Chapter One - part I

[thestrangeaeons]

    Juliet Welsh was never sure later why she chose that day to bring her biology notes on her thrice-weekly bike ride. Though she often felt the urge to rest at the small pavilion near the park’s exit, and on those occasions she was known to spend a good deal of time with a paperback novel or her sketchbook, she’d never brought so much as a scrap of her notes before. She really couldn’t say why she felt compelled to bring them along today; as far as school things were concerned, she preferred to leave them behind when riding.

    She had vague thoughts, as she was leaving her apartment earlier that morning, of sitting in the gazebo and looking over yesterday’s notes on the citric acid cycle in preparation for next Thursday’s exam, even though she was fairly confident she understood for once. Bring them she did, and forgot she’d done so, until a sudden breeze swirled the page out of her back pocket as she was riding.



    “Ah, damn!” she muttered, and stopped. She looked back just in time to see the wind twisting and jerking her page of notes down a path to her right.

    She recognized this trail, in the way one recognizes someone one’s seen at the supermarket or the laundromat multiple times but never spoken to. She’d ridden past it a thousand times in the last year, ever since she’d decided to get serious about losing the extra fifteen pounds that put her into the chubby category instead of the average one. She had duly gotten her bicycle out of storage in her mother’s garage and taken it home, where it had sat unused for another five days while the weather unleashed a characteristic mid-spring downpour. After the rain ceased, she’d gotten herself onto the bike and ridden through the trails in the nearby park for two hours, something which over the following year had grown into both a habit and a pleasure. She’d lost the fifteen pounds and several more besides, becoming in turn first average and then slender. Her boyfriend had been delighted.

    She had never really explored the forest paths in those four years, keeping instead to the main track that wound its way leisurely through the park. Juliet had never been one for exploration in the first place, and when she’d first begun her daily bike rides it had been a struggle just to keep the bike on the track, let alone go off and explore trails that might or might not be paved. A creature of habit, she kept herself to the trail she knew and never thought anything else of it.



    She’d paused in front of one of the more disused tracks. The fork where it split from the main path was half-overgrown with bushes, and a low-hanging branch nearly disguised the path as a mere niche in the trees. It had clearly been a long time since anyone had gone down it, as the trail itself was quite buried in several years’ worth of fallen and decaying leaves. Juliet had noticed it peripherally long ago, but never had the urge to follow it. Today, whether she wanted to explore or not was of no consequence. She needed those notes.

    Stupid breeze, she thought as she ducked her head and slipped beneath a low-hanging branch. Of all days to be windy, it had to be today. What the hell possessed me to bring my notes along? Stupid, stupid, stupid . . . And of course I didn’t bring my bike chain, either. Serves me right if someone steals it.



    Not that she thought theft likely; the bicycle was ancient. She’d been meaning to replace it for several months now. The brakes were in abominable condition and one wheel had three spokes missing. Good riddance to whoever might steal it. It wasn’t a particularly good bicycle; in fact, only by the smallest margin did it exist in the ‘bad’ category instead of the ‘ridiculously crappy’.

    The wind seemed to be teasing her: it would drop off, sending her notes drifting to the forest floor, and as soon as she came within retrieving distance would snatch them back up and tumble them further away from her.

    It was clear to Juliet that no one had come this way for months, possibly even years. The trail, such as it was, was in some places totally obscured by thick drifts of gently rotting leaves and sprinklings of pine needles. And the places the dirt of the path was actually visible were unmarked by so much as a footprint. Trees and undergrowth pressed close to the edges of the trail, in some places so close that Juliet had to turn sideways to continue chasing her wayward notes.

    You would think, she thought as she ducked under a branch stretched across the path, that with all these trees around, my paper would catch on something. No such luck, I guess.

    She very nearly missed the clearing. Coming around a bend in the track, Juliet saw that her notes had at last come to rest against the trunk of a tree, and sighed in relief.





    Her eyes on them, she didn’t notice the tree root rising, almost invisible, from a pile of dead leaves. Instead of stepping around it, she tripped and pitched forward, arms flung out to break her fall, and smashed face-first into the ground. She swore. The leaves were unimpressed.

    Getting to her feet, she stormed over to the tree, seized the notes, and was about to stomp back the way she came when a flash of purple caught her eye. Curious, she glanced to her left.



    And there was the clearing. Roughly semicircular, nearly enclosed by dense underbrush, but curiously empty in the middle. Aside, of course, from the flower.

    Juliet stuffed the notes into her back pocket, barely aware she was doing it, and turned toward the thicket. The flicker of violet had been a flower, which grew more or less in the middle of the bare patch of ground. Pushing branches out of her way, Juliet entered the clearing and crouched beside the flower.



    It looked like an iris, but beyond that, she couldn’t say. I knew I wasn’t cut out to be a botanist, she thought ruefully. I should have thought before picking a major. Still, it was an iris. That much she could be sure of.

    What, exactly, an iris was doing out here in Canterbury Park, was anyone’s guess. Irises grew wild, didn’t they? Still, there was something odd about an iris growing in a patch of bare earth. Not so much as a blade of grass could be seen closer to the iris than three feet.



    Strange. But not worth much thought, Juliet decided. She’d caught her notes, they were folded safely in her back pocket, and the iris (if that’s what it was) wasn’t as interesting as finishing her bike ride. She left the clearing and followed the path back to the main trail.



    Her bicycle was where she’d left it, eliciting some guilty and very secret disappointment. It would have been nice to have a bonafide reason to replace the damn thing. Regardless, she climbed onto it and continued her ride, with little more thought for the iris.