Морган Райс - Loved

“This is definitely the place,” Caleb said. “This is where Elizabeth lived. The question is: why did the map send us here? I don’t see anything,” he said, finally, admitting defeat.

“Neither do I,” Caitlin had to admit.

A comfortable silence fell over them. After the whirlwind events of the day, she was exhausted.

She was just happy that they had shelter for the night, and too tired to think of anything else. She loved the feeling of his coat around her shoulders. She felt the shape of her journal, still inside her jean pocket, and felt like taking it out and writing. But she was too tired.

She looked across the room, and studied Caleb. She marveled at how he was so impervious to the cold, to being tired, to seemingly even being hungry. In fact, if anything, he seemed to gain energy at night. He still looked in perfect condition, despite all they’d been through. Despite being shot. She looked at his arm, and saw that it was already entirely healed.

As he stared into the fire, lost in thought, his eyes glowed an intense brown, and she felt overwhelmed with the need to know more about him.

“Tell me about you,” Caitlin said. “Please.”

“What do you want to know?” he asked, still looking into the fire.

“Everything,” she said. “The things you have seen…I can’t even comprehend,” she said. “What do you remember most?”

A long silence blanketed the room as Caleb sat there, brows furrowed.

“It’s hard to say,” he began softly. “In the beginning, in the first lifetimes, I was just overwhelmed with the thrill of being alive, century after century. I had lived when all others I cared for had died. At first, you begin to lose friends and family, and anyone you’d ever loved. That is what hurts the most. That is the hardest time. You begin to feel very, very alone.

“After the first hundred years, you begin to form attachments to places instead of people. To villages, cities, buildings, mountains. This is what you cling to.

“But as centuries turn into centuries, even these places disappear. Towns disappear. New towns arise. Countries get folded into other countries. Wars wipe out entire cultures you loved. Languages get lost. So you learn not to cling to places either.”

He cleared his throat, concentrating.

“When places you love disappear, you cling to possessions. For hundreds of years, I collected artifacts, priceless treasure. I took great joy in that. But after hundreds of years, that, too, lost its luster. It becomes meaningless.

“Ultimately, after thousands of years, you look at life differently. You don’t attach yourself to people, to places, or to possessions. You don’t attach yourself to anything.”

“Then what stays with you?” Caitlin finally asked. “What do you care about? There must be something.”

Caleb stared, thinking.

“I suppose,” he said, finally, “what stays with you, when all else falls away…are impressions.”

“Impressions?”

“Impressions of certain people. Memories of times you spent together. How they affected you.”

Caitlin wanted to choose her next words carefully.

“Do you mean, like…relationships? As in, like, romance?”

A silence covered the room. She could feel him choosing his words.

“There are all sorts of relationships that matter, but at the end of the day, romance probably stays with you the most,” he finally said. “But there is more to it than that. In the beginning, it is about romance. But over time, the person…occupies a small part of you. I don’t know how else to explain it. But after all the centuries, that is what remains.”

Caitlin she was touched by his honesty. She had expected him to talk about where he was born, where he grew up. But he had done far more, as usual. His words impacted her, but she wasn’t sure how. She didn’t know how to respond.

“After so much time,” he finally continued, “when you meet people, you immediately try to place how you knew them in other lifetimes. I find that anyone who I meet now, I have also spent significant time with them in some incarnation. They never remember, but I always do. I find myself waiting for the moment when I recognize how I’ve known them before. And then it comes, and it all makes sense.”

Caitlin was afraid to ask the next question. She hesitated.

“So…what about us?”

Caitlin’s brow furrowed, as he stared into the fire. He waited a long time before he responded.

“You’re the only one I’ve ever met where everything is…obscured. I know, somewhere, that I have known you. But I still don’t know how. Something is being held back from me, and I don’t understand why. I can only assume that there is something about you—about us—that I’m not supposed to know.”

Caitlin didn’t know what to say. She felt overwhelmed with emotion for him, and she didn’t trust herself to say anything. She knew that whatever she said would come out wrong.

She stood up and grabbed a log, and with a trembling hand, reached out to throw it on the fire.

But she was so nervous, that the log slipped, landing on the floor with a thud.

Caitlin and Caleb both stopped and stared at each other. The thud of the wood: it was hollow.

The floorboards. There was something beneath them.

At the same moment, they both hurried to the spot on the floor where the log landed, as Caleb smoothed it over with his hand. Centuries of dust were wiped away, revealing the bare wood. He rapped hard on it with his knuckles, and there was, again, a hollow sound.

“Stand back,” he said, and she leaned back against the wall.

As she did, he pulled his arm back and punched the floorboard. There was cracking wood, as he punched a hole right through it, and reached in and tore up several floorboards.

Caitlin grabbed a candle, and put it inside the hole. There was not much space, and they could see the dirt on the ground. Caitlin moved the candle. At first, it revealed nothing. But as she moved the candle to the corner, she suddenly saw something. “There.”

Caitlin reached in and slowly extracted it. She held it up, and wiped away an inch of dust.

It was a small, red satin pouch. Tied shut by a string.

She handed Caleb the candle, and began opening it. She wondered what on earth it could be. A coin? A piece of jewelry? Her heart pounded with excitement as she finally got it open. She reached in delicately, and felt something cold and metal.

She held it up and they both stared.

It was a small key.

She looked back in the pouch, to make sure there was nothing else. This was it. Just this key.

She handed it to Caleb. He too, held it up, getting closer to the fire, examining it every which way.

“Do you recognize it?” Caitlin asked.

He shook his head.

Caitlin came over, getting close to him, as they both sat by the fire and touched the key. As she turned it over, she noticed something. She licked her finger, and rubbed it alongside the metal. A final layer of dust evaporated, and there was visible a small inscription, written in a delicate script.

The Vincent House .

She looked to Caleb. “Do you know it?”

He leaned back, shook his head and sighed.

“I guess our search isn’t over,” he finally said.

She could hear the disappointment in his voice. He had clearly expected to find the sword here.

She was sorry, and felt somehow to blame. She, too, was frustrated by all the clues. She leaned back herself, settling in for what she assumed might be a long search. At least this place had yielded a clue. At least it wasn’t a dead end. Now, at least, they held a key. But to what?

Before she could finish the thought, Caitlin suddenly keeled over in pain. She was struck by a hunger pang, worse than any she’d ever had. She could barely catch her breath.