by Bre Hall
“How’d you find us?” Charlotte asked.
“You, disappearing into the woods with a picnic basket?” Alena chuckled. “You weren’t exactly discreet, miss.”
“Why’d you follow me?”
“Curiosity, mostly,” Alena said.
“Billy could have shot your brains out.”
“And your mama’s looking for you,” Alena said. “Your dress arrived for tonight. She’s itching to get you into it. Figured I better fetch you before she sent out a search party.”
“Good thing too,” Charlotte said. “No one can know Billy’s here.”
“I understand,” said Alena.
“Not Mama, not little Cyrus or Kate,” Charlotte said. “And especially not Daddy.”
“I understand, Miss Charlotte,” Alena said. “Your secret is safe, but you better get back to the house before it’s not.”
Charlotte nodded, unfolded herself from the hollow, and crawled out into the daylight. Leaves rustled from inside the oak. She turned. Billy was kneeling in the opening, mangy head poking through. His swirling eyes caught hers.
“You’re going?” he asked. “Just like that?”
“You know what Mama’s like,” she said.
“So, I’m just supposed to sit here by myself all day?”
“I packed you food,” Charlotte pointed to the basket resting just inside the shadow of the tree. “There’s a book in there too.”
“But you’ll come back later?”
“Not tonight,” she said.
“Why not?” Billy asked.
“It’s Mama’s annual Cotton Ball,” she said. “I have to be there.”
“After, then?”
Charlotte exhaled sharply. “You are acting like a child, right now.”
Billy shrunk back into the hollow so she could no longer see his face. His voice fell apart like one of Alena’s biscuits. “It’s just that I was alone for so long.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’ll be back tomorrow morning. I’ll tell Mama I’m going into town to see Anne. Then, I can spend the day with you. We’ll play games and tell stories like when we were kids.”
“You promise?” Billy asked.
“Yes,” she said, picking up her skirts and turning toward Alena, who was a few steps ahead of her, flitting through the trees like a sparrow above a pond’s surface at twilight. “I promise.”
Charlotte took one step toward the house and, slowly, the trees turned to smoke and everything in that world folded in on itself. As Charlotte began to fade, Ren returned. She dropped through the chasm of color, a thousand thoughts racing through her head as she tried to breathe. A moment later, she slammed into her own body, took a deep breath, and sat up on her bed. Her good eye opened. The bracelet was in front of her, right where she had left it, the pebble still spinning on the open locket disc. She closed it quickly, tucked the bracelet back into the sandwich baggie, and slid it into the top drawer of her bedside table.
She could still feel Charlotte clinging to her, feel the spirals of Charlotte’s hair pasted with sweat to the back of her neck. It all felt so real. Maybe, she thought, maybe she and Charlotte could share a soul. Grams’ book produced enough evidence that reincarnation could be a possibility. A true possibility. Otherwise, how would she explain it?
Peter popped into her mind—pulling a drag off a cigarette, talking about superhuman races. An army of fingers clawed at her insides. It scared her. All of it. What if it was true? What then? Was she, like Peter had said, actually in danger?
She turned off the lamp on her bedside table and crawled beneath her sheets with her jeans still on. She closed her eyes tight, taunting sleep to greet her swiftly. But in the darkness a hundred thoughts about Peter, Charlotte, reincarnation, and the supernatural reached out to her. Ren’s mind became nothing but a steady, electric hum of questions.
chapter
8
THE WEDNESDAY MORNING SCHOOL BELL was about to ring, but all Ren could hear was the sound of corn stalks whipping against one another in the strong, chilly wind and her bike tires humming against the gravel road south of town. She pedaled over the steel truss bridge, the top of the abandoned Johnson house winking out over fire-red trees, and then she shot up the driveway at full-speed. She didn’t slow down until she was in the front yard.
She abandoned her bike, handlebars leaning into a dead bush, climbed the tilted porch steps, and knocked on the door. She took a step back and slipped her hands into the pockets of her jean jacket. The bracelet rested at the bottom of the lining, still zipped into the plastic baggie. She wrapped a few fingers around it, reminding herself why she was seeking out Peter. Again.
Just when she was about to give up on him being there, footsteps creaked inside and the door squealed open. Peter stood in the doorway, sleeves rolled up on a plain black t-shirt, barefoot, smoking.
He brushed a curl out of his eyes, smiled. “I thought I’d be seeing you again.”
“I didn’t think I gave off that impression the other day,” she said.
“What brought you back?”
“I don’t know for sure,” she said. “But I want you to tell me more.”
“About what?” he asked. “About the bone? About Charlotte? About the Discentem?”
“Everything.” She took a step forward. “All of it.”
Peter pulled the cigarette from his lips and flicked his thumb against the butt, ash fluttering to the ground. He stepped to the side and waved an arm toward the inside of the dark house. “Come right in.”
She stared into the bleak hallway. Newspaper was pasted to the walls in lieu of wallpaper, yellowed and peeling. Bits of debris—rotting wood, crumbling sheetrock—were scattered across a scratched wooden floor. All she could think of was the Johnson family. The murder. The chopping of the body parts. No one her age went into the abandoned house. No one who came back out.
“What?” Peter asked. “It’s just a house. Nothing to be afraid of.”
“I’m not afraid,” she said forcefully.
“Then what are you waiting for?”
She stepped over the threshold. The scent of mold hit her first, an undercurrent of wood rot, cigarettes. Peter closed the door. The place was lit by streaks of light pouring in through the gaps in the wood-covered windows. She followed Peter closely as he led her down the hallway, around piles of abandoned papers, books, and clothing strewn about. Wild images of Mrs. Johnson’s husband dragging her through the house by her hair, her limbs flailing, knocking everything out of place in a fight for her life surfaced in Ren’s mind.
They stepped into the kitchen. She sucked in a clean breath. That room wasn’t like the rest of the house. No piles of debris or delipidating junk leftover from the Johnsons. Just yellow-tiled countertops, freshly cleaned cow statuettes that must have belonged to Mrs. Johnson, and a sun-faded green wall covered in over a dozen working clocks. They beat loudly and not one displayed the correct time.
“Why are there so many?” Ren nodded to the winding hands fastened to the middle of each timepiece.
“They keep me hidden.” Peter had his back turned to her as he dug through a cabinet full of porcelain dishes.
“They’re yours?”
“Yes.” He pulled down two mugs. “Would you like a cup of tea?”
“Do you have coffee?”
“No.”
“Then nothing,” she said. He placed one of the mugs back in the cabinet. “How exactly do clocks keep you hidden?”
“Time is bound in clocks, captured, like a prisoner,” Peter said, moving to the sink with a copper kettle. He began to fill it with water as he spoke. “It defies natural law. It moves beyond it. The Auxilium’s abilities are rooted in nature. They work with the wind, the tide, the naturally eroded walls of a canyon, not against it. Clocks do just the opposite, and for some reason, because of that, we can’t see or sense things close to them if we are searching from a distance. It’s like that part of the world is void. Until we stumble upon it for
ourselves, that is.”
Ren snorted. “You’re joking, right?”
“No,” Peter said, turning the gas stove on, the burner click-click-whooshed to life. He set the kettle on top of the blue flame ring.
He was being so casual about it all. She couldn’t tell if that made her angry or nervous, so she crossed her arms over her chest and decided on angry. She was used to playing that part. It’s what helped keep the walls intact around her. Kept her safe.
“You expect me to believe that bullshit?”
“Something brought you back here,” Peter said. “You’re curious. You wanted to know more, and that’s what I’m doing. Telling you more. So, why don’t you sit down and listen. Try to understand without being so skeptical.”
“I’m not skeptical.”
Peter chuckled. “You’ve always been a skeptic.”
She sat down across from Peter at the small table, the fake, marbled linoleum top chipping off in places. They stared at one another for a strong minute. Then, the tea kettle began to whistle, Peter got up, poured himself a cup, and sat back down.
“Well?” she asked.
“Well, what?”
“You told me I should sit down and listen,” she said. “Here I am. Sitting. Waiting. Listening.”
“What brought you back?” he asked. “Honestly. Because something must have.”
“Charlotte,” she said. “And the fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about all of this.”
Peter smiled, the corners of his mouth pushing into his smooth cheeks. He winked, his long, dark lashes touching down for a moment, before springing back up. “Good.”
“How is that good?” she asked. She leaned against the back rest of her chair.
“It means your past is closer to the surface than I imagined,” he said. “It will make the experiments easier.”
She sprawled her arms over the table and clasped her fingers together. “See this is the part I don’t understand. The evidence of reincarnation alone is enough to make anyone run, but the fact that you want to experiment on me. That’s insane.”
“And yet, you came back.”
“Like I said before, I wanted to know more,” she said. “That’s all. Knowledge. Not practice.”
Peter shook his head, the curls on the top of his head shivering. “It doesn’t work like that. You don’t get to know about this world without taking part in it. Either you’re in or you’re out.”
“Right now?”
“Yep.”
“You’re serious?”
Peter leaned across the table, inching closer. “Absolutely.”
She drew her hands back. She hadn’t skipped school and rode her bike all the way to the creepy Johnson House alone just to quit. To close off the door to her past. It wasn’t like she wouldn’t be able to get out of it later if she wanted to, right? But Peter didn’t need to know that.
“You’re not going to stick me with needles or hook me up to any kind of machine, are you?” she asked.
“No.”
“Fine,” she said.
“Is that a yes?”
“I’m in.”
Peter took a sip of his tea. “Excellent. Where should we begin?”
“At the beginning,” Ren said. “I want to know everything.”
“Everything?”
“Yes.” She rolled her eyes. “Everything.”
She settled into her chair like a cat hunkering down in a flowerbox and watched Peter pour more hot water over the tea bag in his cup. It smelled like the mint chewing gum girls at school always passed around right after lunch. She wrinkled her nose. Blocked out the scent.
“In this lifetime, you have been taught that humans are the only being of their kind,” Peter began. “We know this to be false. When the Earth was drummed up millions of years ago, two other species with higher intelligence were also placed on the planet. Discentem and Auxilium.”
“Auxilium are the ones who can hide themselves in the clocks, right?” she asked, trying to help herself understand this fully.
“In a sense,” Peter said. “I myself am an Auxilium. We were created to protect mankind. We have the ability to fly and heal. In modern culture we are referred to as angels, however, we do not live in the celestial plane as most might believe. We are bound to the earth and walk among the humans.”
“Do you take on hosts?”
“No,” Peter said. “We’re not like what you see in the movies or on TV.”
“Alright,” Ren said. “If you’re the flying creature, I must be the other one, right? The supernatural one?”
“You’re a Discentem,” Peter said. “While the Auxilium’s purpose was to protect, the Discentem’s was to teach. It’s a common belief that humans only use about ten percent of their brain capacity. Discentem’s use one hundred percent and then some.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” she said. “How do they use more than one hundred percent?”
“Their brains are structured to function on a larger scale than humans.”
“Okay,” she mumbled, then said sarcastically, “Because that clears it up.”
Peter carried on. “Human, Auxilium, and Discentem. From the outside, they look nearly identical. It’s what they do that makes them different. But what really sets them apart is their soul. Human souls are fragile; that’s what makes them mortal. They live, they die, they cycle through a few lives to complete the soul enough to move on to the afterlife. Auxilium souls are a mix of the two. Our souls are extremely powerful and, unless we are killed, keep us from aging.”
“If you don’t age, then how do you die?”
“Our souls have a weak point. There is only one way in which we can be killed,” Peter said. “But the downfall is, for us, there is no second life like the humans. No afterlife, either.”
“You just vanish?”
“Simply put,” Peter said. “Yes. When it’s over, it’s over.”
“That doesn’t seem very fair.”
“It’s not.” Peter pulled his cigarette case from a pocket and lit one. A puff of smoke floated toward the ceiling like a balloon loosed into the sky. He studied her with his dark eyes for a moment before continuing. “You are the lucky group, well, were, obviously, since I’m having to teach you of your forgotten past. Discentem were absolutely immortal. A Discentem’s soul was complete from the beginning. That, along with their abilities, kept them from dying. Or so we all thought.”
“So, Discentem have a weak point in their souls also?”
“Yes,” Peter said. “But it’s not a natural weakness. It was manufactured.”
“What do you mean, manufactured?” she asked.
“Do you remember the other day when I mentioned a curse?”
“Uh-huh,” Ren said, flashing back.
“For millions of years Discentem and Auxilium worked together to better mankind,” Peter said, taking a drag off his cigarette. “Naturally, the world needed a leader, someone to look to for guidance. Two Discentem rose to power: Samara and Drustan. Samara was breathtakingly gorgeous, erudite beyond measure, and blessed with more abilities than any other Discentem. She was a natural ruler. Kind and teeming with grace. Her only demise was her love for her partner, Drustan. Handsome, intelligent, and powerful, Drustan was equal to Samara in many ways. Except for one.”
“Let me guess,” Ren said. “He was an evil bastard.”
“If Samara was a blazing light, Drustan was an oozing darkness,” Peter said. “He kept up appearances, of course, for Samara, but he loved sneaking off, teaching the humans about greed, lust, and murder. Basically, any deadly sin you’ve been taught, Drustan introduced.”
“He was like the Devil,” Ren said.
“Very much so, yes,” Peter said.
“Of course, Samara was not blind to Drustan’s antics, but she turned her gaze away from it,” Peter said.
“Why? Why not call him out on his bullshit or dump his ass?”
“Simple,” Peter said. “She loved him.”
>
Ren rolled her eyes. “Give me a break.”
“Just wait.” Peter beamed, his gaze driving through her, sending a Fourth of July sparkler burst of heat to her cheeks. She looked down at her hands as Peter rambled on. “Drustan started causing uproars among the Auxilium. Feeding the ones who would listen with ideals of being second-class. Shadows to the more powerful Discentem. Hordes of Auxilium believed him. They saw what was false and made it true. They saw what was minor and made it major. As you can imagine, this caused a mammoth-sized rift between the two species.”
“What did Samara do then?” Ren asked.
“At first, she did what she had always done, turned away. She tried to invent a reason for why Drustan had done what he’d done, an excuse to pardon him, but the Auxilium in her high court implored her to see the truth. This is where the story gets a bit fuzzy. Not long after her meeting with the high court, there was an incident of some kind. It is still unknown to most everyone, myself included. All I know is that there was an altercation between Samara and Drustan that caused them to split and inadvertently forced everyone to choose sides. The majority of the Auxilium stood with Drustan, as well as a few Discentem who shared his love for trouble. We call them the Rogues. Samara’s followers consisted of a small number of loyal Auxilium—that’s me—and the majority of the Discentem. Thus began the greatest war earth has ever seen.” Peter stood and walked to the sink. He pulled a glass out of the cupboard nearby and filled it with water. He took a sip, then another. He peered out the small window overlooking the trees that separated the Johnson’s property from the river bank. “No one knew that the Discentem couldn’t die, not in the beginning. So, earth became the battlefield of winged creatures against supernaturals, leaving the humans to crawl into caves to wait out the danger.
“I won’t bombard you with the meticulous history of the war, not now. What I will tell you, though, is how the Rogue Auxilium gained the upper hand. Drustan and a few others took to studying the makeup of their Discentem souls. Through a series of grotesque tests on prisoners of their war, they discovered how to split a Discentem’s soul. After the splitting, the Discentem quickly lost their powers, aged and died.”
