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Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four

For a few seconds, Sarah just stood there, looking at the cell phone in her hand in silence. Finally, Hillard asked, “What’s that?”

“My cell phone.  Christine had it …”

As Sarah continued to stare at the cell phone, her brain tried to process why it had been laying on the side of the road, when she knew that Christine would have held onto it no matter what. After a moment, Hillard gently took the flashlight from her hand and began searching the ground around where the cell phone had lain. He wasn’t gone long before he returned to her side. He didn’t look happy about what he had found.

“Someone took her, didn’t they?” Sarah asked quietly, a feeling of dread washing over her.

“Looks like it. Those rough types I talked about earlier, I would guess. But I have a feeling that I know where they took her. They wouldn’t really hurt her, not yet. We should be able to get her back.”

“Shouldn’t we call the police?”

That question seemed to give Hillard pause – he looked like he wanted to tell her something but was holding back. After a moment, he looked down at the phone in her hand and asked, “With what?”

Tears welled up in Sarah’s eyes. She should never have let Christine go off on her own. Visions of Christine, clothing torn, blood on her face, began to flash through Sarah’s mind. Her breath roughened and she began to cough again.

Hillard put his arms around her. “It’ll be okay,” he whispered reassuringly, “I’ll help you find her.”
Something about holding Sarah in his arms made Hillard smile, despite the seriousness of the situation. When he had first seen her, she had been so defiant and strong, and now she was full of a gentle vulnerability that it made him want to protect her. That was a new experience for him. Hillard generally tried to keep his distance from other people, whether physical or emotional. He felt like he was connecting with Sarah in a way that he hadn’t connected with anyone in a very long time, and although part of him just wanted to enjoy the feelings that were rushing through him, it was something he couldn’t afford right now, especially with someone like her.

He stepped back. “Come on. We’d best get moving. And I’m going to try to explain some things to you, although I’m not quite sure about the best way to go about it. There are some things happening around here that you’re going to find hard to believe. When I first saw you there, in your car, I thought there might be some way I could ease you into this, but I don’t think that’s possible now.”

Sarah was really confused now. She wasn’t even sure how to respond to what Hillard had said, so she just decided not to.  She turned away from him and started walking down the road again, Hillard falling into step beside her after a moment. Sarah looked over at him, waiting for him to begin to tell her whatever it was he wanted to say, still having no idea how to respond to his strange declaration.

It was awhile before Hillard sighed, ran his fingers through his hair and said, “Okay, this is a lot harder than I thought it would be. I don’t even know where to start.”

He didn’t continue. They walked on in silence for a few minutes, and then he sighed again. “Okay,” he said slowly, “you know the fog you came through the other night?”

“Yes.” Sarah was really curious as to where this was going now.

“Well, let me just give you a hypothetical situation. I want you to suspend all of your preconceptions and just listen to what I have to say with an open mind, okay?”

“Ohh kaaay.” Sarah drew the word out slowly and had to work hard to stop herself from forming a wall of disbelief at the very suggestion of anything that might require her to keep an open mind. Things had been so strange for the past day or so that part of her wanted to close up at the very hint that Hillard might throw any more weirdness her way.

“Just imagine that the fog was a gate,” he started, and now Sarah stopped walking for a moment and just stared at Hillard, searching his handsome face for any sign as to whether he actually believed what he was saying, or if he thought he was being funny. He continued, with the same serious look on his face, ”a gate to another world just like yours, but somehow different. In this world, something happened differently in the past. This world developed in whole other ways from your own.  It‘s as if it were the same world up to a singular point in time where one person made a different decision from that which was made in your world, and at that point the two futures branched off in two different directions.”

Sarah stopped and just looked at him for a minute. “You lost me at the point where you said that the fog was a gate. The rest of it sounds like some great Twilight Zone material though.”

“Well, has anything seemed strange or out of the ordinary to you since you came out of the fog?”

Sarah thought about the road suddenly becoming gravel, without any visible sign of construction. She thought about Gerwin and Elke and their secret looks and lack of technology. Even Hillard himself was strange. To say that things were strange or out of the ordinary was somewhat of an understatement.

“Okay,” she finally admitted, “Yes, some things have been a little . . . odd. But what you’re talking about is impossible. I think, at the most, I must be having some kind of fever hallucination. It’s also possible that you’re some kind of lunatic, and I shouldn’t be so trusting as to let you just lead me off into the dark like this.”

Hillard sighed in frustration. He could see that he wasn’t doing a very good job of explaining things to her. He didn’t want to scare her off completely and have her decide that he wasn’t a safe travelling companion. He decided to just let the matter drop for now and let things take their course.

“Well, fine, either I’m crazy or you’re crazy. We can just leave it at that for now. I can promise you, however, that I won’t let anything happen to you. I promise to keep you safe no matter what. How about we just don’t worry too much about what I’ve been saying and just go and find your sister, okay?”

Sarah was only too happy to drop the bizarre subject and they continued walking down the deserted gravel road. The sun was starting to come up and Sarah could hear an entire symphony of birds beginning to sing in the trees around her. Despite the lovely surroundings, her cold was sapping a lot of her energy and she was feeling pretty exhausted from all of the walking.

Hillard looked over at her and saw how worn-out she looked.

“Do you want to stop for awhile?” he asked, a concerned look in his eyes.

“We need to get to Christine. Or, at the very least, we need to get to a town so we can tell the police what happened.”

Hillard inwardly groaned. Sarah really didn’t seem to understand that things were different now. There was no authority they could go to for help – the authority was the one who had her sister. However, the idea of resting, away from the hot sun, appealed to him.

“Do you have anything useful in these bags?” he asked.

“Just a change of clothes and some toiletries,” she answered, realizing that if they were going to rest for awhile she really didn’t have anything useful with her except for the emergency blanket.

“Well, I have a few things. They should do the job for now.”

They walked off the road into the woods a bit and then walked parallel to the road for a short distance until they found a nice sheltered spot that looked suitable as a rest stop.

“What if there are wild animals?” Sarah asked nervously, looking around her, picturing a bear coming through the woods to kill them both.

“They tend to keep their distance from me,” Hillard replied, with a hint of a smile. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep watch. You just get some rest. You won’t be any help to your sister if you’re really sick.”

Sarah was too tired to do anything but watch as Hillard spread a thick fabric ground cloth on the mossy forest floor. She didn’t have the strength to argue with him. When Hillard finished with the ground cloth, Sarah walked over to it, pulled the emergency blanket out of her bag, put the bag under her head as a pillow, and then lay down and tried to sleep. However, without the exertion of walking, her body temperature quickly dropped, a process that was sped up by the chill seeping up from the ground, passing all too easily through the cloth covering.

Hillard noticedSarah’s discomfort as she tried to wrap the blanket tighter and tighter around herself. Without saying a word, he strolled around the rest area, picking up twigs and small pieces of wood from the ground. Then he pulled some dried moss up and added that to the pile of kindling. He gathered some rocks, dug a shallow impression in the ground with the heel of his boot, and surrounded the hole with the rocks. Then he put the moss in the centre and started laying twigs around it in the shape of a tepee. This process took him all of ten minutes. Finally, he took a stone and his knife out of his bag and struck the stone sharply with the knife. Sparks flew from the knife, landed in the moss and, within minutes, there was a small fire going. Hillard dragged the ground cloth, Sarah and all, closer to the fire and wrapped the ground cloth up over both Sarah and her emergency blanket. Sarah was too tired to say a word.  Then Hillard pulled another blanket out of his bag and covered her with that, too. Within minutes, Sarah was feeling warmer and finally able to sleep.

“But what about you?” Sarah asked sleepily, grateful to have someone take care of her, but feeling slightly guilty as well, thinking that Hillard was probably feeling the cold nearly as much as she had been.

“I’ll just settle myself down over here and keep an eye on you,” Hillard replied, walking over to a tree, sitting on the ground in front of it and reclining against it, as if it were the most comfortable chair in the world. “I like the chill of the autumn.”

Sarah was too tired to argue, so she closed her eyes and gave in to the waves of sleep that were enveloping her. She was soon snoring softly.

Hillard just watched her. The tree he was leaning against was providing enough shade so that the heat of the sun was not bothering him too much. He would prefer to be in a complete shelter but, with Sarah with him, he hadn’t been able to move fast enough the night before to make it to the cottage.

Sarah was an interesting woman. A bit stubborn for his taste, but he liked it in a way. She didn’t just accept what she was told; she seemed to have an intelligent, questioning nature. She would be in for a heck of a shock when she finally accepted her situation. He just hoped that they reached her sister in time. Normally, fog travellers, once taken by Lord Radek, survived for about a month, sometimes even less. He reckoned that he and Sarah should be able to reach the castle in a day or two. He just wasn’t sure how in the world they were going to get in.

Hillard closed his eyes for a bit, confident that the forest creatures would not want to come within a hundred feet of him. He smiled as he dozed.

Read Chapter 6 next Wednesday, November 2nd, 2011 . . .

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