The Empath (The Above and Beyond Series Book 1) (2 page)

Shortstop,

Now you celebrated your first night. It’s time to get to the hard work. Now I know you wanna scare the wildlife with that fiddle o’ yours but you gotta set up the place before the storms start.

I’m gonna talk you through the small stuff, so don’t sweat it. Step by step like that head doctor says. In no time at all the place will be fixed up and firing.

You remember the field next door? The one I always tended? Well, it’s yours now, Shorty, so if you go in the ol’ barn you’ll find the tools I left. They ain’t none of that new fangled fancy stuff but they work.

Prepare the field for plantin’ and then build the box you promised the pesky squirrel cos otherwise, if she’s anythin’ like her grandmother and ancestors, she’ll hammer a hole in your roof!

Love,

Nan xxx

P.s - I’m your Nan you halfwit. Why the hell else would I have put up with you?

 

I laughed, feeling for the first time in years someone understood me. Tears sprung to my eyes and I sobbed like I’d never done before.

Through my tears, I saw another scribble at the bottom of the page.
 

P.P.S - Stop blubbering and get on with it!
 

I placed the book inside the trunk, fired up the stove, and made myself some freeze-dried stuff that my father had thrown in a box.

In an hour, I was out in the field, digging through years of bramble and vine. I scooted past the animals’ nesting and opened up the barn where Nan kept her tools.

I had always thought that the little field was the farmer’s next door and that Nan had worked for him but now I knew different. I turned and looked at the higgle-piggle wheat field, its weeds thicker than some sections of the cricked and cracked fence.

Even if it needed work, it was mine.

I spent the entire day ploughing and plucking and turning over the field until it was looking something like Nan used to conjure and felt as though I had never been away. I’d helped Nan in the field so many times that it felt more like home than the large, empty house my parents had occupied.

After dinner I pulled out some wood from the back of the shed and built the box for Mrs. Squirrel with a flap and lever attached. The squirrel watched me attach the box to the wall in the waning sunlight. She investigated her new store as soon as I stepped away.

Mrs. Squirrel seemed pretty pleased with it. She tested it for structure and safety, did a dry run with the nuts and tested out the lever I’d attached for her to keep her stash from the birds. Happy that I had appeased the resident nag, I boiled some water on the stove for supper.

I heard a scraping in one of the rotting kitchen cupboards. I opened it up and Mrs. Squirrel sprinted past with a sealed package of sponges. “Hey!”

If squirrels could snigger, she would have. It was a good thing those sponges had survived the flood and they’d been sealed up so tight. I could have used them.

“Thieving little—”

I stopped as she appeared on her box, trying to haul her loot through the gap.

“Hang on a minute.” I opened up the window, reached through, and snapped off the packaging. I then helped the little thief to break up her bounty and stuff it into the box. “It’s supposed to be for your nuts, not you,” I told her.

She gave me a look, which told me that she wanted another box for that, preferably within reach and if I’d be so kind to fit a flap to the wall so she wouldn’t have to keep finding holes to get into the house.

“Y’know, Nan was right . . . bossy,” I told her.

The squirrel flicked her bushy tail into my face and closed the lid as she settled in to her new home. I looked around at the creaky, leaky shack of a place I had inherited.

“At least one of us has some comfort,” I muttered. I wandered wearily over to my sleeping bag, ate my boiled slop, and was out as soon as my head hit the pillow.

Chapter 25

SOME PEOPLE’S WEEDS are another’s prize blooms, and no more was this the case than with creeping Charlie–that little plant that covered the ground in a thick blanket of green, then, in spring, burst out into the most vivid splashes of purple you’ll ever see. It could provide cures for all sorts of ailments and could be put in tea. It had a load of uses
, if
you knew what you were doing with it. Nan had. She’d cook up that little plant when I had a cough or a cold and in no time I’d be running around causing chaos. She had used the garden like a pantry, she knew every leaf on every tree and what she could use it for.

I’m not Nan. I ain’t got no idea how to cook toast, let alone make up a nettle stew or a cough mixture from ground ivy. Still, that didn’t make the display that greeted my eyes, as I walked out into the morning sunshine, any less soul soothing.

I sat there for at least an hour in the morning sun. I felt like a child that had just opened its eyes to the wonders of the world. The simple pleasure of touching the indigo bursts meant more than my simple words could ever explain. So long had I been in the tomb of gray, thick stone, that I never dreamed such simple moments would ever be mine to treasure again.

After some wrenching and a prod from Nan in my ear I walked to the field. I made up for my leisure by working through every meal until the scarecrows were dancing in the evening breeze and the field was sewn with every seed Nan had stowed in the trunk for me.

Now, in a perfect world, I would have let the ground settle, I would have turned it over a few times, perhaps adding some new rich fertilizer to boost the nutrients. I didn’t have that kind of time. The belt of storms would be on their way soon enough and I needed the seeds to get growing.

In Oppidum the weather is so unpredictable in some months, that you can go out in the morning in shorts and return at night wrapped in a scarf and gloves. A lot of the politicians are saying it’s the world warming up but I can feel how important it is that weather cycles fluctuate, that they gotta change and shift about. I ain’t no expert on anything but I think that’s how the world seems to work. It’s always on the move, always growing and changing and evolving. It’s us that has to go with it, not try and control it.

And that’s pretty much how it seems to work in Oppidum. We get this really unique phenomenon which scientists say is all about different air meeting and having some kind of disagreement. Either way, the result is we end up with summer storms. Every mid-May till sometime mid-June the weather goes completely bonkers. Mother Nature seems to look in her box of weather and thinks, “this needs a good ol’ spring clean,” so tips the box and empties it right on top of us. We get everything from blizzards to persistent thunderstorms, to gales so strong they blow over cars. There was rain so heavy one year and the river got so high that Nan and I were trapped on the half floor overlooking the main floor for days. And I ain’t even gonna go into twisters.

Then, as if Mother Nature decides she’s happy she’s emptied out her garbage, it all stops. Normally on my birthday.

I still had a couple of weeks until the storms would arrive and hoped it would be long enough for the seeds to get all nestled in before the kitchen sink got thrown at them. As I locked up the barn and sauntered back to the cabin for the night, a scream hit my ears at such a level that I braced myself for the blow from an attacker.

Sun setting, run, run faster, legs so tired, so wobbly, run, stumble, fumble, fall, crawl, run, have to run, hands, so tight, so large, pain, so much pain, run, please, run . . .

I rubbed my head, trying to fend off the panic thumping its way through my body. “That was a bad one,” I told Mrs. Squirrel who was looking at me, nut in her mouth. “Just a vision, that’s all. Must be tired.”

Mrs. Squirrel wasn’t convinced but then neither was I.

There are three kinds of visions that I seem to have. There’s the flashes, like the ones I just had. They are like watching a minute of a blockbuster movie in 3-D.

Then, there’s the dreams—the kind that gets me up close and personal. I experience all the sights and smells and feelings, I’m all tuned in like I am actually there. I find it really hard to figure out if it’s something I am experiencing or a vision.

Then, the last, the prophetic ones. Like I said before, I hate them. All the fire and fury and strange symbolic things that I don’t have the faintest idea how to decipher.

The flashes seem to be like a warning beacon, a feeling so intense that it ripples through the area like an aftershock.

The dreams are another’s experience, as it’s happening. Somehow I am living the event with the person, experiencing what they experience.

Then the prophetic are clearly what could be, or will be or may be. I don’t know. I wasn’t given an instruction manual. All I know is that they are terrifying and not very useful even if I could understand. Who the hell would listen to me anyway?

Mrs. Squirrel bounced up onto her box. She seemed happy that I wasn’t going to faint before she got into her nut-store and I headed inside for the evening, trying and failing to rid the flash from my mind.

MARI, SUCH A sweet peach of a girl. Dark hair swaying behind you as you walk. You don’t belong here, Mari. You don’t belong anywhere. Your filthy mongrel roots and your promiscuous ways . . . you’re all the same, all less than human. Like cattle, but you’re not so worthwhile. It’s not like you’d make much money if I sold you for meat.

How does nature let runts like you exist? What is your use? You’re a nobody, Mari. You’re vermin, a dirty, flea-infested, disease-ridden tramp.

I’m going to change all that Mari . . . right now . . . I’m going to change everything for you. How would you like to be special, Mari?

I’ve waited so long, you see . . . waited and waited to start my collection. I think you’re the perfect test, Mari. A worthless guinea pig.

Yes, I’ll collect you, Mari . . . sweet, disgusting, Mari. Oh what fun we’ll have.
 

MARI SAID HER thank yous to Mrs. O’Reilly and headed out into the corn field. She hadn’t expected anyone in this hole to even look at her for a job but her mother had told her Mrs. O’Reilly wasn’t like the others in this small town.

She didn’t care that Mari wasn’t from here and she didn’t care that Mari was from the gypsy train that had pulled into town for the summer.

Mari wasn’t sure why here. The place was dead, boring. Who would vacation here? Besides the locals were all red-neck idiots who hated them.

At least she could get some money together this summer. Strawberry picking sounded like hard work but she didn’t mind that at all, she loved the feel of dirt in her fingers, a connection to the earth.

She’d gotten it from her grandmother, the mysterious woman who everyone turned to. The woman who she half wished her mother would be more like. It sounded harsh in her own mind but Grandma was steady, calm, her wise nature soothing.

Mari’s mother was anything but those things. She dragged them from town to town, sometimes for months away from the train, as if she was running from something, as if they were being chased by a nightmare.

Mari had asked why once in a fit of frustration and the only thing her mother could tell her was “nine-eight-four.” She didn’t even know what it meant. They were running from a number.

Mari had demanded this year that there would be no more running. She was going to have one summer in a single place and that was final.

Something cracked behind her and she turned. A bar smashed into her temple. The ground hard. The blood tasted metallic as it dribbled into her mouth.

She reached out to crawl. A rope jolted her neck, she scrabbled for it, clawed at it, ripped her skin to pull free.

Air, she needed air, breathe!

The rope loosened. Not by much. She gasped, spluttered.

A rope rubbed roughly at her ankles and the sound of a machine roared into life.