Dreams of Shadows, Patrick Sean Lee [best historical fiction books of all time TXT] 📗

protect his face…and then he disappeared! She continued forward, her head held high, and a look of savagery on her face. Two of the invaders of our Eden were still behind me. I heard the gravel stamping beneath their feet as they tried to run, but their escape was doomed in another flash of black fury, different from the leader’s hornet end, but just as effective.

As quickly as that, the four of us were alone once again. I wept more loudly in the strange silence.

It was over. Mari knelt beside me, looking down at me with pity. The other Mari. She offered her hand to me, helping me sit up. I quickly covered myself as best I could, blubbering incoherently, trying to put what had happened all together into something that made sense.

“What…what did you just do?”

Mari sat back on her haunches, her eyes filled with sadness, but she didn’t answer. She reached forward, straightened a few strands of tangled hair at the side of my face, and then she rose quietly and crossed the space to Ash and Jack. I whipped my head around. He was lying on his back, his face turned toward the house, and droplets of blood oozed from his ear and nose. That side of his face that I could see was as red as a beet. Jack's blouse was torn. She knelt over Ash with her hands covering her mouth, shaking her head, crying in streams.

A moment later Mari returned to me with a worried look. She said, “We have to get him into the house quickly. He’s hurt badly.”

I regained my senses, struggled to my feet, and went with her to Ash. Together we carried the little unconscious boy toward the house with Jack stumbling along beside us, absolutely destroyed by all that had just happened. On the way Mari said in a low voice, ”You are not to mention anything of how those savages left, Amelia. Not to anyone. Simply tell them that a dark presence materialized and frightened them away. Nothing more.”

I shot my eyes to her. “But why?”

“Because I said not to, that’s all. Be patient. Will you do that?”

I wondered if I could—or should. After all, we were all in this together. My suspicions concerning the change in Mari were now absolutely confirmed, though what her exact connection to the alien presence was still baffled me.

We passed the tower sitting stone silent in the grass. I glanced over at it.

“Don’t even think about it, Amelia.”

I looked back at her. “Did the old Mari die when she touched it? You’re not Mari anymore, are you? You’re somehow one of them,” I put the question to her plainly once again.

“You’re wrong, Amelia. I’m Mari, I swear it. You’ll understand in time. Quickly, now, let’s get Ash inside.”

We reached the steps, and with little effort, ascended them.

What Have We Here?

We laid Ash gently onto the nearest sofa in the living room. I ran to the kitchen, and returned with a moist, clean Terry cloth to daub the blood from his swelling face. Mari was sitting on her legs on the rug holding his lifeless little hand in hers when I returned, her eyes closed tightly. I knew without asking that she had to be summoning the creatures that had bestowed a remarkable power on her. Perhaps she was asking them how badly Ash really was hurt, and what she should do to mend him.

There was nothing more that I could do for Ash. I cursed the man who had struck him, and I continued to search Mari’s face, hoping her eyes would pop open, and she would look up at me with a large grin. I have it!

She merely sat, her lips moving almost imperceptibly.

Ten minutes passed, when at last I heard the low roar of the Ferrari and the hurling of gravel from beneath the wheels. I left Mari and Ash, and ran to the porch just in time to see the powerful car skid to a stop beneath the steps. Cynthia threw the door open and leapt out before it even came to a halt, followed by an ashen-looking Munster brandishing a pistol on the other side.

“What?” he shouted.

She said nothing, racing up the steps with her eyes riveted on me, darting from my face to my shredded clothes, and back again to my face.

“I’m okay,” I said clasping my sweater with one hand, my shorts with the other. “It’s Ash.”

She hesitated for only a heartbeat, looking at me with her mouth open in bewilderment and shock, and then she sidestepped me and rushed inside. Munster bounded up the steps before Cynthia had gotten two steps, and grabbed hold of my shoulders, the pistol still locked in his hand. He whipped his head around to the drive and orchard they had only seconds ago passed, searching for someone still lurking there in the shadows.

“They’re gone,” I told him.

“They? What happened? Are you okay?”

“Yes, yes. It’s Ash. One of them beat him unconscious.” I saw his eyes dart over my shoulder toward the interior, and then back to me.

“You sure you’re okay?” He looked hard at me, and then let his eyes drop to my hand holding the sweater closed. I forced the whimper rising in my chest down, and took a deep breath. Closing my eyes in shame, I simply nodded in the affirmative. But I wasn’t okay, and he knew it. How can you be okay after something like that? I survived, that’s all. As for Ash…

He tightened his grip on my arm with his free hand and began to lead me across the porch toward the somber vigil inside.

“Tell me,” he said.

In garbled and broken half-sentences, I tried to relate the series of events, shying away from Mari’s actions as best I could, trying to construct a lie that would deflect more questions centering on her. I was no good at lying, editing my comments clumsily, and I knew when the rest of our group arrived shortly, I’d have to pull it together and tell them something halfway believable. I didn’t see what was happening to Mari. She was over there somewhere, cries of no, no, no erupting from her mouth. I couldn’t see for what was happening to me. Just a terrible hailstorm of rocks and dirt and broiling black clouds. And then quiet. No good at lying. Maybe someday I could tell them the truth of it.

Cynthia was beside Mari, one hand on her tiny shoulder, the other on Jack’s quivering arm. It was apparent that Mari hadn’t said much to her—if anything—because the moment we arrived, she turned and began her litany of questions. I began the revised lie once again. Mari didn’t look away from Ash, and Cynthia could not, in her best efforts, calm Jack down.

 

It took ten minutes more until the same entrance of Peter and Charles and Lashawna and Jerrick in the truck. The same rush and pounding of feet on the wooden porch steps. The same looks of shock, and the flurry of questions the moment they saw Mari and distraught Jack, Ash unconscious, and me clasping my tattered clothing standing at Munster’s side.

“One of ‘em was the guy I didn’t cap at the church. Jesus, I shoulda’ killed him when I had the chance,” Munster said amid the rush of voices.

“But…where…I mean, the creatures killed them? Took them away? What?” Peter asked. Jerrick found Ash’s body. He ran his fingers over the wounds slowly and carefully. I rehashed the events that had occurred in their absence again and again until they seemed satisfied and finally went silent.

There was little more to be said. Peter lifted Ash from the sofa and took him upstairs to the same bed Mari had occupied a few days earlier. I went as quickly to the bedroom across the hall, found fresh, untainted clothes, and changed into them, not wanting to ever, ever again see the sliced and torn clothing I’d put on that morning.

Cynthia was in the room, near me, offering words of comfort. Clumsy words. I’m so sorry, Amelia. In time…followed almost immediately with little diversionary snippets of what she and Munster had done that morning.

“He sideswiped a truck just outside Marysville! He was so angry, but I had to laugh. He’s crazy!”

“Honest?”

“Yeah. He’ll probably have to get himself a brand new Ferrari once everything settles down,” she said with a laugh.

“He’s going to kill himself one of these days,” I said, pulling a maroon hoodie over my tangled hair. I was grateful for the change of subject. I straightened myself up somewhat, and we left to join the others.

Mari had decided to sit with Ash. I was thankful for that. God knows, maybe she could summon him back. The rest of us left her there and went back down, Jerrick, begrudgingly. Lashawna had to nearly pull him away from Mari and Ash, and no doubt he would have stayed with them had Mari not said in a sweet voice, “I’ll watch, Jerrick. You can go. I’ll call if…when he wakes up.”

The discussion in the kitchen centered, not on Ash—we’d been through one crisis similar to his with Mari—but on the men who had found us.

“We saw the truck parked at the side of the highway near the gate,” Charles said. He stood at the sink counter pouring water into the coffee maker. Cynthia sat beside Jack and me, one hand on mine atop the table, while Lashawna poked through the contents of the refrigerator on the other side of the room. Jerrick, Peter, and Munster sat across from us, worried looking.

Peter said, “There have to be others.”

“Maybe we string a wire or somethin’ down at the road. You know, so if anyone tries to sneak in…”

“Or we pack up and move farther out,” Jerrick broke in.

Lashawna returned to the table with a platter of anemic-looking carrots and sliced beets. She laid it on the table and then sat down beside Cynthia. “I like it here. I don’t want to run away and start all over again.”

“You don’t know that there are others out there, Munster,” Peter said.

“There are. Bet on it.”

“So then, what do you propose we do?” Charles asked.

“Set a watchman at the window like we had before any of you got here,” Peter suggested. I saw Jack’s eyes flick to the ceiling, as if she was fearfully searching in her mind for the window that would announce the appearance of other beasts. 

“For the rest of our lives?”

“Maybe so,” Peter answered my question.

“Those carrots don’t look much better than the beets,” Cynthia said almost absently, poking at the wilting veggies.

“They’re still nutritious,” Charles said. “Amelia, get some food in you.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“WHAT are we going to do? I don’t want to stay locked up on this farm for the rest of my life! And I certainly don’t want to live in fear that long, either,” Lashawna said.

Charles left the counter and the coffee maker. His brow was furrowed. There was no good way through our futures, no real vision of hope, I could see in his face.

“We’ll stay. For the time being, anyway,” he said. “Munster might be right. A trip wire across the road in. It wouldn’t require much electricity, just enough to break a