by C. L. Bevill
But there was confusion underlying their tones. In her mad rush to escape, she had lost them in the maze of tunnels. Anna almost made a disgusted noise. Lost them, but lost myself, too.
Anna stared behind her and knew that she didn’t dare go back. She could only hope that this passage intersected something else and led to the larger tunnels that would take her to the surface. And, of course, there was Gabriel. He knew where she was. Unless, he was one of them, searching for her.
She rose up and headed up the passage, grateful to feel the slope going gradually upward. Up is good. Anything up is good. Let them keep their secrets. Then a nasty little voice asked her, But what about Meg?
Anna could only hope that she could convince the family to start searching for Meg, that something was wrong with her, and that she needed help. No matter what was hidden in the mine. No matter what they wanted to desperately keep from Anna. Certainly, the health and well-being of one of their own, even half an outsider, would be important to them. After all, they had gone out of their way to rescue Anna from Dan Cullen and they hadn’t even met her before.
Fear is what binds the family together. Fear and love. Fear of what?
After long minutes, Anna’s own fear began to seep away. She could hear nothing behind her and the passage led upward. On the other hand, the tunnel intersected with no others and grew smaller and smaller. Dark earth began to streak through the white salt of the dome’s uppermost regions. Then it was red sand with thin streaks of salt marking the walls. Closer to the surface.
Anna squeezed through a bend and found a dead-end. I have to go back. The thought was demoralizing and frankly frightening, back into the black depths with unknown people and things. She glanced over her shoulder and saw that the light from her headlamp was dimming. She reached up to tap the batteries, recognizing that she had been down in the mine for what seemed like forever and the batteries had to run out sometime. When she slipped the spares out of her pocket and disengaged the headlamp she saw that there was another light source in the narrow passage.
The dead-end slithered on a few feet and ended up as a rounded hole where someone had once dug his way with merely a shovel. Anna let her eyes adjust to the bleak gloom and saw that there was a crack in the earth above her and a little bit of light spilled downward. It didn’t look like sunlight but rather like fluorescent light from a store or some alternate light source. Water had drained through the little crack and made it wider, just enough to show some concealing brush growing at the very edge.
The headlamp and batteries dropped out of her hands, as she doubled her effort into scaling the sides of the craggy tunnel. When she climbed out, knocking great clumps of sand away from the rim of the hole, she saw that the light was coming from a huge billboard on the boundary of the tiny town. She had seen the sign before, when Sebastien had taken her to the auto parts store to get the fuel filter for his truck. With bright lights illuminating it at night so that it was highly visible, it invited people to come back soon to Unknown, to fish and to enjoy the lake, and to have fun. The base posts covered with ivy and brush concealed the small fissure that had collapsed sometime in the past, uncovering a distant opening to the underworld.
Anna scrambled out and breathed a great sigh of relief. The stars shone above her and the night air was strangely welcoming.
Chapter Seventeen
Monday, December 22nd – Tuesday, December 23rd
There are those who say that if a homeowner hangs a sprig of rosemary at the entrance of a house it will drive away devils and contagions of the plague.
At the entrance of the salt mine, Gabriel met Sebastien Benoit and his sons, Gaspard and Raoul. The road was mostly overgrown and the gates were locked. In the shifting light of a nearly full moon Gabriel could plainly see the mine buildings. A single floodlight by the closed, large double doors of the main entrance of the mine showed nothing out of the ordinary. No one was screaming; no one lay bleeding or dead.
Sebastien said, “I called Meg’s son and he said Meg had gone. But you know she’s gone before.” Gaspard clambered out the other side and Raoul followed. Raoul tugged on the padlock at the gate and it held firm, flakes of rust fell away at his touch.
“And the mine?” Gabriel stared at the locked gates. The rusted padlocks appeared as though they had been there decades. He bit back a sneer of disgust. They probably had been there for exactly that long. His gaze followed the chain-link fence as far as he could see. There were no breaks there and the razor wire at the top was there to prevent the casual trespasser and protect the liability of the property owner.
“No one in there now,” said Sebastien firmly. “Although some geology students wanted to go there last month. Said they’d bring scuba gear for the flooded shafts. Hee-hee-hee.” Gaspard and Raoul remained silent. Each slowly looked around them as if searching for Anna and Meg, but neither was there. “But we’ll search it if we have to.”
“The back gate, near the Conja Woman’s home, was open,” said Raoul. “The lock had been pried away, missing, non? I would have thought hunters, wanting on top of the bluff, looking for squirrel or rabbits. We looked. But the mine, she is closed up tight. The mamselle, she could not be inside. It is tight like a drum.”
“Dieu, Sebastien. Was it ever like this for any of the children? Do they lose their minds while getting used to the gifts?” Gabriel ran an exasperated hand through his black hair. Anna’s vision of the mine had seemed so clear to him, so lifelike. But then so had some of her previous thoughts, someone chased her down a blackened trail, which had only been him concerned for her well-being, and dead women hanging in the back of a truck like butchered meat, which had been the ponderings of a psychotic.
Sebastien sighed. “Do you remember what it was like for you as a boy teetering on the edge of adulthood, Gabriel?”
“I remember the thoughts running through my head at a thousand miles an hour,” Gabriel said. “I thought that I could never turn it all off and it would drive me insane.”
“Oui. Like that, exactly. And the dreams? Did you have the dreams?”
Gaspard rumbled, “Dreams of death. Dreams of flying like the hawk, above us. Dreams that we could understand each man’s innermost desires. So real.”
“At eleven, I was so certain of a young mamselle’s love I went to her father to ask permission to marry her,” added Raoul. “But it was all in my head.”
“And we were but les petits. Little children unsure of our gifts, unsure what was real and what was a trick of the mind.” Sebastien turned to the gate once more. “Anna never had that period of learning where she had only to ask an elder for guidance. She had only herself and who can say what she conjured in her mind. She will adjust or…”
“Or what?” Gabriel’s voice was fierce.
Sebastien shrugged. “She will adjust.”
“You’ll look around the mine area?” said Gabriel. He didn’t want to think of what would happen to Anna if she couldn’t make the adjustment to the family. It was incomprehensible. “I will check the roads near the bluff and perhaps see if she went back to the garage.”
“Oui,” agreed Sebastien. “We will keep looking for her. Just to make sure she hasn’t hurt herself.” He hesitated before adding, “There are sinkholes near here, like the one which took her mother, treacherous quicksand. We must be quick.”
•
Gabriel was as tired as a dog after chasing a dozen rabbits and not catching a single one. He had searched every place he could think to look. He had waited at the garage for an hour. Finding her door unlocked, he even looked in her apartment and saw that her possessions were still there. In fact there was even money under the bible. The fact that the bible she had spoken of as a prized possession was still there made him both sigh with relief and break out in a cold sweat.
He opened the old book and saw that the birth certificate she’d mentioned was still tucked away in the back, hidden under the binding, where it had been placed years ago. She hadn’t lied to
him. On the yellowed form, there was her name and the name of her mother, issued in Baton Rouge, twenty-four years before. Anais Tuelle. Arette Tuelle. Anna.
He opened his thoughts up and could find nothing. A void of blankness answered him. It was as if she were unconscious or dead.
“Not dead,” he snarled suddenly and threw the bible down on her nightstand. Gabriel looked down and saw that his grandmother’s quilt was carefully spread across her narrow twin bed, all creases smoothed away, shown to its best advantage. This was the same quilt he’d so carefully wrapped her in when he’d brought her inside his house.
Gabriel touched the quilt and almost brought up a corner to his nose, hoping to catch the faint scent that was so uniquely Anna’s. Sunshine and woman altogether in one package. But that very moment he caught something else. A sigh of a thought that told him she was thinking of him. Gabriel?
Anna? Where are you?
For a single instant they connected; she allowed him back inside her head. Gabriel closed his eyes and he knew where she was.
•
Stumbling down the side of the road, Anna had been positive that she didn’t want to return to the little apartment above the garage. She was unsure of her safety. They, whoever, they were, knew who she was, and they knew where she would be. What was the saying? Just because I’m paranoid, doesn’t mean they’re not after me. Time to trust someone. But who?
She suddenly knew who it would be, who it had to be. Because that one person had sworn to her that they would never hurt her, that they couldn’t hurt her. He had thought, It would be like stabbing myself with a machete if I did that. Gabriel?
•
Anna was in Gabriel’s bed. Phideaux was stretched out along her length, keeping her warm, his cinnamon head resting on her thigh, his brown eyes studying his master, without moving so much as a muscle.
Gabriel stood above her, watching her. Not surprised to find Anna in his house, he was, however, shocked to find her asleep in his bed. One of her arms rested behind her head, the other across Phideaux’s body. She had a long scrape across her temple that had oozed blood down past her eye and a bit of dried blood at the corner of her mouth. Black rings of exhaustion circled her eyes and her hair was wild.
But still beautiful, he thought, tilting his head to examine her more thoroughly. . Her eyes twitched in REM sleep, as she dreamed about something that he couldn’t quite understand. Dark dreams. Blackness shifting on blackness. Confused. Tortured?
Gabriel went to get a warm washcloth to wipe the blood away from her face, but first he stopped and called Aurore on the telephone. She would tell Sebastien that Anna was found and safe, to stop the men from searching. Gabriel knew that it was odd, using the convenience but he was tired of mental theatrics. Aurore spoke to him perfunctorily and was cordial, enquiring about Anna’s health.
“I don’t know. She’s asleep. She looks…tired.” Gabriel looked over his shoulder in the direction of the bedroom, as if he expected to see her standing there, listening to his conversation. “I think she’s going through the same kind of changes we all did as adolescents.”
“Pauvre p’tite. I will pray for her and light a candle.”
•
Anna woke up in Gabriel’s bed. Again. Same dark wooded sleigh bed. Same ceiling fan. Curtains on the window were shut as they had been before. However, the old fashioned quilt was missing, replaced by a newer blue one with appliqué stars and crescent moons made of reds and oranges. The old quilt’s gone because it’s on my bed in the little room above the garage, she thought. I kind of stole it.
There were a few other things different. Phideaux the spaniel was spread out across her shins, taking advantage of bodily warmth. She felt like her body had been taxed to its limits, her lungs like they had been severely tested, still sore in her chest. And Gabriel was sleeping in the chair beside the bed, his stockinged feet propped on the bed beside her legs and the dog.
Anna didn’t move. She looked to one side and saw that Gabriel was lightly grasping her wrist. Dressed in jeans and a plain white shirt, he sat in a simple oak armchair that was tilted slightly backward. One hand was on her wrist; the other hand lay on his thigh. His chin rested on his chest and his eyes were shut.
She stared at him for a long time. Anna hadn’t had the opportunity to look at Gabriel without being noticed herself. He had a five o’clock shadow and she knew he had sat beside her bed all night long. She didn’t know what time she had walked in through an unlocked front door with Phideaux greeting her happily, but according to the way the sunlight was slipping around the edges of the curtains, it was the better part of the morning she had slept through.
But she felt stiff, aching as though she had run a race. I did run a race. I won. But Meg was gone. Missing or dead. Deep inside Anna knew which one or she wouldn’t have crawled into Gabriel’s bed. She had known when Meg had sent her last thoughts out. Graveyard. Anna? Beware, Anna. Beware. Those were the thoughts Anna received before Meg had died.
Anna stared at Gabriel’s down turned head, watched his chest rise and fall. He’s going to say it’s my imagination. Then where’s Meg?
Gone. His eyes were abruptly open. Gold eyes looked sleepily at Anna. Her son says gone. A troublemaker that one. She played on your insecurities, Anna. On the state of adjustment that you’re going through.
Gabriel sat up and the front two legs of the chair loudly hit the floor. He drew his feet off the bed and Phideaux moaned with canine protest. “She knows about us.” He cursed in French. “The whole world knows about us. Except you.”
“She was never in the mine?” Anna brought her hand to her face and felt the scrape left there, evidence to herself that she had fallen, tripped over a rail. The scrape had a Band Aid on it. “I heard her. It was so clear. She was dying!”
Gabriel’s thumb caressed the pulse in Anna’s wrist. “She has played these tricks before. She doesn’t like me much. I’ve never respected her the way she wished to be respected. It’s her petty way of revenge.” He sighed. “The family, we are only human.”
“Humans with a little extra,” Anna said bitterly.
“It’s true, we have the gifts, but we have all of man’s frailties. All are present and accounted for, Anna. But there is goodness among us. We trust in each other. We count on each other to hold us all together as a group, as a family.”
“You have secrets,” she said. His thumb burned along her flesh. She had an urge to slide her wrist up so that she could touch his fingers with her own but she couldn’t quite bring herself to do it.
Gabriel sat forward and took her hand in his. He examined her fingers, pulled them apart and looked at them. His thumb touched the marks left by the handcuffs. “All of us have secrets,” he said finally. “I told you our gifts are strongest between family members and ones who…love each other.”
Anna’s mouth opened and then shut again.
“We’re not related to each other, Anna,” he said. A faint blush stained his cheeks.
Her brow furrowed. “Are you trying to tell me that you love me? Gabriel, you don’t even know me.”
One of his hands shot out and captured her other hand. He pulled it around so they could both see the marks left by the man who had slammed a hood of a car across her fingers. “He wanted your job to go to another person,” Gabriel said firmly. The lines on his forehead creased as he concentrated. “I thought he might be your boyfriend and I was jealous. I felt your pain as if it were my own.” He held up his right hand and showed her his palm; three stitches closed the wound there left by a lure. “Just like you felt my pain. If you were to die, I think that I might die too.”
“Gabriel?” she said falteringly.
He went on as though she hadn’t spoken. “You hit him with something. A wrench? I laughed because you were so alive with your outrage. I laughed and then I was angry as well, because you hadn’t come to me yet.” He paused. His fingers stroked hers. Heat flashed through her body, streaking like lightning, pulling at t
he depths of her soul. “It’s been known to happen this way sometimes. Pairs come together as if assigned by le bon Dieu Himself. Like Lisette and Varden, they were meant for each other. But each grew up knowing that the other was there and would be there for them as long as they lived. Sometimes these pairs happen to people we think are the least matched couples.” His fingers tightened on hers for a moment. “You think I want a woman who knows almost nothing of our culture, who I believed waited deliberately to taunt me?” Gabriel’s eyes rose to Anna’s. Gold fire blazed there. She froze.
Inside she received a clear statement of the remainder of what he was thinking and she finished it for him, the words he couldn’t bring himself to say to her. “A woman whose imagination might be driving her mad?”
“Not your imagination, Anna,” he said sadly. “It’s only that you’re not used to the veiled eyes. And Meg didn’t help with her little trick.”
Anna slowly sat up, pulling her hands out of Gabriel’s and using them to lever herself upward. With a little blush she realized she was wearing only her T-shirt and panties. Gabriel shrugged not very apologetically. “Your pants were filthy, ripped and torn, caked with mud, your shoes looked like you walked through the bayou. I left the shirt and underwear. I could have taken everything off.”
“And you slept in the chair beside the bed like a gentleman.” Anna mocked.
“I can help you, Anna.” Gabriel ignored the tone and gritted out the offer.
“Help me?”
“Your father won’t appear to aid you. He won’t want people to know that he slept with a married woman, got that woman with child. He won’t come forward. But perhaps you’ll be able to identify him in time. Remember what I said.”
“The gift is strongest between relatives and loved ones,” she repeated.
“Oui. I hear my mother now and again. But Camille and I can have a conversation between each other a hundred miles away from each other. No other has that ability with me, except…”
