After dropping off Iron Man at home, Vee decided to fill the remainder of the day with running some errands with Eli in tow. Both because there was a lot of stuff to get taken care of, but also because she wanted to keep her mind off the bizarre events of the day. Thankfully by the time the evening turned late and they made their way home and she ushered Eli off to take a shower before bed, she had put the strange elk incident out of her head. Or at least she had dismissed it thoroughly enough as a bizarre trick of the light that she could almost believe it without questioning.
"Are we gonna go back out there tomorrow?" Eli asked while getting tucked in, pulling the blankets up comfortably while Vee tried in vain to smooth out his still-slightly-damp hair.
"Mm. Maybe not tomorrow, but we'll see about the day after." She smiled at him, combing back a stray lock that immediately sprang back into unruly place. "I have to take care of some things before we go again."
He nodded, rolling over and settling in against his pillow comfortably. "Night, Mama."
"Night, kiddo." Vee murmured, leaning down to kiss the top of his shampoo-scented head before she took her leave, shutting the door quietly in her wake before she headed back into the living room. Iron Man was on the couch, wagging his tail as she approached, and as she plopped down beside him he scooted close to set his heavy head in her lap, receiving the ear-scratches he was after while she pried her phone loose from her pocket underneath him. Now she could open her email and take a look at the forms Atkins had sent over, though trying to look at anything even vaguely legal-ese made her head hurt, and she sighed as she simply copied over the files and attached them to a new draft that she prepared to send off to Tess.
It took a few drafts before she felt she had explained the situation properly, with just enough detail to give context while keeping it succinct enough to not…ramble? Truth be told she wasn't sure what she was afraid of in that regard, only that she desperately hoped Tess would give her some sort of clarity, some kind of straightforward answer that would make everything seem so much clearer and take away the burden of guilt she felt when thinking about any of the potential outcomes.
With the email sent, she placed the phone on the cushion off to the side before letting both hands rest on Iron Man's head, kneading the smooth fur that covered his muscular blocky head. "What a day." She mumbled, and his tail thumped against the couch mildly. "You've got such short hair, you'd be miserable out in the forest, wouldn't you?" She glanced down at the dog, as if expecting him to reply somehow. Of course he just kept wagging, enjoying the attention with no comprehension of what any of her words meant. It was a flimsy excuse, not one she even needed to dwell upon as a reason not to take the cabin. Eli needed school, after all. And she needed work. She couldn't imagine there were many jobs out there available to an outsider, and while she was hardly making much money working at the store as it was, it was still consistent enough, and gave them insurance if nothing else.
It would be irresponsible to uproot them all over again and go out to the middle of nowhere. Vee shook her head, trying to silence the increasing clamoring in the back of her mind. She couldn't make such a decision based solely on childish guilt and nostalgia. It made much more sense in all aspects, and perhaps most of all financially, for her to just wash her hands of it and sell the place off. Good forest property in Oregon was worth quite a lot, even in such backwoods locations.
Iron Man huffed against her thigh and she blinked slowly, bringing her thoughts back to the present as she lowered her gaze to him. "…Wanna go outside?" His tail thumped in response, his brow crinkling adorably as he looked back up at her, and as she shifted he happily jumped up off the couch, plodding over to the door where she could hook up his leash and step outside.
She took a deep breath of cool night air, but the acrid taste of the city lingered on her tongue. It wasn't like the air out in the woods, where it had smelled of richness, earth and moss and rain despite it being a dry month. She walked down the stairs and out across the parking lot, letting Iron Man lead the way with his strong sniffer picking up all the fun little tidbits of information that only a dog could appreciate. Standing by the grassy stretch at the front of the complex's lot, she tilted her head back and looked skyward. It was a clear night, but the city lights made it difficult to see much in the way of stars. She wondered how vivid they might be out at Kato's house, right now. How quiet the woods must be, compared to the ever-present noise of Portland at night. She could hear a distant siren somewhere, and there were still cars on the road, lights piercing the darkness between streetlamps as they went on their way.
She lifted a hand to shield her eyes from the light as one car turned into the parking lot, and sighed as she looked to Iron Man while he inspected a particularly smelly patch of clover amid the grass. "Come on, buddy. It's getting late." She gently tugged his leash and he amicably padded after her, the pair skirting around the edge of the lot while the car that had entered cruised slowly, looking for a parking spot. It was an older car, somewhat weatherbeaten and rusted on the bottom panels; familiar, but Vee couldn't place which of her neighbors it belonged to, not at this hour. She climbed the steps back to the apartment, yawning as she ushered Iron Man back in and locking the door before she went about turning off the lights and taking herself off to bed. She let Iron Man into Eli's room before retreating to her own, smiling as she listened to him flop over at his designated spot beside the boy's bed.
Tired as she was though, she found herself struggling to shut her eyes once she'd laid down. She stared up into the dark, the thin rays of light from passing headlights in the street below tracking across the ceiling above her. Vee twisted and wrung her hands together, tangling her fingers in the blanket as she pulled it up over her chest, only to push it back down to her midriff as she found herself too warm too quickly. Every time she closed her eyes to try and will herself to sleep, something gnawed insistently at the back of her mind until she opened them again. She tossed and turned, struggling to find a position comfortable enough to ignore the restless nerves that hummed beneath her skin, and only after she'd spent the better part of an hour fidgeting did she finally throw her hands up with a scoff of irritation and sit herself up, grumbling as she rubbed the heels of her palms into her tired eyes.
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A faint sound caught her attention then, a faint scratching sound that made her pause. For a moment she felt the rise of dismay in her heart—not another bout of rodent troubles, she hoped. The last apartment they'd lived in was in constant struggle with rats chewing through the walls and wreaking all kinds of damages. But the longer she listened, the less it sounded like scurrying paws in the walls and more like…the sound of branches scraping on the outside of them. Of course, that made no sense. Perhaps Iron Man had gotten disturbed by something and was asking to be let out of Eli's room. She rose and crossed to the door, pulling it open—
The hallway before her had disappeared. Instead a dark corridor lined with the dense, heavy drapery of evergreen fronds lay before her. The next moment, the doorknob in her hand was gone as well, the bedroom at her back vanishing into the dark of the forest. She shivered at the feel of the pine needles that brushed her spine, as if coaxing her along down the path that lay ahead despite the way it melted into pitch black nothingness. Vee swallowed hard, her heart pounding with something between fear and excitement, a nameless apprehension churning inside her as she forced herself to obey the pushing of the fronds at her back and the pull of the dark ahead. The needle-crusted branches around her shifted and swayed in a breeze she could not feel, and the sound was almost like whispering, but of course no coherent words could be picked out of the muffled cacophony.
One step at a time she made her way down the dark path, the blackness that stretched ahead of her beckoning her onward despite the nervous hammering of her heart against her ribs. Something was there, waiting for her—but what? She could see something changing ahead; a light, a pinprick like a match-flame in the swirling dark that was at the ever-moving end of the path. Slowly that light got bigger and brighter until she realized it was no match-flame, but the light of a bedside table's lamp in a bedroom that looked familiar and yet felt entirely foreign. A room she remembered well, despite wishing she could say otherwise. The blackness dissipated abruptly, the branches around her melting into solid walls that only warped a little if she tried to focus on them too long. The room was sparsely decorated, plain white walls surrounding a small four-post bedframe where a child sat, knees pulled close to her chest and hands over her ears. Vee knew what she was trying to block out even before she found herself suddenly in the child's place, assuming the same position, and she closed her eyes tight as if it would do any good to block out the noise that became clearer on the other side of the closed door across from her.
"There's nothing left to talk about!" Debbie's voice was shrill in the way it always got when she was afraid of losing an argument. "That…barbarian is trying to corrupt your daughter, and you seem happy to allow it!"
"You're taking it all wrong, Deb." The voice of her father—she barely remembered it in her waking hours, but she knew it without question here in this strange dreamscape. "He's harmless, she's just being a kid. Kids love to make up adventures and stories, you know."
"Not like this, Dean." Debbie sounded like she was trying not to cry now. "He's putting wicked ideas in that girl's head, I know it. How can you be okay with them being alone together out in the woods like that? It's not right."
"Are you insinuating—"
The room suddenly pitched hard to the left, then the right, like a ship caught in the dreadful swells of an ocean storm, and Vee heard her child-voice cry out in fear as she was thrown toward the wall, bracing herself as she prepared to crash through the window. But the impact never came. Instead her nostrils were filled with an earthy, damp smell. The smell of the forest after a heavy rain. The rustling of branches muted from the water that clung to everything, the forest dripping and breathing around her as she sat up and found herself surrounded not by the darkness any longer, but by green.
She ached all over and her head was pounding so hard she could barely see straight, but still she turned over, clawing her way through the sodden moss and pine litter. "Come back!" She called out in a voice raw from crying, her heart pounding as she struggled to focus through the pain and the blood that trickled down her forehead into her eyes. There were voices coming from behind her, someone calling her name. "Come back!" She called again, reaching out to the greenery, to something that had long since disappeared. Her vision swam, her head throbbing painfully, and her hand fell back to the dirt, settling in the curve of a massive paw print.
Vee jolted awake with a gasp, the harsh beeping of her alarm only partly responsible for shocking her back to reality. She sat up sharply, flailing briefly as she untangled herself from her blankets and got to her feet, only to stand there motionless in her room, her alarm still beeping steadily from her bedside table. She felt electrified, like a deer caught in headlights, thrilled and paralyzed by fear all at once. Finally the beeping became just annoying enough to snap her from the trance, and she scrambled to her bedside table to silence her phone. Then she sat on the edge of her bed, her hands shaking as she struggled to collect her racing thoughts again. A dream, but not entirely. No, there was memory in there too. Fragmented and lacking context, as all her patchy memories of her childhood were, but she still knew what she'd seen were no mere figments of imagination.
But they were missing pieces. She looked at her hands, flexing her trembling fingers slowly as she remembered the feel of the moss and mud underneath her. She had fallen. Running from something, or someone. Yes, that was it…it was before they moved. She had been trying to run away, a childish maneuver born of panic and desperation. She didn't want to leave the forest. Her grandfather. Her friends. The mountain.
The mountain calls me. Kato's words still inked on that folded bit of paper tucked away out of sight, but not out of mind. "God." She mumbled, burying her face in her hands as she folded in on herself, dragging in one ragged breath after another. I know it calls you too.
Was that what was happening? The mountain calling her? Were the answers somewhere out there, left behind all these years and just waiting for her now, puzzle pieces that had been lost just waiting to be found so she could see the whole picture again?