Feelers Pt. 12

My knees felt weak and I was afraid I would actually fall over, so I sat down on the grass before that could happen. As Grant and I stared in horrid fascination at the print, we saw little trickles of dirt at the edges falling gently into the hollow hoof print. Three narrow, deep holes splayed out from the front edges of the hoof print, making me think of the claws the creature had used to grip me around the waistband of my jeans. I rubbed my still-bruised hip, unpunctured thanks to my leather belt.

 

As we both realized how very fresh the print was, we both had the same thought- run! But quiet. Which meant slow. Which meant nerve-wracking. It's not easy to breath quietly when it speeds up and your heart starts pounding away! But we tried. Backing away, trying not to rustle the grasses, looking around fearfully, we crept across the clearing to a stand of trees.

 

"What if it's a tree animal?" Grant breathed out

 

"Not with the hooves, I don't think," I whispered back, though with those add-on claws, I really didn't know. But we both looked up above us. We could see nothing up in the branches. "Let's get away from here. Did you get a good drink?"

 

"Yes, and I got the water bottle filled."

 

"Good, so let's get to a better place where we can talk and figure out what's going on and what we need to do next!" I nodded, and pointed over to a hilly place behind the trees where the landscape looked jumbled with big boulders and tufts of bushes. I pointed the direction, and Grant nodded. Looking around as we went, we picked our way a hundred feet into the rough wild area. We hunkered down behind a rock, sheltered by a little bluff behind us. Roots from the shrubs above hung down like a curtain where the dirt had been eroded away from the bluff. We scrunched back and made ourselves comfortable in the relative gloom of the cave-like dugout.

 

"Do you notice the sun is lower in the sky now than it was when we first got here?" Grant asked. Now I did.

 

"I think it will be dark soon," he said. "We may have to spend the night here."

 

Instinctively I drew a little closer to him, getting a little comfort from his nearness. "Maybe there'll be a moon."

 

"Maybe," he said. "Maybe two moons."

 

"Maybe three," I snickered. For some reason, probably the relief of being relatively safe in the total weirdness of our situation, I felt giggly now. "Maybe a dozen, like Saturn or something."

 

"Maybe we're on Saturn." Grant joked. "Maybe we're aliens!" Now I couldn't help it. We both started giggling and snickering, the effort of staying quiet making strange noises in our throats and tears in our eyes. And then I was afraid I would really start to cry, so I pulled myself together and shut up.

 

"Ok, what do we know? We aren't on Earth anymore, at least as we know it," I said. "And that foggy place, I don't think that was Earth either. So what happened?"

 

"That foggy place didn't seem like anything," Grant said. "There wasn't anything there. Even the fog wasn't damp, didn't smell like smoke. It was just like, uh, like physical blurry, is all I can describe it. And those ghostly scenes. They didn't all look like Earth scenes. I'm kind of wondering if they were other worlds. Maybe different worlds that hooked into it, sort of like if the blurry place was a hub that could connect them."

 

"So that creature might have stumbled into the hub like we did. It didn't belong there either." I still refused to feel bad about stabbing it with the pencil. It was tooth and nail, kill or be killed. Eat or be eaten. "I wonder how long it had been there."

 

"Long enough to get hungry," Grant said. "Unless it is just naturally vicious."

 

"So how did we end up getting here? Why did we come to the creature's world?" I thought about what led up to that. The fluff of fur, floating ahead of us on the merest whisper of a breeze that we couldn't feel. The way it seemed to be drawn to one spot, and then being sucked down to the ground.

 

"I think there must be a pull from the world to the hub. The fur was caught up in it and showed us the spot, or portal, if you want to call it that." I thought for a moment. "I wonder if there are lots of portals, one to each of those worlds. Places you'd never notice unless you were looking for them, and if you had some small piece of something from that place."

 

"But we walked all over the place and never found the way back to Earth!" Grant exclaimed.

 

"Yeah, we tromped and stomped all over but didn't look for anything subtle."

 

"I guess we could try something with, say, a strand or two of our hair to find the portal to Earth." He paused. "That is, if we can figure out how to get back to the hub."

 

Now it was definitely getting dark. And chilly. I pulled my sweatshirt out of my backpack and put it on.

 

"We never did get a chance to inventory your pack!" Grant said.

 

"Too dark now, we'd lose something," I replied. I made a mental note to rummage through it myself tomorrow in private to make sure there wouldn't be anything embarrassing to pop up.

 

We sat in friendly silence for a bit. It was nice feeling like we didn't have to talk to be enjoying each other's company and not feel awkward, like at school when you meet at the locker and you don't know what to say. There is the dead silence, or the dreaded babble, both making me want to kick myself afterwards. But now it was funny. I'd had such a crush on Grant. It was so thrilling just to walk by him in the hall and say hi. I would get nervous and sweaty just thinking of having to think of brilliant things to say if we ended up near each other at lunch or PE. But now he was more like a real friend. We'd gone through some stuff together, and it was funny, I didn't feel that super strong attraction of liking him anymore, but I felt comfortable with him, like a real friend.

 

"Hey, Andie," Grant whispered. "What are you thinking?"

 

"Nothing important." I said. "I'm not sleepy yet, and the night might be long. So, tell me about yourself. Do you have brothers and sisters? What are all the classes you're taking?"

 

The rest of the long evening was filled with us sharing stories, hearing about Grant's little sister and older brother, who apparently was a super jock who got all the attention, and how he liked history and social science but his folks were trying to get him into the math and science track. He opened up about his friends, which ones were real friends and which ones he felt were using him. He talked about the teachers he liked and then we got onto the subject of Mr. Devius.

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