Echoes (Book 1): Echoes

by Caplan, A. M.

  “I was . . . are you familiar with the gas station at the four-way intersection to the east of town?” She nodded. There were only two stations in the area, and the one he was talking about was the bigger of the two, a truck stop for semis off the highway.

  “I was by the gas station and my car was hit by a very large truck. I really only remember seeing the bulldog emblem on the front, and I woke up next in the road where I had my second unfortunate meeting of the day with a motor vehicle.”

  “Now wait . . .” She started to speak but he raised a hand. She raised an eyebrow but conceded, nodding for him to continue.

  “After you hit me I found myself waking up rather uncomfortably in a small creek I believe is not far from here.”

  Hannah laid the shotgun across her lap and closed her eyes. She rubbed her temples, wincing at the pressure against the one that was still swollen and painful, willing herself to hear out the story.

  “So you got in two horrible accidents in one day, and you just woke up somewhere else, not knowing how you got there, even though after at least one of those accidents, you should have been dead?” She opened one eye to look at him.

  “Yes, that is what happened. You asked for the truth, and now you have it.” He sat back, arms crossed. “You can choose not to believe it, if you wish.”

  “I’m beginning to think I may have hit my head harder than I thought. You were hit by a Mack truck. Then you woke up in the road, and I hit you with my car. Six months later you show up breaking and entering and I shoot you.”

  Hannah took a deep breath and crossed her eyes, the pain shoving her thoughts into alignment a little more cleanly.

  “I know how bad you were hurt when I hit you with the car. I didn’t just see it, I touched you. I remember how much blood you lost. Then you were gone, not just you, but the blood too. You were nearly dead and you just disappeared without a trace.”

  “I was completely dead.”

  She laughed out loud, then choked it off at the look on his face. “I’m sorry, obviously it’s not funny. But really, you died and then just vanished, and then you woke up in a creek. How about when I shot you upstairs?”

  “I died then as well. Sadly, I have a rather long-running habit of doing so.”

  His face was dead serious, and she would have sworn he believed every word he was saying. Everything about this was absolutely crazy. But what about how he’d actually disappeared right in front of her without a trace? And even worse, what about the fact that this was the first explanation she’d heard that in any way matched what she had experienced?

  “You know what?” she said, standing up. “My brain hurts. I need some time to digest things. Thank you for your ah, story. Now, Mr. Shotgun and I, we’re going to try to get some sleep.” She got up and started toward the door, then turned back to him. “You can sleep on the couch, so if whoever you say you saw in the woods comes through the door, they’re going to have to go through you. Good night.”

  She walked out the door to the stairs.

  “Hannah.”

  She paused without turning.

  “Please stay away from the windows. Lock your door.”

  She nodded.

  “And do not try to sneak out. I do not know who might be out there. If you try I will stop you, for your own safety.”

  Crap. She’d been absolutely considering sneaking out.

  12

  How was it possible to be so exhausted and yet so entirely unable to sleep? Hannah tossed and turned crankily, flipping the pillow and attempting to punch it into submission. The house was quiet, save for its familiar shifts and moans. Usually they were something she found companionable, the aches and complaints she knew so intimately. Tonight each tick and snap sounded like the crunch of snow underfoot or the groan of a hinge.

  Finally she gave up altogether and got out of bed. Pulling back the curtain, Hannah looked out over the silver-white backyard toward the line of trees that was black in the thin slice of moon. There was no movement, not even the shapes of the group of deer that usually fed there, where the snow was never too deep. Dropping the curtain back into place, she shivered at the thought of someone out there looking back at her. Rubbing the gooseflesh from her arm, Hannah pulled on her robe against a chill that wasn’t entirely from the cold and locked herself in the bathroom.

  The bathtub gave off billows of steam and she let out an involuntary squeak of pleasure as she lowered herself into the water. The heat melted away the knots in her back and legs, and she felt weightless and light, the tightness in her head loosening up, her thoughts slowing and untangling. Hannah did her best thinking in the tub.

  Uncle Joel; she missed him so much. None of this would have gotten to the state it was in if he was still here. He’d been the most resolute, determined person she knew, and he’d raised her to be resilient and sensible. At least she’d thought she was until recently. He also would have been the one person she could have asked about this.

  “You have to look at things from more than one angle, Hannah.” She could almost hear his voice. “Believe what you can see.” That one rattled around in her head.

  Letting a tear slide the short slope into the bath water, she tried to shove away the great lump of guilt that rose in her throat. Hannah hadn’t been raised to fall apart like she had, to crumple and give up. Joel certainly would never have imagined she’d fold altogether and think about walking away from life. And what about now? Things had turned on their axis again, but where did it leave her? What would you say to this one, Joel?

  Sinking until only her face broke the surface of the water, reveling in the silence, Hannah stared upward, counting the thin white strips of lathe in the funny curved ceiling above her head. Like the dining room, the upstairs bathroom had been tacked on to the original saltbox farmhouse. It sat directly on top of the flat roof of the kitchen, and when they’d climbed on top of it one day to fix a leak in the roof, they found that the long and narrow room had been topped off, in true waste-not want-not fashion, with the curved top from an old cattle trailer, tar papered and shingled over.

  The problem of creating a ceiling for such an odd curve was solved by the small strips of wood, tightly fitted against each other above her head. One by one she counted the thin lengths of white and the hair-widths of black between them. In her mind she drew labels on them, scribbling out the facts, the feelings, the disbelief, and the belief as well. Truth, falsehood, possible, impossible. Did reasonable always mean right? Where did the parameters of the things she could believe and the things she couldn’t even come from?

  Mentally she pulled them down and rearranged them, trading them like pieces of a puzzle, parsing them like words in a sentence.

  Finally Hannah sank under the surface of the water, expelling a stream of bubbles on the way down, watching the white lines and black spaces blur together through the ripple of water.

  When she couldn’t hold her breath any longer, she popped up and stepped out of the tub, drying off before the chill could seep back into her skin. Not wasting more than a second looking at her bruised face, she ripped a comb through her hair and coiled it into a heavy, wet bun at the nape of her neck. With her robe tied tightly against the cold, she opened the door.

  “Damn it! You scared me!” She walked out to a broad back sitting in the near dark on the top step, silhouetted in the light from the kitchen downstairs.

  Asher didn’t turn. “I was concerned. I heard you get up, but there was no sound for a very long time.” She was touched by his concern, she guessed. Maybe he thought she’d drowned. At least it would have been warmer if he’d had to pull her out of the water again.

  She stood behind him in silence until he got up and went back downstairs.

  “I made some tea,” he said to the air.

  It was some minutes before she decided to come down, then several more by the time she pulled on a pair of leggings and her favorite sweater, old and holey but soft as a kitten. She went back for a pair of thick wooly
socks after stepping on the cold wood of the floor. When she finally made it down the stairs she could smell chamomile and lemon.

  Asher sat at the kitchen table, holding a mug. When she appeared he rose and took the kettle off the burner and filled her mug on the table across from him. Hannah sat down and savored the smell that rose up and the burning heat cradled between her palms.

  “There has not been any movement outside.” Asher spoke quietly, his oddly colored eyes fixed on her. His way of staring so intently was growing on her, and she stared right back.

  Hannah nodded. “I feel like someone is out there, watching. I don’t know if it’s because you put the idea in my head, but the darkness out there seems”—she searched for the right word—“loaded. And there’s no deer. There are always deer in the backyard, especially this time of year. They come by every night, you could set your watch to it.” Even the birds had grown silent. She hadn’t heard the call of an owl all night.

  He nodded, finally looking away toward the kitchen window where a towel was draped to block out the light.

  “So.” She took a sip of tea and burned her tongue. “How long?”

  His eyes looked back to hers.

  “You said you’ve gotten in terrible accidents or something and”—she hesitated to even say it out loud—“and . . . died, then woken back up in another random place, and it’s been going on for a while. So how long?”

  He was trying to make a decision, she could see it in his eyes, but he didn’t speak for a moment.

  “Does this mean you have decided to consider what I am telling you with some seriousness?” he finally asked.

  She thought for a moment before answering.

  “All I know is what you told me is the first thing I’ve heard from anyone that remotely makes sense with what I know happened. I’ve been feeling like part of my brain has been missing for half a year, so if this is what I have to entertain, I’ll entertain it. Better to feel like I’m in my right mind.”

  He laughed aloud, which startled her. And irritated her, until she realized it wasn’t directed at her.

  “Strange, is it not? The most unbelievable thing you can imagine is the only thing that makes you feel like you are not losing your mind.”

  “Does all of that have something to do with whoever might be out there?”

  The tea was finally cool enough to not burn her mouth, and drinking it gave her something to do. She finished it too quickly, then rose to turn the kettle back on. When he still hadn’t answered, she pretended not to be bothered and gathered up a stack of mail, pulling over the trash can. The pieces began to fall one at a time into their appropriate places. Trash, bill, trash, bill.

  “They may be related,” he finally said, “myself and whoever is out there, though right now I cannot say for certain. I will tell you the rest, if you want to hear it.”

  She nodded without looking up. Trash, bill, trash, bill.

  “You heard a small part of this earlier, or yesterday actually. Before the first time I ended up here I was at my home, sitting outside watching the sun set. The next moment I awoke in the middle of a field full of very surprised cows, not too far from here, as it turns out. I was able to get hold of a vehicle and intended to make my way back home. When I pulled out of the station after filling the tank, my car was hit by a large truck, as I told you. The next part you were there for.”

  The kettled whistled, making them both jump. He turned it off and filled their mugs again.

  “So you’ve died three times now in six months, and you’ve ended up here?” she said.

  Asher nodded. “Four. I died that night, sitting on my porch. But yes. Though even three times is well above my average. I make a habit of avoiding death as much as possible. I have passed on and come back more times recently than has ever happened in such a short span. It has never happened with such frequency before, and I have been around for a very long time.”

  “How long is a long time?” Hannah was down to a small stack of envelopes that couldn’t be thrown out or ignored. She paused in her sorting for his answer. He looked around the room but didn’t speak. Hannah decided to humor him.

  “Who was the president?” she asked.

  “It was pre president.”

  “Pre automobile?” She raised an eyebrow.

  “Pre plumbing,” he offered.

  “Pre horse?”

  “I do not think anyone was pre horse.” He smiled.

  Silence. She couldn’t even believe she was trying to think of things with hard dates between plumbing and horse.

  “Gives new meaning to the phrase older than dirt,” she said.

  “Dirt was around. Newer than dirt.”

  “You know what, I’m going to leave that alone for a minute.” She was laughing now, trying to do it quietly, but it was building in a big way, down in her belly, tears beginning to leak from the corners from her eyes.

  It took a full minute for her to calm down, and longer before she could completely stop. When she finally wiped her eyes and looked at him he was leaning back, unsmiling.

  She probably shouldn’t laugh at a potentially crazy person. Except herself.

  “Okay. No. Sorry. Please go on.”

  He was still looking at her, stone-faced. At least he didn’t look mad, just serious. She studied his expression. There was a time when Hannah had been pretty sure she could spot a liar. If that was still true, he was either really good, or he believed what he was saying.

  “I mean it. Please keep going. How long ago?”

  He leaned back for a moment and thought.

  “Births were not recorded the way they are now, so I do not know the year with any certainty. I know now, from what I remember of the time and what I have been able to discover, that it was sometime around the Battle of Hastings. I recall my father’s stories of it when I was a child.“

  She was staring at him open-mouthed.

  “Battle of Hastings? As in William the Conquerer, the Norman Invasion and all that? Come on.” She shook her head. At least it was a good story. He was still selling it, no jiggle or anything.

  “I am surprised you are familiar with it.”

  “I read a lot. That was hundreds of years ago.” She couldn’t believe she was even encouraging this conversation.

  “It grows closer to a thousand,” he said.

  She didn’t laugh at him. If he was making it up, he was going all in.

  “Okay, go on.” She might as well hear it out. “So you’ve been returning to life every time you die ever since then? For almost a thousand years?” It sounded way worse coming out of her mouth.

  He nodded. “That I am actually telling you this, something I have not told anyone in a great many years, should give you some indication of the seriousness of the situation. If it would make you understand the potential danger, I would take the shotgun you so unwisely left upstairs and prove it to you.”

  “Prove it? What are you going to do, shoot yourself?”

  He got up and rinsed out his mug, moving the window covering aside a slit to peer out.

  “That is not a route I ever choose to take, if there is any other option, and now is certainly not the time. It is still dark and there is no telling who might be nearby. If I were to go right now, it would leave you vulnerable.”

  She was about to protest the need for him or anyone else to protect her, but something stopped her. She had always thought herself more than capable of protecting herself, but sitting here, not knowing what she needed protection from, Hannah was afraid.

  13

  Hannah rolled over and nearly hit the floor. Somehow she was on her squashy living room couch, covered in the crocheted throw that was usually draped across the back, daylight leaking in weakly around the edges of the windows. The floor creaked behind her.

  “It has been some time since I have seen someone fall asleep while sitting straight up,” Asher said. “It was a bit disturbing. One moment you looked like you were about to speak, the next you were
falling over. I thought you were ill until you started snoring.”

  “I don’t snore.” She sat up groggily to accept the mug of coffee. His hair was wet, dark toffee colored instead of honey blond. He was also shirtless and wrapped in a towel. Coffee slopped down the front of her sweater.

  “Sorry, still half asleep.” Hardly. The dryer buzzed and stopped thumping, and Hannah blotted her wet front with her sleeve while he walked toward the kitchen. He was tall and broad, that much had been obvious from the beginning, but without the heavy shirt he’d been wearing, she could see he was more finely built than she’d guessed. Big but not burly, and very muscular, tapering to a trim waist. She was pretty sure she was blushing to no one, and concentrated on her coffee.

  He came back into the room, buttoning up the freshly laundered shirt.

  “I am glad you slept.” She felt the dip as he sat at the other end of the couch, and she scooted her feet away. “You must have been entirely exhausted to fall asleep like that. One moment you were there, the next, headed face first into your tea.”

  “Must be,” she said. She had been exhausted, but it wasn’t just that. Hannah was pretty sure she had also reached total mental overload, trying to process his crazy story. And she’d been frightened, felt trapped in her house, hemmed in by the dark and not knowing what might be out there. Her brain had just decided enough was enough. “I don’t even remember getting up.”

  He must have carried her to the couch. That was kind, and she was sorry she’d missed it. Was she usually this kind of a disaster? Hannah was getting red in the face over a man who was undeniably very easy on the eyes, but who was one hundred percent crazy. Unless he was telling the truth, which was two hundred percent crazy.

  “I think we should venture out today, during daylight, while it is safer, if you are willing.” His voice seemed loud, booming after so much whispering in the dark.

  She nodded. Maybe they should. Her mind was wrapped around things as well as it could be, but a little distance and a little reality outside of the house would be good for perspective.