The Child Of Mystery
By Eve Hathaway
Published by Publications Circulations LLC.
SmashWords Edition
All contents copyright (C) 2014 by Publications Circulations LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this document or the related files may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, by any means (electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, companies and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of either the author or the publisher.
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Chapter One
TICK TOCK.
The grandfather clock downstairs ticked off the seconds that had passed since Aunt Frances and Uncle Josiah went to bed. Melinda listened for their creaking bed -- one body, then the second. In fifteen minutes, Uncle Josiah would begin to snore. But even after three years of living with her aunt and uncle, she still had no idea if her aunt ever sleeps.
Tick tock.
She suspected that at least, she had not been sleeping deeply. Although she knew that her aunt could not read her thoughts, Melinda also knew that she suspected something.
It was the night before her fifteenth birthday -- and her wedding. Melinda had been planning her escape for three months now ever since her aunt and uncle arranged for her to become Old Man Herman's third wife. She tried not to think about the consequences if she were to get caught. The last girl to protest a marriage had been forcibly raped by her betrothed in front of the elders.
Rumor had it that she lived, still bound in chains in the basement of the man she never married, every year giving birth to a child whom she would never see. And she had merely protested. What Melinda was doing probably warranted death if she were caught.
So she had better damn well not get caught.
Tick tock.
She reached over her head to push the curtain aside so that the light of the moon could shine on the alarm clock on the dresser. Ten o'clock. She had two more hours to wait. Melinda felt the exhaustion from the day's labor creep up on her, but she had poured some of her uncle's morning coffee into a thermos earlier that morning and drank it before she went to bed.
Now, it was all she could do to keep her body under the covers. Luckily, her cousin Lucy was nine years old and a sound sleeper, so she didn't wake when Melinda slowly eased out of the warm bed and tiptoed out the door.
Until then, though...
Tick tock.
Three years ago, her mother got ran off the road on the way to Melinda's recital. In any other state, it would have meant a hospital stay... maybe a few stitches and a cast. But in Boulder, Colorado, it was a death sentence. It wasn't until she saw her Aunt Frances at the funeral that she understood why her mother never mentioned her past.
Three years, living with these crazy Christian Knights, kneeling to pray and biting her tongue and singing the praises of the simple life -- all the while scouting for a way out, watching the timing of the patrols that circled the compound, learning which floorboards squeaked and how to move silently through the creaky clapboard house.
It all came down to this night.
And the boy who was not a boy, but an angel.
The elders said that he was possessed by the devil, but Melinda could see the truth behind his form. It was a gift of hers that she had kept secret in this dangerous place -- being able to see angels and demons as they stalked the earth.
During her first year in the compound after her mother died, she wondered if somehow the gift had died along with her freedom, because she could not see any of the glowing auras in the people they inhabited. She still did not know what to make of the fact that the cult was so isolated that neither heaven nor hell would bother with it.
But then Caleb wandered into the compound, and though she knew him for what he was, nobody else did. When they discovered he didn't know how to speak and had nothing between his legs, the elders decided he was possessed and needed to be exorcised.
Since then, he had been kept in the equipment barn, crammed into a large dog crate. Nobody quite knew what the elders have been doing to him for two years, but the screams that emanated from the barn frightened even grown men into grumbling about letting the boy go.
Still, nobody dared enter the barn to do it.
The hands of the alarm clock converged on midnight. Everybody was resolutely asleep. Melinda reached under her pillow, pulled out her old sneakers, and slipped out of the room like a shadow.
Tick tock.
She was wearing the clothes that she brought with her when they first moved her to the compound -- sweatpants, socks, Polartec fleece sweater (they allowed her to keep these because they were "more useful than vain"). She was carrying her sneakers -- she hadn't tried them on this floor. There was no telling if they would squeak.
Her heart was going like a trip hammer and cold sweat broke over her as she went, ever so slowly, down the stairs, each step a careful consideration of her weight on the wood.
The door to her aunt and uncle's bedroom was closed, but that didn't mean Aunt Frances was lying in bed, sleeping. For all Melinda knew, her aunt could be wide awake, just waiting to throw open the door and catch her deceitful niece who was obviously trying to escape, and then throw her upon the justice of the elders. She wanted to be out the door now.
When she was halfway down the stairs, the banister gave a squeak. The sound might as well be a shriek piercing the silence. Melinda stifled a gasp and held her breath.
Above her, there was a muffled shifting of springs; but after a minute neither her aunt nor her uncle opened the bedroom door. She let the air out of her lungs and she fought to keep her legs from collapsing. And somehow, she managed to make it down the rest of the stairs without a sound.
Then she crept through the living room and into the kitchen. It would have been faster to go through the front door, but the great lock on that door could not be opened quietly, plus the hinges squeaked. The kitchen door was quieter but the tumbling of the bolts as the knob turned seemed impossibly loud, and she wondered how her aunt could possibly not hear the grating noise of metal-on-metal, or the gunshot clarity of the click as the door opened.
Tick-tock.
But still, the house remained silent. And as the cool night air rushed past Melinda, she breathe a sigh of relief. There was a peculiar finality to the act of closing the door behind her.
Ahead of her, there was the night. Behind her, the nightmare.
And on the horizon, a new dawn.
Chapter Two
MELINDA DIDN'T THINK there were patrols within the compound but she kept her head up as she laced her sneakers anyway. Uncle Josiah had been grumbling about one of the elders making such a proposal but nothing seemed to come of it. Nevertheless, she kept to the shadows, hoping the navy blue of her clothing was close enough to black. The moon was full tonight, but the clouds were patchy so what light there was shifted, rendering even the shadows unsafe. In the dark, she was even more aware of how sharp the blades of grass were against her fingers and how loud the crickets really were.
Shut up! she wanted to scream. She couldn't hear her own footsteps -- how would she hear if someone was coming up behind her?
It took her longer to reach the barn than she thought it would. She didn't have a watch but the skies had shifted noticeably from when it was first dark and the moon was high and white in the sky now. And this frightened her. What if she couldn't get him out in time? What if he couldn
't run?
She pushed those thoughts out of her mind. He's an angel, she reminded herself. Even if they had broken him, he could heal. How she knew that... she wouldn't think about that now, because now, she had to pick a lock.
She reached into her pocket and took out the bobby pin. It was a simple operation, really -- push and slide, until the tumblers fall apart. But it took skill, and patience, and a delicate touch. And warm hands. And daylight. And luck. She was painfully aware of how clearly she could be seen against the barn door should anybody happen to glance her way. The cult members went to bed early, adhering to the old maxim of early-to-bed-early-to-rise. But even though the windows remained dark, it felt as if the houses were watching her, accusing her, sending a silent alarm to the elders. She found herself glancing up at them from time to time, the words 'Please, be quiet' on her lips.
Finally the lock gave, and she slipped into the barn. It was pitch black -- the sliver of moonlight that she let in disappeared as she closed the door. But after a moment, the glow of his aura spilled from behind the tractors. It was faint, but it was enough to keep her from running into the tractors and confines that he was housed with. She was alarmed at how silvery it was. Most angels had a golden aura.
But when she saw him, he was surprisingly whole -- and naked. She had not prepared for that. She hoped Gabe was. A few scratches marred his ghostly pale skin. He blinked at her, his eyes black with pain.
"I've come to get you out," she whispered.
He said nothing. She took a slender metal file she'd filched from the foundry and lodged it into the padlock. She took a deep breath and slammed the file and padlock into the ground so that the file crunched into the lock. A bit of shimmying, and the lock sprang open.
"Come with me," she whispered, wishing that the clanging as she unwound the chain from the bars of the kennel would stop. The air in the barn was still, silent -- there was no echo. Still, it would be dangerous to assume they were safe. "Stay close, and stay quiet."
She led him to the back of the barn where there was a smaller emergency door. She wished she knew what time it was. They would have to go out and pray that the patrols had passed or were still far enough away that they could make it to the first cornfield without being seen. Fifteen minutes between patrols seemed like a long time, but given how much open space there was between the barn and the corn field, their window of opportunity was actually quite small.
She cracked open the emergency door -- it was chained shut. But the chain was so loose that they could both slip through the gap in the door.
There was no one in sight. And together they ran, darting for the corn.
The crash of their bodies against the stalks would have alerted any nearby patrol if there were one. She didn't take chances, didn't stop to listen and see. She grabbed Caleb's hand and led him down the narrow row and to the footpath through the field -- a narrow gap between the rows where people could walk, the easier for the farmers to get home in the middle of the day to have lunch.
They were running when, overhead, a flare burst.
They had been seen.
Shit.
Chapter Three
MELINDA HAD HOPED to at least get to the edge of the corn before they were seen. They were moving quickly, without disturbing too much of the corn, but it will be obvious which path they were on.
She turned into a bare row where they had laid down the water lines this year and followed that. They were a little noisier -- there was less room -- but the tassels overhead were still and that's what mattered.
In the distance, she heard men shouting. Keep running, keep running. Her legs burned, but she willed herself on. A stitch knotted in her side, stabbing pains shot through her with every step. Nobody ever died from pain, she told herself. Right?
Caleb managed to keep up with her as they turned onto another footpath. She didn't know the corn fields that well that it made her nervous not to follow the original path. Gabe would be expecting her to come out at one spot -- if he's there. It was the only part of her plan that she could not prepare for. It was the only part of her plan that must not go wrong.
It was too late to turn back.
They ran. The darkness carried the menacing roar of diesel engines being revved.
Oh, fuck.
And suddenly there was no more corn, just grass. They had made it out of the fields, but she could tell by the sound of the engines that they were going around the corn. They had gotten only a few minutes, at the most, before the men caught up to them.
That was when she took Uncle Josiah's Zippo lighter out of her pocket, lighted it, and waved.
And a good 300 yards away, it was answered by a flicker of headlights. Her legs nearly melted with relief! Behind her, there was shouting -- the men in the cars had seen her signal. They must stay still, though -- Gabe couldn't see them in the dark. If he ran them over then everything would be useless...
And there he was, not a hundred feet away. A burst of adrenaline hit her and she jerked Caleb, and together they ran towards it.
"Open the door!" she screamed. "Open the door!"
Gabe got out. He had gotten taller since she saw him last, and ganglier, and there's a stoop to his posture that suggested crushing burdens. But he was here, that was all that mattered now. He flung open the back door of his Jeep. It was a new car. When she was still living in the outside world, he was driving a Ford Escort. But that was a minor detail.
"Go! Go! Go!" she yelled, though what she really would have wanted to do was to kiss him senseless for being here. "They're coming!"
The first of the headlights popped out from behind the far edge of the corn field.
"Shit!" Gabe said. "Hang on!" he shouted. He gunned the engine and they rocketed backwards. She and Caleb fell to the floor in a pile of limbs as her arm slammed against the divider between the front seats.
The jeep bounced up and down, throwing the two of them into the air. But even in this desperate state, Gabe had the sense to lock on his seat belt. He threw the car into gear and they shot forward, heading towards the interstate.
"I hope they're empty," Gabe muttered.
The jeep had higher ground clearance but it was slower in four-wheel-drive. The cars the men were driving sent beacons of light bouncing wildly through the Jeep and those beacons were getting brighter. As they rumbled forward, she pulled herself up and looked out the rear windshield. She was nearly blinded by the headlights.
"Yeah, wouldn't do that," Gabe said, the nervous edge in his voice the only indication that he knew that they were there.
"Can't you go faster?" she pleaded.
"Not if I don't want to roll over."
"They're catching up to us!" she shrieked.
"They'll definitely catch us if we roll."
The blast of a shotgun caught Melinda's throat as she began to reply. There was no tearing of metal or shattering of glass, though. It might have been a warning shot or it might not have been -- the cars were bouncing too much to be certain. For the first time that night, Melinda sensed the hopelessness of their situation, a falling sensation that crushed the breath from her. She watched in horror as the cars spread out behind them in a line.
And then Caleb's aura became a blinding light to her even though Gabe was as insensitive to this glow as he was to the headlights in his rearview mirror. The kid's coal-black eyes began to glow red, and then white. And as she watched, he spread his ethereal wings and said something unintelligible, yet the anger in his words was unmistakable.
Lightning flashed from his eyes and a red glow came out of his mouth.
He was all aura now -- a beautiful, terrible creature whose sole purpose was death.
Terrified, Melinda covered her ears and closed her eyes tight as a wall of orange light and heat hit and surrounded the Jeep. But she had to look back to see what was happening.
The line of cars had become a wall of flame... a solid wall of orange light occasionally broken by a grill.
Caleb slu
mped to the floor of the Jeep, unconscious and drained.
Gabe, in his usual, tight-lipped manner, said only, "Well, that was something."
"Yes. Something. Oh, thank God!" She breathe a sigh of relief.
Gabe drove on until they reached the Interstate and they headed south.
Chapter Four
"IT'S NOT EXACTLY a matching set or anything, but it's wearable," Gabe said as he entered their motel room.
They had driven through the night, stopping only for gas, passing Wichita and turning west.
Gabe finally pulled into a roadside motel at daybreak. He paid for two nights and a room with two twin beds and slept most of the day. Melinda watched TV while Caleb drifted into and out of consciousness.
In daylight, Caleb's hair was a pale, white-blond. His eyes, when he opened them, were a clear, milky gray, and the birdlike bones of his body jutted alarmingly from his skin. Melinda tried to convince him to eat something out of the mini bar but he wouldn't touch it. She had spent the day looking between the unconscious forms of Caleb and Gabe and Law & Order reruns. The news channel mentioned nothing about an inferno last night, which probably meant that they were safe.
For now.
Gabe had finally woken up an hour ago, stretched and said, "I'm going to get us some food. Anything you want?"
"A Coke," she had said right away. It had been years since she had tasted one. The cult was a strange one -- it forbade Coke and candy but not Twinkies; and cell phones but not cars. Members were only allowed to go to "the city", as they called the little college town of Lincoln, on business approved by the elders. In that sense, it was lucky that she was getting married because a wedding dress was approved business. Her uncle had taken her but he wasn't allowed at the fitting.
"Please mail this for me," she whispered to the attendant.
The attendant looked at her alarmingly but she mercifully pocketed the letter.
In the three months that followed, she prayed that she had been explicit enough in her diagram of the compound, the signals that she planned to use, or that the letter had not been intercepted before it got to Gabe. The only thing she knew for sure was that he would be there if he got it.
And he was.
She wondered, for the first time since her escape, if it meant something that he had driven three-hundred miles across purgatory to rescue her.