He went slowly, letting me walk at my own pace and if he was silent, I didn’t feel the need to fill the air with words. He watched me carefully out of the corner of his eye checking to make sure that I wasn’t going to fall over, have a fit or something else equally as crazy.
The ground under my feet was soft, covered with pine needles and moss. But there was rock underneath, too. The footing was solid enough so that I didn’t fear sliding; what I was afraid of was tripping over my own feet.
Not more than a week? earlier I was recovering from brain surgery. Involuntarily, my hands went to my head searching for the drains, staples and the brace I last remembered. None of it was left on me.
Mr. Sanderson stopped at a huge evergreen that must have been close to two hundred feet tall. Its branches swept the ground like a skirt and covered a good hundred feet of ground. When I had been a child, I had loved to play under them. My own private wonderland, my Fae world. The needles were blue and smelled like Christmas. Blue spruce. A small grove of them dotted the sides of the hollow, almost ringing it. The other trees were Sitka pines and lodgepole pines.
I saw no deciduous trees, just pines, firs and evergreens. There was grass growing in the meadow, a bluestem with their heads gone to seed. Waist high in places and beaten down where animals had trailed through towards water. I heard water splashing to my left but couldn’t see a stream nor were there cottonwoods or sycamores to indicate where water lay.
Thin deer trails crisscrossed the meadow, their tracks and others plain to see in the dirt. Something larger than deer had gone through, also. Elk, probably or maybe mule deer.
We followed the main trail stepping lightly upon the same path as the wild creatures until we had traversed the glade and entered the woods. Here the trees bore the sign of a past fire with burned stumps among the newer growth that was still decades old. The underbrush had not taken over, but the trees were so close and thick that one couldn’t see more than a few feet.
He led me only a few yards into the forest until we came upon a huge rock plopped down in the middle of nowhere. Granite, it was as large as a school bus or eighteen-wheeler, shaped like an iceberg and split up the middle by a tenacious cedar growing out of a massive crack. Over the years, the tree had split the rock until it was almost ready to fall over.
The fire had touched the rock, too. Parts of it were blackened and cracked by the heat yet the tree had somehow escaped the flames. I wandered around the massive boulder, marveling at its appearance and location. It was clearly not of the same rock strata as the stones around it. It had not fallen from a rocky mountain above us for there were no cliffs that I could see. The ground under us that was exposed was not the same type of rock, not granite and not even the same color. I didn’t think that a glacier could have carried it from somewhere else and dropped it there, yet I had no other explanation for its appearance.
On the far side of the stone, there was a flat area and I found petroglyphs carved into its surface. Running my fingers into the depressions, I traced the spirals, bee hives and bird shapes.
When Mr. Sanderson spoke, his voice breaking the silence made me jump as I hadn’t been expecting it.
“It’s pre-Clovis, Neolithic,” he said. “Maybe as early as the first hunter/gatherers who came over the Bering strait land bridge.”
“Do you know what they mean? Or says?” My voice sounded strange‒ like it didn’t belong to me.
“No one knows what the symbols mean, Cris. Just suspicions,” he answered.
“I remember an Indian woman teaching me about spirals‒ that they were the signs for the world. And that these meant the four winds. East. West. North and South.” I pointed to the broken cross, what the Germans had taken, reversed and named the swastika. Originally, it had been Hindu.
“Do you have memories from before you were Crispin Lacey?”
I shook my head. “I think if I had, I would have gone crazy. There were so many times that I wanted to die so the dreams and nightmares of other memories would stop. I rarely remembered anything from before the accident. I didn’t know that I was different until I woke from the coma and found Crispin’s diary. That’s when all this started, not before.”
“I find that hard to believe, Cris,” he said soberly. “You’re rather a unique person.”
“No,” I shook my head. “I’m not. After all, you, Jane, Matt, Tempe, Jake and Johannsen all are or were like me. In fact, every one of us humans have the same potential in them to remember their past lives. So they can learn from their mistakes and make the next life better than the last.”
“Does this mean Johannsen and Tempe will have to return?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Not in our lifetime. I don’t know. All I know is that both are really gone this time. They aren’t after me or us anymore.”
I looked around some more and asked him why we were there. “Not that I’m not happy to get out of the tower but this was what you wanted me to see? Why?”
“It’s a surprise,” he said, and we waited. Long enough for the sun to cross the sky. For shadows to grow long and the air to chill. Long enough for the wildlife to grow accustomed to our presence and continue on with their normal behavior.
I heard it first. The harsh crunch of something approaching as it disturbed the leaf litter. I turned towards the sound and saw horses riding through the woods towards us. I stood up and moved closer to Mr. Sanderson, unsure who it was until they grew nearer.
I ran, then. Nearly leaped onto the saddle of the lead horse. Matt leaned over and grabbed me by the waist, picking me up. He hugged me, whispered to me in Gaelic before setting me back onto my feet. I looked up at Jake. He smiled back at me and kicked his horse forward to reveal a third animal saddled with a heavy loaded pack.
“How? Where did you come from?” I asked, holding onto Matt’s stirrup as he nudged the horse forward to Mr. Sanderson.
“Jonas,” both greeted. “Jane?”
“In the tower, watching for stragglers,” he responded.
“The horses didn’t pick up anything following us. Nor did we spot any aerial surveillance. We bought all new clothes and gear in case the Feds tagged our stuff, one of Jake’s buddies scanned us for bugs. We’re clean.”
“The FBI let you go? Just like that? What about my grandfather?” I asked. “I’m sorry about your brother-in-law, Matt.”
“The NYPD is still looking for the perp that murdered him,” he returned. “They didn’t find any fingerprints, trace evidence or video implicating him or anyone else, even though Jason’s office had a CCTV system. The tapes were all taken.”
“They have any leads? Do they suspect the grandfather?” Mr. Sanderson questioned.
“Sergeant DeAngelis has an alibi for the murders of both Tempe and Jason. Also for Cris’ kidnapping. The FBI and the State Troopers insist he had nothing to do with Tempe’s case. There’s an Amber Alert out on Cris and a court order to return him to his grandfather’s custody. The lawyers of the Trust are backing him.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not going with him. I’ll become an emancipated minor and decide my own life.”
“The Judge ruled against you on that, too Cris. You have to be sixteen. He said that a ten-year-old child lacks the mental acuity to make any such legal decisions.”
“Bullshit,” I snarled. “I’m way older than ten. Hell, I crossed the coast on horseback by myself and eluded the cops, the FBI and SAR for weeks. By myself.”
“Come back to the tower. There’s a shed where you can stable the horses. Jane will make supper and you can decide what you’re going to do next and where you’re going,” Jonas said.
“Want to ride with me, Cris?” Matt asked. I nodded and he swung me up behind him on the back of the saddle. We followed Mr. Sanderson to the fire tower.
Jane was standing at the foot of the stairs as we approached, in her hands a set of binoculars. She had been watching us for a while and I also noted that she had a rifle slung over her shoulders.
As the horses came up to her, she told us to bring them to the shed while she went back up the stairs into the tower. To keep an eye on their back trail. From her vantage point she could also observe if any drones might be in the area.
I followed Mr. Sanderson and the horses to the shed where there was room for four horses to tie in short stalls. There was a hand pump inside to water and a bin filled with oats. A few bales of hay had been stacked in a corner, no more than for a few days feeding. The meadow had enough grass to graze three animals for a month or two.
Both men dismounted, unsaddled while I attempted to drop the load off the pack horse. Mr. Sanderson told me to let him do that as I wasn’t supposed to be lifting anything heavier than 2 pounds.
“Want to help?” Matt inquired. “Take this.” He handed me his fanny pack. From the weight and shape, I guessed that it held a weapon ‒ probably his off-duty piece. I raised an eyebrow at Jake, but he said he could carry his own gear as it wasn’t much. Saddlebags, mostly.
I watched as they unrolled the pack, setting stuff into three separate piles. One for the tower, one for now and another for later. Neither would tell me what ‘now’ or ‘later’ meant. By the time they were finished it was dark, and I was exhausted. I dreaded the thought of climbing the stairs and was yawning wide enough to crack my jaws. My complaint brought comments from the others.
“I think,” Mr. Sanderson said ruefully, “we’d best get this boy to bed before he falls over.”
Matt looked up at the tower where the lights glowed like a beacon in the rapidly encroaching darkness. “Can Cris climb on his own? How many steps up to the top?”
“300+ and no, he can’t,” he answered. “We’ll take turns carrying the stuff up.” He eyed the piles. “Some of it we can store in the shed. The food had to come up so the bears can’t smell it. Crispin we’ll carry, take turns with him, too.”
Matt scooped me up in one arm while he pulled his pack onto his shoulder with the other. He must have done some intensive physical therapy somewhere because he managed to carry me up the whole series of steps without limping or passing me over to the others. I fell asleep before he reached the top and only woke up when he tucked me into my sleeping bag on the cot near the beds.
He asked me later if I was awake enough to eat and I remembered grunting something. Then, I was trying to chew on a piece of jerky. I thought it fell out of my mouth before I could finish it, I was so tired and out of it. I woke a few times during the night. Either I saw Matt watching me from the table or sitting on the couch holding my hand, I was comforted that he was truly there and not a dream. I slept the rest of the night in a deep dreamless slumber that was better than drugs.