The Lodestone
by J. Philip Horne
Novels by Mr. Horne:
The Lodestone (2011)
Joss the Seven (2016)
For news of upcoming works, please join Mr. Horne’s email list at
http://www.jphiliphorne.com
To Abigail, Jonathan, Nicolas, and Josiah.
You bring me joy.
Copyright © 2011 by J. Philip Horne
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current U.S. law, no part of this book may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the author.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.
http://www.jphiliphorne.com
Contents
Chapter 1 - Vines
Chapter 2 - Drakin
Chapter 3 - Kansas?
Chapter 4 - Wizards
Chapter 5 - Wyvern
Chapter 6 - Thorns
Chapter 7 - Derek Harland
Chapter 8 - Kansas
Chapter 9 - Rabid Raccoons
Chapter 10 - Escape
Chapter 11 - Denver
Chapter 12 - Dwarves
Chapter 13 - Betrayal
Chapter 14 - Three Carts
Chapter 15 - To the Forest
Chapter 16 - The Cellar
Chapter 17 - Peppers
Chapter 18 - Planning
Chapter 19 - Rescue
Chapter 20 - Recover
Chapter 21 - The Lodestone
Chapter 22 - The Seal
Chapter 23 - Mirrors
Chapter 24 - Resolve
Chapter 25 - Hillacre
Chapter 26 - Final Countdown
Chapter 27 - Mom
Two-Chapter Preview of Joss the Seven
About the Author
Chapter 1
VINES
JACK PARIS’S ARMS prickled with sweat as he walked to the bus stop. The Texas sun ruled the morning sky, raining down heat. Jack shivered and jerked his head around, looking, but saw nothing.
His breath came in quick bursts as his feet carried him forward by force of habit. Past five houses and one empty lot. He’d taken the same steps from Miss Edna’s house to the bus stop for the past four years. Something was different this morning. Something evil.
The school bus rumbled up to the corner and let out a loud gasp as it pulled to a stop. Jack rushed up the steps into it and looked around. The boys all sat in a cluster toward the back. Sara wasn’t there, leaving an empty row since no one ever sat by her. Everything looked normal. He stepped forward and took his usual seat by Sally, who didn’t bother looking up from her book as he flopped down beside her and kicked his backpack under the seat in front of them.
The bus accelerated forward and around the corner, heading back the way Jack had walked. He stared at the worn gray seat-back in front of him and tried to contain a growing panic. As the bus pulled past Miss Edna’s house, Jack’s skin crawled with a sensation of hateful watching. The shock froze him in his seat, rigid and breathless, and then it was gone as the bus rumbled down the road.
“Boys are so gross,” Sally said, scrunching her nose up and looking at him with girl disdain. “It’s not even that hot yet. How did you manage to get so sweaty?”
Jack tried to respond, but his throat and jaw were still clenched tight. I’m not sweaty, he wanted to say, but at that very moment he felt a bead of sweat on his forehead break free and become a trickle, slowly winding down between his eyebrows and along his nose until it reached the tip and hung there like the overripe pears in Miss Edna’s backyard.
“Fine, Jack, just sit there cross-eyed looking at your nose. Real mature.” With that, Sally made a show of turning away from Jack and back to her book.
“I, I don’t know why I’m sweaty,” Jack said as he wrestled his jaw into submission and wiped the sweat from his nose and forehead. “Hey, Sally, did you just feel something weird as we pulled past Miss Edna’s house?”
“First off,” Sally said, not looking up from her book, “I’m not talking to you at the moment. Second, the only weird thing going on this morning is you. Third, why can’t you call it your house? I know she’s not your mom, but you’ve lived there for years.”
Sally spent the rest of the ride reading her book while twirling a curl of blonde hair just behind her left ear. Jack sat still and breathed, gradually calming down. When Brad gave him an elbow to the back of the head as everyone shuffled off the bus, it was reassuringly normal. Jack always liked to exit last, which was fine with Sally since it gave her more time to read.
The school day dragged by as though seventh grade itself were grinding to a halt in the sweltering late May heat. Back on the school bus that afternoon, Jack plopped down beside Sally and tried to sit so that none of his skin touched the vinyl seat as the bus’s air conditioner roared ineffectively. He tensed in anticipation when the bus turned onto Maple Street, but Miss Edna’s house flew by uneventfully. The bus jerked slowly to a stop at the next corner, and Jack grabbed his backpack and headed for the door.
As he walked back up the street toward Miss Edna’s small, overgrown yard, his steps slowed and his eyes restlessly scanned all the nooks and crannies of the houses he passed. Something felt wrong. When he reached the edge of Miss Edna’s yard he stopped, dropped his backpack to the ground, and strained his mind to understand what he was seeing. In a flash of inspiration he realized that it wasn’t what he was seeing, but what he wasn’t seeing. There was no motion or noise. No squirrels, or birds, or bugs. It was dead calm.
Jack panicked. Leaving his backpack to fend for itself, he made a dash for the front door, ripped the key from his pocket, and fumbled the door open. Inside he slammed it shut, locked it, and sat down hard with his back to the door. His head slumped between his knees and he tried to get his breathing under control. A minute later, he looked up and found eight pairs of feline eyes staring at him.
“What’s going on, Peppers?” Jack asked the black-and-white patched cat he considered the leader. “It’s freaky out there. And why are all of you sitting in here?” Jack stopped and counted them again. Eight. He looked from cat to cat. Peppers, Hopper, and Moses. Cleopatra and Antony together off to the side. Juniper, Loki, and Houdini. “Hey! Where’s Roscoe? Why are all of you sitting here staring at me with Roscoe missing? Go find him! Go!”
Jack jumped to his feet and waved his arms at the cats, but they calmly ignored him and stayed put. Giving up, he headed to the kitchen, grabbed an apple to munch on, and started doling out food to the nine cat-bowls spread along the floor near the back door. Doing normal things calmed him down and helped him think.
Jack went back to the front door and paused in front of it. His backpack was out there on the sidewalk. It would make sense to go get it, if thinking about it didn’t make his stomach clench up toward his throat. Why was he scared?
Jack forced himself to name his fear. “I’m scared of the missing squirrels and birds and bugs, and of a creepy feeling that no one else feels.” The door listened placidly.
“Boy, does that sound stupid when you say it out loud,” Jack muttered as he unlocked the door and swung it open. All the cheerful little noises of life greeted him. Bugs, lizards, birds, squirrels. Even the Smiths’ dog two doors down was barking its head off. He stood for a moment and drank in the sounds and motions, then marched out and retrieved his backpack.
After working through his homework, Jack checked the clock. There was half hour until dusk, and Miss Edna wouldn’t get home from the county hospital until full dark, so he had time for a quick trip to the bluff to clear his head. He grabbed a bott
le of water and a flashlight from the kitchen, and headed out the back door. Jack followed a narrow stream that ran behind Miss Edna’s house, through the neighborhood, cutting under streets in giant culverts, and out into the east Texas scrub beyond. A well-worn path had been cut through the bushes and scrub trees surrounding the stream by years of neighborhood children following the water. Soon he was past the last house and cutting the corner toward the small river into which the stream emptied what little water it had to offer.
Half a mile ahead the hill lurched above its surroundings, an affront to the east Texas flatness. It rose a hundred feet in a sharp crescendo to a hilltop with a steep bluff overlooking the riverbed. Jack had felt the pull of the hill like a slow, implacable tide in his gut ever since Miss Edna had moved them to the small town of Hillacre after taking him into foster care in Paris, Texas. If he concentrated, he could feel the gentle tug of the hill and turn toward it even when they visited the Wal-Mart fifteen miles down the road in Turner. Jack felt like he and the hill belonged together.
He wound his way around the thickets of scrub trees that dotted the land to the base of the hill and ran up its back to the lonely, huge red oak that stood at the summit. Gasping for air, he collapsed onto the ground at the side of the tree. The air up on the hill was better, stirred by winds that the ground below fended off with a layer of hot, rising air. With the help of the breeze, Jack caught his breath and sat up. He was sitting beside the tree near the edge of the bluff and looked out for miles over empty east Texas land to the south. To his right, partially obscured by the tree trunk, the sun was just slipping below the horizon, but dusk was a drawn-out affair in the summer, so he could still see for miles. The tree sat within a few feet of sharp incline straight down to a rocky riverbed, and its roots could be seen from below fighting to hold on to the side of the bluff.
The vines were what really drew the eye. Huge, ropey, tropical lianas draped the oak, humbling it under their weight. Six of the vines hung down from upper limbs into the empty space beyond the bluff over the riverbed. Those vines made even less sense than the hill, and no one in town seemed to know why they were on this one tree in all of Texas. They hung much farther out than he could hope to jump, and even if he could jump far enough, he wasn’t sure what he would do next, hanging out there over empty space.
“One day,” Jack said to the vines, “I’m going to run like the wind across this hill, jump out over the empty, and catch one of you.”
“Then one day,” the tree said in Sally’s voice, “you are going to smash your body all over those rocks below.”
Jack leapt to his feet and raced around the tree to find a smirking Sally sitting with her back to the trunk, a book in her lap. He gathered his breath for a retort when a sharp, explosive crack sounded, followed a moment later by a gust of wind that knocked Jack to the ground.
Chapter 2
DRAKIN
JACK HIT THE ground a few feet from the precipice, and his water bottle flew out of his hand and disappeared over the edge. His mind was racing. It was just too many weird things in one day to be unrelated. He looked at Sally and realized she was struggling to find her voice so she could let loose with a scream. He rolled over and sat up next to her, covering her mouth with his hand putting a finger to his lips with the other.
“Shhhhh,” he whispered. “Keep your mouth shut. Something’s going on. Something bad.”
“What was that?” she whispered fiercely. “Did you do it?”
“What? Of course not. Now be quiet and follow me.”
Jack didn’t wait for her to argue. He started crawling forward so he could see down the back side of the hill, and a moment later he heard Sally following him. As they got out from underneath the tree, the ground started tilting down ever steeper, and Jack saw motion up ahead. He flattened himself on the ground and Marine-crawled until he could see down the hill, but nothing made any sense. He rubbed his eyes and looked again. Sally scooted up next to him and let out a gasp, confirming he wasn’t seeing things.
Two men were headed down the hill, surrounded by a shadowy group of large something. At the center was a tall man in blood-red robes. Beside him was an even larger man wearing only a kilt and boots, covered in medieval weapons held to his body by all sorts of leather straps and cords and sheathes. The things around them, the animals, made no sense. Jack blinked hard and tried to get a better look as the group reached the bottom of the hill and were swallowed by shadows in the failing light, but the group quickly disappeared behind a thicket of trees.
“Jack,” Sally said, “I’m scared.”
“About time. I’ve been scared all day.”
“I thought they were apes, or, I don’t know, maybe gorillas since they were so big. But did you see that one that looked back this way? That was no gorilla.”
“I know. Sally, we need to move,” Jack said. “Stay close, okay?”
Sally didn’t look okay. It was hard to tell in the gathering dark, but she looked like she was about to throw up. “Sally, come on. This isn’t one of your books. Let’s get going.”
Sally clenched her jaw and gave a quick nod. Jack stood and set off at a run down the hill.
Miss Edna offered a confident, strong security that Jack had never experienced before meeting her four years ago, and he desperately hoped she would be home when they got there. At the bottom of the hill, he angled more east than north to intercept the path by the stream. He kept a hard pace, running and weaving through the scrub, until they came to the crease in the land that held the stream.
They hit the path as it approached full dark. Jack pulled the flashlight out of his back pocket and tried to aim it down the path as he increased their pace. A minute later the first winking lights of the neighborhood on the edge of Hillacre came into view. They reached the back of Miss Edna’s house a few minutes later. Jack stopped to see if Sally wanted to go on to her house, but she ran right by him and up to the back door. Jack sprinted after her, and they crashed through the door at the same time. Just as he locked the door, they heard the front door open, and Sally let out a little squeal.
“Jack? Who’s with you?” Miss Edna called from the front room.
“Miss Edna,” Jack called as relief swept through him, “It’s Sally. Ma’am, can we talk? Everything’s all wrong.”
“We saw monsters!” Sally said, as Miss Edna stepped into the room, surrounded by cats weaving around her feet. She was a tall, strong woman who wore her blue medical scrubs with real dignity. Her straight brown hair was in a long ponytail, and her face, which somehow looked both old and ageless, was creased with concern.
“Jack, Sally,” Miss Edna said, “sit down at the table. I need some information, and it’ll help if I get it quickly. Where were you and what did you see?” She immediately held up a hand to stop them as Jack and Sally sat and both started to speak. “Sally, let’s hear it from you first.”
“We were up on the hill. Well, not together. I was reading, and then Jack showed up, and then there was an explosion. Not like, you know, a bomb in a movie. More like, oh, lightning. Lightning, right there on the hill, without a cloud in the sky. And no actual flash of light. So maybe more a thunderclap.”
“Okay, Sally, thank you,” Miss Edna said. “Stay calm, dear. Jack, do you agree? A thunderclap, but no lightning?”
“Yes ma’am,” Jack said.
Miss Edna’s brow furrowed, and Jack thought she looked scared. He’d never seen her scared before, so he wasn’t sure, but it looked like fear on her face.
“What next, Sally?”
“We crept forward,” Sally said, “and saw two men surrounded by, oh, it was awful, Miss Edna! They looked like gorillas, but they had heads like a wolf or something.”
Miss Edna sat down hard in one of the chairs. “Which way were they headed, Sally?”
“Toward town,” Sally said. “I think it was toward town.”
“There’s more, Miss Edna,” Jack said, unable to contain himself any longer. “I’ve been s
cared all day. Something was creeping me out this morning, and then when I got home after school, it was quiet for a while. No birds, no nothing. And Roscoe is missing.”
Miss Edna’s face fell into sadness. “Roscoe isn’t missing, my dear Jack. He’s dead. I can feel it in my bones. But we’ll have to mourn him another time. Now listen carefully, you two. Sally, your parents are away, correct?” Sally nodded. “Serena is watching you for the next few days?” Sally nodded again. “All right, I’m going to call Serena and lie to her, you understand? For her safety, I need to make sure she doesn’t wander around looking for you, but I don’t want to risk sending you home just yet, okay. So I’m going to deliberately lie to her for her own safety and yours. Understood? You must stay here, and Serena must not come looking for you.”
With that, Miss Edna stood and lifted the phone from the kitchen counter. As she dialed, she walked to the front living room. Jack strained to hear her words, but only heard a snatch or two about Sally being sick and falling asleep at Miss Edna’s house.
“Jack, I’m scared,” Sally said for the second time that evening. A tear tipped out of her left eye and fell to the kitchen table. Jack felt his own throat constricted with fear, but hated to see her cry. It made everything awkward. He reached out and smeared the tear across the table.
“All right, children,” Miss Edna said as she stepped back into the kitchen, “to action. Both of you hustle through the bathroom, then start pulling any non-perishable food out of cabinets and arrange it on the counter for me. Don’t forget bottled water. Understood?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Jack and Sally said at the same time. She nodded to them and swept out of the room toward her bedroom. Miss Edna no longer carried herself like a strong, maybe a little weird, cat-loving foster mom. To Jack, she had the bearing of a queen. Jack and Sally glanced at each other, and they both shrugged.
While Sally ran to the bathroom, Jack started pulling various snacks and canned goods out of the pantry and cabinets. When Sally got back, he ran to the bathroom. He found Sally still rummaging through every drawer and shelf when he returned to the kitchen. Suddenly, Miss Edna was back, and Jack dropped the can of beans he was holding when he saw her. She was wearing a deep green robe, with the only ornamentation a silver cross on a heavy chain around her neck. Her hair fell down over her shoulders, freed from the ponytail. In her left hand she held a magnificent staff of dark, gnarled, polished wood, and in her right hand was a shotgun.
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