by C. G. Garcia
“Kat, I’m going to tell you something that may seem as if I’ve finally gone off the deep end and am drowning alongside your dad, but just hear me out before you laugh in my face.”
Kat eyed her with something akin to fear, shifting her feet uneasily and glancing over her shoulder once as if expecting an attack before she nodded reluctantly.
Feeling somewhat foolish, Allison began, “All morning, ever since your pounding woke me up, I’ve been feeling as if someone was watching me. I ignored it at first, thinking it was just my imagination, then it kept happening over and over until I could actually feel something like fingertips brushing against the back of my neck. It made me feel like I was under your dad’s gaze all those times when he was deciding if I should be punished or not—you know, small and helpless. The last time was in the car. That’s why I was so quiet. I’m sorry if it seemed like I was totally ignoring you just to spite you, but I was just trying to figure out what was happening to me. What I want to know is if you’ve been experiencing something similar to that?”
Kat didn’t answer her right away. Her expression was thoughtful, and Allison wasn’t sure if it wouldn’t have been better if Kat had laughed in her face. Was she remembering something? Allison shifted her weight from foot to foot nervously in the suffocating silence, waiting for her sister to speak with the air of a defendant waiting for a jury’s verdict.
“Well, I haven’t felt like anyone was watching me,” Kat finally replied quietly, “but now that you mention the ride over here, I did notice that it got cold all of a sudden. In fact, I was just about to ask if your air-conditioner was being wonky, but the cold just suddenly went away.”
“I noticed that, too,” Allison whispered.
“This is getting really creepy, Allie,” Kat said uneasily, her eyes flitting around the park. “Let’s get out of here. I don’t care where we go, as long as it’s far away from here!”
“I agree.”
Allison turned around and began retracing her steps across the park, Kat walking so close that their hips occasional brushed. However, she only managed to walk a few feet, when without warning, a brilliant light as potent as looking directly into the sun flashed a couple of steps in front of them.
Kat was instantly struck mid-scream with a force so great that it caused her to fly back about twenty feet, landing in a crumbled heap at the foot of a tree, while at the same time, Allison was brutally knocked to her knees as that same force hit her legs, crying out as pain reverberated up her legs from landing hard on both kneecaps and momentarily blinded by the searing light that had seemed to materialize out of thin air.
What the hell…? Allison’s mind echoed those words a split-second before she felt a violent tug on her body that jerked her towards the source of that brilliant flash, and half-blinded, she frantically dug her fingers into the moist ground and hung on for dear life.
***
Kat cried out in shock as an unexpected flash of light blinded her, and a tremendous force, like the fist of God, crashed into her body, flinging her back though the air. She squeezed burning, tear-filled eyes shut a split-second before she felt the bone-crushing impact of her body slamming unmercifully to the ground. A blinding pain shot up the length of her arm from her forearm, feeling as though it had been bent in half. She choked on her scream, her mind instantly filling with a blackness that promised a painless oblivion.
No! Gritting her teeth, Kat fought off the welcoming darkness and the bile rising to her throat. Had a bomb just gone off? Allie—where was Allie? She opened her eyes wide and blinked them rapidly to try to clear the colorful lights of blue, red, green, and yellow that clouded her vision.
Once she had focused her blurry vision enough to see the scene before her, she gasped in horror when she finally spotted her sister. Where the flash of light first appeared now stood a luminous, circular light, undulating like small waves across a lake and reflecting every color of the spectrum that was visible to the human eye and even some that Kat’s mind couldn’t make sense of, that made her head hurt, and the darkness already threatening her with oblivion expand when she tried to focus on them. The mind-bending phenomenon appeared as though someone or something had torn a hole in the very fabric of the world, allowing the illumination of another world to shine through.
However, the light was not what horrified Kat. What really turned her blood cold was the sight of Allison and the fact that half of her body had already disappeared into that rippling brilliance. She had dug her fingers into the grass and earth in front of her and was clinging with all her might, sobbing in terror, and desperately calling out Kat’s name.
“Allie! No!” Kat heard herself scream as if she was listening to someone else.
As Allison’s body abruptly lurched back, she frantically clawed at the grass, at the earth, anything to prevent herself from being sucked into that rip of light, Kat struggled to sit up, trying to unsuccessfully ignore the bleached-white bone that had splintered out through the skin of her arm and now lay exposed in a mixture of gushing blood and torn muscle.
“Katherine! For God’s sake, help me!” Allison screamed hysterically as she slipped farther back into the rip, clawing desperately for anything to prevent the light from swallowing more of her body than it had already claimed.
Trying to ignore the pain that seemed to grow more unbearable by the second, Kat staggered to her feet and almost immediately nearly collapsed, weakened from both shock and the alarming amount of blood flowing from her compound-fractured arm. She swayed dizzily for a second or two before she regained enough of her balance to keep her feet.
Cradling her mangled arm with the other, the teen stumbled as quickly to the aid of her sister as the threatening blackness and weakness allowed. Time drastically slowed until Kat felt as though she was stumbling against the high-powered current of a rain-swollen river. Allison seemed to be miles away. The world had become as surreal as a dream.
That light could suck me in too! her mind screamed frantically at her, but she ignored it. Her entire being was focused on reaching Allison before that light swallowed her whole.
Then Allison suddenly lost her grip on the moist earth and was drawn, screaming, back into the light and the unknown. In a last frantic attempt to save her sister, Kat dove forward, ignoring her injured limb totally, and reached out her good arm to snatch at Allison’s frantically scrabbling fingers.
When Kat hit the ground, a wave of unbearable pain flashed up her arm and through her body simultaneously with the realization that her fingertips had maddeningly only brushed the tips of her doomed sister’s. This time she went willingly into the black oblivion that awaited her, taking with her the terrible image of her sister’s face twisted with terror as she disappeared into the mysterious rip of light and the distant sound of footsteps pounding towards her. A last fleeting thought comforted her as she lost consciousness, assuring her that all she had just witnessed had to have been a nightmare and not reality.
CHAPTER TWO
Disorientation greeted Allison the moment the blinding light had completely pulled her body into its shimmering chaos by an unexplainable force that had seemed to grab at her body almost hungrily with its greedy, invisible hands. She immediately felt the light, itself, as a presence, a living entity. It surrounded her, penetrated her entire body with a heat that was almost unbearable, a fiery ocean ready to drown her, to devour her. The essence of the light completely saturated her very atoms, forcing them to pull away from each other until she no longer had a physical body and only the separated particles remained.
Although she was merely a seemingly infinite amount of detached atoms, she still felt an essence of herself—her thoughts and emotions—still aware and attached to every one of those microscopic units that had once been her body. It was as if her atoms were the grains of sand that made up the beach and the light, the incoming tide that saturated it.
Terrified, Allison tried to scream, but in her present state, it was impossible. Nor could she he
ar anything while inside that world of white-hot light she “saw” only through her mind’s eye. She could only feel the sole emotion of fear radiating throughout her entire being.
I’m dead, she thought frantically, grasping at anything that sounded even remotely rational to her frightened mind that helped to explain what was happening to her. Death seemed the only logical explanation, though her mind instantly railed at the thought of having her life so abruptly and inexplicable snuffed out.
Then terror became madness.
Without warning, her newly separated atoms rushed forward within that strange realm of light at an impossible speed, weaving in and out of perceived bright showers and pulsing swirls of light that were filled with every color of the spectrum and even a few that weren’t ordinarily visible to human eyes.
Reason completely left Allison at that point of her preternatural journey, along with her conscious awareness of everything that she was experiencing. It was as if she had lost her abilities to think, feel, to function at all, while she was in her current state of being. All she had were momentary images of her surroundings and places she had never seen flashing rapidly in her mind like the incoherent dream images of a fevered mind.
Then phantom voices broke through the silence. They seemed to surround her, to penetrate her, feeding information into her being so rapidly that she could not grasp any of it. She was no longer Allison, but only a cluster of cognate particles pulsing with their own radiant life.
Mercifully, the trek ended almost as quickly as it had begun. Her separated atoms violently combined once again in a whirl of glistening chaos to reform her physical body. A blinding, white light illuminated her entire world, and Allison soon found herself once again alert and gasping desperately for breath as if she had abruptly been revived after drowning.
Dizzy and lightheaded, Allison realized with a start that she was standing on firm ground, and her knees were beginning to buckle. With a cry of dismay, she crumbled to the ground.
Lying sprawled out on her stomach in what felt and smelled like grass, her face pressed uncomfortable into the thick growth, Allison finally noticed that a vast darkness embraced her instead of the brilliant light of that strange realm.
Dear God, I’m blind!
Panic threatened to wash over her for a minute or two before she noticed that she had yet to even open her eyes. If circumstances had not been what they were, she would have burst out laughing at her absentmindedness, but she only sighed inwardly with extreme relief that the experience had not blinded her.
Allison cautiously lifted her head, which felt as if it weighed a thousand pounds, and gingerly opened her eyes.
Immediately, she wished that she had just kept them shut. The world spun aimlessly before her in an array of greens, blues, and flashing yellows, causing an insistent pounding to begin in her temples and her stomach to lurch. Allison moaned miserably and squeezed her eyes tightly shut until the drums in her head ceased to beat so strongly.
God, what happened? Did I just experience death? No—that can’t be right. I’m still breathing, and my body hurts too damned much for me to be dead. Maybe it was a near-death experience—
Her thoughts froze as the sound of whispering abruptly reached her ears as if a couple dozen people had suddenly surrounded her. Her eyes flew open again at the sound, and she hastily rose. This time the pounding in her head did not resume, and though she still felt a bit dizzy and woozy, the world was no longer spinning in circles before her as though she was riding an out-of-control merry-go-round.
It can’t be—
There was no circle of curious onlookers surrounding her, nor was anyone in sight, but that wasn’t what had her staring dumbly with rapidly widening eyes at the scene before her. She knew within a heartbeat that she was no longer in the park, or for that matter, in California. What she saw before her—her mind stubbornly refused to believe.
A vast, highly intimidating forest with a species of trees that she had never seen replaced the cypress and pines that had dotted the landscape before that oval light had appeared out of nowhere to claim her.
These trees were enormous—larger even than the familiar redwood trees of California, but their size was not the main characteristic of them that had caught her eye. It was the appearance of the peculiar structure of the limbs and the strangeness of the leaves they sported. Bent at unnatural angles in every possible direction imaginable, the trunk and branches of these trees reminded her immensely of the Okinawan bonsai tree one of her roommates kept in their living room.
“It’s almost as if someone multiplied the size of that little tree by a hundred,” Allison muttered wondrously under her breath.
That’s where the resemblance to the bonsai tree ended and the unfamiliarity began. The leaves—if they were in fact leaves—were a shade of green so deep that they were almost black. From where she sat, the leaves appeared to be like the blossoms of a monstrous rose that had mutated to be ten times its normal size. Hundreds of these rose-like leaves littered the many twisted branches of the trees.
On their own accord, her eyes darted from the trees to the ground. She gasped in surprise. What she had believed was grass when she had felt it earlier, was in a sense, not grass as she knew. It had three times the width of ordinary crab grass and was a pale green in comparison to the green-black of the leaves above.
It was then that Allison noticed that something in the air was—wrong. It smelled heavily of nature, a scent unfamiliar to her city-bred nose, but that was not the reason for her sense of wrongness. Some essential element was missing, something she could not quite grasp completely. It even tasted different.
This can’t be happening! Where in God’s name am I?
As Allison glanced wildly around in the vicinity of where she sat, she noticed that she seemed to be in a small clearing within the forest that was no more than fifty yards wide. There were no visible paths emerging from the trees that suggested that anyone had ever visited this particular clearing, and she didn’t know whether to feel relieved or distressed.
She squinted up into the sky and instantly cried out in shock at what she saw. Not one, but two suns radiated down upon her. One was high in the sky, about twice as small as Earth’s sun, but just as blinding. The other was barely rising over what little of the horizon she could see through the gaps in the trees. She noisily released a breath she hadn’t realized she was holding and put her hands over her eyes to childishly block out the scene that was right out of a sci-fi movie.
I didn’t see that—dear God, I couldn’t have seen that—
While she had been observing the alienness of her new surroundings, Allison had completely forgotten about the faint whispers that initially had caused her to open her eyes and sit up in alarm. They now returned to her, a little more audible than before, and also, a little more insistent for her attention.
Allison immediately dropped her hands from her eyes and scrambled to her feet, whirling around from left to right still a bit unsteadily to try to locate their source but spotting no one once again. There was only the forest in every direction as far as the eye could see. The whispers seemed to be coming from the air directly around her.
—or the inside of my head—
She shuddered uneasily and tried to banish that last, unnerving thought from her mind, but it persisted no matter how hard she tried to shake it. It was then, as her mind was frantically trying to find another line of thinking, that she remembered Katherine. Had she been sucked into the light as well? Allison was a bit alarmed that she couldn’t remember anything between the time she had first seen Kat running towards her and right after she had been pulled completely into the light.
“Kat!” she shouted urgently. Her voice sounded small and weak against the magnitude of the trees that loomed all around her.
Only the whispers filled her ears.
“Kat! Are you here? Please answer me!” she shouted again through a half-choked sob.
Still nothing.
&nb
sp; Realizing that she was alone, a blow that was as affective as a fierce kick to her stomach, Allison began to cry earnestly in fear and despair. She didn’t know where she was or understand how being sucked into a light had brought her here. All she knew was that this strange forest she now stood sobbing in was completely foreign to her, and the whispering she heard was growing frighteningly louder with every breath she took.
She sucked in several slow, deep breaths in an effort to stop the tears as she stared out into the forest, convinced that the voices she heard originated somewhere far back within the thicket. One minute, two, then she abruptly felt something inside her head shatter as if it was a mirror shattering into a thousand slivers of glass after striking the ground. There was no pain.
Before she could contemplate what the odd sensation could have been, the incoherent babbling of a million voices suddenly swelled up in her mind, filling it with a shrillness and volume that was impossible to bear. It was as though she was wearing headphones and someone had abruptly turned up the volume to an unholy maximum.
Allison screamed in sudden agony and fell to her knees, instinctively throwing her hands over her ears in a vain attempt to silence the infinite amount of voices that seemed to be booming all around her. A warm stickiness began to run through her fingers. Still, the voices came, swelling in volume and frequency with every passing second.
Screaming terribly at the top of her lungs, Allison’s mind mercifully shut down a few moments later, no longer capable of bearing the trauma and pain those voices caused. She fell over onto her face for the second time that day, consumed into the darkness of an unfeeling unconsciousness that still harbored the endless amount of voices that continued to swell in her mind.
CHAPTER THREE
Whistling the tune of an old ballad he loved, Aidric gazed lazily up at the sky through the tree branches high above. Not a single cloud loomed in sight, which meant that this time there wasn’t even a remote chance that he would be caught in an unexpected downpour and drenched as he had been the previous quarter-moon.