The Boy Who Fell from the Sky, Jule Owen [classic romance novels txt] 📗

Slowly, Mathew stands. The cat stands, too. Mathew backs into the forest and walks away. Behind him the cat is growling and, he imagines, cursing, on the other side of the river.

It can’t cross, he tells himself. It can’t reach me. 

If he goes further into the forest, he has no idea how he’ll get water. Besides, the river offers a direction. The forest is nothing but confusion, and he might wander around in circles in there for the rest of his life. Even if he doesn’t know where he’s going to end up, having a definite path forward is better than standing still. 

He decides to carry on, trusting that the cat can’t cross the river but conscious now of each twig snapping beneath his feet. 

He stops when the sun is starting to get low and finds a good tree with vines hanging down, like the one he slept in the night before. The humidity in the air is intensifying; he can sense the rain coming. Gathering banana leaves and bunches of fruit, he hauls the lot into his tree. He has time to gather more comfortable bedding and to make the roof of his tree house good and waterproof before the rain starts. 

Safely in his small bedroom, he takes off his shoes and socks. His feet are white and wrinkled with the constant dampness, and red and oozing on top where his boots have rubbed his sunburn raw. He dries the white parts with some of the forest moss he managed to gather for his bed but daren’t touch the red parts. He takes off his top and his trousers to dry. Sweat clings to him. He stinks. I need a bath, he thinks. The last thing passing through his mind before he falls into a deep dreamless sleep is I hope the cat can’t climb trees. 

Friday, 17 June 2472, Siberia

In the morning, life seems better. He has slept in; he doesn’t know how long, but through the leaves he can see the sun blazing high in the sky. 

When he gets down from his tree, the cat is nowhere to be seen. A few feet away there’s a bend in the river where the water filters off and slows into a shallow pool. Wading in, he washes himself and his clothes and hangs them on sticks to dry in the sun while he eats his breakfast. A sunny rock provides a place to dry his sodden boots and he opens the front, pulling at the laces. He tosses the banana skins into the swim of the river. 

As he eats he tries the Nexus and the Blackweb once more, booting Charybdis. He thinks about Clara and wonders if she’s wondering why he hasn’t called. He thinks about his mother and what she must have thought when she came home and he was missing. She must have called the police by now. Someone will search Mr Lestrange’s house, and they will find him. But then he realises, although he’s in Lestrange’s house, he’s in a game and time passes differently in games. Perhaps in the game, his mother still hasn’t come home from work. 

He wants something other than bananas now, fairly badly. Wondering what else in the forest is edible, he packs moss on the top of his wounded feet in his socks and boots and laces them, wincing as he tightens. 

Less and less focused on finding the door back to reality, more focused on the cat, he carries on. 

He senses it. He’s sure it’s nearby, on the other side of the thin strip of water. His mind cycles feverishly through ways to get away from it – climbing trees, running further into the forest. Occasionally, as he walks along, he comes across felled trees, their thick trunks lying across his path, so he has to clamber over them. It crosses his mind that if he rolls one of the smaller trees into the water, he might ride on it like a boat down the river and away from the cat. He casts around for the right kind of tree. 

Hours later, he thinks he’s found one. It’s a little way from the water’s edge, but he guesses it won’t be too hard to drag it. He wedges his stick under it, to help dislodge it from the undergrowth. It takes the next couple of hours to snap off twigs and branches. His hands are cut and sore when he stops to wash and drink in the late afternoon. He glances at the sky. The big low moon is still his companion, but it’s obscured by gathering clouds, and he realises he needs to prepare for the night. Hunting about, he finds a tree to climb and banana leaves, but no bananas, which unnerves him. Up in his tree, wedged between thick branches at the top of the bowl, unable to lie down, he listens to the night and falls asleep hungry. 

Saturday, 18 June 2472, Siberia

When he wakes, he lies for a few minutes wondering how many hours in his real life amount to hours in this virtual world. He’s trying to work out if his hunger is real-world hunger or if, as is often the case in these games, he has only been playing a few hours and his rumbling stomach is a trick of the VR. 

Now he’s sleeping as long as his body needs, distrusting the sunlight. The nights seem very short.

Sitting in his treehouse, he examines his hands, arms, and feet. They’re sore, really painful. It’s a remarkable simulation. It’s reassuring that, back in real life, Mr Lestrange is sure to discover him in his Darkroom soon and end the game. 

He climbs down; the tree trunk boat is where he left it. 

When he goes down to the river to drink, he scans for the cat and concludes it’s moved on, at least for now. He’s torn about whether he should keep walking and leave the tree trunk boat where it is or finish it and make his escape while he can. 

Hunger drives him further into the forest in search of breakfast, and he finds another banana tree. After he’s eaten, he loads a bark rope with bananas and hangs it over his shoulder. On his hunt he finds berries, nuts, and fungus but has no idea what is edible and what is poisonous, so he daren’t eat them. After breakfast, he becomes preoccupied by the idea that there might be fish in the river. Some of the rivers on the Elgol estate have been repopulated with salmon and trout. This place is wild enough not to have been overfished. Indeed, as it’s just a game, and the forest is crawling with life, it follows that the river would be full of fish. Perhaps he could fashion a fishing rod from a sapling and use some of the abundant forest insects as bait. But he lacks the skill to build a fire in this damp place and, even if he caught something, the thought of raw fish makes his stomach churn. His grandmother would be ashamed of him. 

If he gets killed in the game, he imagines, as in all games he’ll be ejected, back into cold, hard reality – or in this particular case, gentle, safe reality. Perhaps, then, he should get himself killed. Incredible as this world is, it’s frustrating and he’s growing tired of it. With that thought in his mind, he heads back to his tree trunk boat. 

Having loosened the trunk some more with his walking stick, he makes a long rope with the bark strips, ties it around one end of the tree and pulls, stopping periodically to clear the route of stones, branches, and plants.

After forty minutes of hard work, he manages to drag the trunk to the edge of the riverbank and pushes it in with a great splash, then jumps in after it, just managing to catch hold of the slippery bark as the trunk is turned and grabbed by the river.

It catches the flow and starts to travel down sideways. Mathew gets behind it, throws his arms and his chest over the top, hauls himself up and hugs the wet wood to him, in the still fast centre of the river now. The riverbed is far from the reach of his feet. The force of the water pushes him and the tree on, and they gather momentum. Then, as the river bends, it suddenly narrows, and the tree gets jammed between the bank and a rock. He hauls himself along the trunk, the current rushing beneath him, dragging at his legs. 

When it’s shallow enough for him to touch the rocky river bottom with his feet, he stands and pushes at the wedged tree. It won’t move. In front of the tree, on the bank, branches and other debris have got tangled against a jutting rock. His tree is caught on this mess. Reaching across the trunk, he manages to clear away the debris and push the front of the log to face down the river. Taking a firm hold as the log-boat starts to move again, he uses the momentum to drag himself chest-first along the top. Lying face-down, he precariously manages to balance and he thinks that when he stops again, he’ll try to find two smaller logs to tie to the trunk with bark rope, to form a raft. 

The river widens and deepens again, and he hangs on harder still as the force of the water gathers, but he feels more vulnerable and wonders how he might turn the trunk so he’s behind it again. He slips off and gradually edges it around in the water, pushing against the current. 

Staring ahead to where the river narrows, he spots a large stony beach on the right-hand side. The water becomes shallower, his feet bang and drag on the riverbed, and he lifts his legs. Near the beach, the water gets shallower still, the tree gets stuck, and he wades around to push it free. 

Something large and powerful hits him from the side, throwing him onto the shore. 

He’s so dazed, it takes him a moment to realise it’s the cat. He scrambles to his feet – there’s a searing pain in his shoulder, but no time to think. The cat is between him and the river. He tries to move further along the beach nearer the water, but the cat has him covered and cuts him off. Slowly, he backs towards the forest, all the time expecting the creature to pounce. He somehow scrambles over a bank, gripping roots, grass, plant stems – anything. There’s a vine hanging by his face – he grips it and pulls, testing it, and quickly gets a foothold and swings towards the trunk of a tree, throwing his leg and catching it on a branch, levering himself with his arms and his wounded foot. The cat comes bounding up the bank. Mathew gets clear just as the cat launches itself at the tree, leaving a great gash mark in the side of the bark. Struggling crazily, Mathew kicks and scrambles and climbs desperately, until he’s sitting on a sturdy branch. The cat makes one more attempt to get at him, leaping and falling with a crash. 

For a long time it sits at the base of the tree, roaring at him whenever he peers down. 

It starts to rain. The branch becomes slippy, and he retreats slowly to the heart of the tree. His shoulder is numb with pain. Touching it with his hand, he finds that it’s wet and sticky. When he looks at his fingers, they’re covered