The Unexplained (Beginning)

The Unexplained (Beginning)

BEGINNING-

“Stop it!” I yelped when he caught my hand and spun me around to face him. “Stop it! Let me go!” His grip tightened, and he lifted my fist in the air.

“You can’t just run away from everything!” he bellowed back. “You’re the curious one! If you’re going to be curious, you have to face the consequences for it! Did you think I wouldn’t see or smell you there?”

“I didn’t even know what you were! How would I know that you’d know I was there?” I screamed, managing to pull away from him. I turned to run again, figuring he wouldn’t keep up the pursuit for a second round.

“Saph!” he called, catching the hood of my cloak this time. I choked and desperately fumbled for the bow that held the cloak on my shoulders. I hadn’t double-knotted it today; thank goodness. “You’re not going to run away this time! You may be able to get out of spying on the Headmaster’s conferences, but this is something I can’t let you run away from!”

I pulled the bow loose and left him with my indigo cloak, in search of a place where I could hide. If he could smell me out like he said he could, I was in trouble. What did he plan to do with me if he wouldn’t let me run away? I knew what he was, but it’s not like anyone I told would believe me. He sighed and grumbled, and his footsteps were behind me again.

“Sapphire! Wait! Maybe I took the wrong approach on this, just wait up! I won’t hurt you, if you’re thinking that!” Lance wailed. “Saph!”

I laughed, winded. “Sure you won’t! That’s what they always say when someone’s going to die!” He groaned, and we kept up the chase. Ahead, I was lucky enough to see that a door was left open, and a woman I knew well was outside, sweeping. “Claire!” I hollered to her. She looked up, surprised. “Claire, help me!”

I rushed through the door and up the stairs of her cottage, happy to know that she had delayed Lance at the door. I glanced back when I reached the top of the staircase and smiled; Claire repeatedly whacked Lance with her broom, and he cowered beneath it, begging her to stop, telling her he didn’t mean any harm. She wouldn’t hear it; that was just like Claire, since she acted as my mother.

I fluffed my skirt and sniffed, “Serves you right!” At that moment, Claire’s husband passed behind me, and took in the scene downstairs.

“She gets downright nasty with that broom,” he remarked, amused. “What’d you do this time, Saph? Spying on the Headmaster again? That boy is a prefect, isn’t he?”

“I didn’t do anything,” I murmured, “Lance is just being mean for no reason.”

“You know what you did, Saph!” Lance roared from the porch. I flinched at his tone.

“Don’t you say a word to my Sapphy!” Claire scolded him. “If you want to cause someone trouble in this town, you can answer to me!”

“Enough!” Lance growled, waving his hand on the ground. Shadows came from nowhere and busied Claire, scaring her into dropping the broom. He pushed past her and made directly for me.

“Excuse me, Finnegan!” I yelled hurriedly, navigating my way around him into the second story hallway. I ran to the back room where the biggest window was, thinking that, if anybody, Finnegan could delay Lance. He was a burly man who did lifting work every day; a logger. No one in town challenged that man, or messed with his wife.

I only heard a loud, short scuffle before there were footsteps after me again, but I was already at the windowsill, windowpanes flung wide open, curtains back and out of the way. I’d grabbed a towel, and positioned it around the strong clothesline draped over to the next rooftop, which was lower. This would work if I could slide right.

Bravely, I jumped, and right after, Lance’s hands hit the sill. He cursed. I imagined he would find a way to continue pursuit, and so I only had a little time. I hit the edge of the roof roughly and let go of the towel. Luckily, I managed to catch a rung of the ladder the owners of the place used to clean the makeshift rain gutters, and climbed back up to the roof. I knew well how to roof hop, and Lance was no match when I fell into my element.

I was too concerned about escaping to put a map of the rooftops into my head, and set off in one direction without caring where it would take me. I tied the end of my skirt in a knot to keep it from bothering me and jumped the short distance from one roof to another alone. I could lose Lance in this enormous town and escape him at the border, I thought, until I suddenly remembered I had gone in the wrong direction. I gasped and turned around, to find that I hadn’t been roof hopping alone. Lance was a decent distance away, but hot on my tail, shadows rising from each side of him. And he was angry. If I went the right direction and tried to dodge him, I would fail, so running across the borderline was out of the question. What else could I do?

The way I was heading, I would collide with the narrow river in the center of town. They constantly used it to ship goods by boat; more than likely, I would get sucked into a propeller or whisked away by the current. It was windy today, and the current would be vicious. But I had no choice.

Hesitating would only end in Lance catching me, so I started to run the way I had been going again, hopping my way to the river. I came to a halt on a rooftop overlooking the river, making my choice. There was a small gap between boats I could jump into, and it wouldn’t stay that way for long. Boats were always on the move.

Lance was close behind me now; I had stopped too long. “Sapphire, don’t you dare! You’ll drown! I know you can’t swim!” he panted.

No, I couldn’t swim. But I could flail and hope that got me somewhere. So I readied my stance, sprung, and plunged.

“No!” he gasped out from the spot where I had been. I hit the water hard and struggled to pull my way to the surface for air. The current was strong, and a small body like I had moved increasingly faster than any boats there. It was a tight squeeze around them, between the side of the boat and the marble curb at the edge of the river, but I fit, and eventually made my way to the surface for a quick breath of air. Water rushed into my mouth after I breathed and I choked on it, spitting it out in hopes that I would catch some air again. I couldn’t get any through the coughing I had to do to get the water out, and my energy ran dry quickly as I flailed in order to stay on the surface. Around me, I heard people panicking.

“Is she crazy?!”

“Somebody help her!”

“Throw her something that floats! She’ll drown!”

At the last moment, someone from a boat tossed a plastic orange buoy they cut from a fish net into the water, and it floated down with me. I reached for it and held onto it for dear life, riding the rough current downtown.

“Can someone grab her?” people shouted from the city streets.

“Someone catch her!”

“Throw her something! A rope!”

Many ropes were thrown in, but I lost sight of them under the water. I caught one eventually, but the buoy slipped out from under me when I did, and I sank beneath the current like an iron anchor. I still held the rope tightly, though the shock of being dropped in the water again and quickly drowning stunned me. My hands knew what to do when my life depended on it. They pulled the rope around my waist and tied the best knot they could. Very soon after, the rope went taut, and I came up to the surface of the water again.

“I’ve got her!”

“Pull her in! Everyone, help us!” I’m not that heavy, I thought absently.

“Good work, man!”

With everyone in town working at the rope, I came up over the curb in no time. I pulled myself to the edge, exhausted and, above all, freezing. I cursed Lance in my head for causing me so much trouble, and I was sure that wasn’t the end of it, either.

Dozens of people rushed to my side and made a commotion, but only one knelt by me, wrapped a dry towel around my shoulders, and untied the rope from my waist. I held it together at my breast, and thanked the man whom, I assumed, had thrown the rope in the first place.

“Are you all right?” he asked, concerned. I nodded. The strong man smiled. In appearance, he reminded me of Finnegan. A logger-type, or someone who did heavy lifting as their day’s work. People applauded around us, congratulating the save. I was grateful for them; if it weren’t for their attempts, I would have drowned in my escape. People on my side of town weren’t like that; they would have watched me drown without so much as an ‘oh well’. I had landed myself on the other side of the river, a place where I’d not yet been. You could cross the bridge ahead to get here, but it was dangerous and hard with all the boats going through. Besides, I was caught up in the University where I boarded. They were strict there, and declared you ‘dropped out’ if you crossed the river. I was there on special terms, merely because I needed a place to stay, and my mother had told her friend, the Headmaster, to keep me there before she died.

The Headmaster wasn’t so generous to his companions. He was close to my mother, closer even when my father’s boat sank in the ocean on one of his travels. That didn’t mean, however, that he would respect her dying wish without something in return, so I could only stay by attending school there and achieving high grades. If I crossed the river and he discovered it, I would be booted. Lance would rat me out like he usually did as a prefect there; that or he would let me run. But it wasn’t like it mattered now.

I saw something I shouldn’t have. Lance wasn’t going to let me get away with it. He didn’t care that I didn’t understand, and so I ran, frightened. Now, he would return to the Headmaster and tell him what I had seen between the two of them. It wouldn’t be a matter of boarding anymore; if I was seen on that side of the river again, I would be seized, and who knows what would happen after.

Perhaps Lance would even cross the river himself if given the Headmaster’s permission, search me out, and bring me back. I sincerely hoped not. I wished for him to leave it at the riverside with all my heart.

“You must be cold,” the strong man stated, snapping me out of my memories and fears. He smiled kindly, and I saw no flaw in that. “Come on home with me; my wife will take care of you. Oh, I almost forgot! Here I go, talking on, and we’ve not even exchanged names! I’m Taffut; you can call me Taffy if you wish. And you?”

I grinned back, and he helped me to my feet. “Sapphire. You can call me Saph.”

“Well, then, Saph,” he beamed, “let’s get you home and into some dry clothes. How about that?”

I nodded again. “Thank you.” He parted the crowd easily, and we walked up the cobblestone streets, past cottages like I’d not seen before. They looked so jolly; unlike any buildings I was used to. Maybe I was just overcome by the marvels of a place new to me, and the cottages were the same as the ones I knew. I wasn’t sure.

He guided me to an average sized cottage and took me inside, calling to his wife. I saw her before he did, in the cozy little kitchen to the side. She put down the dishes she’d been holding and hurried over.

“You’re home early?” she questioned, and then she saw me. She was full and not too tall, which gave her a homely appeal to me. Her hair was as red as fire, and sat in short waves atop her plump, happy face. “Who’s this?”

“I saved the little thing from the river,” Taffy answered. “She’ll need some dry clothes. I think she’s from the other side of the river, so she might need somewhere to bunk tonight. Can we do that?”

“Oh, of course we can!” the woman bubbled, taking me by the hand. Her instant kindness was unfamiliar to me. “Come along, dear—oh, you poor thing—what’s your name?”

“Sapphire,” I answered her, following her through the house and up the tight stairs. They creaked as we went up them, making me think of the ones in my old house before my mother died.

“That’s a pretty name, and so unique,” she complimented. “Mine is Delba.”

She took me into a sunlit room and quickly dug through some clothes of hers that could fit me decently. “You’re so tiny,” she mumbled to herself. “Hmm…”

In a few minutes, she pulled out a slender dress that looked as if it would fit me well. “Ah! Here we go! I wore this when I was much younger. It should fit you fine.”

She gave it to me, along with a towel and some dry undergarments that she also wore when she was younger, and let me change. The sleeves were a little loose, and just a little too long, but it made for nice, dry, temporary clothing. I handed her my wet clothes, and she hung them on the clothesline outside the window. She then took me back downstairs and sat me down in a chair around the dining room table.

“I’ll fix you some hot tea to warm you up on the inside, how’s that? And you can use the attic room if you’d like, for now. There’s a bed up there. I bet your parents will be worried sick…” She went back to the kitchen, and Taffy wandered in from outside.

“They’ve let me off work for the rest of the day,” he declared before sitting down at the table.

“That’s wonderful,” Delba exclaimed. “I’ll make you some tea.”

He turned his attention to me. “Not to worry; we’ll try to get you back over the river as soon as tomorrow. I can only imagine what your parents will be thinking when you don’t return home tonight…geez…but the boat traffic is just too heavy. It’s too dangerous.”

“I don’t have any,” I corrected him.

He made a shocked face, and Delba dropped a pan she had been moving to make room for the tea kettle. They both said the same thing at the same time, making me feel a little intimidated.

“None?!”