I am afraid.
Elias sat down beside him. The sun was setting over the hayfield, turning the grass to gold. A normal sun. A normal field.
At the bottom of the valley, beside the black river, stood a cabin. Not old—ancient. The logs had been hewn with an axe, not a saw. Moss grew thick on the roof. One window was broken. The door hung open.
Elias made a choice.
But that was a question for another summer.
“You found it,” she said. It wasn’t a question.
Elias laughed. “That’s impossible.” -C- 2008 mcgraw-hill ryerson limited
“Where did the biologist find it?” Elias asked.
And he thought of the thing that wore his mother’s face, screaming as the valley collapsed. He wondered if it had been trapped there for centuries, wearing the faces of a thousand lost people. He wondered if throwing the compass away had freed it—or simply sent it somewhere else.
The last entry was a single line, scrawled so violently the pencil tore the page: I am afraid
He stepped inside.
She smiled, and her smile was perfect, and that was the problem—it was too perfect. No crow’s feet. No chapped lips from the arctic wind. She hadn’t aged a day in thirteen years.
He looked at the open journal. At the words It looks like my mother. At the date: 1932. A normal sun
He decided to go.
The valley shuddered. The sky cracked. And then, like a dream ending, the valley folded in on itself—the steep walls collapsing, the black river vanishing, the cabin crumbling into dust.