Chapter 11
I nodded and grabbed my bag, following him out of the hotel room and down to the waiting taxi. The flight was long and if I hadn’t brought the book it would have been even longer since the man wasn’t very talkative. I still hadn’t bothered to ask his name; keeping him nameless meant that I could still think this wasn’t real, that I was still imagining everything.
Since we left New York at noon and traveled backward in time, we arrived in Hawaii at three, which evidently left more than enough time for us to make our way to a place called Spitting Cave with a stop-off for supplies.
We were at your standard camping and general supply store and I was trying to think of anything other than dying. Nervous, I asked him, “So, what exactly do we take on a trip through the Barrier? What exactly is the Barrier? And once we make it through, what then?”
The man was impatient, walking through the store, pulling things off shelves and putting them in his shopping cart. “Think of it like a hiking trip—you take water, nonperishable food, sleeping bags, things like that.” He hesitated before continuing; he studied me and then shook his head and went back to picking out food to bring. “The Barrier is a wall that was created a long time ago around a large continent in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. It’s a barrier to hide magic, made of magic. If we make it through, then I’ll help you find a job and start a new life.”
“You keep saying if we make it through and if we survive. If it’s just a wall then what’s the big deal?”
“The Barrier is magical; it’s not a physical wall. It’s magic set up to keep people from trespassing. So we’ll have to make our way through layers of spells that were created to do anything possible to stop us from succeeding. We will be attacked in every way imaginable: physically, psychologically, emotionally. It will try to destroy us on every level of our existence.”
I paused in the middle of an aisle of MRE’s and cured trail bologna, for the first time getting a glimmer of what I was about to do. “That sounds horrible. How is that better than a warlock?” I was starting to get hysterical and might have said “warlock” a bit too loud, because men farther down the aisle gave me a weird look. I didn’t care, though, because I was coming to the realization that I might really die. Before it was almost a game, now I was picking out a sleeping bag for a trip I might not survive. All the things I’d been trying not to think about were flooding through my head.
He walked over to where I was standing and stood over me, blocking me from view. “Believe me when I say the Barrier is the lesser of two evils. Julius is a sadistic man with lots of power and he gets off on torture. If he got a hold of you it would be months, maybe even years, before you would be dead, and by that time you would be just a shell of the person you are now.”
This was just getting better and better. He stepped away from me and went back to picking out supplies. I just continued to stand there, my feet frozen again. Stupid things just couldn’t get use to facing death.
We left the store and headed out to Spitting Cave, the taxi dropped us off and we started walking out. “So what are we doing here? Do we go into the cave and get transported there? Is there a doorway or something? What do we do?” I was getting tired of having to force him to give me information. It would be nice for once if he just told me what was going to happen instead of dragging me where he wanted me.
“I didn’t want you here, so I am not dragging you where I want you.”
Crap, I did it again. This was getting ridiculous.
“Yes, it is.”
I sighed and just shut my mouth, which was a good thing since the trail was getting steep and slippery. I could see the ocean spreading out in front of us and then all of a sudden we were at the end. There was nowhere else to go. I looked around, trying to find a cave, but all I saw was the ocean and the occasional spray of water as it splashed up. Then he started climbing down. Down a cliff that led to nothing but crashing waves. The last few times I’d asked questions I didn’t like the answers I got, so I decided not to ask this time.
We stopped about a quarter of the way down on a small ledge and he started making sure his pack was on securely and then reached to make sure mine was too. Still no answer as to what we were going to do. He turned back to the ocean and looked down. “When I say, we’ll need to jump.”
This was originally published in the book Magicae Terra Episode One. The full story is currently available on Amazon.
The image was created using canva.com
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