The Saints of Swallow Hill by Donna Everhart

Author:Donna Everhart [Everhart, Donna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Published: 2021-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 18

Rae Lynn

She wanted to call out for help, only she didn’t have it in her, and if she had, who would hear? She’d overheard the work hands say the box held nothing but sorrow, and all the tears and sweat of the suffering, as well as a bit of each soul who’d fled from it to the Great Beyond. If they did have to go by it, and they certainly had when the crop they were working happened to be beyond it, they’d turned their eyes away, some believing by looking at it, the sorrow it held would jump on to them.

Time no longer made sense. Whether it was light or dark, it all melted into one and the same. She’d gone deep inside herself, where she could escape the sticky, hot, suffocating interior. Once, she’d woke to what she thought was rain. She instinctively moved her head, opened her mouth, and caught a tiny stream of water, cool and sweet, falling through the thin crack, her only eye to the world. She wasn’t sure it was rain, though, because it stopped as quickly as it started. And there was the sun, high in the sky, creating a streaked pattern across the top of her. A miracle had happened, she determined. The water had been a miracle.

Another time, Warren appeared to her, but what a strange place for him to be, near her feet, staring at her from that impossible spot. Where was the rest of him? Was he coming up through the ground? He appeared different, too pale, his hair and eyes too black, and when his arm stretched up, up, and up, his fingers, extra long and narrow, she didn’t want him to touch her, not this Warren of the other side. Cold fingertips brushed her brow, and there was nothing she could do. Was he saying something to her? His words came like a hiss, unintelligible. She didn’t like this Warren. She wanted him to go away, and as she rose from the depths of her delirium, she jolted awake, aware the hissing was her, straining to breathe.

The nightmare Warren gone, she quickly descended to where she was most comfortable now, a serene area of soft dreams where no pain, thirst, or hunger were allowed. There she could take in long, cool drinks of water. She could rest under shade trees. She barely moved, if at all, and the only part of her that did was her heart rate, which grew more erratic and rapid. She was well into her second day and no longer fully conscious. She hovered between the here and there, her mind delivering only one persistent, yet clear message to the rest of her body: I am dying.

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