When I awoke it was morning. A quick glance at the hands I held in front of my face confirmed I was much older than four years old. I hauled ass to the bathroom and examined my face closely in the mirror. An almost eighteen-year-old Sean Taggart looked back at me and I breathed a sigh of relief.
My recall of what had happened during my dream was very detailed and the reason I had panicked and run for the bathroom mirror was that I had remained with Charles and Grandma for two years! It seemed that no time had passed here in 'the other world' at all during my dream.
With my first concerns out of the way, my next priority was to find Brenda and share everything with her. No way was I dumb enough to go to Mom with this! She had come down on me hard as I was growing up, whenever I mentioned anything even remotely outlandish. Charles and Grandma had explained to me that Mom was in denial.
Brenda and I were in our senior year. Christmas break had just started, so there was no school to worry about. I wasted little time wolfing down just enough cereal to satisfy Mom that I'd had breakfast and headed for our front door.
"Sean! Put on your heavy coat please and make sure you've got a hat and gloves, Mister!" called Mom.
Once I'd bundled up to Mom's satisfaction, I opened the door. Snow had fallen overnight, and it made everything look fresh and clean. There was something else different about the morning though and it brought a huge grin to my face.
The Road! I could see it, I could feel it, it was still there and I could still connect to it! My body tingled almost like it did when Brenda gave me that special feeling when we were together. I could hear the words of the birds chattering away all around me, as I stepped out into the virgin snow.
A new feeling came to me as I walked through our garden, new yet somehow familiar. It spoke to me of the bite of the frost and of a deep and all consuming need to sleep and rest. Of course, it was the soil beneath my feet!
My ability to somehow get the best out of any plot of land had always been based on my understanding of the soil and of the plants that grew in it. This was a deeper understanding altogether. I could feel the soil resting for the winter months, waiting 'til spring would warm it and bring it bursting to life once more.
The truck was buried under heavy snow and I was staring at it, trying to decide if driving today was such a good idea.
"Noisy is coming, noisy is coming, noisy is coming," chirped the birds in the old Birch tree. I wondered what they meant and then I heard an engine sound.
As a practised gardener, I knew what a lawnmower sounded like, but mowing the lawn was extremely unlikely given all the snow. The noise grew louder and the birds got more and more excited in their chatter. You tell me what sounds stranger to you - me hearing and understanding the birds, the possibility that someone was mowing their lawn in two or three feet of snow or the sight of Brenda wrapped up in woollens and skidooing down the street towards me?
Yep, the noise was 'my girl' coming slowly towards me through the snow on some kind of weird looking sled. She wasn't moving very fast, and it took her a few minutes to reach me.
I liked the new term that had sprung unbidden into my head - 'my girl'. That's how I thought of her now and it gave me a warm and fuzzy feeling that just felt right - yep, my girl, that's what she was.
When Brenda pulled to a stop beside me, I looked over her sled and recognised a fair bit of it as the old mower I had 'thrown away' at the end of the summer. Brenda saw that I recognised the bits.
"I told you there was nothing wrong with the engine that a decent mechanic couldn't fix," she said. "Some business-man you're going to make, Sean if you keep throwing away your assets!"
"But how did it end up like this?" I asked, amazed at what my girl had built out of what I had thought was scrap.
"Dad had some old junk that needed to be used up and he's been teaching me welding. Put that together with my natural talent and the rest, as they say, is history!"
She was wearing a thick, green, parka with a fur-trimmed hood. The hood was thrown back and a bright red 'bobble' hat sat on her head, covering her brown hair and her ears. The red scarf and gloves accessorised in that way that girls seem able to do and she was wearing sturdy looking boots which had her jeans tucked into them.
"Come on, slow-coach! You should have cleared the drive by now so your Mom can get off to work. You do want us to have the house to ourselves today, don't you?" she asked with a laugh.
Brenda's words acted as a pretty damned good incentive. I don't believe I've ever managed to clear our drive that quick before, although my girl did help quite a bit. I slyly used the power I had stored up to help as well and we made real fast progress. I knew I had lots to share with Brenda once we had finished, but now I was thinking of other priorities.
The town plough passed up the street before we were finished and dumped a deep pile of snow where the end of our drive met the street. I couldn't resist blasting the last few feet using the 'power' instead of the snow-shovel and Brenda gasped at my little display. I heard Charles laugh inside my head and then the voice told me not to waste my gifts on building any more snow fortresses.
Mom was impressed with our efforts and she managed a quick 'hi' to Brenda and 'bye' to me as she rushed off to her first appointment of the day.
We stamped our feet on the porch to get the worst of the snow off of our boots, and hung up our layers of survival gear in the hall. Brenda looked really cute with her nose and cheeks tinged a deep pink from the cold and I could read the glimmer in her brown eyes for what it was.
There aren't many things that would stop me from sharing the details of my dream with my girlfriend, but the prospect of what she had in mind was certainly one of them. Brenda had recently progressed our relationship to the point that oral sex was one of our favourite things - duh! Of course it was!
I had already seen Brenda naked quite a few times now. Our relationship was developing nicely, but she still had a kind of cute shyness about her.
Once we made it to my room, she blushed as she unbuttoned her blouse and lowered her pants. I got to see her brown nipples again and the white panties she favoured today. Yep, my girl had certainly come up with a fine way to spend the day and I was just going to do as I was told!
"I swear you've grown some Sean Taggart. This thing is harder than usual to fit in my mouth," she said as she managed to do just that.
As usual I was just thankful for what she gave me. We were laying head to toe and I was worshipping what could only be described as the prettiest thing I'd ever seen!
After, we cuddled for a while but my room was cold, even under the duck feather quilt and we dressed hurriedly and headed for the kitchen. Making hot chocolate together was nice and we huddled round the kitchen table soaking up the heat from the drinks and Mom's old-fashioned range.
"Sean, you had better let it out or I swear you're gonna burst," said Brenda.
"What?" I replied in surprise.
"You've been dying to tell me something since the moment I arrived. Now come on, spill!"
She picked up her hot chocolate and plopped herself down in my lap.
I smiled as I recognised just how well this beautiful girl had come to know me already. It seemed she was able to read me like an open book, but I didn't think that was a bad thing at all.
While we had been shovelling snow I had been thinking deeply about how much of my dream I should share with Brenda. I'd come to the conclusion that I should tell her all of it. After all, we didn't have secrets between us and I didn't want to start developing bad habits.
Brenda's face was a study as she focused on what I was telling her. Her eyes grew wide with amazement and her mouth dropped open as I told her about speaking with Charles and then taking to the air to 'fly the Road'.
"Wow! That is so awesome. I wish I could have dreams half as good as that," Brenda exclaimed.
I coughed and nodded my head to one side, indicating to her that she should look round. Brenda gasped when she realised I had floated us both up out of the chair and that we were hovering above the kitchen floor.
"It's real? You can really fly?" she gasped.
I nodded and tried to control the stupid grin on my face at how impressed she was.
"Oh ... My ... God!!" she squealed. "Sean, this is incredible! What else happened?"
Once I had lowered us both back into the chair, I told her about the eagles, meeting Grandma and then the story that Charles had shared with me.
"The weird thing about my dreams up until now, has been that I'm always four-years-old in them. Charles told me that was the normal age for me to enter my training as if there was nothing unusual about it.
"He started off by explaining about a different world to this one - a world called Gael. He wouldn't tell me a lot about it instead he insisted I learn for myself. You know that way adults always think they know best and tell you about the things you don't want to know, the boring stuff?"
Brenda nodded to show that she understood all too well this annoying habit that all adults seemed to have.
"Well, Charles was a bit like that. He said he was to be my teacher and that I would have to study hard. He was always looking to do a deal in return for anything he told me. You know - okay, Sean I'll tell you more about flying if you finish this geography lesson - that kind of thing."
Brenda nodded again making it clear that she was used to being treated the same way by her parents.
"Anyway, the rest of the dream was weird. I had to learn the geography of Gael and Charles also made me work really hard learning the language. He said there was a lot for me to cram in and that I would thank him in the long run, for being so hard on me.
"The best bit was learning more about the soil and the living things that grow in it. Charles seemed to be impressed with how quick I was in learning all of that stuff."
"Well of course you would be good at that, you are the best gardener in the Midwest after all," said Brenda proudly.
"It was frustrating though. I wanted to control the dream. I wanted to fly with the eagles and investigate the world he was showing me in the geography lessons, but it was like no other dream in that sense. I had to do what he wanted, not what appealed to me. He told me that there was much more to learn and that I would be coming back for more lessons."
"What kind of lessons?" Brenda asked.
"He said I had to learn about the creatures in Gael and that eventually I would get to the hardest lessons."
"What? What?" Brenda urged me to continue.
"I don't know. He wouldn't tell me. It was like when your parents tease you when they want you to do something, you know. 'Sean, you need to understand this stuff first before I'll tell you about that' - that kind of thing."
"Mom and Dad do that to me all the time. It sucks big time, doesn't it?" said Brenda.
"Yep, but I wasn't expecting it in my dream. Anyway that was about it. I did get to do some flying but nowhere near enough. Apart from the plant stuff the only other neat things were being able to spend time with Grandma and learning more about controlling the power. But Charles did say I would be back."
Brenda seemed to instinctively know that boys are really bad at remembering all of the important little things when they tell a story. She started to ask me questions and was soon getting me to remember snippets I had forgotten.
I told her that Charles and Grandma kept talking about me as if I was a different kind of being.
"They used words like 'your kind'," I remembered.
The fact that I could understand the eagles was something else that Brenda got excited about when I told her.
"I wasn't that surprised that I could do that because I've been able to understand the birds and even dogs around here for a few years now," I said.
Brenda got a little annoyed that I hadn't bothered to share that with her before now, but she soon got over that and carried on with her interrogation.
"Oh, there was something else that was a little weird. The cabin that Grandma and I lived in was almost a carbon copy of your cabin in the woods. Well, apart from the fact that it didn't have all the modern gadgets and technology," I told her.
"Sean, this is really exciting. What this Charles taught you in the dream seems to have remained with you. Can you remember the language?"
I was able to speak to her in what I knew was fluent Gaelic, but Brenda just looked at me quizzically of course.
"I just told you that you have the deepest, loveliest, brown eyes that any girl has ever had," I translated.
That earned me a scorching kiss from my girl and I was glad we weren't floating at the time or we would probably have come down with a bump!
"What do you think it all means, Sean?" Brenda asked me.
"I'm not sure. It almost felt as if Charles was preparing me for something. It's like I've got a job to do and he's getting me ready for it. I don't know. Some of the dream was great and some of it was pretty boring. Normally when I have this dream I wake up as soon as Grandma appears but this time it went on a lot longer. I think I was there for about two years in the dream."
"Have you told your Mom about all of this?"
Once again, Brenda's question reminded me about an important point that I hadn't yet told her about.
"No way! Mom gets real upset if I ever talk about my weird dreams. Anyway, Charles and Grandma told me that Mom is in denial. They said that Mom ran away from Gael when I was a baby to try to keep me from learning any of this stuff. They said that she's going to have to face up to it sooner or later, but I don't want to be the one to raise it with her. No, sir!"
Brenda was curious about the amount of power that seemed to come from the road and that there didn't seem to be any technology in my dream at all. The most advanced thing I had seen in the dream had been an old-fashioned plough.
Engines and machines were what got Brenda most excited (although recently, oral sex seemed to be her favourite!) and she was disappointed that my dream didn't feature more of her kind of thing.
After what seemed like hours of her questions she eventually ran down and I suggested we go out and get some fresh air.
"Can we fly round the kitchen once more?" she asked excitedly.
Nothing was too much trouble for my girl and I held her tight and zipped around the kitchen several times while she squealed her delight.
We bundled up into our coats, hats, scarves and gloves once more and went back out into the snow. Brenda once again read my change of mood and commented on it.
"A minute ago you were just goofing around, but now you look as if you've suddenly got a purpose again," she said.
I shook my head at how she picked up on things. I had remembered something else important and wanted to do something about right away.
"You know, part of the lessons I had with Charles was about using different plants as medicine. I'm pretty sure that Gael doesn't have doctors and hospitals the way we do and he was really insistent that I study that stuff really hard. For some reason I think it's important for me to gather a basic stock of plants and herbs that I can use," I told her.
"What? In this snow?" she laughed at me.
"That just means I'll have to look a little harder, but I think I know where I can find some of the things I'll need."
Together we cleared the snow off of my truck and I positioned some lengths of wood so that Brenda could ride her sled into the back. I threw the wood in the back too so that we could use them to unload it later.
Driving in the snow took all of my concentration and Brenda was careful not to distract me. She hummed away happily to herself, as she tried to guess where I was headed.
My plan was to make for Indian Wood.
The trip took twice as long as it would have normally because of the conditions. I had to park the truck almost half a mile away, as the snow was just too deep to risk. That meant we had a difficult walk and it was cold. For once we were glad our folks had drilled us on wearing warm clothing.
The ley lines around me were getting easier to identify and seeing them gave me an idea of how the 'walk' could be made easier. I didn't think there would be much risk so long as I didn't make it too obvious so I wrapped one arm round Brenda's waist and told her to hang on to my shoulder.
I used the power to lift us both. I stopped only a few inches above the surface of the snow and then began skimming us along in the direction of the woods. Brenda thought this was wonderful and a very practical use for my new ability.
It was only a matter of minutes before we reached the edge of the trees and I set us down once more. We looked behind us and laughed because there were no footprints to mark our journey. Tugging her hand, I pulled her into the trees.
The sense I got from the trees around us was that some of them were very old. There was a mixture of hardwood and softwood and the coniferous variety had done a good job of keeping the worst of the snow off of the ground beneath them.
Brenda watched me moving quietly through the wood, stopping every so often to pick a few leaves or to unearth a piece of root. She wanted to know the properties of each thing that caught my eye. I expected her to be sceptical about what could be treated with the plants, but she seemed to trust my feeling for nature without question.
In the very centre of the wood was a Yew tree and I grew excited because I knew the kind of things its berries could be used for. This deep into the trees no one could see us and I gathered some of the power around me and then flew up to the highest branches to gather the freshest fruits.
With my latest prize stored away in the pocket of my jacket, I suggested we start back for the truck.
"It's so peaceful and quiet in the woods," Brenda commented, "the snow seems to absorb sound and make things even more quiet than normal."
"That's how much you know," I replied with a snicker.
"What do you mean?" she asked, a little upset with me.
"Well, the reason it's so quiet is that we're making so much noise we've frightened off every animal for miles," I replied.
"But apart from a bird or two, I haven't seen sign of anything."
As we retraced our steps I pointed out the tracks of a fox and several turkeys.
"Don't fret on our account, Red. We mean you no harm my friend," I said conversationally.
"Who are you talking to?" Brenda asked.
I tugged on her hand to bring her to a halt and nodded my head to our right.
"What?" she asked.
"Just beside that little Holly bush," I said quietly.
Brenda gasped when she eventually made out the fox that was watching us. It was on edge, and ready to run if we made the slightest wrong move, but I spoke quietly to it once more.
"Don't be afraid, Red. We're just enjoying the woods the same as you are."
Hearing my words did seem to calm the fox down and its nose rose into the air as if she was trying to catch and mark our scent.
"Isn't he dangerous?" Brenda whispered.
"He is actually a she, and no, she won't bother us."
I waved at the fox and it turned and disappeared deeper into the woods.
"She almost looked as if she understood what you were saying," said Brenda. She looked at my face and then added, "Oh, she could, couldn't she?"
I nodded and we started walking back the way we had come.
Edited By TeNderLoin