Out Of Reach

Chapter Two: Dreams & Memories

Chapter Two: Dreams and Memories

Tuesday, July 7th, 1:37 am

Carter woke with a start. In her dream, something was chasing her. While the memory of whatever it was had immediately disappeared upon waking up, there was still something lingering in her mind about the dream that she did not like. Her back was drenched in sweat and her stomach was in knots. She glanced through the curtains and saw that it was still dark out, and she heard a gentle rainfall. The clock on her bedside table read 1:37. She was completely exhausted and wide awake all at the same time, and she decided to pay a visit to Max to calm her down. She loved having him so close, just one door down as opposed to a few blocks away back in town.

She slid her feet into her fuzzy slippers and took one last look through the curtains. She nearly had to do a double-take. Carter could have sworn that she saw glowing eyes staring at her from the woods across the gravel driveway. Carter began to argue with herself, trying to reason that it could have been anything. She had seen nearly everything that the woods had to offer over the years.

When she was young, she and Max had stumbled upon a small injured doe lying in the meadow between the cabin and the woods to the south. They immediately called her dad on their walkie talkie and he showed up fifteen minutes later with a trailer hitched to his four-wheeler. When her dad got close to the doe, she frantically tried to stand, but was unable to move, likely from exhaustion. She hardly put up a fight as dad strapped her down to the trailer and brought her back to the large empty barn on their property next to the detached garage. The garage had once been Carter's grandfather's workshop, but was mostly storage these days, as was the barn. Her father had cleared out one of the horse stalls and ordered Max and Carter to gather all of the old towels they could possibly find, and they created a little bed for the doe. Her father mashed some painkillers into some food and managed to get the doe to eat. Then, he taught them how to set a broken leg. They all pitched in, nursing the doe back to health over those next few weeks. Carter fell in love with the doe and named her Annie. She naively assumed that Annie would be grateful, that she would realize how they had saved her, and that when they finally did let her go, she would want to stay. But alas, as soon as Carter's father opened the stall, Annie fled. They never did see her again, the doe with the limp.

The year before that, Carter came across a fox while playing hide and seek with Max. She was sitting quietly in the bushes, hiding from Max, when it strolled past and stopped to stare her down. It was the most elegant creature that Carter had ever seen, with fur as red as the sunset and eyes that sparkled like the lake at night. The fox quickly lost interest and ran off, but Carter often remembered that little fox.

...

With her heart pounding, Carter crept out of her room, the door squeaking as she squeezed through. Roadie, who had been sleeping soundly outside of Thomas's door, lifted her head from her paws and gave a few thumps with her tail before laying her head back down again. The four of them each had their own rooms with Max and Josh's rooms coming first on either side of the hall, and Carter and Thomas's across from each other at the very end of the hall.

She padded down to Max's room and stopped before opening the door to listen to the familiar sounds of the cabin at night.

Thomas's soft snores, the fan going in Josh's room, the gentle even ticking of the grandfather clock in the living room.

At the other end of the hallway near the living room, there was a small table with a lantern on it. It had been her grandfather's, but Thomas had fixed it up to be solar powered so it stored up energy from the sun during the day and lasted all night.

Upon entering Max's room, Carter could see he was sleeping peacefully. Whenever she had nightmares, which was often, she liked to sleep next to him. It was much easier for her to do so at the cabin, as their parents generally frowned on them spending the night together since they began dating. When they were in town she would call him at all hours to tell him about the terrible dream she'd had, but by the time he picked up, she would often have already forgotten what the dream was about in the first place. Sometimes Max would sneak in through her bedroom window and stay with her, but he was always gone before she woke up.