Airel (18 page)

Chapter XI

Somewhere in the Mountains of Idaho, Present day

I was running. The faster I ran, the worse my fear became. The thing that pursued me grunted and howled with rage as it chased after me. I dared not look back, concentrating on digging into the rough terrain with my feet. I felt each power pulse of my cadence as I sprinted, tucked my head, and felt the resistance of muscle on bone. 

I exploded into a clearing and a huge tree cast a demented shadow in front of it as if leading the way. I was running through the clearing toward a forest of impossible black trees with dark purple leaves. 

I screamed as a clawed hand gripped my shoulder from behind, and I put on an extra burst of speed, tearing loose. A slice of my flesh was taken from me as hot pain ran into my shoulder. The evil looking forest loomed two hundred feet ahead, possibly within my reach. I felt I would be safe there from whatever was determined to get me.

“Airel… Airel…” The voice was guttural and sweet at the same time, taking on the characteristics of the beast as well as my own conscience. The dark woods parted in a curtain and I dove through. I landed on hard shale and skidded to a stop, opening up new wounds in my back. I clambered to my feet. 

I turned and saw the hooded beast as he lurched to a stop at the edge of the forest. He howled, then I heard my name again. “Airel… wake up…”

The beast was hunched over, wolf-like, but standing on two legs instead of four. Massive clawed hands, covered with fur, hung at his sides like broken branches. He paced back and forth outside the boundary of the forest and his robe fluttered like feathers as it clung to his thin frame. He croaked my name and my face burned with heat.

“Airel!” 

My eyes shot open. Michael was sitting over me with his hand on my forehead. He had a look of concern on his beautiful face, and somehow he looked as if he had aged overnight. I tried to speak, but my body was wracked with pain and my throat was so dry all I could get out was a grunt.

“Calm down, you’re going to be okay. Here, drink this.” Michael handed me a glass of water and I took it with greed. It burned as it went down, but I drank all of it. I knew it might be drugged again but I was so thirsty that I didn’t care. 

Michael leaned over and kissed my wet forehead. He smiled at me, but it was weak and I noticed a tremor in his hand. 

“What are you doing here?” I managed, but it sent a fresh wave of nausea through me.

Michael shushed me and said, “You’re still here with the crazy man. He let me see you after you fainted. You have been in and out of consciousness for eight days now. He has been trying to heal you with some weird chanting and some other stuff I’ve never seen before. I’ve been trying to feed you, in between your nightmares and screaming fits. You really scared me, Airel. I thought you were gonna die.” At this, his voice caught, and he held back tears, looking away.

“What are you talking about? What are you doing in here? Where am I?”

“Airel, what do you mean?” Michael was visibly upset. 

That’s it. I knew I was going crazy now. I seriously had no idea which way was up, what was real, what was safe and what was dangerous anymore. “I was so worried Michael, I thought you were gone, dead. I don’t know. I’m so confused.”

Michael was silent, then, “Airel…” And I shuddered. I was drenched, I felt disgusting.
Eight days?! What in the world is going on here!
I felt insane. 

“I’m sorry Airel, I didn’t know it would be like this.”

“What is going on, Michael? I think I was drugged.” I noticed that I was no longer dressed in my fancy blue dress. I wondered how that had happened. It creeped me out beyond words. I was wearing pajamas and they were stuck to me as if I had been wearing them for a week.
Gross.
 

Michael tucked a loose strand of hair behind my ear and took my hand. “Don’t you remember? We were taken, and…I…” He looked down as if he had done something he was ashamed of. 

I scanned the room and some things started to come back to me. I remembered having been locked away in this, my "high tower." I remembered rainbows dancing on the bed in the new dawn of some lost day I could not recall as of yet. Like a badly cut movie, random scenes started to come back to me. 

I remembered calling out for Michael, banging on the door to my room, which, I remembered, had a really nice bathroom with a huge claw-foot tub. I had been the one who had changed my clothes.
Weird.
I rubbed my temples.
What else?
I tried to conjure the past. I felt fury—
why? 

I was angry. I was angry because I feared the captor had murdered Michael. I saw myself pacing in an angry stew in front of my locked door, and I knew why. I was furious at having been locked up like an animal, no matter how nice the accommodations—and I was worried sick that something horrific had happened to Michael. 

The scene shifted and I was flooded with the realization that I was madly in love with him, that I knew it, that I had reconciled my heart to that reality. That explained what happened next in my spastic movie reel vision. I delivered a crushing roundhouse blow to the door of my cell and it exploded off the jamb into a million splinters.
I had been Bruce Lee, for crying out loud…Bruce Lee on gamma rays, or whatever.

The movie reel continued. I was running through the obliterated doorway and down the hall. Rooms appeared, covered in years of dust, furniture draped with sheets. Other rooms were clean. Then there was Michael’s room—I knew it to be his room, but when I opened the door, which was unlocked, it was empty, and I feared the worst—that he was dead. I saw myself running down hallways trying to find him, down a flight of stairs, and being arrested by the appearance of the blond killer, the master of the house. He had appeared out of nowhere. I was struck at his beauty for the smallest of moments. 

Then the movie reel took a really bad turn. There was vomit everywhere. It was mine. I saw myself as I retched time after time, right onto my captor’s fancy carpets, losing whatever I had in my stomach from the Cheesecake Factory with surreal violence. Fast forward, and I was dry heaving as the killer picked me up and carried me to my room.

I looked at Michael in confusion. I smelled bile.
Oh. That might explain the dreams.

Michael lowered his head, his blond hair matted and sticking to his face from sleepless nights. His shoulders began to shake as he turned to go. I had somehow hurt him.
It must be hard for him, too…
 

“Michael, I’m sick or something. Eight days?” I pulled him close and hugged him. He was warm and at once I was aware of how I must look and smell.

I tried to pull away but Michael held me firm. He was…crying. His back was tight and I could hear his muffled sobs. “Michael, what’s wrong?” 

“I…Uh.” He pulled back but wouldn’t look at me. “I’m sorry, Airel.” Turning, he rushed out of the room. 

“Michael!”

Chapter XII

I was confused and hurt. Not for myself, but for Michael. He was in pain and something was on his mind but I didn’t know what to do. Should I leave him be, give him space? Relationships were hard. Most of the time I didn’t even know what I wanted, let alone what Michael did. I decided to let him be and clean up. I was covered with eight days of sweat and I could feel my clothes sticking to my body. 

Bathing can be glorious. I hosed off in a scalding shower while filling the tub, then climbed in for a good soak. There were candles and matches, which I used, as well as several clay pots of very yummy smelling botanicals. I was guessing that everything in the bathroom, as well as everything in the bedroom, had not been touched by any kind of manufacturing process at all. There were no electronics of any kind that I could remember either, come to think of it. Not even a clock. Well, not an electronic one anyway. 

Everything was rough, but well-made. The tile, the fixtures—all of it bore the stamp of authenticity in a way that no house in town could touch. Even the water felt different. Maybe he had built a massive boiler somewhere in the house that heated the water to be used for bathing. Or maybe it was coming from a natural hot spring. Whatever it was, it wasn’t running out any time soon, for which I was grateful. I was starting to feel like myself again.

When I thought about the hallway, my mind flashed back to my parents, my friends, my whole life as I had known it. I sat there in the tub for a pretty long time, just crying. It had been at least eight days—that’s what Michael had said—and my parents probably thought I was dead.

Oh, God!
I couldn’t imagine how they must feel by now. But I had to resolve myself to the fact that, as of right now, there was absolutely nothing I could do about getting back home. I might be able to set a few things in motion…

I had to get my mind back out of desperation mode. I looked at the candles that illuminated the enormous bathroom, watching them burn. Blackness rested against the outside of the lead glass windows, beyond which was at least a thousand foot drop to the valley floor—I had peeked out earlier.
Hmm.
 

I didn’t know how, but literally every piece of clothing I owned somehow showed up here, in the closet in my room. Cell.
Wait, is the door still busted off the hinges?
If the door was gone, I was basically free. I dragged myself from the tub and back into the shower, resolving to check on that. First, I wanted—needed—to be squeaky clean.

When I was done and dressed, I took a passing glance at the door that led to the hallway. It was as if I had never kicked it down. I shook my head, trying to hold onto my version of reality. It didn’t matter that it was, like, version 6.2.7 by now. It just had to make sense to me.

I went back into the bathroom and peered into the mirror. Gorgeous, of course. Superhumanly gorgeous. Michael would die. So to speak. I ran a brush through my hair expecting it to frizz into a fro, but amazingly, it looked like I had just stepped off a cover shoot for a magazine again, only better. I looked into the mirror, leaning into it to get a closer look. “Aaaaaaaaand…no makeup necessary.”
Bonus. 

This was weird, I was not used to being—looking—like this. I knew it was a gift and I decided to enjoy it, because if I
did
have a baseball size tumor in my head I was dead anyway. 

My thoughts turned to Michael. He seemed to be under some sort of pressure. Was he just worried about me? I didn’t want to push him to talk to me but at the same time I wanted to know what was going on in his head. I missed him. 

After a few minutes sitting on the foot of the bed, I opened my eyes. I remembered, more than anything, two words: “I’m sorry.” They came to me in a version of Michael’s voice; it was recognizable but strange. I knew that he had sat at my bedside for the span of eight days muttering those two words.
Now why would he do that?

I decided I needed to break with all of this. I was clean, beautiful, and ready to take on the world. “Never mind that it’s two a.m.” I rolled my eyes. It was time to create something new to look back on at a later date. I walked to the door that led to the hallway, expecting to find it locked, especially since it was dark outside. I was trying to imagine kicking it down again.
How had 98 pounds of me done that, exactly?
I stood in front of it and extended my index finger to it. I placed it on the door and pushed. It swung free, yawning open on the hallway, which seemed to be dark and quiet.

Why do I sense a trap?
I went back to the nightstand and grabbed a fresh candle, lighting it. I looked up and down the hall, finding no creeps milling around in the shadows. I took the plunge, walking out in my bare feet so as not to make unnecessary noise. 

There were doorways to my left and to my right and I remembered my last trip down this particular hall. I had been a rabid wolverine looking for someone to kill. They say Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned, and I believed them. I passed on by the room adjacent to my own, which I was pretty sure belonged to Michael. I wanted to go in, to talk to him, but I pushed the thought away. 

I came to the staircase and descended it to the main level. It was a grand house, really, like an ancient monument that just kept going and going and going. I found that the house was situated with its front toward the mountain and its rear to the cliff face where the waterfall cascaded. It all looked stately and majestic, except it was underground, which was still weird to me.

I found the kitchen next to the ballroom, separated by three massive stone arches over two feet thick. I went in, needing food and all-of-a-sudden hungry. I grabbed a handful of bright red grapes from a clay bowl, popping one of them in my mouth. I stopped and looked down at them, marveling at their taste.
Best grape I’ve ever had?
I threw another one in my mouth and coolness satiated my jagged throat. I groaned aloud with delight and began to devour them.

Brick and granite ran throughout the kitchen, and the dark wood cabinets were carved with intricate feathers around their tops. A carving of an eagle was centered on each door. 

A formal dining room was through the next set of arches, with a glass and silver chandelier hanging from a forty-foot ceiling. The room had to be seventy feet square, with an enormous dark granite table in the center that could seat over a hundred guests. 

Okay, so this dude is excessive. I still don’t like it.
But the grapes were good. So I ate them. I finished the last one and wandered back through the kitchen and across the ballroom. On the other side was a study, if you could call it that, with leather couches encircling a stone fireplace that was forty feet tall, with a mantle that held a few books at about head height. A hearty fire was leaping in the grate, lighting the space happily. 

Bookshelves were stuffed handsomely full on every wall. I couldn’t resist scanning the spines for titles, seeing some I recognized, and a lot I didn’t. Some looked so old I was afraid to touch them. I felt as if I had spent too much time already, so I left that room and moved on.

I found myself standing at the head of another long hallway, this one aglow with wall-mounted torches and curving to the right so that I could not see the end. 

I stopped and listened to see if I could hear anything, but all I heard was the faint popping and crackling of torches. Like on the second floor, there were doors on each side of the hall about every twenty feet. I opened a few and found that these rooms were clean and used, or at least ready for use. 

I couldn’t help wondering if my kidnapper had many guests. Was he a partier or something?
Yeah. This place is party central.
Did he have people over to dance the night away in the great ballroom?
What was he doing, flying them in?
Somehow I didn’t think so, but it was strange that he had all this space for a single man. I guessed wealth just made people eccentric.
Which is polite for really weird.

Toward the end of the hall I found another staircase leading down. Unlike everywhere else, it was pitch black. An earthy smell wafted up in a draft of cold air. I wondered if it might lead to the outside and if so, whether or not it would end under the waterfall. I didn’t want to find out. My nerves were shot. Besides, in front of me was quite the curiosity. It was a massive double door, filling my end of the hall like a sleeping dragon.

I didn’t notice how large the corridor was until I stood in the shadow of these gigantic doors. They were made from huge slabs of wood, carved and inlaid with copper and gold, forming an image of an angel fighting a beast with two heads. It was stunning. The sword in the angel’s hand looked like there was light bursting from it and each ray was accented with silver and glass. At the top, the two doors arched toward each other and met in the middle. Big black pulls stood like hands at about shoulder height for me.

I stood in awe, unable to move as I studied the engraving. It was indeed very beautiful, but it was unnerving at the same time. I wondered who had done the work, but had no illusion as to whom this room belonged. 

The killer. He had no name to me. I figured he fancied himself a scholar of history or something. Maybe he brainwashed himself into thinking he was doing the world a favor by taking girls and doing God knows what to them. I had a feeling in the back of my mind that my conscience, and maybe even
She,
did not approve of what I was about to do.

I turned the large handle, pausing to gather my nerves, then pushed. The door was so heavy that for a brief moment I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to open it. At last it swung in, silent on its hinges. The room was dark. But as the door opened my diminishing candle, aided by the torches in the corridor, threw an orange light into the room. My shadow fell long and fuzzy across thick carpet. 

Straight ahead in the darkness was a canopy bed, very ornate. It stood on a raised platform against the wall. I crept in and closed the door gently behind so I wouldn’t announce my presence, if I hadn’t already done so. 

I held my candle aside and down, waiting until my eyes adjusted a little. I kept my back to the wall. This room was round too, and opposite me were large windows much like the ones in the ballroom, showering the floor with starlight. I sneaked boldly to the bedside. Nothing stirred in it as far as I could tell. 

I came to the windows of tall etched glass and observed a setting moon, blood-orange, against the snow of a distant mountain range. There was a trailhead at the edge of the porch outside the windows. It seemed to lead toward the base of those mountains. There was a shed or shack, partially on stilts, that clung to the mountainside. Below it was a square patch that looked like one of those places where gymnasts do their floor routines for the Olympics, but it was washed-out brown and stuck out over the drop as if it were floating. 

I forced myself to look away. Though life was getting difficult to assess—
which is an understatement—
I still wanted to be cautious. If it turned out that being savagely murdered in the dream meant certain death in the real world, I had to keep my guard up. It didn’t matter if I sometimes couldn’t tell what was a dream and what was the real. I was so overwhelmed with my life that it was getting difficult to stay tough. 

I took a brief survey of the rest of the room. I found a bathroom, a tub that was more pool than tub, and some odds and ends that I couldn’t really place.

I watched the bed curtains to see if I was safe to explore further. I heard respirations barely louder than a whisper.

I moved to the closet, which was like a private WalMart. It was filled with every kind of clothing imaginable, in every style. 80’s MC Hammer pants, old suits like the mobsters used to wear, and even robes, all of them appearing to suffer from the occasional actual use. It blew me away. It looked like a costume wardrobe from a movie studio. Of course, there wasn’t a stitch out of place; everything was orderly. I think I would have felt more comfortable if there was one thing normal in the place. Like shoes kicked in the corner or even dirty undies in a pile of old t-shirts or something.

I was creeped out, and I’m not sure if it was the thought of killer underwear or not. But I felt the irresistible yanking need to turn around, as if he was standing right there. I grimaced, dreading what was coming—not sure if I was going to die of embarrassment or a knife wound—and raised my hands in surrender, turning slowly around. I almost said, “Okay. You caught me,” but I didn’t, because as soon as I had turned and opened my eyes again, there was no one there.
Just another unexplainable item to add to the list.
 

I was not deterred from my nosiness, and continued on creeping through my captor’s private life. I chalked it up to the fact that I figured he owed me at least a little information—and if he wasn’t going to volunteer any, I would find some, so help me, and he would be at the mercy of my interpretation of it.
So there.
 

It was a bummer that all I found after that was a bare concrete room, it was about the size of a restaurant refrigerator. Killers need storage space too. But that was probably the weirdest part of another weird night strung on the necklace of my existence. Palatial house, in which everything is obscenely overstuffed—then a tiny bunker of a room that’s just…empty. I was seriously wondering how many of these kinds of things were going to continue to happen to me. 

I wasn’t leading a life, I decided. My life was leading me. Where, I did not know, and was almost afraid to ask. But whenever I asked the heavens for explanation, they were silent.
Typical.

I yawned and decided I was getting sleepy and needed to make my exit sooner rather than later. I retraced my trail to my room, being extremely careful not to leave any crumbs. I fell into the soft bed and this time I didn’t dream of anything. No monsters, no running. Just blank sweet sleep. Was that good or bad?