This is day two of the Allhallowtide Triduum, from A Daughter of Her People.
“Faneesha” (Phoenicia in standard spelling) is Hannah’s home town, from which she had been abducted the previous year.)
Rays of light penetrated her eyelids, and a white light burned inside her head. The white light forced her eyes open.
She grew aware of her surroundings by degrees until she realized she was lying on the floor, dressed in yesterday’s clothing, surrounded by a cold gray light.
This was the afterlife. She was in the antechamber of the world to come, waiting to be admitted.
Yet her breath came out in puffs. This wouldn’t happen in the afterlife. And she had a thudding headache. That wouldn’t happen either. She bent her wrist back and it twinged. She felt pain. In the world to come, even in the judgment room, there would be no pain. She was, therefore, alive. A curious, electric energy coursed through her veins, dueling with thirst and ravenous hunger and an indefinably odd sensation in her cramped, bloated stomach. How could her stomach be bloated? It was empty. They had only eaten a few crackers with skippy and jam in the last days.
Hannah tried to rise, but she was weak and fell back. Grunting, she heaved her body up and forced herself to crawl to a bay of three tall windows. When she reached the bay, she propped herself up on her elbows, looked through the windows, and gasped.
The land rippled and curved on slopes that rolled to infinity. She squinted and made out smaller stone structures, and the demarcations of stone fencing. To the left—north—the land fell away, and the smudged, blurry, tufted green of treetops were visible. Bottomland. A river runs down there, she thought. Plants grew there, things to eat. She would look for them when she got her wits together and could walk.
The window faced east to the sun. It was now just edging over the horizon, warming the room from gray to a pale gold orange. The room was bare, apart from indistinct humps sheathed with dust-covered plastic sheeting against the baseboards. Their own possessions were in a heap in the center of the room.
Hannah forced herself to stand and lurched towards the miniature ceramic heater. Max must have gotten up in the middle of the night and gone to the car; the incident with the blanket now made sense. She hovered over the heater, drinking in its tiny radius of warmth, and realized she was alone in the house. Where were the woman and her children? Had she dreamed them? No, she had been real. They had surely seen her. Perhaps she was a witch, sent to guide them to their destination. There were good witches, like Zabeth, the best knitter in Faneesha. If you needed help with knitting, Zabeth was the one to go to. But she was still a witch and to be avoided.
And where were Mr. Jed and Max?
She drained a canteen in one gulp, felt better, and followed the braids of the sun’s brilliant rays on the floor to the north parlor on the other side of the hallway. It was a twin to the south parlor, but empty, its bay windows boarded shut. The floor was bare. In the dark, Hannah saw the faint, almost phosphorescent markings of human contact on the floor, but no matter: the woman and her children were gone.
Groaning like an old woman, Hannah shuffled back to the south parlor, and on a whim pulled off the plastic sheeting near the baseboards. A cloud of dust escaped, and she sneezed and stared at what she had uncovered, a couch upholstered in glowing blood-red satin, embroidered with thick gold thread in a diamond pattern, its carved backing a rosewood grape arbor, vines of fruit twisting skyward over two feet. Faneesha had skilled woodworkers, but none on this level. As she traced the carving with a forefinger, she heard laughter coming from outside. It was Mr. Jed and Max, probably arguing.
She ran outside, barefoot, onto the porch, and stopped, stunned by the frigid air, the cold under her bare feet, and again by vast land unfurling in a great encompassing circle. The air clawed her lungs, and her stomach contracted in a tight knot when she saw Jed and Max. The two were struggling and panting as they dragged something up the hill.
Oh Lord, it’s the woman! How could they be laughing?
As they neared, Hannah made out the stiff carcass of a deer buck with a fine rack of juvenile antlers.
“Why couldn’t you have bagged a squirrel?” Jed said between grunts.
“I would have if I’d seen one first,” Max grunted back.
They stopped in front of a small stone house slightly down the hill. Max hawked and spat a hunk of phlegm on the ground. “I’ll make some dry ice and we can use it to store the meat! I’ll show ya, it’s a neat trick,” he said, between breaths.
At that moment, hopping from foot to foot on the freezing porch, Hannah demoted Mr. Jed and Max from hostile, threatening strangers to simple idiots. They had no idea what to do with a kill. No matter how empty a place seemed, creatures lurked. Her stomach was flipping somersaults but if she didn’t take control, the place would crawl with vermin and scavengers in no time.
“What are you fools yammering about?” she snapped. “You don’t need ice! It’s twenty degrees out!”
She barked an order to put the carcass in the little stone house and went inside to put on her boots and get her knife.