Portals Heather

by Leslie Edens Copeland

  "That's the idea!" said Bellum. "Why do you think I keep mortals like this foul Bruce around? So easily he does my bidding. In fact—"

  A scream interrupted Bellum. Shirleen came running out of the double-wide, wielding a shotgun. "Bruce Slade! You just let that poor boy go! You've gone too far. He ain't nothing but a kid. Get back!"

  She pointed the shotgun at Bruce. Bellum grinned. He slid easily into the shadows and vanished. Shirleen didn't seem to notice but helped me to lift Emmett's nearly lifeless body. We carried him, unconscious, inside.

  When Bruce came to the door, Shirleen leveled the shotgun at him again. "I don't think so, mister. You're in the doghouse. Get back to the little trailer until I tell you."

  Bruce slunk down the stairs and sat in the doorway of the teardrop trailer, glaring at the double-wide. I spied my ring floating in the air near his ear, where Bellum, no doubt, whispered to him evil thoughts—universal evil.

  Shirleen and I laid Emmett on the ratty old couch in the double-wide. He groaned but didn't wake, and I smoothed back his hair to quiet him. Shirleen ran to the bathroom for bandages. While she rummaged, I held my hand over Emmett, allowing the little blue snowflakes to sink in. I still had almost no spectricity. My healing caused his swelling to die down and his gashes to stop bleeding, but he didn't regain consciousness. I wiped away the tears that filled my eyes. How could I help him if I didn't stop crying? My focus had gone to pieces.

  Shirleen returned with a first aid kit and the phone. "I called Bruce's doctor earlier. They said he should be under psychiatric observation. These doctors! How is the boy?"

  "He's unconscious. Call 911, Mom!" I shouted. "He could have internal injuries, brain damage! He could die!"

  His precious mortal life. I'd almost forgotten Emmett had been dead when we met. He'd gone through so much to be here. I couldn't allow him to lose that life now.

  But Shirleen hesitated with the phone. "If I call, they'll lock your stepfather up for sure."

  "So?! Bruce should be locked up." I watched Emmett's dark eyelashes flutter against his pale skin, dreaming of Dead Town, of All's Hold, of ectoplasmic labyrinths, and portal fields ringed by dire, gray trees.

  "Please help him," I pleaded to Shirleen.

  "Who is he? Who are his parents?" she asked.

  "He's . . . he's just a boy. I don't know his parents. His name is Emmett. We just—met," I said. My face flushed, and Shirleen stared at me.

  "I see. Well, I can't risk getting Bruce arrested. I'm calling your aunt," she said.

  "I guess." I wanted an ambulance, the hospital. But really, any attempt to remove Emmett from the junkyard would fail, the way Bellum had us penned in. I didn't know what a spirit-blind mortal might see—something convincing, some realistic rationale for why he couldn't be removed—but Emmett couldn't leave. Bringing in Aunt Doreen, who was a nurse, would get him help the quickest. I planted myself next to Emmett's unconscious form and tried to sprinkle him with spectricity whenever Shirleen's back was turned. Almost nothing—but I'd keep trying, every few minutes, until help came.

  ***

  Aunt Doreen tsk-tsked over Emmett's condition when she saw him. "You say Bruce did this? I don't know why you stay with that man. A man that gets violent like this is going to get violent with you one day." She patted my back and I nodded. "Or your kids."

  Shirleen put her hands on her hips. They'd been having this argument since Shirleen got engaged to Bruce. I heard my mother's half of it every time Doreen called on the phone. "Tell me if you can help him without a hospital. I don't want Bruce arrested. I just want to make sure this young man will be okay."

  Shirleen smiled fondly at Emmett. He'd awoken moments before Doreen arrived, confused, but oddly cheerful. Now he gave us a stiff thumbs-up and grinned through his swollen lip.

  "Ah, life. It's for the living," he said.

  "I'm going to give him a sedative and something for pain," said Doreen, drawing up a syringe. "He may have cracked ribs, but he doesn't have a concussion. He's got some nasty gashes. What did Bruce do that with? It looks like he attacked him with barbed wire. You really ought to reconsider this relationship, Shirleen."

  "No, Bruce didn't do that," I said. "Emmett ran into the fence."

  "Sure, honey." Doreen clucked at me. "Sure he did. It's lucky Bruce didn't get a hold of Heather, too. This little boy was trying to protect her, I don't doubt. Brave." She injected Emmett, who winced at the needle, and watched with fascination as the fluid entered his arm.

  "I'm not a little boy. I'm a two-thousand-year-old spirit. Actually, a deity, although I'm not at my best right now. But I have many, many incarnations, and my name is Emmett Groswald Cornelius St. Claire Marie-Claude Juan Rodriguez Gabriel Lysander Tippetarius Zetian O'Toole Carlisle Fitzhugh . . ." With that, Emmett drifted off, his eyelids fluttering shut.

  Doreen chuckled. "It's amazing what people will say under the influence of sedatives. Just yesterday we had two people full of cactus spines who claimed someone blew up a Cholla cactus with electricity from her fingertips, and that's how they wound up in the ER. The things people will say!"

  Watching Emmett sleep made me tired, too. I yawned widely.

  "You'd better get to bed. Nothing more you can do now. I'll sit with him," said Doreen.

  I would have preferred to sleep on the floor next to Emmett, but Shirleen hustled me off to my old bedroom. I hugged Emmett once more before I left, infusing the hug with healing spectricity, and brushed his cheek with my lips. He smiled sweetly in his sleep.

  ***

  Very early the next morning, a disturbing howl broke the peace. I ran out of my bedroom wrapped in a quilt and nearly bumped into Shirleen. Doreen was gone, and Emmett slept on the couch, breathing evenly. Shirleen looked out the front door and clucked in disgust.

  "I do not know what's gotten into that man," she said. She stomped outside and I peeked out. There lay Bruce at the end of the driveway, thrashing in the dirt.

  "Bruce! You get up from there! Don't make me call the police!" shouted Shirleen.

  But what I saw: a cloud of birds diving at Bruce, pecking his eyes and face. A pack of demon dogs dragging him back and forth, mauling him like an old bone. A spirit attack! Shirleen could not see such things.

  "Let me get him, Mom. I'll bring him inside," I said, hardly able to keep the panic from my voice.

  Shirleen crossed her arms and stomped back inside. "Fine!" she shouted. "Don't you let him lay a hand on you, or it's the police. I'm up to here with that man."

  I went to work. Standing close to the property's edge, I zapped a few of the larger dogs off Bruce. My spectricity had built up a little in the night but it was still pretty weak. I picked up a stick and threw it, giving it a psychokinetic push to send it farther. The dogs took off after it, running their hardest. I gripped Bruce's hand, waving birds off. My hand slipped in the blood—one of his eyes bled profusely, and he had bite marks and gouges up and down his limbs. I pulled with all my strength. He crawled, until he was inside the property line. The dogs returned, happily presenting the stick. When I didn't throw it again, they howled and barked. I could hardly hear for the din.

  "Can you stand?" I asked Bruce. He grunted and leaned on me, limping his way into the double-wide. His appearance was horrific and I had no idea how I'd treat his paranormal injuries. Regular doctors would be no help—the spirit blind couldn't see the damage done to Bruce by Bellum's minions, much less treat it.

  Shirleen blocked the door. "Where do you think you're taking him?" She poked Bruce in the chest, on one his nasty gashes. I cringed. The blood from the spirit wound stained Shirleen's finger, but she did nothing to remove it. I wondered how often people around me suffered injuries from a spiritual cause that no one could see.

  "He's not well, Mom," I said. My grave expression must have convinced Shirleen, who knew I was no fan of Bruce. We helped him into my bedroom and lowered him to the bed.

  "His eyes!" said Shirleen with a gasp. "I truly think that man's g
one crazy. Been drinkin' for sure." She plodded out, muttering that she'd check on him later.

  Bellum's birds had almost pecked out one of Bruce's eyes, which is probably why they looked crazy to Shirleen. My hands shaking, I got the first aid kit and tried to patch Bruce up, but no matter how many bandages I applied, the blood soaked through. The bedding was drenched with it now. I held my hand over him, letting spectricity drift down, but only a few snowflakes fell. I didn't have enough, and by the time I recharged, Bruce might be damaged beyond hope—or die. Panicking, I realized the only way to help Bruce and Emmett now: I would have to go to the Bellum.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Bellum Omnium Contra Omnes

  I touched Emmett's sleeping temple. Shirleen was engrossed in television and took no notice as I tried to sense him. His mind read garbled, thick—he was still a good, long way from consciousness. But I had to help Bruce now.

  Emmett couldn't advise me. I had no choice. I slipped out the back door, across the sandlot. I stood before the teardrop trailer. I didn't have to wait long.

  Bellum's elongated form materialized out of the shadows. His voice was smooth and smug. "Come to bargain for little Bruce's life?"

  Of course, he knew. The Bellum would know every incident of chaos if he knew nothing else.

  "Something like that," I said, wondering what indeed I was doing. Why should I care what happened to Bruce, while Emmett lay unconscious from the wounds Bruce had inflicted? But an image kept playing in my mind's eye: Bellum's hand in Bruce's head.

  He manipulated Bruce, just as he manipulated me and Emmett. I wasn't going to leave any mortal behind to become Bellum's plaything, not even Bruce.

  "Why can you interfere with mortals? You said you couldn't touch Emmett as a mortal, but you've inflicted all kinds of pain on the mortals of this junkyard," I said.

  The Bellum's head tilted back. He laughed and laughed. "How little you do know, mortal Heather with your teeny tiny spectricity bolts. What deep, deep spectral crap you have gotten yourself into. And now they have all left you alone . . . oh, it's delightful!"

  The sound of his laughter resembled a rolling thunder, spreading from horizon to horizon. I watched clouds amass overhead and wondered if it would really rain, or if this was just the effect of Bellum's amusement.

  "But I know you said before, you can't interfere with Emmett when he's mortal. How can you have us penned in here like this, unless . . ." I sank into silence. I observed the clouds growing thicker over the junkyard. Something about those clouds . . .

  The Bellum watched me closely, the Ring of Esperance shining from his forehead like a third eye. I glanced around at the mounds of junk so familiar to me. Then I thought of Bruce, lying bleeding in the double-wide, and Shirleen, so willing to tend to Emmett, and feisty Aunt Doreen, who so disapproved of Bruce that she'd never visited us before. It all felt wrong.

  "Say you will, and I'll bring our battlefield here immediately." That's what Bellum had said to Emmett. But how could he bring the Lexiverse here? The only portal out had been destroyed.

  "Even I can't fly out now!" Bellum had said.

  Because . . . because he had us all penned in. Even himself.

  Penned in.

  I sucked in a sudden breath. Bellum really couldn't fly out. But not because of his birds and dogs.

  He was truly trapped here, along with the rest of us, and had been since the portal's destruction. Because . . . he'd never actually gotten out at all, and neither had we. We were all still trapped in the Lexiverse, disguised as the junkyard! None of us had ever left, never returned home!

  The minions, the birds and dogs, must only be a diversion of the Bellum's. Something that made sense to our minds, something for us to see that explained why we couldn't escape.

  We were all still trapped inside the Lexiverse, and Bellum didn't want us to know it.

  If that was true, Shirleen and Doreen couldn't actually be here. They were creations of the Lexiverse, taken from my memories, and perhaps my hopes and dreams. This had backfired on the Bellum. Shirleen and Doreen were helping me, protecting Emmett instead of helping to destroy him. So, did this mean—I was making things happen here too?

  Shirleen and Doreen were acting out the way I always hoped things could be. I had an influence on reality in this Lexiverse, too. I, too, could pen things in.

  If we were all trapped, then Sam and the Paranormals must also be here, somewhere. But I had no idea where, nor could I sense them.

  I turned without a word from Bellum and went inside the teardrop trailer. Moments later, frost began to form on the teardrop's windows, despite the eighty-degree heat outside. Icicles grew past the windows, hanging from the trailer's edge. My breath swirled misty patterns in the cold air.

  I was doing it! I was creating ice, negating his reality, by turning my back on him. It was clumsy, though. I didn't really know how to direct this crafting. I would need some tool or method. Something I did well.

  Through the window I could just see Bellum, stomping his feet and flinging his arms in a tantrum. The frozen handle of the teardrop trailer rattled and rattled, but the door did not open.

  Bellum roared, and I looked up. He glared down at me through the overhead window, floating furious over the small world he had created. Muttering to himself, words, words. Bellum needed just the right words now to stop a young medium from overtaking his universe.

  I willed my notebook to my hand with a certainty I'd seldom felt. I seized my cheap ballpoint pen. And I wrote. My pen fluttered over the pages, the words almost writing themselves. So many lives depended on me now, but I was in the grip of inspiration and didn't worry or hesitate. I saw so clearly, though I never could have explained what I saw. But I knew this: as I wrote it here, in this infernal Lexiverse junkyard, so it would become.

  I wrote.

  Sam and the Paranormals saw a large funnel of wind and light, spinning round and round. A powerful portal appeared dead in the center of their world. Through it, they glimpsed visions of the junkyard. Sam sensed Heather's presence.

  "She's in the junkyard, and she's in trouble! Come on!" Sam said to the others.

  Sam, Lily, Trenton, Oskar—they all entered the portal. Pell-mell, they flung into its furls, landing hard on the sand before the teardrop trailer door. They puzzled at the sight of the ice and frost, and Bellum above, muttering in Latin and cloaking the sky with black clouds. The storm rolled in fast, a cloudburst of Bellum's fury. The rain pelted, stinging their skin like tiny bullets. Heather's icy door creaked open, and she beckoned them inside, still writing in her notebook.

  While I wrote, I heard a creak at my door. I pushed it open and beckoned, but I kept writing. Outside, I glimpsed Sam! He set his jaw against the rain, his green eyes bright. Behind him, Lily, Trenton, Oskar. All with frowns and tired eyes, glazed with Bellum's rain.

  "Everybody inside!" I shouted. But kept writing. Penned in. I can pen things in too.

  I wrote, and I read aloud as I wrote.

  They piled inside, escaping Bellum's rain shower, which was making them feel extremely angry. But inside Heather's frozen teardrop trailer, those feelings stilled. Instead of cold, they felt numb. Anesthetized. Calm, composed—all their bitterness, anger, and fear frozen.

  "Welcome to my little world. I've created a haven for us inside Bellum's Lexiverse. A tiny pocket where we can't feel anything. This prevents Bellum from using our feelings against us. And by the time he thaws us out, we'll be gone. Escaped through the only way out. My ring."

  I stopped writing to say, "Bellum's trying to get through the portal I used to bring you here. But it only goes to wherever you were. He can't escape that way."

  "It goes to the Round Room in the Vic," said Trenton in a wooden voice. The others nodded without expression.

  I said, "It was illusion, just as this is illusion. I must write and speak these words. 'Any wounds inflicted in this Lexiverse cannot remain in our mortal world. They are purely artifice of the Bellum in this false Lex
iverse junkyard.'" And I wrote, in my notebook, the spell, the incantation I had concocted. No wounds would remain, once we escaped.

  "Not false!" Bellum's voice boomed in on us, penetrating the trailer. "How is what you see and hear any less real in this place than any other?"

  "You have no power here, Bellum," I said. I wrote it as I spoke, penning a new reality.

  The mortals shook off Bellum's attempt to cast doubt, easily ignoring him without the vulnerability of feelings. This temporary numbness served them well.

  "We shall confront him," said Heather.

  "Yes," the others intoned.

  "But listen. First, Emmett and Bruce are in the double-wide, badly wounded. We need to get them out of here. I know none of us have any great love for Bruce. But Bellum has been torturing him and forcing him to do his bidding. We can't leave him here. He's badly injured, and he'll die."

  I heard Sam say it, as I wrote it, and who knows what came first? Sam said, "I agree. I volunteer to get Emmett and Bruce while Heather holds off Bellum."

  "I'm with you," said Lily.

  "Let's go get them," said Trenton, his voice so strange and flat, without emotion.

  Oskar said, "Leaving Bruce behind would not only lack compassion. It would also be extremely foolish. If we are in the Lexiverse, can't Bellum kill a mortal to make a ghost portal? And thereby, get out?"

  "You're right. Oskar, you are as smart as Trenton claims," said Lily a monotone voice.

  "Then we need to get Bruce out before Bellum succeeds. I'll message Sam. Bellum can't pick up on that."

  I was pretty good at this speaking-while-writing thing. The words scribbled around on the page but remained readable enough. Years spent writing—in the dark, on the fly, on buses, everywhere I went—paid off now. Sam smiled as I kept going.

  "Everybody stick close to me and do what I tell you. And you've got to stay cold. No feelings until we escape," said Sam.

  They nodded. For once, even Trenton's face was a blank.

  "Here we go," said Sam.

  Now the real challenge. I'd have to write and run. Could I do it? I stood up and walked after them. I wrote.