But otherwise, there was really not much to see, and not any obvious places to hide anything. It was completely bare. Unfortunately, it seemed like another dead end.
At least it was dry, and sheltered, and cozy. If nothing else, they could spend the night here.
Maybe warm up, rest a bit.
“Think you can get the fireplace to work?” she asked.
He examined it. “I don’t see why not.”
He handed her the candle, went over to it, and quickly extracted all the debris and branches.
Caitlin sneezed at the dust.
He reached up into the chimney and extracted more branches, and gathered them up and carried them out of the cottage.
Caitlin could hear climbing on the roof, and then heard him extracting more branches from the chimney. She suddenly felt a small draft of air, and realized he had cleared it. Seconds later, he appeared back inside, carrying a small stack of dry, burnable wood. She marveled at how fast he did everything. The speed of the vampire race. It was incredible. It made her feel so sluggish in comparison.
He placed the wood in the fireplace, took the candle from her, and lit it in several places. Within a few minutes, they had a roaring fire in the cozy little cottage. She was grateful for the heat.
She crammed their candles into the stone walls, up high, and between that and the fire, the room was now quite bright and warm. With her hands now free, she got close to the fire and leaned back against the stone wall. She rubbed her hands before it, and was starting to feel better.
Caleb followed suit, sitting on the opposite side of the fire, his back against the wall. They faced each other across the small room, their feet almost touching.
Caleb examined the room, looking at the floor, scanning the walls, then the ceiling. He looked intently at the bricks in the fireplace, scrutinizing every possible detail. Caitlin found herself looking, too. They both had the same thing on their minds: what could be hiding here? And where?
“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.