Trail Marked by Heather Hambel Curley & Rebecca Hamilton

Author:Heather Hambel Curley & Rebecca Hamilton [Curley, Heather Hambel & Hamilton, Rebecca]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Evershade Publishing

Chapter 16

The hike up Blood Mountain was hard. The climb down Blood Mountain, on the other hand, was brutal to the point I was scared to move: wide gaps between rocks required hopping from spot to spot, but the landing was slippery. It would be all too easy to just shoot across the rock and fling off the side of the mountain.

And with the constant feeling of being followed, we were moving at a far faster pace than was probably safe.

“Well, we’ve fooled around long enough,” Pixel announced, gracefully extending his leg across one rock face to the other, like a gangly, sarcastic gazelle. “Explain this Vexing. Or do you want us to guess, maybe like a game of charades? Strip charades, yes, Chaos goes first.”

Chaos huffed, rubbing his hand across his eyes to blot away the sweat. “Hold still, Pix, so I can figure out which one of you to hit.”

“Oh, fabulous, double vision. That’ll make getting down the trail all that much easier.”

Jase reached his hands up to steady me as I crawled down a steep, angled rock. “It’s not something you can pinpoint. It just is, it always has been: cultures all around the globe mention it in one form or another. In Japan, they call it the kappa. It supposedly kidnaps children and drowns people. The Romans said Romulus and Remus both disappeared after they were surrounded by mysterious fog. In America, it’s the lost colony of Roanoke, and the British have a lot, namely, the lost crew of the Marie Celeste.”

“People don’t just disappear,” Star said. “There’s a rational explanation for everything, if you look hard enough.”

Jase shrugged. “Sometimes. But not always.”

“Can you just quit with this cryptic shit?” Star stopped on top of a flatter rock and turned back to look at us. “Get on with it.”

“Hold onto my hands, and I’ll lower you down.” Jase held onto me and waited until my feet were planted firmly. “Let me put it this way: in the past 100 years, over 1100 people have disappeared from national parks. And that’s just here in the United States alone: that’s 1100 people who just vanished. Gone.”

Rootbeer said, “I mean, it happens. But that’s over the course of 100 years; if you do the math, that’s eleven people a year. And how many national parks are there?”

“Fine.” Jase fell into step behind me, noticeably close as if he was trying to make sure I didn’t trip…or maybe disappear, considering our conversation topic. “In the late 1940s, a Morse code message was received from a Dutch ship near Sumatra. It said, ‘All Officers, including the Captain, are dead. Lying in chartroom and bridge. Possibly whole crew dead. … I die.’ When the American ships got there, they found the entire crew dead, in various expressions and positions of terror, and even the dog was dead with its teeth bared in a snarl. There was no evidence of physical harm.”

“Okay, but—”

“Owen Parfitt in the 1760s. He was unable to walk because of disease, so he lived with his sister.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.