Fridays not only meant the weekend was coming, but Fred also sometimes lucked out and managed to cut out of the lab a little early for the start of an early weekend. This happened ot be one of those Fridays, and she planned to take advantage of it while she could. She and another co-worker decided to take a hike. It had been a little while since Fred had really been able to do some Breck exploring, and she was really feeling a connection with the earth today. So, why not?
They kept up a steady pace as they hiked, but it wasn’t like they’d taken the most strenuous trail - more so on the easy side of medium. A couple of times they’d stop to look around or take a short break, but they mostly just talked about work or personal things. Her co-worker was had been in a relationship for a while, but Fred’s was somewhat on the newer side of things. She and David were still in that honeymoon phase, or at least they were from Fred’s perspective anyway, so she probably talked about him more than most people wanted to hear. Thankfully, though, her friend didn’t seem to mind.
The conversation had shifted from relationships and boys back to work again when Fred’s attention was pulled away by an odd-looking tree. The tree looked like it had some kind of image on it. “Do you see that?” She asked, pointing to the tree, but her friend didn’t seem to have any clue what she was talking about.
Fred just shook her head and laughed it off. “You go on ahead. I’m going to take a quick breather. I’ll catch up with you in a sec.” She waved her on and took a drink of water, her eyes drifting over to the tree again once the other girl was out of sight. There was a picture on it that Fred couldn’t quite make out until she stepped closer and then it was like she was pulled in completely.
It was like flashes on a screen when she looked more closely. She was there standing with a girl a few years younger than her and they were hugging. Fred smiled and realized soon that the girl was her sister, Caley. Only… no, that couldn’t be right. The two were meeting for the first time, and Caley was… what? Her daughter? Before she could make sense of it, the picture changed and there was a man with a bumpy and ridged face staring back at her with yellow eyes and a toothy grin. She felt a pang of familiar fear sweep through her just at the sight of him.
Blinking, Fred stepped back from the tree in surprise. What she’d just seen didn’t feel foreign to her. No, they felt like memories, but they were memories that didn’t make sense. She tried looking back, but this time the images were gone.
“What the hell?” She said to herself and touched the tree bark with her fingers. “I guess I’m going crazy.” And just saying the word ‘crazy’ out loud made old memory that didn’t make any sense. Had she really gone crazy?
The last several days had been very strange. Abigail felt as if she was losing her grip on reality and that made no sense. Work was stressful but that wasn’t anything new, things at home were fine, she’d been spending time with Isaac which had been good. Despite the fact that she and Collin had dated for some time, there had never been any awkwardness with him or his family when things were over. Mark understood and she walked up the trail, Abigail smiled to herself, thinking how lucky she was to have him. That didn’t explain the feelings though, the dreams the strange little things that popped into her head. The felt like memories but yet they also felt real. Maybe she did need some time off.
She had just come round a corner when she heard Fred’s voice and she stopped for a moment before approaching her. “Fred?” she said. “Are you okay? I was just coming up the trail and I heard you, you sounded scared.”
Startled, Fred turned around at the new voice and sighed a little when she saw Abigail standing there. She knew the other girl as a friend of her brother's, but it had been a little while since they'd seen one another.
She laughed a little nervously and waved her hand off like it was nothing. "Oh, no, I'm not scared." She glanced back towards the tree; the picture was still nowhere to be found. "I mean, I might be a going a little crazy, but..." Fred turned back to face Abigail.
"Do you ever think you see something and when you look again, it's not there?" She motioned to the tree with her thumb. This was like something she would have experienced if she'd had a nice little afternoon with some magic mushrooms. Not a normal afternoon stroll.
“Yeah, I think everyone has things like that happen now and again. Especially lately,” it came out before she realized it and she sighed. “I haven’t said anything to anyone but I’ve been having these strange memories, dreams, I don’t know what to call them but things that I’m sure have never happened to me yet they seem real. So maybe there’s something in the water.” Abigail had no idea what it could be but it was comforting to know that someone else was experiencing it. “What did you see, if you don’t mind my asking?”
The dreams and memories that Abigail describe were a little too familiar for Fred’s liking. Or maybe she should have been grateful that it sounded familiar since that would mean she wasn’t the one going crazy - at least not all by herself. Then again, Abigail hadn’t seen tree showing memory motion pictures.
“There were two of them,” she explained. “The first one kind of made sense, but… didn’t. Caley and I were meeting up for dinner or something, but it felt like it was the first time I’d ever met her. She and I met when I was younger and came up to Colorado to visit my mom one summer, and she was just a little girl. But here, she was as grown as she is now, and I’m pretty sure I called her… my daughter.”
She shook her head. “The second was of some kind of monster with a bumpy face and yellow eyes. Like out of a bad horror movie or something. I could feel the fear from seeing him like I was there.” She sighed. “What have your dreams been about?”
“My uncle Kai. Except he wasn’t my uncle, he was some kind of priest maybe, I’m not sure but he said something to me about stars and something called Kyber,” Abigail shook her head. “I don’t know what it is and neither did he but he remembered the same thing. And that we were different people wherever this was.” There was more and she wasn’t sure that she could talk about it but maybe it wouldn’t be so scary if she did. “I also had a dream about a bright light, I was with someone but I don’t know who it was and we…..died.”
As she listened, Fred wasn’t sure what to make of the different stories Abigail was experiencing in her dreams. It was all so much different than anything she could have thought of, and half of both her dreams and Fred’s own sounded like something out of a science fiction or a cheesy horror movie. “Maybe there’s just something… in the air. Or the water.” She shook her head, not really knowing how else to explain it. Her scientific and sometimes conspiracy theory prone mind could pick out a handful of different explanations but none of it made any logical sense.
“I don’t think staying here is helping, though. And I need to let my friend know I’m okay; she went on ahead. You want to walk with me back to the road?”