One Winter in Icabon - Chapter 1

Chapter 1: Phase One

44 years later

The box was slung around her neck and laid upon her chest, as opposed to its previous position resting against her right side. It was distracting, but it was bad enough having one hipbone worn permanently by the bobbing of a black shoulder bag carrying a heavier load than its apparent emptiness let know. The muscles there never ceased reminding her of the unnecessary callusing she’d allowed, and she was tired enough of hearing that all day long. In any case, the CB radio was in need of adjusting again, though she held little hope for it; it had lost most intelligible signals four hours ago, even before she’d entered the woods. She repositioned the antenna to several varying angles, extended it upwards, sideways, and slightly downwards to its full length, and then collapsed it altogether. For an instant it blathered out a couple tinny, incoherent male voices having some sort of conversation, with the interruption of a singular female voice. She held the radio close to her ear, listening. A name was thrown into the talk; the signal fizzled, broke back, and then died into soft static.

She rocked her boot heels in the dirt, which crackled faintly and let them sink. It was definitely a name they were referring to. But it sounded nothing like Reese.

She had been half expecting to hear something about herself the moment she realized--back when the idea of leaving was no more than that--that human contact had to be made in order to explain her disappearance. The guy behind the desk at the Residence Inn’s lobby seemed the only one a little interested in his brisk guest’s abrupt decision to check out. Most of the time, Reese was of the languid, somewhat wily type that proved either attractive or displeasing to her (few) frequent acquaintances--she was prompt and to the point when she wanted to be, and even this rather dorky kid had caught wind of that. Gazing distantly out the glass doors of the inn’s entrance, she’d told him her eyes and stomach better agreed with the closer proximity to the San Antonio River in the Hyatt. He had seemed to acquiesce with this notion, and waved her away with sleepy eyes. Reese walked the few blocks to the Hyatt and loitered about the mall inside like a normal female tourist, casually interested in all the pleasing possibilities. She looked at spring dresses on late season sale; she handled colorful figurines of sea mammals and lightly caressed the bronze shell of a swimming loggerhead; she bought a corndog and sat outside the rear of the mall at one of the white, round plastic tables, listening to music from Titanic played by a band next to the river, as a tourist boat glided by and the guide made a joke about the music. She threw away the stick, went back inside, exited the hotel, and made her way to a less conspicuous street. A Hostess truck yielded to her hail, and she was taken quite a ways towards her next destination.

A breeze blew by her ear, sufficient to disturb her long, dark tresses from their place. She brushed them back absently, meanwhile lowering the volume on the CB radio to a gentle hiss. She’d wondered about how much it would take to get the truck drivers talking, and how soon the opportunity would come. If she had a measure for trustworthiness--since she trusted no one--there remained no detrimental reason for drivers from her hitchhiking experiences to be less loyal to her inquiries than any other sympathizing soul. Reese was by no means naïve enough to rely on feelings or notions that could change in a wink--especially if betrayal was to their advantage. It was no big deal anyhow: Others just like her come to them all the time, and most go on to get away with it. The convicted ones were a minority not spoken of much, with the police focusing their energies towards more serious criminal activity. If Reese had to be a felon, she at least wouldn’t be a druggie with a brain too fried to rectify.

So, all things considered, life is good. She smiled darkly at that thought.

The air was crisp and chilly against her skin. It seemed to stand as still and frozen as the sparse patches of frost on the ground, and, more so, the slicks of ice she watched for, her boots then shifting course to avoid them. The first snowfall hadn’t arrived. The U-Haul driver who’d dropped her off at the south border of this forest observed it was too early yet to get such cold until the end of this month. What Reese knew, if anything, about New England without outside help was that it never failed to see snow, despite whatever had come throughout the rest of the year. It was a certainty which she had prepared for.

An outlet store some miles from the state border had the jacket (at a hefty bargain) that she presently wore. She’d always liked suede for its feel, and the wide lapels made it for something almost prepossessing. The light tan coloring made her think of the unfortunate cow, but it was too much a steal to pass up. Its length covered her rump, flapping slightly with her forward movement; the jacket was further restrained by the attached belt, tied in a bow at the front. Everything else had been hers some years, now. Her black Filas sweatpants swished between her legs like the crunching of fallen leaves; they could be unzipped at the ankles to let out the fabric a few inches. They fit her comfortably--not perfectly. Her head was covered by a white beanie, made of extraordinarily soft fleece. Grandfather had given it to her as a Christmas present when she stayed with him in Massachusetts. She was nine, she remembered.

Reese’s face was almost cocoa, still light enough to be considered Caucasian. Her nose was board, tending towards the left. She never plucked her eyebrows. Behind her sunglasses, they helped to make her expressions rich and evocative.

Brought to nothing more than a purveyor of static whispers, the radio at last felt the pangs of drained power after some thirty-six consecutive hours. Reese, who had begun walking again, picked up the machine’s strangeness as the whispers faded in and out of audibility. She started to run, now feeling the radio’s inner protests of shuddering and shifting parts, small metallic noises in simultaneous rhythm with her quick steps. Stark white birches flew at either side of her vision like dumbfound sentries, curious at something so ridiculous that they dared not intrude lest the sight were an illusion after all. Before her, a deep brown blur loomed with its broad, naked arms stretched low and straight that they could be a hazard to the unmindful. She saw the branches run high, until they narrowed to a tiny, warped point against a large patch of gray. The sky was overcast, fluffy, cool. The leaved birches gave way to a clearing this maple had ruled for the trail. Reese stopped inches from the trunk and whirled about, her face to the sky, the radio lifted above her head, the strap still attached, the antenna flicked up to its full extension.

For the first time in hours, a voice from the other side crackled with meaning. The signal first jumped in indecision between lines. A man blared with crazed enthusiasm, “And the hits just keep on coming….” The machine whined with heightening frequency, a sound progressively weakened so it wouldn’t come to strain any ears. The sharpness was dulled, deadened; the warm, humming vibration ceased. A wind blew through its vent, and the instruments within resounded hollowly. It was over.

Reese brought it to back to chest level. Her fingers moved from the radio’s edifice to the narrow sides, their sensitivity checked by the anchors which held the machine to its owner by means of the dark strap. They wavered over unclasping it from the strap and using the latter to reinforce her shoulder bag, but then fell away to her sides. She ignored balance, and as would’ve otherwise happened naturally, her body fell, stopped with a dull thump by the tree trunk. She collapsed further, landing on her bottom; the bark chaffed her neck. Her head trailed behind it a thin plume of white breath, soft, almost shimmering. As her knees were pulled to her chest, rigid hands grasping at loose dirt and getting grimy between the fingernails, the brightness of the insubstantial pillar laid faint intimation through her shaded eyes. She thought for a moment about taking off the sunglasses, but was content enough with the impressions of shimmers coming out in shaky, clumped white mists from her lips. They glistened, hovering. Involuntarily, a hand came, palm upward, to touch the plumes’ substance. The hand absorbed it, and she put it down. White continued to stream out, heedless.

Furrowing her brow, Reese tilted her head to a patch of frost on the ground to her left. She swore quietly, and crushed the patch with an outstretched heel.

“Great,” she muttered. Her hand picked away the prickles at the back of her neck. She scrutinized the splinters hanging on her fingertips, then tossed her hair to the back from lying against her shoulder. “Just fantastic.”

Looking upward, her view of the gray sky was bordered by the thick roundness of her glasses frame and, just below the curved line at the top, woolly hairs that curled a little away from the bulk of fleece. Reese pulled at the winter beanie to cover her ears, and she eyed the icy patch she had just devastated. Muddy drips were seeping into the cracks, and the ice already had uncongealed to clear bits that were rapidly melting. For some reason, she had no clue what she was mad at--it was something specific, at least in the first place. Other factors had come in to her plan coming up north, of course, so complications were bound to arise (and had arisen) in her journey. Funny, to think of it like that: A journey. My journey. Well, with things as they’re going, she thought, I see here a one-woman expedition with too much on mind. This was the truth, she concluded. She had left with adequate notice, had found a means of travel, and had known in the most basic sense where she was heading and how she would deal with the consequent affairs when she arrived. Even if the New Hampshire police suspected a fairly young woman of her known character to seek refuge in a remote place--of which there were enough of in this state--it was hard to imagine their effort stretching beyond mid-Hampshire territory. Reese was careful not to get into any serious trouble with the law, case-in-point her clean police record. Being no major offender, and a saccharine nuisance when she sensed circumstances were not favorable, the law brushed her aside as a harmless eccentricity who simply needed some taming by “good citizen” civility.

In other words, there was presently nothing to worry about from the outside world. There was just one problem…

She was startled out of her thoughts by movement above to her left, in the tree, and quick, lilting noises of something passing through the air. A crow was perched on the lowest bough, not far from the trunk. It seemed unusually intent upon an indentation in the facing side of the wood; the bird’s dark beak picked at it, almost tentatively, unsure about what it was perceiving. At one point, there was a violent outburst of beating, flailing wings and raking claws at the notch as the beak assaulted and tried to wrench at something within it. Then, as the creature apparently realized its endeavor impossible, it let off and shuffled a little away from the spot; it looked all but resigned. It stayed for about a half-minute, then took off with a shrill caw into the birches.

Reese pulled herself from the ground and strode to the tree’s bough. She put up a hand this time to feel all around it, checking at first for unnatural irregularities in the wood, and then focusing her attention on the notch that so captivated the crow. A fingernail chipped away at the dirt and rust, and exposed what partially confirmed her suspicions: A screw. Moving her hands a bit more to the left revealed the edge of a wooden plank. Her eyes narrowed. She cleaned mud from along the right side where there was another screw, another wooden edge. More quickly, she dug at and wiped away the imbedded mud from the plank. The chore was made the harder by deep striations and patina consistent to the texture and color of the tree itself. This was only problematic, though, for the first minute. Suddenly, the etchings began to make human sense. Reese wiped a remaining, wet chunk of obstructing dirt, and stood back to make out the meaning.

The sign was very old, from what she observed. Whoever had put it up--or decreed that it should be done--had seemed to decide that only one signpost need ever exist, that the work was done and such shant ever be necessary in the future. She had been prepared to find but one signpost, having been informed of this in advance, and had readily relied upon the directions given. This was certainly remote, but could the place be this rustic? The sign was old, anyhow, though, and the one thing she was concerned with was that she had liked what she heard about the town.

At the far right of the sign was a large, crude arrow pointing in the implied direction. Preceding it were these words:

ICABON, NH – 4 KM

It’s as if they expected people to get that lost, Reese mused wryly at the inclusion of the state’s abbreviation. But who the hell uses only kilometers on a road sign? It was an oddity, she had to admit, yet certainly nothing to be alarmed over. What seemed strange was the fact that slushy mud had, somehow, been smeared over the words on the sign in a manner that couldn’t be due to innocent mudslinging. The possibility of dirty snow that had melted enough to drip onto the bough, and then froze at a speed that kept it there as was, proved far more remote. Reese was surprised at the latter inference; ridiculous, really. Especially when the elements went so far as to make the sign itself blend in with the rest of the tree--quite by accident, incidentally.

“People get wrapped up in so much crud,” was her only response to this. Well enough I don’t end up straddled between sides. I’m happy as a spectator.

Ah. She remembered…. Times had once been that everything was a mystery, and nothing to her was inhibited. She always knew when someone was going to call at home, and Grandfather would answer to hear of a terrible accident, that they’d done all they could, that they were sorry for him and the child. A day came when it was her turn to pick it up, and when the conversation was over she was alone, at nine years old, and no one was there to look after her for five hours. Five hours was as good as forever--she blocked the thing out, never again felt those premonitions when she’d rather let them come, ready or no.

But now something clung to her, a vague entreaty that, voluntarily, turned her interest from the signpost. Cold needles touched her spine, ran up like a match striking raw sandpaper. She wondered if she was bleeding through the jacket. Something was wrong.

The screeching poured forth as an explosion, a piercing that whizzed without heed to even the omnipresence of trees and reached her ears in electric sharpness. Near pain left Reese dumb for a moment; then a noise that struck familiarity widened her acuteness to an overriding level. She followed awkward, weighted flapping of wings towards the edge of the path to her left, then stopped before the birches. There was no way to tell where it was through the loud, broad rustle of leaves and bending branches. Its cries, much softened and devoid of the horror of the first shock, were infrequent, often stalled for significant periods. She waited, irresolute. Then the noise was brought to her in a fast moving sphere, with an indistinct flash of black through the disturbed leaves. She ran now away from the great maple down the way she came. Her arms moved freely, careful of the thin trunks to the right, her feet light and padding with insistent ease. Ten seconds passed before she realized no sound reverberated but her steps on the dirt trail. Again she paused, her breath coming short, her head up and searching. There was nothing, not anymore. Just silence.

It felt as if her insides were sucked dry by an invisible force, not much less unsubstantial than her flowing white breath. Emptiness left her throat dry, and Reese hugged herself as her head lowered, the expression in her eyes shielded by the sunglasses.

Her peripheral vision caught an incongruity of the ground. It was very visible and, when she turned to look at it directly, very obvious. The bits of frost, though forming a small vibrant circle at the edge of the trail, were scattered in minute clumps and near void sprinkles. Many of the leaves still sparkled in the afternoon light, with a tendency towards hardness than dew. As she gazed, a dark spot splashed onto the circle, which spread through the infinitesimal crevices as scarlet. Another fell and extended, not far off from the other. She brought her head up to a straight, outstretched branch, where the blood wrapped thickly around a tiny section. Unlike the others, it was devoid of rime. Her back and legs tensed, and she stepped backward, slowly.

A birch quivered near its base. Two yards behind the frost patch, in the woods, a disheveled tuft of feathers laid next to a pool of the scarlet. Pressed on top of the carcass, flexing and moving with the natural tendencies of the body, was a huge paw.

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One Winter in Icabon - Chapter 2  [13+] In which Reese confronts the first of her dangers... by Light Rises