“What is that,” Kayleigh asked.
“What? You’ve never seen a telephone before?”
“Not like that,” Kayleigh awkwardly admitted. “What’s the circles for?”
“That’s how you dial,” Savannah answer before realizing where the real focus should lie, placing her hands on her hips. “The bigger question is…why is it here?”
Kayleigh shrugged, picking herself off the floor. She padded down her sundress as if it was sprinkled with dust or sand or dirt from a picnic. There were no such things in the void. “Maybe someone wants to reach out and get in touch with someone.”
“Who? Us?”
Kayleigh shrugged, again.
With nothing left to do…or better…Savannah approached the telephone. The stand and telephone remained where it stood, unlike the door which stayed consistent in its distance from the two of them whether they walked toward it or away from it.
Kayleigh followed closely behind her.
Cautiously and suspiciously, Savannah picked up the card. Upon opening it, there were two words written in a beautiful English-style calligraphy. She frowned at its message.
“What does it say,” Kayleigh asked.
Instead, Savannah showed her the card with an air of disappointment.
It read:
Answer Me
“’Answer Me’? What is that supposed to mean?”
The little hammer encased in the telephone rapidly struck the tiny bell inside, causing the phone to ring unexpectedly. Startled, Savannah and Kayleigh jumped back. A small yelp escaped Kayleigh’s lips. They stared at each other for a bit as Savannah tentatively reached for the receiver, but then pulled back at the last moment. Kayleigh urged her to go ahead. As long as it wasn’t her that was picking it up, she didn’t see the harm and rather have Savannah do the honors.
A moment passed. Savannah steeled her nerves, took a breath, and lifted the receiver off its cradle.
“Hello,” she answered, feeling incredibly silly for doing so. What else was I supposed to say, she thought.
Not a single voice came through. That was to say, not one solitary voice, but a collection of voices, clamoring to be heard. Whispers. Whispers in the dark. Faint and indecipherable whispers. Talking over one another, talking to one another, arguing, conferring, and trying to speak to her. Words spoken in a mixture of earthly languages. Spanish, French, possibly Mandarin, and Arabic.
Savannah didn’t know any other language than her native tongue, but there were certain distinct words that were recognizable. Hearing them unnerved her.
“What do you hear? Who is it,” Kayleigh asked.
“Whispers,” she hesitantly replied, holding the receiver away from her ear. “Just whispers. I can’t make out what they’re saying.”
Kayleigh stepped forward, grabbing the receiver from Savannah, and placing it to her ear for a listen. She didn’t hear whispers, however. She heard the soft rumbling of ocean waves rolling onto the shore and the distant crashing of water crests against formations of rocks. The gentle slapping of ocean water folding over itself. There were no whispers to be found here. Her eyebrows knitted and tightened in confusion. Not only from what she was hearing, but what she wasn’t hearing: the ocean and no whispers. She placed the receiver back on the cradle. “I didn’t hear whispers. I heard an ocean.”
“The ocean?!” Savannah shook her head. “No, no! You couldn’t have heard that. It was whispering.”
Kayleigh considered the possibility they heard two different things. All things concerned, it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility as they were in an impossible place experiencing impossible things. “What is this place?”
“The rabbit hole.” Savannah’s answer drew a strange look from Kayleigh. The look one got after saying something completely insane. “That in-between place Alice fell into.”
“Alice? Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Alice? That Alice?”
Savannah nodded. “Some kind of limbo, I think. Purgatory.”
Suddenly, Kayleigh got scared. The thought of limbo or purgatory was not a comfortable one. In fact, it was downright terrifying to her. A giant lump formed in her throat as she could feel her entire body tense up. “Are you saying we are…dead?”
“No,” Savannah denied, realizing the mistake of thinking such thoughts out loud. “No…”
“Yes,” Kayleigh countered. “Yes, you are. You are saying we are dead. We are not dead. We are very much alive.”
“When was the last time you ate, Kayleigh? Or had a drink? Slept? Used the bathroom?”
“We haven’t been here that long, Savannah. Just a couple hours. That’s all.”
“Are you sure? Because I can’t remember the last time I did any of those things. In fact, I can’t remember a lot of things.”
“Purgatory is supposed to be nothing like this place.”
“How can you really know? How can anyone know?”
Kayleigh paused. Thought about Savannah’s very practical question. “This is a dream. A really incredibly intense dream full of abstract thought and nonsensical happenings. Because…because…a dream feels real while you’re in it. Feels like you lived an entire day in a blink of an eye. There’s no such thing as a perfect memory. Sometimes you forget how to run or read. Yeah, this is a dream.”
Before Savannah could argue Kayleigh’s line of thought, the door manifested into existence. Instead of trading places with the stand and the rotary telephone, it rematerialized fifty yards away eclipsing a burst of silver and gold light. Savannah and Kayleigh simply watched as the door presented itself. They half expected for the door to remain close while half hoping that something different would happen.
It did.
The phone rang, once more.
Their eyes fell upon it as it continued to ring.
* riiiiiiing…riiiiiiiing…riiiiiing *
“Have you ever been in a dream where you knew you were dreaming,” Savannah asked. She was genuinely curious. To her knowledge, it never happened to her or ever heard of it happening. That wasn’t to say, it never did. Dreams were never a conversation starter unless they were funny or horrifying. At least, not among her circle of friends…whoever they were. She couldn’t remember them anymore.
“Once,” Kayleigh replied. “It’s kind of surreal if you think about it. I don’t remember what I was doing in the dream, but once I realized I was, everything felt different. Like you had no worries about anything.”
* riiiiiiing…riiiiiiiing…riiiiiing *
“Dreams feel real, right?” Savannah tried to get a feel of what Kayleigh was talking about. Kayleigh nodded, so Savannah continued. “And everyone seems real, right? And they probably think they are real.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“So, to you, I would seem real and I would certainly think I was real. To me, you would seem real and you would certainly think you were.”
“Right,” Kayleigh agreed. Her eyes narrowed, trying to figure out where Savannah was going with this line of thought.
“Then which one of us is dreaming?”
Silence fell between them save for the…
* riiiiiiing…riiiiiiiing…riiiiiing *
Savannah brought up a good point. A solid, yet unexpected, question Kayleigh didn’t anticipate. She just assumed she was dreaming. She must have been. Why would she be cognizant of her own existence if she wasn’t dreaming?
Kayleigh read a book once. She couldn’t remember what it was called or who wrote it. It wasn’t even the type of book she would normally enjoy but her good friend, Padma, recommended it about a very human looking robot that didn’t know it was a robot. Believed wholeheartedly and with every fiber of its being that it was human. Until one day, it found out, went crazy, and went of on a homicidal frenzy until it had to be destroyed. Or was it a movie, she tried to recall.
Either case, no matter the media format, she couldn’t imagine she was the robot.
* riiiiiiing…riiiiiiiing…riiiiiing *
�
�We should probably answer it,” she suggested.
“I answered the last one,” Savannah replied, staring at the door that should have disappeared by now. But it remained amidst the shimmering of the silver and gold light surrounding its perimeter like a magical portal silhouetted by celestial light. “And the door is still there.”
Kayleigh returned her gaze to the door for a moment, taking focus away from the continuous ringing of the telephone. “It’s going to open this time,” she said, finding hope for the first time since she had been in the void.
“You don’t know that,” Savannah pointed out.
“And you don’t know that it won’t. It has never…stayed…for this long before.”
“It may not let us get near it. It never has before.”
“Savannah,” Kayleigh began, raising her hands in frustration. “You have no sense of hope. You talk about optimism, but I don’t find any hope in your voice. You rather just stay put on let things happen rather then trying to find ways to make things happen. Find ways to get out of here. That is not optimism.”
“What are your worried about? You think this is a dream.”
* riiiiiiing…riiiiiiiing…riiiiiing *
“Oh, who am I kidding,” Kayleigh yelled. “This is not a dream. But this isn’t reality, either. This is something else. We are somewhere else. And if that door opens, and if it is true that only one of us can walk through it, I hope it’s me because I did what I could to leave this place.”
“Did nothing but sob for four hours, walk for a few hours more to absolutely nowhere, and dragged me along.”
“You didn’t have to follow me. Didn’t have to escort me like some sort of den mother.”
“Den mother?! I am only twelve years older than you. If anyone should be allowed to go through the door, it should be me. I’ve been here longer. Not by much, I will admit to that, and only to that, but it’s true.”
The two exchanged glares. Things got heated pretty fast out of the blue. The situation built to a tense moment with the glowing door and the insistent ringing of the telephone either one of them was eager to pick up.
Savannah had to step away. Needed to take a few steps back and reevaluate what was going on. Needed to take a breath.
And that was exactly what she did, holding her hands up to gesture a truce as she took a step back, and let out a breath before mumbling to herself. “Savannah Nicole Tennyson. Born April 6, 1982. Aries. Born in San Francisco to Patrick and Phyllis. No pets. Love rabbits….”
“Knock that off,” Kayleigh complained, rolling her eyes. “What does that help? If you forget, you forget. Nothing we do about that. It’s not like there’s ginseng laying around.”
* riiiiiiing…riiiiiiiing…riiiiiing *
“The door is still here,” Savannah replied, slowly managing to calm herself. “The door is still here, and that damn phone is still ringing.”
“We can’t do anything about the door. But we can do something about the phone.”
Finally, Kayleigh removed the receiver from its cradle, bringing it up to her ear. She didn’t say hello. Instead, she just listened. She figured she would just do that and see what happened. Logically, whoever was on the other end must have known who was on their end. If not, why call at all? Was it someone who was in the same predicament as they were? Someone who desperately wanted to find a way out? Or someone who was bored and just needed someone to talk to?
During the first answer of the call, all she heard was the ocean. The soft, soothing, yet powerful crashing of the waves upon an unknown shore. Savannah heard whispers, but all she heard was the large body of salt water.
This time, there was neither.
This time, there was a long, electronic whining. An extended, prolonged beep. Like the kind she normally heard when she left the headlights of her Toyota on. Or in a medical show when a patient…
She dropped the receiver, backing away from it in surprise and horror. The long beeping came through loud and blaring as the receiver dangled and swung like a pendulum, smacking against the wooden stand each time it passed.
The door began to open.
The silver and gold light splintered the door right down the middle as the two halves separated and pushed apart slowly. The Spanish-style double door was ornately carved from mahogany and beautifully stained into a dark brown finish. It arched along the top in a gentle bow. Each of its six panels, a mirror image of the one across from it, displayed a mastery of patience and techique learned centuries ago. Comprised of arches and right angles, the Baroque-era door stood magnificently, bathed in the light. The negative space between was full of intricate flourishes that gave it grandeur and elegance. The wood groaned, creaked, and rumbled as if it was made of stone and hadn’t been opened in centuries. The sound echoed in the still air. Grinding and cracking, snapping and breaking free like giant glaciers.
Distant voices came through the receiver. Human voices. English voices, as the beep diminished into the background. Savannah and Kayleigh paid no attention to what the voices were saying. The opening of the door was too impossible to ignore. The feat of the improbable was before their eyes and they could see nothing else.
Majestic light poured in, covering the immediate area with silver and gold like a newborn star. Blinding, yet young. Soft as the sun rising over the horizon at the break of day. Then, the door burst open, complete and wide. Strong winds forced its way through, pushing passed still air. After moments of opening slowly, widening the gap to just mere inches, the impatience of the invisible force could tolerate it no longer.
Then a voice shouted from the telephone. “Clear!”
An electric pop sizzled the air. A static charge filled all available space. A rope flung out from the opening of the door. It laid on the ground just short of reaching Savannah and Kayleigh. It glowed with blue and white energy, pulsated gently before them until it was pulled back, disappearing through the door.
They watched as the rope was pulled back through, unsure of what to make of it. The voices continued to speak, but they continued to only focus on the door.
The voices grew louder, jumbled and incoherent at times as if they were screaming over one another. But it wasn’t screaming. The voices were raised. But out of a sense of urgency.
A voice came through again, more muffled than before. “Clear!”
Another electric pop. The rope came back through the door again at a slant, coiled at the start, then rolling out at it lagged in the air moving passed Savannah as she and Kayleigh moved closer to the door. The rope laid on the ground for only a moment before it scooted back toward the door.
Instinctively, Kayleigh reached down for it. The tail end of the rope slipped right through her fingers, but Savannah was quick to follow, making a grab for it. She missed with her right hand, but her left slipped under the glowing rope, feeling the electricity course over the palm of her hand before closing her grip.
“Don’t let go!” Kayleigh exclaimed.
The rope emerged from the door for a reason. That much Kayleigh knew. Whether it was a lifeline, a rescue, or a line of breadcrumbs to follow, she was certain it was an attempt to help them leave. Whoever was on the other end must have known something. Must have known that because the door was open, didn’t mean one could have just simply walked through it. Maybe there was a preventive barrier just as a bubble protected its pocket of air.
Perhaps there was no way to tell. Or perhaps there was only one way to tell.
“Don’t worry,” Savannah replied. “I got it.” A sharp electrical current zapped through her body. A painful, stabbing sensation that struck every nerve from her hand to her brain. Reflexively, Savannah let go. “Ah! Damn it!”
Kayleigh chased after the rope. She hoped to catch it while it dragged onto the floor, working its way back to the door. If the rope was the way through, she didn’t want to take the chance of it not coming back for a third attempt. She rushed passed Savannah, keeping her eyes on the trailing rope as it continuously m
oved out of reach. Not much for running, she scrambled for the rope, reaching down and clamoring for it while Savannah stayed put. The rope was too fast for Savannah to catch up, but Kayleigh managed to stay right on it as the rope further moved further toward the door, and the door’s distance was now twenty yards away.
She wasn’t about to dive, sprawling herself on the cold floor, but she needed to catch it the same way someone didn’t have the energy to chase a quarter rolling on the floor. She managed to get slightly ahead of it. Not much. But just enough. She stomped on it, keeping it from moving any further.
The rope remained still, crackling with electricity under the weight on her foot.
“I’ve got something,” the voice remarked. Despite the telephone being yards behind her and the voice coming out of several small holes in an earpiece dangling off a stand, the voice sounded like it was next to her, more muffled than the previous occurrence. “But it’s faint…”
“Now, you don’t let go,” Savannah told her. “I’m coming.”
“I don’t know if it will let you.”
“What is that supposed to mean,” Savannah asked, finding herself walking faster.
“Only one of us can go through the door, remember?”
“Now, just a wait a minute…”
Kayleigh picked up the rope, keeping her foot on the end until it was in her hand. “I don’t make the rules.”
“What rules? Who’s to say?”
* beep, beep.....beep, beep.....beep, beep *
Coiling, the rope wrapped itself around Kayleigh’s arm and then, tugged, gently at first. Then, it became more…encouraging. Like a helpful nudge. The pull nearly took her feet from under her.
“It has me.”
“What do you mean it has you?”
“It’s pulling me toward the door.”
Savannah was just a couple feet from Kayleigh now. Just shy of arm’s length. Her eyes widened with hope. If she could reach Kayleigh, hang onto her will she passed through the door, maybe they would count as one. Maybe…
Two Souls, One Door: Beyond (Into the Void Book 2) Page 2