The Way North
Copyright© 2025 by Art Samms
Chapter 11
We stayed still for a long time, just staring at that shimmering light through the trees. I felt the hair on my arms stand up.
Finally, I took Lena’s hand. “Let’s move back,” I said. “Let’s talk about this a little. We shouldn’t get too close yet.”
We stepped into the shade at the edge of the clearing, just far enough that the hum softened into near silence. I could think again, or at least try to. That hum — it hadn’t been there the first time, which had me thinking.
Lena turned to me, her eyes wide and bright in the fading light. “That’s what brought you here, isn’t it?”
I nodded slowly. “Yeah. Or something just like it. It looks the same ... at least from this distance.”
Her next words came without hesitation, quiet but certain. “Then let’s go through together.”
I looked at her sharply. “Lena—”
“I mean it,” she said, squeezing my hand. “Wherever it leads, I’ll go with you.”
My heart clenched. God, how I loved her courage — that quiet, unwavering strength. But I couldn’t let her walk into this blind.
“Listen,” I said, crouching down on a fallen log, motioning for her to sit beside me. “We don’t know where this leads. It might take us to my time. Or some other time. Maybe it’ll be a hundred years before or after. Hell, maybe we’ll come out where there are dinosaurs running around.” I smiled a little, trying to lighten the weight of it, but my voice caught on the last word.
She didn’t laugh. She just tilted her head, thoughtful. “You really don’t know, do you?”
I shook my head. “No. I don’t even know if we can go through together. I was alone last time.”
She didn’t waver. “Then we’ll find out together.”
I let out a shaky breath. “If we do end up back in my time ... it’ll be different. There are things there you can’t imagine. We’ve already talked about some of them — machines that fly, lights without fire, people talking through boxes across the world. It’ll be loud, fast, confusing.”
She frowned slightly. “Machines that fly. And other things. I remember.”
“Airplanes,” I said. “Cars. Electricity. It’s called technology.”
She mouthed the word slowly, as if tasting it. “Tek-nol-o-gy.”
“Yeah.” I smiled faintly. “And people read and write everywhere. You’ll need to learn.”
Her face softened. “I want to. I’ve wanted that all my life.”
“I’ll teach you,” I said immediately. “If we make it back — no, when we make it back — I’ll teach you everything I can. I promise.”
She looked at me for a long time, and something unspoken passed between us — something that felt like trust, love, and fate all tangled up together.
Then I remembered the coins. I reached into my pack and pulled out the small pouch, setting it in her palm. “I found these near that shack,” I said. “Old coins. Some gold.” I showed her the other assortment of coins I’d put together along the way.
She opened the bag and let them spill gently into her hand, the late sun catching the metal in flashes of light. “They’re just coins,” she said, puzzled.
“In this time, maybe,” I said. “But where I come from ... they’re rare historical things. People collect them. They might be worth a fortune. Enough to start a life.”
She blinked at me. “If you say so, Caleb,” she said with a little shrug. “Then I believe you.”
I closed her hand around the bag and folded her fingers over it. “They’re ours,” I said. “Our start.”
She looked down at our hands — mine rough and scarred, hers strong and slender. Then she looked up again, meeting my eyes squarely. “You said before you wanted a life with me,” she said softly. “I believe this might be the way to have it. Whatever’s on the other side, I’ll take the chance.”
There was no tremor in her voice, no trace of fear. Only certainty.
I could only nod, my throat too tight to speak.
We sat together as the light from the portal shimmered faintly through the trees, the sound of the forest dimming around us as if even the world were holding its breath. The decision settled between us as easily as breathing. The sun was dropping, the light from the portal gleaming brighter in the shadows, beckoning. Lena looked at me once more, her eyes steady, and nodded.
“That’s it, then,” I said softly.
We moved toward it together, each step quiet and deliberate, as though the earth itself might protest. The air grew thick with a kind of vibrating pressure, a sensation more felt than heard. My heartbeat seemed to match its rhythm. The mysterious hum got louder as we approached.
When we reached the edge of the shimmer, I saw it: a trap door beneath the light, half-buried in leaves and dirt, made of some strange silvery metal that caught the glow and scattered it in ripples. Just like before.
Lena knelt beside me. “This is it?” she whispered.
“This is it,” I said. My voice barely carried over the pulse in my ears.
We looked at each other—long enough to say everything words couldn’t. Then we joined hands. Her grip was warm and sure, the one solid thing in a world that was about to change again. In what way, we couldn’t say.
“Ready?” I asked.
She nodded once. “With you, yes.”
Together, we pulled.
The trap door lifted easily, almost weightless. Beneath it, there was no staircase, no tunnel—only light. A swirling, liquid brightness that looked almost like fog, alive with motion. The hum grew even louder, wrapping around us. I felt the pull before I could think to resist, a soft but irresistible force.
“Lena—” I managed, turning toward her. Her face was lit from below, her eyes wide with wonder and something close to joy.
Then everything folded in on itself.
The air rushed out of my lungs. My vision blurred, shapes and colors melting into one another. I felt as though I were falling and floating at the same time, Lena’s hand the only thing anchoring me. There was a roaring in my ears, a flicker of light behind my eyelids—then, just as suddenly as it began, it stopped.
The fog cleared.
I was standing upright, my feet on solid ground, sunlight pressing against my face. It was hot, humid—summer, unmistakably. It seemed to be mid-morning, but I couldn’t say for sure. I blinked and looked around. Trees, thick and green. The air shimmered with heat. A cicada buzzed somewhere close.
Lena was still holding my hand. We looked at each other first—both of us there, whole, together. Then we turned our gaze outward, taking in the woods, the silence, the utter unfamiliarity.
“Are we...?” she started, her voice low with awe.
“I don’t know,” I said, my throat dry. “But we’re not where we were.”
We turned slowly in place, scanning the endless green. No houses. No roads. No sound but the wind and the cicadas.
The door that had carried us here was gone, as though it had never been.
For a long moment, we just stood there, still hand in hand, surrounded by sunlight and mystery.
Wherever we were—whatever time this was—we had crossed together. We just stood there for awhile, taking it all in—the trees, the heat, the strange stillness of the place. It felt real, but fragile somehow, as if one wrong word might shatter the moment and send us tumbling somewhere else again.
After a few minutes, I found my voice. “We should move,” I said. “See if there’s anything—anyone—around.”
Lena nodded. We started walking, picking our way through the trees. The woods were thick, green, and heavy with summer air. I recognized the look of the forest—the species of trees, the smell of damp earth—but that didn’t mean anything. I didn’t expect the natural world to change much in a hundred and seventy years, at least not out here.
Every few steps, Lena reached out to touch a branch or a patch of moss, as if to make sure it was real. I couldn’t blame her. My own hands were trembling slightly, though I tried not to let her see.
After maybe ten minutes of wandering, I stopped. “I think we’re ... somewhere in the same region I left from. Appalachian foothills, maybe,” I said. “But I can’t be sure.”
Lena looked around and shrugged. “Trees all look the same to me,” she said softly.
That made me smile. I was about to say something else when I heard it—barely audible at first, a low, steady rumble seeming to come from above. It grew slightly louder, rising above the rustle of leaves.
I looked up instinctively—and my breath caught. High above, slicing across the bright blue sky, was a commercial airliner, silver and sleek, sunlight flashing off its wings.
For a second, my brain just froze. Then I felt a grin spread across my face. “Lena,” I said, pointing upward. “Look.”
She followed my gaze. Her mouth dropped open. “What ... what is that?”
“That,” I said, my grin widening, “is one of those flying machines I told you about.”
She squinted up at it, shading her eyes. “It looks so small,” she said, disbelief in her voice.
“That’s because it’s so high,” I said. “There are probably a couple hundred people on that plane.”
Her eyes snapped to mine. “People? Inside it?”
I nodded.
She watched it for another long moment, until it disappeared beyond the treeline. Then she shook her head. “There’s no way I’d ever get inside that thing,” she said firmly.
I laughed, a little too loud, the sound breaking the tension. “Once you see what it can do, you might change your mind.”
She gave me a sideways look, half amused, half doubtful. “We’ll see,” she said.
We stood there for a while longer, letting it sink in. The plane was gone, but the reality of what it meant hung in the air. We’d made it. We were home—or at least, I was.
I reached into my pocket, suddenly remembering. My fingers brushed against the rough fabric of the small bag. I pulled it out and opened it carefully. The coins gleamed in the sunlight—silver and gold, untouched by time. They’d come through with us.
“Still with us,” I murmured.
Lena looked over my shoulder. “So, they made it too,” she said. “Guess we’re rich in your world now?”
“Maybe,” I said. “If we can figure out where the hell we are.”
We fell silent again. Around us, the forest was alive with summer sounds—birds, insects, the rustle of leaves—but no human voices, no engines, no buildings in sight. We were in my time, but as far as the world was concerned, we might as well still be lost.
I glanced at Lena. Her dress was torn at the hem, her hands still rough from travel. My own clothes looked even more ridiculous here than they had back there. We were dirty, tired, and completely out of place.
But we were together. And that counted for a lot.
Lena looked out at the trees, then back at me. “So,” she said quietly. “What now?”
I looked around, trying to picture the nearest highway, the nearest sign of civilization, the long road ahead.
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “But ... we’ll figure it out. Let’s keep moving. Maybe we’ll find a road.”
Lena nodded. “All right,” she said softly.
We picked a direction at random and started moving, our steps crunching softly on damp leaves. Sunlight filtered through the canopy, flashing across Lena’s face as she walked beside me. She kept glancing upward, as if half expecting another of those planes to appear. It was apparent that her curiosity had been piqued.
After a while, she said, “That thing in the sky ... how far did you say it was?”
“Hard to tell,” I said. “Definitely a few miles above the ground.”
She gave me a look that said she wasn’t sure whether to believe me. “That high?”
“Yeah,” I said, smiling. “And that trip we took — from North Carolina to here? That took us, what, a few weeks?”
“Just about,” she said, watching the path ahead.
“Well,” I said, “on one of those airplanes, it’d take maybe two hours. Three, at most.”
Lena stopped walking and turned to look at me, her expression unreadable. “Two hours,” she repeated slowly. “You mean we could’ve just flown there?”
I laughed. “If we’d been born in my time, yeah. You’d get on a plane, sit in a seat, have something to drink, maybe watch a movie, and before you knew it, you’d be there.”
She shook her head, half in disbelief, half amusement. “You can keep your flying machines,” she said. “Ain’t no way I’m getting in something that high off the ground.”
I chuckled. “You’re not the first person to say that.”
We walked on in silence for a while longer. The ground sloped almost imperceptibly downward, and through the trees we could see an occasional flicker of blue sky.
Lena spoke again, her tone quieter now. “All those things you told me ... machines that do people’s work, lights that burn without fire, people talking to one another across miles of land — that’s all real?”
“All real,” I said. “And more than I can explain. You’ll see soon enough.”
She was quiet for a moment, then said, “Seems like a world full of magic.”
“Sometimes it feels that way,” I said. “But it’s not magic. It’s ... science, knowledge. People building on what came before. Remember that people have had many, many years to learn new things.”
She gave a little smile, though it didn’t quite reach her eyes. “And where do people like me fit in this world?”
That one made me stop and think. I slowed my pace a little, looking down at her. “You’ll fit,” I said. “It won’t all be easy, but you’ll have choices. You’ll be free to learn, to live how you want. You’ll be able to read, to write, to work — anything you set your mind to.”
She took that in silently, nodding once, her lips pressed together. Then she said, “Well, I aim to learn, then. You said you’d teach me. I’m holding you to that.”
“You have my word,” I said.
We kept walking. Every so often I’d catch her staring at the sky again, her expression caught somewhere between awe and disbelief. For all the strangeness, she carried herself with the same quiet courage she’d had every step of our journey — through mud and fear and hunger and hope.
The diffused sunlight slanted through the trees, warmer and clearer than it ever seemed in the nineteenth century. I could feel it pressing against my skin, that heavy North Carolina summer heat — so familiar, and yet, now, it felt foreign. There was no trace of wood smoke, no distant clang of a blacksmith’s hammer. Only the steady whisper of insects, and beyond that, a silence that made the hair on my arms stand up.
We’d been walking for a couple of hours, slowly descending, seeming to confirm my hypothesis that we were in the foothills. The landscape felt the same as it had before I vanished — the same rolling slopes, the same sweetgum trees — but the air smelled cleaner, sharper, almost sterile. Lena walked beside me, eyes constantly shifting between the treetops and the direction of the sun. She said softly, “We’re heading southeast.”
I smiled faintly. “You sure?”
“My mama taught me how to follow the sun,” she said, touching her hand to her heart. “It’s late morning, and it’s almost straight ahead. That means we’re going this way.” She pointed down the slope. “Southeast.”
Once again, she’d aced me with her knowledge of navigation via nature. And it matched my own rough sense of geography. Somewhere beyond the next few ridges should’ve been the same stretch of Carolina where I’d disappeared — the same ground, two centuries apart.
We kept going until we heard a distant sound that made Lena grab my arm — another low, steady rumble, this one ground-based, like thunder that didn’t fade. It took me a moment to place it. When we finally stepped out of the trees and saw the narrow two-lane road below us, the source became clear.
Cars.
Three of them passed in quick succession, tires hissing on the asphalt. The sunlight flashed off their windshields like signal flares.
Lena froze. “Caleb,” she whispered, “what are those?”
Once again, I couldn’t help but grin. “Those are cars — the other machines I told you about. That one’s a truck.”
She blinked, speechless, as another one sped by. “They move so fast,” she breathed. “And there’s no horse ... no smoke.”
“They’re powered by engines,” I explained softly. “You’ll get used to them.”
She didn’t answer, just stood there staring, her expression a mixture of awe and something close to fear.
We made our way down to the shoulder of the road, keeping our distance as more cars passed. Each one left a faint wake of warm air and exhaust. I could see a green road sign up ahead, half-covered by brush. Asheville 48 miles.
My stomach turned over. Asheville — that confirmed it. We were, in fact, back in North Carolina.
We followed the road toward a small town, the kind of place that defined the word “quaint”. Gas stations. A diner with a neon sign. A little pharmacy with glass doors. It was all so mundane — yet it felt impossibly futuristic after everything we’d lived through.
Then I saw it: a digital temperature display outside the bank, glowing bright red in the daylight. It flickered between 88°F and a date — AUG 3 2027.
I stopped walking. The numbers blurred for a second before I could focus on them again.
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