Sanctuary

by E. Edgar Price

  *****

  A huge splash erupted from the pool when Benji canon-balled in. The cool water engulfed him and he quickly stretched out and stroked to the surface. The pool wasn’t very deep and he’d nearly sunk to the bottom after that last dive, so he considered abandoning the game when he gulped in air. He swam to the side of the pool and pulled himself out of the water.

  “I wish it was deeper,” he called out to Jessie. She was lying on a lounger at the edge of the pool in a dark purple swimsuit with a red ball cap shading her eyes. She seemed intent on a paperback book, but looked up to answer him.

  “I know, it’s pretty shallow compared to the community center, but I can trade in size for comfort and crowd control.”

  “The community center?” Benji inquired, grabbing a towel from a nearby chair.

  “Like a YMCA,” his cousin explained. “They just finished it a few years ago. It has a big outdoor pool with high dives. The depth goes down nearly twenty feet, but the whole town shows up during the summer; too noisy.”

  “I guess,” Benji said. Jessie went back to her book and Benji commandeered another lounger to finish drying off in the sun. He put his hands behind his head and looked around at the pool. This had to be the most awesome house he’d ever seen, though, he’d probably keep that thought to himself for a while. He was still angry at having to be here at all, despite the cool house.

  After the meeting with Grandpa, he went upstairs and lay on his bed willing his mind to process day. The tour had been alright, he wasn’t much interested in the farm, but he liked the oversized chessboard and the maze. Lunch was different, all that talking and cheeriness. Everyone acting like it was okay that Mom was dead and Dad had pretty much abandoned his kids. Benji huffed to himself in disgust. And that pow-wow was . . . interesting.

  When Grandpa said that he really wanted them there, Benji felt an odd mixture of relief and resentment. It was an awkward moment, but he felt slightly better about living here after that conversation. It helped to know that his grandfather was disappointed in his dad, too. Benji had wondered if he encouraged Dad to go, but it seemed like Grandpa was almost as upset by Dad’s behavior as Benji was. It felt good to have his own anger validated and, by some contrariness it helped to reduce his anger, too.

  Feeling more tolerant of his new (temporary) home, Benji decided he might as well take advantage of such a lavish place. He jumped up from his bed and dug around in a duffle bag until he produced a pair of orange swim trunks. He changed quickly and discovered Jessie and Adam already there and having a race in the blue water of the swimming pool.

  Benji hesitated, he hoped that he could have some time to goof off by himself. He sat on one of the loungers and watched Jessie beat Adam in the contest. When she surfaced after sweeping her red hair back under the water, she spotted Benji. She and Adam both cajoled him into joining and eventually Benji did, but neither he nor Adam could beat Jessie. She was fast.

  After Adam tired, he said he was going fishing and invited both Benji and Jessie to join him. When they both declined he went hunting for a more willing participant and they hadn’t seen him since. Benji assumed he found someone and Adam was probably baiting hooks by now.

  Jessie got bored with racing and stroked around lazily in the pool before getting out to dry off. She’d taken up her current position on the lounger about a half hour ago while Benji continued to swim. Now Benji was bored and tried to think of something new to engage in, somehow TV didn’t hold much of an appeal.

  A chill breeze wafted over the pool. In Mobile, he’d have considered the day too cold to swim. Despite the sunshine, the air raised goose bumps across his arms.

  After considering a few options and rejecting them, Benji settled on checking out the chess board while no one else was around. He shoved his feet into a pair flip-flops and put on the dry shirt he’d brought with him. After a yelled goodbye to Jessie, to which she replied with an absentminded wave, he tromped around the pool house to the big chess board.

  The tallest pieces were his height, but when he tested them, found they weren’t hard to move. They seemed hollow. Benji was not a chess player normally. He knew the names of most of the pieces; the smallest were pawns, the castle-like ones were rooks, the horses were knights, and there was a king and queen. His fuzzy knowledge didn’t include the pieces that looked vaguely like Papal hats, but that didn’t overly concern him. The board itself was stone with inlaid marble squares in black and white.

  Benji began moving pawns and rooks about, not really trying to remember the actual game rules, but rather imagining a raging battle. He shuffled the brigade of white pawns so that they clashed with the black ones. The white ones ended up with enormous losses, but they rallied their knights for a counter attack. Benji hazily recalled that chess was a mock battle anyway, so he figured envisioning a war was as good a strategy as any. The black knight ended the battle by slaying the white king and, though their numbers were decimated, the black side reigned victorious.

  Benji began to reset the pieces and prepare for another battle when he found himself staring into the tree line. The chess board wasn’t that far from the forested boundary. The trees didn’t look special or anything, but, perhaps because of Grandpa’s rule rather than anything inherent in the trees, they gave Benji a chilly feeling of foreboding.

  What was beyond the tree line? Were wolves waiting in the dark patches of forest? Maybe they were watching from a distance, watching the silly human boy play pretend soldiers with giant pieces. The thought both scared and embarrassed him. He tried to push the fierce faces of wolves out of his mind, but didn’t have much luck. The game lost its allure, too, and Benji left the chessmen where they lay.

  On his way back to the manor, he felt a tingling between his shoulder blades. The sensation of being watched. He shuddered, but forced himself to keep going without turning back. He wasn’t a weakling and he wasn’t afraid of a bunch of stupid wolves that may or may not be in the forest. He rolled his shoulders to dispel the eerie feeling, but hurried a little faster towards the pool.