November 1, 2020 - Nolan Acreage near Nevada, Iowa
Her head rested on his shoulder, her eyes closed. She could smell him, warm and sleepy with hints of musk and man. It was a smell that brought memories rising to the surface, memories of what was and could have been. For a long moment, Jes stayed where she was, her face buried in his neck, giving herslef that tantilizing moment of could be before she drew back, her arms falling to her side.
His pale eyes were puzzled as she stepped back, the questions clear in their depths. She just shook her head, one sharp gesture from one side ot the other. She saw the flare of hurt in his expression and she pushed away her own response. “I’m okay.” Her voice was a little hoarse, thick with tears she refused to let fall. “Thanks.”
“Uh, no,” He had to stop and clear his throat, “No problem.”
She retrated, taking slow steps until she was on the other side of the bed.
“You alright now/” He asked. He didn’t move, didn’t reach for her, but the desire to was in his eyes.
“Fine. I’m fine. I’ll, uh, I’ll see you in the morning?”
He nodded, turned, and left her alone in the darkness of her childhood bedroom. The house was quiet around her, muffled and sleeping. It seemed he was the only one she had awakened. She sighed and closed her eyes, taking a few deep breaths to center herself. When she opened them again, the ropes of blue-white light were still there, pulsing as though driven by the beating of some unseen heart.
She reached out again to touch, shivering as the sensasion washed through her. She touched one and then another, the sensations of each slightly different. She looked at each tendril, some as thick as her thigh, others barely wider than a hair, each blazing with the blue-white light. It was so bright it should have seared her, burned at each touch, but there was no pain, only that buzzing sweet-bitter energy. She heard Rock’s door close at the end of the hall and slowly walked from her room, stuiding the threads that filled the house. It was like some grand web that connected everything. Some connections were stronger than others, some threads thicker, but everything was connected somehow.
She stepped outside, into the darkness and immediately felt the chill of the coming winter wash over her. She was still wearing pajamas, not suitable for being outside. It was there that she saw the strangeness in the threads that surrounded her. Amidst all the writhing fluid threads that she had been studying there was a tightly knotted cluster of dim threads that barely pulsed. Without conscious thought, she walked across the porch and down the steps. Her bare feet on the gravel of the dooryard almost pulled her attention away, but her fascination with the threads pulled her across the dooryard to the cluster of tangled and knotted threads.
It felt like there was something other guiding her actions, something far below consciousness, whispering like an instinct she didn’t know she had. She reached out and touched that dim knot.
Something flared a brilliant purple, almost as deep as it was bright, and made her squint against the light. The crisp taste of ginger filled her mouth, almost burning in its potency. Her eyes were watering when she opened them, streaming as the taste burned her. She jerked her hand back and the taste vanished.
“What in the hell is going on?” She murmured as she reached out to touch one of the blue-white lines that writhed nearby. Lemon-mint batteries. She shuddered and pulled her hand away. “I am losing my damn mind.”
She touched the tangled threads once more and again ginger burst on her tongue. The threads pulsed with the purple light, not bright enough to burn this time. She felt something swell within her, pulsing in time with the threads. It was like the pulsing was tugging at something deep within. She stepped forward again and her hand brushed against something solid and smooth. She hadn’t noticed it beneath the threads and the light, but she now stood with her palm pressed against the front fender of Rock’s truck.
The tangled threads were a part of the truck. Up until this moment, the threads had been ethereal, something her fingers touched and slipped into, like a flow of water washing over her hand rather than a solid physical object that she could grasp. As she continued to touch the tangled threads, her fingers trailing in the flow, she saw how it was knotted with one of the other threads, choked off and separate from the rest of the web of threads that seemed to fill the world. It was thought as much as action that had her fingers closing in a fist around the thread. It was slender, as big around as a charging cable, and it writhed in her grip like a living thing, fighting against her touch as she tried to tease it loose from its knot.
Again that pulse seemed to swell within her, in time with a brightening of the thread in her grasp. There was an ebb that followed the swell as though something were washing out of her and into the thread she held. The taste of ginger in her mouth intensified, making her eyes water again, even her nostrils burned with the taste. With a tug of mind and body, the end of the thread slipped free. It writhed its way out of her hand, flailing like an unfettered firehose.
She was winded, like running up a flight of stairs.
Gwendolyn was the first one up, as per the usual. She started a fire in the wood burning stove and started coffee. It was warm in the house by the time the coffee had percolated and Gwendolyn took her warm cup out onto the porch like she had done so many mornings in the past. The smell of coffee filled her senses as she stepped up to the railing and lifted the cup to her lips. That first sip scorched its way to her stomach and she lowered her mug. It was then that she saw Jes.
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The wind tugged at Jes’ curly brown hair, swirling it about her face as she stood before Rock’s truck. She wore flannel pajama bottoms and a white a-line tank top that barely covered her. Her skin was pale and prickled by gooseflesh. She was almost entirely still in the pale dawn light, but her hands moved almost as though they were directing a symphony only she could hear.
The mug thudded as she put it down on the wide railing and hustled toward the stairs. “Jes?” She called out, her voice loud in the silence. “Jes?”
The girl didn’t answer, her hands still moving fluidly in front of her. She didn’t shiver, but her skin was so pale that the purple streaks of her scars stood out like a roadmap against it. It was the work of a moment to close the distance between them, to reach out and touch Jes’ bare shoulder. “Jes?” She called again. She felt like ice.
Her focus never strayed from whatever she was doing, though her eyes looked distant as though she was looking a thousand miles away rather than at something so close. She continued to pluck at the air, both hands moving with languid grace.
Her lips were moving faintly and it took a long moment for Gwendolyn to hear her words over the frantic pounding of her own heart.
“No, not that one. This one next. Then here.”
It was a near constant stream of words that made no sense to Gwendolyn. She slipped off her jacket, cuffed the sleeves and slipped it over Jes’ frigid shoulders. She hurried inside and grabbed an afgahn off the couch. “Alan! Hadrian! Get down here!” She shouted up the stairs as she hurried back outside to wrap Jes as best she could in the blanket.
They couldn’t tug Jes away from whatever she was doing, nor could they get her to respond to questions. Occasionaly, it was obvious that she knew they were there. She would glance at them, seem about to surface from whatever fugue state she was in, and then sink back into the depths. Eventually, the three of them stood a few feet away, sipping coffee and watching her carefully.
“What in the hell is she doing?” Rock asked.
“I haven’t the faintest idea.” Gwendolyn said. “I thought she was conducting music, when I first saw her.”
“I’ve never seen anything like it.” Hadrian said.
“She was acting really strange in the middle of the night. She fell out of bed and was talking about nonsense. Something about licking batteries.” Rock said.
“Batteries?” Hadrian asked.
Rock almost waved the question away. “It’s a way we store energy.”
Hadrian seemed to perk up, his large ears twitching. “She was tasting energy?” He looked toward Jes, tilting his head to one side. His expression was pensive.
“I guess. She didn’t say much, really, but she was fine when I left her Talking nonsense, but fine.” Rock added.
Hadrian hummed in response, not taking his eyes off of Jes.
They were like flies buzzing at the edges of her consciousness, plucking at her attention, trying to distract her. The sun was shining, bringing a little warmth to her limbs, that and the blanket she was wrapped in. The last tangle yielded to her touch, flailing like the rest. It was like some sort of many tentacled beast now, writhing and flailing, still disconneted from the rest of the web that seemed to connect everything.
Jes tilted her head to one side, studying the mess. Her hands stilled for the first time since she had begun picking at the knot and she tucked them under the blanket to warm them. She felt drained, almost hollow, as though picking apart the knot had taken something from her. She took a pair of deep breaths, tilting her head in the other direction. There was something missing. She touched one of the flailing strands, grasping it in one fist. She had the sense that it was vibrating, sending something out into the world and seeking a response. With her other hand she touched two of the brilliant blue-white threads. The first seemed to be vibrating much faster, almost a constant tremmor. The second was slow, more of a steady pulse than a vibration. She grabbed the other end of the loose thread, holding one end in each hand. It was instinct as much as thought that had her weaving the loose ends into the two diffent threads, bridging the distance. There was a flash of brilliance and Jes closed her eyes against it. Whatever had been ebbing within her suddenly left in a rush, taking the breath from her lungs and the strength from her knees. She went down.
They were around her in an instant, asking questions, talking in a buzz that filled her ears. At first she couldn’t make heads or tails out of any of it. It was just a wash of noise that swirled around her. Her head ached, her right eye throbbing in time with the beat of her heart. She was cold. It was a feeling so intense she couldn’t hold back the rattling shivers that swept through her. Without answering any of the questions, she let Rock help her to her feet and stumbled toward the house.
It was nearly noon and she was nearly leaning against the woodstove in her desperation for warmth. Her hands, almost blue with the cold, were wrapped around a mug filled with fresh coffee.
“I don’t know what it was, honestly.” She answerd at last. The coffee was warming her insides and the stove her outsides. She squinted, looing around the living room. “I can see this strange blue-white stuff all over, it’s like a web that connects everything. I couldn’t go back to sleep after I woke up. I was only going outside for a moment, but then I saw something strange about the truck. It was like a knot or something. It wasn’t connected to the web.” She snorted. “Network down, right?”
Hadrian looked puzzled, but not much moreso than Rock and her mother. She looked from one to another. “I really don’t know what I did, but I feel like I ran a marathon this morning. I’m tired, drained. Like I worked hard.” She shrugged.
“Maybe it was a halluciantion?” Rock suggested gently.
“Or you were sleepwalking.” Gwendolyn said.
Hadrian just looked from one of them to the other and shook his head. “Real or imagined, it seems to have taken quite a lot out of you, Jes. Perhaps you should go back to bed.”
She nodded. “Maybe not bed, but a nap.” She curled up right there on the floor, near the woodstove, wrapped in the blanket, with her head pillowed on her arms.