CHAPTER FOUR
Mom was furious when I got home. Revealing the evening’s plan lead to shouting that went on for a good half hour, bouncing around the walls and the three empty wine bottles on the piano top. She repeated the phrase, “You’re dead meat,” like a new personal motto, and I had not even gotten a chance to mention my meeting with the dream chasers.
I knew not to get her any angrier in her present state, so I took a seat next to Peaches on the couch.
Instead of the pleasant calm before the storm I had hoped for, Mom followed me, saying, “The neighbor kid, Mary Margaret, came home with an interesting advertisement today. She was even nice enough to let me keep a copy once I asked her about it.”
She ripped the messenger bag off of my back by the straps and began to fish around inside until she pulled out one of my fliers, “Oh, interesting. They must have been passing these around. How else could you have gotten one?”
I wisely kept my head down. Peaches moaned along with me, hoping Mom would drop her argument, but that only made it worse.
She ran her hands through her hair, saying, “You know, I tried hard enough to get your father to come down to my level, but now you’ve let the whole town know what I’ve known all along: his mind is on another planet. Great, I have another Quinn in my life who can’t leave well enough alone. Did you have anything else you wanted to tell me?”
After unflinching my eyes long enough to announce the news of Darius’ arrival, she put me on living room cleaning duty while she whipped up something for dinner, throwing in expletives and grunts for good measure.
Despite the rift between Mom and me, I could not help but think about Darius’ plans to possibly help us find my father. He could have also been full of crock like the dream chasers so desperately wanted me to believe. I never ruled out the same possibility for my father’s dream tales, so I wasn’t going to get my hopes up for a stranger. Everything was just a little too overwhelming to process.
A few hours passed, bringing night time along with it. I pretended to fluff the couch pillows for the hundredth time, made sure Peaches was outside in the back yard and out of biting distance, and resumed a place by the door to keep Mom from scaring Darius away from the get go. She was certainly capable of doing some damage.
Five minutes after seven, the jingle of the doorbell went off. When I opened the door, the sight was enough to bring the entire science world to a screaching halt.
I knew some people could look different when they had altered their clothes or the lighting had dimmed, but Darius might as well have aged sixty years since we had last spoken.
Nevermind that his cheeks were swollen inward, barely leaving room for his tongue to move, but a foot of height had disappeared, making him shorter than me. If it weren’t for the man in front of me wearing the same suit, or the same winning smile, I wouldn’t have known they were the same person. I considered that I may not have been paying full attention to him at the store.
I said, “Should I get you a cane?”
I checked for Mom who, thankfully, was too busy to notice our guest had arrived. With the coast clear, I said to Darius, “What happened to you?”
Darius kept his volume low, “There is no time. Can I come in, little Quinn?”
He sidestepped me, limping and gripping tightly to a big black box. Each step harder than the last, his legs were literally withering away under his own weight.
“What’s in the box?”
“All in good time. Do you have a card table?” He spotted the dining room table at the back of the house. The nerves pouring out with his voice, he said, “Perfect. This will have to work.”
I tried to gently grab his shoulders to slow down the clash of the titans, a little afraid I’d have broken his bones if I slipped. One slight mistake could crumble the new Darius into dust. What was I saying to myself? People just did not age like that.
But, just as the tips of my fingers could grace the fabric of his suit, his body shot forward to the table with the speed of a rocket. I didn’t have time to react. Even Peaches, who had a habit of barking at strangers, stared at our house guest from the back door with a vacant expression. My perception of reality was splitting at the seams.
I kept my voice low so as not to call attention to Mom who had broken into song in between yelling at me to keep cleaning. I said, “Darius, can we save the experiment for after dinner? We might get lucky and the wine will wear off—”
He interupted me, “No, no. This is important. Contrary to your belief, Alan Quinn, she may need all the wine she can get for this one.”
Darius sat the box down on the table and lifted the lid to empty the contents: a large red stone. His eyes lit up. “Gorgeous.”
The dimmed lights flipped on to their maximum brightness. The singing had stopped and the gloves had come off, or should I say oven mitts? Mom had entered the ring.
They both held still in a time lock; Darius at the left end of the table and Mom holding a plate of freshly baked bread on the right.
“Maggie! How are you?”
“You aren’t looking very—”
“Well?”
“Something like that.”
“I have had better days. I hope you enjoyed the piano.”
Darius placed himself in front of the stone. He said, “I have come to help you find Reese.”
“Really? And, how do you plan to do that exactly?”
“Well, I already have a theory about where he may be or at least where he is going. The first part of the search is proving that place exists.”
The plate dropped from her grip, throwing bread on to the wooden floor. I knew things were about to hit the fan. The inevitable train wreck could have been prevented if I had just minded my own business several hours before.
“What is all of this?” she said. Her hospitality had reached its end.
Darius continued, ignoring Mom at the brink of her rampage, “Reese mentioned something about a faceless man coming down from the heavens. ‘The man will be shrouded in darkness,’ he said. He may even be missing limbs.”
He said, “He will not start off that way. No. It will be hard to predict. He will stop at nothing until he has captured Alan and brought him back to the homeland. Reese called it Draio. Our nearing acquaintance probably has another name for it.”
It strangely sounded rehearsed. I jumped up from my hiding place on the couch and said, “He is coming for who?”
Mom clacked her heals against the floor until she was safely between me and the miraculous aging man. She said, “Alan, you’re grounded. Now, go upstairs.”
“Don’t I have a say in the prevention of my future kidnapping?”
They both shouted, “No.”
“Just checking.”
Darius made sure the stone lay centered on the table, “As I was saying, this man is nothing more than a solid black shape, a walking black hole sucking in any poor soul who will adhere to his paranoid rants. Reese called him a—”
“Silhouette,” I added. “Dad called the shadow people on Draio Silhouettes. He said they were being enslaved.”
Mom said, “I thought I told you to go to your room, Alan.”
“That he did.” He spoke as if Mom had left the room. “When your father and I would discuss the creatures in his world, we came to the conclusion not all of those things could be counting on the welfare of their species. They do have a little bit of human in them after all.”
Talking about Draio filled me wit
h the parts about my Dad I loved and missed: his story telling. I said, “What is the stone for?”
“I am glad you asked.”
Mom stomped over to the table and swept her arm across, knocking everything, including the stone, to the ground. She shouted, “I do not know what bull you’ve been feeding my son, but you can leave this house immediately.”
Darius pleaded, “But, I am doing this to save your family. Hopefully, you will be able to see that.”
Mom’s eyes watered, “I appreciate everything you’ve done for my family over the years but the last man who believed in all of that garbage, abandoned his only son for a new life.”
“Maggie, I implore you to listen. You are making a mistake.”
Mom said, “Leave, Darius,” and pushed the crippling man towards the front door as fast as she could without tumbling him over. I was not sure she would have cared if she had.
I yelled, “Stop, can’t you see he is in pain?” until my vocal chords felt like they were going to fall out from the strain. It didn’t help. Mom had already forced Darius halfway out the door.
She said, “If you happen to run into my idiot of a husband, be sure to ask him if all of this was worth it. I’ll be sure to have divorce papers waiting for him when he returns.” She slammed the door closed, leaving Darius in the cold.
The words swung through the air and pierced right through my chest. Mom spun around, holding her hands to her mouth, trying to erase what I could only hope she didn’t mean. She opened her mouth to apologize but the beeping of the smoke alarm went off, reminding her something lay burning in the oven.
“Please, stay right there. Don’t move,” she said. “We’ll talk about this.”
She truly had given up. I had to clear my head. Opting to grab Peaches leash, I exited out the back door and walked into the night.
Peaches couldn’t have been a better choice for getting my mind off of things. Her little muscles pulled and fought till it felt like my arms were going to fall off and land in a pile in the backyard. No matter, It would have taken an earthquake to get the vision out of my head of how quickly Darius went from mega-god to decrepit old man in the time it took most people to take a small nap.
I opened our gate. Peaches’ powerful scent and strength guided us through to Hatter Circle’s main road. Only a handful of houses made up the neighborhood but they all were either empty at that hour or a few of my neighbors had a nasty habit of keeping their lights down to spy on the town’s going ons. I would have joined in too if I’d known about the night’s excitements and was not on the front lines of the mystery.
The one thing that stuck out to me? Darius, a walking bag of bones, must have picked himself up and drifted away because there were no signs of him to be found. Dad’s stories about the magical world of Draio sounded too fantastical to be real, but I was beginning to reconsider. Darius did not look ill, but cursed.
My reflection on the subject was interrupted by the yanking and pulling of a frazzled Peaches at the end of her leash, I said, “What is it, girl?”
The answer came when a street light flickered in the far distance, revealing Darius’ decrepit frame walking into the darkness and thick autumn fog. My curiosity was too great. I had to talk to Darius about the stone, so I let Peaches drag me all the way to the park at the end of the street where Darius was—still nowhere to be found.
I heard a voice but I couldn’t make out the direction. Almost unrecognizable, a male’s voice said, “Everything worked like a charm. Now, I have not been as faithful to you in the past as you would prefer, but I do not see why we can not both represent your greatness on the homeland. We could be kings together.”
“Darius? Is that you?” I called out.
The voice rose a few octaves, fear clawing at every word, “Please? I have done what you have asked. I do not think my heart can last another age cycle. Give me immunity from this horror!”
Peaches’ barking turned to moaning at the sky. I followed the direction of her snout until my eyes laid upon a star unlike any other. It twinkled neon blue, but could have been an airplane or a satellite. This particular star set its path for me and fast, taking shape as a blue orb as it got closer to the ground.
“It has begun, Alan,” Darius said, walking out from the shade of the nearby tree. A bone snapped in his right leg, bringing him to his knees. The moon mixed with the light from the blue orb illuminated his skin wrapped so tightly that his bones were beginning to break through.
He could barely get his words out through the pain, “Trust none of your allegiances and only your dreams. Remember, this will always be bigger than you, but never doubt your importance.”
Weakly, he looked up to the sky and spread his arms, saying, “Please, be merciful,” and his body popped into a cloud of dust.
I dropped the leash, running full sprint towards the spot where Darius’ body once laid. I said, “Darius? DARIUS? You have to help me find my father. You have to!”
He was gone. He died right in front of me. The cold sting of hopelessness splashed over every inch of my being. Out of options, I turned to slapping myself in the face, urging my body to wake up from this terrible nightmare.
There was nothing left of him and no one left in the park but me and my dog. Nothing until I heard a high pitched vibrating hum like a tiny creature with a squeaky voice was giggling behind me.
With its ultraviolet glow, I had to squint my eyes just to look at it. The sapphire blue orb hovered a few feet above Peaches’ head. Barely larger than a softball, it broadcasted enough light over the park to make me forget daylight still happened to be hours and hours away. Peaches remained locked in place, mesmerized and unharmed, while I checked over my shoulder to see if I was the only one witnessing the phenomenon. It was still only me.
With a hand above my eyes, I took a shot in the dark and tried to communicate with it. I was still too dazed from watching Darius--disentegrate. I said, “You there, could you tone it down a bit? If I am going to be dreaming, I rather not wake up blind.”
The orb sucked in the light, which in turn expanded it to the size of a classroom globe. It continued to giggle but this time with a lower tone.
I said, “Are you responsible for killing Darius?”
It stopped giggling and spun a little bit to its left and again to its right, making a whistling noise I understood to be “No.”
“Do you plan to kill me?”
Another “No.”
I lowered my hand and inched closer to the orb, eventually standing between the shiny being and the dog statue Peaches had become. Nothing had the power to get Peaches to stand still, especially shiny lights.
It giggled again.
“What do you want? Why are you here?” I pleaded.
The words sounded so cliché but I couldn’t concentrate hard enough to manage anything else. I reached out to touch it, jumping back a few times in case I would have to run at a moment’s notice. Positive it was not going to attack me, I placed my hand on its surface.
What I found? An inky ooze like a jar of old, watery jelly that had liquefied under a noon day sun. It swallowed my hand but instead of the bones, or whatever I exactly expected to find when my hand went in, I found nothing. My hand safely made it to the other side unscathed.
And then, the orb shot off towards the woods quicker than a leopard hunting a gazelle.
Not too long after, Peaches followed at the same speed, throwing dirt up in the air. I lost her in the forest on the other si
de of the park’s large pond.
I called out, “Peaches!”
My legs weren’t quick enough but I took off with whatever speed I could muster until I stopped at the forest’s edge. I could still hear the evil laugh of the blue orb and Peaches’ puppy yelps between the crunch of her paws against crinkled leaves and twigs. The forest was in solid darkness. The sounds were getting fainter and fainter. Not being one to walk aimlessly into dark places, I gave it a second or two, hoping Peaches would give up on her hunt, allowing us to search again under daylight’s safety.
All of those hopes diminished when an awful shriek ripped through the air, following the reappearance of the orb by my side. It blinked red like its battery power was depleting.
I said, “Where’s the dog?”
Peaches’ yelps morphed into screams. I forced my hand through the goo of the orb, using it as a guiding light. Oddly, it didn’t fly away or attempt to put up a fight as I ran in the direction of my dog.
But no matter the amount of light it provided, I still managed to trip over every branch that found its way in my path. Each step was succeeded by a chorus of ouches that blended in with the chirps of crickets and hoots of owls, but I had to trudge through it. I had to find my friend.
An hour passed. Daylight remained a long lost dream. The blue mass I had willfully chosen to guide me dimmed. It didn’t help the landscape appeared to be repeating itself. The trees shaking against the wind above taunted me like a group of laughing jesters.
I gave panic another chance.
“Peaches?” Nothing. “Peaches?” Still nothing. “Anybody?”
The sphere fell free from my grip. It slapped against the ground like a deflated volleyball.
“Maybe it was just my imagination,” I said to myself.
I had become just as, if not more, delusional than my own father. The thought was nearly enough to convince me there wasn’t a crescendo of deep whispers attacking my ears, chanting, “The king will fall. The Silhouettes will rise.”
Their volume rose up and overpowered the rest of the night sounds. It was so loud that I was forced to jam my fingers into my ears and curl up in a ball, but it only became louder, harsher. Hands tugged on my shirt, forcing my focus upon my would be attackers, but there was no one there. I pulled away as hard as I could, making virtually no progress until the hands released me, allowing me to fall on my butt.
“Who is out there?”
All at once the whispers stopped. In their place was a man’s voice with a hint of a British accent. He repeated the same phrase, “The king must fall. The Silhouettes will rise. Oh, wait, do not eat that. Please?”
A crunching noise echoed through the woods and the voice vanished just as quickly as it had appeared.
Somewhere in the background, I heard the exhausted panting of my golden lab. While her hot breathe was enough to make my nostrils flare up, I was more than grateful to see Peaches. She licked my face and everything got a little brighter—I mean lot brighter.
“Peaches?”
I pushed her back to study her mouth which was glowing bright blue.
Good news? She got a hold of the sphere and made the whispers go away. Bad news? She ate it.
The Silhouette (Alan Quinn and the Second Lifes) Page 4
