Strange Attractors - Kim Falconer [53]
‘Damn the thieving demon!’ he cursed, but the sound of his voice was drowned out by parrots chattering in the rainforest canopy. It was an empty threat, and he knew it. ‘Stop laughing at me,’ he said, shaking his fist at the rainbow birds.
Everything ridiculed him—the parrots, the heat, the greenery. He felt it in the intensity of the light, the smell of the air and the cackling sounds in his head. Of course they laughed. They had good reason. Everett had got himself lost again, and was doing his best not to let the crazed desperation take over. He wiped his hands on his pants. ‘How could I have let them go?’
He took off his pack and sat on a fallen log, drinking from his waterskin. That was one thing never in short supply: water—clear, clean and abundant. It rained buckets every afternoon and he could fill his canteen, and slake his thirst, in moments during a cloudburst. That’s why everything grew so fast—the trees, the ferns, the birds. He looked over his shoulder at the trail that had taken hours to blaze. It was already closing over, like a wake behind a boat, subsumed into the jungle—a curtain of green heat. He slumped against the tree, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He’d lost the trail and he’d lost his way. He’d lost the thief. It couldn’t get any worse.
Thunder clapped overhead as clouds rolled in. The bright green foliage turned dull, the colour drained from the leaves. The air went thick and still.
‘Perhaps it can get worse.’ He strained to see the sky through the treetops. ‘Coming early, are you?’ He waited for a reply but the storm didn’t answer.
He’d been tracking the thief for two days, falling further and further behind. There was little chance of catching up now, considering he had lost the trail, had no idea where he was or where the demon thief had gone. ‘You think you can take my life from me, but you can’t. I will find you!’ He sank the machete into the ground.
For months, or was it years, Everett had relived the night the babies had vanished, the night they’d been spirited away. His sleep was tortured by the memory, his mind never quite getting past the shock, the guilt, the paranoia. When he awoke, he would run after the phantom. Sometimes he told Regina or the others he had to go back to Sector Six for supplies; other times he said nothing and took off, running away in the night, under a new moon, and not returning for days. When he did come back, he had little recollection of his absence—none that he could discern from his strange dream states—and no better understanding of his own behaviour, though he was haunted with peculiar visions. Haunted and disturbed.
Regina wanted to take him on a vision journey, a ritual that would penetrate the disassociated realms of his mind and bring him back to balance, but he refused. At those times, when she encouraged him, it seemed that she was in league with the thief. He accused her of it, pounding his fists on the table or threatening her with the back of his hand. She denied it, of course, which enraged him further. She remained calm, sitting quietly with her hands folded in her lap, her eyes resting gently on his. He wanted to kill her in those moments. He could never trust her in any case. It was her fault. She was the one who had let the thief in.
No matter how Regina explained it, he knew she was to blame as much as he, but if he killed her the thief may not come back. Then how would he find the children. Everett needed to follow the demon’s trail. The children would be grown now, he realised in his more lucid states. Still, he had to get them at any cost. One of them was different—more different than could be imagined. She was from a distant world perhaps. He’d yet to find out where, or how that could