Jonah Havensby
Authors: Bob Bannon
Jonah Havensby
By
Bob Bannon
For My Mother,
who said to me
“Just sit down and write me a story”
Text copyright 2014 by Robert T. Bannon
Jacket art copyright 2014 by Carrie Wisemantle
All rights reserved
This is a work of fiction.
Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination
or are used fictitiously.
Any resemblance to actual persons, events or locales is purely coincidental.
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Table of Contents
I
Jonah Havensby was hanging from his bedroom window by a sheet tied hastily under his arms. His first thought was how cold the siding of the house was on his bare feet - cold and wet. In the fall, it always got cold at night, and a thin fog usually hung in the air making it moist. He hung there, from the second-story bedroom window by the bed sheet tied around him by his father.
His dad had roused him from a deep sleep. Not so much waking him up as bursting into the room and sweeping him off the bed to his feet. “There’s no time to explain right now, Jonah, but you have to leave. And you have to get away now,” he said. He shook the boy’s shoulders gently but sternly until he was sure Jonah was paying full attention. “Dangerous men are coming here, Jonah. Very dangerous men. I’m sorry. I can’t explain right now. There’s no time.”
His father rushed into a flurry of activity. He tore the sheets from the bed, tied them together and tied one end under Jonah’s arms, cinching the sheet at his chest. “This will do. It will have to,” his father said.
Jonah was fourteen years old. He was groggy with sleep and nothing about the situation made sense. He had no frame of reference for a situation like this. His father, who he often considered to be one of the gentlest people in the world, was telling him that dangerous men were coming. Who would want to harm his father? Or did they want him? Were dangerous men after him? He could only stand and take instruction.
“I’ll lower you out the window. You’ll be just fine. You’ll run to the woods. If something bad happens, run all the way to the caves. You remember the caves?” His father asked. Jonah nodded and wiped the last remnants of sleep from his eyes. His father stopped and looked down at him. “Jonah, tell me you remember the caves.”
“Yes!” Jonah said obstinately. “Yes, I remember where the caves are.” He said in an angry but sleepy mumble.
“Come here,” his father ordered. Jonah moved to the window which his father slid open. The cold night air rushed in, chilling Jonah. He was only wearing a red t-shirt and white basketball shorts, the same thing he always slept in. The shorts, he felt, were a luxury item. On the rare occasion they went anywhere, it was usually to the mall in the town nearby, and that was usually to buy clothes to replace ones Jonah was growing out of. The last time they were there, Jonah had begged and bargained for the basketball shorts and finally won out. That happened even more rarely.
He wasn’t sure why that thought had even occurred to him, but his father snapped him back to reality by moving him roughly by the shoulders and telling Jonah to sit on the window sill with his legs out the window while his father wrapped the other end of the sheet-rope around himself.
Jonah did manage one word that night, “But..”
“No, Jonah. No questions. There’s no time now. They’re coming. I’m sorry. There’s no time,” and with that, his father looked deep into his eyes, kissed him on the forehead, hugged his head to his chest then looked at him again. He smoothed Jonah’s curly brown hair, hair that never would quite be tamed, giving Jonah a perpetual look of just waking up. “You’ll be alright. I promise,” his father whispered, and with that, his father put his green-gem necklace around his son’s neck and lowered him out the window.
His father’s face was just above him. “When you reach the ground, don’t look back!” his father said in hushed but stern words. “Just run! I’ll find you. I swear I’ll find you.” His father’s pointy face glistened. He had never thought of his father as a strong man, and bearing the weight of the boy in the sheet was the most physical thing he had ever seen his father do. The sheet slid slowly down and, as it did, Jonah’s feet walked down the siding, leaving wet tracks.
Jonah looked around from his perch. There were few neighboring houses, and even those were quite a distance away. Most of his surroundings were tall fir trees and other smaller, leafy trees that created a canopy around the area. He could smell the pine trees in the air. He could see how the mist of the fog danced and hung around the greenery.
The house itself sat on a large bluff. The view from the large window in the living room was a sea of trees and, off in the distance, the small town that was a couple miles away. The only access to the house was a thin, winding highway that was rarely used.
“I can help,” he wanted to say. “I can do something! Please don’t make me leave!” His thoughts begged his mouth to move, but all he could do was stare into his father’s fearful eyes. They looked much smaller, and more tired than usual. His father usually wore thick glasses. Jonah had tried them on only once when he found them sitting on the living room coffee table. He put them on and was going to walk into the kitchen to show his father, but everything was so distorted and blurry he found he couldn’t walk through the room.
The descent down the side of the house stopped for a moment. His father seemed to be judging the distance. “Just a little more. Then run!” His father said in a hushed and hurried tone. He disappeared into the window, and the sheet started to move again.
The front of the house, the opposite side of where they were now, lit up like daylight. Jonah’s first thought was that the sun might be coming up. But the light was too white, the beaming light too out of place with how dark the rest of the world looked. When he looked straight up, he saw that the light seemed to be carried by the fog, giving the roof of the house an ominous halo that loomed over him.
A commotion had started in that direction as well. Tires screeching. Car doors slamming. A chorus of shouting voices. They sounded angry, but they were too far away and far too many of them to make out any one word.
The bed sheet moved faster. His feet slid down the white siding. “There must be something I can do!” He thought furiously. Why wouldn’t his mouth move? It frustrated him. Why couldn’t he stay? All of those thoughts were pushed aside when the gem started glowing.
The gem was what his father called, his ‘life’s work.’ His father studied it day and night. Looking at it under microscopes or heating it to unimaginable temperatures, or just the opposite, freezing it. Jonah wasn’t allowed in the lab. His father said there were far too many expensive and breakable objects in there. But every now and then, he would sneak in to see what his father was doing, only to be shooed away.
The gem was a cylinder that was three-inches long. It came to diamond-fine points on either end. It was completely smooth to the touch and emerald green. His father had let him hold it in his hands only a few times. On those occasions, his father asked him to hold the gem with both hands, look at it, concentrate on it. He didn’t fully understand why. It was just a trinket to him. Sure, when you looked through it, it made the room look green, which was pretty cool. But otherwise it seemed pretty useless. He remembered touching the ends and finding them too sharp. If you applied the slightest pressure, one of the ends might pierce the skin, so he was always careful. It must have been included in the ‘expensive and breakable’ category since it meant so much to his father. So it seemed somewhat of an honor just to participate.
At one point, his father had fastened a silver chain around one end, so it looked like a necklace. A necklace that was now heavy around his neck as he slid further and further away from his bedroom. And his father.
He had never seen the gem glow before. That’s what caught his attention. It lit up his red t-shirt and the white bed sheet that was tied around him, casting a green glow.
He grabbed it, afraid this new light might alert anyone who was on the other side of the house. The temperature of the thing hadn’t changed. He had anticipated at least some heat, like touching a light bulb. But it was still the same smooth object. He tucked it into his t-shirt and wrapped one hand around it, at least dimming the green light to some degree.
Bam! The loud noise from inside the house sounded like a door exploding off its hinges.
He fell the last few feet to the ground, landing on all fours. When he hit the grass at the foot of the house, he was welcomed with a far colder and damper feeling. Now his feet and hands were soaked in chilling dew from the grass. The pine needles that seemed to be everywhere in these tree-filled surroundings, both jabbed and tickled his hands and feet.
His father appeared once again in the window. The chorus of voices was now coming from that window instead of outside the house. The ‘dangerous men’ seemed to try and pry him away from the window. “Jonah, go! Now!” His father yelled. And then his father was torn from the window by these men Jonah didn’t recognize and couldn’t see well.
He didn’t want to run. He wanted to do something. He wanted to help. But just as those thoughts registered, he found that he was indeed running, moving fast through the back field of long grass and pine needles. Only when he reached the trees did he turn to look back.
From this distance he could see his bedroom only as a small lit frame in the house. Shadows in the frame struggled against each other. A leg broke out the window he had just escaped from. What were they doing to his father? The curtains over the window came down too, as someone, presumably his father, was slammed against the now open space in the wall.
The light in that frame of a window went out. And then the house exploded.
II
Jonah was sent reeling, the force of the explosion blowing him into the tree trunk behind him. He stood and tried to shake it off. His ears rang as he tried to restore the breath that had been knocked from him. He looked at where his house once stood. Half of it clearly gone, the other half in flames. He screamed as tears welled up and then poured down his face. One foot made its way toward the house. He had to run back to his father. But something stopped him. His father had lowered him out the window to get away from the ‘dangerous men’. If Jonah went back now, he was sure they would still be there. There were probably still more at the front of the house and others who had survived the explosion. He couldn’t stay here in the woods and cry. He had to get to the caves.