Page 10 of Roaring Heat
For one reckless heartbeat, I wish he had stayed. Not to talk. Not to touch. Just to occupy the space and keep the quiet from sounding like an accusation.
I move through the main room because movement feels like control. The antique brass bed sits beside the window. The kitchen is along the far wall with the narrow island and two barstools separating it from the rest of the room. There's a leather couch facing the fireplace with a pair of sturdy chairs angled toward it. A painted and distressed coffee table speaks of extensive use and not neglect. A small bathroom with clean towels folded in neat stacks. The furniture is eclectic and welcoming, as it was built to last and be useful.
Heat lingers, then thins. I trail my fingers over the back of the chair, surprised by the soft residual heat still clinging to the worn leather. The fire may have gone dark, but its warmthlingers, subtle and fading, like a memory reluctant to let go. I wish I could keep it. I wish I could bottle whatever Beau carries that makes rooms feel more anchored than they were an hour before.
The recorder sits in my palm like a responsibility. I set it on the island and open my journal beside it, the leather bending easily, the spine softened by years of fieldwork. The pen feels heavier than it should. Words do not want to come in a tidy line, so I start with facts. Time of return. Weather. Notes on the clearing. Names of locations, distances, landmarks, anything that can be measured. The act has always helped. Numbers do not care if your hands shake.
Redwood Rise is supposed to be a study, not a test. The statement looks firm on the page, yet memory disagrees. I can still see Beau cross the schoolyard earlier, a clean cut through chaos. The turn of his shoulders. The economy of his steps. The way his gaze broke a situation into parts and solved the right part first. There had been no hesitation. He didn’t doubt for even a breath. The precision of instinct, trained repeatedly, made it seem inevitable.
I return to the bench by the door and peel off my boots, setting them side by side on the mat. My soft wool socks find the rug, and the rough weave surprises me with its comfort. There is something bracing about the scrape of texture across tired feet. I roll my toes to wake feeling in them, and the old ache in my arches answers in a familiar voice. The slight pain is honest, and honesty steadies me.
The cottage holds the day in subtle traces that do not lean on scent. A faint warmth on the iron grate. The smallest drift of heat rising from the hearth. The air carries the memory of the fire, without smoke. I tell myself that that’s enough.
I fill a glass at the sink and stand at the window while I drink. The marine air from the ocean has moved higher into the trees.It gathers in the hollows and blurs the edges of trunks and limbs so that the redwoods become shapes and then suggestions and then nothing certain at all. The world tightens to what exists inside these four walls, plus the few feet of porch that still shows itself. I set the glass down and write a reminder to call my sister when I am in town tomorrow and can use my personal cell phone. Her laughter has a way of pulling me back to myself, of anchoring me when everything feels adrift.
I try to bring a sense of control back into the space. I stack a small pile of field guides on the coffee table so tomorrow’s work will be less heavy at the start. I straighten the throw on the end of the couch. I fold a map and slide it back into the side pocket of my pack. The discipline helps until it doesn't.
The first sound is so faint it brushes the edge of perception, like a ripple in still water. My breath hitches, and a tight coil forms low in my stomach as my ears strain for repetition. Did I imagine it? The uncertainty lands sharp in my chest, the way tension sometimes does just before a storm breaks.
Then it comes again, unmistakable this time—a subtle scrape, deliberate and slow, like weight dragging across gravel outside. My spine stiffens, and every muscle along my back tightens with instinct. I set the pen down and rise, the room suddenly too quiet, too still, every sense reaching toward the dark beyond the windows. A scrape. Not fast. Not careless. A weight that lifts and drags rather than lifts clean. The second sound proves the first. A slow step over gravel near the porch.
My hand goes to the lamp, and the room shifts from gentle yellow to the deeper blue of evening. I move to the window to the left of the fireplace and take the curtain between my fingers. The fabric is old and sturdy and cool. I keep my body to the side, angle my head, and look through a thin triangle of glass.
Fog rides low across the yard. It moves like breath in a sleeping chest. It thickens, thins, and thickens again. The porchrail is only a darker band through the pale. I hold my breath and listen past the thud of my heart for other hearts that should not be there.
A board on the porch squeaks—not with the sharp pop of an old nail, but the low groan of wood under strain. The sound travels through the windowsill and into my bones, flipping my stomach in a queasy roll. The floor shivers with a faint tremor that has nothing to do with the wind. It’s the same wrongness I sensed once before, when I saw Beau near the strange, invisible ley lines the locals whisper about. I glimpsed them only in the clearing and still don’t know if they were real or just the product of exhaustion. But in that moment, the world tilted askew, like a compass needle knocked off true north.
That same imbalance prickles against my skin now, gathering behind my ribs and fluttering beneath my sternum. The tension swells in the quiet like thunder that refuses to break—charged, restless, and stronger than before. Frayed at the edges, it feels like a pulse of chaos disturbing the air, a presence just out of reach, nameless and unexplainable.
“What the hell,” I whisper, and the glass takes my breath and cools it.
The air holds. The pressure spikes. My head throbs in a slow drumbeat that syncs with the floor under my feet. I open the curtain another inch and let my eyes adjust to the gray. The Jeep sits where I left it, in all its turquoise glory. The nearest trees are ghosts drawn with a careful hand and then smudged. The fog looks like something alive that has not decided what it wants to be yet.
A shadow thickens, separates, and moves. I cannot say where it came from because fog makes liars of edges. It stops just beyond the line of the porch and waits. I think of Beau’s way of waiting, the taut stillness that has a purpose, and I know at oncethis is not that. This is patience that tastes of choosing rather than deciding.
I do not breathe for three counts, and suddenly I see eyes in the fog.
They sit low, just above the haze, as if the head that bears them presses them down while the body crouches close to the ground. They glow with a color I can’t name, as if a summer storm had bottled itself inside the glass. Neither red nor gold, but some volatile alloy of both, molten and alive, watching me with unrelenting focus.
My breathing constricts, tension swelling like a gathering storm just beyond reach. I can’t look away. I don’t even want to. Something ancient and instinctive in me stretches forward, drawn toward the glow, desperate to find answers in a place where questions have never needed words. They do not blink. They do not sway. They look the way a compass points, not with curiosity but with a kind of authority.
Instinct in me splits. The part that obeys science reaches for measurement. Height from the ground to the centerline. Distance between pupils. Angle of gaze relative to the porch steps and the threshold. The other part of me knows that none of those numbers will tell me what I already feel on the inside of my skin. Watched. Assessed. Noted. Kept.
The board speaks again. Closer.
I step back and bump the table with my hip. The journal slides, flips, and lands on the rug with a muted sound that feels too loud. I crouch and grab it because my hands need a task. The paper edge bites my finger, and the bright sting anchors me for one clear second.
I rise and look again, but the eyes are gone. The fog erased its own work. The porch is a dark rectangle and nothing else.
The quiet that follows feels deliberate, as if it waits to see what I will do. I remain by the window until my knees throband my feet ache from standing too long. Panic ebbs, not into calm, but into something heavier. A compact ember of fear and defiance settles in my chest, solid and unyielding. It beats beneath my ribs, steady rather than searing, anchoring my breath and reminding me I’m still here. Contained, not extinguished, it steadies me enough to breathe without running. The rational part of my mind makes a list, because lists are reliable: animal, person, something else. The next word does not belong in a field journal, and I refuse to write it.
Beneath everything, another awareness threads through me. The ley lines people whisper about murmur at the edge of hearing. I don’t believe in them, but the feeling climbs from the base of my spine to the back of my neck. It isn’t pain, only a quiet insistence, as if a pattern shaped the earth in a way I can’t explain. Patterns reach for each other, and in that pull I sense Beau, not only as a man at my door but as an absence that alters the surrounding room.
The cottage holds. No further sounds from outside. No more boards complaining. No breath that is not mine. Far below, the ocean sends up a steady rush that filters through the trees like a calmer kind of weather. The nausea eases. My hands stop shaking. The floor feels like a floor again.
I cross the room and lower myself slowly onto the couch, settling the journal across my knees with care. The cushion gives under my weight, familiar and firm, but not enough to banish the tension running through my spine. My fingertips linger on the leather cover, the warmth from my hands seeping into its surface. I stare at it without opening it yet, caught between impulse and hesitation, the steady beat of my heart loud in the quiet.
My breath is shallow, measured, as if the act of sitting still might draw something forward or hold something back. I ease back slightly, grounding myself in the rug's texture beneath myfeet, the coarse weave anchoring me in place. The leather is warm where my hands have held it. The moment stretches, and I let it.
