Chapter Seven

A Boy And His Rock

“Find the tower. Find the tower where it all began.”

Isaac held onto his concentration with all his might. There were too many keys nearby, the voices threatened to overwhelm him.

“Find the tower. Find the tower where it all began.”

And the voice was so loud. The voice echoed in his mind. It sounded like a young boy but the only thing he said was the same line repeated over and over again. The inflection was all wrong for a child to, it sounded more like a religious incantation than a call to action.

“Find the tower. Find the tower where it all began.”

Yes, yes, we get it! Isaac tried intoning a message in his mind back at the key but he might as well not have bothered, the voice merely kept on intoning the same two sentences.

The fact that the voice was so loud must mean that the key was close nearby. He couldn’t sense a direction, but perhaps that was because it was too close? It was worth a shot. He opened his eyes and the voices ceased like he had stepped through a door into a room devoid of sound.

It took some time for the sounds of the rain to come back into focus. He made sure Aster still breathed and slept on. He grabbed a bundle of the pine branches and moved to uncover the makeshift door enough for him to step outside.

He straightened his back after covering the entrance up after him and he felt the tension in his muscles. How long had he been sitting there jumping from key to key in his mind. It seemed to him how bizarre it must’ve looked while he was doing it. It had been difficult to tell the time when he was under, and the clouds covering up the sky made it difficult to judge how far the sun had traveled.

The canopy above led most of the rain away from him but just two steps out from the tree the rain poured down. Taking the bundle of pine branches and holding them over his head like a poor man's umbrella, Isaac stepped out into the rain and began his search.

He hadn’t the faintest clue of where one would look for a key in a forest. His first instinct would’ve been to ask Aster for help, but she was out of the count. They were relying on him now. His next thought was to review what he knew. The keys came with the people arriving with the strange storms. So either someone was nearby, or someone had dropped a key or left it somewhere, or perhaps more likely, someone had died.

Isaac shivered, from the cold or some ominous premonition, he couldn’t say but he cast about for further clues. If there were someone alive out there, so close by, Isaac would probably have heard he or she by now. But what if they were hiding? Isaac’s skin prickled all of a sudden as if he could feel two eyes watching him, preying upon him.

He shook the feeling off. If they were skilled enough to remain undetected up until this point, then Isaac would never find them unless they wanted to be found. He would have to assume he wasn’t being watched.

He also highly doubted someone would leave their key voluntarily, even one as useless as Isaac’s. Keys were everything in this place it seemed.

Then the only remaining conclusion Isaac could draw was that he was looking for a corpse. Having made the deduction, Isaac straightened his spine further. Right, where would someone have died in the vicinity of this tree?

To the left the terrain dipped slightly in a decline down to the riverbed. In front of him, to the right and behind him there was nothing but forest. More pines like the one he and Aster had taken refuge in. Perhaps someone had thought of the same thing. His excitement growing he walked circles around their pine, brushing aside branches and looking inside the other trees, hoping to spot a hideout much like their own.

Aster had said that when the keys called out to you, that meant they were synchronized to you personally, and being synchronized meant that you could utilize that particular key. At least, that’s what he remembered her saying. Perhaps he had misunderstood. He tried not to get his hopes up, but he was like a starving man in more than one way. He needed to believe he could survive. He needed a useful key to defend himself.

After having checked the thirtieth pine he felt the hope begin to wane. The rain had begun seeping through his makeshift umbrella the last ten minutes. He couldn’t keep this up much longer. If he got soaked through, who knew how long it would take before he would be dry again.

He sat down and balanced the branches on top of his head. Trying to breathe in a calm and ordered fashion, he closed his eyes.

“Find the tower. Find the tower where it all began.”

His eyes flew open the second the voice finished the incantation. The voice had sounded lower in volume. But much more than that, Isaac had heard an inkling of a direction, pointing back to their hideout, but slightly off center. Isaac looked and tried pinpointing where he had heard the voice coming from. Yes, the voice had come from a bit to the left, from the riverbed.

The fire burned inside his chest once again. He stood up, forgetting the branches balanced on his head and showered himself in the rainwater trapped between the pine needles. The impromptu shower didn’t abate his passion however, he stooped just long enough to scoop them back up and jogged over to the river.

When he arrived he hesitated. Where would someone die on a riverbank? There was nothing but rocks, earth and a strip of sand along the river. But his mind raced ahead a hundred miles an hour. Perhaps he had been wrong about someone dying, perhaps someone indeed had dropped their key. It would probably lie just beneath the sand, waiting to be discovered.

He flew up and down the small strip of beach, sliding his foot behind him, upending the sand as best he could in a methodical fashion. He felt a bit like he was mowing a lawn, one foot at a time. The going was slow and after just a couple minutes his calf began to burn from dragging the other foot behind it with little support. Isaac hopped around and switched to dragging with the rested leg and mowing sand with the tired one.

The fire inside him kept him at it. For how long he didn’t know, but the sky started to darken eventually.

He ran out of undisturbed sand and started trying to upend the rocky edges of where the beach met the grassy knolls. But he snagged his foot on a root after only a couple feet and fell on his ass.

Cursing the root and everything it stood for he hobbled hunchbacked and defeated over to a large rock and sat down on it to rest.