Gram slid her hand across my back and then hugged me from the side. Geeze, two hugs in one day, I must be special. I squashed my sarcastic inner voice and instead just tilted my head to the side to lean on her shoulder. She was a little shorter than me, but it felt good to do it all the same.
I guess I had decided not to reject my gift after all.
#
We loaded up the car with sleeping bags, lanterns, a camp stove, and other camping items. Gram had gotten out the cooler and packed it full of sandwich and hot dog fixings, and Tara showed up with her tent.
Packing her tent was a little bittersweet since the only people who had ever slept in it were her and I, in my backyard. But in a way, that made it better – not only were we sharing it with Gram and Gramps, but we were using it this one last time, almost as if we were marking a transition between childhood and adulthood. The symbolism was Tara’s idea, but it resonated with me too.
The crunch of gravel alerted us to Sam and G. pulling up in Sam’s new ride, and I looked up from loading the car to see the two of them and Lily getting out of the convertible, looking slightly windblown but happy.
Lily approached, the smile on her face nonthreatening, though there was definitely a dark question in her eyes – as if she was saying “are we cool?.” I gave her a long look back that said “Maybe.”
“Hey guys! So cool of you to invite me camping,” she said, gesturing to the stuff. “I haven’t been in ages, though I used to go with my aunt and uncle all the time when I was a kid.”
“Cool,” I said, not really sure what else to say, or if I was even interested in saying anything.
“I’m going to ride with Melody on the way there,” Tara said, smiling. “But I’ll probably ride with you guys on the way back, if there’s room?”
“Oh, sure. We packed light since your”—Lily looked at me—“Gram said that she was bringing enough food for everyone. So really there wasn’t much else to worry about besides a tent and sleeping bags.”
I nodded, wishing I could come up with something clever to say, but I was beginning to realize that I was a little intimidated by Lily. She didn’t come off as overtly aggressive, but the black combat boots and cut-off camo shorts gave her a tough-girl vibe that I knew I didn’t have. I scanned up her layered tank tops to her red lipstick and dark eye makeup and realized that she was exactly Sam’s type and I was… not. I saw it so clearly now.
Lily was dark, edgy, unpredictable, high energy – exactly the kind of person Sam needed to keep him focused and engaged. I knew I should be happy for him, but instead, it just made me feel even more sorry for myself.
“Hope you brought sun screen,” I said, regretting it as soon as I closed my mouth. It sounded kind of bitchy.
Lily grinned. “Don’t worry, I brought gallons. The spray kind too.” Her eyes were less daggers now and more aloof, almost neutral.
I smiled. “Cool.” Are we cool? Yeah, we’re cool, at least for now.
#
The drive was long and fairly uneventful. The landscape was not terribly interesting to see until we got out toward Abilene. From there, the acres and acres of windmills were both whimsical and awe inspiring. Every once in a while, we would pass a large semi pulling a trailer with one of the turbine blades on it, and each time I saw one, I was amazed at how freaking huge they were. If the blades were that large, how big were the windmills? Yeah.
Also out along the highway heading west, we started to see land formations that looked like they wanted to be miniature mountains, except someone had sliced the top of them off so that they were flat like table tops: the Callahan Divide. I looked at Tara.
“I wonder if these are the mountains that the boys saw in their dream?”
Tara gazed out the window and shook her head. “I don’t think so. These look too far apart to be what G. was describing to me.”
As I turned my gaze back to the window on my side of the car again, I realized I was feeling a slight pang of jealousy. I’d never been jealous of Tara before, and it was an uncomfortable feeling. It used to be the three of us and now it wasn’t. Now it was the “five” of us, except it wasn’t really that either. It felt a lot like the two of them, and the other two of them and… me. I sighed.
“What are you thinking about?” called Gram from the driver’s seat.
“Not much. I mean, we’re heading out into the great unknown here. None of us really know what we’re supposed to be doing, and I think it’s fair to say that we don’t even know why we’re going.” That sounded convincing, I thought, probably because it was also true.
“Don’t get too discouraged,” said Gramps. “Your Gram and I have done this kind of thing before.”
“You have?” Tara and I asked in unison.
“Oh yes,” he said. “Even Matthew. That’s what we were doing down in Fredericksburg, you know. When that photograph was taken.”
“Is there, like, a ceremony or ritual we have to follow?” Tara asked. Gram glanced at us through the rearview mirror.
“Not exactly,” she said. “We’ll tell you more tonight, when we’re all together. You can ask questions then.”
Tara slumped a little in her seat, but I hardly noticed since I was already off on a tangent thinking about that photograph that Esme had taken of Gram, Gramps, and Matthew. I fished around in my bag and pulled it out. I sat idly, with it in my lap, tracing the outline of each person with my finger. Gramps had said he could feel energy from photos. I could now feel energy from a map. What might I get from this photo? Could I still feel Matthew even though he was gone? Did his energy linger?
72. SAM
I’d never been to the desert before. There was something haunting about it at night – desolation all around you, the light of a million, million stars above you. I’d never seen the milky way with my own eyes, but there it was, a swathe of filmy gauze striped across the sky. It might have taken my breath away if it hadn’t been for Lily lying beside me, staring up at the stars, too, chatting on about everyday things, with no knowledge of what tomorrow would bring and how it might change us all.
I let her chatter on because it would be rude for me to interrupt, but also because her voice was soothing in that familiar way – it made good background noise for my nighttime daydreaming.
I found the Pleiades in the sky and focused on it, letting the rest of the stars fade away into an indistinct blur of light and darkness, letting my mind unfold as the wind blew.
I hadn’t tried this kind of daydreaming since I was a child, but somehow I knew that to do my part in Orla, I was supposed to see. Margaret had called me the Lantern, and I supposed that meant I should cast some light on the situation… that maybe my dreams have meant something all along, and finally I was going to find out what.
The constellation brightened, drowning out the rest of the stars, and the tiny shape that resembled a question mark opened up and folded out like a box within a box. I’d never seen such a thing before but I didn’t have to ask what it was – as so often was the case during my dreams, the information was given to me. It was a tesseract.
The boxes were hinged on each corner so that they could slide in and out of each other. As I watched, one became opaque and the other translucent. They flattened out and unfolded, and there were eight cubes stacked like a four-sided cross. And in one cube was the face of a man I knew very well --Matthew. There was a searing light as the cube he was in split open. And then he was leaning over me, his face nose to nose with mine.
“Save me,” he whispered.
My whole body jerked like I was electrocuted, and my eyes flipped open, wide and searching. It had been so real. He had been so real. WTF?
Lily had gone quiet but was still beside me, dozing off. She woke as I began fidgeting for my phone and asked muzzily “What’s up?”
“Shit, I’ve got absolutely no bars out here. Let me see your phone?”
She fumbled for hers and I waited impatiently, resisting the urge to snap my fingers. When she ha
nded it to me, I was hopeful – she had three bars. But when I tried to use the browser and do an Internet search, the three bars slid down to zero. “Damn it,” I said, frustrated.
“What’s the deal?” Her eyes were closed and she was already beginning to fall back asleep.
“I need to look up what a tesseract is.”
“Oh that’s from A Wrinkle in Time,” she said. “Ask Mrs. Who.”
“What?”
She giggled. “Not what, Who.” She waved her hand lazily in the direction of Tara and Melody’s tent, where Gram and Gramps had already settled down for the night.
“Great idea, I said,” and leaned in to kiss her neck.
She giggled again, but she had rolled over onto her side and slid her arm beneath her head. She was already mostly asleep again.
#
“Are you sure he said ‘save me’?” Gram asked, leaning toward me, searching my face.
Gramps was reading my aura and he nodded slowly. “Margaret, he’s telling the truth.”
“I wasn’t doubting that, Harold.” She wrinkled her brow and frowned. “I just want to be sure he had the words exactly right.”
“Why, what does it mean?” I asked.
“I remember A Wrinkle in Time,” Tara said. “I must have read that book a dozen times growing up. In it, the kids use a tesseract to reach another dimension.” She glanced at Melody quickly and then away again. “They had to rescue Meg’s brother, Charles Thomas.”
“Holy shit,” I breathed.
“What does that mean?” Melody said, and her voice had an odd quavering to it. “What are you guys trying to say?”
“They aren’t saying anything dear,” Gram said.
Gramps leaned forward to pat Melody’s knee, and G. reached out to put a hand on her shoulder.
“Does this mean he’s not really dead?” G. asked.
“We don’t know what it means, and we won’t know until tomorrow. It isn’t good to speculate too much.”
There was a sound of crunching gravel from outside the tent, and suddenly the group went very still. I was closest to the flap, so I leaned out and was startled to see Lily listening.
“Oh, hey,” she said.
“Hey, I thought you were sleeping.”
“I woke up and it seemed like everyone was gone. Freaked me out a little bit.”
“Sorry,” I said, feeling slight chagrin. “Come on in and join the party.”
“Actually, I think I’m ready to go to sleep now, if you youngsters don’t mind,” said Gram, shooing us with her hand. “Go on out and enjoy the stars. It’s a beautiful, clear night. We’ve a big day tomorrow.”
We piled out of the tent, and I stood up and captured Lily’s hand.
“What does she mean ‘big day tomorrow’? Aren’t we just out camping? I mean there’s nothing around here for miles except sand dunes and vultures.”
“We’re going to visit a ghost town tomorrow,” offered Tara. “It’s been abandoned forever.”
73. MELODY
I just didn’t know what to think. I thought we were out here in the desert to close some stupid vortex, to prevent the entities from streaming in, and now we were supposed to pull Matthew out of another dimension? I had just gotten used to the idea of him being a ghost. What was I supposed to do with the idea that he might still be alive?
“You don’t think he made it up, some sort of cruel joke, do you?”
Tara looked at me weird, and even G. shook his head. “No way, Mel. Were you even looking at his face when he was telling your Gram? His face was pale. He looked almost… scared.”
“This whole thing, it feels so…” I threw a rock into the dunes and kicked the sand with my toe.
“Surreal?” G. finished for me.
“I was going to say contrived. Made up. Like this is some sort of bad movie script.”
“You’re just having a hard time wrapping your head around it,” Tara said, reaching up to me.
I sidestepped her. “Maybe – but how come you guys aren’t? I mean both of you just glibly go along with whatever. Neither one of you is freaked out, just the tiniest bit?”
Tara shook her head, but G. shrugged and nodded.
“I wasn’t at first. For me it was just a sudden surge of energy and motivation. Which was great, because you know, I needed a reason to get in shape. But then, that thing happened with you and the entities, and I had some sort of sword of light, and that’s when it got to be too much to take in all at once. So I buried myself in exercise for a little while and tried not to think about it too much – let my mind sort itself out. But you know what made the most difference?”
We shook our heads.
“I asked my martial arts instructor a little about it – like the sword of light and stuff – and he said that there’s a whole shadow world out there, in sync with ours, in which impossible things happen all the time. And then he just looked me in the eye and said, ‘maybe you saw a piece of that.’ And I was like… whoa. And it made me look at everything in a new way. I was sure he was going to laugh it off or tell me it was a dream, but that isn’t what happened at all.”
He paused, digging a hole in the dirt with the heel of his shoe. “So I decided, right then and there, to just go with the flow. I’m pretty good at that anyways – I hate conflict. Which is weird right? For me to be some guardian type and hate conflict…”
“Well, that’s just great for you guys,” I said bitterly, feeling like bitchy was the only mode I could do right now. “But I can’t just go with it.”
Tara put a hand on my arm. “That’s because, Mel, you feel like you’re out of control. That’s always been the thing with you, you know? Control over something, even if it’s only what color shirt you’re going to wear… and now you feel like everything’s changing and…”
“There’s nothing I can do to stop it,” I finished.
“Yeah,” said Tara. She sighed. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry about the Spirit Board. I’m sorry for everything.”
“Seriously, Tara. Could you not make this about you right now?”
The hurt look on her face and the surprised look on G.’s made me feel instantly terrible. I glanced away, my shoulders hunched. “I’m going for a walk.”
There was a sliver of moon out now and a slight breeze to break up the overly warm Texas night, but the thing that made me most surprised was how much of the starlight was reflected by the sand. Miles of sand dunes stretched in every direction, as far as I could see. The glimmer of our campfire was a distant reminder of human contact. Out here, I was alone, perfectly alone, with nothing but my terrible thoughts for company.
There was a strange energetic buzz around me, and I couldn’t place its source at first, but then I realized that it was everywhere. The earth here, the feeling of the earth, was so much more intense that I could feel the energy through the soles of my shoes, up my legs and in my hands. And once I realized what I was feeling, it was as if I had given the sensation permission to come on full force, and then I was awash with the energy. “Holy Cow,” I whispered to no one in particular.
I plopped down atop one of the dunes and took my shoes and socks off. I buried my feet in the sand and waited quietly for my body to understand that I was plugged into the circuit.
And then it came – the rush. I felt as if my head were going to detach from my neck and float away, my awareness inside my body felt like a balloon bobbing around inside my skin, and I knew, just knew, that if I relaxed a little bit more, I could pop right out and fly up into the sky.
I was getting high off of the energy of the earth. If people only knew what they were missing…
I plunged the fingers of my left hand into the sand and felt the trickle spread up my arm to my shoulder, and then to my head. I did the same with my right hand and willed the energy back into the earth again, causing the sparkling current to flow through me. And as I sat there, completing the circuit, I could feel little bits of negativity flake off of me and drain into the earth
. Like little black flecks of creosote from a chimney, they burned up as they hit the ground.
Holy cow.
As I sat there, calm returned to me and my frayed patience knit itself back together. I could feel the deep pulsing of the earth in my fingers and in my feet, and I knew, just knew, that I was a part of something bigger. Bigger than I had ever imagined, maybe even bigger than a tesseract. And the bigness made me feel small but it also made me feel loved, so very loved.
The love was pink, peach, and gold. It was music. It was the sunset and the dawn. It filled me to the brim, overwhelming my senses until I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I began to cry with relief, and maybe, finally, just a little bit of joy.
74. TARA
Orla was different than I had expected. It was a ghost town, and it was definitely on a crossroads, but there were semi-trucks everywhere, zooming up and down the highway, causing me to flinch every other second because I felt as if they were watching us, watching our every move as if we were interlopers or spies.
“Are we sure this is the place?” G. asked as he leaned down to talk in my ear. He looked around at the vehicles, the car that was so clearly meant to be Sam’s, at Lily and Sam standing off to the side, taking photos of a broken-down old building, and shook his head.
“This is definitely Orla. There’s even a green sign with the town’s name on it over there,” I said, pointing. “Why?”
G. looked off into the distance, squinting. “There are no mountains.”
I followed his gaze, and indeed, there weren’t. I had wondered about that myself but had shrugged it off. “Sam says that not everything in his dreams come true.”
G. nodded, but he didn’t look convinced. “What else is there? You brought along the list, right? How do we know which spot is the right spot?”
I pulled the piece of notebook paper out of my pocket and unfolded it, holding tightly to it against the wind, which seemed to be picking up. “So ah, besides the mountains and the crossroads, we have lightning crashing into itself – obviously that’s not happening yet,” I paused to pull a few strands of hair out of my face and tucked them behind my ear. “Though the wind’s picking up… maybe soon?” I glanced up at the sky then back to the list. “And a heavy metal door? I think it was red in my dream, and then the last thing was an arrow in the ground. I don’t know what that means but, it seems like with all this scrub brush and stuff, that an arrow would be pretty hard to see.”
A Quarrel Called: Stewards Of The Plane Book 1 Page 24
