by T. S. Graham
Sophina nodded. She wanted to reach for the doorknob, but something stopped her.
“Sophina, what’s wrong?”
Sophina knew what was wrong, but putting it into words wasn’t easy.
“I’m scared,” she admitted. “My father tried to kill me yesterday. I’m alive because you got there before he could finish me off. I can’t just forget that—even if he didn’t know what he was doing.”
Mrs. Tanner’s green eyes sparkled in the sun that shone through the hallway skylight. “Sophina, your father released you before he knew I was coming,” she explained. “I don’t expect knowing that will make you forgive him now, but I hope it provides a start.”
She then turned and disappeared into the stairway to the first floor, leaving Sophina to face the bedroom door alone. This time, she opened it.
Mr. Murray was sitting on the bed with his head hung low. Sophina was so nervous that she forgot to breathe as she stepped forward and faced him.
“Daddy . . . ?”
An oppressive silence settled over the room as Mr. Murray stared at the floor with eyes that didn’t quite look human.
“I’ve done horrible things,” he said, so faintly that she could barely hear.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she encouraged, her voice cracking as tears formed.
“I remember everything,” he forced out. “It was my body . . . and my hands . . . but I couldn’t control them. I saw a red glow . . . It was so beautiful, I had to go to it.”
Sophina took another step forward, but his pained look kept her from taking another.
“I hurt Eliot—and I hurt you.”
Sophina shed the last of her doubt and wrapped her arms around her father’s neck.
“I’ll never forgive myself,” he said.
Sophina stood. “You will forgive yourself,” she said firmly. “The father I knew loved his family more than anything, and would never hurt them. You’ll become that man again—I know you will.”
“How . . . ?”
“You’ll do it because you have to,” Sophina stated. “I lost you once. I’m not losing you again.”
Her words seemed to resonate within her father, because, for the first time, he reached out to her. She had no idea how long she cried on his shoulder, but when she finally stepped back, the harshness in his eyes had diminished.
“How long have I been gone?” he asked.
“Two months.”
“How will we explain it to your mom?”
“We’ll tell her the truth,” Sophina answered simply.
Mr. Murray thought about it for a moment, and then showed Sophina the beginnings of a smile. Nothing could have lifted her spirits more.
14 THE REUNION
“Sophina!”
Gail Murray stumbled into the living room of their home. She had been on the verge of collapse for hours now, but had somehow managed to stay upright.
“Eliot!”
She listened, trying to coax any semblance of a response out of the silence, but all she heard was her own labored breaths.
She willed herself past the sofa, where the half-eaten bowl of kettle corn still sat, and toward the hallway that led upstairs. But she stopped short of the doorway. She had walked this path many times in the last two days, and always with the same result: Her calls went unanswered, and Sophina and Eliot’s beds remained empty. Deep down, she knew that this time would be no different.
Gail fell to her knees as a string of bizarre events from the day before replayed in her mind.
She had run to the Grange Hall after escaping the tornado, thankful to find it in one piece. The only people there were Greg Harris, his wife, their son Erickson, and a handful of Thomasville’s elderly residents. Greg had told her that he’d seen Sophina just a short time earlier—a revelation that sent her heart racing.
But what he’d said next was like a splash of icy Gulf water to her face.
“She’s gone. And I doubt she’ll be seen again until she’s good and ready.”
She had pressed him to explain what he meant by “good and ready,” but he refused to elaborate, saying that his grasp of the situation wasn’t strong enough even to try. He did, however, offer her some advice.
“Go home and wait,” he had suggested. “And don’t talk to anyone you see along the way, because it will only confuse you more.” He then asked her to have Sophina contact him when she came home, because he wanted to “discuss a few things” with her.
Gail was furious when she left. It was obvious that Greg had held something back—something big—and the very thought of being kept in the dark enraged her.
Unfortunately, she soon learned the reason for his secrecy. Instead of going home as he’d suggested, she had returned to the shelter at the school. Once inside she saw Beth Durham, a teacher of Sophina’s, whose eyes were wide and bloodshot.
“I saw Sophina!” she gushed. “It was horrible! Her eyes glowed red!”
Beth’s ramblings were difficult enough to follow, but by then several others had joined in—all trying to speak at once.
“A hole opened up in the air—and she jumped through it!”
“The thing that came with her . . . it had no legs!”
“That thing was a man—and he wasn’t alive. Nothing living could’ve melted away like that!”
“She jumped to the ceiling to grab that bug!”
“It wasn’t a bug! Have you ever seen a bug that looks like that?”
Overwhelmed, and wishing that she had taken Greg’s advice, Gail forced her way through the gathering crowd and rushed back out into the lashing rain. She had spent the next few hours revisiting all of Sophina and Eliot’s favorite outdoor haunts, trying to get past the shock of what she had heard.
Sophina jumping through a hole in midair? A dead man with no legs chasing her? Glowing eyes? She had thought about the shadow blobs that had chased her through the woods, but they seemed downright plausible compared to these other claims. There must be a logical explanation for it all, but it eluded her.
She completed her trek around the village by slogging down the road to Glacier Lake Park. She stood on the beach, admonishing herself for being too scared to take the shortcut through the woods. There wasn’t a soul in sight, or a trace of hope in her mind.
And that’s when things got really strange.
As she stood there, the rain had stopped, and the sky became awash in warm red light. She looked skyward—thousands of feet above Jagged Mountain—to find that a hole had formed in the swirling clouds. Through it she saw the peak of a massive, snowcapped mountain.
Just as her mind had begun to absorb the surreal sight, a blinding flash of white light jolted her to her knees, and a horrific ripping sound vibrated the air that touched her skin. Moments later, when the pain in her eyes had subsided, she looked up to find that the phantom peak was gone. In its place was a glorious swath of baby-blue sky.
A tremendous roar swept across the lake as she stared at the fast-expanding hole, and a titanic column of water poured down from the sky and hit the far shore, scouring the sand from the beach.
After that Gail had wandered all night through the debris-filled streets under a clear, moonlit sky, trying in vain to convince herself that she hadn’t lost her mind.
Now, as she sat on her living-room floor, a question she had somehow managed to suppress steamrolled to the forefront of her mind.
What if you never find them?
She had entertained the thought before, of course, but had always been able to squelch it. This time it wasn’t going anywhere. The dogs of misery that had nipped at her heels so often since Stephen’s death had been kept at bay by one thing: her knowledge that Sophina and Eliot depended on her—for everything.
But if they’re really gone, she agonized, that’s . . .
. . . That’s something a mother doesn’t recover from.
“Mommy . . .”
Gail spun around to face Sophina, who stood in the doorway with her arms dra
ped around Eliot. The children ran to her and blanketed her shivering body with their warmth. She smelled their hair, felt their wet cheeks against hers, and heard their sobbing breaths meld with her own.
She wanted to hold them like this forever, but their hands pushed her away. She tried to pull them back until she realized that they were clearing a path to the doorway, where someone else now stood.
For a moment, she was sure that it was all just a cruel dream. She had fallen asleep without realizing it, and her deepest yearning had manifested in her unconscious mind—only to be ripped away from her when she awoke.
But this was no dream. The man who looked at her with tearful eyes was real.
With her children at her side, Gail rose up and met her husband halfway across the floor. No one spoke as two generations came together as one, and she didn’t want it any other way. So many questions needed answers, but this was not the time.
Her family was whole again. And that’s all that mattered.
Table of Contents
Reviews
Copyright
Dedication
1 THE PERPETUAL RAIN
2 THE INTRUDER
3 THE GATEWAY
4 THE VALLEY OF TRELLAH
5 THE ELDERS
6 THE CROSSING
7 THE FOREST OF THE DEAD
8 THE ECLIPSE
9 FRONT-PAGE NEWS
10 THE TWO STORMS
11 THE WRATH OF THE UMBYANS
12 THE CAVERNS OF MOUNT VAHKAR
13 BEHIND THE MASK
14 THE REUNION