“Woman, is there a—”
“Woman?”
She looked like she might jump me. The intensity of her glare pushed me back a step, making me trip over a tree root. I stumbled and fell, opening a gash on the outside of my leg. Excalibur back-stepped out of the way. It was then this feisty woman seemed to notice the horse.
“Who are you?” she asked him in a surprised tone.
I wasn’t sure if she expected him to answer or not.
“This is Excalibur,” I said pushing myself to my feet. Warm blood trickled down my leg. “And I already told you, I am Solomon.”
Glaring sideways at the horse, she took a few steps backward. “Y-yes. You did.” Her gaze fell to the fresh blood on my leg. “Praise the Lord. You need a doctor.” She glanced at Excalibur again, then back to me. “Do you have a pack… with some clothes in it? Some I.D., maybe?”
I held my hand out toward Excalibur. “I have only the horse, and I don’t know for certain that he is mine.”
“And you really don’t know where you came from?”
“I seem to have forgotten, and I shall appreciate any help in the matter of finding out.”
“Really, hmm,” she said low, as if she spoke to herself. She took a moment to consider something, while drumming the fingers of one hand on her hip. After a deep breath, she said, “Okay, come with me. I’ll get you some clothes, and drive you to a hospital, but that’s as far as my goodwill goes, you got that?”
“Thank you…”
“Melba,” she said.
“Melba,” I repeated.
She untied a pink scarf that had been wound three times around her neck and held it out to me.
I looked at the garment, confused.
A blush of red peeked through the brown skin on her cheeks, and she closed her eyes and looked away. “Take it and cover yourself up.”
It was only after the scarf was in my hand that she peered at me from between two fingers.
I looked at the silky offering draped over my fingers, then back at her.
She did an eye-roll thing, snatched the scarf back, then wound it around my waist, tying the loose ends at my hip, all the while her head tilted upward.
When she finished covering me, she turned toward the path and said, “This way.”
My companion and I followed.
Although Melba was tiny, she walked with confidence, her back straight, and her stride strong. She wore her trousers and shirt loose, covering any curves she might have had, and her black silky curls bounced on her shoulders. Her appearance seemed strange to me, but how would I know what was or wasn’t strange, since I did not know otherwise. Yet, although she acted tough, she seemed refined, educated—out of place for… for a woman of color.
She never once looked back to see if I still followed, or if I was about to hit her over the head with something—I still held the gun.
A few minutes later, a familiar and welcome scent wafted past me in a teasing manner as we left the trees behind and walked into a yard. The perfume of peach and magnolia blossoms, swaying on a light breeze, greeted me, welcomed me, and somehow, foretold of spring. I could almost taste their sweet nectar on my tongue. A vision of hot peach pie, cooling on a sill, tugged at my memories. An image of a tiny, older woman of mixed race, similar to Melba, and wearing a flour-dusted apron, appeared in a haze in front of me. I tried with all my might to look past her, to see her surroundings, but like a snap, a sharp noise dissolved the haze, and the vision ended.
The siren blared again, growing louder by the second.
“They’re back,” I whispered, stopping in my tracks, halfway across the yard.
Melba turned, suspicion evident on her features. With her honey brown-eyed glare and matching skin tone, I realized she was indeed a mixture of races, not black or white, but somewhere in between, just like the woman in my vision.
The siren grew louder.
“You mean…” Her gaze widened. “Are you in trouble with the law?”
“No. Maybe… I don’t know.” I gave an honest answer.
Anxiety rushed through me. I was in trouble with the law. I had to be. Were those strangely-uniformed people the law?
After shaking her head and saying, “Why me?” while looking at the sky, she grabbed my wrist and pulled me toward one of the two small buildings that sat this side of a white bungalow.
Just as the blaring vehicle pulled into the driveway out front, Melba opened the wide door of what appeared to be a shed and shoved me inside. “You and,” she gave the horse a look of unease, “your friend can hide here. I’ll get rid of the cops.”
She shut the door on us. Through a crack in a board, I watched as Melba picked up a basket filled with peach blossoms, fussed with her hair, then headed at a fast pace toward the people she called “cops.”
With the distance between us and the breeze hissing through the gaps in the boarded walls, I couldn’t make out what they spoke of. But the cops got back inside their vehicle and left.
Melba came back in a flash.
“They were looking for a drunk, naked man in his mid-twenties, riding a horse.” She raised her thin eyebrows in question.
So I wasn’t very old, about half the age Melba looked. “What did you tell them?”
“I gave them a laugh, and then said I would be on the look-out.”
She wasn’t laughing now.
“I-I’m not drunk.”
“I can see that. But you are naked.” Her gaze fell to the bulging scarf I wore. “If I didn’t know any better, I’d think you were the product of some college prank. But somehow, frat boy doesn’t fit your mannerisms. Are you sure you didn’t jump off the cover of a romance novel?” She gave an airy laugh, and then waved her hand in the air. “Forget I said that.”
“Forgotten.”
Melba spoke strangely. But she seemed trustworthy. She hid me from my pursuers. I had to believe she would help me… remember.
“I suspect you’re hungry?”
I gave her a nod. “Food would be appreciated, ma’am.”
With a laugh, Melba said, “Ma’am?” Then she looked at the ceiling and said, “Lord, what have you got in store for me?”
She stepped outside into the sunlight. “I’ll be back later. I have some things to take care of first.”
Excalibur ventured outside with Melba. He stopped to dine on the uncut clover growing alongside the shed.
“And you,” Melba held a pointed finger to him. “Don’t you touch a blossom on those trees! And stay hidden!”
Excalibur nickered in answer, and then resumed munching clover.
“That’s a fine looking Arabian.”
“Arabian?” I had no clue as to what she meant.
“Your horse. He’s an Arabian, isn’t he?” When I didn’t answer, she continued. “When I was young, there was a farm twenty miles from here that bred Arabian stallions. I always liked their regal look, compared to the old mare we had.”
I took her word for it, since she seemed to know more about everything than I did.
Inside the shed, I found something that looked like a large, green canvas, folded into a square. I opened the stiff object and spread it out on the dirt floor, then looked around for a pillow-type object. A large, shiny bag with the words potting soil printed on the side looked like a fair choice. When I had everything in place, I looked down on the makeshift bed, wondering where I’d slept the previous night. Then I glanced over my torn, damaged body and hauled in a deep breath… at least the searing pain in my throat had lessened. I didn’t want to take advantage of my hostess’s hospitality, but I needed rest.
With a groan, I eased onto my back, my head falling into the dent in the bag my fist created, and waited for Melba to return.
eariness from the day’s events took its toll, and my eyelids grew heavy. As I stared at a shovel and a rake spanned across two rafters, and the cobwebs dangling from them, I caught movement from the corner of my eye. A large spider scurried upside-down across t
he ceiling, stopping at a substantial web in one corner. I watched the arachnid make its way toward a captured fly until my eyes blurred and fell into slits.
The musty scent of earth hovered around me, creating bits of memories to play at the fringes of my mind. The smell of the ground eased into the smell of sweat and blood. Swollen, red lines appeared, crisscrossed, on dark skin. Thick, rusty-scented liquid spilled from bodies like sap from a wounded tree. A feeling of power filled me…
My eyes flew open. I hadn’t meant to fall asleep. Daylight had turned to dusk sometime during my nightmare. I tried playing the gruesome scene back in my head, but the day’s events quickly took over all other thoughts. My first memory was of sitting on Excalibur in the middle of a broken street, chunks of earth and rock everywhere, everything coated in layers of dust and dirt. Water spewed from the ground to my right—something I hadn’t really focused on before; no wonder, with the angry mob’s verbal attack. Had I caused the destruction? Had the destruction caused the damage to my body?
As I lay there willing myself to remember, my eyes grew heavy again. Staying awake became an effort. I tied focusing on the spider but could barely see the creature in the darkened corner. A throbbing pain, or a sting from a wound, kept me on the alert, enough to keep me from falling asleep again. Outside, swaying tree branches brushed against the side of the shed, keeping a steady beat, giving me something to focus on.
My thoughts wandered to Excalibur. He hadn’t come in when Melba left, and she’d closed the door behind her. A sudden craving to see the stallion bloomed inside me. Wincing, I sat up. My body had grown stiff in the hour or so I lay there. A shadow passed over the glow of sunset that came through the little window, casting me for a moment, in total darkness. I waited for Excalibur to pop his big white head inside. But when he didn’t, a bone-chilling prickle crept under my skin.
The shadow transformed into a dark mist, accumulating at the window, thickening on the sill. Like a nightmarish waterfall, it cascaded down the wall, pooling into a black froth on the ground of the shed. Dusk peeped in above it, enough to see the contrast of the gray sky against the invasion of darkness. My wounds stung, and with the pain came the stark realization that I wasn’t dreaming. An evil presence seeped from the entity and traveled through the shed, creeping across the dirt floor toward me, backing me against a wall.
“Excalibur,” I whispered, but he didn’t answer.
The gloom came nearer. I pushed against the studs in the wall, but I had nowhere to go. The darkness swallowed my feet first, and then my legs, as the creepiness traveled up my body faster than I could move away.
I tried grabbing it, swatting at it as if it was a nest of ants crawling up my legs, but it continued advancing. Standing now, I reached overhead, until my hand came in contact with the shovel. I pulled it down, and with a tight grip on the handle, I swung the makeshift weapon out in an arc in front of me, as if I could swat the emptiness away. When the shadow reached my neck, icy fingers closed around my throat, tightening, twisting my skin in opposite directions until the breath ceased expelling from my lungs. When I thought the veins in my face would burst, a rectangular beam of dusk shot across the floor. A woman screamed. The shadow retreated faster than I’d ever seen anything move.
I drew in a long raspy breath, as my widened gaze met Melba’s—equally as wide. One hand gripped something that hung around her neck. In the other, she carried a load.
“Spirits help me,” she said while tracing invisible signs in the air with her fingers.
After a couple deep breaths, I realized I still held the shovel above my head. I lowered the tool, searching the room as I did. The shadow had retreated the way it came in, the moment Melba opened the door to the shed. Had she seen it?
Exhaustion took its toll. The shovel fell from my trembling hands, and I fell to my knees with such force, a roar of pain escaped me.
Melba fell to the floor beside me. She laid her hand on my shoulder, then immediately retracted it, as if something had bitten her. She fell backward, landing on her behind. With my head fallen forward and sharp pains shooting down my back, I turned my head to the side, enough to see her through my hair.
Her brown skin had paled. The load she’d been carrying scattered on the floor around her. She even seemed to have stopped breathing. Then she sucked in a gust of air and closed her mouth.
“Did you see it?” I asked with a rasp, my shoulders heaving.
Melba snapped out of her contortion of fear.
“A strange, naked man trying to kill me? Yes, I saw it.” Her chest rose and fell with her heavy breathing.
I shook my head. “No. I… you saw it, didn’t you?”
She cradled the hand that touched me in her other, rubbing it gingerly. Then she narrowed her hazel eyes on me. “Only evil has the energy to pass from one soul into another. You’re crossed with it.”
“Evil? What kind of evil?”
“A dark aura surrounds you, Solomon” Her expression softened. “Yet, I feel it has not taken your soul. But something sinister wants it… wants your soul.”
What could want my soul? Whatever Melba spoke of, maybe it had already taken my soul, and my memories with it, and now I was an empty shell of what I once was.
Melba came out of her shock and picked an object off the ground. She flipped a switch at the base of what looked like a lantern, and light beamed from the upper half, casting a warm glow in the small space. After hanging the lantern from a nail on a beam, she picked up a square container, took off the top, and handed it to me.
I examined the contents: cooked chicken, sliced between bread, a piece of frosted cake, and a pear. Then she sat a jug filled with water in front of me, and handed me a tubular container filled with what she called herbed tea.
“Drink the tea first. It’ll sooth your throat and whatever else ails you.” Melba saw me struggle to remove the top. “Turn it.
A burst of hot steam shot up my nose, and with it, a pungent odor spiked with undertones of citrus and mint; all in all, not bad. By the second sip, the rawness in my throat lifted.
While I savored the strange concoction, Melba pulled a small bottle from her trouser pocket. With it, she proceeded to spray a fine mist into the air until the inside of the shed felt almost humid. I couldn’t make out what she mumbled as she sprayed; something about cleansing, and evil spirits.
While she did her thing, I lifted a slice of bread, noticing a white, creamy substance slathered on the inside of the slices.
“Mayo,” Melba said looking down at me in mid-spray, as if I should know. “You’ve had mayonnaise before, right?”
“It’s highly probable,” I decided, and took a bite and then another. The food tasted wonderful, like the first meal I’d ever eaten.
As the last sip of luke-warm tea pushed the last bite of bread and chicken down my throat, Melba pulled a bucket from a corner and sat on it. She toyed back and forth with a strange wooden carving that hung from her neck on a gold chain, and a tiny, red pouch that hung beside it.
“Thank you for the food. I shall pay you once I find my… my—”
“Identity?”
“I guess so.”
“Hmm, the sane thing to do would be to take you to a hospital, where they can have the police check for missing persons, or file a report, or whatever they do.” She leaned forward, letting go of the objects around her neck. “But I fear you need a different kind of protecting, Solomon.”
When she said the name, pertaining to me, adrenaline rushed through me, shooting a thrill along my veins, charging my insides, making me feel stronger. In that moment, I knew without a doubt I was Solomon. Brandt, on the other hand, I had trouble connecting with.
“Brandt.” As I said the name out loud, a shudder tore through me.
“Brandt?” Melba repeated. “Solomon Brandt?” Her eyes narrowed. “That can’t be your name.”
“It is my name.” As I defended the name as my own, I detected a note of authority in my voice that hadn
’t been there before.
“Is that so?” Melba said dubiously. “Hmm, you do look sort of like…”
“Like who?”
“No one. I have the strangest feeling about you… Solomon Brandt. You were sent to me for a purpose.” Her gaze fell to the floor, to the left of her, and she spoke almost to herself. “And for some strange reason, I don’t think it would be wise to send you away.”
She bent forward and rummaged through a sack, pulling out a small wooden dish. She took off the wooden cover and stuck her fingers in what looked like dirty grease. Then she proceeded to cover each scratch and gash over my entire body with what she called healing tincture.
“This will warm your skin and deep heal those wounds. The spicy scent also has a calming effect.”
When she had my wounds dressed, she picked up the bundle she’d dropped earlier.
“Here, put these on.” She held up strange-looking undergarments, a plaid shirt, and trousers, then laid them by my feet. “I’ll bring you water for bathing in the morning; the tincture must have time to do its work.”
When Melba turned on the bucket to face the other way, I got the hint and picked up the clothes. The undergarments stretched over my bruised skin, but the trousers and shirt barely fit over my brawn.
“I don’t think they fit,” I said as I tried futilely to stretch the shirt fabric so both ends met. The buttons were at least eight inches from the holes.
Melba spun in a half-circle on the bucket. “Hmm, I’ll have to find something suitable for you to wear.” She looked longingly at the shirt covering my shoulders. “These were my husband’s clothes.”
“Were?”
“He passed nearly fifteen years ago, at just thirty-six.” Moisture pooled at the corners of her eyes as she spoke. “He was cutting down a tree with his chainsaw when a gust of wind came up out of nowhere and pushed the tree in the wrong direction… he died instantly.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Yes, well, that was a long time ago, but feels like just yesterday.” A melancholy smile appeared on her face. She lifted the other items she brought with her. “I guess these boots won’t be of any use to you, either. They’re only a size nine. I don’t suppose you know what size shoe you take?”
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