I couldn’t afford to live like that anymore.
I couldn’t do anything about the sorrow, couldn’t force myself to be happy. But I could try harder to leave the guilt behind. Not that I didn’t have things to feel guilty about. Because I did. My lack of awareness had contributed to Ben’s death and ruined my life, not to mention what it did to Kate. And my selfishness had dragged Ty down for too long.
But I needed to move past it so that I could see what was in front of me and up ahead. I needed to travel light.
Later, Lupe came up to me while I was taking my afternoon break.
“José told us what you did,” she said.
“You mean last night?”
“Yes.”
“But all he did was drive me around,” I said. “I didn’t talk to him about it. Wait, he doesn’t see ghosts, does he?”
“No, but he said the strangest thing happened while he was standing out there in the park. There was no one else there, just the two of you, and he said he heard someone laughing. He said it sounded like a little girl.”
I smiled at her and nodded.
“Abuelita says she will help you now,” Lupe said. “Tonight, after everyone has gone to bed. She will meet you by the campfire and will help you on your journey.”
CHAPTER 62
I walked out to the small campfire and sat down next to it. A few others were there, quiet and sitting in a circle, staring into the flames.
“Drink this,” the old woman said, handing me a cup.
I took a sip of the dark liquid as smoke weaved around me.
“Every drop,” she said in a language I had never heard but could somehow understand.
I drank deeply as she sang, and when I looked back over at her, I could see that the flames now danced in her eyes and I could see their color. Vivid reds and oranges lit up her face, but soon the smoke came in and took everything away and I was lost in the clouds of the fire.
“It is time now,” she said and once again I understood the unfamiliar language and my head began to spin and my body began to spin and I was spinning around the circle, spinning through space, like the earth around the sun.
Faster and faster I went. And the faster I moved the more peace I felt. Then the cloud of smoke parted and I could see the old woman again and I could see the fire again. She threw something into it, setting off embers that flew high up into the dark sky. The sweet smell of sage filled the air and I breathed it in and my troubles all melted and burned in the flames, their ashes carried on the wind.
An owl hooted in the distance and the old woman said, “Follow the sound. Follow the sound and fall back into the waters of your death.”
I closed my eyes and fell and fell and fell, deep into the black, frozen lake. But when I opened them I was floating on the surface, the sun warm on my face, and saw the trees and above them the white puffy clouds up in the sky.
“You must go deeper,” I heard the old woman say. “You must leave the light to see what you have come to see.”
I fell back into the water again, letting myself drop into the darkness. My eyes were open, but I could not see. Down I went and it was bottomless and I felt that it would never end.
But then I awoke and found myself on a small boat shrouded in fog.
CHAPTER 63
When the fog swirled around and slowly lifted, I could see that the stranger sitting across from me had white hair and a scraggly beard escaping from under his hood. His gnarled, boney fingers wrapped tightly around the wooden oars and a look of dread colored his face.
He stopped rowing and began to speak as he pointed at something I couldn’t see.
“The horror,” he whispered, his voice shaking like a thousand leaves in the wind. “The horror.”
His eyes bulged in the direction of whatever it was that filled him with so much terror, but all I could see now was the water, black and still, all around.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “What is this place?”
“This is the river between life and death.” He dropped his oars, gesturing wildly again, and shrieked, “But the die is cast!”
And that’s when I saw them.
Standing at the edge of the shore.
Dark figures, too many to count, moving slowly toward the water.
“Who are they?” I whispered, inhaling some of the dank, lifeless air surrounding the boat.
“They are the undead, those too afraid to face judgment in the afterlife, too afraid to face their maker. Unclean souls who only wish to return to the life of the flesh back there across the river.”
He pointed behind me, but when I turned I saw only the dark water and a thick fog bank in the distance.
“The die is cast,” the old man screamed again, shaking his head violently. “The die is cast!”
As the murkiness continued to burn off across the way, I began to see more detail. As he had said, the figures on the shore were not alive. I could see that clearly now, see the skin hanging from their bodies, their arms and legs misshapen and deformed. They were not men, but appeared to be grotesque ghouls of their former selves. They had no eyes, only silver circles covering the empty sockets as they stumbled along the sandy shoreline.
“He seeks to lift the veil between life and death,” the boatman said. “He is building a bridge across the river back to the other side. When he is finished, earth will become just another Hell.”
I looked and now saw hundreds, maybe thousands, of the ghouls form a shadow that moved across the black shore like a swarm of locust.
“Oh, my God,” I said, bringing my hand to my mouth.
But there was no God in this dark and barren place. No sky. No sun. No Heaven. No hope. No life.
Only death, and things far worse than death.
He stepped out of the fog and stood on the shore, surrounded by the things, his hair slicked back in that familiar ponytail, his gaze vivid and alert as he stared out across the water.
And when our eyes met, he smiled, and I understood fully the boatman’s terror.
CHAPTER 64
I woke up alone in the cabin.
I rubbed the sleep from my eyes and looked down at my watch and saw that somehow it was already past nine in the morning. I sat up in the bunk and thought back to the night before.
My head hurt a little, but other than that everything seemed in place and I felt okay. The ceremony was hazy but the vision itself was burned into my memory forever. I had seen what I needed to see and knew what I needed to do.
While the coffee brewed, I looked out the window and saw the workers in the field across the way. I poured a cup and brought it outside with me, sitting down in the old woman’s chair and gently gliding back and forth as I listened to the morning. Birds sang in the breeze, a tractor engine sputtered in the distance, horses snorted and whinnied over by the barn. The air smelled fresh and clean with the sweet, mild scent of the chile peppers blowing in the wind.
I saw Lupe and the old woman look back my way and then start walking toward me. I left my cup on the porch and met them on the dirt road.
“Buenos días, Dolores,” the old woman said.
“Buenos días, Abuelita,” I said. “Y mi nombre es Abby.”
Lupe smiled.
“Ahora le creo. Ese sí que es su nombre,” the old woman said. “Very beautiful.”
“So you survived the night?” Lupe said.
“Yes, I feel good. Please tell your grandmother I appreciate everything she’s done for me. I won’t forget her. Or you, Lupe. Gracias. De mi alma.”
The old woman nodded and whispered something to Lupe as she stared at me with large, mournful eyes. She took off a necklace that had been hidden in her shirt.
“¿Estas segura, Abuelita?” Lupe said.
“Sí, sí.”
Lupe turned to me.
“She wants you to have this. It’s her St. Christopher’s medal that she’s worn since she was a little girl. She wants you to take it for your journey. It will help protect
you.”
“No,” I said. “That’s too—”
But the old woman shook her head and held the chain out in front of me. I bent over and let her slide it around my neck.
“Gracias,” I said, looking down at the medal.
Abuelita spoke again.
“She says she has had a dream about you and the blue-eyed man. She wants you to know that she was not wrong about him. He has fallen and cannot erase the things he has done. But she now sees that she only saw one side of his face, that he is seeking his own path toward redemption.”
The old woman said something else and Lupe shook her head.
“No,” Lupe whispered. “No, Abuelita.”
“Sí,” the old woman said. “Sí. Dile.”
“What is it?” I said.
Lupe looked at me.
“I don’t want to tell you this next part, but she insists.”
“Tell me.”
“It’s about how the dream ends.” Lupe took in a deep breath as she held my gaze. “She saw you die.”
I swallowed my heart and looked over at the old woman.
“She thought you should know. She will pray for you, every night. Me, too.”
“Vaya con Dios, Abby,” Abuelita said, taking my hands and squeezing them in hers.
She said something else and then reached over and hugged me. She looked at me one last time and then hobbled down the road, back to the field.
“You are a spirit of the light she says. But that the light is sometimes swallowed by the darkness.”
I bit my lip and nodded.
“Adios, Abby,” Lupe said.
“Adios, Lupe.”
CHAPTER 65
I packed a few of my clothes and left the rest. I slid the money Kate had brought for me, the credit card, and my new ID into my left front pocket and the pepper spray in the right. I rolled up the paring knife tightly in a T-shirt and placed it in the outer compartment of the pack. I left the Walkman with the old cassette tapes on Lupe’s pillow, along with the Dodgers cap at the foot of her bunk. I took the money I had collected from one of the white-haired men a few minutes earlier and wrapped it in the scarf Abuelita had given me that day in the field. Then I left it on her bed.
I checked everything one more time to make sure I hadn’t forgotten anything important and saw the phone Kate had brought me. I picked it up and held it tight.
I wanted to call Ty and tell him that I loved him with my whole heart, more than ever, till the day I died. I wanted to hear his voice again, and I wanted to say goodbye.
But instead I brushed away a tear, dropped the phone back in the pack, and headed out the door.
CHAPTER 66
I walked along the lonely stretch of road, hoping the old woman was wrong, wishing the wishes of a condemned man as he stands before the gallows.
Wishing that there was another way.
But then I thought of Nathaniel Mortimer.
He had been helpless to save his wife when she died from a brain aneurysm and something in his own brain had snapped. From then on he had been obsessed with finding a way to bring the dead back to life. That’s what drew him to me. When I died he injected me with something that he claimed brought me back. He had tried and failed to duplicate that initial success with the people he had killed in Bend and other places. That’s why he kidnapped and tried to drown me a second time on that island as his team of scientists looked on.
But death was not the end of his obsession. Somehow, he was able to come back, at first in spirit form, and then as something else, something that could take over the bodies of the living. But in his mad dream, that was not enough. It was just the beginning.
Nathaniel Mortimer was out there somewhere, looming in the shadows, tilling and sowing in his garden. His garden of evil. Waiting until the day when he would reap his wicked crop of death and destruction and unleash hell upon the world.
There was no turning back, no running away.
He was my destiny.
And because of the vision, I now had a pretty good idea where I could find him. I had seen a clue.
He was growing stronger and stronger. But I knew I couldn’t rush. I needed to prepare. I would only get one chance and I needed to make the most of it, to somehow match his strength when the day came, and find a way of destroying him once and for all.
CHAPTER 67
I jumped when I suddenly noticed the fallen angel walking next to me.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” I said after I caught my breath. “Why the Clash? I mean, does your shirt have some special meaning? A symbol of rebellion? The end of the world?”
Samael turned and looked at me.
“No, nothing that apocalyptic,” he said. “I just like their music.”
We continued on the empty road in silence, the vast desert of sagebrush and bear grass and cacti spread out around us. After walking all day, my feet were sore. But I didn’t mind. It was a nice change from being on my knees.
“There’s an old barn up ahead where you can spend the night,” Samael said. “And a gas station a little farther up from there has a motorcycle for sale. It’s seen better days but it will get you where you need to go.”
“I don’t know how to ride a motorcycle. Are you trying to get me killed, Samael?”
“You can do it, Abby.”
I took in a breath and let it out slowly.
“What else is on your mind?” he said, looking at me with those icy eyes.
I stopped.
“The old woman. She told me that you’ve done some bad things.”
He looked down at the ground for a moment.
“She’s right,” he said. “I have.”
“But she also said that there is hope for you. That you’re on a path of redemption.”
His eyes flinched for half a second, and then he turned away.
“I remember now,” I said, a thousand feet later. “That first time we met.”
“How much do you remember?”
“All of it. You were at the bottom of the frozen lake where I drowned. That was you.”
He nodded.
We walked on as the sun fell away, leaving us in the deepening shadows, with Venus burning just above the line that separates the earth from the sky, burning through the darkness and lighting our way.
THE END
The adventure continues…
Forty-Four Book Twelve
coming Valentine’s Day 2015
Also new from Jools Sinclair…
Who says you can never go home again? Go back to high school with Abby and Jesse, back to a simpler time, back to where it all began... before that fateful day on that icy mountain road that would change them both forever.
It's almost Thanksgiving and the biggest game of Abby Craig's life is just days away. But before she can focus on scoring goals, she has to help Jesse solve a mystery that's been haunting the school's basketball team for the last fifty years. Meanwhile, her boyfriend Conner is proving to be a whole different kind of distraction. Will Abby be able to juggle it all or will her junior year end up being a real turkey?
This heartwarming short story is a prequel to Forty-Four, which has been downloaded by more than half a million readers. The Road Not Taken is approximately 10,000 words long.
The Forty-Four Collection
Forty-Four
Forty-Four Book Two
Forty-Four Book Three
Forty-Four Book Four
Forty-Four Book Five
Forty-Four Book Six
Forty-Four Book Seven
Forty-Four Book Eight
Forty-Four Book Nine
Forty-Four Book Ten
Forty-Four Box Set, Books 1-5
Forty-Four Box Set, Books 1-10
The Road Not Taken (An Abby & Jesse Short Story)
Forty-Four Book Twelve (coming Valentine’s Day 2015)
Available on Amazon.com
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About the Author
Like her main character, Jools Sinclair lives in Bend, Oregon. She is currently working on the next exciting installment in the Forty-Four series.
Learn more about Jools Sinclair and the Forty-Four series at… JoolsSinclair.com
Praise for Forty-Four
*****
A FANTASTIC novel! 44 was just about impossible to put down once I started. From the very beginning, there was an air of mystery that kept me on the edge of my seat… I highly recommend this fantastic novel!
The Caffeinated Diva
*****
Everything from the setting, to the time frame, to the characters, was beautifully developed. This book is truly a gem and I highly recommend it. It literally took my breath away.
Avery’s Book Review
*****
Sinclair sucked me in like a vacuum cleaner sucks up dirt. She brings mystery, love, and friendship to the book and weaves a lovely tale.
Just Another Book Addict
*****
IMPRESSIVE! 44 is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, and will take readers by storm. With so much information in such a small book it will impress readers to the detail and depth in so few pages. The conclusion will take your breath away. Don’t miss you chance to check out this amazing story.
The Book Whisperer
*****
Fantastic, edge of your seat thriller. A MUST READ! It twists you about and as soon as you think you have it all figured out, throws you for the final loop with an ending that will break the hardest heart.
Wormhole
Forty-Four
Forty-Four Book Two
Forty-Four Book Eleven (44 series 11) Page 13