Both the boy and the angel followed the direction my finger pointed. The boy’s mouth began to open in a yell of surprise as he saw the lights just a few inches from the heel of his shoe. He took a step away, but before his foot could even leave the ground, the angel was beside him, traveling the six or seven feet so quickly she became a blur. She swept him up with one arm while simultaneously reaching for something on the ground with the other. I had a moment to see the thick branch in her hand as she raised it over her head and smashed it down onto the two glowing eyes.
There was a popping sound followed by a hiss, and then the two lights flickered, dimmed and vanished.
Immediately, I began to question what I had just witnessed, because this woman I had thought of as an angel had crossed the space to the boy, grabbed him and the makeshift club, and dispatched whatever the eyes belonged to in what seemed like only a second. No one should be able to move that fast.
It must be me, my inner voice whispered, I’m not well. It really shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’d be seeing things weirdly. Still...
The angel swung the boy to her left side, carrying him on her hip as though he were a toddler, before lowering him to the ground. The boy’s mouth hung wide open, either from fear or from awe at the way the angel had just dealt with whatever those eyes belonged to. This last choice seemed most likely given the look of admiration on his face, his eyes following the angel as she moved closer to where she had dealt her killing blow to the jade-eyed thing.
The angel dropped to her knees, prodded with her club at something I couldn’t see in the carpet of leaves. She reached down and picked that same something up with the thumb and forefinger of her left hand, raised it to eye level and examined it closely for a few seconds, twisting whatever it was back and forth before finally dropping it into the palm of her other hand. She stepped closer to the fire to get a better view of what looked, to my strained eyes, like a shapeless lump lying on her hand.
“Can I see?” the boy said, stepping in closer to her… and let out a little gasp of astonishment. “What is it?” he whispered.
The angel’s eyes left the crushed object in her hand to look at the boy. She flashed him her dazzling, reassuring smile but didn’t say anything, just shook her head in what was an obvious gesture to convey I have no idea. She continued her examination for a few more seconds before coming around the fire to where I lay, followed closely by the boy. The angel lowered herself to the ground near my head and sat cross-legged. Slowly, she extended her open hand to me until it was a few inches from my eyes. Then she tilted her head inquisitively as if to say to me, You got any idea what this is?
I blinked several times in succession to try and clear the thin layer of mist blurring my vision. It didn’t help, so I reached out and pulled her hand closer, bringing it into focus. Now it was my turn to gasp. Resting in her upturned hand was what looked like a large bug—a stag beetle is the name that came to mind. It was about seven inches long, completely black, with six articulated legs, two of which still moved weakly, pedaling through the air in slow circles. The legs were attached to a carapace that was split in two, two delicate-looking wings lay just beneath the chitin covering. Two large compound-eyes sat on either side of a broad flat head from which extended a dangerous looking set of pincers that resembled the horns of a deer. It looked like any other bug for the most part. Except for the inch-long crack along the belly of the carapace. Instead of spilled goo and insect-guts, I saw tiny gears and pulleys and levers, all working in perfect synchrony, moving the two still functioning legs.
It was a machine!
A nightmare of a thought suddenly elbowed its way through my pain to the front of my befuddled mind; what if we were machines? What if whoever the voice on the bridge had belonged to had taken my soul, my essence, whatever you want to call it that makes me me and placed it in a new body, a mechanical body? Like the suicidal robot I’d seen on the beach. What if all my guts and innards had been replaced by cogs and wheels and pulleys and God-knows-what-else. I felt hot tears begin to roll down my cheeks as panic swept over me. My sudden emotional turn seemed to surprise the angel. She pulled her hand, and the mechanical beast it held away from me, moving it out sight as though that was the cause of my tears.
I realized she must think the dead robo-bug had scared me. But there was still enough of my brain functioning that I had already figured my panic was nothing more than the far-fetched imaginings of a paranoid brain and a body suffering through withdrawal. The unconscious man lying just a few feet away pretty much disproved my theory that we were anything other than human. The gash across his skull bled what was obviously real blood. Which meant he was human. And if some evil genius had decided to place my mind in an android’s body then why leave me with all this pain? Why not just give us new, perfectly functional robot-bodies, instead? No, this was definitely the same body I had before the voice had saved me from my own stupid half-hearted attempt at suicide.
I started to try to explain my idea to the angel and the boy, but before I could muster the strength to get the words out, the night sky exploded.
Four
All heads swiveled simultaneously toward the forest’s canopy. Bursts of red, green, blue, yellow, and every color in between cascaded through gaps in the branches above us. Flashes of color streaked across the sky, saturating everything in a kaleidoscope of shimmering hues, illuminating the heavens like the Aurora Borealis on steroids. It was a beautiful but disturbing light-show that gave no hint or clue as to what could be causing it. I saw from the confused expression on the angel’s face that she was as surprised as I was. The boy, on the other hand, seemed absolutely ecstatic at the incredible aerial show. He stood, face turned skyward, wide-eyed, mouth fixed in an ‘o,’ staring at the shimmering ribbons of color.
The aurora sliced through the darkness around us, pushing it away, painting everything with a surreal blast of color.
I noticed something even more curious floating through the air all around us; tiny motes of what I assumed to be dust. Not much bigger than a pinhead, these tiny particles glowed and pulsed with a small but intense white light of their own as they swirled slowly through the air.
If you’ve ever shaken a snow globe and watched the imitation snow swirl, it looked just like that. If the aurora hadn’t revealed them, I doubt any of us would ever have known they were there.
I inhaled a deep breath of air… and tightly shut my mouth again as I sucked several of the glowing particles into my mouth. A moment of fear followed as I wondered whether they might be dangerous before I realized that we must have been inhaling them from the second we arrived here. Certainly from the time the angel and the boy had brought me into the forest. It was, I reasoned, probably just some kind of particulate matter from the layer of rotting leaves and vegetation that was reflecting the light from the aurora somehow. But whatever these tiny motes of lights were, they were everywhere. The entire forest, for as far as I could see, glowed with their otherworldly presence. Even the branches and trunks of the trees were outlined by this weird glowing pixie dust. It lay in a thin layer all over the ground, too; a sparkling carpet of tiny white lights.
The boy shifted his feet as he moved to get a better look at the aurora, kicking a puff of the pixie dust into the air. He didn’t seem to have noticed its presence yet, his attention focused entirely on the small gap of sky visible through the forest’s canopy.
The angel, on the other hand, definitely saw them. She followed a single glowing mote as it traveled across the space between us. She raised one eyebrow when she saw me watching her watching it as if to say, ‘Well, this is weird.’ I was in the process of shrugging back my amazement in answer to her when a violent boom shattered the silence of the forest, shaking the ground and sending leaves spinning from their branches. I jumped in surprise. The boy yelped in shock, and the angel took a step backward, shaking her head as though she’d been slapped. At the same time, the aurora grew momentarily more intense, and I felt the
strangest sensation pass through my body. It was like a low-voltage electric shock, mildly discomforting but not painful. It lasted for only a few seconds, but every muscle in my body jerked in response. I suddenly felt very warm, as though I’d developed a low-grade fever. Raising my hands to eye-level; I saw they were flushed red. Sweat popped on my forehead, my arms, my legs, and my breathing became very rapid as I gulped in huge lungfuls of air.
And then it was over as abruptly as it had started, melting away as though whatever God ruled this place had thrown its off switch.
Darkness hemmed in our little camp once more, held back only by the light of the campfire. The pixie dust continued to glow for a little longer before it too faded away, disappearing as though it had never been there, even though I knew it still must be, floating invisibly through the air.
The three of us remained silent and motionless for several long heartbeats. I think we all half-expected the sky to ignite again, but it didn’t. And as the shock of what had just happened began to fade, I realized the pain that had permeated my body was also gone, vanished, as though it had never been there.
I sat up, slowly.
There was none of the vertigo I’d experienced just a few minutes before the aurora. In fact, apart from a stomach that felt as empty as I knew it was, I felt… fine. Better than fine. I was… invigorated. Not even a creaky muscle from lying on the damp ground for so long. Tentatively, I got to my feet and stretched. Gone were the muscle aches and cramps. Gone was the sense of alternately being on fire and encased in ice. Gone was the knife-wielding headache, the nausea, the sweating. I took a few steps. The limp I’d had since the car crash, that was gone too. It was… miraculous and terrifying at the same time.
“Wow!” I said, quietly. “Wow!”
At the sound of my voice, the angel turned and looked at me, smiled, then said in perfect English, “Well, you’re certainly looking better.”
I blinked three times in quick succession.
The little boy stared, too. “I can understand you,” he said, matter-of-factly to the angel.
The angel froze mid-step. She turned to the boy, turned back to me. “And, apparently, I can understand you, too,” she said, enunciating each word slowly as though she was double-checking each of them as they left her lips.
We stared wide-eyed at each other.
“This is very… peculiar,” the angel said. “Until this moment, I have been unable to understand anything you have said. I recognize that your language is an old one, but there appears—"
Before I could ask what exactly she meant by ‘old,’ we were interrupted by the injured man who had been lying unconscious next to the fire.
He sat up, slowly shaking his head from side to side, as if waking from a deep sleep. The blood-stained bandage fell from his head into his lap.
I gasped: the ugly gash across his forehead I’d seen just minutes earlier had vanished, replaced by a thin line of fresh, pink skin where the wound had been.
The man blinked several times, squinted at each of us in turn, and said in a thick Midwest American accent, “Where the hell am I? And who in God’s name are you people?”
Five
We stood rooted to the spot; four strangers stunned into silence, the only sound the constant hiss of rain, each of us expecting—hoping—for the other to say something, anything.
When no one did, I spoke up.
“My name is Meredith Gale,” I told the man, “and these others are… well, you know, we haven’t actually been introduced.” I looked at the angel, raised my eyebrows questioningly.
The woman stared back at me, an odd expression on her face. It wasn’t so much a look of surprise, more like she recognized something when I told them my name.
“What?” I asked after a few seconds of her staring at me.
It took a couple more seconds before the angel answered me. As if she was carefully weighing her reply, she said, “My name is Weston Chou. I am—or rather, I was—the Security and Research Officer for the exploratory vessel Shining Way.” While her words were obviously English, Chou’s accent was still exotic and unrecognizable to me.
‘Security and Research Officer’ seemed like a particularly contrary mix for a job title, especially for someone who I assumed worked on some kind of a privately funded ocean-going research vessel. Or maybe she was part of a foreign navy, which would explain the strange accent. I didn’t mention any of this; my mind already had enough to think about, and I was trying to remain as present as I could, considering the utter weirdness of what had just happened.
The angel, or rather the woman who now said her name was Weston Chou looked to the boy. “And you, little one, what is your name?”
“I’m Albert,” the kid stuttered, “Albert Edward Glanville.” Then after a short pause, he added, “Schoolboy.” Albert nervously shifted the small objects he held from hand to hand, and now I saw they were glass marbles. He noticed me looking at them and held them out for me to inspect. They were larger than the ones I vaguely remembered owning as a child and quite lovely.
“They’re beautiful,” I said.
“You can have one if you like,” Albert said, sheepishly, holding all six on the palm of his extended hand.
“No, it’s okay, you keep them safe.” I tried not to smile but couldn’t help myself. The kid was just too cute. Between his obvious wide-eyed admiration of Chou and his English accent, well, he was just adorable.
The man nodded each time we identified ourselves, and when we were done, he stood there as if assessing us. “Okay, well that’s good. Now what I want—”
“And your name?” Chou interjected.
The man looked taken aback. “It’s Phillip. Phillip Yeoman. Where the hell am I?”
Chou said, “When we found you on the beach, you were unconscious. You had a broken arm and a head laceration, possibly some internal injuries. Albert and I did what we could to stabilize you. Moments ago there was an… event. That event appears to have healed your injuries.”
Phillip chewed his bottom lip. “Beach? I don’t remember any beach. I don’t remember anything at all after—” He stopped talking as though he had been on the verge of giving away some personal secret.
“When we arrived,” I said, “I saw stuff falling out of the sky around all the other people in the water. I think parts of the bridge I was on arrived here with me. Maybe you were hit by something heavy that came through with you. It’d explain the broken arm and head wound.”
“There are others?” Phillip said.
“Yes,” said Chou. “I estimate there were at least two-hundred others in the water upon our arrival.”
“Well, where are they now?” Phillip demanded.
I said, “They all panicked and ran away into the forest. It was pandemonium for a while.”
Phillip turned slowly, looking out into the darkness as if he expected to see some visual clue to where he… where we… were. “There’s no shelter nearby? No town? A village maybe? Nothing to tell us where we are?” he said. I presumed he was talking to us because he didn’t bother to turn and speak to us directly.
Chou smiled. “There was no time to inspect the area.”
“Well, don’t you think it would be a good idea if we looked for some shelter? We could be close to a town and not even know it,” he said, looking back over his shoulder at us. “And I’d prefer not to spend the rest of my night out here.”
“Without some form of portable illumination,” Chou said, her voice low, “anyone foolish enough to venture further into the woods will quickly become lost. And it was obvious when I carried you here from the beach that there is no shelter other than the trees within the immediate vicinity.”
Phillip turned to face Chou. “You carried me?” he said, condescendingly. “Look, lady, I’m thankful for your help, but I hardly think you’re capable of carrying someone my size more than a few feet.”
I have to admit, I found the idea a little farfetched too, at that point. Phillip was ea
sily one-hundred-and-eighty pounds, maybe more. Chou was tall and obviously fit but couldn’t have weighed more than one-twenty. No way was she going to be able to carry a full-grown man too far.
“She did,” the boy, Albert, said. “I saw her pick you and Meredith up and carry you both here.”
Phillip didn’t look convinced. He stared at Chou for a few long moments.
Chou held his stare. She threw more twigs into the fire. It crackled and bloomed, sending sparks floating high into the canopy, reminding me of the pixie dust I’d seen earlier.
“Did you see the tiny lights during the…” I searched for the right word to describe the light show that had swept over us only minutes earlier, “…aurora?”
“I saw them,” Albert said excitedly. “They looked like tiny stars floating through the air.”
“Huh?” said Phillip. “Aurora? What lights?”
“You were still unconscious when it happened,” I said, and quickly explained what had occurred while he lay senseless, adding, “and when it was done, that’s when you woke up. Your head wound had vanished, and it looks like your broken arm has healed too. And I… well, let’s just say that I feel a lot better than I did when I arrived here.”
Albert said, “And we can understand each other now, as well.”
Phillip looked at the boy. “So, you’re saying that before this… aurora happened, none of you could understand each other?”
“Well, Albert and I could understand each other, but we couldn’t understand Chou, and she couldn’t understand us,” I said.
Phillip eyeballed me with such incredulity I wanted to punch him. “It’s true,” I said.
“Well, I certainly don’t intend to wait around here all night,” Phillip said eventually, his gaze moving over the darkened canopy of the forest. “Can’t even see the damn stars from here.” He turned back to Chou. “Which way is the beach?”
The Paths Between Worlds Page 4
