Haunting Origins

Chapter Thirteen

Pretty Lewis woke up to a cleaner room and an active, but quiet, Eve shuffling things around. She knew the instant he was awake and knelt by his bed.

“Morning,” she whispered. “Your friend is still asleep.” Eve was wearing rust-red robes now, with her slender arms uncovered and a poncho that fell down her front like a large, square bib. The closest thing to which Pretty could compare her outfit was a half-dress half-sleeveless tee shirt. Her hair was in a neat braid that curled into a ball on the back of her head. She looked nice.

“Blink?” Pretty said, surprised and slightly embarrassed at his much deeper voice.

“I put his glasses over there; he fell asleep with them on.”

“I’m amazed I fell asleep at all.”

“If you came from less than a thousand feet of elevation, you’re going to need some water. I think we’re close to eight thousand feet.” She rolled her eyes as she corrected herself. “That’s what the altimeter says. You need to drink a lot of water and don’t make a habit of running up flights of stairs or rock-climbing because you might pass out.”

“Okay…” Pretty said. He felt fine and breathing was easy. Then he quietly stood up and found that he was wrong.

Blink was laying on the top bunk now nearly face-to-face with the standing Pretty. He was pulling wet breaths through his mouth and his reddened nose was running.

“Where’s that other girl that was going to be in here?” Pretty said to Eve.

“She’s out right now. She doesn’t need to spend every second in here after all.”

“Guess not.”

Eve put a large beat-up plastic cup filled with water in his hand. “This is your first of two. Drink them both now.”

“All of it?”

“Do you need to pee right now?” Eve asked, folding her arms like a mom. Once her arms were braced against her chest, it showed just how much her warm-looking robes were deemphasizing the shape of her body.

“No,” Pretty said, paying attention to his peripherals but maintaining perfect eye-contact. She can read my thoughts, fuck. WEINER, WEINER, WEINER, PINK ELEPHANTS.

Eve appeared to take no notice as she answered: “Because you’re dehydrated. Drink until you need to pee and thank me later. Does your throat hurt at all?”

The Leader shook his head.

“Headache?”

Another headshake.

“But you felt a little light-headed standing up, right?”

“Yeah. And hungry.”

“You’ll eat, don’t worry. You seem to be adjusting well.” She smiled, patted him on the shoulder, and then pulled him into a hug.

Pretty allowed it, but wondered why she did it. “What’s this for?”

“You’re appreciated and wanted. You can live and we don’t have any expectations of you right now. Just sit and watch. It must have been hard having to jump all by yourself,” Eve said.

During the first part of her little speech, he felt a pang of something so unfamiliar he didn’t know if it was bad or good. Pretty made a strange face and broke the hug. “That’s a bit of a weird thing to say; what is that supposed to mean?”

Eve had a quiet, unsurprised and understanding face as she said: “You don’t have to try to impress us; drink water and stay healthy.”

“So you can feed me to a novis later?” Pretty said dryly. It was strange to hear something like that leave his mouth as a serious and realistic comment.

“It doesn’t happen frequently, but it does happen. If it means anything to you, I don’t think you’ll get fed to the novis.”

“Yeah, that means the world to me, thanks,” Pretty said. One way to drive girls nuts was to be sarcastic and rude to them.

Blink took in a large sigh, but he stayed asleep.

Pretty took a look at the Pilot and then asked Eve, “Can the Shepherd hear everything that happens in this room?”

“He can hear everything that happens on the Stone Compass,” said Eve. “But his actual vision and perception is shorter. I’ve seen through his eyes a few times and only when he is asleep or meditating or isn’t focusing on a certain spot will you go unheard.”

“Do you know when you’re heard since you’re a prophet?” Pretty asked.

“No,” said Eve while she broke eye contact. It was clearly a lie as she put a finger to her lips and then said. “I wish, because then I’d feel a little more safe.”

Pretty thought, Can the Shepherd hear us now? Is he listening to us?

Eve looked at him, nodded, and said, “But he’ll show you how it works later, I’m sure. It isn’t often that he has someone to show the Compass to.”

“If he can’t listen to this room” in theory, he thought “is there anything else that his stick can do?”

“Jump between worlds into that tube system you came from. What you did, but with an Axiom Staff or a real rift, it’s different. Mirrors can only jump to other mirrors which means they can’t jump to Veldur. But with a regular rift, those can move you to Veldur or any of the other rifts on another world.”

“How did he get it in the first place?”

“If I’m going to go into that story, maybe Blink should be awake. The Shepherd would like you both to hear this.”

Pretty gave Blink a few small pushes and Blink flipped onto his back, causing the whole bunk bed to creak and he kicked the ceiling which made a hollow thwammm. The Pilot was took in a deep breath as Pretty and Eve stood in surprise waiting for his next move.

Pretty started laughing. “You always wake up like that?”

“Where am I? Who are you?” Blink was looking at Eve.

“It’s Eve, Blink,” Pretty said.

Blink eased into a seated position. “I remember now.”

“Why’d you flip out?” Pretty said.

Blink answered instantly. “Jeffery used to wake me up gentle and then he would grab both of my shoulders and body-slam me into the bed, unless I kicked up at him before he could. I thought that was what was happening. Where are my glasses?”

Pretty took in those words as Eve handed Blink his glasses. Jeffery. That son of a bitch.

“What time is it? And are we still on that floating rock?” Blink asked.

“Yeah, we’re still here. I don’t know what time it is. Do you even have time since everything is always moving around?”

“No, we don’t have a set time like they used to before the Rise because all of our landmasses don’t stay in one place. We just know mealtimes and the shift rotation for the minders which happen at nearly the same time each day. The Shepherd used to say when that was, but now I make the call so he has less to do.”

Pretty had a bizarre thought, but he shook it away because it was just wild.

“Kind of,” Eve answered the question he didn’t ask. “I’m sorry, your mind is just too easy to hear because you don’t know how to shift.”

“You’re like the Shepherd’s wife in a way?” Pretty said.

“From what I know about wives, yes; I guess you could say I am. I help him out with things he is working on and I can work on my own things as well. I calculate where other landmasses are, where we are, and the best way to get to those other landmasses. And what time of year it is and what elevation we are at to make sure everyone is staying healthy. I’m teaching someone else some of these skills as well so I don’t have to do all of them myself.

“I’m going to take you on a tour of the Compass and let you know what goes on here before you decide what you’re going to do with your lives.” Eve watched as Blink eased himself down the ladder and put on his shoes.

“If I’m honest, it doesn’t feel like we have much of a choice. At least, the Shepherd made it sound like it was up to him,” Pretty said as he sat on the bed and put on his own shoes which were neatly laid right next to his bed.

“We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it,” Eve said.

She doesn’t realize how creepy that sounds, does she? Pretty thought and instantly remembered she could read his thoughts. “Or how creepy it is that you read my mind, huh?” He sneered.

Eve sighed tiredly and said brightly, “Ready to see the Compass?”

“Sure,” Blink said, though he was actually quite hungry and thirsty.

Eve said to Blink: “I’ll need you to drink these two large glasses of water first and then we’ll eat the first meal. Everyone else has already eaten and started today’s chores, but after you two eat, we’ll start the tour.”

Blink actually smiled and they did just that. After a meal of dried fruits and some smoked meats (which they were told was choice food), they drank another half-cup of water and walked outside.

It was sunny, but the breeze made it feel chillier. Eve looked right in her element in those interesting robes.

“Why don’t you wear a coat?” Blink said as he put his hands in his coat pockets and bunched his shoulders.

“It’s not that cold,” Eve said.

“Maybe to you.” Blink shivered. “It’s as cold as your mom out here.”

Pretty held out his hand in front of Blink whose face lit up and he slapped it. Nobody had done that for him before and he had always wanted someone to offer him a hand to slap after a smart comment.

“This is the Back Deck,” Eve explained with a small smile. There were a couple of wooden, severely weather-beaten tables which had been sanded again and refinished. “It’s a popular hangout spot and Home Base when we’re playing any outdoor games like Hide-and-Seek-Tag.”

Pretty’s eyes nearly fell out as they opened wide. “We play that in Winton! We even call it the same exact thing!”

“How about that?” Eve said with that motherly voice.

Pretty said nothing after that and let Eve continue with the tour. Before them was a field of different mansions: Brick ones, black ones, a cube-looking one, some that seemed to have carried some dirt with them because their foundations weren’t completely flat.

“The Compass is several hundred feet deep and reinforced with metal wraps so that it stay together quite well. It has to be deep because many of the mansions have basements that grow into the ground when they leave or return,” Eve said.

“How do the novis know where to go when they’re traveling?” Pretty asked.

“It’s part of their instinct,” Eve said. “They have a keen sense of smell”

Damn right they do, Pretty thought

“and with their smell they can find fraisers in other places, usually other worlds. They find the unsuspecting ones in dreams and then they travel. They’re experts at finding a proper place for the mansion.”

During those few sentences of explanation, the blood drained from Pretty’s face. These novis could have been the ones that came to Mariah in her dream. From firsthand experience, Pretty knew Eve was telling the truth: The novis come in dreams, they set up shop, and launch an attack on unsuspecting fraisers. “Oh, shit.”

“What?” Blink said.

“Blink, what if that’s why the novis killed all those teenagers in the Bushkill Massacre? They didn’t eat the bodies because they just needed the fraise? Teenagers would have been young enough… ugh, that’s horrible.”

Blink shrugged. “It makes sense.” He didn’t know how to react.

Eve was watching Pretty and Blink closely now. Pretty let out a large breath of air and looked like he needed a moment to collect himself. Eve let him have it.

“How do the mansions move, anyway?” Blink said.

Pretty missed most of what she said as strange thoughts swam in and out of his head. Eve had answered with: “They usually have mirrors with them in the mansions. Mirrors can’t travel to Veldur, only to other worlds if a novis is using it to travel, otherwise they probably would have gone extinct or all be living in zoos or something similar. The mansions fold up until they’re eventually gone; mansion-travel is different because it isn’t a jump which is how humans travel between worlds. Unless you know how to move around on an ‘interdimensional vehicle’ as the Shepherd calls it.”

“So they need a mirror to move?” Blink said. “That’s it?”

“For the most part.”

“So if we broke the mirror, does that mean that mansion can’t move anymore?”

“Unless they had another mirror or a natural reserve of acrylium in the house, or the novis were able to find an acrylium reserve, yes, they would be stranded.”

“What’s acrylium?”

“It’s something that allows you to make jumps between universes.”

“Like some kind of drink?”

Eve seemed thoughtful about that question. “Maybe it has been made into a drink; I’m not sure. But I’ve only seen or heard about it in powder form. It’s like a mineral I guess.”

“Like a rock?”

“Yeah.”

As they walked, they passed mansions which Pretty and Blink side-eyed and stayed close to Eve. These buildings were too quiet for the beast within. Like a gift-wrapped time-bomb they stood all pretty, all gentle, holding those grinning novis who were waiting for the countdown to end so they could unleash their hellish presence.

“They’re from different time periods. Most of them were built in the 1900s so some are over one-hundred years old. Sometimes if I get close enough I can know some of the history behind it or where it went and how much it traveled. It’s rather difficult though.”

“How can you live on this ship?” Pretty said.

“We all eat well if that’s what you’re wondering. And the Shepherd makes sure we stay healthy and doesn’t mistreat us,” Eve said as she gathered a small clump of her noticeably worn, but well-kept robes to make sure she didn’t trip.

“Depends on what you mean by ‘mistreat’,” Pretty muttered. “Or ‘healthy.”

“The Shepherd was a clinical psychologist. He helped people with troubled minds and knows how our minds work quite well. He knows what’s best for us.”

“He could also have just lied about his background.”

“Maybe, but it’s unlikely. He said he graduated from the University of Arizona with a Master’s Degree that he had to write a paper about anyway. He thought he only had to write a thesis if he were aiming for a PhD, which means a doctorate or an eight-year degree-”

“I know what it means. Anyone ever tell you that you mansplain?” Pretty said.

“I didn’t,” Blink said and Pretty only looked at him sharply for a second.

“What does ‘mansplain’ mean?” Eve said.

“It means you over-explain things with details that other people probably already know.”

“I don’t care; I will start from the beginning with any explanation to make sure everyone is up to speed. If you’re insulted by the fact that I’m taking the time to explain at a conceptual level, that’s a personal problem. I want the conversation to be easy to follow and I want to ensure that I’m understood. I do that with everyone, even the Shepherd.”

Pretty shrugged.

“Anyway, I believe he’s telling the truth. Regardless of what you think, he knows how to keep us healthy and knows what we should be eating. When we can, we make our own candy. There are several fraisers here who know how machines work and we’ve kept our little Honda generators running so that we have electricity for part of the building, lights, and other small rechargeable things.

“Some days we have a good wind and are on our way to where we want to go and haven’t hit any gravity spots or whirlpools that will slow us down and we just play all day and relax.”

“Why do you want to stay here? Why wouldn’t you want to leave and see the world?” Pretty said.

Eve took a deep breath. “I don’t know what life was like before the Rise, but it sounds wonderful. Not many fraisers are able to live a quiet life in a village or off of a fraiser farm and stay away from the cavaliers or other dangers like monsters. When you’re here, Pretty, you don’t have to worry about being chased and killed.” Eve adjusted the grip on her robes.

“You said the Shepherd feeds kids to the novis.”

“Not all the time.”

“’Not all the time’, is that supposed to make it better somehow?! This bastard feeds kids like ME and BLINK to monsters! Holy fuck, I can’t believe this is actually real.”

Eve sighed again and dropped her gaze as she walked. Then she stopped and faced the two Astronomers. “Life’s hard, right? Can we agree on that?”

Blink swallowed and the fear in his eyes said ‘yes.’ Pretty nodded, but his face never changed.

“My life before this was terrible, can you believe that? It was worse than the fate that I have now; the impending death that I’m counting down to is better than life elsewhere. Maybe you’ve never been raped before, maybe you don’t know the feeling of relief from danger even for a sure amount of time.” Here, Eve’s eyes were bunching up with water and she swallowed her emotions back before continuing. “Maybe you don’t know the thrill of overcoming an irrational fear or overcoming the fear of death? Of all the people who wish their lives were different, ask any fraiser on this whole planet if they wanted a different life and they would say ‘yes’. Offer them a life on this ship and they will accept, even knowing that just before they lose their fraise in their teen years, they are guaranteed to be sold a slave or to be fed to a monster. We love the Shepherd because of his protection and are grateful for the life he gives us. Maybe you’re unaware, but life and survival are cousins, not twins. Their relation is far from parallel; in fact it’s pretty detached. Life and living is the goal and maybe survival is a support system to life at times, but life is not survival. The next time you try to tell me freedom at the price of survival is equivalent to living, make sure you’ve lived in the wilderness on your own or in a cage for a year and watch yourself choke on the words if you’re still alive.” Eve turned on her heel and left the two Astronomers behind.

Blink wasn’t sure he understood everything that was said, but he knew for sure that Eve had a life that was likely worse than his. He had a newfound respect and started following her again, though she seemed like she’d rather be left alone now.

Pretty shoved his hands into his jean pockets and took in a few deep and sad breaths, blaming the altitude for his shortness of breath. How much easier and simpler would life have been if the Astronomers just let themselves get eaten on that Dark Night? Go pound salt, is what Myles’s dad used to say when someone was bothering him. Without saying it, Eve just told Pretty to go and pound a whole sea’s worth of salt.

A few seconds of thought, Pretty finally walked after Eve and Blink who had stopped and waited for him to catch up. Then they kept walking, but now in silence until they reached the end of the Stone Compass where two flagpoles were fixed directly into the rock and two comically large flags flapped in a flowing partnered dance with the wind. One of the flags was completely white and the other was totally green emblazoned with the image of a stick.

“The Amber Staff, Auric, on that flag. The white means we’re a merchant ship which usually means we’re armed, which is true. We have hangars and a few guns for emergencies, but usually all it takes is a few hangars to whisk over to another boat and drop some explosives which we are running low on, but others don’t know that,” Eve said and gave a strange glance to the Astronomers.

Pretty wrinkled his brow. Low on explosives. Is that supposed to mean something?

“Just down those stairs is a small lookout on the back of the compass. It’s protected from the wind, so someone or someones may be down there already.”

They walked down the stone steps until they could hear their feet and shuffled to the railing. There was a bench against the wall away from the railing and on the bench were two fraisers: Sandy and another one with a better head of hair, a quiet complexion, but loud blazing eyes. “Hi, you guys,” Sandy said.

“Hi, Sandy. Hi, Anna,” Eve said. “Meet Pretty and Blink.”

“I remember them from yesterday,” Sandy said. “Hi again.”

Pretty nodded without a word as he was realizing just how high up they were. He put his back against the stone as far from the railing as possible. “Shit. That’s pretty fuckin’ high up, huh?” Blink seemed fine, the little bastard.

“Nothing to worry about,” Eve said. “Even if you fall, we have hangars at the bottom of the boat who will see you fall and catch you before you hit the water.”

“Oh that’s comforting and doesn’t make it any scarier.” Pretty hadn’t moved from his position.

Blink kept his footing from the side and peeked over the ledge and then moved away from it. “That’s pretty far down, but when you look, it doesn’t seem as far. It’s just water down there. It’s like being on a boat on the ocean in a way.”

“That doesn’t make me feel any better, Blink. I just want to be home right now. Fuck, why did you take us here, Eve?”

“I didn’t realize you were so scared of heights. And as a prophet I can’t lie and say I’m not enjoying this to an extent.”

Fuck youuuuu, Pretty thought and remembered simultaneously that she heard that with her invasive prophesying mind. Fuck you againnnnn.

If Eve did hear it, her poker face was incredible. Maybe she learned how to pretend not to hear with years of practice.

“We can leave here; there is one more thing I’d like to show you.”

“If it’s anything like this, you can count me out,” Pretty said.

“It’s considerably less scary and is indoors.”

“Good.” Pretty never looked over the Ledge and scooted his way to the stairs. They walked across the Compass back to the resort. Pretty recognized the same flags flying on top of the ski resort: One all-white and another green one with the stick on it. There was another one, considerably smaller, red with a yellow cross in the middle.

“What’s that red and yellow flag mean?” Blink said, walking right next to Eve.

“It means ‘don’t pass in front of me’ if we were a boat on the ocean. Here it means we’re planning on docking and we go first if someone is trying to dock in front of us at Stablefield.”

“You still use boat flags? That’s pretty cool,” Pretty said, hoping this question would be the starting of their forgetting his previous behavior.

“And flag signals.” Eve nodded.

They were once again in the Great Room, but instead of taking a right towards Eve’s room, they went left to a part of the resort they hadn’t been yet. Eve brought them into a larger room with a low ceiling.

“The Shepherd said this used to be a gift shop which is why you can see through the windows. Now we all use it as a quiet room and a library.”

The library part was obvious: There were books on shelves which were bolted to the walls and had bungee cords across each of the shelf units.

“To keep the books from falling out when this thing rocks?” Pretty plucked one of the stretchy cords.

Eve nodded. “Books aren’t allowed outside of this room unless you’ve been given special permission from the Shepherd or myself.”

“I guess they’re pretty hard to come by these days, huh?” Pretty said, still not quite realizing they were so far into the future.

“Yes. But what I wanted to show you in here are these.” Eve turned her back to them and faced the whiteboards on the walls and rolling whiteboard near them. They were covered with some kind of math far beyond the Astronomers’ understanding.

“Whiteboards.”

“These are for locating where we are in relation to other boats,” Eve said with a smile and a twinkle in her eye. “Okay, you can sit down right over here.” She pointed to the only open chair, a lawn chair, and realized there weren’t enough for the two of them. “Oh, uh, one second.” She whisked over to the two folded chairs in the corner and forced one of them open. She clacked it open and laid it neatly next to the first, patting it with a grin.

The Astronomers sat down.

Eve stood in front of the whiteboards and folded her hands together with a sigh. “Okay, so there are a bunch of huge landmasses that are all floating around. That means it’s pretty hard to know where they are since everyone is always moving, right?”

The boys nodded.

“A few years after the Rise there was a group of smart people who figured out the best use of boats and minders and all of that who also knew how ‘radio towers’ worked. Do you know what those are?”

The boys nodded. “Mostly.”

“Radio towers send out a signal and based off of the strength of that signal, we can detect how far away it is. On the Compass we have two antennas, one on the front and one on the back, and we are always receiving signals from different landmasses. That means we can triangulate those locations just based off of how far away they are and set a course for them. Do you know what ‘triangulate’ means?”

“Nah. None of that makes sense to us, but it sounds pretty amazing that you could figure that much out with the technology that you have,” Pretty said.

“Triangulate,” Eve started, “means that we pick up a signal from two different landmasses, see that there are two different values from each of them, and over a short period of time we can pinpoint where these landmasses are just based off of that small movement. Cool huh?” She finished that sentence with another excited breath and a grin.

“I still don’t get it,” Blink said, scratching his head, “but at least we know where this big floating boat is going. All this looks so complicated and we only just started learning algebra.”

“I skipped a year in math, so some of this makes sense. A lot of the adding and some of the graphs on the whiteboards, but I don’t know how it works,” Pretty said.

Eve said, “We know which landmasses are which because of the different frequencies they beam. They’re designated, like radio stations, and since there isn’t anything blocking the signal and there’s just open air between us, the signal can reach hundreds of miles, and those are the landmasses we care about anyway. It’s interesting though, because sometimes we’ll land at a landmass and when we leave we won’t see it for a couple years or so. The Shepherd has a route, however. He’s a genius when it comes to trade.”

“You mean, trading kids?” Pretty said.

Eve lost her smile and said, “That’s all I really wanted to share from this room; that’s how we know where we’re going and that we’re less than a day away, though you can’t see the landmass yet. Lunch is soon; you can meet with and talk to more of the fraisers on the Compass and see what they think about living here if you’re still apprehensive, Mr. Lewis. In the meantime, feel free to stay in my room and rest. I’ll bring you some more water. The Shepherd will likely speak to you soon to see how you’re coming along. I’ll show you the way.”

The three left the room and returned down the hallway to Eve’s large room. She opened some of the blinds to lighten the area.

Eve paused. “Oh, look, Harriet left us a pitcher of water. That was thoughtful.” There was a plastic, lidded, one-gallon pitcher and four metal cups lined up, all with differently-colored hairbands around their necks to tell them apart.

“Once each of you drink a full cup of water, I’ll go and see where the Shepherd is and I’ll come back.”

“We have to drink the water?” Blink said. “Even if we’re full?”

“Yes,” Eve answered as she poured them each a cup.

The boys drank slowly and reluctantly and, as promised, Eve first nodded with a motherly smile and left.