Escaping Fate (6 page)

I had pretty much forgotten about my
plan to visit my grandpa, but now I felt like I needed to keep that
appointment. Setting the photos back on my nightstand, I could not
forget them when I made my way over to the bathroom to get ready
for bed. I took my time, but found myself back in bed too quickly.
Climbing under a light blanket, thoughts of dying young girls
swirled in my mind.

I laid in bed staring at the ceiling.
Knowing by now that the dream would come again, I tried to keep my
eyes open as long as possible. The problem was that there was
nothing up there to hold my attention. Debating about what I could
hang on the ceiling that would keep me awake the longest I felt my
eyes start to close. Against my wishes, the dim light of the moon
faded from my sight and I fell asleep.

Chapter Seven

The raven haired girl’s proud figure
grew more distinct as the mist thinned and turned into shifting
smoke from two large fire bowls built at the temple’s base. Forced
to begin walking by the guards behind her, she trudged up the
steps. She counted each step she took in her mind. She counted to
keep herself from screaming at the guards and the crowd and Fate
itself. She looked at her feet to shield her eyes from the stinging
smoke swirling around her body, and struggled to keep from looking
at the top of the stone staircase.

It was a morbid desire to look at what
awaited her, she knew, but in the end could not keep from giving
in. She glanced up to the plateau above her. The billowing smoke
barreled down at her, and she knew it came from the great
sacrificial altar standing in the center of the mesa. It waited
there year round, reminding the city of their commitment to the
gods.

At the sight of the smoke her stomach
turned and she quickly lowered her head unwilling to face her
future. She feared the smoke, but she knew it was the least
terrifying item that awaited her at the top of the stone staircase.
She kept walking up the steps and watched as the smoke grew larger
and the fire that produced it came into view.

Wanting to run back to her small mud
brick home, the raven-haired girl looked out into the crowd, hoping
for a sympathetic face, but cringed when she saw instead nothing
but intense joy in the faces of the crowd. They cheered and jumped
and clambered to get closer to her.

Seeing their excitement sent hate
rushing through her body, pushing every other feeling away.
Straightening herself, she set her mouth in a scowl and glared at
each stone step she was forced to tread. The rough stone scraped
against her bare feet. She despised the crowd for their cheering.
She looked down at them again, though she could not really see
their faces anymore, and silently cursed them for the
savagery.

When the hate-filled girl looked back
towards her destination, the first guard had stopped. She forgot
her anger instantly and stiffened in fear. She had reached the end
of the stone staircase. There was nowhere to run.

A breeze began to blow, but not even
her hair moved as the wind silently carried in a thick mist that
enveloped her body.

***

Waking up late in the night, I was
barely able to breathe. The raven haired girl’s fear had me nearly
paralyzed. The girl from the dream, her face was etched in my
memory forever. Sitting up, I tried to blink the image away. I
reached for the lamp and switched it on. Soft yellow light spread
over the table and blanket.

As my eyes adjusted, they fell on the
photos. The face from my dream stared back at me hauntingly. The
only thing the faces in the photos were missing was the ceremonial
paint that the girl in the dream was forced to wear. The silvery
eyes looked the same, but were filled with very different emotions.
The happiness in the photos was obvious, but the fear that
overshadowed me dulled the emotion and I imagined I could see the
desperation behind their smiles.

As I stared at the photos I realized
something else that I should have caught right away. The girl from
the dream looked no older than either of the girls in the photos.
Why? What was happening? Why were all these girls suddenly reaching
out to me? Having no answer to my own questions, I laid staring
into the shadows.

I tried to understand the fear
surrounding me, but I couldn’t even understand what, if anything,
was happening to me. I felt as if I was being pulled into something
beyond my control. The late night hours stirred my mind and led me
to a thousand different conclusions that made very little sense and
finally back toward sleep. In the morning I would find some
answers. At least, I hoped I would.

Chapter Eight

Walking to my grandfather’s house early
the next morning I wondered again if I was making too big a deal
about the photos. Based on my parents’ reactions I was sure they
would say that I was if I actually tried to explain my fears and
theories, but they didn’t know about my dreams. Without the dreams,
I probably would have agreed.

Maybe it would all turn out to be
nothing, stress from moving or something like that. But if I did
not at least try to answer the nagging call I felt when I looked at
the pictures of Katie and Maera or thought about the dreams, I
would never be rid of the suspicion that had enveloped
me.

I took a deep breath and knocked on my
grandpa’s door. I really hoped I was not about to make a fool of
myself as I watched the door knob turn. Grandpa Alden opened the
door, and seeing who was calling on him lit up with joy. He ushered
me into his cozy home with hugs and promises of treats regardless
of the fact that I had just finished breakfast.

“Arrabella,” he cried, “how are you,
darling? I’m so glad you’ve come to visit me. I get lonely around
this old house.” Even when talking about his loneliness, my grandpa
had a sweet and excited smile on his wizened face. I was sorry that
I had not made the effort to come see him before.

Explaining that he had been in the
process of making himself some hot chocolate when I arrived, he
hurried back into the kitchen. He was always in the process of
making hot chocolate. I could not pull up a single memory of my
grandfather’s house when I had not been offered hot chocolate and
cookies.

“How did your doctor’s appointment go,
Grandpa?” I asked from the living room.

“Oh it was fine. The old heart is still
pumping away, even if my cholesterol is still too high.”

I heard the tinkling of coffee mugs
being taken out of the cupboard. “Grandpa, you have to take care of
yourself,” I chided, filling in for my mom. Every memory of hot
chocolate at my grandpa’s house was always followed by the memory
of my mom’s troubled frown. It wasn’t just her children she worried
about.

“Don’t you worry about me, honey. I’m
just fine.”

He returned from the kitchen with two
mugs brimming with hot chocolate and little white marshmallows. I
smiled at the colorful mugs as I took one and remembered the story
he had told about buying them at the end of a long hike in the
mountains of Chile. Everything in his house had a story behind
it.

My grandpa sat down across from me with
his own mug and a smile that matched my own. Even now in the middle
of a hot summer, he warmed his hands against his mug of hot
chocolate. If this was how you got to be seventy something years
old and still active and happy, everyone should drink hot chocolate
of every day.

"So what brought you to my house? Do
you want to hear a story?" he asked hopefully.

"Actually, I do," I said, but paused
before making my request. Would he really tell me about Katie and
Maera, I wondered? Foolish or not, there was no turning back for
me. I needed to know. "I wanted to hear about Katie…and Maera," I
said. My grandpa's face saddened and he lowered his eyes to his cup
of hot chocolate.

"I didn't even know that you knew about
either of them. Did your dad tell you about them?" he
asked.

"Not really. I was helping mom sort
photos and I came across some pictures of them. Dad did tell me
that they both died, but not much else. What happened to Maera?" I
asked as I carefully laid the photos out on the coffee
table.

"Your mother has so many pictures.
She's quite the genealogist actually. She has all the names of our
family written down for generations,” he said. A deep sigh escaped
his lips before saying, “But she doesn't know the stories.” He
looked back into his mug of dark liquid. "Maera, my beautiful twin
sister, I still miss her, even after so long."

"Maera was your twin? Dad didn't tell
me that," I said. The grief that still showed in his face made me
wonder if I had made a mistake in assuming my grandpa would tell me
what I wanted to know. My mom might have made a mistake in assuming
that my dad would overcome his grief one day, too.

"Yes, we were best friends.” My grandpa
looked up and regained some of the jovial attitude he'd had
earlier. "You want to know how she died don't you," he said,
managing a meager smile. I nodded guiltily. "Well, for her
sixteenth birthday, I mean our sixteenth birthday, our whole family
went on a trip to the beach. Maera loved the beach. She spent every
spare minute she had there.” He paused again, stirring his hot
chocolate and looking at the photos Arra had brought. He picked one
up and said, “This is a picture of her that very day.”

His eyes became teary and he put the
photo back down when his hand started to shake. I picked it up
immediately. It was one of the pictures I had found early that
morning before coming to see him. A beautiful girl with midnight
black pig tails and a boyishly old fashioned bathing suit smiled
and waved at the camera. I was stunned to know I was holding a
photo of Maera taken on the very day she died. The young woman’s
smile haunted me, and I too set it back down on the
table.

“Maera and I decided to race each other
to a buoy that was a dozen or so yards from the shore. I'm not sure
how far it really was, but she was way ahead of me, laughing while
she swam.” He smiled as he remembered the day.

“I was swimming hard, trying to catch
up to her. I slowed a little and glanced at her to see if I was
gaining any ground. But when I looked up, I saw her splashing
around and yelling for me to help her. I still remember how scared
she looked. I tried to get to her, but I couldn't swim fast enough.
I was almost there, when she suddenly went under, pulled under it
seemed.” He shook his head, as if he had just said something
ridiculous. “When I finally pulled her back to the surface she
wasn’t breathing."

The memories I forced him to recall
drained him of his usual cheer and warmth. He blinked his eyes
furiously to keep the tears back. Looking into my mug, I regretted
the pain I was causing him. I wanted to crawl home and slip back
into the comfort of my bed, but something pushed me on, telling me
that I needed to know what really happened to these
girls.

The fact that both Katie and Maera died
on their sixteenth birthdays could merely be coincidence, but
because of the dreams and the strange urgency I felt, I sensed
something more serious was happening. My own sixteenth birthday was
only days away and its approach was rapidly losing its normal
appeal.

Neither me nor my grandfather spoke for
several minutes. I could not tear my mind away from the lost girls,
and the glazed look in my grandpa’s eyes said he was having the
same problem. Neither girl’s death seemed particularly
extraordinary. A drowning and a horse riding accident, those could
happen to anyone. Only the day held some clue. I considered that I
had made a huge mistake in my assumptions, but I knew I was missing
something very important.

"Why did Maera drown?" I wondered. “It
sounds like she was a strong swimmer.”

"Nobody could be sure. To me, it’s
strange, but it almost looked like someone was pulling her under,”
he said quietly. “Some said it must have been some kind of riptide,
but the waters were very calm that day. And why would it catch
Maera and not me? I wasn’t that far away from her.” He sighed
deeply. “I just couldn’t understand it. It was a very strange
incident, just like Katie.”

"Just like Katie? What do you mean? I
thought Katie was thrown from her horse. That’s horrible, but it
could happen at any time."

"Oh, the fact that she was thrown from
her horse wasn’t strange. It was the why that was strange,” he said
knowingly. “There was nothing around that would have spooked that
lazy old nag of a horse. And the fall shouldn't have killed her,"
he said matter-of-factly.

I cocked my head to the side. It was
the hint I wanted, but was I just fishing for something to confirm
my fears? My grandpa sounded a little too much like he was looking
for a connection. I began to wonder whether I was doing the same
thing.

"After the accident your father told me
something that set me on edge,” he said, leaning toward me
seriously. “He said that they had been running the horses and he
was ahead, but he heard her scream and looked back. He could see
that she was galloping her horse way too hard, as if she was
running from something. He said that both she and the horse looked
terrified.

“The police looked around for something
that might have scared them, but they couldn’t find anything. As
Katie’s horse neared your father, the animal reared, throwing Katie
right into the tree. When the medical examiner spoke to us about
the cause of her death, he didn’t really have an answer. Her skull
had been cracked, but as the doctor said, it was a relatively mild
injury. In the end he said she must have died of shock.” My grandpa
shook his head, his tired hands clenched tightly into weathered
fists. “It devastated your father. He won't talk about it
now."