Hi All,
As many of you know, October is my FAVORITE time of the year. SIDE BUT IMPORTANT NOTE - It is breast cancer awareness month - men and ladies, check, check, check!
October is my favorite month for a number of reasons - the season is changing, the best fruits are fresh, apple cider and Oktoberfest brews are abundant, and of course, my favorite holiday is a mere few weeks away - Halloween!!!!!!!!!!!!!
I have many a new trick up my sleeve this year to make yours and my Halloween a delightful treat. Like last year, I will be doing a series of short, spooky stories to satisfy you thrill seekers. This first one is based on a dream that I had, so if you are into the extraordinary, you are indeed in for a treat. Curl up with your favorite cider or pumpkin spiced latte, and buckle in dear readers, you're in for a wild ride.
Sent to Save
It happened when I was visiting a national monument, one of those natural 8th wonders of the world places that I had visited countless times. The extensive sight is known as the White Caves, an underground network of rooms and caverns thought to be carved out from the workings of a nearby lake. A long, downward path leads you to the impressive sight that you can see from the parking lot a quarter of a mile away. The entrance, or the atrium as we locals call it, sits like a valley that a recent earthquake unveiled after several thousand years of being hidden from man's eye. But, we contemporary visitors were not the first to these white walled caves. On the tall wall at the back of the entrance, there are ancient petroglyphs depicting tales and legends unknown to any local or global cultural experts. The conclusion of the specialists, determined that this collection of pre-modern people were extremely intelligent, resourceful, and detached from interaction with the rest of the world.
The site was naturally a highly sought after place to see, and as a researcher and journalist I had been here more times than I can recall. Just this summer, it was determined that the historical aspects of the site were strictly limited to the entrance and that the standing cavern walls were sound. This was great news for outdoor-activity junkies, such as myself, as it meant that the caves were open to hikers and explorers, along with swimmers who were now allowed to dip in the highly rich mineral waters.
The site that spaned two miles underground was well lit. The salt and minerals in the walls obsorbed the sunlight and sent a warm glow throughout the underground caverns. Being that the site was within a decent biking distance from my suburb condo, I made at least three visits a week to the pools within the caverns. I'd peddle over, lock up my bike, change out from my biking sweats, dawn my suit and submerse myself in the thick, rich waters. By the end of September, there was not a crevice nor a slip in the smooth caverns that I did not know. So it was to my great surprise when I found a cylindrical opening in a quiet corner of one of the caves farthest from the entrance. Tourist season had ended and it was early enough in the day that I was alone in this cave. Now, I've been on journalist missions around the world where we women are respected about as much as dirt, but my calm heart and analytical head have always gotten me out of trouble and helped me to see clearly through danger. In other words, being alone in this environment was about the equivalency of having breakfast alone on my patio in the morning.
Being able to investigate this new detail by myself was satisfying nearly every thrill seeking bone in my body. This new cylindrical tunnel was fascinating to me. The water that filled these caves to about four feet deep came in slowly, gradually from a source a mile away from where I was, but here I was staring through a tunnel that clearly was feeding water into this cave. The incoming stream was not rapid by any means. It was calm, and from what I could tell, there was naturaland direct sunlight on the otherside of the tunnel. Now, this was another surprise. The only source of direct sunlight into these caverns was in the entrance. It simply did not make sense to be seeing sun rays, forgive the pun, as clear as day on the other side of the tunnel. Every inch of this site both above ground and below had been documented by researchers, quite often with me jotting down notes a mile a minute at their side. This was something new and I had to see what it was. I hate to use this phrase, but little did I know what I was stepping, or in this case swimmig in to.
The tunnel was small, but large enough for me to half swim, half crawl in a squatted position through. It was filled about half way, but I could see as I progressed by the markings on the wall, that the tide in there did not vary either way. That was comforting, but what was increasingly peculiar was the unmistakable sound of gentle waves rolling onto a beach. This made no sense. The lake was miles away and the nearest ocean was over a hundred miles away. And yet, once I made it to the other side, I could not believe what I saw.
I emerged from the tunnel, slowly, carefully. There was sunlight alright, but no direct source of water feeding into the cave. My mind was so overwhelmed with the vision before me that my body operated automatically to remove itself from the tunnel and out onto the moist, coarse sand of a beach. My eyes scanned my surroundings, absorbing every detail but unable yet to process what had happened. I stood on a long beach that led out to an ocean a quick walk away. To my right were tall, steep cliffs, with light colored sand stone towering above me. To my left was a long band of sand with pine trees leading up a hill, with numerous plateaus. This was not an unoccupied place. I could see numerous stuctures on the hill, and they looked like maintained beach shacks.
I suddenly came to realize, although it continues to completely baffle me, that I had stepped through some sort of rabbit hole. For a moment I thought that maybe I knocked my head going through the cave and had passed out, slipping into a dream, but that couldn't be true. This was too real. Every one off my senses was being stimulated. I could smell the pines on the hill acrosss the thin bay. I was squinting from the sun reflecting off the glittering waters. I could feel the sand scraping between my toes. I could hear the waves splashing. I could taste the salt on the air.
Whatever had brought me here, wanted me to stay. I knew this, I can't exaclty explain why, but a sense of purpose and knowing filled my body, like I was being possessed by a mission I had no prior knowledge of: there was a boy here that I was sent to save.
At first this seemed ludicrous - here I was soaking in a swimming suit in a land I did not know on some hell-bent mission to save a boy I also had no idea about. And yet, somehow, my heart knew. It was the strangest sensation of my life. There was a feeling of energy pounding from my heart, that commanded and forced my actions, with which my head would struggle to keep up.
Regardless the madness and the hesitation and any sense of security that was on the other side of the tunnel from which I emerged, I had to move now and fast.
My feet made an abrupt turn to the right and I was bounding up a set of stone steps that my eyes had not seen. As I climbed, I saw that my feet were no longer bare, but in boots. My entire outfit had been changed! In an outfit like one would see in steam-punk movies, I was able to comortably make my agile climb to the top of the cliffs. Once I reached the flat apex, I instantly locked onto a white light house at the edge of the cliff. That was where the boy was, the boy I was sent to save. To the day I die, I will never be able to explan "how" or "why" any of this happened, only what transpired.
For a moment, I hesitated to see my surroundings. From the top of the cliffs, I could see that this was a coastal area. A long strip of beach went for miles to the north, and to the east through a thin haze I could see mountains. This area was populated, but largely undeveloped. I took a deep breath of the clear air as my eyes continued to scan eastward. And then, a sudden, dire sense of urgency and dread filled me before I even saw it. Far off in the distance, yet still only a few miles from where I stood, I could see a structure that I knew had a supremely dark purpose, one that spelled out an apocalypse for all of the people in this area. The dread was not for mysellf, but for the boy.
My feet again bolted, this time in the direction of the house. Without any greeting or announcement, I threw open the front door. There in front of me was the young boy and his father. The man looked to be about my age and a lightness, like hope from familiarity passed between us.
"Come on," I directed, taking hold of the boy's hand. "We'v got to get him to the shelter."
With nothing but the clothes on their backs, the father and the ten year old boy, raced with me across the cliff tops and down a short hillside past the beach where I had emerged. As we ran, I realized that we were headed to the area that in the reality I left, were directly over the caves. We ran on solid ground that in my reality was where the wide-mouthed entrance of the cave should have been.
Our trail raced down a short slope where a thick half circle door stood agape. There were a small number of people in this entrance to what was a well fortified shelter, hidden in the hillside. It was clear that the people were unwilling guinea pigs for the government that was about to unleash hellfire on its own. I pushed the young boy and his father into this shelter and they turned to look at me as if I was killing them by not staying. For whatever reason, I knew that there was another shelter entrance that I had to go to. I would enter the safety zone from there.
"I have to go," I said to these strangers who knew me enough to trust me with their lives.
Their looks were hurt, but they understood. They clearly knew more about my role in this society than I yet did.
My feet once again began to bolt down farther down the hill where I spotted yet another shelter entrance, but this one had a long line of school aged children waiting to go inside. It was immediately apparent that there was a disproportionately small amount of adults to the children.
The bone chilling and unmistakable sound of sirens began to wail. These were the screams that anyone who had lived through the Cold War in the 1950s would recognize that doom was on its way. I bolted to the front of the line where a small number of administers were clearly processing the children before letting them enter.
"We have to get them inside now!" I commanded, hearing the authoritativeness in my voice like never before. The idea of these children being outside when the package dropped from that devious blacktower was not something I would stand for in this reality or my own.
"Ma'am, we don't know where half of their parents are, we have to ensure we know who they are!" the female administrator with a large hand written list replied.
"There will be plenty of time for that!" I yelled, the sirens were so loud and the imperativeness of the situation dire. "Get out of their way and get them inside!" Without waiting for any response I threw up my arms and motioned the children to rush forward as fast as possible. The children needed little incentive to escape. They rushed into the shelter as orderly as could be expected given the circumstances. As I watched them run into the shelter, I thought of all the horror movies I had seen in my reality where someone always falls when some monster is coming after them. As the last of the children made it into the cave, I felt hugely relieved that luckily in this world, that sort of nonsense did not occur. However, right after the last of the children passed by the sirens stopped.
The silence that followed was the deepest sense of terror I have ever known. There were still a small number of people running out from the surrounding forest and towards the door when it happened.
The initial shock wave came rolling through the trees, like a blast of wind that nearly knocked the wind out from me. It felt as if the entire right side of my body had been slapped by a fiery hand. A person running fell foward and a man who was nearly at the entrance and struggling to help his aged mother make it to the caves bent forward dramatically from the hit. There was nothing I could do for the majority of the people pressing forward, but I could not close the door knowing that these two were so close. I bolted out from the cave and helped to carry the elder woman with her son into the solid edifice of the shelter. Right behind us was the second wave, one more powerful and far more deadly. Three of us grasped our hands onto the four foot thick led door to close it. The extra push from the second blast sealed shut the door, locking us inside the caverns.
~*~*~
What will happen next????? Tune in next week to read the exciting conclusion of "Sent to Save."
Until then,
Your humble author,
S. Faxon
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