The Snare

The Snare

Astrid’s leg began to jounce up and down rapidly as the need became more desperate for her to empty her bladder.  “Please find a place soon,” she pleaded.  “I really gotta pee!”  Jordan glanced at her just long enough to let her see him roll his eyes.  The smirk that played across his lips was mischievous and sexy and if she hadn’t been so uncomfortably bloated at the moment, it would have melted her.  [GAS – Exit 649] the sign read as they passed on by at 75 miles per hour.  “There!  The next exit!” she pointed.  She closed her eyes and tipped her head back, breathing a sigh of relief, her leg still jittering.  By the time they had driven the three miles to Exit 649 and started down the off-ramp, she was worrying that when she stood to get out of the car, gravity would overwhelm her and she would end up wetting herself in the parking lot.  She steeled herself, doubled her efforts (“mind over matter” she repeated to herself like a mantra), and shoved the car door open.  She walked briskly to the side of the building where the blue girl wearing a blue dress stood.  Fighting against her body’s realization that she was almost there, she pulled the broken-down gas station’s bathroom door handle, praying that it would be unlocked.  It was.

Fully relieved, both physically and mentally, she emerged from the dingy little room to find that Jordan was no longer in the car.  Shading her eyes from the mid-morning Texas sun, she scanned the landscape.  Then she saw him, perusing the front porch of a tiny antique shop next door.  She hadn’t even noticed it when they pulled up.  “Little Big Bear Antiques and Collectibles” looked as unassuming as its name sounded.  Just the type of treasure trove she liked to discover on road trips.  She hurried over to see what kind of interesting junk and needful things they had to offer.  The building itself looked like an old General Store.  Its white-washed wooden clapboard face was shaded by a covered porch that ran the length of the storefront.  Metal buckets and washboards, mismatched farmhouse chairs, and other odds and ends littered much of the porch.  Jordan had picked through the stuff outside and when he saw Astrid was back, he asked if she wanted to go in and look around.  He knew she loved to poke around this kind of place. 

Opening the door to pass inside, a miniature cowbell hung on a piece of string over the doorframe made a flat metallic tinkle.  As the two crossed the threshold, a short fat middle-aged lady standing behind the counter with her back to the door half-turned and greeted them with a tip of her big floppy hat and an enthusiastic “Welcome! Please look around.  And take your time!  We’re sure to have somethin’ y’all just can’t live without!”  Astrid and Jordan were immediately drawn in - Jordan, by the military memorabilia to the right, and Astrid, by the vintage clothing and jewelry to the left.  Jordan ran his fingers over the rough canvas field packs with their faded black stenciling, wondering where they might have traveled during their years in active duty.  He admired a pair of WWII paratrooper boots.  And then his gaze fell upon the jackpot.  It was a coveted (at least by him) M1 Carbine with a folding stock, propped casually among a scattering of wooden handguards, ammo magazines, and bayonet scabbards.  Ammunition cans from different eras lined the wall.  Jordan was in heaven.  He picked up the rifle with extreme reverence and inspected its weathered surfaces with great care and respect.  He brought it up as if to fire.  It fit nicely into the pocket of his shoulder, felt like it was made for him in fact.  He had a brief moment of dizziness and quickly set the weapon back where he had found it so that he could steady himself.  The spell had vanished though and there was no need.  He took one more longing glance at the gun but, knowing he couldn’t afford to buy it, moved on to some other interesting finds that might be more affordable. 

There were racks of jackets and pants and display cases of hats, belts, and helmets.  Boxes upon boxes of patches and medals and rank insignias crowded shelves that lined every wall.  Old photographs were strewn here and there across every surface.  Astrid found him as he was making his way through the vintage military uniforms.  There were dress uniforms and field uniforms.  Combat gear and accessories for in garrison.  Astrid loved all things vintage and they spent some time in this overlap of their interests enjoying the fashion and the history together. 

Music from the 1940s drifted in from some distant place and it seemed to echo through the store as though it were being piped through metal ductwork.  The acoustics of the shop were strange; even their voices sounded hollow and tinny when they spoke.  Jordan thought of the flat ‘tink’ of the cowbell when they had come through the front door.  The realization that something wasn’t right about this place was just beginning to bloom when the floor beneath his feet became tenuous, like standing on a thick layer of Jell-O, and he felt the vertigo return stronger this time with a wave of heat and nausea.  He tried not to panic as, reeling, he noticed that there were no windows in this less-than-tiny shop.  The walls lined with shelves full of boxes of trinkets and war relics were bowing in toward him and somehow stretched now as far as he could see.  He couldn’t believe they had been inside long enough to have gotten so deep into the belly of this beast.  From where he and Astrid now stood, the door they had come through maybe thirty minutes before was so far away that it looked like a tiny speck on the horizon.  The world swam out of focus and he feared he would faint and send some priceless object to shatter on the floor into a million pieces.  He grabbed for something to steady himself.  His vision began to clear, though everything still seemed a bit hazy and he decided his eyes were not to be trusted, maybe his mind too.  He looked down and realized he was digging through a box of folded maps.  The box must have been what he had used to keep from falling over but he didn’t really remember.  In one hand, he held a map titled “US Territories of The North and The South – 1861”.  In the other hand, he held a compass.  He didn’t recall picking up either of these and wondered for a second if this might be a dream.  It most definitely felt dream-like.  All of his senses told him that things here were not as they normally are when one is in the waking world of reality.  Then something touched his arm and made him jump nearly out of his skin.  It was Astrid.  Sweet Astrid!  How had he forgotten she was somewhere among these treasures?  “Jordan,” she squeaked, “I don’t feel very good.  Can we go?”  Her hand tightened on his arm, whether to steady herself physically or mentally he wasn’t sure.  Somehow he knew if they didn’t go now they would never get out.  They would become pieces of antiquity themselves, just two more lost treasures among the millions already trapped here.  Jordan grabbed Astrid’s wrist and started toward the door.  It was so far away and Jordan wondered once more if he was dreaming as the floor became spongy again and the aisle they hurried down didn’t seem to get them any closer to the exit.  It stretched out in front of them like the carrot dangling before the horse that will never attain it.  Astrid made the task more difficult by trying to stop to look at the beautiful things she was seeing, oohing and ahhing at one thing after another.  Jordan’s vision swam in and out of focus, or more accurately, from focus to focus, one version of the store giving way to another and then fading back to the first.  Just as Jordan realized what this meant, the illusion shattered all around him like a plate glass window blowing out and falling away in jagged sheets.  Around him he now saw moth-eaten clothing on rotting corpses.  He felt revulsion rise in his throat.  He looked quickly away and observed broken-down furniture, stacks of mildewed paper, a discarded babydoll that looked all too real, and a mountain of other dust-covered toys.  All this where the massive military menagerie had been only seconds before. 

The woman that had been behind the counter when they had come in now rounded the corner into their path, walking toward them, separating them from their only way out.  Her hat was gone.  Her head was all but bald with a few wisps of white hair clinging to her scalp like stray spider webs.  Her face was misshapen with heavy wrinkles and her ears had the cauliflowered appearance of the ears of a veteran boxer.  Her eyes were sunken and slightly uneven on her face.  And she was smiling.  As she closed the distance between them, her smile widened (she glimpsed Jordan’s terror and was enjoying it immensely) and Jordan saw that her teeth were jagged points of bone jutting from slick gray gums.  The teeth were spaced apart as if every other one of them had fallen out.  They looked to Jordan like they were made for tearing flesh.  Horror gripped him tight and, fastening his grasp on Astrid’s wrist, he bolted, knocking the troll-woman out of his way in his adrenaline-fueled flight toward freedom.  His left hand stretched out to shove the door out of the way.  He dimly registered a violent jerk to his right arm as his momentum propelled him over the threshold and out onto the wooden porch.  Too late he became aware that he had lost Astrid.  She had been yanked from his grasp.  The door had slammed shut behind him and there was no going back.  He was left alone in pitch darkness.

As he scrambled on his hands and knees, trying to put as much distance as possible between himself and the door, he thought the darkness was because he had closed his eyes when he had burst onto the porch.  But opening his eyes didn’t change anything.  It was like being blind and for a moment he wondered if he was.  Nothing made any sense.  If he was blind, how did it happen?  Did the troll-woman somehow take his sight as a punishment for his escape?  Or was this another illusion?  And if he wasn’t blind, how could it be so dark now when it had been mid-morning when they had entered the quaint-looking shop only an hour or so ago?  The panic started to resurface but he forced himself not to react.  He forced himself to be still.  He knew his only hope was to be rational, that all those questions were irrelevant right now.  The fact was that it was dark; so dark that he wasn’t even able to see his hand when he waved it in front of his face.  The fact was that he couldn’t see.  Whether he was blind or not, he had to get away from here and he had to do it without the benefit of sight.   He stayed completely motionless on his hands and knees, listening.  He wanted to know if there was anything out here in the dark with him.  He needed to know.  When enough silence had passed to satisfy him that he was alone and relatively safe, he began to feel around, trying to get an idea of the area he could not see.  He made sure to keep the direction of the porch to his back or to his left as his hands explored the terrain.  The last thing he wanted to do was to crawl back toward the Little Big Bear.  He thought he felt raw hard-packed earth beneath him in all directions.  He tried to stand up and only succeeded in getting a lump on the back of his head and face-planting from the rebound.  He spit, wiped his mouth, and began to crawl with one arm outstretched to protect himself from another unexpected knock to his noggin.  When this antenna-hand touched an earthen wall, he was glad he had taken the precaution.  He felt around some more and found that there was another wall behind him.  He took a deep breath, attempting again to keep the panic at bay.  He knew the porch must still be to his left so he turned ninety degrees to his right and began to crawl, again with his antenna-hand out in front.  After covering several yards’ distance, he was satisfied that he was in some kind of tunnel and put down his feeler deciding it was no longer necessary.  Based on the pure dark nature of this strange environment, his assumption was that he was underground.  He was too busy figuring out his next move, however, to wonder (as he would, obsessively, years later) how he had entered and exited through the same door and been under the scorching Texas sun going in but came out into an underground tunnel.  Now he just focused on crawling forward and not panicking, trying not to think about what might be in the dark behind him…or in front of him.

Time had become fluid since they had entered the antique shop, which made it hard to gauge.  It seemed like he had been crawling for several hours and his muscles were starting to cramp in evidence.  He was considering stopping to rest, was thinking he might even stretch out on the floor of the tunnel to unkink his arms and legs, when the tunnel took a sharp left turn.  For an instant, Jordan feared that it would lead him back to the Little Big Bear’s awaiting fangs but his fear was forgotten when he realized he was beginning to be able to see again!  So he wasn’t blind!  This joyful realization momentarily overshadowed the fact that the presence of light might also mean that he was nearing the end of the tunnel.  He crawled faster toward the dim glow that reminded him of a full moon on a dark Rocky Mountain night.  The moon grew larger and larger until he found himself spilled out onto a creek bank beneath a small bridge. 

His sense of time and the soreness of his muscles was verified when he saw that he had been crawling underneath a long path that cut through a wooded area where nothing looked the least bit familiar.  The deceptively charming little shack was nowhere in view.  He breathed a sigh of relief.  He allowed himself a brief moment to mourn Astrid.  She was one of the sweetest, most sincere people he had ever met.  She hadn’t deserved the ending she had come into.  After a moment, he reluctantly pushed Astrid aside in order to survey the area and focus on building a strategy.  He was still considering what to do next when he saw movement within a clump of bushes.  “Come out!” Jordan demanded.  He sounded a little hysterical, even to himself.  He knew it most likely was some non-threatening woodland critter but he prepared for battle just the same, brandishing his fighting stance.  A small boy with a dirt-streaked face stood but didn’t move out of the shelter of his hiding place.  Jordan relaxed and with tired compassion inquired if the boy was alright.  “Are you all alone?” the second question following right behind the first.  The boy said nothing but began to cry instead.  By the look of his dirty face, he had been crying a lot and wiping the tears away with the heels of his dirt-covered hands, just as he was doing again.  Jordan looked at his own hands.  They looked like the boy’s.  The boy had come through the tunnel as he had.  Jordan went to him and tried to comfort him, though he found himself struggling not to break down.

When his sobbing had subsided, the boy was able to explain how his parents had brought him and his baby sister into the store on their way to visit his grandparents.  They had stopped to see if they could find a gift for his Mimi’s birthday.  He was the only one who had made it out.  The others were lost.  “All the books!” his eyes grew wide with memory as he told his story.  “So many books!  I just got lost in all the stacks and didn’t care where they were.  By the time I figured out they weren’t real, it was too late.  I couldn’t save them.  I just ran.”  He hung his head and began to cry again. 

Jordan stroked his back.  “What do you mean?  What wasn’t real?”

“The books!  The books!  They weren’t real!”  The boy spoke with such intensity, as if it was of the utmost importance that Jordan understood what he was saying.  “It was some sort of…glamour, you know, magic.”  He whispered this last word like it was a secret.  Jordan didn’t remember seeing ANY books in the shop, though he hated to read so he may just not have noticed them.  Military gear, guns and ammo boxes, and gun belts, but no books.  As many books as this kid was talking about would have been hard to miss.  He tried intently to remember what he had seen when he entered the shop before the military equipment captured his attention.  Maps, uniforms…and then it dawned on him.  He had seen what he was most interested in, what he wanted most to see.  Astrid had been off admiring, well, whatever; he wasn’t really sure what.  Until, of course, she had joined him while he was looking at the uniforms!  She loved vintage things, especially clothing.    That was the place where their interests had overlapped and brought them back together.  That was where their illusions overlapped.  Only his had made him queasy and the disoriented and this, he hypothesized, had somehow broken its hold on him - on him, but not on Astrid.  Her stomach had felt somewhat unsettled but she didn’t have the vertigo or nausea he had experienced.  The troll-thing (which neither he nor the boy had mentioned to this point) had held her tight in its grasp.  So tightly, in fact, that she had been ripped from his.  He looked back over his shoulder to where the tunnel had emptied into the creek…under a bridge.  He squared himself urgently in front of the boy, squatting to look him in the eye.  “They’re gone now.  Your parents, your sister, and my…Astrid.” 

“Your what?”

“Nevermind.  My girlfriend, okay? ”  The boy wrinkled his nose as if the words themselves stank.  Jordan stood and motioned for the boy to follow.  “Come on, kid.  We’ve gotta put some more distance between us and that tunnel and we need to do it now.” He didn’t know where he was, where he was going, or how far they would have to go.  He only knew they had to get away from that bridge before any more of those creatures appeared.

He put his hands in his pockets as he set out into the woods.  The fingers of his right hand encountered the cold disc-shaped object just as the kid snatched something from Jordan’s back pocket.  “What’s this?”  Unfolding it, he was delighted with his discovery.  “It’s a map!  Cool!”  A flicker, like heatwaves off of Texas afternoon asphalt, passed across its surface as it came fully open and the title seamlessly transfigured from “Territories of The Norse-gnome and The Shadows” back to “Territories of The North and The South” as Jordan had first seen it.  The two began their trek through the forest in search of a landmark that would lead them home, unknowingly heading deeper into Norse-gnome territory.