Authors: Sarah Kernochan
By then they will have met their destiny: the cataclysmic showdown between Yenu Krisnu and Shaarinen.
Gita and the Tawny One advance, crouching, through the woods, to the edge of the clearing where Hoyt’s house stands. Pressing her burning stomach against the cool earth, she commands Collin to lie belly-down beside her on the carpet of pine needles so they can peer from under the tree branches.
They watch Shaarinen proceed up the driveway toward Hoyt’s bungalow. Collin whispers, “The two of them are definitely working together.” He hears Gita make a gagging sound. In surprise he turns to see her clutching her stomach, a yellow patch of vomit sinking into the earth. The smell of bile reaches his nostrils. “Gita!”
“Shh!”
Shaarinen turns and looks in their direction. His female form climbs the sloping lawn, toward the tree line. Flattening themselves against the ground, the children hold their breaths as Shaarinen comes to a stop right in front of their hiding place. His pale gray vacant eyes scan the woods.
Gana has thrown her protection over them; Shaarinen cannot sense their abhorrent goodness even three feet away.
The demon moves off, skirting the edge of the property. He keeps close to the perimeter of the trees, searching for something. Rounding the corner of the house, he disappears from view.
Collin scrambles to his feet.
“Stay down!”
“Don’t we have to see what he’s doing?”
“Wait ‘til he comes back around.” Gita seems paralyzed, curled up and hugging her abdomen. The color is drained from her face.
“You’re all white.”
“I’m being purified.”
He waits respectfully. Maybe when the war is over, he’ll be all white too, by the grace of Gana.
After twenty minutes, Shaarinen has not reappeared.
“Maybe he went in the back door?”
Gita sends Collin on recon. Staying inside the tree line, he moves toward a position where he can view the back of Hoyt’s house, passing what looks like a dump: old furniture and truck parts chucked into a leaf-filled pit. Could be a portal! Gita says that demons use them to come and go from the Worldunder.
Completing his circle around the house, he calls, “He’s gone!”
Gita emerges from their hiding place, looking revived. “I know, ‘cause the pain in my belly’s going away.”
“But where did he go? We were watching. Unless he snuck into the woods back there. Maybe there’s a trail we don’t know about.”
Gita eyes the woods behind the house. She does not seem to be feeling the warrior energy at the moment. “Shaarinen wouldn’t have to sneak away. He can dematerialize. It’s one advantage he has over us. You’ll be able to do that too, one day.”
Collin straightens up with pride. He is coming into his own as an avatar: already taller, braver, filled with purpose.
He picks up a rock from the driveway, hurling it at Hoyt’s front window.
The rock smashes through the pane, shards of glass collapsing inwards. Letting out a whoop, Gita watches him take another rock from the lawn. His aim is sure and true. The air echoes with the crash of another window destroyed.
Gita and Collin grin at one another, no words necessary: Hoyt is as much their enemy as Jane. Grabbing a rake leaning against the tool shed, Gita moves to the kitchen door, swinging the handle with all her might against the glass panel.
They circle the bungalow, demolishing every window. The woods seem to shiver with each report: a crash, and then laughter. Not the laughter of children, but of a goddess and her acolyte.
C
HAPTER
T
HIRTEEN
J
ane’s sneakers crunch in the dead leaves, her socks snagging on greenbrier. When she started out, entering the woods in back of the bungalow, the trail was visible, climbing the hill diagonally. Passing a ravine where someone had dumped some junk, it switched back, continuing in a gentle zigzag uphill. But as Jane got higher, the trees grew closer together and the underbrush took over until the trail disappeared entirely.
For the last 20 minutes she has been climbing without guidance, fending off the thorny reach of blackberry bushes, tripping over roots and saplings. Conifers crowd out the birch and oak trees, carpeting the ground with their needles.
Granite rocks great and small protrude on the hillside, but do not constitute a wall.
She trudges upward, straw hat tipped over her eyes, gaze fixed on the ground before her, not daring to look behind. One glance will confirm that the way back is swallowed up, and she is lost.
Suddenly her head slams hard into a low-hanging branch. Rocked back by the blow, she loses her balance, tumbling into a thicket, her hip hitting something solid beneath a snarl of vines.
Rubbing her already swelling forehead, she extricates herself from the vines, tearing the strands apart. Her hip is bruised; beneath the tangle of vines is a pile of stones—the hard thing her hip encountered when she fell.
She scrambles unsteadily to her feet. Something directs her gaze back to the pile of stones. Though the smaller rocks are scattered about, beneath them is a sturdy base of large, heavy rocks.
She is looking at the remnants of a wall. A farmer’s arduous labor, from more than a century past.
Brushing off the heaps of dead leaves, she discovers more such rocks. Looking up the hill now, she can trace the wall beneath the foliage vaguely creeping and crumbling upwards.
Farmer Quirk’s wall! In a burst of exhilaration, she is almost running up the steep incline. Where will the stones lead? Something of great importance waits at the top—so her vision said! She gasps for breath as she climbs, salty sweat trickling into her open mouth.
The crest of Rowell Hill is up ahead.
Throwing off its camouflage, the wall emerges wholly, real and intact, crowned by a glory of green moss. The terrain levels out; Jane slows to a walk, taking more care to step over the loops of vines, skirting the prickly shrubs. She is intensely thirsty.
She glimpses a bright expanse of sunlight through the trees—an open area. Heart pummeling her ribs, she rushes toward the light. As she parts the pine branches to step through, she finds herself in a small clearing. In its center is a shack.
JANE DRAWS NEAR
a small, primitive lean-to made of weathered planks: perhaps an old hunting shelter. The roof seems recently tarpapered, shaded by the overhanging branches of chokecherry trees. The door hangs tilted on loose hinges, a long-handled ax and a spade propped beside it.
Pressing her ear to the door, Jane listens for sounds of someone inside. She hears only the drilling of a woodpecker nearby, the katydids simmering in the trees. Lifting the door’s hook-and-eye latch, she peers inside.
A single room. The flooring is made of the same splintered wood as the walls; a built-in bench covered by a narrow mattress and folded blanket are its only furnishings. There are no windows, only a hinged flip board that props open to serve as hunter’s lookout. Arranged neatly against the wall are a kerosene lantern, folding camp stove, some butane canisters and plastic gallon jugs of distilled water.
She enters eagerly, unsealing one of the jugs and gulping down water as fast as she can. Pausing for breath, she lets the water splash over her face and clothes.
Looking around the room, she feels no stirring of memories; her instincts are silent. Is this her journey’s end? Is this mean little shack the answer to her soul’s eerie unrest?
She curls up on the bench mattress to collect her thoughts. Fishing Eleanor Graynier’s brooch from her pocket, she clasps the talisman between praying hands, closing her eyes:
Why was I brought here? Help me understand what I’m to do. Heavenly Redeemer, send another memory, a vision, an answer…
Sleep comes instead.
THE SOUND OF CRASHING
in the underbrush outside jolts Jane awake. Something approaches. Sucking in her breath, she waits helplessly.
A light tattoo of hooves on dirt, crossing the clearing, fading.
She opens the door in time to glimpse a herd of deer, a regatta of seesawing white tails, bounding away through the woods. Following the deer’s progress, her eyes stray to a heap of stones strewn over the clearing’s opposite perimeter.
How could she have missed it? Quirk’s wall does not end at the clearing, and it beckons her onward.
Glancing at the long shadows extending over the ground, and the slanting light through the trees, she sees the sun is low. No time to venture further; she must turn back and retrace her way down, God willing, before dark.
“I MUST GO BACK
tomorrow, to follow the wall further.”
Brett applies iodine to Jane’s scratches where the branches flayed her face and arms as she stumbled down Rowell Hill.
“You should’ve waited for me.” He dabs the cotton ball to her cheek, the warmth of her breath on his wrist, the flowery smell of her soap. They sit on her bed, a province not permitted him before tonight.
“You disapprove.” She pulls away. “Yet I am so close to remembering. I can feel it.” She glances at the doorway, suddenly aware of a pair of eyes on them.
Collin flits out of sight; they hear his bare feet pattering back to his room, his door shutting.
“Your son feels a certain antipathy to me.”
Brett wants to stay on point. “I don’t like you wandering about the woods all alone.”
“But I have a map.” Slipping under the covers, she slides her feet down, playfully nudging him until he is obliged to get off the bed. As he lays a cold pack on her forehead for the bruise, she chatters on. “It will help my concentration to be alone. I must be mindful every second.”
Messages abide in everything God places in the world before us, she tells him. Every crumb of earth, every blade, leaf, rock and cloud signifies, “if we could only learn to read them!”
Brett has never seen her so pretty and beguiling, her cheeks’ customary pallor yielding to bursts of pink, as if life and spirit have broken to the surface. He wishes that she could always be so happy, and that he was the cause. Jane settles back on the pillow. “I shall hardly sleep, waiting for tomorrow.” Brett offers to read her some poetry to help her sleep. “I should enjoy that very much.” He fetches an anthology of the romantic poets he got this afternoon, driving all the way to the nearest library in Quikabukket. She listens intently to some poems of Shelley and then Poe, asking him to read several times over the one called “Ulalume.”
And we passed to the end of the vista,
But were stopped by the door of a tomb –
By the door of a legended tomb;
And I said –”What is written, sweet sister,
On the door of this legended tomb?”
She replied –”Ulalume – Ulalume –
‘Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!
The romantic poets are a real gloom-and-doom crowd, Brett thinks, disappointed; he could come up with better poetry himself. Like,
Jane, oh oh Jane…You steal my heart again… and again…
He looks up from the page. She is sleeping. Removing the cold pack, he touches his lips to her cheek, and to the sweet dent at the corner of her mouth.
Oh, Jane…
C
HAPTER
F
OURTEEN
W
hen Hoyt lifts his head, he is in pitch blackness, hunched over a table. His mouth tastes of bile and tannins. His brain stutters to life: he is at Jack Meltzer’s desk in the study.
Groping for the desk lamp, his hand collides with a glass bottle. It topples. He switches on the light; red wine is spilling onto the keys of Meltzer’s computer.
Righting the bottle, Hoyt swabs the keys with the hem of his T-shirt, waking the computer from sleep mode. The screen brightens to reveal the
Wikipedia
article he was reading when he passed out.
It all started earlier that day when he’d picked up the Meltzers’ chair at Iacovucci’s. The repairman had turned the chair over to show Hoyt where he’d had to glue the joints. “Tell your client no one should sit on this,” Iacovucci said. “These chairs aren’t just old, they’re crap.”
That was when Hoyt noticed, inside the seat frame, a strange insignia burned into the wood: a variation on a broken cross. The same symbol that was stamped on the cover of an old Bible. The same book containing the lock of auburn hair that had multiplied and clung to his fingers. “Any idea what this mark is?”