Falling into Forever Read online

  When they reached the top of the steps, a blast of wind from the open window above the mattress hit their faces. The breeze swirled around the tight room and stirred its musty, rotten smell into their noses. Spotting a dangling cord in the middle of the room, Taylor yanked it until a bare bulb came alive above their heads.

  “It’s gone,” said Taylor, pointing enigmatically at the mattress under the window. “The doll, I mean,” she explained. “Where’s the doll?” She looked around the cramped place. “Maybe it’s under here,” she said, picking up the blanket lying atop the mattress. She shook it in the air, dust scattering throughout the room.

  In the corner across from the mattress, Alexandra knelt to the floor as she rubbed her fingers across the lid of a large metal chest with the name J. Peyton scratched into the surface.

  “Look,” exclaimed Taylor, staring at the floor underneath where she had shaken out the blanket. “I told you,” she announced, holding a sharp tooth up to the light. “What do you think it belonged to, Alex?”

  “Probably to a rabid poodle,” teased Alexandra, her hands fumbling with the padlock on the footlocker.

  “I can take care of that,” said Taylor confidently, pocketing the tooth as she once more waved the bobby pin in the air and sat down at the box.

  Alexandra hovered over Taylor’s shoulder as Taylor shoved the metal pin into the lock and whipped the pin violently back and forth. As Alexandra patiently observed Taylor work, a howl from deep in the woods beyond the house shot through the open window.

  “Did you hear that?” Taylor asked as she popped open the lid of the chest.

  “Yeah,” said Alexandra, staring at the opened front of the rusted metal box.

  “Perhaps it’s Dixie,” Taylor said jokingly. “Maybe something is eating that stupid dog somewhere out in the woods.”

  Alexandra rifled through the chest and delicately retrieved the treasures, one at a time. Inside she found an army uniform adorned with metals and ribbons, a pair of boots, and an army officer’s dress hat. At the bottom of the chest, she spotted a leather-bound journal and grabbed it anxiously.

  The pages began with scribbled diary entries dating to 1944, the year her Uncle Joseph had spent in combat against the Germans in the final days of World War II. There wasn’t too much detail that Alexandra knew about her uncle, only the little that Granny June had told her. Flipping further through the book, Alexandra saw the handwriting grow shaky and the words dwindle to one per page. “Horror. Madman. Fire,” she read aloud. On the final page, she stared at a drawing: a man with wings growing from his back and spewing fire from his mouth.

  “That’s freaky,” shuddered Taylor as she peeked over Alexandra’s shoulder at the illustration.

  Suddenly, Granny June’s voice bellowed behind them, “What are you two doing?” she demanded. They turned and saw her at the top of the attic steps.

  “Nothing,” said Alexandra as she quickly shoved the journal back into the chest. Her face flushed red.

  “Those things belonged to my brother Joseph,” Granny June said. She stepped toward the girls. Taylor swiftly removed the officer’s cap from her head.

  “I’m sorry, Granny,” Alexandra admitted anxiously, her heart pounding. “I didn’t mean to disturb anything.”

  “I’ve told you about him, have I not?” Granny June said. “He was an army officer, handsome and brilliant.” Granny June was frowning.

  “So why don’t you talk about him?” Alexandra asked innocently. “I think it’s cool. My uncle, the war hero.”

  Granny June stared at the round window as its curtains billowed in the sea breeze. “He was never the same after the war, Alex. He never told me what happened to him in the conflict, and I learned after a time not to ask. I just accepted that my dear brother would have a troubled soul.”

  “What happened to him after he came home?” asked Taylor.

  “He died in a hunting accident out in the woods,” said Granny June, gazing toward the window. “Joseph was hunting with our dad early one morning not long after that picture was taken. They were determined to find the fox that was killing and eating our chickens.” She paused for a moment, looked at the girls, and then she continued. “That was a few months after your dad was born, Alexandra. I was hanging the laundry out on the line when I heard my dad crashing out of the forest, yelling that Joseph was dead. It felt like time stood still. When the deputies arrived, they all went back into the forest to get the body. They carried him out of the woods, and I saw a hole in his chest where his heart should have been.”

  “Gross,” Taylor said.

  Granny June placed her hand on the girl’s shoulder and looked her in the eyes. “My brother would not want his things disturbed,” she said softly. “Please put them back in his footlocker.” Then she turned toward the attic steps.

  Alexandra deftly placed the journal on the floor at the side of the box. She helped Taylor fold the uniform and place the boots and cap back into the metal box. “I think I’m going to be sick,” she said to Taylor as she stood, hiding the journal behind her back.

  “You do look a little green. Why don’t you go lie down?” Taylor suggested as they walked down the narrow attic steps together. “Get some rest. Remember, we are so not going to miss the party tonight.”

  “Wake me up in a bit,” Alexandra told Taylor as she shut the door to her room behind her.

  Alone in her bedroom, Alexandra pulled the curtains shut and laid down on the bed with her eyes closed tight, but her stomach rocked back and forth as it had on the sailboat. Dragging herself to the bathroom, she stood over the sink and stared at her eyes, puffy from the salt water. She clung to the sink pedestal as her legs swayed beneath her, but her grip failed, and she collapsed to the tile floor.

  She had succumbed to an infinite blackness. Yet she could see a man floating in front of her. A dark robe clung to his body. He pulled the hood back from his head to reveal fangs in his gaping mouth. He pursed his lips and spit. A ball of fire flew toward her. She flung up her hands to shield her face, but the flames engulfed her body.

  A voice in the darkness called her name. “Alex,” Taylor said, “do you want a soda?” Taylor was standing over her, shaking her shoulder.

  “What?” Alexandra muttered, still staring into a fire.

  “I said, do you want a soda?” Taylor repeated, sitting down next to her friend on a hollow log pulled up next to the bonfire.

  Alexandra dug her bare feet into the beach sand. “Sorry,” she said. “I was, um, thinking about something else.”

  Taylor popped open the soda can and held the cool drink up to her friend’s cheeks. “Don’t scare me like that, Alex. Your face looks just like it did when I found you on the bathroom floor.”

  On the other side of the bonfire, someone turned up a radio. Taylor jumped up to dance. “I love this song,” she said. “Come on, Alex. Loosen up.” Taylor tried to pull Alexandra up from the log.

  “No, thank you,” responded Alexandra, clutching the soda and planting her feet more firmly into the sand.

  “Go on, Alex,” said Brad. For the first time, Alexandra noticed the handsome young law student sitting next to her.

  “Fine then,” said Taylor, reaching out for Brad’s hand and yanking him up to dance.

  The low, constant crash of the ocean lured Alexandra away from the fire. Standing up to stretch, she walked toward the dark water. As she stood in the wet sand, the waves lapped against her feet. Behind the gathering storm clouds in the sky, a full moon peeked down on the water. Lightning bursts shot through the heavens, and bursts of thunder rumbled far out over the ocean.

  Reaching in a pants pocket, Alexandra pulled out her cell phone. A new text message from her mother waited. “What are you doing?” she read aloud.

  A picture would explain it better to her mom than she could, she decided. So she turned her cell phone camera’s viewfinder toward the bonfire. No one dancing around the fire noticed the flash as Alexandra snapped their picture.
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  Alexandra peered at the photograph. Taylor looked like she did not have a care in the world holding Brad’s hand, but behind her the flames raged. Alexandra looked closer, holding the screen close to her eyes. She wiped a raindrop from the plastic screen and stared harder. She knew that what she was seeing was a trick of the moonlight and sparks, but the sight of a man’s figure standing in the middle of the flames sent a shiver down her back.

  Raindrops started falling fast and furious on her head. “Come on, Alex!” Taylor yelled at her from across the sand, as the storm began to blow in from the sea. The sudden squall made short work of what had promised initially to be a fun evening. The girls headed back to Peyton Manor, hoping that it would clear by morning.

  But even by late the next morning, the soggy sky refused to relent and drowned their hopes of spending the day on the beach. So they packed their bags and dragged them to the front door, ready to depart for Atlanta.

  Granny June pondered over the gray clouds from her front porch. “The weather lady on Channel Two says this is from a hurricane churning in the Caribbean. It’s only going to get worse the next few days, I’m afraid.”

  “It’s okay, Granny,” Alexandra said, wrapping her arms around her grandmother. “We’ll be back soon. I mean it,” she said, smiling.

  Granny June walked the girls to their car.

  “Thank you for putting up with us,” Taylor said, tossing the bags into her trunk.

  “Be careful,” Granny June whispered to her granddaughter and squeezed her hand.

  Alexandra got in and closed the passenger door. Taylor drove slowly down the gravel path. As the car pulled away, Alexandra watched her grandmother disappear around the curve in the driveway. When they reached the gate at the end of the driveway, Alexandra checked inside her handbag, which was resting at her feet on the floorboard.

  “Maybe you should take that back to the footlocker,” Taylor said.

  Not much gets by Taylor, Alexandra thought. She shoved her Uncle Joseph’s journal back inside of the handbag and threw the purse back on the floorboard. She pulled her red sunglasses over her eyes, even though the day was dark.

  “No,” Alexandra replied, ignoring Taylor’s warning. She twisted the leather strap of her necklace between her fingers. “I don’t like secrets, and I know she’s hiding something from me.”

  The roar of the Mercedes’s engine echoed through the woods, past the rundown shack buried among the ancient, moss-covered oaks. The Gullah woman inside smiled to herself. She walked to the doorway of the shack, holding a glass jar in her hands.

  “You hear dat, Cyrus?” she snorted aloud, laughing. “Dey goin now.” The barefoot woman stepped from the doorway and stared into the woods.

  “Dat Alex tink she can run, Cyrus,” the woman called out to the trees, sneering. “But dat girl cain’t hite from Jasmine. She got dat book wit her, and dat book gots the devil in it.”

  A brown wolf with black eyes padded toward the shack from behind a wide tree trunk.

  “Dat a good boy,” the woman said to the wolf, rubbing his back as he sat obediently at her feet. “Eat now,” she said, opening the glass jar in her hands.

  The putrid stench of decay stung her eyes, but a cackle escaped her lips. “I know my Cyrus like da heart da most,” she said, pouring the slimy contents of the jar on the ground in front of the animal. “You goin need strength, Cyrus, to follow dat little girl home. Dat girl got what we need, and you goin to take it back.”

  The wolf swallowed the treat and licked a puddle of dark blood from the dirt. Raising his head to the sky, he howled through the treetops.

  “Eternity with me, if you obey. Go now, Cyrus,” she ordered him. “Bring it to Jasmine. After you bring it to me, then you can have dat girl.”

  6

  Restless

  The evening before her first day back at school, Alexandra had tried to take Jack, her bulldog, for a relaxing spin in the park. But Jack had sensed another big storm coming before Alexandra had even heard the first clap of thunder. His short bulldog legs were in full gallop by the time the first swift winds picked up. She ran behind him, his leash burning into her hand. Approaching the park’s exit, he reared to a stop as the concrete pathway spilled out to the busy intersection.

  While they waited for the traffic light, her gaze drifted up to her tenth-floor balcony, and the first drops of the afternoon shower splashed in her face. In the sky above, dark clouds rolled in quickly.

  “Mom will be worried about us,” she told Jack, holding his leash tightly.

  Behind them, a crowd poured from the park to avoid the oncoming rain and gathered on the sidewalk, waiting for the light to change. While Jack panted impatiently at her feet, Alexandra listened to voices around her making dinner plans and movie dates. As the time passed, the crowd became a full-fledged throng of people. To avoid getting claustrophobic, she kept her eyes on the passing traffic.

  “This light never takes this long to change,” she told Jack as he whined. Tossing a shy glance to the gathering crowd behind her, Alexandra’s eyes searched for the handsome guitar player.

  I guess this isn’t the best weather for a concert, she sighed to herself, unable to catch a glimpse of him.

  As she bent to soothe Jack’s head, a girl’s enraged voice from somewhere in the swarm behind her yelled, “That’s what you get, Bobby Higgins. I hate you!”

  Someone in the crowd must have stumbled into Alexandra, because she abruptly fell forward into the street. A car horn blared as she lurched helplessly into oncoming traffic. Tires squealed against the pavement. She winced as a sharp pain pierced her arm. A tight grip yanked her shoulder back and nearly out of its socket. Her heart pounded and roared in her ears, but a pleading voice echoed above the sound of her racing heartbeat.

  Be careful! a man’s voice said.

  Alexandra’s eyes opened wide and stared back at the shocked faces of the crowd gathered around her. “What happened?” she asked, sitting up. Jack jumped into her lap and licked her face sloppily from forehead to chin. She realized that she had let go of his leash.

  A chubby, towheaded toddler, squeezing his mother’s hand, looked at her and held his sippy cup up to her face. “A tall man grab you,” he said. “Want some juice?” he offered.

  “A man? Where did he go?” Alexandra asked.

  “That way,” the boy pointed east down the sidewalk, his hair blowing furiously in the approaching storm.

  Alexandra raised herself to her wobbly legs and strained her eyes over the crowd. “I don’t see anyone,” she said.

  “Maybe he fly,” the boy suggested. His mother picked him up in her arms.

  “Maybe,” Alexandra nodded her head, noticing that her sunglasses had fallen to the road.

  “Say ’bye, Joshua,” the boy’s mother told him. “He can be silly sometimes,” she said, smiling warily at Alexandra.

  “Bye, bye, bye,” said the boy as his mother walked with him across the intersection. Waving goodbye, Alexandra watched the boy flap his arms like wings as his mother carried him.

  Hours later, Alexandra’s heart was still racing as she tossed and turned, wide awake in bed. Jack was next to her on top of the blankets. The bold, red numbers lit up on her alarm clock warned her that it was already three in the morning. Only a few hours remained until dawn, the first morning of her senior year.

  She flicked on the bedside lamp. Jack, in response, buried his head under a pillow. Pulling her Uncle Joseph’s journal from the drawer in her bedside table, she flipped through the pages until she landed on a handwritten entry, the ink faded against the yellowing pages.

  October 20, 1944, 18:00

  Winter has set in early in this ragged southwestern German forest, and never have I been as thankful for the campfire and my tent as tonight. The captain assures us that the only German soldiers in this sector of the woods around camp are dead ones. The rest have surrendered or have fled to Berlin.

  But we patrol all the same. My turn on our sector�
��s perimeter came after noon, and the trail through the woods was soggy in the rain. The Jeep’s tires bogged in the mud, stuck, just as the rain turned to sleet. But with what I at first believed to be luck, I spotted the mouth of a cave carved into a nearby hillside. I waited hours for another Jeep to come pull my vehicle from the mud. As the icy rain pummeled the trees, I paced in the cave.

  I waited, bored. So I turned on my flashlight and wandered back inside the cave. But I turned around when the stench became overpowering. Bones crunched beneath my boots, and I am sure that I recognized a human skull among those of the forest’s wild beasts. Tomorrow I may go back to the cave to be sure of what I saw.

  Poor Uncle Joseph, Alexandra sighed as she shut the book and returned it to the drawer. Outside her bedroom window, an emergency siren pierced the night. “I guess I may as well give up trying to sleep,” she said to Jack as she rose from her bed to investigate. Pulling back the heavy curtains from her window, she saw the flashing blue lights of a police car parked on the street below her window. Two police officers hovered around a boy standing next to a bicycle, his head shaking back and forth.

  Pressing her face to the window, Alexandra noticed a shadow pacing behind the policemen as they spoke to the kid with the bike. She had a high perch over the scene. With her forehead bearing down against the cool glass, she stared, her eyes riveted to the sidewalk. She gasped as a canine—a massive beast more wolf than dog—emerged from the shadows and into the streetlight. The beast had his face fixed upward, as if directly upon her window.

  The kid jerked his arm and shook a finger past the two police officers. It was clear that he wanted them to look at something.

  Alexandra held her breath. Be careful, she thought and closed her eyes.

  A howl rang into the night, audible to anyone nearby awake at that hour, and she braved another glimpse down to the sidewalk.

  But she could see only the police officers, climbing back into their patrol car. “Gone?” she asked herself.