close one. But you have to remember that we are here to do what we can. You have to remember that they are not immortal and there is a predetermined time for them. We don’t know when that is, so there will come a time when no matter what we do, it won’t help. We cannot override Lorenzo’s decisions and only he knows when their time has come.” Jacob told him as his piercing eyes stared him down. Jacob had a very intense personality. He sat back in his chair with his ankle crossed over his knee. He rested his chin on his hand and his elbow on his other knee. He looked very controlled, and relaxed even. This was in direct contrast to Ben who was sitting bolt upright biting his nails down to the quick. Jacob continued to size up Ben, staring at him. This unnerved Ben even more.

  “Why are you staring at me?” Ben spat out. He got up and started pacing around. Marie had fallen asleep on the couch and he walked around the room looking in all the corners. As he expected, a dark soul was forming in a corner beside the end of the couch.

  “Look! They are still coming for her! Good grief!” Ben put his hands out and shoved at the shadow. Oddly, it started laughing at him. A female face formed and then quicker than Ben would believe, a woman appeared. He recoiled for a minute, looking surprised. Her startlingly plain face would have been passable, but she had that evil grin on her face. Her curly red hair was flowing in all directions and she had deep creases in her expression. Evil had been working on her a long time. Maybe centuries. She looked as solid as him, but somehow more fluid, less content with her existence. Her body was always in motion like an eel.

  “You can’t keep her safe forever, you know!” She laughed a throaty gargling laugh that made Ben’s blood run
cold. Her talon-like freckled fingers darted forward to mockingly caress Marie’s forehead. Ben reacted just as fast and blocked her. He moved himself into the same space as Marie. The woman would have to literally go through him to get to Marie. The evil vapor of a woman vanished, her laughter fading away. She was obviously toying with Ben.

  After Ben pulled his head together and the room seemed quiet again, he stood up and looked at Jacob who hadn’t moved during the whole scene. In fact, he looked a little tired of the whole thing, if anything.

  “How can you just sit there?” Ben yelled at Jacob. Jacob straightened, stretched, and then relaxed back into his chair again. Jacob lowered his eyes to the ground and then looked back at Ben.

  “Have a seat, Ben.” Jacob said. “You are doing great. You’re new at this. And really, you are doing super for a newbie. It’s been, what, a couple of months?” Jacob held his hand out questioningly.

  Ben softened a little. His shoulders relaxed a degree. “Yes, it’s been 2 months. The first month I had to learn fast. I wasn’t born alive. In fact, I was only about 10 weeks in my mother’s womb. My living body was still quite unformed. The team that caught me took care of me until I got my bearings and I’ve been with Tom a few weeks watching Marie.

  He never should have left me with her! I’m not ready. I still don’t know what I’m doing.” Ben held his face in his hand as he leaned against the wall. Marie slept soundly and Allen was reading a dendrology textbook in the chair next to the couch. Darkness had fallen and Allen reached up and turned on the lamp on the table beside him, making a barely audible clicking noise.

  “Well, it’s not like you’re totally alone, you know. I was there, too. Both of us worked together. It worked fine. These things happen all the time. Seriously. They,” Jacob nodded toward Marie and Ben, “have no idea how close they come all the time.”