The Gatekeeper Trilogy

by Scott Ferrell

  I passed people walking in the cool evening air or driving around on their last errands of the day. They meant nothing. I’m sure if I took a moment, I’d recognize many of them. In a town the size of Gate City, knowing at least half the population wasn’t outside the realm of possibility. But they didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was getting home. The only thing that matter was my mom. Aunt Stacy, too.

  I turned up my driveway, jumping the steps to the front door. I hesitated outside, listening while I caught my breath. There was only silence inside. I grabbed the door knob. It turned. Aunt Stacy wouldn’t leave the door unlocked, would she? Did she in hopes I would return?

  I twisted it slowly until the latch gave way with a click and opened the door about an inch. All was dark shadows inside. I opened the door further and stepped into the living room, crossed to the hall, glancing towards the bedrooms. The whole house was deadly calm.

  I pulled some energy from my well of power and called softly down the hall. “Mom? Stacy?”

  I wasn’t really expecting a reply. I got none. My rapidly beating heart started to sink. What if I was too late? What if something happened to them? I would never forgive myself if something had.

  “Mom?” I called out louder, edging down the hall.

  “Hello, Gaige.”

  The sound of the voice caused me to jump. My heart tried to beat itself out of my chest. I spun and peered into the dark kitchen, my power on the edge of release.

  A dark form stood from the kitchen table and moved toward me. I backed away until it moved into the weak glow of the microwave clock. My heart quit beating all together as I stared at the person standing in the kitchen.

  “It’s good to see you again,” he said.

  I stumbled to find words. “Dad?”

  PART TWO

  SHAKING EARTH

  18

  THE PLIGHT OF RICHARD PORTER

  My heart roared back to life and thumped hard against my chest. My knees grew weak and a lump climbed up my throat. There was no way my dad could be standing there in the kitchen. No way. I was dreaming. Hallucinating. The trip back through the gateway had scrambled my brain.

  I turned from the kitchen and called down the hall, “Mom? Stacy?”

  “They’re not here, Gaige.”

  I ignored the apparition from the grave and hurried down the hall. I opened my mom’s door. The bedroom was dark and empty. I stepped to Aunt Stacy’s door and knocked before opening it. The room was just as deserted. Neither room showed any sign of trouble. The beds were neatly made—something Aunt Stacy insisted on—and nothing seemed out of place.

  “Gaige, I know this is hard to understand.” The apparition stood at the entrance to the hallway.

  “I’m going crazy,” I muttered, not daring to look down the hall. I went into my room, shutting the door behind me.

  A knock immediately followed. I stumbled over a pile of clothes on the floor as I hurried to the bed. I sat and hung my head in my hands. I was going crazy. That had to be it.

  I lifted my head and looked around the bedroom. Everything was just as I had left it that morning I argued with Aunt Stacy. In fact, nothing had been disturbed. Even the sock drawer where I had retrieved the flashlight was still open. It was like everything that had happened over the past few days wasn’t real. Doubt started to invade my weariness. I couldn’t have imagined it all, could I?

  I looked at the clothes I wore—the same jeans and t-shirt with the drumming stick figure. They were a little dirtier than I remembered. Okay, a lot dirtier. I racked my brain for some reason for my clothes to be so filthy. Something other than I had just traveled to another world where I had walked down from a mountain, through a forest, and tramped through a swamp. Where I met strange creatures and was captured and tortured before escaping. Did all that really happen? If not, what had happened between leaving my house in the morning and getting home after school?

  No. I hadn’t imagined what happened. I couldn’t have. The bumps, scrapes, and dirt crusted all over my body testified to what I had gone through.

  Anger surged in me. I jumped from the bed and burst out of my room. My dad backed away at my sudden appearance, but only had so much room with the wall a couple feet behind him. I didn’t realize I had even raised my fist until his head snapped back and thumped against the wall.

  “Who are you?” I roared.

  “Look, Gaige,” he started, rubbing a hand on his jaw.

  “I asked who are you?”

  “It’s me. Richard. Your dad.”

  “My dad’s dead.” The statement came out tight, cold.

  “I know you’ve thought that, but I—”

  I pushed past him and thumped back down the hall, all the pain and soreness of the past few days forgotten. “This isn’t happening.”

  He followed me. “I know—”

  “Where are Mom and Aunt Stacy?”

  “They’re not here. They were gone when I got here.”

  “When you got here,” I muttered under my breath. “You’re not supposed to be here.”

  “If you would just slow down—”

  I was halfway across the living room to the front door before I spun on him. “I can’t slow down! They could be in danger.”

  “They’re fine,” he assured me.

  “You don’t understand. There was some creature here. It was working for Daresh.”

  “Daresh,” he repeated. The tight hatred in his voice slowed me.

  “You know him?”

  “Yes,” he clipped before blowing out a long breath. “If you’d just slow down for a moment, I can explain everything. Your mom and her sister are fine. Look, see.” He dug piece of paper out of his pocket and held it out to me.

  I stared at it a moment before hesitantly taking it and sitting on the couch. I flipped on a lamp and unfolded the lined piece of paper. The handwriting was my aunt’s.

  G,

  It’s been a few days since you left. I don’t know what happened. I don’t know if it’s something I said that last morning you were here. I tried to be understanding and let you know that you’re loved, but I guess I failed, huh? We have everybody looking for you, but Grace hasn’t been doing well since that morning. I had to get her out of the house. She was going stir-crazy, pacing back and forth. We’re staying with Mr. Minor down the street. If you get this, please come down. Please. We love you, G.

  Stacy

  I blew out a breath and wiped a tear that had slipped from the corner of my eye. The note didn’t make sense. Mr. Minor? Why in the world would they go stay with Mr. Minor? I stood abruptly, stuffing the note in my own pocket. I had to go to the old dentist’s place. I had to make sure they were okay.

  “Wait.”

  I turned to the person who looked like my dad. I still couldn’t wrap my head around the fact that he was standing right there. He shouldn’t have been. He had been dead for three years.

  “I have to go make sure they’re all right,” I said.

  “They’re fine. Besides, it’s getting late. They’ll be asleep. We need to talk.”

  “Talk,” I said. “Is that what we need?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Just give me a few minutes and then we’ll go down to Mr. Minor’s house to check on them. Okay?”

  Okay? Nothing was okay. Nothing made sense. I just spent a week or more being chased across an alien planet by giant, minotaur-like creatures while discovering I was some kind of chosen freak who can open a gateway to that world and move things with my mind. I was imprisoned, tortured, and escaped on a steam-powered plane while being chased by steam and magic-powered dragons. I was anything but okay.

  “Please, Gaige.”

  I sunk back onto the couch but said nothing. I don’t think I could form enough thoughts to spit out a coherent string of words even if I wanted. I wasn’t sure if I did. What I really wanted was to go back to my room, lie down, and sleep. When I woke up, everything would be back to normal and this would have been all some weird, c
razy nightmare.

  “I didn’t die that night your mom and I went for a drive,” he said.

  “They found your body on the side of the mountain,” I said, my voice hollow.

  “They found a body. Not mine. It was planted there.”

  “Why?”

  “As leverage against Grace.”

  I shook my head. “I just don’t—”

  “Please, just let me tell you what’s happened.”

  He took my silence as his cue to continue. “I was hurt pretty bad in the accident. Even though I was wearing a seatbelt, it must have failed and I was flung from the SUV. I couldn’t even tell you the number of times I tumbled down that mountain before I came to stop, staring up at the moon and stars above me. I was so dazed I couldn’t even make sense of what had happened.

  “While I lay there, broken, this dark form appeared above me, hissing in what seemed like some kind of language. Through the pain, I felt something crawling onto me. I think it was the vegetation because it prickled and crept until it covered me completely, blocking the view of the sky.”

  I knew who he was talking about and thinking about that dark creature made my blood boil. If I had some way of achieving it, my greatest desire would be to make Daresh and all his henchmen hurt. A lot.

  “The next thing I knew, I woke up in a cage on a plain in the middle of nowhere. The only things around were grass and a little hut that housed my guards. They never answered my questions or pleas. Never said a word to me. They just watched and fed me once a day.

  “It must have been years of hell. I don’t know. I lost track of time and all the days just blurred together in that little cage. I spent half the time shivering and the other half too hot to think. I thought I would die there.”

  I stared at him as he spoke. He looked like my dad. Sure, his face was weathered, his hair was flaked with gray, and he was thinner than I remembered, but couldn’t that be a result of his captivity? He even had a few of Dad’s quirks like the way his mouth stretched a little to the side while he talked. My mind still refused to work right and believe what I was seeing. My dad? Alive?

  “Then, a few weeks ago, a storm blew in. I’d seen those storms on the horizon but they never came near where I was held and I was thankful for that. It was unlike anything I had ever experienced. As it roared towards us, the guards locked themselves in their shack.

  “The storm was incredible. I huddled as tightly as I could in a corner of my cage, clinging to the bars as rain blew in sideways to pelt me like ice cold BBs.”

  He paused and swallowed. When he spoke again, his voice was tight. “Through however long I was there, it was always you that kept me alive, Gaige. You and your mom, if she was still alive. I fought through unbelievable urges to just die. But the dream of returning to you two kept me alive.”

  I sniffed, ran the back of my hand across my nose, and wiped it on my pants. My mind whirled like a tornado. My thoughts were like chunks of debris inside the twirling disaster.

  “But,” he went on, “in that storm, I lost all hope. I wanted to die. Then, something happened.”

  “What?”

  “These…creatures appeared out of the storm. They walked upright like the roaring winds were nothing more than a gentle breeze.”

  They must have been the creatures Seanna had told me about as we watched a storm cross the plains in a distance. I guess not everything she had told me was a lie.

  “They were tall like people who had been stretched beyond what was humanly possible and then stretched out twice as much. They were naked with bone-white skin. Their hair hung limply in strands despite the wind that blew hard enough to tear my guards shack apart like it was held together by Silly Putty. With nothing left to cling to, those men inside were tossed away into the darkness like they were paper dolls. Those creatures—I think there were three of them—glided to my cage. They paused and one held out a hand at the door. Its long finger brushed the lock and it froze over, cracked, and fell to the ground. Then, they glided away, lost in the storm only a few feet away from the cage.

  “The storm finally blew past. Morning light crept into my cage when I finally pried my stiff fingers from the bars and stood. I tried the door. It was open. I had freedom, but as I stood there looking at a plain that stretched on forever, I had no idea what to do with it. So, I just walked.”

  “You were on Alisundi,” I said.

  “I know,” he replied. “I’d been there before with your mother.”

  I nodded. Right, Mom was the Gatekeeper before me. It made sense Dad would know about her role. Had she really taken him through the gate with her?

  “Even though I’d never been on the plains of Delicia, I had long guessed that’s where I was, so I started travelling East in the direction of the gateway, hoping that it would be open if I found it. I walked through swamps, dense forests, and climbed the side of a mountain to get there.”

  I swallowed again. Had we passed each other? It hurt somewhere deep inside me to think I might have walked passed my dad, missing him by only a few hundred yards as he escaped his doom and I marched toward mine.

  “I got lost in the mountains, but through some stroke of luck, I stumbled on the ravine that leads to the gateway and it was open. I went through and came here. That was only a few hours ago. I came here and when I found that note,” he indicated my pocket, “I took the world’s longest shower, found some of my old clothes in a box in the closet, and was waiting for morning to go to Mr. Minor’s. That’s when you showed up.”

  “So, that’s it,” he added when the silence stretched on a little too long.

  I nodded, not trusting myself to speak. It felt like I had tried to swallow a brick.

  “I know it’s a lot to take in,” he said.

  Understatement of the year. It seemed like every day for the past week was harder to take in than the last. There was only so much a person could endure both mentally and physically, and I was getting perilously close to both thresholds. I blew out the breath I had been involuntarily holding. It was too much to take in at that moment. I’m not sure I could have taken it in at any moment. I was just confused, hurting, and tired. So very tired. Not much room for anything else.

  I gulped, cleared my throat, and gulped again before I thought I could trust my voice. Still, it wobbled and croaked a bit when I spoke. “I don’t know what to say. I thought you were dead. You were dead. There was a funeral and everything.”

  “I know, but I wasn’t—”

  He stopped as the house vibrated. He looked around, his brows creasing.

  “What was that?” I asked.

  Before he could answer, the house shook again, harder this time. Longer. The lamp buzzed as it slid an inch across the stand next to the couch. I stared at it as its light shook over the living room. Its dance paused for half a second before it jumped violently across the stand and dived to the floor.

  Everything shook. The house creaked and boards vibrated against each other while the ground bucked under us.

  It was over before either of us could react. One moment it felt like the earth was trying to open up to swallow us whole, the next all was still and a car alarm blared somewhere up the street.

  “An earthquake?” my dad asked.

  “I think so,” I said.

  I started to stand, but the whole house shifted out from under me and I stumbled into the coffee table. I fell over it and rolled to my knees as the floor under me jerked back and forth. Dad was thrown onto the couch.

  “We need to get out,” he yelled over the roar of the earth trying to rip itself open beneath us.

  I didn’t have time to fully comprehend his statement before all went quiet again. Plaster dust floated calmly down from the ceiling as we stared at each other.

  “We should get outside before—”

  “The gateway,” I blurted out as the thought formed in my head.

  “What about it?”

  “She told me the last earthquake was caused by it being rippe
d open wider,” I said, pushing to my feet.

  “Who did?”

  “We have to go to the park,” I said. “Aunt Stacy’s Mustang.”

  “What about it? Gaige, you need to slow down.”

  “It was in the driveway. She leaves her keys…” I glanced at the row of hooks by the door. Aunt Stacy always hung her keys. They weren’t there. “Why would her car be here but not her keys?”

  “They’re on the floor,” Dad said.

  Sure enough, they lay by the door where the earthquake had knocked them from their hook. “We have to get to the gateway.”

  19

  THE CALL OF THE WILD

  I idly wondered where my scooter was as Dad drove us toward the park. I imagined a police officer passing the park a few times in the middle of the night before getting out to inspect the abandoned ride. Did they run its plates and show up at Aunt Stacy’s door? Or maybe she’d already realized I was gone and called the police. When they found the scooter at the park, did they search the area, thinking I might have fallen from the cliffs? They were not very high, but rocky enough a fall could do some damage. The thought made my stomach clinch.

  I’d been so stupid. Stupid to trust Seanna. Stupid to not just turn around and go back through the gateway when I had the chance. Did I really ever have a chance? I’m not sure I did. Everything the Ashling did drove me away from the gateway and by the time I realized it, it was too late. The knot in my stomach melted to a boiling anger.

  She had helped us escape and lead us back to the gateway at the risk of her clan, but that didn’t change what she had done up to that point. She used everything she knew about me to drag me on that insane trek. My mom, magic…even my emotions. Aoife was right. Falling for her was the stupidest thing I’d done in a life full of stupid.

  The car drifted across the center line for the third time. “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” Dad said. “It’s just been a few years. And, um, I’m really tired.”