by Steve Vernon
I shake my head and laugh, then move up the hill. It is only Agnes. My love, my imagination. The muscles ping in the tops of my thighs. I sweat in the warmth of the wool cardigan Agnes knitted three years ago. And around me the woods still rustle. I catch small movements from the corner of my eye; see a great black-tailed squirrel dive for cover and tell myself it is only him and his brethren that cause the movements. But the cold suddenly chills me. There are not that many squirrels. Something else stirs among the leaves.
At the top of the hill I turn around like a lighthouse, surveying the changes the new snow brings to the landscape: a downed tree, a newness, a wound, a healing. Through the branches I catch glimpses of bright red -- yarn I tied hither and yon to hold memories of Agnes in the forest. I sense movement in the way the leaves settle too smoothly in place when I look at them. The sun-glare on the snow hides all footprints.
The coyote interrupts my study. He approaches directly through a copse of aspen, shivering the saplings. At the top of the hill he circles me, his gray fur rough around his shoulders and hips. His sharp face holds hazel eyes that cast furtive glances at me. He has only mangy fur on his back and tail. A poor excuse for a coyote, I think. Something ill. No wonder it preys on the neighbors' pets. It still circles and I turn with it. Then it sits down and stares.
"What do you want? I've no food for you, I'm afraid." I think of Agnes. If she were here she'd want me to try to bring it home. She'd want to set out food for it. "Poor thing," she would say. "See how its ribs stick out?"
She would be right. The coyote looks poorly fed. It stands up and approaches. "Get on with you." I shoo it away with a sweep of my hand. "Go chase something small. Go trick someone else."
It stops and studies me again. Its dark eyes shift over me. I shiver as the wind picks up. As its eyes meet mine. Things move in the brush and then go still. The coyote starts moving again. I don't want a sick animal near me. I stomp my foot at it. The coyote jumps back. "Go on. Get away," I yell.
The coyote stops again.
And then it leaps forward. It comes at me from the side, its tongue still lolling from its mouth, its teeth bared. Its body crashes into my shins and I stumble. Almost fall. "Get away!" I yell and stagger a step. I kick at the coyote and it jumps back. It leaps again, sideways. Leaps again and hits the backs of my knees. I fall, oh-my-God, I fall. I hit the snow face-first. "Get away!" I moan as I scrabble in the snow for a stone, a stick, anything to defend myself. I wait for its weight on my back. Wait for teeth. Nothing.
I roll over and the coyote is nowhere to be seen. The underbrush trembles with unseen movements. Shivering, I fall back onto the snow. My head rests in one of the empty spots created by my footprints. What happened? I didn't know coyotes did such things -- were dangerous. When I reach into my pocket, Agnes's glove is gone. Stolen.
"Give it back," I yell into the still air. My words die, useless. I get up and stumble down the trail towards home. The woods rustle, whisper, quiver around me. Unseen beings hover. Fear -- fear of the coyote -- rides me. When I get home the house sits empty. Oh God, it is so empty. Except for my newfound fear.
Spring, and Agnes's cats still have not come home. Small heaps of yellowed bone in the coyote den, I suppose.
The trails, though, have filled with birdsong. The robins returned last week and the song sparrows. I know because I stood at the edge of the woods and listened. But I did not enter. Only once have I entered since coyote came to me and then I saw his flickering shape amongst the trees, watching. Waiting. Keeping me from Agnes just as Dr. Michael has done.
In the woods the branches fill with the blush of intended leaves. Once they fluttered with their load of yarn, but -- well, I cut the strings from the branches on my last furtive foray into the trees. I left them to litter the forest floor; the birds would take them, I thought. Agnes would be pleased. But I could not leave those memories tethered as small offerings to the coyote that wanders those ways. Not when he has banished me from the forest. From Agnes.
So I no longer walk to Thurman Ridge. In fact I stay home much more. When I do walk -- even just down the lane -- I carry a walking stick. I tell my children my age affects me, I tell people the stick helps on the hills, but really I intend it for the coyote -- to save myself. And when I walk the road, the woods that border it are full of whispers, full of half-seen movement. Agnes's doing, I know. She walks in the forest, tethered away from me, as Dr. Michael wanted.
I could live in the forest, if it were not for the coyote. But the beast has confined me to the garden.
I sit back on my haunches and study my handiwork. The cat door gleams, oiled and ready. I pulled the nails this morning, then tidied and painted the small opening. It looks welcoming to all.
That done, I turn back to Agnes's garden, which glimmers with crocus, primula, and the phallic swell of hyacinth buds that rise through last year's dead foliage. Leaves rattle under the cedar hedge, the sound I've known in the forest. I smile. A wood-wren tsk-tsks me. A flock of titmice twitter in the hedge, in the hoary apple tree covered in lichen and old moss. The sword fern in the corner quivers as if something waits there. The rhododendron's dark leaves cup the offering of early flowers. The garden lives, knows. I smile more broadly and sit cross-legged on the still-cold ground.
The earth rises away from the garden towards Thurman Ridge, where coyote lurks. Lower down the trees cover the hillsides and shelter the memories I abandoned there. The memories I ripped from the house behind me. The memories I visited on all those long walks -- until coyote.
I lay my hands on my thighs, palms upwards, pleading. "Agnes," I whisper. "It's okay now. Dr. Michael and the children are gone. We can do as we please. We can repay their trickery." I close my eyes and the spring sunlight warms my face. The breeze wipes at my skin in a familiar touch. I hear the foliage shift.
"Yes," I whisper. Agnes returns on creature-feet, unseen in the underbrush. I open my eyes and the small things crawl toward me, brown and beautiful with bits of colored wool in their wild-lichen hair. "Come," I say, and point towards the cat door. "You can come and go as you please. It's safe. There are no coyotes, no Dr. Michaels here." I blink and the beings are gone. The cat door swings, beating in the sun. I hear Agnes's laughter from the kitchen. I climb to my feet and enter, calling to the denizens of my unempty house. Perhaps I will get a cat and call it Agnes, so people will not think me strange.
About the Author
Author of the well-regarded Cartographer Universe fantasy series, Karen L. Abrahamson writes short fiction, fantasy, romance and mystery novels, as well as non-fiction for newspapers and magazines.
A born wanderer, she currently lives near the ocean on the west coast of Canada with two Bengal cats who channel James Dean’s attitude. When she isn't writing she can be found with a camera and backpack in fabulous locations around the world.
To learn more about her, visit her website at www.karenlabrahamson.com and sign up for her newsletter to receive information on new publications.
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To find more of her writing, visit www.twistedrootpublishing.com.
Also by Karen L. Abrahamson
and available through www.twistedrootpublishing.com
Fantasy:
The Cartographer Universe (in chronological order)
The Warden of Power
The Cartographer’s Daughter
The American Geological Survey Series:
Afterburn
Aftershock
Aftermath
Afterimage
Terra Incognita
Terra Infirma
Terra Nueva
Other Fantasy Novels by Karen L. Abrahamson
Ice Dragon
Emberstone
Mutable Things
The Crystal Courtesan
Mystery:
Through Deep Water
Romantic Suspense:
Ashes and Light
Shades of Moonlight
Judas Kiss
Secon
d Spring
A Different Nightmusic
Shadow Play
A Sneak Preview of Afterburn
Chapter 1 - A Laser Diffused By Mist
Vallon Drake climbed out of the black Subaru WRX 265 and slouched against its swept-back side on the rain-slicked street. She chewed her lip as she considered the space at 1525 Broadway where the heritage-blue house used to stand—not the place she had put it. The last of the change tremors still quivered through the soles of her Doc Martins, and mist haloed the streetlights—the kind of mist that made any proper survey reading nigh on impossible.
But then, it wasn’t a matter of her having taken a wrong turn and needing to triangulate on an unknown point. She knew the metes and bounds of the Seattle city lot probably better than anyone, given she’d had to replace the damned house a couple of times. She didn’t need to refer to the street sign or a map.
Satellite photos said the house was here at 3 p.m. this afternoon. Now it had disappeared, and in its place stood a decrepit, three-story parking garage with a neon sign that pulsed ‘vacancy’ and ‘Parking $10 a day’ like a taunt, spelled in vitriolic orange meant to increase her mad. More so with the alarming scent of ozone and ether still thick in the air. All the little hairs rose on the back of her neck.
Not a good sign. She tasted blood and stopped chewing.
“Where the hell are you, Simon?” she growled, her voice too loud and throaty in the night. The silence ached as it must have when the world was new-made.
She’d sent him out to check on the house when she’d had the first inkling something was wrong–again. The darned house seemed to be a focal point for change. A tingle in her hands, a dead zone forming on the city-wide survey map as she used the old fashioned stereoscope
she still preferred to do readings.
But the fact he’d broken protocol and hadn’t reported in after he’d called in his arrival had forced her out of the strictures of the observation desk and into the damnable rain. Which was worse remained to be seen.
Another tremor underfoot and images of the house burned like an afterimage on the back of her eyes. And behind the blue house image lay others—back to the house she’d lost all those years before.
Old grief and remembrance stabbed her breath away…. That was why she kept the blue house in place. A token of what was lost. Stupid. She kicked the heel of her Doc Martins with her other foot and crossed the street. No traffic at this time of night, though in the distance she could hear the hiss and whine of traffic on I-5 down the hill. A chill wind sheeted the misty rain and she hiked the collar of her leather jacket
up under her hair. Didn’t help—much.
No sound. No movement as she stepped up on the curb, but she didn’t need to triangulate for every sense to tell her something was wrong. Not even a parking attendant in sight in the evil, orange light.
She -reached- sent her mind out, and turned her gaze inward.
[Dim glimmer of rats creeping into the rear of the newly-made structure.]
No candles of human life.
[The familiar sheeting flame that was Gifted.] Simon, damn him. She turned her vision outward and found herself turned slightly—toward the side of the parking structure. Simon, checking out the place, probably. The fact that he hadn’t checked in or responded to her calls just another example of the irresponsibility that had ended the most recent of her string of relationships.
“How the heck you got to be an agent is beyond me.” But then there were those who would say the same about her.
She hauled out her cell again and punched in redial as she followed the flame of Simon’s presence around the corner.
The cell buzzed. Buzzed again and a muffled answering ring came from beyond a browning cedar hedge planted to screen a staircase from the used bookstore next door. From down the street came the annoying rattle of an approaching shopping cart, probably the night staff from the local Safeway reclaiming the carts that always walked away with the locals.
What the hell was Simon doing? Rousting derelicts on stairs?
But there shouldn’t be any derelicts in a parking lot that shouldn’t even exist. The homeless liked the tourist haunts of Pikes Place Market or Pioneer Square.
Unless whoever made this place actually knew what he was doing and wanted to add in the bits of realia that gave a new place a sense of history. Like she’d given the blue house cedar hedging last time she remade it.
That sent a chill up her back. She hunched into her jacket and stepped into the ill-lit stairwell. “Simon?”
No answer, but the incessant buzzing of her phone and the matching muffled buzzing that came from somewhere above set all the hairs on her body on end, because no matter what had happened between her and Simon, this wasn’t like him.
Not like him at all.
She climbed the stairs, wishing her job as an agent of the American Geological Survey came with a gun instead of a theodolite, sextant, pen, and ink. Sometimes guarding the landscape against illicit change—and undoing those changes—brought its own kinds of danger just because of the part of town it brought you to.
But the area around Broadway wasn’t that kind of place. A nice neighborhood stood beyond the stores. Seattle University waited down the block.
The rundown parking garage so didn’t fit.
The first landing stank of urine, so whoever had made this place had a feel for detail, not like when the bookstore owner had changed the house to another store that held shelf after shelf of a single volume of an idiot’s guide to how to run a successful business. That had been the latest change she’d undone.
“Simon?”
She thought she heard a sound above and took the second set of stairs faster. She came up onto the first layer of empty parking stalls. The buzzing was close now, coming from the side of the parking garage closest to the bookstore, but still muffled. The mist diffused the few yellow lights illuminating the expanse of gray concrete, and clung to the darkest corners so she couldn’t see what was there.
“Give it up, Simon. The game’s old.” She was angry now, because dammit, this job wasn’t something to play at.
Something moved—low, down next to the concrete wall at the edge of one of the dark spaces. She -reached- and Simon’s flame greeted her. He was damned well playing games.
Epithets ready, she headed for him. -Reached- not understanding what she saw and, “Oh shit!” She went to her knees.
“Oh shit, no! Simon! No!”
And the two socked-feet spasmed and jerked, ankles windmilling where they grew out of the concrete wall.
“Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit. Oh shit.” All the anger washed away. Vallon fumbled in her jacket for the equipment her job required. Black leather case. Mont Blanc fountain pen. A scrap of blank paper no one would remark.
She spread the oily-finished paper—vellum, really—on the concrete and, holding the paper down with both palms, fought to steady her breathing. -Reached-.
Not to Simon this time, but down through the parking lot’s smothering concrete. Down through the living soil. Down as deep as she dared go, to the glittering capillaries that spread up from the ley lines that ran through the earth like deep veins.
Carefully now. Gingerly -reached-.
Gold power surged over her skin. Dangerous gold fire merged with her and burned. Her skin singed as she spun a thin tendril of power into her dark core. Light filled her as she snapped back to her body. Holding the heady power inside like potent, destructive cordite.
Focus on the vellum.
Pen and ink. She hung above the blank page.
No time to replace the Broadway house. No time to do this smooth and right. She slammed her awareness into the concrete wall, and to Simon. Still his living flame, but weaker. Much weaker. Sketched lines—the concrete gone in a doorway. Another set of stairs. There. Right there. Held it in her mind.
The acrid scent of anachronistic ink helped her focus. The force of her power turned on the wall. Concrete shimmered.
Shimmered again, like a light bulb surging and dying under too little power. Like a laser diffused by mist. Almost as though something blocked her efforts. The concrete structure shimmied as if someone tried to shake her loose.
“No, damn it.”
Simon’s bright flame blackened at the edges. She released more power and the wall began to fade, concrete smoking up to join the night mist. This had to work, and work fast.
Aflash of power that almost blasted her backwards. Something—
someone— blocked her, and from the earth came the sound of rumbling.
Surprise almost snapped her link. No one blocked change except agents of the AGS. Hell, no one blocked her.
She dove deep to the soil and linked more fully to the power than her training ever advised.
Pain stabbed her gut. It raced down her arms like open flame as she poured an invisible golden stream from her hands into the wall. The block shattered like the concrete as her power flooded into the wall.
Concrete softened and flowed. Parted like a sea. Ran down into a deep well that was stairs that went—she didn’t care where. Brimstone and ether burned her nose, and then suddenly Simon was there. Released from his prison, he tumbled to the floor, blonde-grey hair caked with concrete, face desperately pale.
The pen fell from her fingers as she released her focus and scrambled to his side. Pulled him to safety as the wall did an old movie fade-in. Pulse? She -reached- for his flame.
None.
She swore and slammed her fists into his chest, praying she could start his heart.
“Jeezus, man.” She glanced up to see a kid in a red Safeway vest and she realized she didn’t hear the carts anymore. He must have heard her. Come to help. But now he backed away. Backed away and then spun and dove for the stairs.