by S. D. Rudd
Sunburned.
No grass grew, no flowers decorated, no trees stood lofty. It was a desert with no excessive sand, no tumbleweed, no cactuses, no vultures circling…and it was not hot.
Baron. Houses and buildings used to be there. He could tell.
Wood and brick and concrete and steel were splayed about. In all appearances, something hit it…something mammoth. Nuclear explosion came to mind. The crater being so deep and wide in diameter, however, told him that no weapon on earth could leave a mark that impressive. Even with the quantum leap in technology he had never known a weapon of such catastrophe.
“What happened here?”
No response. The lion just gazed at the crater.
“Was it a war?” Alan asked.
The lion only returned a sorrowful expression that opened more questions than before. Alan thought he saw a tear splat onto the hard sand…that glistened in the sun, he just realized. Glass?
What kind of heat could turn every inch of sand into glass particles? He panned the area as far the eye could see, which he could somehow see hundreds of times greater in this realm, and noticed a world of shattered wood, crushed concrete and melted twisted steel as well.
And glass.
“My goodness,” he said in disbelief.
The white lion then led him to the bottom of the waterfall where the mouth of a cave looked uninviting. As the lion walked through, Alan had thoughts of going the other way until he heard the familiar voice again.
“Peace,” was all the lion said, its jaw motionless.
Somehow, that was enough.
The cave was supposed to be dark but it wasn’t. Alan saw every crack, crevasse, and chasm as the lion’s brilliance became the source of light. “What’s down here?”
His answer would not come. Instead, the lion took him to a place where a thirty foot wide river flowed. In the center Alan noticed the water bending as if being sucked downward, but only in that one spot. The current dipped and recessed to normal levels as it passed.
Across on the other shore was a rock the size of a forty story high skyscraper. Alan watched as the rock also began to bend…more like buckle and, before long, the rock came roaring down. He fought against running as the ground shook beneath him.
Stalactite swayed overhead, large gushes of water from the underground river kicked up on shore, and then…a swelling commotion sounding like a forest blaze came at him from the right. Alan’s limbs trembled. Adrenaline of useful fear flooded his veins. His thermal heat sensor initiated. Something was wrong; his thermals never lied.
“What’s happening!” he yelled at the lion over the noise.
“All is well,” the lion said, soft and tender as before, yet Alan still heard him over the commotion.
All is well? Alan thought. Then why was he seeing red?
Suddenly, a wall of black blindsided him, hurling him through the air. He didn’t feel the landing because, this wall, was all around him. Everywhere. Every inch. No breathing room, just suffocation and claustrophobia and…screeching. It wasn’t long before he realized the black wall was actually a swarm of spooked bats!
They swooshed pass him, many of them slamming into him. Alan folded his body into the fetal position, the swarm unintentionally clawing at his body, drawing blood, he assumed and it never seemed to end. How many bats were there?
He saw red even through his closed eyelids now. He made out reddish silhouettes of countless bats flapping around him. Then it hit him…these bats circled him like a tornado. They were organized, settled on one issue and one issue alone. Alan’s blood heated up but he wasn’t angry.
Something crashed beside him and Alan flinched. His bones tightened up. Another crash penetrated the tornadoes’ outer wall but the bats were unaffected. They still swarmed. Clawing.
At that point, Alan knew that the clawing was organized too. Intentional. That and the crashes had to be Stalactite falling from above. He heard the rumbling from collapsing rock ever more now.
The blood rushed through his veins faster, pumping harder. His skin felt powerful, a strange sensation yet somehow familiar. As the bats tore away at him and the Stalactite fell all around and closer, his mind drifted to a time he knew he wasn’t supposed to remember.
But he did.
Ancient towns, stone structures, odd people in faraway cultures. Rocky surfaces on earth, mountainous, with lava flowing in various places. A house. Presumed to be his house.
A dark blur shot pass the image of the house, too fast to decide if it were just a hallucination. This house...what was this house?
It was on his tongue.
He knew this place. Well.
He knew that he knew it because of the fear that was attached to its memory. The scene inside his head flashed to an outsized vat of black boiling liquid, his body hanging desperately overtop it. An obscure figure sneered at him in the corner of what looked like a basement.
Something happened to him in that house. Alan’s body twitched with pain over the boiling vat. He had been beaten severely, hanging from a chain that broke both of his wrists in two different places. And the pain.
His body resembled that of a new sadistic style of pizza. The dreadful figure standing in the corner just watched with an evil grin, satisfied.
“Why are you doing this?” Alan remember saying in a weary voice.
“You know very well,” the deceptive voice said. The very sound of it froze his blood for a second.
“Please, please…just let me go!” He was too weak to cry anymore. “Just let me go,” he pleaded again, losing hope.
“You know I can’t do that.”
He couldn’t feel his broken wrists anymore, which he didn’t mind. He’d been hanging from them too long. “You brought me here…”
“No I haven’t.”
Alan knew he was right but he was sick of the pain. “Just let me go. Please. I won’t cause any trouble, I swear.”
The figure just stared at him for a while. Then he said it, “no one escapes the Nest.” The figure turned nonchalantly as someone activated the lift and the chains descended towards the black boiling vat below.
“Nooo!”
The closer he got to it, the more intense the heat grew. It was unbearable. Whoever operated the lift followed behind the first figure. A woman. He knew her. She kept her gaze on him as she walked, tears in her eyes yet her face was stony. Mind control.
“Don’t let them do this to me. Please.”
Her body convulsed with sobs but she followed the growling order of the figure. At first she appeared as if she would turn around, run to the lift and stop its motion but she knew seemed to know that would have been a mistake. She followed behind the evil figure, looking over her shoulder the whole time.
“Don’t let them do this to meeee!”
Now, her sobbing had grown to wails. She fell to the floor, hid her face from Alan, and released deep cries. Alan’s feet were almost to the vat when he saw the obscure figure swear at her. He then grabbed a fistful of her hair when she wouldn’t respond and yanked her up from the floor, until she was walking but only with the urge to relieve the discomfort. The obscure figure dragged her up the stairs and slammed the door.
Alan felt hopeless. His feet hit the boiling liquid…and his eyes popped opened to swirl of bats. Energy surged through his body. He still saw red but now was able to see shades of green, yellow and orange which was odd.
His bones stiffened.
He stood up within the swarms’ vertex, defiance permeating throughout his limbs. A thick crackling from above. Then another crack. Alan looked up to see an enormous stalactite formation shifting overhead. He knew it was getting ready to fall but he didn’t feel compelled to move. Then, without warning, it dropped. Alan merely centered his attention back on the now violent river ahead of him.
While the large piece of rock fell…and disintegrated around him. Alan looked around him, bats still slamming into him but Alan not noticing much, and he realized that it
had fallen on him yet it never touched him. Something felt different. There was a new power he’d never experienced.
“That’s enough,” he said in a calm voice and the bats shot off in every direction faster than they had come. The river steadied, the rock tower had fallen but settled, and the remaining stalactite stilled. No more rumbling; no more screeching. The white lion stared at him, satisfaction in his eyes.
“All is well,” the lion said.
Alan, still trying to understand what had just happened, said “all is well.”
He looked back at the debris from the rock tower. A narrow rocklike staircase remained completely intact in the middle of all the boulders and debris.
“What just happened?”
“There,” was all the white lion would say.
“I don’t understand what I’m looking at.”
“Stairs.”
Stairs? Alan was more confused than ever. If all of this was the first test, what was to be gained by what he’d just saw? And what test could this be? There didn’t seem to be anything needed to pass in order to advance to the next challenge…then it hit him. Maybe the condition of this strange world was symbolic. But of what?
“It’s symbolism,” he said. “Is that what you want me to know?”
The lion did not respond.
“Symbolic of something…maybe my soul?” he fished. Nothing affirmative registered in the lion’s body language. Go fish. “Symbolic of events taking place in my home?”
The lion gave him a vacant glance. Then it hit him.
“What’s gonna happen to earth?”
Fire filled this brilliant creature’s eyes when he said, “destruction.”
“How? From where?”
“Above.” Alan was getting ready to ask from whom before the lion cut him off. “Do you see it?”
Alan searched the rubble.
“I’m not sure if—”
“Look.”
He did.
All he saw was the rubble where the tall rock structure had once stood. And the stairs. The stairs. Fully intact. Just like the white door in the house. Alan’s mind flashed to the image of the trapdoor he had seen beside the door in the old house. He had plans of going back there to investigate when he went back for Camille. White door. Trapdoor. Stairwell.
There was a connection some kind of way.
Something’s down there, he thought. The moment he formed that thought, something hit him with the force of a bus, knocking him unconscious.
NINETEEN
CHIRPING. ALAN HEARD a distinct chirping. As if the birds producing the annoyance swirled around his head in mocking form. His legs were cold. No…wet.
Really wet. Submerged.
Waters. He heard waters trickling pass his left. Nearby. His legs. They must have been lying inside a puddle. Something had hold of his left foot. Either that or it was broken. He couldn’t move it but it didn’t hurt.
Wind.
Moving in between the treetops, disturbing the leaves, reminded him of hissing designed to either taunt him or intimidate him or both. A repetitive chime reached out to his ears from the distance. Alan focused on the familiar sound, eyes not yet open.
From the right.
The sound came from his right.
Just then, something small and light smacked him on the forehead and, for a split second, his blood froze before he realized he must have been lying under a tree. The chiming stopped. He opened his eyes and confirmed that he was surrounded by a forest of white oak.
Alan sat up and looked around in a frenzy. No. Nothing rang a bell. Neither where he was nor how he’d gotten there. But he knew where the chiming came from.
It had started up again.
He tried to move his foot once more but couldn’t. His eyes darted toward it. That’s when he saw the broken tree branch resting atop it; a large one. He lifted the branch off his foot and dropped it to the side.
A chime.
Looking around the indentation his body had made in the moist dirt, he noticed a perimeter of freshly hewn down branches almost in the shape of his body. It was then that he knew what had happened.
Alan had fallen here from above, which might have explained the large impact felt just before losing consciousness back in the cave with the white lion.
A chime.
But, again, he was not hurt, just discombobulated much like the landing after the trip through the vortex.
Camille.
He had to remember her name for he was to go back for her…if he could figure out how to get back to that house.
Another chime.
Monica.
That was where he needed to go. If he could find her before the day ran out…Camille had said something about him repeating the same day all over for the last three days. He couldn’t afford to do that, not as long as Monica remained kidnapped. If only he had a clue where to start…
It chimed again.
This time Alan snapped out of his trance and leaped up onto all fours.
He scurried toward the sound, rustling leaves along the way, crunching pinecones underneath. The chiming grew in volume as he scrambled on all fours searching for it.
Alan dove for the sound well hidden inside a pile of a colorful dehydrated leaves, the chime blaring in his ears. As he pushed the leaves aside and grabbed the phone, he caught the last chime just before it silenced too soon.
“Hello!” he said, sucking in heavy air, feeling out of shape. “Hello, hello!”
No response.
He wrenched the cell phone away from his ears with clenched teeth and checked the caller ID. Number blocked. “Dang!” he said to himself. Alan was sure that the phone would ring again so he rested his back against a large rock and drew a deep breath, resting his eyes for a moment.
How did I get here?
The vortex.
It had to be the vortex that brought him here because nothing else made any sense, which seemed to be the norm for him as of late. Either way he had to grab a hold of his bearings and navigate through this forest before nightfall.
He slowly opened his eyes and took in the scene. Trees. Everywhere. White trees, colorful leaves. Fall? Yet it felt like the dead of summer. What time was it? Never mind that, what day?
A colorful blanket of dehydrating leaves made it impossible to see the ground in most places. With a quick scan of the forest floor Alan noticed patches of grass peaking from areas less saturated with tree cover. Green grass, maybe even weeds.
To his left, a steady trickle.
A river, he assumed.
Although not visible from his vantage point, Alan could tell that it was long and wide enough to have its own name. The mountainous landscape resembled that of West Virginia and Alan had to wonder if that was his location. His heart rate picked up at the thought.
If that were the case, then he’d have no problem at all finding his way out. All he had to do was find a main road and hitch a ride. He could pick up one of his cars from home and start searching for Monica…although that alone would test the strength of his connections. Last Alan saw of her was at the restaurant.
His memory was coming back.
An explosion. A fireball, that he assumed was a scud missile, had hit the place. He was rendered unconscious…by poison. In his coffee. Yeah, that’s right. Then…dragged. She was dragged out. Someone dragged her out!
He couldn’t tell who it was but that’s never stopped him before and neither would it now. He’d find them. Eventually.
Once he did Alan would put a bullet straight through the skull of each person involved. His second unreasonable motive for killing.
Rage.
Which was scary. He was beginning to show some emotions not of us own. Where did he learn to rage? Probably at the Nest. The Nest. Something about that thought struck him hard. He’d remembered that place well…he’d just escaped a part of it today at the house. The house sat inside the Nest.
He knew because of the creature, who he now knew was c
alled a Leviathan, prowled that domain. Camille had told him. The creature, the Leviathan, lived inside the Nest. At the lake. In the lake. He’d never seen it but had heard stories about it…he wasn’t sure from whom. His best guess was that Camille had told him. How much of his memory was lost?
Alan’s brained tightened. He was thinking too hard and the thoughts plaguing his mind alarmed him.
Memories.
He was having latent memories
Oh, the joys of living in two worlds, having two realities. When he was in one world he remembered nothing of the other…it all seemed like a vivid imagination. Was he dreaming here? Or there? Or anywhere?
There were no dreams, just realities. His life robbed him of the Nest’s memories and vice versa. He had to remember. He had to remember!
Camille. The Leviathan. Monica. Shawn Ramsey.
Shawn Ramsey? Shawn Ramsey…Shawn Ramsey.
Shawn Ramsey!
The terrorist, the atheist, the doomsday creator. What dealings did he have with his father? Ian was an honorable man, a humanitarian.
The last thing he would do was associate with such a vial human being…unless he was being forced to. Yes! That had to be it. Alan’s father had made it ever so clear that he knew about Shawn’s “hand in other cookie jars.”
Ian knew that Shawn was planning to stab him in the back. Yet, that fact did not make Ian cease from dealing with Shawn. There had to be some kind of leverage. Alan had seen in on his father’s face when he raised the question about Ramsey’s connection to him and the AIMS Corp. He was scared.
No, terrified.
Leverage. There had to be some leverage and Alan would find out. Could he also be behind Monica’s kidnapping? That thought crossed his mind for the first time. Only one way to find out.
Pay his family another visit and ask plenty of questions. But first he had to…what was that touching his right pinky through a stack of withered leaves?
Something firm. Leathery.
He yanked his hand away, eyes shooting over to a rectangular object. A book. Alan pushed the leaves aside to reveal its gold foil lettering across the brownish, leather cover.
The word “Journal” was scripted in large cursive.
Alan snatched it up and flipped past the cover to the title page, where the same word was scripted in black ink. No publishers’ information, just a few lines for the diary owner to personalize it. The first two lines were blank…but the name written in the last line sent chills through his body.