“I am all in a sea of wonders. I doubt; I fear; I think strange things, which I dare not confess to my own soul.” ― Bram Stoker, Dracula
Words help to explain understanding, yet in their limitation they deny perception to the those who travel beyond explanation. That night the children refused to surrender to sleep. Nathan and Kyle jeered their cousin from Nathan’s room as Whitney laid in the bed in the guest room. She was annoyed by the boys’ bullying while equally enchanted by their attention. She did not know whether to cry hysterically from the ageless insults to her gender or giggle from the affectionate attention from the novice clowns. Eventually the chatter subsided, during those moments the house became silent. Only time understood which child fell to sleep first. Their dreams took hold. A cocoon of remarkable thoughts replaced their conversation.
During the late evening darkness Whitney instinctively sprang up trying to determine the sound that had interrupted her sleep. She heard the footsteps race down the carpeted stairs. Immediately she went to the doorway of Nathan’s room. Kyle’s makeshift bed was empty. Whitney went to the side of Nathan’s bed and momentarily observed his peaceful pale face. She shook his shoulder until her cousin was awake.
“Kyle just went downstairs,” Whitney said in a loud whisper. In a moment of disorientation Nathan considered the possible motivation for Kyle’s impulsively furtive rise from his bed. Nathan understood from surveying the room and the limited light that omitted from the skylight that the time was somewhere close to when night grows bold prior to its retreat before the brink of dawn. The boys had a complicated bond forged from the union of family and evolution. Nathan went over to his cousin’s bedding, attempting to conceal that he was patting his hand over the sheets. He observed that they were dry. “I said that he went downstairs, let’s go find him,” Whitney explained not comprehending Nathan’s investigation. She spotted a small flashlight on Nathan’s bookcase next to the door. Whitney placed the flashlight in the tiny front pocket of her pajama bottoms. She had already slipped into her wool-lined slippers. The two children quietly went by the father’s room and gingerly descended the stairway making certain not to place their weight on the railing. They went to the kitchen where the light above the sink gave away the details of the kitchen. The doorway to the deck was slightly ajar. Nathan and Whitney approached the door. Nathan slipped on his sandals that were next to the door. The cool evening air greeted Whitney’s bare shoulders. She returned to the kitchen and grabbed her red cardigan that had been draped over the chair where she had eaten her dinner. She put the cardigan on as she made her way through the doorway onto the deck.
The children stood facing the edge of the trees in the backyard as they listened to the rhythmical stretching of the springs in the darkness. Kyle had been so excited throughout the day by Nathan’s new trampoline. The apparatus was much bigger than his own and being new, Kyle had staked his claim over it by recklessly jumping and tumbling on the black canvas that received him then launched him higher and higher into the air. His excitement overcame his sleep. His preoccupation gave way to impulsivity. The image of enjoying the solitary freedom that the trampoline provided him rose higher than the evening shadows. Whitney was prepared to scold him from the railing of the deck. She and Nathan suddenly observed a rapidly approaching ominous cloud in the moonlight. Before either child could react, the cloud accelerated and swooped down over Kyle. The darkened cloud clutched Kyle as he leapt into the air, instantly lifting him. Whitney showed the beam of the small flashlight on the object. Nathan and Whitney were shocked by the unmistaken image. The cloud was a multitude of moving winged creatures of enormous dimension, and in the center of their shanghai was their apparent leader dwarfing his troop in size. The children were further astonished as the moonlight revealed a glistening golden pendant attached to a chain worn around the neck of the leader
Zeborg, the dark-shaped commander of the calamity of bats, extended his claws and bared his fine sharpened teeth. His crimson mouth was prominent even in the surrounding darkness. In a flash Kyle was lifted above the trees like some eerie winged beast of the night. He yelled once. His screech mimicking the cry of a nocturnal animal who had been stocked by an unsuspected prey. As he struggled to kick and fight his captives, Kyle realized the height to which he was carried to. He ceased his resistance when he was overcome by a paralyzing sting from the bite of Zeborg.
The moment of Kyle’s astonishing abduction required a reflexive reaction from the children who watched in horror from the deck. As Kyle ascended into the night sky by the lurid cloud of bats Nathan descended one step of the deck and hastily leapt the final three where he fell on the cool ground. His momentum carried him forward. Springing to his feet as he raced to the edge of the woods. His decision denied Whitney her sensible internal voice. She followed Nathan loyally if not reluctantly. When he reached the trampoline Nathan hesitated momentarily, looking back. He was relieved to see that Whitney had followed him. The children paused only to exchange an equally desperate and terrified confirmation. Nathan led Whitney into the darkened woods
The moonlight provided a spotlight to follow the path of the frenzied cloud and its limp captive. The stream from Whitney’s flashlight wildly bounced around as she navigated the uneven terrain. Still the light provided the children with an indication where obstacles existed. The image of Kyle’s still body being lifted further and further away appeared like a scarecrow that had been stolen away by mocking crows. The flight of the cloud of bats was deliberate yet sporadic as they climbed and dipped and climbed and plunged again from the wait of their captive. The children desperately raced to keep pace with the helter-skelter cloud. They were whipped by the springing bows of the firs and scratched by the branches of the trees. Whitney caught a recoiling branch in her face producing tears that fell onto her cheeks. Tears released from her bested spirit. The woods were familiar to Nathan. He had often traveled them with his dad and Sadie, the family dog, into the solitude of its adventurous lure. Nathan’s father entertained his son with contrived stories of the forest. The father’s boundless imagination, in the secret of the surrounding trees, would often betray his responsibility. He would indulge Nathan with entertaining, yet frightful tales of children who braved the woods only to be chased by hungry wolves, angry witches, and a headless child. Now as he pursued his cousin floating in the evening sky Nathan noted as he and Whitney passed Sadie’s Trail and clamored up Bullet Hill that his ordeal was more terrifying than his father’s tales. At that point the bats angled deeper into the forest. The children ran by the dark waters of Witch’s Pond and turned upon Rabbit Hill. Nathan stopped instantly in his tracks as the bats suddenly disappeared into the side of the hill. His maddening chase confronted its destination. The bats descended into the rocky heights of Indian Ridge, a path that climbed upward along a narrow hill that, on one side, was bordered by erect fir trees that whispered in the evening silence of the forbidding darkness extending beyond the shadows of the trees.
Nathan was swept by a memory as he reluctantly surveyed the other side of the spine of the hill where trees were replaced by dark jagged rocks of granite deposited by a retreating glacier from an age long forgotten. The boy once reached this point in his journey with his father, unable to maintain his study of the darkened slope, his curiosity yielded to his forbidding fear. He was not ready at the apex of that childhood wonder to look beyond the narrow scope of apprehension. At that moment he clung to his father’s hand, who returned a knowing smile. He lifted his son to his shoulders as he whistled a familiar securing tune.
Nathan and Whitney had arrived at the edge of the phantom path without his father’s guidance and Nathan knew exactly which cave in the side of the chiseled rock bank of the fold the calamity of bats had arrived at.
On a winter’s walk with his father and Sadie, Nathan had observed in the snow, soiled tracks of an animal.
“Dad, what animal would make those tracks that disappear in the side of the hill?”
Observing the tracks from the security of the ridge, Nathan’s father replied, “Out here you likely would find a fox or a family of coyotes, but those tracks appear bigger.”
“Is it a bear?”
“No, I do not believe that black bears live in this area and their prints would be deeper and wider as well.”
“Are these the wolves that you told me about in the story?” Before his father could reply Sadie came running up the ridge, the hair on her neck was raised and her tail dipped close behind her hind legs. She anxiously ran to Nathan’s father, her eyes mirrored fear. “What’s wrong old girl?” the father inquired searching the dog’s body for an injury while casting a concerned glance toward the cave that the dog had returned from.
“Is she okay?”
“Yes, she probably caught her paw in the rocks or stepped on a jagged edge, come on little buddy, we better get home now.” Nathan’s father’s reply failed to conceal his concern. He held his son’s hand and returned down the ridge throwing more than one look toward the opening on the side of the ridge. Nathan hurried keep pace with his father’s long strides. Throughout their journey home father nor son spoke of what they both observed, a splattering of crimson in the patches of undisturbed snow that had not been soiled by the tracks of the unknown predator.
Now Nathan and Whitney stood at the opening of the same spot that Sadie had run from. Nathan recalled the blood-stained image for the first time since that winter’s walk. He realized that he could no longer retreat from the threatening memory. He might have even ushered Whitney to return the way that they had come if their heavy breathing had not been interrupted by whimpering. The children listened in silence to their cousin’s agonized cry. “He’s alive,” Whitney whispered.
Nathan’s anxiety was boldly displayed,“Of course, he is alive. Be quiet!”
“What are we going to do, we can’t just crawl in there among all those bats and rescue him? They’ll get us too!”
“Whitney, he’s all alone.”
“He shouldn’t have gone out on the trampoline at night,” she protested. Nathan looked into her dark eyes. Her irises were magnified by the darkness. Running back to get his father was unreasonable Nathan concluded as Kyle was in imminent danger. Nathan looked at Whitney again for an solution. Her face was soiled from the frantic journey. He knew he had to enter the bat’s lair if Kyle was to be rescued. Nathan’s attention returned to Whitney. “Why do you keep looking at me?” she whispered. Nathan hastily covered his face and then his entire body with the damp soil at the mouth of the cave. “What are you doing?” Whitney inquired.
“You are going to wait out here while I crawl on the floor of the cave to get Kyle, they won’t see me with my body covered with this mud.” Whitney understood that this plan desperate and the only plan the children had. She began covering herself in the same mud-bath. “I told you to wait out here.”
“Well, I am older than you and I won’t stay out here by myself. We must move very slowly. We can’t make a sound.” Fueled by the urgency of their task Whitney entered the darkness of the cave with Nathan following.