Some Chapters From My Upcoming Work, 'Where Morning Never Comes'

The world of storytelling offers endless possibilities, but few stories linger in the mind like those that explore darkness and light in equal measure. My upcoming work, Where Morning Never Comes, dives into such a realm, weaving a narrative that challenges the boundaries between hope and despair, although shedding more light on the dark side, revealing the parts of history that are often left out.

The story revolves around Abigail Mason, a young girl on the third Roanoke Voyage (The one everyone knows, about the disappearance of the colony, in 1587). The book quickly offers a gripping glimpse into a world where hope feels distant and darkness lingers, especially for young Abigail, who is left with her aunt and uncle as food supplies dwindle, with little more than her doll as company, and a few troubled friends . At age 11, Abigail is the daughter of one of John White, head of the expedition’s top men, and provisions have run out, forcing him, her father, and Simon Fernandes, another captain, to return to England. Leaving behind some men in charge of the colony, along with Manteo, the historical native that befriended the English, the settlers run low on food and find they must voyage for help. Manteo takes some of the men to Croatoan, but they return with a hostile chief that wants the settlers to voyage to his lands on the other side of the sound. Soon, the colony finds themselves being held hostage, and Abigail befriends the chief’s daughter, in her plan to escape and return to the fort, for nothing more than to warn her father and the others of their fate when they return. But she must let go of her childhood and brave the trials of death, suffering, and betrayal, and outwit the forces that seek to control her, all to the backdrop of mother nature working magic in the pre-colonial new world. Below are some chapters from this work, along with some illustrations, that offers a glimpse into the themes, characters, and atmosphere that define this novel - particularly those after Abigail escapes the hostile group of natives, angered at the settler's ways, on her voyage back to Roanoke with her friend Tacumwah, the chief's daughter.

A young girl on a path through a dark forest, symbolizing an uncertain journey ahead.

THIRTY

THE SMALL RED bump on her head, from where George hit her with the stick, was caked with dry blood and she picked at it. Abigail pulled the long black braids of hair behind her head, to part it for Tacumwah to rub more of the ragweed on her scalp. A poultice of healing herbs and plants Tacumwah tore out in small handfuls from the bramble about them. It smelled of sage and basil leaf.

The girls sat together in the field and the early morning dew drops on the reed edges collected sunlight and scattered the glare in a thousand places and the birds sang a chorus echoing in the tree boughs, with the unseen autumn peepers balancing the harmony at ground level. The sunlight baked Abigail’s hair and she sat with her legs folded and Tacumwah spun around to face her, helping her remove briars from her dress.

Abigail found blood on her dress, and checked her hands, to see more blood than the stains on Tacumwah’s head. She felt a strong urge to spring up and run into the woods, like she might be dying, as her hand pulled her dress back, finding more blood on her legs.

She put a hand inside her chemise and removed two fingers, and they dripped with fresh, dark black blood. She darted upward for a moment and Tacumwah grabbed her by the arm and pulled her back. Abigail thought about the blood and it wasn’t the right time for it to happen. Why did it have to happen to her now, she thought. Out of all times for it to happen.

Tears rolled along her cheeks and Tacumwah held her arms and shook her to get her full attention. “Mawass'nen,” she said. “Kije manito,” she added. Tacumwah touched her fingers to Abigail’s and took the blood on her and reached toward Abigail’s cheeks. Abigail pulled away. They met eyes. Tacumwah kept her fingers raised with the blood on them and looked inside her, searching over the little settler girl’s face, like she was seeking something material inside of her brain. A point to steady, then reach in to fix. Abigail’s two light blue eyes swam with fear and sadness.

“Mawjaatch keshawehk,” Tacumwah said. And she took the blood on her fingers and wiped a run of it under each one of the dark brown eyes on her native face, two war stripes of Abigail’s blood on her.

And then she stood up with her bow in hand and faced the sun with her eyes closed to bask in the light with the blood on her.

TWENTY NINE

SHE AWOKE TO the muffled, moaning, grunting, squirming girl in the darkness.

The air was cold and her body was near rigid, her fingers felt like sticks attached to her hands. She rolled in mud and a light rain in the night left her in slick patches of dirt that made rising difficult until she had her dress under her knees to catch the ground and hoist herself with a firm grip on a clump of fescue. The moonlight helped illuminate the moaning, grunting bodies as she approached the two of them on the ground.

George Warren straddled Tacumwah, and she was bound in rope and squirming. He had his pants down around his knees and the back of his ruff covered his naked bottom and his red suspenders flapped about as he gripped her with his legs and kept her quiet with his hands around the binding rope he must have tied around her mouth as a crude gag. Abigail crept closer and rubbed her eyes to get a better picture of him raping her. Their forms were clearer and the clouds parted for more light to show them there.

A small broken branch sat beside him and she knew he must have knocked her out with it to tie the ropes and she could only obey what she felt must be done. She went for the stick with a horror of intense fear and sickness. She wanted to spew her guts and the more she watched him raping the native girl, grunting softly, the smell of brandy on him, the more she wished all people on earth were dead.

The stick felt light above her head and she raised it higher and dropped it with a firm whack and she knew she hit him hard enough when he grunted and slumped over with his chin tipped downward. He sat on the girl, still on top of her, slouched over in a prayer position.

She pushed him with the stick and he fell over on the ground, belly up. Tacumwah was squirming and Abigail dropped on her knees to help free her of the ropes tied around her hands. The native girl rose and pulled the gag from her soiled mouth and crawled to her feet. “Kokosh,” Tacumwah yelled at George, lying on the ground. She spit at him. “Kokosh,” she said to him. She stormed off to grab her bow and a small pouch she slung over her shoulder and made her way into the bushes.

Abigail stooped to check on George. He was still breathing but he was unconscious. “Wait,” she said and she followed the small girl into the growing darkness with the light of stars illuminating her outline and tree leaves concealing her path away from the sleeping boy.

IN MOONLIGHT MEANDERING down through branches and in open spaces around the shapes of small rock ledges in the nighttime woods they felt their way into the cover of forest and in the silence. They arrived into a small streaming brook that boiled over and the cascades filled the cold air with sounds of water moving from one stagnant vernal pool to something churning and containing life.

They moved without saying a word and the unspoken kept Abigail trusting her more, she thought, than if they might be speaking about the many things that really didn’t matter at all anymore.

Abigail followed the reflection of the moon, like a pearl in the distance of her focus, glowing in the shallow pools where the water quieted, in cascading steps, and her chaffed bare feet fell firm on the bedrock, as she dodged the water and kept nimble on her toes. They dropped into a wet carpet meadow and then they followed dry grass up an embankment and found comfort in some tall beach grass weeds, bedding down to sleep together for the night. They kept cuddled with their backs turned to stay warm and Abigail clutched onto Audrey and dreamed about being back at the fort, keeping her mind fixed on changing her clothing. It was all she could think of and what she desired most.

She slept and awoke and slept again in bursts of bright blue starlight that shrunk time and hours felt like mere blinks of her eyes. The funnels of blue plasma were like paths of eyes for her to find in her dreams and the eyes took her into many situations of things that came, things to come, and things that might be happening all around her, things arranged and close to happening, but might never come in the morning.

In early daylight hours she awoke to a deer grazing right beside them. The fawn was young and still with spots and snorting around in the grass, not more than ten paces from her naked feet.

She kept an eye open and she tipped her head and turned to find Tacumwah still asleep, or she thought so, but she couldn’t see the girl’s face, turned around. The deer chewed on grass and sniffed around and then lifted its head and shifted around its ears to listen to something in the distance. It darted. In a moment’s time another form showed up in the same spot to replace the deer, it was a small black wolf that smelled of scat and disease and it turned to look at Abigail, scared to move her finger an inch away, and then it sniffed the air and scampered off to follow the trail of the deer.

THIRTY ONE

THE VOICES DESCENDED upon them from all directions and caught their position in the woods and they scriggled lightly on unfirm ground and slid down a narrow chute along the path of rotted elms and rose muddied from the leaves. At the bottom segment of the embankment the ground was soft and Tacumwah motioned for Abigail to follow her up the side of the hill and into a mound of talus to dodge the downed logs and swamp sod.

When they reached the open forest along the north banks, they met with level ground and ran like startled deer through a quarter mile of thick woods until rocks appeared, some ledges and open boulder piles blocked by a lake of ferns with no bottom to them.

Abigail kept to the open rocks and stepped over the gaps between the stones. Tacumwah hurried her along and they found themselves at the end of the rock gallery hopping into a chasm between two plate-like shards as high as village huts and the leaf piles gave way.

Tacumwah disappear first with a faint rasping scream and Abigail dropped behind her, sliding into the hole under the canopy of sticks and dried leaves. She slid along a small downward chute at a slight angle and clawed at the roots and rocks in the tunnel until she dropped ten feet and fell upon a pile of bones and Tacumwah curled up on the ground next to her, holding a swollen ankle.

They sat looking up at the dust clearing and the sunlight on them, blackness all around in the cave they were trapped inside of. The voices were near, then far, and they waited several minutes to make sure they wouldn’t be found.

Tacumwah coughed and brushed some dust from her animal dress and Abigail knelt to help her stand. Tacumwah rose and shook her leg and Abigail knelt to pick up Audrey and then the two of them stared up into the hole above them and the light fell upon them and they wondered the same things, what was up there and how they would climb out, such things, without saying a word to one another.

Kaleidoscopic, the light came through in different places with leaves and plant matter and a morning moisture keeping a halo on the dust. Tacumwah left to examine the dark. Some flickers of flint rock, a few embers and she had a fire going, lit on a small torn piece of material, clothing from one of the bodies in the hole. When the fire lit the room Abigail staggered backward, only to scream lightly at another body of bones behind her.

The bones were everywhere, animals that may have fallen in and were trapped. Some of the bones were of people, natives perhaps, she guessed. A burial room. A pile of bodies sat roped together in the corner, men in armor and iron suits. Weapons laid scattered about on the floor around them. They were Spanish explorers and they had been dropped into the cavern. Or forced into it and murdered. Abigail searched the corpses and found a tinder box with flint chips and an old wrought iron lantern and she took the fire from Tacumwah and put the burning cloth into the lantern to help them seek a plan of escape from the tomb without burning their fingers.

The air was dank but the ground was dry and it was cold. They shivered and Abigail stripped one of the bodies of armor to look for bits of clothing that might help her keep her body temperature stable. The fabric was thin and eaten away by rodents but a mostly intact half smock was enough to keep her from shivering, draped over her shoulders, and then they made their way through to the back of the cave through some small corridors they had to squeeze through and stone slabs to duck under. Stalagmites dripped and water on the walls was green with lamp flora and smudges of sulfur and they reached an impasse in the cliff but there was light in a small tunnel that led upward.

“Niibin ongota,” Tacumwah said and she pointed up at the sky. Life was up ahead of them and a crawlspace away.

Abigail was picking around for bits of rope from behind them in the corridors and soon she was tying knots the way her father taught her. In the dark, with flickers of fire and their shadows playing games on the rock wall, they built a small hoist. They tied the yarn to a staff taken from one of the soldiers and fixed it along the top of the ledge above them near the exit hole.

Tacumwah crawled up and shimmied her way above the cavern and dropped the hoist for Abigail, with Audrey dangling from a tie on her waist, and helped pull her up through the hole and out again into the sunlight.

THIRTY FIVE

THE SHEER CLIFF face was a reminder that there was always something that required she go around it. They stood at the top of the arched rock wall and Abigail kicked a small shingle of limestone off the edge of the stone shelf and she listened to it skip along off the rocks below and shatter somewhere in the places below she couldn’t see but could guess about. There were tree tops underneath the ledge and she knew beneath them were more things they would have to maneuver, obstacles that would turn them one way. And then the other.

“Always something to go around. Aunt Alis always used to say that.” She turned to Tacumwah. The girl nodded along as she picked at the fine strands of fiber along the run of rope on her bow and Abigail thought she might have even understood what she was saying. “If we could turn into birds, we could fly right down to the bottom,” she added. Then she turned to Tacumwah. “But only little children believe in that kind of stuff.”

She slowly passed an eye toward the native girl and Tacumwah remained still and said nothing. Abigail looked at the doll in her arms. Audrey’s smile was a reminder that the world around her wanted to fool her eyes. For what other purpose could it be smiling if not to remind her that there was no reason for it, the smile. She looked at the doll again and she closed her eyes. She felt the weight of it. It felt like she had been carrying around an enemy dressed as a friend and the smile on Audrey’s face was all of a sudden much more sinister when she opened her eyes again.

She placed the doll down on the edge of the cliff, by her two bare feet. She looked at Audrey again, she would never forget that smile. A reminder never to smile like the doll and never trust a smile. Something she would always go around, if somebody smiled at her. The smile. Always go around it, she thought to herself.

She looked at Tacumwah. The native girl looked at her and nodded. She wore no smile on her face and Abigail intensely knew that Tacumwah understood her.

“Come on Tacumwah,” she said. “Let’s get on with it before the smiles get us.”

 THIRTY SEVEN

HIS FACE NEVER changed, not from the moment the arrow tip penetrated his ruptured eyeball, from the back of his skull. The distorted smile on him remained as he hobbled forward for several short paces. He collapsed and fell into the water with a flat, quiet splash.

Abigail looked up from the dead native, a small man with many wrinkles on him and she stared at Tacumwah. The little native girl kept her chin high and her eyelids aimed downward and she held her bow in one dangling hand and slowly approached Abigail. She reached out her other arm and pulled her friend to her feet.

The two girls brushed dirt from themselves and fell into a small routine of young girl things and they were regrouping and gathering their wits. Abigail found only tree leaves and a soft wind when she reached into her thoughts for the journey ahead.

“Awaten,” Tacumwah said and she motioned her hand with a finger pointed down, to turn around, and Abigail spun on her heels for Tacumwah to rub dirt off her back and tie her hair in a small bun. Her blonde locks fell into long clumps and Tacumwah tied the mane several directions, in a braid, and then slipped a cord around the hair knot. Abigail closed her eyes. The air was musty. She let her thoughts wander and a native popped into it and her eyes opened and he was there. Across the hillside, standing in a clump of blueberry bushes and scanning the horizon with his fingers above his brow.

Tacumwah tugged on her back and the girls slipped down to knee level. They crouched and ducked under some bushes and crawled along the undergrowth, griping rising tree roots, scraping over rocks and moving like two small creatures of the forest, until the trees grew thicker for them to cover in. They rose and darted into the woods. From behind they could hear a native, “Peyakwan,” he called, and then more natives called out and soon they were calling out again, in the distance. The girls continued to navigate the forest, for nearly an hour, scampering through brush and tall meadows, climbing along hillsides and keeping to the shade and covered areas of the woods. They moved in silence and with haste and when the air was still and the skies were empty Tacumwah slowed Abigail and they spied a small creek to wash in. The dry river forked along mud banks and fern beds and disappeared around a sharp cove of rocks.

They made their way toward the water, and in a staggering fall, Tacumwah fell backwards on Abigail, trotting behind her. Abigail caught her, the two girls looking up at the tall native.

He wore a tie around his head and his cheeks were heavily pitted and behind him two more natives appeared. The girls backed away cautiously, keeping to the edge of the brook, and they watched the natives standing about and watching them. They were a different tribe, Wanchese’s men, perhaps, Abigail thought. When the ground grew stiff again and the brush was light they spun and made their way into the woods. The natives never advanced. 

THIRTY EIGHT

THEY HELD THEIR breaths and they squinted their tired mud-covered eyes and Abigail pretended she was a dusty old boulder stone, squatting and hiding in the bushes. It felt like an hour, or more. She shivered and rubbed her arms with her hands to try and keep warm. They waited long after the voices dwindled and the sounds of natives pursuing them changed from quiet talk and chatter to birds singing and branches falling from high trees into the brush. Abigail rose to stand and Tacumwah cuffed her arm to keep her hidden, more time to make sure the woods were clear for them to move along on a new path toward the settlement.

In the distance a wolf howled and yapped and it sounded like there might be more than one, and Abigail shivered and Tacumwah looked her over, noting she was tired and hungry and they had ground to cover and the air grew dark and it smelled of a rainstorm approaching in the early night.

They stood and walked near to one another until it grew too black to see through the forest and the tangles of shadows were lighter than the air. A small embankment gave way with some broad tree roots that corralled a flat area of pressed clay, and when cleaned of leaves, it was practical for them to huddle together and keep warm from the night breeze.

They lay together, Tacumwah on her stomach and Abigail cloaked around her from behind. A wolf called again and the moon gave way from a patch of clouds and the native girl began to hum a tune and draw in the soil with a stick. She scrawled the shape of an animal with pointed ears and a long snout and “Wolf,” Abigail whispered to her. “My father has hunted and killed at least ten of them since we arrived.”

Tacumwah turned her head for a brief glance and then went back to scribbling shapes of more wolves in the dirt.

Abigail thought about her father and a band of fierce visions circled inside her mind and she saw her father, John White and Simon Fernandes on a boat, voyaging across harsh weather waves under the same pale moon, and her father was looking over the side of the ship stern, out toward her watching from above him. She wanted to call out to him, but she couldn’t open her mouth, nor her eyes, and soon only the waves remained, and they took her under, into sleep.

LIKE SMALL REAVERS, they arrived sometime in the morning hours and stole several acorns Abigail had gathered to nibble on, during the previous day’s walk, right out of her dress pocket. They were field mice and they scattered as evidence of their crimes in the dawn sunlight.

“Nda ni wi sinaganan,” Tacumwah said, taking note of her tiredness and growing hunger. Abigail understood, they had to be moving on.

They marched through swampy brush land and wet open fields and came through a small forest with a long, low ledge of rocks, with jagged cedar trees in the ditches along the edges of the ridge.

They walked through the stones and something struck at Abigail’s ankle, and she hopped away to avoid it striking again. It was a snake, and suddenly, they were all around her. More snakes than she could count. They had tails that rattled and she knew them as the dangerous ones that caused sickness and sometimes even death. Tacumwah approached one of them and grabbed it by the tail in a swift dart of her fingers and dangled it as it spun and snapped at her. It missed and quickly calmed. She tossed it down along the edge of the rocks, and went for another. And another. She removed three of them from their path, and then, “Kaawiindii wiikaa giishpin,” she said, shrugging and motioning for Abigail to follow her. Abigail shrugged also and tip-toed along the open rocks, stepping around several more snakes as they slithered and some lay still.

At the far edge of the rock embankment, they dove around and descended into another dry swamp and Abigail felt a rush of energy under her feet. They scampered in long twirling leaps and Tacumwah hummed some native tunes in quiet hymns and they covered much ground.

The marshes grew deeper and soon they stood knee-deep in dark brackish water along the edge of the river that fanned open in a broad channel that met with the sound. Tacumwah collected several buoyant logs and strapped them together after tying some cordgrass in woven, knotted ropes and Abigail clung to them as they made their way across the water with the small native girl along the back of the float, kick-swimming and pushing their raft through the waves. The sun showed and the water grew deeper and Abigail could see shapes in the water below her. She pressed her face into the liquid and she opened her eyes and a monstrous alligator lizard hovered not more than ten feet below the logs, moving with the current along the bottom. It looked to be twice as long as the make-shift raft they clung to.

She watched it without a rise in her heart and no fear in her thoughts, shifting its tail to slip away into a dark, muddy trail of river weeds and the empty water felt comforting.