Oracle--Mutant Wood Read online

  Pauline fell silent for a moment, as if digesting Ana’s words. She looked back and forth at her daughter a few times, in deep contemplation. Finally she said, “So no more Cosmic Brownies, huh?”

  “Oh, Mom,” Ana sighed. “Think of it as a balance: if you know you’re going to eat a lot of carbs at dinner, then go easy on them at breakfast and lunch. Or if you’ve got some strenuous exercise planned, that may justify eating some more sugar so that you have enough energy.”

  “But why would the fats food group have been removed, I wonder?” Pauline put forth.

  “I’m not sure—maybe it was done on purpose, maybe on accident,” Ana responded. “The answer usually comes down to money, doesn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m not aware of too many people who have gotten rich off of bacon and eggs,” Ana said, “but breakfast cereals have certainly brought in a lot of cash in recent years, even though cereal, toast, and an orange hardly seem like a ‘balanced breakfast’ to me.”

  “You know, young lady,” Pauline said with a proud smile, “maybe you’re on to something.”

  Indeed, the self-taught health guru had a point. Perhaps a mere coincidence, the current condition of Stonehenge bore striking similarities to society’s current diet. What initially had started out as six food groups had been, over the years, reduced to just five. Though the grains, fruits, and vegetables trilithons were still intact, the meat and dairy trilithons had suffered some major blows, while the fats trilithon had disappeared altogether. With several of its foundational pillars missing, little wonder then that society’s overall health, like Stonehenge, lay in shambles.

  The two Cooper women spent the rest of the morning going through every food item in the kitchen. They cleaned out the cupboards and dumped out the drawers. They scrutinized the contents of the refrigerator and the pantry. Pauline had never been one to pay much attention to nutritional facts labels, but that was now a thing of the past. She was astounded to find that her kitchen wasn’t very balanced.

  By noon, the mother and daughter had come to a realization together: the difference between diet and lifestyle. Before, Pauline had tried to ‘go on a diet’ without changing her lifestyle, which only works for as long as the diet goes on. What she really needed to do, however, was make her diet a part of her lifestyle—make her way of eating her way of living. Then, whenever the Cosmic Brownies came out, she wouldn’t have to reconfigure her diet but only make some quick adjustments, and then she’d be back on track.

  While Pauline and Ana were cooking up a balanced lunch, Mr. Coy and Jaret appeared in the cloven tree trunk on the Keep’s grounds. They had just arrived from Waters Deep, where they narrowly escaped death. Mr. Coy was puzzled why the Deep’s trilithon had taken them to the Keep, until Jaret said, “Take me to my girls.”

  Coy led Jaret into the mansion house, down the elevator, and onto the twenty-first-century floor, where they hurried to the Coopers’ place and knocked on the door.

  “Dad?!” Ana shrieked.

  “Jaret?!” Pauline squealed.

  “My girls!” Jaret cried, taking them both in his arms.

  “Oh, I’m so glad you’re okay!” Pauline said.

  “How did you get here?” Ana asked.

  “Through a tree,” Jaret answered with a bit of bewilderment.

  “Me, too,” Ana said.

  “A tree?” Pauline gasped.

  “Long story,” Coy mumbled to her. “Actually, I first went to the Deep, where I rescued this big lug.” He patted Jaret on the back. “Then we escaped right before Lye—” A look of concern washed over Coy’s face. “Wait a minute, where’s Paige?”

  “She’s not with you?” Ana returned.

  “No,” said Coy. “You mean she didn’t come with you?”

  “Nope,” Ana replied.

  A moment of silent pondering ensued.

  “Ana, was this the first place you were sent to?” Coy asked. “To the Keep?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “What were you thinking about at the time?” Coy wondered.

  “Um,” Ana tried to recall. “Well, I was thinking of the trilithons as food groups and how excited I was to tell my mom about them.”

  “Hmm,” Coy thought, as if solving a riddle. “Captain,” he said, turning to Jaret, “what were you thinking about right before we were sent here from the Deep?”

  “My girls,” Jaret said, pulling both his wife and daughter into his side. “I wasn’t sure you were going to get us out of there, Ben—figured we were done for. So I was thinking how nice it would be to see Pauline and Ana one last time.”

  “I see,” Coy supposed pensively. “As for me, up until I was transported away from Stonehenge, I had been thinking about you a lot,” he said to Jaret, “wondering if you were okay—still alive, even.” Then, addressing the whole group, he said, “Well, folks, it seems to me that these trilithon-portal things transport you based on what you are most concerned about at the time—it sends you according to your desires. So, in the case of Paige, that means…”

  “She probably went to wherever Ret is,” Ana finished.

  “Exactly,” Coy said.

  Jaret whispered to his wife, “Honey, have you lost weight?”

  “Well, actually,” Pauline said with a giggle, “no, but that’s about change. I hope you like fats!” Jaret stared at her oddly.

  Just then, there came another knock at the door. Everyone glanced at each other. Mr. Coy answered it.

  “Leo!” Coy beamed. “How goes it, my boy?”

  “Mr. Coy,” Leo panted, as if he had just sprinted to the door, “there’s something I need to show you.”

  “What is it, son?” Coy asked with seriousness.

  “Remember that assignment you gave to me to search the Keep until I found something about a strange tree in Russia?” Leo explained to Coy. Leo leaned to the side to awkwardly wink at Ana.

  “Yeah…”

  “Well, I found something,” Leo said.

  “Take me to it,” Coy requested.

  “Yes, sir.”

  Leo led Mr. Coy to the elevator in the center room of the twenty-first-century floor, Ana following closely behind. They descended one floor, climbed out, and headed toward the corridor between the walls of the first two decades, on which was painted the years 1900 and 1910 in big black letters. Near the end of the corridor, Leo turned left into a hallway where the very last door on the left was ajar. Leo stopped outside and let Mr. Coy enter first.

  The headlines caught his attention right away:

  TUNGUSKA EXPLOSION ROCKS RUSSIA

  MYSTERIOUS BLAST BAFFLES SCIENTISTS

  POSSIBLE METEORITE STRIKES SIBERIA

  UFO SIGHTING IN RUSSIA

  “The opposite wall tells what really happened,” Leo said. Ana had entered the room and was holding Leo’s hand, forever a little creeped out by the Keep.

  Mr. Coy turned around. The first thing he noticed was a blueprint of an atomic bomb. Next to it was the dog tag of the pilot who flew the plane that dropped the bomb. There were several schematics of the great tree—its height, girth, number of limbs, even the exact coordinates of its geographic location. Black and white photographs showed before and after scenes of the Tunguska River valley—before, a beautiful forest; after, a leveled wasteland. A picture of a massive mushroom cloud confirmed Mr. Coy’s suspicions: the mysterious Tunguska Explosion was the work of neither meteorites nor aliens but Lye, who dropped a crudely-constructed atomic weapon on the infinity tree in his effort to gain access to the wood element. In capital red letters, a final photograph of the bomb had been stamped UNSUCCESSFUL.

  “What is his obsession with nuclear power?” Mr. Coy mumbled to himself.

  “I can show you more evidence in a few other rooms,” Leo offered, “if you’re interested.”

  “No, no, I think I’ve seen enough,” Coy said. “Thank you for all your hard work, son.” He put his hand on the young man’s shoulder. “You’ve been very
helpful.” Leo smiled.

  “So, what does this mean, chief?” Ana asked of Coy, as a sidekick would his superior.

  “It means I’ve got a date with that cloven tree at sunrise,” Coy answered. “If I think about Ret when I warp this time, it should take me to him. Then I can give him the Oracle, find Paige, and get out before Ret collects the element.”

  “Sounds like a plan!” Ana cheered. “Let’s roll!”

  “You should probably ask your parents first,” Coy suggested.

  “Oh alright,” Ana agreed, as they left the room.

  Pauline and Jaret needed little persuasion, knowing their daughter was in good hands with Mr. Coy. In fact, the Coast Guard captain would have joined them had Pauline not pointed out that he should stay home to fully recuperate—or, as Leo joked to Ana, re-Cooper-ate.

  There was no sleeping that night for Mr. Coy as he made preparations for their excursion. While everyone else went to bed, he stayed awake, too worried about Paige and what lay head. About an hour after midnight, he figured he had just about everything in order when he heard something on TV that caught his attention. He rushed into the other room to find that the regular programming had been interrupted for some breaking news:

  Dr. Lionel Zarbock, renowned physicist and leader of the United Nations effort to stop Ret Cooper, was seen on the grounds of Stonehenge before dawn this morning. He was leading a large company of international soldiers, all on foot. Security personnel at the scene reported seeing Zarbock and his men disappear just moments ago at sunrise, after standing as a group in the large gap of the iconic monument’s inner circle. It is believed Zarbock was acting on information that would lead him to the Cooper criminal, whose exact whereabouts remain a mystery. Reporting live from Stonehenge, I’m Katie Kline, Channel 4 News.

  Mr. Coy’s heart began to beat a little faster. Although this was breaking news for the world, it was bad news for him. Once again, Lionel was throwing a wrench in his plans. How did he know about the trilithon? And where was he going with an army? The situation had just gotten a little more complicated and a lot more dangerous.

  But Mr. Coy had an idea. He grabbed his phone and urgently dialed a number. Time was of the essence. It just might work, but only if they moved fast. Sunrise was coming.

  CHAPTER 15

  TURNING THE PAIGE

  It was happening again. She could sense herself getting caught in the downward spiral. With tears in her eyes and a lump in her throat, she cut a helter-skelter path through the woods back toward the trilithon, her pace hurried and desperate. Every pulse of her aching heart surged throughout her body, the sound of each beat in her ears making her deaf to the outside world. Her mind was swirling out of control, without her permission, but she was powerless to stop it—just like each time before.

  Yes, Paige was falling into depression.

  This was nothing new to the daughter of Benjamin and Helen Coy. For as long as she could remember, Paige had suffered from regular episodes of despair. At first, she assumed it was perfectly natural to be sad once in a while, but as she grew into adolescence, her moodiness worsened until, on her worst days, it would cripple her. On more than one occasion, she had overheard some of the Manor’s staff and students discussing their own personal struggles with “depression,” and each narrative sounded strikingly similar to what Paige was experiencing. But she didn’t like the D-word. She would admit to feeling depressed occasionally, yes, but in her mind she didn’t believe she actually had depression. She liked to think she was stronger than that. And most of the time she was. But sometimes she wasn’t…

  It always began with a trigger: something that set her unhappiness in motion—an unkind word or unmet expectation, a disappointing result or unpleasant thought, something she could not change about herself or the world. Whatever it was, it upset a delicate balance in her psyche—an unseen but very real (perhaps even chemical) equilibrium—and altered her mental and emotional stability. From there, the demon played dominos with her well-being, slowly consuming her every thought until there was no longer any joy to be found in anything. Pessimism pushed out simple pleasures. Hopelessness haunted every action. A prevailing pointlessness turned everything mundane. It was a chain reaction—the epitome of misery: inwardly ravenous yet outwardly silent, and all in her head.

  Paige was a lot better at hiding her depression than dealing with it. She kept it completely concealed, putting up a false front of sunshine despite the gloom within. A fair amount of her despondency stemmed from her parents. Paige had no memories of her mother—only pictures, tear-stained from thumbing through them on hard days, which somehow gave her the strength to keep going, like a child admiring a hero. She could not say the same for her father, however. Until recently, no one had quite understood why Mr. Coy had distanced himself so drastically from his daughter. Like most children, Paige thought it was because there was something wrong with her—that she was a disappointment to him, an embarrassment. Now she knew it was for a much different reason, but the damage had been done, and, like most people, the mental pathways formed from the injustices of childhood continued to determine her self-worth and define her anxieties.

  Well did Paige remember the day she finally went to see a doctor. It had been a rough week. She had lost the will to live (again), not so much a desire to take her own life as a wish to no longer exist—a lack of fulfillment and purpose in life that made it seem foolish to keep living. Each day that week, she had come home from school and gone straight to bed, hoping that things would be better in the morning. But they never were. By Friday, she was at a loss of what to do. Ashamed and afraid, she did not know who to turn to. Over that weekend, she mustered the courage to act, and then on the following Monday, she flagged down the psychologist who was guest-teaching at the Manor. He asked her a few questions, ran some simple tests, and then shared his diagnosis: the D-word.

  “No, not me,” Paige immediately thought to herself. “I can’t have d…d…”

  Then the psychologist handed her a prescription.

  “Antidepressants?” Paige mentally balked. “I don’t need those.” The doctor handed her the prescription, but Paige hesitated in accepting it.

  “There’s no shame in needing help,” the psychologist smiled lovingly, “only in not seeking help when you need it.”

  Those words were enough to convince Paige to pick up the pills. Still, it would be a few more days before she actually started taking them. She kept them where no one would see them, worried about the stigma of being “on medication.” She tried the medicine for a few weeks, which was hardly enough time for it to kick in, but then stopped when she found an even better remedy.

  “My name is Ana,” the Cooper daughter introduced herself to Paige, who, at the time, was the newest student at their middle school. “Let’s be friends!”

  In no time at all, Paige found Ana to be the perfect prescription for her battle with depression. Ana’s undaunted buoyancy never failed to lift Paige out of her doldrums. They laughed together, talked together, and just had good plain fun together. Paige had found her antidepressant—this time in the form of a person rather than a pill.

  There was a side effect to Ana’s friendship, however: association with her adopted brother, Ret. Although Paige quickly fell in love with the boy, she tried not to give in to her feelings, for she knew they came with the risk of disappointment if Ret did not reciprocate them—and disappointment was one of the triggers of her depression. But she just couldn’t resist. She loved everything about Ret—his bright skin and eyes, his hair that was even blonder than her own, his good heart and innocent nature.

  Most of the time, her slow-growing relationship with Ret staved off her depression, keeping the monster locked in its cage. But she knew opening her heart was like opening the cage door, making her vulnerable to another outbreak—like when they met Alana, the pretty princess of Sunken Earth. The thought of Ret pursuing someone else reawakened Paige’s mental complex that day, and her deep-rooted fee
lings of inadequacy returned. She experienced similar distress when Miss Carmen came into the picture. Fortunately, these dives into depression were stopped fairly quickly each time because of something that Ret did to reaffirm his concern for Paige, and she was riding high (her highest ever, perhaps) after she helped him collect the wind element in Antarctica. Now, however, after seeing yet another female stranger steal her place at Ret’s side, she was distraught like never before.

  For Paige, the ups and downs of romance (especially the downs) affected her disorder more than anything else. The high-stakes emotion of love seemed to rock the teeter-totter of her inner zen with the heaviest hand of all. Some might call Paige a helpless romantic. Others might say she was unstable or obsessed. And perhaps that was true, for no matter how level-headed and straight-laced she appeared on the outside, she was still on the inside just a teenage girl—one who was turning out remarkably well despite her challenges. Plus, to her credit, there was something about this land that brought out the mutant in each of us. For, in some way or another, and whether we realize it yet or not, are we not all mutants?

  And is that not what depression is—a mutation? A cancer of the mind, it invades something healthy and functional and reprograms it into something foreign and destructive. It ranks especially terrible because it has a way of feeding itself—gaining strength from the misery it causes, like how a hurricane intensifies while spinning above water. Paige was old enough now to know when the storm was brewing—mature enough to recognize the signs and try to avoid it, which always proved easier to attempt than to actually accomplish. In some sick way, the syndrome seemed to infect its victims with a venom that eroded their rationality—that mutated their desire to be free of the monster into a desire to befriend it.

  Such was happening to Paige in this moment. She knew she needed to snap out of it, but the mutated part of herself produced a steady supply of depressing thoughts in order to keep itself alive. It had waited to flare up until she was worn down, knowing she was most susceptible when weak and alone, like a predator stalking its prey. Dizzy and delirious, Paige’s march slowed to a stagger. She was mutating, and her will to fight was becoming weaker the longer it went on. She fell to her knees, her face flushed and awash with tears. It was over; there was no one to save her. Laying on her side in the dirt, she curled up into a ball as the unseen darkness closed in on her.