21. Time Collides
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
TIME COLLIDES
Mothers. Fathers. Children. Armies. Bodies. Bones. Days. Nights. Years.
Time collides. The longer I am held hostage, forced to view what Skelt would have me see, the more convinced I am that it does.
I can no longer be certain what is real and what is fantasy. Well, not fantasy, but not my reality. Not my time. Not my truth.
Henry walks in front of me. He tracks through a bloody field in a blue uniform marred by dark streaks of blood, mud, and sweat. The smell of the battlefield strikes me even from where I stand in a creek that runs scarlet. The wind wafts the scent of gore in my direction. The movement of the breeze matters little. The metallic odor of blood is enough to make my heart pound a little faster. It is an amount of bloodshed that shouldn’t be possible. Beneath it is a twinge of vomit and rotting meat.
I have been to this field before, washed in this creek. Henry cried over a button he found in the mud and he never told me why.
Ahead, Henry is younger than I ever knew him to be, but not by much. His deep, brown eyes are so haunted and faraway that I wish to run to him and cradle him in my arms. I would try if not for the water flowing around my ankles holding me in the stony creek bed with a vise-like grip.
Birds caw overhead, occasionally dipping to tear at the bodies of those soldiers who are lost. Above the sound of carrion eaters are the moans of the dying and the pleas of the injured where they await rescue.
As Henry tracks too close, one such soul reaches out for him, begging him like he is God on earth and can help him somehow.
“Help me,” the dying man in grey coughs blood, his voice so weak to barely be heard from where I stand as an unseen voyeur. He fought for the south but, despite never having fought a single battle in all my life, I think that only matters when armies meet. Right now, in the tragic aftermath, they are all just men with no politics or sides between them.
Henry’s eyes are dim as he shakes the pale hands of the desperate soldier from around his ankle, but he does not leave the man to die alone. Hesitating, he whispers, “I don’t think I can.”
“Don’t let me die alone?” It is a question and a command at once. The man breathes the words through gasping breaths. Cannon fire has taken one of his arms and he holds the bloody stump with his remaining hand even as blood spills over his chest and into the folds of skin on his gaunt neck to pool beneath his head the way milk does when a new baby is fed with a spoon.
Henry’s eyes shift across the battlefield. Many of the soldiers in blue have crossed the water already. Some walked straight through me along their path, exhausted and bedraggled. No one is near enough to watch as Henry drops to earth made muddy by human blood and sits beside the man in grey. With trembling hands, Henry pulls the man under his shoulders. The dying confederate soldier is so far gone it does not appear to pain him anymore. Henry lays the man’s head in his lap and strokes his hair. “I’m here.”
“Don’t let me die alone.” The man pleads again, his eyes sliding closed.
Henry’s eyes shift across the plain, ensuring once again that he is alone, though I doubt anyone would judge him for the kindness he shows in this secret moment. He turns his attention back to the dying man. “I won’t leave until you do. I’m Henry Raleigh. What’s your name?” He speaks to the man in the same tone of voice that he used when lying beside me in bed just before we slept. Here, standing unseen in front of him, I know him. I remember. He is gentle and ready to listen to that man the same way he was always prepared to listen to me, and then to Anne, our daughter.
Through chattering teeth, the confederate soldier stutters, “Arthur Penn.”
Light returns to Henry’s eyes and he glances skyward like they are making introductions in the streets of town rather than a bloody field. “I’m your brother, Arthur. Your best friend.”
The two men fall into silence. Neither move save for the uneven rise and fall of the dying man’s chest. Then he stutters, “You’ll tell my ma where my bones are?”
A tear slips free to track down Henry’s face, but Arthur is too far gone to see it. “I’ll tell your ma.” Henry’s voice remains steady and reassuring.
Arthur nods, the motion jerky. “That I love her. That I’m sorry.”
“I will. I’ll tell her.” And though Henry doesn’t know Arthur Penn’s mother or where she lives or how to find her, and Arthur might know it as well as I do, he smiles. His shaking grows less fierce until it ebbs away entirely. His hand falls away from the bloody stump and Arthur dies in Henry’s lap.
There is no ceremony. No one to tell. Men from both sides will return to this field to collect their dead and hopefully someone will know and recognize Arthur so his mother will know his fate. Henry still does not leave. He remains on the ground, soaked through with blood, filthy and so tired his skin seems to sag under its own weight like he is an old man rather than being little more than a lanky teen. Blinking up at the cheery, blue sky, so out of place hanging over this field of death, Henry’s chin quivers. “Lord, let someone find my brother here. Tell his mother he loved her.”
Just as his face crumples with grief, I am whisked downstream.
“Never is a long time.” Skelt’s voice whispers in my head and my consciousness flies through water and time, which might be the same thing.
Anne leans over me in the creek. She is smaller than I last saw her, still carrying baby fat. Her chubby hands reach for me, and I reach back only for her to start, terrified. Her eyes wide, she wails and scrambles farther away from me. Wishing to comfort her, I mean to follow her up the creek bed only to watch myself arrive beside her. “Anne, are you crying over nothing again?”
Anne is too distraught to form any words. She might yet be too small to utter them. She points right at me and a shade of me from my past stares in confusion. I remember this day. I know my next words before I hear myself utter them.
“If you cry over nothing, no one will come when there is something to fear! Come along.” She scoops Anne into her arms and the little girl buries her face into a shoulder that is both mine and not. I try to call her name and only hiss, a long white tongue darting from my lipless mouth.
I am a snake. It was not nothing that made Anne cry, but a snake. One that might have also been me.
Guilt pummels me from all sides at the realization that I scolded Anne for her fear and dread rips at my heart for how many times it was the case before and after this moment. Hopelessness that I will never be the mother she needs me to be and the determination to save her, to try harder, mingle together into something thicker than the blood in my veins, making me feel sluggish and cold.
“Never is a long time.” Skelt returns, pelting me with the same line.
Time and again I am washed from one scene to the next. Some I know and others I do not recognize at all.
Still, I see those I miss most above all others. Henry and Anne. Little by little, I learn more about them and, in doing, all the ways I have hurt them without meaning to. The times I scolded Anne for what she did not understand, and the days I was short with Henry when he had toiled away on my behalf or grieved something I did not know. These are moments I was never meant to see and there are endless lifetimes of them that Skelt can make me visit.
Moving from one place to another is like drowning in the river again. Arms enwrap me and pull me through water and time at once. When I emerge, sputtering and swiping rivulets of water from my eyes, I blink and stand in front of Henry as he had been the day he was lost to The Thicket, only more worn. His eyes are set deep in his face and dark circles have formed beneath them. His hair is unkempt, and he appears hopeless where he leans with his back against the barrier that keeps him locked within the woods, his hands toying with his handkerchief. The one that…
Reaching into my pocket, I pull Henry’s handkerchief from my apron. I half expected his to vanish when I touched it, but both remain.
The wind blows in winter’s chill and I shake in the center of a stream that has thin sheets of ice on its edges. The place feels so familiar. It could very well be the same spot where I first decided to venture out of the rift and deeper into The Thicket.
“I must go deeper?” Henry asks with his eyes on the treeline. Just as I did when I became stuck in here, he stares like he can see through the trees and hills, directly into our home.
“For any chance, yes.” The voice of Skelt answers him from the water, only the monster babbles in an endearing tone from the stream beneath my feet rather than the booming voice I have heard before. “To barter with The Keeper.”
“But I’ll forget them? How will I know who to return to or that I should try?”
The water does not answer him and, like Henry didn’t really expect it to, he turns over his shoulder to stare out at the land from which he is barred.
Rising to his feet, Henry pockets his handkerchief and, with a final glance at the barrier, he starts marching into the woods. “I’m going to find a way out of here, Odell.” How cruel that I am right beside him to hear his promise and he does not even know it. “I will barter with this Keeper and be home by nightfall.”
He speaks with a dreamy air, like he is trying very hard to convince himself of the truth of his words.
How very wrong he would prove to be. Though, if I were a betting woman, I would have bet on Henry finding his way home. It is more bitter truths that I would have won such a bet, too.
He will make it home and Anne and I will not be there to greet him.
Henry vanishes into The Thicket. To my eyes it is as though he blinks from existence just before I am pulled beneath the impossibly deep water yet again.
At last, the walls of the limestone world of Skelt form around.
“You seem tired, little mother. Lost.” Skelt’s script has changed, but it means the same thing. Never is a long time. I never could have known how long it would be until living a hundred lifetimes. I do not know how long Skelt has kept me trapped in their waters, but long enough.
I am a mother and I have choices.
As soon as my body has physically arrived in its spot, grounded in its proper place, I beg, “Stop! Stop, no more! Please, no more!”
My own soul feels tangled with so many others that I can hardly find where I end and another begins. I do not know if I am a snake, a child, or a dying soldier bleeding out into a muddy creek.
“Stop.” I beg Skelt, knowing what it means to do so. This is the end of my path through The Thicket. I will manage to somehow thwart The Keeper knowing nothing at all, or I will be lost forever.
I want to bellow all my frustration, but I have screamed pleas at this being that does not care to listen too many times to count. My voice is hoarse from all my railing. It could have been moments since I fell into this chasm or it could have been weeks. Years.
An added thrill of fear courses through me. Someone needs me. Someone needs me faster than this. I can remember them when in the water and lose them the moment I am dry. I cannot bear to be stuck much longer.
“There is always a choice, little mother. You are choosing to stay here and be my toy. You are lost now. You could choose The Keeper if you wished.”
Choices.
That has been the riddle of this place since the very beginning. I must choose the next path, always without knowing where it leads. I do not know what I will find on the other end and, when I do, I only know one path means to be trapped in The Thicket forever and the other end remains to be seen.
This place, though, the path of Skelt, cannot be the one that will get me to where I hope to go, wherever that is. If I remain here, I will be stuck in puddles and creeks for the rest of time. It is terrifying to think that such a fate appeals to some small part of me. At least I might sometimes see those lost to me. On the next path, the final path, that may not be the case.
The same dark laughter rises from the depths of this place. “You have made choices before.”
The limestone falls away again and I brace myself for what is to come. Standing in the woods once more, I am watching myself, just as I have many times since drowning in Skelt.
Beneath my feet is the brook that babbles its way into the woods. I imagine it meets with Skelt somewhere in The Thicket. If all this has taught me anything, it is that all water finds its way there eventually.
“I want to go deeper.” The other me speaks and draws my attention away from the water and back to her. She speaks to the woods, her eyes fixated on something over my head. Behind her, Henry stands watching her, a small and triumphant smile on his lips that I could not have seen at the time even if I had been staring right at him. “I want to go to The Thicket. I want to walk where others grow lost.”
I wish I could reach out and stop her. She has no idea what is coming. She cannot possibly comprehend what is going to happen to her. This is a choice I made willing and ignorant.
God save me, a terrible choice.
Ripped back through the water, I land on the white limestone on my hands and knees coughing up mud and water, sopping wet and freezing. The presence of Skelt presses down on me with its invisible weight and his voice sloshes through my brain. “You can leave whenever you wish.”
Henry sold me to Skelt to bring me to The Keeper, and Skelt has brought me here to force my feet onto the final path. It is as I thought while drowning. There is only one thing in The Thicket that would care to lay such a trap.
Mustering my courage, I clench my eyes tight against the fear and make my choice, less willing and ignorant this time. “I choose to go.”
“Do you, little mother? That is a big decision.” Though the voice of Skelt asks with concern, there is a lacing of cruelty to it. Yes, this was a plot, and it has worked. I will face anything to save myself one more venture with this river.
“I want The Keeper to find me.” My words ring with something profound. It is like church bells in a high tower. A promise of things to come, a reminder of great meaning and importance. “I will go to the Heart of The Thicket.”
“By all means, then.” Skelt’s voice resounds with triumph.
There is no shimmer to warn me of its coming and no sound. I do not even blink before I am standing in the center of a clearing. Fallow’s presence buzzes to life in the back of my mind.
In front of me is an unassuming seat made of granite where a man, who could be no one but The Keeper Of The Thicket, lounges, wearing a pleased smile.