He’d heard that scientists around the world were experimenting with genetics on a level he could barely comprehend, playing god with different genes and chromosomes in order to make the human species more efficient and productive, but this was science fiction on a whole new level. He briefly wondered what government agency was behind this, and what did they want from him? And, if these weren’t human manufactured creatures, then the only other explanation was.... Well there didn’t really seem to be another explanation.
Then the thing began to talk, and government conspiracies flew out of his head as a surge of white-hot fear broke through his bones, making him weigh a hundred pounds more than normal and pinning him to the glass floor. The other scenario hit him with a weight he wouldn’t have believed possible. And if this were indeed an alien abduction, then he owed a great big apology to all the rednecks he’d mocked for so long.
207
Kristi Brooks
“Hello, Roger, I have been sent to represent the council in their decision to bring you to Obawok. My name is Firturro, and I’m your watcher. My apprentice, Tigaffo, is waiting at the door. I understand this has been a great hardship for you, and I apologize, but the council could not be persuaded otherwise.” He paused, and his violet eyes bore into Roger’s own and cut through the confusion and panic, calming him a little. “Please, we have a lot to cover before tomorrow. So, if you could follow me, that would be a great help.” He gestured to the opening that hadn’t been there before.
Roger couldn’t make his body function properly. His feet were still bound by fear and his mouth gaped open. Not only was this Firturro the oddest thing he’d ever seen, but he could also speak perfect, unbroken English.
If what the creature had said was true and Roger was now on some far away planet, then how did they know English? To his knowledge, no one had studied him yet, and according to all the sci-fi books Roger had read, they would have to probe him before it would be possible for them to have this kind of knowledge of him and his language. Unless this wasn’t the first time, a small voice whispered in his head.
The creature stopped and turned back to Roger, once again motioning to the doorway. Roger found his fear loosening a little. He may have been terrified, but he was also curious.
The thing waited patiently while Roger stood. His limbs were stiff at the joints and groaned a weak protest as he moved, so he paused to stretch before walking to the door.
As Roger followed this so-called watcher, he noticed that there were little yellow gnomes holding the glass paned doors open. They were so much cuter than the green trolls that he had an almost irresistible urge to pet one as if it were a puppy or a kitten instead of a funny yellow creature. It was odd, but these cute little gnomes were almost human-like. They looked like small, bald, androgynous children, and looking at them made him feel more comfortable. Almost as if he were in a trance, he reached out his hand, hoping to make some kind of rudimentary connection to confirm that this was not as unreal as his ration mind wanted him to believe. More importantly, he wanted to comfort to these small beings that looked just as lost as he felt.
Just as his hand hovered above the gnome-thing closest to him, its beautiful unlined face transformed into a horrible monster with two rows of jagged teeth. Its head turned upwards, and it no longer reminded him of a lost child but rather a half-rotted Jack-O-Lantern.
Two seconds before it bit him the trance snapped, and he realized what was about to happen. He jerked his hand back, but he wasn’t quick enough. Sharp, jagged teeth sank into the soft flesh of his palm and tore through the skin with ease, as if his body was as malleable as Play-Doh. Even though there didn’t seem to be any immediate pain, the horror of what was happening overloaded his already fried circuitry.
In the dark green space between realities that he now found himself, Roger screamed.
When he finally did feel the pain, it was so intense that tears automatically welled up in Roger’s eyes. The slight possibility that this had been a product of a dream, the redemption his sanity had been hoping for, ended when the needle-sharp teeth sank into his palm. The creature let go as quickly as it had latched on, leaving Roger’s blood soaked hand to fall back to his side. Flicking a drop of blood off its chin with the tip of its tongue, the creature smiled at him, challenging him to try again.
Roger was silent for a moment before he turned and faced his captors from this other world, this Obawok. Eyes full of accusation, Roger held his throbbing hand as he looked at them.
For the first time since his mother died, Roger was more than afraid. He was terrified; of today, of tomorrow, of what might happen to the rest of his life. He took a few deep breaths, trying to get control of his emotions.
Never let them see you cry.
“Why didn’t one of you two tell me those fuckers would bite?” The anger in his voice rose with each syllable, reverberating off of the small, cramped room in which they now found themselves.
“We would have warned you had we any time to do so. I do have to say that you should have known better.” Firturro gave Roger a sly, mocking half-smile, his straight, well-worn, yellow teeth flashing. “Don’t your people have a saying about how curiosity killed the cat?”
Cradling his bleeding left hand in the crook of his right arm, Roger looked at his new captors. The two trolls moved in unison as they turned from him and walked through another small archway and into a vast expanse of cavernous forest green hallways lit every so many feet by small lamps secured into the wall.
Where the hell was he? In a vain effort to control his rising anger at the situation, Roger bit down on his lip. Lashing out at his captors was likely to make things harder on him, and they might even decide to dispose of him hastily, and that would do him no good. He needed time to think, to plan.
Instead, he turned his attention to the troll doll thing walking beside him. What had he said his name was? Figarro? Like the little cat in Pinocchio?
It seemed to sense it was being watched and immediately turned, its violet eyes glistening even in the semi-darkness. Then, before Roger could move, the creature reached up and grabbed his forearm. The contact jolted Roger like a heavy current of static electricity. The sharp pain subsided as quickly as it had begun and was immediately replaced by a sensation of warmth and happiness. It reminded him of lazy Sunday afternoons watching his mother bake cookies when he was younger, laughing with her as they danced their way through the sun-dappled, flour coated kitchen. Even as he found himself smiling at the memory, he also found the sharp pang of loss that immediately followed any thought of his mom.
Then the creature let his hand go, and the connection was immediately lost, the emotions and memories that had only moments before brought tears to his eyes also dropping away from him. But even more than that, the brief connection had caused Roger’s anger to dissipate like dew under the Oklahoma sun.
“I expected you to be mad, Roger, and I know how horrible and foreign this must be. I just want to make sure you know I didn’t want to bring you here.” Firturro looked straight into Roger’s eyes, making sure he was listening before he continued. “You are going to have to trust me.”
Roger thought about this while he stared into the creature’s eyes. He was almost certain it was telling the truth, but that didn’t change the fact that he had been brought here against his will. Not only that, but maybe that thing the creature had done with his touch was just another form of control, another way to make sure that he did as he was told. Despite the sense of peace and goodwill that surrounded his new companion, Roger trusted nothing.
He broke eye contact with the older one and looked at the other one, the apprentice, and automatically knew this one was far different than its adult counterpart. The little guy was swaying back and forth while his eyes bore holes into the packed floor, nervous twitches of boredom Roger had seen on many of the ruffians he sometimes coached in the county football league. The league had been set up as a way for some of the poorer kids to learn to work
through their anger and become a part of a team. Most of them were hard working kids who honestly wanted to do well and accomplish something with their lives, but then there were the others who saw the league as a joke, an interruption and waste of their time. That attitude was what Roger perceived as he stared at the apprentice.
Knowing that sometimes directness and honesty went a long way toward opening the lines of trust and communication with the kids he coached, Roger decided to try again. “Okay, I’ll give you a chance. I don’t see a whole lot of options. But if we’re going to be on a close basis for the near future, you’re going to have to tell me your names again. I’m havin’ trouble remembering them.”
“Certainly, that’s more than understandable. My name is Firturro, and my apprentice is known as Tigaffo.”
“Okay, you’re Fir...Firturro right? And he’s Tigaffo?” Roger said while absentmindedly raising his hand to point at Tigaffo.
“Don’t point at me,” Tigaffo said, his head held high in defiance.
Roger felt himself snap at the self-righteousness in the voice, and knew that whatever thin string of formality had held his temper at bay was no longer there.
“What the hell? You’re not in any position to command me.” The ferocity of his anger rose with each word, but he didn’t care. These grotesque creatures had abducted him from his house, and this one dared to treat him like some grunt worker at a factory. “I am not going to sit here and listen to some obsessive compulsive little ogre.”
Roger’s face was red with rage and he was screaming at the top of his lungs. His hands were curled into tight fists. His right hand throbbed and pain flooded his arm as the blood pumped through his veins. Without thinking, he raised his left fist and almost slugged the ignorant creature. The painful memory of the gnome’s bite was the only thing restraining him.
Before he got a chance to swing, Tigaffo let out an ear-piercing scream and scurried behind the largest rock column in the hallway. It was then that Roger noticed that there were two other creatures standing in the hall’s shadow. They moved forward as Tigaffo ran but stopped when he signaled them. They were thicker in stature than either Firturro or Tigaffo, but Roger couldn’t tell much else because they stayed in the shadows.
Roger turned back to Firturro as he grabbed Roger’s hand and forced it down. “We don’t do that here.”
Roger found himself slightly amused, despite the shrill of terror from the younger one, or perhaps because of it. “Do what?”
“Obawok as young as Tigaffo are terrified of human’s rage. They haven’t been watching people very long, and they think humans are always dangerous when they become that angry. They see the effects of humans’ worst behavior and are afraid of those confrontations,” Firturro said, his face remaining unchanged by his associate’s fear and his dispassionate tone of voice letting Roger know that he was simply relaying information.
“Oh.” Roger turned towards where Tigaffo was hiding and found himself overcome with the urge to chuckle. These things, whatever they were, apparently had the technology to spy on humans and even to bring them into their world, but for all their technology, they couldn’t figure out emotions. “I’d say I was sorry, but I’m really not.”
“If you think this is bad, you should see council members reacting when someone points at them. They understand the concept of a gun, but a lot of them haven’t watched humans enough to realize there’s a difference between the machine and the pointing finger, although I wouldn’t try doing it if I were you.”
“Council members?” Roger kept wondering what kind of acid trip wonderland he’d fallen into. He looked back to see the top of the creature’s head peering at him from behind the protective layer of rock, but he didn’t come all the way out of hiding. He reminded Roger of one of the characters from those old Warner Brother’s cartoons whose expressions were always frozen in terror a few seconds before they blew up or were smashed by one of those giant boulders.
The corners of Firturro’s mouth even curved upwards a little as he looked at Tigaffo. It was clear that he also found the apprentice’s behavior somewhat comical. Firturro turned to Roger and patted him on the shoulder, once again causing a radiation of warmth to ripple across his flesh with each brief touch.
“Don’t worry, Tigaffo will be all right as soon as he trusts you a little more. For now, I’m going to send him to report to the council.” Firturro turned and motioned to the frightened Tigaffo. “Go and tell the council he’s left the chamber while I take him to his room to rest.”
Tigaffo hesitated and stepped out from behind the rock, visibly trying to shrug off his fear as he shuffled a little closer. “But I wanted to study the human more. There’s so much I need to learn from him.”
Firturro laughed, a deep guttural sound that echoed down the hall. “Obviously, if you can’t even function through a greeting without getting startled, you’re not going to be much use to me. There is a lot to be explained, and your desire to study Roger would only complicate things. Go, tell the council what’s happened and report back to me in a few hours.”
Tigaffo moved down the dark hallway, his body becoming a shadow between the weak lights. But Roger could still see the purple glow of his eyes each time he turned back to look at them before he finally disappeared around a bend in the tunnel. He looked over when Tigaffo had disappeared and noticed that the two burlier creatures were still standing off in the shadows, letting their presence be known without crowding him. It reminded him off the photo ops with the President where the secret service was always just off and to the side.
Roger noticed a smile still played across Firturro’s face, and it changed his appearance dramatically. No longer did Firturro seem like a dangerous being, and Roger felt himself relaxing despite his earlier promise not to.
“Sorry you had to stay in the chamber so long. Our worlds, Obawok and Earth, are close on a certain level of space, but they are vastly different when it comes to time. Because of this enormous time difference, human bodies need a certain amount of time to adjust. ”
“What level of space? What time difference? What Obawok?” Roger asked, his head swimming with visions of alternate realities, dimensions, black holes, sun nurseries, and so much more. He’d never thought about all the infinite possibilities of space and time travel before, but he found that once he started, he couldn’t make himself stop.
“Obawok is our world as well as the name for our people, and it exists in harmony with your world on a variety of levels. However, time here moves rather quickly compared to time on earth. One year of your time is equal to roughly 100 Obawok years.”
It took him a second, but Roger began to add the time up in his head, trying to picture a world in which he could live to be a hundred years old before Bear was six. No matter how many times he tried, Roger couldn’t make the time difference logically mesh together.
“How are you able to watch humans if you’re 1,000 when they’re only ten?”
Firturro nodded, “That would be a problem if we only lived to be a few thousand years old, but Obawok generally live 90,000 years, and we observe two or three humans at once. We don’t start watching humans until their sixteenth birthday, and we’ve usually stopped watching them by the time they turn twenty-two.”
“Oh.” It was all Roger could manage; his head was still racing with numbers and years, adding up seconds and comparing them to minutes, and trying to figure out where the dividing difference was.
Firturro sensed his confusion and laughed a little as he peered up at Roger’s face. The deeply timbered voice didn’t hold any overtones of mockery as it echoed throughout the chamber, and it quickly alleviated a few more fragments of Roger’s anxiety.
“To help you understand, I’ll give you a more accurate breakdown of the difference. There are eight and half Obawok years for every human month, a quarter of a year every human day or roughly three and a half of our days for every hour of your time. It may seem like a very big time difference, but really, it
all works out.”
Firturro turned and motioned for Roger to follow him down the hall even as Roger’s head was still reeling. They walked slowly, and the Obawok following them walked even slower, their uneven footfalls the only sound in the darkness. Roger thought of the coalmines on earth and was chilled. He’d always heard horror stories about the miners dying in the shafts when the walls would suddenly cave in on them. While he’d never been claustrophobic, the network of tunnels made the sudden onset of fear feel as if it was going to overwhelm him.
The fact that Firturro continued to lead him from one passage to another until Roger felt like a rat trapped in a maze and forced to run around aimlessly for some foreign god’s enjoyment didn’t help any. He clenched his sweaty palms to his side, ignoring the dull, throbbing pain of the gnome bite, and tried to reassure himself that the walls weren’t going to mysteriously fall apart.
“Umm, this might sound strange, but do you keep canaries down here?” He meant for the question to be light and even a little humorous, but the fear in his voice seemed to overwhelm any humor he’d intended.
Firturro stopped and looked at him for a moment, clearly puzzled. “What do you mean?”
“I mean, canaries. You know, little yellow birds that could be kept in cages down here so that we could tell if there was oxygen loss if they died. Like miners in the old days? Surely you watched them, too.”
He continued to stare at Roger for a little while until Roger felt a growing uneasiness at the steady violet gaze. Then, without warning, the little man laughed.
“Oh, I see. You’re thinking these caves are like those on earth that sometimes collapse. Well, don’t worry. These passages have been here as long as our people have, and they have never failed us. The rock they are carved from is among the sturdiest earth on either planet.” Then he leaned up to Roger’s face and dropped his voice to a whisper as if sharing a great secret. “Besides, most of these passages weren’t carved by Obawok, but rather were the dens of an old creature only known as the Deburnak, or rock dwellers.”
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