Seeds of Time

by K. C. Dyer

  Darrell, taking advantage of the momentary chaos, gritted her teeth and fled down the stone steps to the beach, pain flaming in her leg like the torches in the lane behind her. Delaney ran beside her, still a brown blur in the dim twilight of the cloudy evening. As she ran down the beach, she could hear the clink of armour from a pursuing soldier. Darrell kept running until she neared the rocks and it became too difficult to see the hard-packed surface of the beach. With the copper taste of fear fresh in her mouth, she stopped to look back at the stone steps only to see a burning torch bobbing along the beach behind her.

  Gasping, and with searing pain in every step, Darrell limped along the rocky outcropping, moving out toward the water. She was sick with worry, both for Luke and for her own well-being.

  I can’t run much further, she thought in a haze of pain. How am I ever going to find the cave with no light? She looked down the vast wall of rock with its many notches, crags, and indentations spreading over several hundred metres of beach.

  Delaney snuffled his nose into Darrell’s hand and whined.

  “Find the cave, Delaney,” Darrell whispered desperately. A few metres ahead of her, Delaney barked and appeared to veer into the rock face. Darrell glanced at the torch-bearing soldier behind her. He was at least fifty metres away still, but she could hear his breath, ragged with the effort of chasing her.

  Darrell stepped hurriedly around the pile of boulders at the cave entrance.

  “Good dog, Delaney!” she whispered and followed him inside.

  Outside she could hear a muffled curse as the soldier lost sight of her. Inside the cave, the darkness was absolute, and Darrell once again had to make her way through touch. With her left hand held out straight in front to protect her face, she walked as quickly as she could, running her right hand along the rough, wet surface of the wall. The rock wall was jagged, and she scraped her knuckles more than once on barnacles that lined the cave. After five minutes of slow progress, she stopped for breath. She could hear Delaney panting cheerfully up ahead.

  Darrell’s stomach was twisted in a knot of worry for Luke, Maggie, and baby Rose. Where would the soldiers be taking them? She felt wracked with guilt for running away. I have to figure how to get Luke and his family out of this mess, she thought. She slid down the cave wall to sit on the sand, only to find the ground was wet. Really wet. The tide was rising and water had begun to flow into the cave.

  That’s why I was scraping my knuckles on barnacles, thought Darrell. This can’t be the right place. The other cave was completely dry. Aloud, she called out, “Delaney! I don’t want to get stuck in here by the tide. Come on, boy, let’s turn around.” The thought of the soldier on the beach chilled her, but there had to be somewhere she could hide where she wouldn’t drown in the meantime.

  Darrell had put her weight back on to her sore leg with a groan when she heard Delaney whimper behind her.

  “Delaney, come!” she said firmly, but she heard no answering movement. The water was up above her ankle now and she felt a pang of worry.

  “Delaney! Please come!” No dog.

  Resolutely, she hiked up the hem of her now sodden wool skirt and headed deeper into the cave. She reached downward to feel for Delaney with her left hand and continued to hold the wall with her right. In less than a minute, she felt a warm nose snuffle into her hand.

  “Thank goodness you’re okay, Delaney,” she sighed with relief. “Now let’s get out of here.” But Delaney continued to whine, and Darrell was forced to drop to her knees in the water to see if she could feel what was wrong with the dog. The cold water swirling around her thighs made her gasp, but it blunted the pain in her leg for a moment or two and she sighed with relief.

  In that moment, her hands felt Delaney’s paw, caught under a rock beneath the rapidly rising water. She scrabbled her fingers under the rock and tried to feel if she could pull his paw loose. It was stuck fast.

  In desperation, with the water now up to Delaney’s chest, she reached up to grab the rock wall for purchase. As she clutched her arm around Delaney’s neck, her hand slipped and both of them plunged under water. His paw wrenched free, but before she could even feel relief, a sudden sharp shock ran through her body and she found that she could no longer breathe.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  When the world stopped spinning, Darrell found she could not sit up. She lay where she was, head swimming and gut churning, then rolled over and was quietly sick on the sand. She got up onto her knees and crawled two or three steps away from the mess, and then collapsed back onto the floor of the cave. Her body felt like someone had beaten her with a board all over. Twice.

  She curled in a ball on the sand and listened to the distant lapping of the surf on the beach. It was a calming, quiet sound and it, more than anything, helped her to come back to herself. Her mouth tasted terrible. She made a move to roll over on the sand and felt a bump like a small pebble under her leg. She reached down to push it out of the way and realized that whatever it was, it was in her pocket. Since the darkness was absolute she lay on her back and felt the object with her fingers. Small, round — it was the candy that Luke had given her.

  Darrell remembered Luke saying something about an upset stomach. She slipped the candy into her mouth and rolled gingerly onto her side. The sweet taste was welcome. The nausea receded almost immediately, and she found herself able to think once more.

  As soon as her memory returned, she struggled to sit up. Even with her eyes wide open, she was unable to see what she was wearing or if Delaney was anywhere near. The sudden movement had made her head swim again briefly, but this time the feeling was shorter-lived. A faint red glow illuminated the inside of the cave and she looked up in time to see the image of a tree burning like a red brand on the rocky wall. As she watched, the glow faded like a dying ember into darkness.

  Though wisps of wet hair clung to her face and neck, the rest of her was completely dry. She ran her hands down her legs and could feel sand-covered cotton. Her jeans!

  Darrell whispered, “Delaney,” her voice hoarse and sore. She made a move to go forward and found her path blocked by a soft, warm body.

  “Delaney!” He answered her with a lick across the cheek. She felt relief washing through her at the feel of his fur under her fingers accompanied by the warm, familiar smell of wet dog. She patted him gently and gingerly stood up, careful not to bump her head on a rock outcropping. Using her fingers along the wall as a guide, she crab-walked sideways up the gently sloping floor of the cave, making her way toward the sound of the sea.

  Darrell walked for less than five minutes before she was able to detect a change in the light. The walls were first black shadows and then grey. In the dim light, she saw her pack tucked safely behind a rock where she had left it and gratefully slipped it on. She crept forward slowly, not at all sure of what to expect.

  From the light pouring through the crack in the rock wall above the entrance to the cave, Darrell could see it was daytime. She remembered her watch and looked at it curiously. She was sure that the shocks that had shot through her arm before she travelled must have stopped the mechanism, but when she looked at it, it appeared to be working. She shook it and looked again. It must have stopped and re-started, because it registered only twenty minutes as having passed since she was first jerked through the wall of time. She thought for a moment and realized that she had slept overnight at the home of Luke’s family, so at least twenty-four hours had passed. Darrell checked the date on her watch. It read yesterday’s date. That proved it. The watch must have stopped sometime during the first few moments of the journey.

  Darrell crept carefully to the entrance to peek out and ensure that no one would notice her coming out of the cave. She peered out, squinting, as her eyes got used to the bright sunlight. In the distance, she could see Lily and Andrea, her swimming partner, wade, shivering, into the waters of the bay. No one else was in sight. She stepped cautiously out through the tiny crevice that formed the mouth of the cave. Her head r
eeled and she put her hand on the rock wall for a moment to steady herself, fearing a return of the terrible nausea.

  It doesn’t smell the same here as in Mallaig, she thought with a pang. The light’s different, too.

  She rubbed her forehead wearily. Maybe it’s me that’s changed. Her stomach clenched at the thought of all she had left behind in Mallaig. What would happen to Maggie and Rose? The shouts of the soldiers rang in her ears with sickening clarity. Coward! she thought bitterly. I should have tried to help them somehow. Her feet dragging, she stepped onto the beach.

  As she walked by the boulders, she noticed that none of the small white plastic boxes remained. After what she had been through in the last twenty-four hours, suddenly Conrad’s activities seemed much less important. Still ... it was a shame she had missed the perfect opportunity to capture Conrad on film ...

  Her stomach dropped into her shoes.

  The camera.

  “I must have left it in the cave,” she muttered and turned to retrace her steps. Inside the cave everything remained the same. The cedar bough was deep in the cave where she had left it, but there was no sign of the camera. She pulled everything out of her backpack.

  Nothing. No camera.

  Darrell crept back out of the cave, rubbing the crease between her eyebrows. She glanced around again to ensure no one had seen her emerge, and then slowly limped up the beach toward the school.

  Her mind whirled with confusion. What was she going to tell everyone about where she had been for twenty-four hours? Where was her camera? Had someone found it? Had Conrad? The sickening possibility that Conrad had found her camera made her stop in her tracks. The film had been exposed, so he would know there was no danger to him, but her name was clearly printed across the back of the case. He would know she had been watching. She suddenly felt very frightened, and very alone.

  Lily was waving from her place in the water, and Darrell returned the wave. She was going to need to come up with a good story to cover her absence from the school, and lying was not her strong suit. She paused and leaned against the boulders to think.

  “Hey, Darrell, there you are!” Kate was making her way down the winding cliff path from the school, wearing her tae kwon do uniform, a black belt tied tightly around the waist. Darrell felt frantic. She hadn’t had time to think up an explanation for her absence. What could she say to Kate?

  “I think Brodie’s looking for you,” said Kate, oblivious to Darrell’s panic. “I decided that you guys were right. I’ve been too much of a tech-head lately, so I’m going to practice some of my tae kwon do patterns on the beach and maybe try a few kicks. You want to stay and watch?”

  With an airy wave she walked past Darrell and strode down to the sand near where Lily and her friends were swimming.

  Darrell’s jaw dropped as she looked at Kate’s retreating back. Why hadn’t Kate asked where she had been? She didn’t have to make up a lie because Kate hadn’t asked. She turned and, with her sore leg throbbing, slowly walked up the winding path to the school. As she stepped into the garden behind the school, she spotted her coffee cup, left there the day before.

  Darrell realized that she was unbelievably hungry, so she scooped up her coffee cup from the grass and stepped into the kitchen to have something to eat.

  After breakfast, Darrell walked up to her room. A painkiller had dampened the worst of her sore leg, but for good measure she sat down on her bed and removed her prosthesis. From her window she could see Lily, out of the water, talking with Kate on the beach.

  Darrell picked up her pen and began to write in her notebook. She outlined everything she could remember and added a whole new list of questions to her previous pages. How could she have been drawn back through time? What had happened to Luke and his family? The act of writing made her feel more organized, but she was still not sure that she wasn’t losing her mind. It was obvious that she had been gone for at least a day. She had slept in Luke’s house overnight. Yet no one here at Eagle Glen had missed her. Her watch showed that less than thirty minutes had passed since she had run deep into the cave to hide from Conrad. Had time compressed in some way? And just where had she been, anyway? Now that she was sitting on her comfortable bed, only the ghost of pain in her leg spoke of her journey through space and time.

  Darrell frowned as she remembered the only other time in her life that she had doubted her own sanity. When she awoke from the accident and found herself in a hospital bed, she had spent the better part of a week trying to convince herself it was all a terrible dream. In reality, the fathers of ten-year-old girls did not die in motorcycle accidents. The loss of a father and a leg were things of nightmare, not of real life. But at that terrible time, Darrell had nurses and hospital equipment and the devastated face of her mother to tell her that it had not all been a dream. Now there was no hard evidence at all.

  She glanced down at her arm and saw four bruises, blue and distinct through her tan. Fingerprints from another time.

  “This is crazy,” she said to herself. “I need to forget about this for a while or I’m going to go nuts.” She carefully locked her notebook away in her desk drawer, slipped back into her prosthesis, and went down to the art studio.

  Darrell pulled an overstuffed chair into the corner and began sketching furiously. She was concentrating so fully on her work that she didn’t notice Mr. Gill come in.

  “A day like this was meant for working outside, Darrell.”

  “Oh, hi, Mr. Gill. I — ah — just needed to sit down for a while. I’m a bit — tired from working at night.” Her face coloured at the lie.

  Arthur Gill did not seem to notice. He was looking at the sketch in Darrell’s hand, and then he looked around the room with a puzzled expression.

  “What are you sketching from? Have you got a photograph pinned up somewhere?”

  She shook her head. “Just from memory.”

  “A picture you remember seeing, then?”

  “Not really.”

  Mr. Gill looked up from the sketch. “You have captured some amazing detail from just a mental image.” He rubbed his jaw as he spoke. “Have you been to some of the older parts of Europe, then? The Vieux Port in Marseilles, or perhaps some part of Prague?”

  Darrell could not meet his eyes. Her face burned. She looked down at her sketch of the dark streets she had walked earlier that very day. “Um, yes. I’m not sure where it was actually. It seems like a long time ago, now. It may just be from a picture I have seen somewhere in a book.” She cleared her throat and managed to look up. “I just have this image in my mind, and I feel like putting it on paper.”

  Mr. Gill looked at her quizzically. “What do you plan to do once you have finished the sketch?”

  “I have a series of sketches in mind. I think I might paint this one using the acrylics that I was trying out this week,” she answered absently, her mind swirling with pictures of Luke and Rose in danger, Maggie in tears.

  Mr. Gill looked critically at the sketch. “I sense a strong feeling of darkness in this sketch, Darrell. You may be better off with oils on this one, in order to capture the unique light in the sky.” He stood up and started to rustle through cupboards. “I think we have some of the right shades in here,” he said, his voice muffled as he rummaged. “I have to go to a portrait appointment today, but,” he brought his head out of the cupboard and looked at Darrell, “I am very interested to see what you will come up with. Your sketch looks so alive. I can’t wait to see how it turns out when you paint it.”

  Mr. Gill left a number of supplies out for Darrell and then hurried out of the room to his appointment. She settled back down to her sketching. After about an hour, she gathered her materials and tried to forget her tumbling thoughts by immersing herself up to the elbows in oil paint.

  Later in the afternoon the light in the studio deepened, and Darrell’s stomach began to rumble. She looked up at the clock on the wall of the studio and noticed with some surprise that it was almost five o’clock. She stood up
and stretched to loosen the muscles of her back and arms, then decided to wrap up her work for the day. Her body was sore from being still for so long, but her mind felt much clearer than it had that morning. She decided to have some dinner and then sit down to figure out what to do next.

  As she walked down the hall, Mrs. Follett came scurrying out of the door to the office.

  “Oh, Darrell! I’m glad I’ve found you so quickly. There is a telephone call for you in the office. I think it’s your mother. Hurry on in, dear, you can take it at my desk.”

  Darrell stepped into the office and picked up the phone with some concern.

  “Hi, Mom. Is everything all right?”

  Dr. Connor’s cheerful voice came over the line. “Hi, honey. That was the very question I was going to ask you! My flight got in two hours ago and I’ve just made it home. I have so much to tell you about Europe. It was fantastic!” Dr. Connor lowered her voice. “But, Darrell, I had the strangest feeling the whole time I was away that you were having a terrible time at Eagle Glen, so I decided that the moment I got home I would call you. I have to go back to work on Monday, but I could come up tomorrow and bring you home, if that’s what you want.”

  “NO!” Darrell realized she was shouting and spoke more quietly. “Sorry, Mom, I didn’t mean to yell. It’s just that I’m — well — I’m having a really ... interesting time here, and I’m just not ready to leave yet.”