Chương 21: Chapter 20 - The Hollow

I'd been right about the nightmares. I couldn't make out any images or sounds, but I recognized the gnawing emptiness that had hollowed out Ms. Durand, and it was painful enough to wake me up at five-thirty in a cold sweat with my heart hammering and a dull ache draining from my head. Of course I couldn't get back to sleep. I comforted myself by watching Kappa. Seeing his small white belly moving with his breath, the fins on his head occasionally fluttering, did my heart a world of good.

I vowed that if I couldn't get eight full hours of sleep, then I would make darn sure that Kappa and Conrad got at least ten. At seven I got up and quietly started loading the backpack that I planned to bring with us into the swamp. It was a desperate (and likely misguided) attempt to avoid the label "unprepared." Kappa murmured something and curled deeper into his nest, but Conrad woke up, and I had to shoo him back to sleep. He didn't fight me. At eight there was a soft knock on the door.

I ran to answer it before they knocked louder. It was Jay. She was holding a huge plastic bag with a local store's logo plastered on the side. She lifted it by an inch.

"Gladwyn said you needed some waders?" I smiled, slipped out the door, and shut it behind me while making as little noise as possible.

"Good morning!" I kept my voice hushed and jerked my thumb over my shoulder.

"Sorry. I don't want to wake them up." Jay handed me the bag.

"You've got someone with you?"

"Yeah. A friend." My face scrunched up in a quasi-thoughtful expression.

"I guess right now he's a coworker."

"Is he the one who needed the biggest waders we could find?"

"Yeah."

"Bad news. Lynson's only stocked double-X."

"Would that be for a portly man of around six-feet tall?""'Fraid so." I chalked up another point for Conrad's pessimism. Two more points and I'd have to start calling it Conrad's realism.

"No worries," I assured her.

"He was pretty sure that'd be the case." I put the bag down on the bench beside our door and opened it up.

"Did I get the waders with bright yellow suspenders?"

"All I found was bib style," Jay said.

"You mean like overalls?"

"Do you mind?" I pulled them out and held them up.

"OshKosh, oh my gosh! I haven't worn overalls since I was a kid!" I laughed.

"They're perfect. Thank you for bringing these over, Jay." She smiled and gave me a shy nod. As I put the waders back in the bag, Jay said, "Oh! And I asked around, but no one in town sells those camouflage suits."

"The ghillie suit?"

"Yes! The ghillie suit. We have a lot of hunters in town, and I was told that they might have them, but they would've had to drive out for them or have them delivered." Dead end. If we got desperate, I could call Darius and ask him if there was a way to trace the ghillie suit back to its owner, but I didn't want to do that until I had exhausted every other lead we had or found some real evidence that the owner of the ghillie suit had something to do with the missing object.

Calling Darius felt like pressing an unlabeled big red button. It was possible that nothing would happen. It was also possible that a lot would happen.

"Was there anything else?" Jay asked.

"No, but thank you." I said.

"Thank you a million times." As she turned to go, my brain prodded me.

"Hey!" I stepped forward.

"Before you go…" Jay glanced back.

"Can I ask you something?" She turned.

"Sure."

"Have you heard about 'the lost children?'" Her eyebrows pulled together.

"The lost…?"

"The lost children," I repeated.

"In the swamp." Her already pale face lost two shades, and she swayed on her feet. Five seconds later, the bag with the waders was on the ground and Jay and I were sitting on the bench.

"Sorry," she mumbled.

"I don't know why I'm so nervous these days—jumping at the dumbest things. I didn't expect to hear you mention them."

"Have other people been talking about them?" I asked. She nodded, licked her lips, then said with a forced smile, "Seems everybody's talking about them these days. If not them, it's something else."

"Has something happened?" Jay put her hands in her lap and laced her fingers together.

"Nothing big. A few people say they've seen something. But Mr. Dalimer is always saying that he's seen something. I don't know why people are listening to him now." Faint white patches appeared on her knuckles. Being a finger squeezer myself, I knew what that meant—she was very uncomfortable. I hunted around for some way to put her at ease.

"It's not a big deal." I may not have been much of a liar, but it'd be a rare and terrible day if I couldn't act casual.

"Ms. Durand mentioned them while we were talking about the preserve." Bingo! Jay relaxed. Her nod was bigger this time. Her whole head bobbed with the motion. Jay bird. I decided to keep that thought to myself.

"That makes sense," Jay said.

"You would talk about the preserve since you're this close to it, and Ms. Durand is out here all the time, isn't she?" Jay raised her head and gazed out at the swamp.

"It sure is pretty, isn't it?" In the morning light, as the chill of the night lifted and the sun started working its way through the trees, it did look beautiful. Certainly prettier than after a few hours of wading through it. But, for some reason, Jay sounded uncertain. She turned to me.

"The lost children is a story that we tell each other—the kids, I mean. We're a small town, so there are only a few of us each generation. It makes it more special, like we're duty bound to scar the next group the way we were scarred."

"It's nice to know that people are people everywhere," I said. This time Jay's smile was real. She tried to sober up before starting her story, but I saw a sparkle in her eye.

"They say that if you're walking by the preserve on a moonlit night, sometimes you'll see the souls of the children that have died in the swamp. They're all still there, trapped. The swamp is so confusing, they get turned around, and they can't find their way to heaven or hell, so they wander the swamp forever, playing together. And you should never try to join their games. If you do, you'll get lost too. Your starved body decays into the water, and you become another lost child."

There must be some toddler-esque part of my soul that is forever sitting cross-legged, staring up in awe at the whole universe. Since it was a large part of my soul (if not the largest), it got first dibs on my reaction. For a few seconds, I sat there—saying nothing, thinking nothing—enthralled by the story. The eerie morning bird calls carried my silence through the air. Support the creativity of authors by visiting Royal Road for this novel and more.

Then whatever random scattering of brain cells made up my adult self took over and set my mind whirring. I could feel the crowd of thoughts and questions coming at me, shoving for a better place in the queue. Jay was watching me, waiting for a response.

"That is one spooky story," I said, making a bid for the understatement of the year.

"Have you ever seen a lost child?"

"Sure," she said.

"Most of us have. But it's usually just movement you see out of the corner of your eye." She motioned to the swamp.

"There's a lot of life out there." Three hours later, while slogging through the swamp, backpack on, wearing my brand-new bib waders, all I could think was, She wasn't kidding. We had stopped by the yurt, but Brodie and Ayla weren't in, and their boat was gone. Since we didn't know how long they'd be out, we decided to talk to them later, and we left to find the place where Vance wasn't supposed to go. It was still cool enough that the animals lingered out in the open, hours after the sun rose.

We couldn't always see the birds, but we could hear them everywhere, and a few birds were too large to miss. The egrets stood out—a dash of white against the dark green and brown background. Near the edge of the swamp, a four-foot blue and gray bird that Conrad informed me was not an egret eyed us as we passed.

"Then what kind of bird is it?" I asked.

"I don't know," Conrad said.

"Maybe a heron?"

"I thought egrets were herons." The bird took off in a rush of feathers.

"Ohhh," I moped.

"Why'd it go away?"

"It's offended that you called it an egret." While we were walking along a rise of dry land, we stumbled across two deer and scared them off. Their bright white butts bounced away between the trees. There were a lot of small mammals, mostly rats and squirrels. I thought I glimpsed a fox, but it disappeared before I could check what the corner of my eye had seen. Uncertain glimpses were how I saw most of the life in the swamp. Snippets, edges, flickers, movement—just like Jay had said.

I'd hear a plop, look over, and see a set of expanding ripples in the water that showed where, only a second before, might have been a frog or a toad. I learned that all those vague shapes moving through the water were fish, and I even saw the head of an alligator before it sank below the surface of the water and swam away. Word about Conrad must have gotten around. And then there were the lurkers.

Less than ten minutes after Conrad, Kappa, and I had left the yurt, Conrad had informed me that we were being followed. Again.

"How many?" I asked.

"Only one."

"Well, I hope he's feeling refreshed and up for some travel." He was still there when we stopped for lunch. I watched his small dark form as he darted between the trees. It looked like the shadow of a child, born from the shade of one tree, only to be swallowed by the next. Kappa was sitting in my lap. He felt me shiver. When he asked what was wrong, I told him it was nothing and urged him to finish his snack so we could get going. He went back to his food without a second thought. I found it harder to concentrate.

When we set off after lunch, I started going in the wrong direction. Conrad had to call my name three times to get my attention. I waded back to him, and he finally got me headed the right way. I wandered on, still lost in my thoughts. The lurkers were probably the grain of truth behind the rumors of the lost children. Ms. Durand must have guessed that. That's why she called them that. Daniel Vance would approve of that kind of thinking. If all you saw were glimpses of them, the lurkers did look like children.

But they shouldn't be lost. Not with the biological GPS skills they had hardwired into their brains. Dang. Yet another awesome superpower I had missed out on. But, somehow, they did give off the air of being lost. Or that they were somewhere they weren't supposed to be. It felt like they were small creatures in a large world that didn't know them. Or maybe I only felt that way because of Kappa. He was out of his territory, surrounded by an unfamiliar colony, and, at the moment, looking more lost than usual.

His bounding and splashing dwindled the further we got into the swamp. He crouched low to the ground and slowed down, staying closer to me and Conrad. When he moved, he crept forward, stopping every few steps to gaze at the swamp around him, his head swiveling this way, then that.

"Kappa," I said, "is everything okay?" His only answer was a low, grumbly hum of discontentment. I pulled myself from my thoughts and took a good look around for the first time since we'd stopped to eat three hours before. The swamp was different. The change had been so gradual, I might not have noticed if I'd been paying better attention, but since I'd been off in my own world, I was startled when I returned to this one. We'd left all the birds and animals behind.

In their place was nothing but silence and stillness. The trees and the hanging moss grew so thick that only a weak white light could trickle through. Everything was shadows and more shadows. We had to squeeze between the trunks and pick our way over the thick, snaking roots that coiled around each other. An inch of pale mist rose from the water. It lingered over the surface, only moving when it was disturbed by us or a hint of some breeze that had managed to sneak past the trees.

When it was disturbed, the mist would fade to nothing, revealing the murky water below. Threads of a dark purple color swirled through the water, and the surface occasionally twitched with ripples that were created by nothing that I could see. The trees seemed to bend in the direction the ripples went, as if they were all reaching or running for the same place.

"We're getting close," I muttered. Kappa stopped and looked at me.

"To what?" Conrad said as he came up beside me.

"I have no idea," I said. Kappa let out an even louder discontent hum, splashed back to me and Conrad, and leapt to perch on the wolfman's shoulder.

"Spooky place," he whispered.

"All swamps are spooky," I muttered as I looked around. I'd said it in a thoughtless way, more to comfort myself than anything—like, maybe I could make it normal by pretending hard enough. Kappa furrowed his brow, lifted his lip, and tilted his head.

"Huh?" Conrad chuffed.

"That's the human in you," he said.

"Swamps are full of dangerous things that either don't care about you or think you might be tasty. Some part of you knows that, so when you get here, you're always looking for danger. Kappa wouldn't feel that way. Swamps are like home to him." I smiled.

"Conrad, are you afraid of the deep dark woods?"

"Nope." My smile became a grin.

"Does that make you the big bad wolf?"

"None bigger." That should've been the moment for a Little Red Riding Hood joke, but it had gotten warm enough that I'd taken off my red hoodie and crammed it in the backpack. I might have pulled it out, just to make the joke, but Conrad's attention had already returned to the scene.

"I'm not usually afraid of swamps either," he said, "but I agree with Kappa. There's something weird about this place." With a sigh, I turned and started picking my way through the trees again.

"Yeah. That's how you know you're getting close." A few yards further on, the bending of the trees became more obvious. They were bowing toward three trees, growing almost on top of each other, in the epicenter of all the spookiness. The lower trunks of the three trees bent away from each other in different directions, then curved back, creating an almost perfect sphere of space, four feet wide in all directions.

Their branches were as tangled as their roots, and they obeyed the same mystic rules as the trunks, bending away, then curling back, as if wanting to get as close as possible to some object they weren't allowed to touch. At the highest point of the empty space, no branches grew. Nothing obstructed the space between the cradle and the sky. Daylight poured down onto… Nothing. The hollow was empty. Only an inch of water lapped around the bottom of the space.

I had started out that morning knowing that I was on a fool's errand—that the object we were looking for had to be gone—but with the bending trees, the spooky swamp, and the dramatic hollowed out space that was oh-so obviously meant for something awesome, the disappointment made my guts feel as empty as the hollow.

"Stupid cradle robber," I muttered.

"What?" Conrad said. I ignored him and walked toward the hollow while slipping the backpack off so I could get through the trees easier. Conrad came up behind me and took it from me as I—moronically—went to put it on the soaking wet ground.

"Are you going in there?" he asked. Kappa cooed my name as a quavering warning: "Mmmeeeraah…"

"It's okay," I told them.

"I've got this." To my surprise, I wasn't faking any confidence. I should've been nothing but knocking knees and forced smiles. What kind of person wouldn't be afraid to step into what was, beyond any doubt, an empty supernatural space, exactly the right size for swallowing humans whole? But I didn't feel scared. Sad and frustrated, yes. But not scared. I put one hand on Conrad's arm and reached up with the other to stroke the fin on the side of Kappa's head.

"Do either of you know some other sucker with magical eyeballs who'd be willing to wade out this far?" When they didn't answer, I said, "Then I guess it has to be me." I let out a comically loud gasp to get Kappa's full attention, opened my eyes as wide as they'd go, and put the tip of my index finger on his nose.

"You keep an eye out for snakes." I moved my finger over to Conrad's nose and said (with a lot more sincerity), "You keep an eye out for gators." He nodded. I turned back to the hollow. As I bent down to creep inside, it occurred to me that if I was the only person who wasn't scared, I was probably missing something. A smidge of borrowed nerves made my stomach flutter—but once I was in there, cradled by the trees, those feelings evaporated.

A silence so profound that I couldn't hear myself breathe crept in beside me. I reached out and put my trembling hand into the cold water caught in the base of the hollow. A vision yanked me out of time. At my feet I saw a stone bowl, almost eighteen inches across. Its dark gray walls were made darker by the water of the swamp. Rough, primitive runes made out of translucent white quartz ran clear through the walls of the bowl.

If I'd been able to hold it up, I could've made out the shapes and colors on the other side of them. The runes ran in lines, like rays, from the outside edge of the bowl toward the center and up the stone stem that rose seamlessly from the bottom. A flame burned at the top of the stem. It was strong and steady, but the color was almost a perfect white with barely any yellow or orange to soften the glow.

It was uncanny—the pale flame, the perfectly fitted runes, the smooth sides of the bowl without any signs of carving. The whole thing seemed to have been… formed … like that—shaped by nothing but a natural process that I didn't understand. The longer I stared at it, the less impossible the idea felt. The thing was as ageless as Big Jacky. Looking at it pried my heart open, allowing a flood of humility and some warm, nameless emotion to spill out.

It felt like the times I'd come home after a long trip and Kappa yelled my name before launching himself into my arms. I wanted to hold it to my chest. Of course I couldn't. Visions are notoriously hard to hold. All I could do was crouch there and gaze at it as time poured in and the world aged around me. The three saplings, that started with trunks no thicker than my wrist, expanded and rose, intertwining their roots and branches, bending toward the bowl without ever touching it.

Water seeped in and out again a thousand times over the seasons of a thousand years. Ceaseless changes flowed through the world, turning my view into a dappled stream of color and movement. The only constant was the bowl, and even that gradually rose as the roots grew below it. The flood of time slowed, then stopped. The vision had taken me back in time, it had returned me to the present, then it simply let me go. The trees and the water had stopped racing, and the bowl was gone.

"Emerra?" Conrad said from behind me. I had to lick my lips twice before I could speak.

"Ummm…could you please pass me my sketchbook and a pencil?"