[Whispering Woods 01.0] The Waiting Booth

by Brinda Berry

  I tried to concentrate on Angel Lester, who dominated the conversation with her descriptive who’s who from the party on Saturday night. Angel’s fast talking washed over me in a dark blue persistent wave of information.

  Lucky for me, Em was assigned to the same group. “Are you even listening to me, Mia?” She waved her hand in front of my face in an exasperated motion.

  “Uh, yeah, sure I am.” My eyes traveled up the wall to the clock and back to her face.

  I noticed that Em had worn her hair in a side ponytail. Was this what she had been talking about? She seemed to be on the eternal quest for that look, that America’s Next Top Model look.

  “What did I just say?”

  “OK, I wasn’t listening to the last thing you said.” I smiled sheepishly and nibbled on my barely there thumbnail.

  Em’s iridescent bead bracelets sparkled as she straightened them on her wrist. “Girl, you have been in your own world for the entire period.” She paused dramatically. “Something is going on with you. It’s Austin, isn’t it?” She leaned forward in anticipation with her head cocked closer to mine in a plea for confidence.

  I rolled my eyes. First my dad, and now Em thought that something had to be going on with me and Austin. I fervently wished my dad hadn’t teased Emily the other day about it.

  “Class, go back to your individual seats now for journal entries on your teamwork,” Mrs. Cranford said in a high, lilting voice. Students groaned. Mrs. Cranford smiled gleefully from her perch on a bar stool at the front of the room. I smiled back, glad for the solidness of her expectations. Mrs. Cranford, in her crisp pink Oxford button-down could always be counted on for schedules and order. Saved by Mrs. Cranford.

  Back in my seat, I proceeded to arrange my black paperback journal in front of me. I wedged my fingers into the pocket of my tight jeans to retrieve the neatly folded note. Discreetly unfolding the paper, I hid it in the center of my open journal. The words on the page were tidy and small, moving in a straight line, not sprawling like mine on the paper beneath it. Each letter appeared to me in a different color even though I knew the note was written in only black ink. Only weird synesthetes like me see in Technicolor.

  Mia, I order you to stay out of the woods at night.

  There are dangerous travelers who would see you harmed.

  We will talk again tonight.

  —Regulus

  I stared at the words with a renewed sense of chagrin. I had been in those woods all my life and never been scared or worried. The woods were a safe place for me. And I just added the words I order you to my list of pet peeves. Maybe there was something about the woods that would lead me to Pete. I read the note for the tenth time.

  The rest of the school day was about as exciting as watching paint dry. I’ve read somewhere that people can do things on autopilot, like driving. You begin at starting point A and somehow end up at point B without ever realizing that you made the journey. It’s a form of self-hypnosis. I was too new at driving to imagine that yet. School was a different story. I ended at point B in last period and couldn’t tell you about any classes I attended.

  The clock eventually struck 3:00 p.m. and the bell filled my entire being with anticipation. I chewed the edge of my thumbnail as I walked as fast as possible to the parking lot. My mission was accomplished as I jumped in the driver’s seat and pulled out ahead of the string of cars exiting the lot.

  My eyes darted to the speedometer, and I exhaled, pressing the gas pedal to increase my speed. I prayed that Deputy Sorrel wouldn’t be sitting in some hidden spot waiting on speeders.

  My mailbox at the end of our road finally appeared. My stomach tingled, and I slowed for the turn.

  The gravel crunched beneath the tires as the car slowed to a lumbering crawl. I pressed the button to roll down the window when I came to the wooden structure at the side of the driveway. With the car in park, the fresh air rushed into the car, tinged with a warm scent that filled my head with orange and yellow.

  This is ridiculous, I scolded myself. Did I think that I would see Regulus and Arizona waiting for me to return from school? I shook my head in self-disgust. Shifting the car into drive, I slowly made my way toward the house. My eyes flicked up to the rear view mirror, more out of habit than necessity.

  And I saw something.

  My foot slid off the accelerator as my head jerked around. I hadn’t imagined it. I caught my breath as a tall, pencil-thin dark figure stood near the waiting booth. By tall, I mean to say, inhumanly tall, not Michael Jordan tall. The figure had been as still as a statue, but how had I missed it the first time?

  It started to move toward me, and the car jerked to a stop. Not because I had slammed on the brakes. Nope. I had forgotten all about driving. I had hit a tree planted inconveniently at the side of the drive.

  The damage wouldn’t be much, but I was frantically trying to get the gear shifted into reverse. I pressed hard on the accelerator pedal. The motor roared. The car wasn’t moving. I looked into the mirror. The tall figure was now much closer and still moving at a steady pace. My heart pounded and my throat seemed to contract on its own.

  I looked down and saw “N” marked next to the gear shift. I shifted into reverse. My foot was heavy on the pedal, and I almost took the car all the way back to the figure. Don’t panic, I whimpered to myself. I made the mistake of looking in the mirror and felt a silent scream rising in my throat. If I had ever imagined what the Grim Reaper might look like, he had just materialized in my driveway. No, he didn’t carry a scythe, but he was actually wearing a black robe of some sort. His face was a shadow in the hooded shroud of dark material that he wore.

  A mechanical, high-pitched whining sound and then a piercing whistle sliced through the air. The figure made eye contact with me in the mirror and next crashed onto the back of my car. His previously covered face now pressed into the back windshield and squeaked as it smudged an oily streak vertically down the glass.

  I heard screaming. After a minute I realized that the hair-raising shriek was my own. The piercing cry was the same scream I had used when Pete had accidentally, or on purpose—when you have a brother, it’s hard to tell—shot a bottle rocket into the back of my tennis shoe when I was ten years old.

  The car door opened, and I was still screaming as Regulus hauled me out of the car. He shook me. Not a gentle shake of waking someone from a night’s sleep, but a hard jerk meant to snap me out of my terror. It did the trick. I stopped screaming. Maybe I should be glad that he didn’t slap me out of my hysteria.

  My knees started to buckle, and Regulus wrapped his arm around my back to lift me to a standing position. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked.

  I looked at him in confusion. “What am I doing? What am I doing? Minding my own business. Coming home from school. What the heck was that? Was that a man?” The words tumbled out in a rush as my adrenaline picked up again.

  I took a deep breath and peered around Regulus to see Arizona dragging the figure by the arms toward the road.

  “We thought you were trying to run over it with your vehicle,” Regulus said with a grimace.

  “Uh, no…just trying to get away.” I moved his arm away and leaned against the car for support.

  “You were going the wrong direction,” he said with a slight upturn at the corner of his mouth.

  “Um, yes, Captain Obvious, I got a little panicked and…and… Never mind.” Arizona neared the area where I had recently watched them both disappear into thin air. Two motorcycles lay sideways on the grass nearby.

  “Is it dead?” I tried to still the tremor in my voice.

  Regulus seemed so calm and unaffected by the whole situation. “No, we don’t execute, unless necessary.”

  “So, what stopped him and what’s Arizona doing?”

  “He’s tagging him and sending him on to be processed,” Regulus said.

  “Tag him? He’s not a deer or some game.” My voice lowered in wonder. “What is he…it…doing here? Did he c
ome from the doorway?”

  Regulus shrugged. “One of many unauthorized travelers in your woods.”

  Arizona pulled out a silver device. He pressed the box to the temple of the inert figure in black.

  “No, stop!” I shouted. Why, I didn’t know.

  Arizona’s eyes met mine from across the drive. He shook his head in answer before pressing a button on the metal cylinder he held. I was accustomed to seeing a smiling almost flirtatious look on Arizona’s face, but now his smile seemed evil. He pulled the body a couple of inches toward him, stepped back, and disappeared.

  I stared at the spot where Arizona and his captive had vanished. Even though I had already seen this same trick once before, it dumbfounded me. I turned to Regulus, who just happened to be watching me looking as though he was interested in my reaction.

  “This is all just blowing my mind.” I felt my legs quivering with the consistency of well-chilled Jell-O.

  He walked over to lean against the hood of my car. My eyes traveled to the dent from hitting the tree. I guess I was lucky that the bumper was the only part that had been damaged. What if that thing had gotten to me? What had it wanted?

  “OK, Mia, ask questions if it will settle your mind to have answers.”

  “The thing that Arizona tagged, man or not?” I started with the question that I had already asked once.

  “Human species,” he said. “But not of this Earth.”

  “He looked like he was more than seven feet tall,” I stated.

  Regulus nodded.

  “When you say not from Earth, what planet?”

  “What planet?” He shook his head. “Listen to me, Mia. I said that he was not of this Earth. There are many dimensions that inhabit the Earth.”

  I knew I was frowning. I started to chew on my thumbnail. Had I missed the science lesson on dimensions? I remembered studying about Jupiter and Pluto. Dimensions, not so much. I was feeling stupid when Regulus started to laugh. My mouth dropped open as I was stunned by the oddity of that sound in relation to his normal demeanor.

  “You’re not supposed to know about the others. We work hard to keep your people unaware.” Regulus had certainly been entertained by my dumbfounded expression. He was still smiling.

  And with the swiftness of a dark cloud blocking the sun, his smile was gone.

  “I apologize for this incident. I underestimated the resources held by other entities.” Regulus avoided my eyes. “I didn’t think others would know about your involvement with the IIA.”

  “Involvement?” I know my mouth dropped in disbelief. “I’m not involved. I only said I would help you to get information about Pete and you know it.”

  “Mia, you are now associated with me and that aligns you with the IIA. Whether you want to be involved or not.” Regulus finally made eye contact.

  I shook my head, trying to negate his statement. “So was the man from the doorway trying to hurt me?”

  “Yes, he planned to remove your presence from the portal.” Regulus spoke as if he were running down his to-do list for the day. Get supplies, check; see what Mia is up to, check; stop dimension traveler from killing Mia, check.

  I tried to remain calm and inhaled deeply. I had been through worse before.

  When my mother had decided to abandon ship, I was a small girl. Pete wasn’t much older and certainly not able to handle the responsibility of a younger sister. My dad had checked out mentally for two long months. He’d paid the bills and brought home groceries, but the house held the air of a family recovering from a natural disaster. Survivors. I imagine that the unearthly quiet in our house was similar to the lack of conversation after a natural disaster like that tornado that had touched down in Whispering Woods the same year. People just don’t have anything to say afterward.

  My dad didn’t talk much until Aunt Candy called and offered to let us live with her. She’d thought Pete and I needed a real home with two parents. That’s the day that my dad mentally came back to life. The tongue-lashing he had given my aunt convinced her to never call again.

  “Is he the only one or will there be more?” I asked Regulus.

  I registered the look of surprise on his face. Did he think I was going to fall apart? Cry?

  “There will always be more. For now, there’s a certain organization that wants to remove you.”

  “You mean kill. Why do you say remove, like it isn’t personal? They want to kill me.”

  “Remove, kill, it’s the same. And it isn’t personal. It’s a strategy to win. They just don’t know that the IIA always wins.” Regulus said the last sentence with absolute certainty.

  “So, who is trying to kill me? I refuse to call him tall, scary guy.”

  “In general, they’re Slips. They enter this dimension to escape life in their dimension. The IIA doesn’t permit it. These Slips carry a deadly disease that would be fatal to the population of your Earth.”

  A loud rapping noise clapped through the air and Regulus shoved me toward the ground. I tasted dirt as he proceeded to not-so-gently press the back of my head.

  “Ow, watch it.”

  His fingers dug into my hair, and he lay beside me on the ground, placing a single finger to my lips to signal the need for silence. I could feel the tension in the weight of his arm across my back and he eased his hand from the back of my head. I stared into his eyes trying to read an explanation of the severity of the situation. Regulus lay still and calm as if he did this every day.

  I attempted to peer around his head and under the car to see if someone held a gun on the opposite side.

  Raised voices and a scuffling sound ensued. Where silence blanketed the woods before, chaos had materialized.

  “Uster,” a voice growled. “Uster…” the voice moaned in a slow, drawn out plea.

  I could now see the two pairs of feet. A moment later, a figure crumpled to the ground.

  “It’s clear,” I heard Arizona report. A hand, his hand, reached down and took what appeared to be a weapon from the hand of the fallen person who could be a twin to the one who had come through earlier. I saw no blood and couldn’t detect how Arizona had stopped him.

  Arizona squatted down and peered at us underneath the car. “I knew there’d be another. This one would have taken you out. Shooting in blanket pattern…” said Arizona in disgust before he was interrupted.

  A wailing sound emitted from a shroud of cloth that tumbled from the arms of the body on the ground.

  “For crying out loud, I don’t need this,” he grumbled as he walked over to the bundle of cloth and pulled aside one edge to reveal a small, irate infant. The tiny face was red and had begun to scream in earnest.

  I jumped to my feet, running over to Arizona and the baby. “No, no, no!” I stumbled over, knocking Arizona aside. The weapon fell from his hand, and I grabbed it and a clump of grass as well. I knelt on the ground while one arm shielded the small bundle.

  The weapon in my hand shook only slightly as I pointed it at Arizona. I glared at both of them. “Over my dead body.”

  Chapter 8

  Slips

  The dull metallic square I held didn’t resemble a gun, but I knew the box was a weapon from the way Arizona had used it. It sat awkwardly in my palm, rectangular and heavy.

  The infant lay in a bundle, quieted momentarily by the touch of my hand on its chest. I didn't know any more about holding a baby than holding a weapon, so I left it on the ground.

  Arizona raised his hands in surrender. “Hey now, calm down, no one is going to hurt the infant.” His eyes left mine for a second as he glanced at Regulus, who stood at my back.

  Arizona approached and sharp pain seared my upper arm. Regulus.

  He dug his thumb into my inner arm and the move worked as though he had pushed a magic button. My fingers sprang open and the weapon fell to the ground. I pressed my lips together to stop from crying out in pain. He kicked the metallic box a few feet away.

  “Never…do…that…again.” He said each word through g
ritted teeth. “Too unpredictable. Stupid girl.”

  Arizona bent to retrieve the bundled infant. He looked into my eyes and smiled reassuringly while removing my hand I had placed protectively on the baby.

  “Mia, I won’t harm this one. Trust me. I haven’t harmed anyone today. Only incapacitated both intruders.” Arizona’s eyes pled, as though willing me to believe him.

  “What are you going to do to them?”

  I glanced at the adult body lying on the ground, seemingly unconscious and maybe even dead.

  “They both must return to their world. Consequences will follow, but that’s not for us to deliver. What do you think you can do for this infant, Mia?” He watched me rub my right arm where Regulus had so effectively applied pressure. It still smarted, and a red mark was left where Regulus’s fingers had been.

  “But it’s a baby, Arizona. Defenseless,” I whimpered. “I just didn’t want you to hurt it.”

  “Enough talk. It is our duty,” said Regulus, cutting into our conversation. “Taking it back through.”

  Regulus picked up the baby and tucked it into the crook of his arm, the way you’d hold a paper bag of groceries. The camaraderie I had felt earlier with him had gone.

  “I’ll come back for the other one,” he said, not even turning to face us while walking toward the portal. As he passed the body on the ground, he casually rolled it over with the tip of his boot and appeared to confirm that it was alive. Then, he resumed his pace, carrying the baby like a football and stepped into nothingness.

  “So, how does he just step, presto, through the portal? I step there and nothing happens.” I rubbed my arm, looking at Arizona for an explanation.

  He sat down beside me on the ground and tentatively took my hand. I started to pull back out of his hold when he forced my fingers over his wrist. Guiding my index finger and rubbing it lightly over the area below the meaty part of his palm, he traced the flat shape of an object beneath his skin.