Quinlan's Secret by Cailyn Lloyd

Author:Cailyn Lloyd [Lloyd, Cailyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Land of Oz LLC
Published: 2020-05-19T22:00:00+00:00

Thirty-Two

Lachlan walked along a country highway, a road lined by tall trees that shrouded the asphalt in a tunnel of green. The trees mostly protected him from the hot sun but he wore an Aussie safari hat to keep the sun off his face where it filtered through. Here and there, patches of prairie grass fought for light. He stopped occasionally, closing his eyes, raising his head as if smelling the warm Wisconsin air. The air was fresh, redolent with smells of rich soil and decaying plant life. The cycle of life at work, renewing the forest and the ecosystem, but he wasn’t here to commune with nature.

He was following a dip in the terrain that suggested a rift in the limestone bedrock beneath, walking to the north over the Niagara Escarpment. Pursuing a presence that once inhabited an old Tudor house, killed his friend, and had migrated in this direction, using cracks and fissures in the rock to facilitate its travels.

On the surface, the task sounded like a fool’s errand. The hint of the darkness beneath was ephemeral at best. At times, he worried that he imagined its presence. He was very perceptive; perhaps only Kenric had been more perceptive. That didn’t automatically make him a bloodhound for all things in the spirit world. As perceptive as Kenric was, it hadn’t saved him, a fact that disturbed Lachlan deeply. What had Kenric missed?

Lachlan averaged three to four miles a day. Meandering, he often backtracked if he felt he’d lost the trail. As much as he disdained technology—a disdain arising from his standing as a crusty old codger—he found his mobile phone indispensable now. It provided updated weather information and maps as he followed the trail. An app recorded every step so he had a complete log of his journey.

Something had changed in the last mile. He stopped and closed his eyes. Perhaps imagined, perhaps real, the vibrations seemed a little stronger, clearer. He looked at his phone. The nearest town, Miller’s Crossing, was five miles up the road. He decided to quit for the day, marking the location in his app, and walking the three miles back to his car in under an hour. Tomorrow, he would park this side of Miller’s Crossing and continue the search.

As he drove back to Milwaukee, Lachlan realized he still had no clear understanding of this thing he was pursuing, the darkness. It felt like a shadow. Could one chase a shadow? Further, he had no plan at the ready once he found it. He hoped the encounter with Kenric had crippled it sufficiently to tilt the coming inevitable battle in his favor, though it wasn’t something he could know with any certainty or any quantitative way.

To some degree, one needed to improvise in these situations. A plan wasn’t always possible. In life, there were known unknowns which he could plan for, at least loosely. But the unknown unknowns? By definition, they would remain invisible until they weren’t. It would be those unknowns that could be his undoing and he remained acutely aware of it.

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