Into Eden: Pangaea - Book 1 (27 page)

The old man got up and came over to him.

“How are you doing, Jesse? Still feeling a little rough? You took quite a nasty blow on the head when you fell, but I’m sure that you’ll be just fine. By the way, they call me the Prophet, and I believe that you and Perez and Enoch will be my guests for a while.”

“You are
the
Prophet? The one that everyone talks about?”

“The very same.”

Jesse felt the knot on the back of his head.

“How long have I been out?”

“Not long, really, three, maybe four hours,” the Prophet replied. “Why don’t you come and join us for something to eat? It will help you get your strength back.”

The smell of meat and onions did make him hungry, and the old man helped him stand and then led him to a chair at the table. Before him, the Prophet set a large plate of pot-roast, consisting of boiled elk, carrots, onions, and a peeled white vegetable that when mashed seem to take on the flavor of whatever it was eaten with.

“These things are great!” remarked Perez. “What are they?”

“They are called, ‘potatoes.’ They grow quite well at these higher climates. A very hearty and tasty crop indeed.”

They were talking about the storm and the accident that led to their being stranded when suddenly the conversation was interrupted by the howling of a wolf, not far from the cabin by the sound of it. The shepherd raised her head to hear, but didn’t move from the comfort of the rug.

“They’ve found the horse,” Enoch explained, interpreting the howl for the humans in the room. “It’s the Alpha male, I think. He’s calling the pack to supper. But something in the sound of his howl isn’t quite right.”

“You mean that it sort of sounds like a wolf, but not quite?” asked the Prophet.

“Yes,” said Enoch. “It doesn’t sound like any wolf that I’m familiar with in the Foothills.”

“That’s because what you are hearing is the howl of a werewolf. Nothing that you want to meet on the mountain, I assure you.”

Perez gave Jesse a level look, and while the Prophet was turned to speak to Enoch, Perez twirled his finger around his head, indicating that he thought that the man was crazy.

“I have always believed that werewolves were only in fairy-tales,” Enoch replied.

“No. Unfortunately, they are very real. It is not safe to be out on the mountain at night, as I’m sure that you have been told. Werewolves are the reason.”

“So the horse didn’t make it?” Jesse said, trying to change the subject.

“Sadly, no. The animal was seriously injured. At least two of her legs were broken in the fall, so I had to put her down,” the Prophet informed him.

“And the rest of our stuff?” Jesse asked.

“All here. Your brother made sure that we collected all of it.”

“How soon do you think that we can get moving again?” Perez asked.

“Oh, when the snows come early like this, they usually stay late. You can’t start a descent until the snow’s gone. You couldn’t find the mountain road, and even if you could, the snow would slow you down enough to make you easy prey for werewolves. It just isn’t safe until mid-summer.”

Perez gave Jesse another of his, “This guy’s as crazy as a bat” looks and went back to his eating.

After supper they sat down to talk, and Jesse and Perez recounted the details of their journey, while Enoch joined the shepherd on the rug by the fire. Soon both of the dogs were fast asleep.

When they had finished their story, the Prophet looked at both of them and said, “I don’t suppose that I could convince either of you to go back down the mountain the same way that you came, could I?”

“No!” Jesse and Perez said in unison.

“We’ve come to avenge the death of our father and our brother, and nothing is going to keep us from doing it,” Jesse added.

“Suppose I told you that you would not succeed?” the Prophet asked. “Could you be persuaded to abandon this folly then?”

“And how could you know that?” asked Perez. “Because you’re the Prophet?”

“Yes,” he answered.

Perez started to say, “And what if you’re just another crazy old man?” but he had no desire to spend a freezing night in a snowstorm surrounded by hungry wolves so for perhaps the first time in his ninety-five years of life he actually held his tongue.

The evening was getting late, so the Prophet showed them to his guest quarters, a small room with two featherbeds and a commode that doubled as a nightstand. On top sat a single candle.

“I’m sorry for the humble quarters,” the Prophet said, “but I don’t really get many guests.”

Both boys assured him that the room was just fine, and the Prophet left them for the night.

As soon as they were down, Perez whispered to Jesse in the darkness, “Jesse?”

“Yeah?”

“That old guy’s as crazy as they come. You know that, don’t you?”

“I don’t know what to think. Either way, I’ve no desire to go out at night with a pack of wolves nearby—werewolves or not.”

“When the snow melts tomorrow, I say that we head south immediately. Get away from this crazy guy.”

“Okay, but not until it does melt. We nearly died on this mountain today. I have no intention of finishing what we started.”

Then both boys—exhausted as they were from the day’s climb—fell quickly asleep.

Jesse and Perez awakened the next morning to the smell of food cooking. The Prophet had a hot griddle in the fire and was cooking some sweet wheat-cakes that he called, “pancakes.” They weren’t what you would expect for a breakfast food, but with some butter and maple syrup they tasted awfully good. Perez’s hopes for an early departure, however, were soon dashed. The snow continued to fall throughout the day and into the night. It drifted against the cabin’s windows, making seeing outside impossible. When the snow did finally stop the following morning, the Prophet shoveled away the snow by the cabin’s door. Outside was a wintry landscape only seen in the Foothills in the dead of winter. Snow covered everything. Over a pace of it had fallen in two days of blizzard, and the trees were laden down with a thick, heavy snow that bowed many (and broke some) branches. There was no sign of the Mountain Road to be seen anywhere. Jesse, Perez, and Enoch were stuck for the winter.

The blizzard that the three travelers had encountered on their first day on the mountain was not to be the last of that season. Over the coming months another three paces of snow heaped up, covering the windows and shutting out light. Between storms they would clear away the snow to let light in the windows, but during storms they had to light lanterns even during the day. The fire in the fireplace never went out.

Jesse and Perez spent their days playing armies on a checkered board that the Prophet brought out just for their entertainment. Perez was the better of the two, but occasionally Enoch would give Jesse a hand by suggesting that he move a legionnaire this way or that. Perez really didn’t think that the help was fair, but winning all the time wasn’t fun either.

The Prophet had stocked up plenty of wood and food for the winter. He had so many foodstuffs, in fact, that it was almost as if he knew that the two boys would be wintering there. Jesse didn’t think that he would ever get tired of potatoes, and the Prophet served them at almost every meal. The Prophet kept a large wooden bin of potatoes in the cellar, and the boys would make daily trips down to get them and peel them for the day’s meals. Off the potato cellar, however, was a locked room that the Prophet never spoke about. When Perez asked him about it one time, the Prophet just shrugged it off with, “Just something that I keep locked away. Nothing to concern you.” The prophet would, however, go in the room sometimes for hours at a time. What he was doing in there had become a topic of much speculation between Jesse and Perez in their after-hours discussions as they lay in their beds at night. None of them could come up with any real reason that the Prophet would go down there and not tell them what he was doing. Over time Jesse and Perez came up with increasingly bizarre musings. Jesse at first speculated that the Prophet merely wanted to be alone and work on his prophecies. He envisioned him working with ink and quill surrounded by stacks of scrolls. Perez had a more vivid imagination. Perhaps the Prophet had a terrible beast chained in there that he had to go in and feed. One of his werewolves, perhaps? Fuel was added to their speculations when Jesse wandered down one day in search of more potatoes only to see that the Prophet had left the door to this secret room open a crack. Jesse could see flashes of white and blue light coming from the room. Almost as if silent lightening was flashing within it. After that, their curiosity was all the more acute, but their guesses as to what could be causing the strange phenomenon in the room were stymied. Enoch, on the other hand, was not part of their nightly speculation sessions. He had taken to spending the evenings with Future, Prophet’s female Atlantan Shepherd, curled up in front of the fire. Being stranded on this lonely mountaintop had not been such a bad deal for him.

Six months passed and it was now the dead of winter. One afternoon Jesse had fallen asleep on the couch and the Prophet was taking a nap in his bedroom and Enoch and Future were sleeping by the fire when Perez thought that he might go down to the cellar and get some potatoes for their evening meal. As was usual, he grabbed a small basket from the small kitchen’s sideboard, lit a candle and then headed down the steep stairs to the potato cellar. When he got there he noticed that the door to the forbidden room had been left open a crack. As Jesse had described weeks before, flashes of light could be seen coming from inside the room. There was no beast in there, he was sure of it…almost. But curiosity getting the best of him, he laid down his potato basket and opened the door. What he saw was a room that did indeed resemble a study. It was filled with pigeonholes stacked to the ceiling on all sides with scrolls, and a desk with an inkwell in it. The flashing lights that he had seen from outside were emanating from under a black velvet hood that had been placed over some spherical object setting on a tripod. Curiosity getting the better of him, Perez removed the hood.

In front of Perez a blue globe hovered—not sat—over a free-standing tripod that appeared to be made of gold. The globe was a pace in diameter, and glowed as it slowly rotated above the tripod. It appeared to be the image of Pangaea sitting on the oceans. Some of the features he recognized. To the far north was the city of Atlantis. In the center, running from the Cardassian Mountains to the Eastern Sea through the Nara Desert was the Elmer River. Below it he could see the Fog Mountains where he presently was, and on the other side the Pishon River and beyond it the vast jungle of Eden. To his amazement, somewhere off the coast of Pangaea, to the east of where Mavenport would be there appeared to be a very large island, something that every schoolboy knew did not exist. Or did it? As he stared at the globe clouds began to cover Pangaea and in a moment he was looking not at a continent, but at a mirror that reflected his face in perfect detail…except in the mirror he was clean-shaven. His two months of whiskers seemed to vanish. Then he realized why his reflection was distorted, and he tried to flee, but as if in a nightmare his feet would not take him.

Jesse awoke from his unintentional nap to find the cabin quiet. Enoch and Future were asleep by the fire and the Prophet was probably taking his daily afternoon nap. Perez was gone as well. Jesse noticed that the door to the potato cellar was open, so he supposed that Perez was gathering potatoes and would be right back up. Jesse decided to busy himself by setting up the armies board for another game with Perez. After a while Jesse began to get concerned because Perez had not returned, so he grabbed a candle from the guest room and headed down the stairs to see if Perez was all right. When he got to the bottom of the stairs he could see that the door to the secret room was standing open and flashes of light were now blaring into the room beyond. Jesse approached cautiously, fearing the unknown. When he looked in, however, he found Perez in what appeared to be a trace, staring at a slowly rotating globe suspended over a tripod of gold.

“Perez,” he whispered, “are you all right?”