No sooner had he left the room than a sudden peace fell over the girls. Claire felt like she might literally melt into the leather wingback chair. Something about the surroundings—old books and dusty artifacts—made Claire feel safe and protected.
“This reminds me of your dad’s place, growing up,” Jackie observed.
Claire’s eyes caught sight of a photo of her father and the professor taken over a decade ago, when Claire was still young and her mother still alive. She smiled at it and looked at another frame.
Next to the photo, she found a photocopied still: a double-paged spread copied from something obviously old; the ragged page edges zig-zagged down the image inked with a jagged toner mark. She took it into her hands and stared at the hand-drawn, charcoal print.
She turned it to face Jackie. Jackie’s jaw dropped and she stared in disbelief.
Professor Jecima pushed a small cart into the room. A teapot, cups, and small plate of sugar cookies rode atop; Greek reference manuals weighed down the bottom rack. He noticed them looking at the image. “Ah, you have found ‘The Brothers’ I see. At least, that’s what I think the small print says at the bottom.”
“Where is this from?” Claire asked.
“That came from an ancient text I’d been working on until late. The book was stolen only recently: the Grimmorium Nitthogr. A very odd book, almost otherworldly—if such a statement didn’t make me sound like I’d given up scholasticism in favor of joining a UFO cult. But it’s a strange text: one unlike any other on the planet, both linguistically and archaeologically. It dates to ten thousand years old or more by our best measuring devices, and yet no culture we know of preserved bound books at such an early date. The language is certainly a linguistic anomaly; it is similar to the famous Voynich manuscript which scholars have tried to decode for over a hundred years to no avail.
“That drawing is a copy from the book. It appears right before a missing selection that had been cut from the text. I’d been working on that image title in order to develop a cypher to the text. It literally seemed to be the key. And yet, it’s all for naught, now. And a pity, too. I’d just begun to make some serious progress in my translations based on it. Very interesting stuff: the Sh’logath cult it was about…
“But you didn’t come here to listen to an old man’s woes. What brings you by?”
Jackie offered, “That’s not your book’s key. It’s Claire’s fiancé.”
Jecima returned a quizzical look.
Claire pointed at one of the two men drawn in a reclining pose against an unfamiliar backdrop. “This man right here is the spitting image of my fiancé, James Shianan.”
He stared back blankly. The name clearly didn’t ring any bells.
“You don’t know who James Shianan is?” Jackie asked incredulously. “Do you ever go to the movies?”
“Not in many years,” he admitted.
Jackie asked, “Do you maybe have an iPad or something with Wi-Fi?”
He fumbled through a stack of things nearby. At the bottom of the pile of small household items was an iPad. “My sons gave me this as a gift a long while ago. I never really took the time to figure the blasted thing out.”
Jackie thumbed it on. It had very little battery left and network signal was weak, but it was enough. She did a quick search for James Shianan and pulled up a Hollywood gossip article and turned it over to the Professor.
“Well… this is quite an uncanny resemblance,” he admitted. “But connecting him to an ancient, obscure text is a little…”
“Crazy?” Claire offered, “Let me tell you a little about crazy.” She launched into a forty minute narrative of the last few weeks. She unloaded the entire story on the old man, ending with their arrival on his doorstep.
Professor Jecima followed the entire story, sometimes asking for more details. He suspended disbelief and gave her story a thoroughly analytical consideration.
“So I don’t know what to believe,” Claire concluded, exasperated, but feeling strangely good after venting all her tangled thoughts and emotions into the air. “I really have three options, as far as I can tell. The first option: James is after me for some unknown reason and the seemingly supernatural things are all coincidence. Number two: Vivian has been manipulating this whole ordeal as some kind of devious villain master-mind. Or thirdly: I’m hallucinating, delusional, or just plain off my rocker—I could be imagining all of this from a rubber room as far as I can tell. What do you think, Professor?”
The wise old man approached her where she sat in the chair. He bent over but slightly so that he could look her in the eyes. After gazing into them for a few seconds he slapped her across the face; the palm of his hand cracked against her cheek hard enough to redden it.
“Whoa!” Jackie yelled incredulously.
Claire held her throbbing cheek. “What was that for?”
“Did that hurt you? Did you feel pain?”
“Yes!”
“And did you see it coming or have any kind of intuition or impulse that warned you it was coming?”
“No…”
“Then you can safely eliminate the third option; this is not a product of your mind. Furthermore, I’d just like to say that my entire history and life story would resent the implication that it was nothing but deluded snippets from an insane person’s imagination. I think we can safely assume you are quite lucid.”
“Well, what do you think, then?” Claire asked his opinion. “What is really going on?”
“I don’t really believe in the impossible, and like Sherlock Holmes said, ‘when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’” He paused long as he gave it some thought. “Something supernatural is happening here; not unscientific, just not yet explainable by it. I guess I would like to know more about this Rob fellow.”
Jackie chuckled. “You and her both.”
Claire gave Jackie a dirty look. The nonverbal communication was not lost on Jecima. He raised his eyebrows, “Oh? Do tell.”
Stone faced and about to give a rational response, Jackie butted in. “Well, he reminds me an awful lot of her dad… except homeless and cute. All signs point to a pair of star crossed lovers.”
Jecima mused, “Ah. A relationship like a Shakespearean Tragedy?”
“Say what?” Jackie was confused. “How does Shakespeare relate to astrology?”
Claire intervened and changed the subject. “I’m a little too preoccupied with staying alive to fall in love, thank-you very much. And I still don’t know what’s really going on just yet.” Her defense was filled with bluster, but her blushing cheeks betrayed her.
The momentary lull afforded them a moment to sip hot tea and turn their thoughts to the next step. As Claire reached for a cookie, Jecima’s eyes caught her pendant.
“I notice you’re still wearing that artifact your father picked up in South America.”
Claire nodded. “I never take it off.”
“I was with him when he found it.”
“At a dig site?” Jackie asked.
“In a junk store,” the Professor corrected. “Like the Grimmorium Nitthogr, I’m not sure of its mysterious origins. Then again, I’m not sure that it’s real, and that could account for the mystery. But it is pretty to look at.”
“Oh,” she said, “it’s real.”
Just then, an exterior door burst open with a loud crash on the other side of the house. The wall hangings shifted and clattered under the impact. A porcelain dish fell from its high perch and shattered as the threesome immediately jumped to its feet.
A loud scratching and smashing sound echoed down the hallway; the cacophony aimed straight for them and moved in fast. They barely had a moment to breathe and no time to react.
The door to the sitting room tore open, breaking off its hinges. A monstrous, lycan shape fell to the floor, skidding to a stop even as the behemoth form melted away into the smaller form of ra
gged, scruffy man.
“Rob!” Claire screamed. She ran to his side where he lay mangled and slumped over, barely clothed following his transformations.
Blood dripped from his twisted and busted nose. More pooled from what looked like a sword-cut across his chest; bruises and burns mottled the skin all over his body. He looked like he’d just been run over by a Mack truck.
Jackie ran to help. She mashed a throw pillow onto the bleeding wound and tried to staunch the hemorrhaging.
“Rob! What happened?” Claire didn’t even think to ask how he found her.
Rob looked up at her, his eyes barely able to focus. He stiffened and whispered with a raspy voice, “Madeline Island.” Then, his eyes rolled back and he slumped limply.
Jackie grabbed his wrist and concentrated, feeling for a pulse. She looked at Claire and shook her head. “He’s dead.”
Claire stared in disbelief. Shellshock blanched her face.
The Professor fumbled in the background, tossing through a cabinet of medical supplies. Jackie urged insistently, “Claire—if he was able to track you, it’s possible that whoever is chasing you can, too!”
She needed to act quickly. But her options suddenly became very limited.
Chapter 10
Claire exhaled a sigh of relief as Jackie’s car cleared the edge of the city. She’d made it past the far edge of the Wisconsin side of the city. Duluth’s twin city over the bay, Superior, shrank behind her and the roads narrowed while the wilderness expanded, thickening. She glanced into the rearview mirror, tilting it down so she could look at her incapacitated passenger.
She’d let Jackie out at a tourist trap near the edge of Superior. Her friend had graciously given up her car and volunteered to find her own way back to her parents place. Undoubtedly it would be watched, but they weren’t pursuing her; they wanted Claire.
Reaching back, she took Rob’s wrist and felt for his pulse. The faint beat of his heart reassured her that he still lived. She stole a glance at him. He still looked terrible, but his color slowly returned. Dark blood splattered Jackie’s backseat with stains that Billy Mays would have difficulty removing. Most of the serious wounds had clotted by now. At first, she feared he might have simply run out of blood, but Rob proved tougher than anyone else she’d ever met, and he healed unusually fast, even if the burn marks seemed to fade slower than other damage.
Claire turned back to the road. Her head was a mess and her stomach roiled like a bundle of raw nerves and self-doubt. She wasn’t sure why she was even doing this: following some vague clue, the last words of a dying, homeless man. Part of her felt she should just go back and tell her fiancé everything—he would surely understand! My heart tells me that he loves me! This is probably all Vivian’s doing, maybe she’s involved in some kind of conspiracy through her government agency?
She pushed the thoughts from her mind. She couldn’t make decisions based on her desire to be back in her relationship of comfort… or because she feared the man in her backseat, either. Her thoughts drifted to the recurring dream of the wolf attack. I wonder if the dream is a premonition—a warning? Am I running towards even more danger as I’m fleeing?
There was that self-doubt flaring up again—the words in her head didn’t even sound like her voice—she barely knew who she was anymore. Claire didn’t know if her sanity was assured, Professor Jecima’s hand slap aside.
Rob mumbled something incoherently. Her ears perked up as she tried to make sense of his syllables. She had little desire to listen to the radio, her only other potential distraction.
“...don’t understand... Tesseract... Have to tell… know before the end... I love you!” Rob writhed like a man with a fever. He rambled like one too.
The voyeurism made Claire blush. It felt a bit like reading someone else’s diary. His fevered state reminded her of a trip to Africa with her father; he’d caught a virus that gave him such a high temperature that he raved like a madman for two days.
“...going to die... Bithia... Everything’s going to burn... will always love you. Claire.”
Hearing her name, Claire’s resolve broke and she turned on the radio. But for most of the next hour, Rob lapsed back into a sweaty quiet.
. . .
The gentle rocking of waves lulled Rob out of his sleep. His eyes fluttered and then opened. He grimaced against the harsh, white sunlight that blinded him as he came around.
Groaning, Rob recognized that he’d returned to the land of the living. He found himself in the backseat of Jackie’s car. His voice barely managed more than a whisper, “Where are we?”
Claire turned around from the driver’s seat. “On the Island Queen ferry: Halfway between the mainland and Madeline.”
Rob pulled up the remnants of his bloody shirt and looked at his chest and abdomen. They still bore bruises and wounds from his battle with the vyrm assassins. Two fresh, bright red burn patches radiated pain through his rib cage. “What is this?”
“A defibrillator burn. Professor Jecima had an AED installed in the final days before his wife passed. Luckily, it was better charged than his other electronics.”
He blinked at her, obviously confused.
“Your heart stopped. AEDs electrocute your heart in order to restart it.”
Rob sat back and melted into the seat. “I think I need to rest.”
“You look like you need it. But don’t take too long. You still haven’t told me the plan.”
“We need to take you to see a shaman so that we can contact Bithia.”
“Bithia? I’ve heard you say that name before,” Claire said.
“When?”
Claire blushed slightly. “You talk in your sleep.”
Rob paused for thought. “I hope I didn’t say anything embarrassing. After everything I’ve been through, I’d hate for it to be embarrassment that finally kills me.”
Claire smiled. She’d never heard him joke before.
“It’s very easy for things to get muddled, confused, jumping between worlds. It gets even more intense when one is unconscious.”
“What do you mean?”
“Between the Prime and the other realms… memories can become... cloudy. Not all of my memories are mine: if I concentrate, I can feel this realm’s memories of myself, search them for answers. It’s how I know my other self’s name is Robert.”
She nodded, accepting his answer, even if she didn’t understand it. “I don’t really get this whole ‘Prime’ thing, or whatever the Tesseract is.”
Rob, still cloudy from the pain and the toll the healing process took on his body, drifted off as the ferry bobbed in the waves of Lake Superior. Groggily he said, “I’ll tell you as soon as I can keep my eyes awake.”
. . .
As the car pulled off of the ferry and onto the wharf, Claire’s anxiety level shot through the roof. Her situation became very real to her in that moment. She had left her home, her former life, and all that she’d ever held dear. Here she was: engaged to a wealthy, famous, A-list actor, but she’d suddenly run away to a tiny, remote island with a homeless man who told her he’d just arrived from another dimension.
“Wait here,” she said to Rob as he rubbed the sleepy crust from his eyes. Claire stepped out of the vehicle and ran into a public restroom just one block from the visitors’ information area.
Since he’d fallen asleep again, Claire’s mind had turned inward again and turned against her. Much like her time in the hospital, it felt like a supernatural invasion: an attack on her mind.
Once inside the bathroom stall, she broke down and sobbed. She already missed her old life, her habits, her father, her friends. She wanted her safety net back! She wasn’t ready for this! In a moment of weakness, she pulled a cell phone out of her purse: an anonymous prepaid cell Jackie had bought for at the truck stop where she’d been dropped. Just in case she absolutely needed to make contact, she had options.
Like it was second nature to her, Clai
re thumbed in James’s number and composed a brief text message. I’m on Madeline Island with the wolf. Please take me home. Just about to press send, her resolve took root again. This was not who she was! She clutched the amulet around her neck and all the haziness that had fogged through her mind evaporated like mist in the sunlight.
That’s weird. I didn’t think I even know James’s number by heart, she admitted to herself. She only knew a handful that she could enter without struggling to remember, and those were numbers she learned before ever owning a mobile phone.
She regained her composure and forced herself to think on the last couple days and the decisions she’d made in that time. Claire fought back against the mental invader that tried closing doors in her mind. She wouldn’t let it twist up her thoughts and emotions.
Everything within her mind claimed that James was vile—urged her to run. But something in her heart refused to quit loving him, despite that. She squeezed the pendant around her neck again. Claire knew that she was a mess. But she also knew she was strong and that she was the one in control: she alone chose who she could give her love to.
She pulled the battery from the phone, killing it cold. Then she hardened her heart and checked herself at the mirror before leaving the restroom and returning to the car.
Claire flung the door open and plopped into the driver’s seat. “Okay. Tell me everything about the Prime and the Tesseract.”
. . .
James opened his eyes. His skin smoldered and a light, acrid smoke wafted off of his body. Vivian stood nearby with her arms crossed. She watched him writhe in pain, like he’d been immersed in some invisible, electric current.
He shook off the throbbing sting and smoothed his robes, regaining composure. A thin layer of ash sheathed his skin. “She has figured out how to resist. She must be learning, drawing power from the amulet.”
Wolves of the Tesseract Collection Page 9