ALEC: An Action & Adventure Fantasy Novel (Alexander Trilogy)

by Stan I. S. Law

  Don grew in Alex’s eyes by the minute.

  “And…” Don added, making a minute adjustment to the fores’l without letting go the wheel. All lines had been brought into the cockpit and were within reach of the helmsman. “And Gypsy Moth IV was 54 feet, not a mere 42.”

  Alex’s mouth dropped still lower. Don knew about his childhood hero.

  “But it’s a lot more fun to do it in company…” Don added wistfully.

  Alex had learned later that neither Don’s second nor his third wife liked sailing. Not unless it was a motorboat. Don called them noisy stinkpots; the motorboats, not the wives—although Alex hadn’t heard anything particularly complementary about them either.

  “So you know Sir Francis…”

  “Not exactly. He died before I was born. But I know what you mean. I admire the guy, although I don’t have the guts myself.”

  And, Alex mused, you’re not really a loner… You’ve just had bad luck with your wives.

  Alex wondered if he could ever sail the seven seas solo. The most he’d done solo had been Folkestone to Calais, across the English Channel. He remembered when the wind had died on him. He’d spent half the night drifting in utter silence.

  He’d never forget that trip.

  An unearthly calm descended all around him. Not even a slightest whisper of a breeze disturbed the mirror of the sea, stretching in all directions. He’d felt suspended between two sparkling universes. The stars were above and below him.

  The stars were everywhere…

  ***

  The stars were everywhere. The sky wasn’t blue; it was as black as the velvet dress his mom once made for a ball on New Year’s Eve. Black and deep—deep beyond imagination. There was no end to this blackness. And suspended in this soft velvet were those innumerable diamonds. Sharp, crystal-like; some shimmering, some fixed with the coldness of broken ice.

  “The Far Country,” he heard a mere whisper. In this cathedral of the Infinite, one could only talk in whispers. Even Sandra.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw one diamond chip expand and then explode like the purest silver and gold firecracker. He had no idea how far it was from him, but it did not seem to get any closer.

  “A Nova. An exploding star. She’d run to the end of her purpose in her present form. Many planets will get their raw materials from this event. Isn’t it beautiful?”

  He sensed, more than heard, her voice. It was as though she were right inside him. As if she occupied the same space. “Two peas in the same pod,” he remembered her saying. Gosh, this is just marvelous! He wished he could show it to his mom and dad. Especially to mom. She liked beautiful things. And this...

  This was beyond beauty…

  Anyway, here was the greatest silence he’d ever heard. If you can hear silence. The only other thing to be heard was the regular beat of his heart and vague cracking sounds—rather like the electric sparks when he combed his hair in the winter. In winter he had to comb his hair or his hat wouldn’t fit.

  “The hydrogen atoms falling right through you,” she explained. How come she knew so much? She looked about his age... “Here, you’re mostly empty space. Only a weak electromagnetic field keeps your body together.”

  He had no idea what this meant but thought it best not to ask.

  “We’ll talk about that later.” She sensed curiosity and added, “I promise.”

  His body was very slowly spinning about its own middle. Both ways, lengthwise and about his waist. The Nova, still growing in size, was drifting over his left shoulder. Coming into his view was a ball of fire with some round, much dimmer but more colorful balls moving slowly around it. They all moved in the same direction but at different speeds. He wondered what...

  “A sun with its planets...?” she whispered. “Not the Earth’s sun, but a sun about five times bigger. We are two galaxies away from the Milky Way.”

  He looked around, trying to understand what it all meant. “Why here?”

  He sensed her amusement. For some reason she would not tell him. He already knew her well enough to know that there was a reason for her silence. Perhaps he wouldn’t understand. Yet. Already that last time she had not treated him like a little boy. Perhaps after he had saved her, she had decided that he was quite mature. For his age, of course.

  “Do you remember nothing?”

  What was there to remember? He’d never been here in his life. Not even on his wildest travels. Suddenly a large block of ice was falling straight at him. It came out of nowhere. Out of total darkness. He panicked. He shut his eyes and saw himself sleeping in his bed. This same instant, he relaxed. The stars were still there, the missile was gone.

  “Thank heaven,” he sighed.

  He was doing a lot of sighing lately. But you should see these stars. Zillions upon zillions of them. Everywhere.

  “That was a comet. It missed us by about thirty thousand kilometers.”

  So he had made a fool of himself. In the Far Country all things were measured with a different yardstick. You might call it a divine yardstick. It was a different ball game altogether.

  “What am I supposed to remember?” He returned to her last question.

  “This solar system. Look at the fifth planet from the sun, the one on the left.”

  The planet on the left grew larger even as he looked at it. It seemed perfectly round. As he got nearer to it, or was it the planet getting closer to him, he counted seven moons. All different sizes, some dark, some reflecting light. Most were silverish, but one was perfectly red. It was just beautiful. Like a great big red ball. All smooth and shiny. “I remember that ball,” he thought, but the memory was no more than a vague whiff of a dream. His attention was distracted by the main planet. It was like the Earth, only it seemed much, much bigger. There was a beautiful, clear blue halo around it, and suspended in the halo were myriad clouds. There were levels upon levels of them. They must have reached an incredible height. They almost seemed to reach the nearest moon.

  “Why does this place look, sort of, sort of...?” He couldn’t quite say it.

  “...familiar?” she prompted.

  “But it can’t be!? It just can’t!” he insisted.

  She didn’t say anything. Alec hung or floated in space, his mouth slightly open, his eyes wide. “Familiar?” he thought. “This world, this moon, moons, these clouds...” And then images formed in his mind. “These oceans, these mountains piercing many layers of clouds, these forests where the trees were as high as the tallest building on Earth, these...”

  His head spun. His mind couldn’t contain the pictures and memories crowding into his mind. The planet receded, the sky grayed a little, and the zillions of stars seemed to rush away, swallowed into the ever-expanding grayness.

  Alec slept. He was overwhelmed by the mounting memories. He slept until his wristwatch beeped repeatedly seven o’clock. For the first time in a long time he didn’t remember much of his dream. He thought he’d seen Sandra, but he wasn’t sure.

  Next time… he smiled. Next time I will not let her go so easily. And he jumped out of his bed and ran to the bathroom. He had to take a shower. The first in three days. A long shower. It felt good. He decided to shower more often. Even if he was perfectly clean. Just for fun.

  7

  Home

  Although he couldn’t remember most of last night’s dream, or perhaps because of it, Alec’s mind kept returning to that night in the castle. Five days had passed since that night, in or out of a dream. A sleep-dream or a daydream. Not that there was so much difference. He didn’t really care. What he did care about, and couldn’t help, was not seeing the Princess. Once or twice he thought he heard her voice, but then… but then he was again quite alone. No mother, no father, no Sandra. Just Miss Brunt and a bunch of noisy boys and girls.

  He counted the TV dinners. There were six left. In six days his parents would be back. Why didn’t they call? He spent most of his evenings at home. They could have called. Only six days, but it felt lik
e a year. His sulking was interrupted by the chime of the telephone he had just relegated to eternal silence.

  “Mom?” he virtually shouted into the mouthpiece.

  “No, son, it’s me. Your father,” his dad added unnecessarily. “We called you twice, but the rest of the time we were offshore, and our cellular couldn’t reach you. How are you doing, ol’ man?”

  “Oh, I’m fine, Dad. Just fine. How’s Mom?”

  “We’re both fine. I wanted to ask you how you are coping. Are you sure you’re OK? Not feeling too lonely, are you?”

  “Who, me? Dad! I’m thirteen years old. I can take care of myself.”

  “Good! Now listen. I’ve left two hundred dollars in the left lower drawer in my desk in the study. That’s in case you need it. To tell you the truth...”

  “Ali, darling, this is me. I love you. We both love you,” Alec’s mother interrupted. “Darling, do you think you could give us a few extra days? Say till Wednesday. It’s just that this man has this...”

  “Mom...”

  “...this marvelous yacht and he offered to take us to the Bahamas, all the way to Nassau, and back in a week or so. We wouldn’t be able to get back by Sunday. But we won’t go if you need us. You must be honest with me...”

  “Mom!”

  “Yes, darling?”

  “It’s all right. Stay as long as you want. Dad just told me where he left me some extra money. I won’t starve. Enjoy yourselves!” he lied. He already missed them something awful. He hadn’t thought he would. But he did.

  “Thank you, sweetheart. Say so long to daddy. I love you...”

  “Bye, Mom. Have a good time.”

  “Bye, son. Be back soon. Don’t forget about the money. The bottom left drawer. Use as much as you want. Bye!”

  And the line went dead.

  Alec’s dad was the best dad a guy could hope to have. How many dads would give their thirteen-year-old access to two hundred bucks? He was kind, generous, even not bad to play chess with, but he saw the world as numbers. He put a dollar sign on just about everything. “Give him a few bucks and he’ll be all right,” was his motto. And the trouble was that, more often than not, he was right.

  Alec supposed that just such a father, a husband rather, was precisely what his mother needed. She was the very opposite. Money was of no consequence to her, not that she had any idea of its worth. She chose her friends from all walks of life, regardless of their financial standing. She once dragged out their ‘cleaning lady’ to the Museum of Fine Arts, on the day on which the girl was supposed to do the cleaning, just so that the poor girl would get a taste of a little culture. Creative impulse, she called it. His mother, not the girl. Then his mother did the cleaning herself but paid the girl anyway. Somehow, this made mother laugh in unrestrained joy. Alec always envied his mother for her facility in dealing with people. She was just herself, perfectly natural. People seemed to accept her for what she was, without conditions or expectations. But, at the same time, dad could not really trust her with the domestic finances. Left to herself, she would find a thousand worthy causes on which to empty their bank account. For dad, two and two always made four. For mother it depended on the circumstances.

  So now they would be back on Wednesday at the latest. Not Sunday. The house was sort of empty. And silent. He liked the silence but not the emptiness. Yesterday he started listening to his own footsteps, just not to feel so alone. And now even Sandra appeared to have gone.

  “I must do something.”

  He started by making a grand tour of the house. He never realized that it had been years since he was in his parents’ bedroom alone. Or in his father’s study. If I am the master of the house, he mused, then I’d better know what is what. Or what is where. Just in case. Never mind in case of what. People in charge have to know things.

  He didn’t find anything exciting in either the bedroom or the study. Funny how the ‘forbidden’ always seems fascinating. Not that he’d ever been expressly forbidden to enter certain rooms; but, well, he always knocked before he did. Now, being in charge, he had the right to go anywhere.

  This took care of most of the day. The following day loneliness returned. Somehow, just hearing his parents’ voices filled the void that was growing deeper and deeper. There was only one thing to do. That evening he went to his own room, sat in front of the dark window, and waited.

  “She will know that I am lonely,” he murmured. “Why am I whispering?”

  No one would hear him. He could speak as loud as he wanted to. “I’m a man. Men don’t get lonely,” he said out loud. The lie didn’t work.

  There was always TV, but he thought TV was for the old folks who had nothing to do. Like me? He chuckled. It wasn’t a pleasant chuckle. And he needed a break from the Internet. His eyes were beginning to hurt.

  He got up and returned to the living room. He sat in dad’s chair and tried to figure out what to do next. All he needed was a little company. Surely, even men need that, don’t they?

  And then he caught his breath.

  “She heard me! Sandra heard me,” he whispered. It wouldn’t do to actually tell her out loud. It wouldn’t be manly.

  Yet even as he leaned back in dad’s chair, trying to decide what to do with the rest of the evening, her voice came to him with the usual softness, almost hesitation, as if she weren’t sure she was welcome. That’s ridiculous, he shook his head from side to side. The Princess not welcome???

  “Thank you. It is nice to hear you, too, Sir Alec.”

  Alec’s chest got about two inches bigger. He knew he was a knight, but it was nice to hear it from somebody else.

  “At your service, my Princess,” he replied in kind. They both laughed.

  How was it that whenever I’m in touch with Sandra I don’t care what happens to me? How come she makes me so happy? She doesn’t have to do anything, just be there. That’s all I’ll ever need.

  “But I’m always here,” she whispered as though a little hurt.

  “Then how come I can’t see you or even hear you?”

  “Hearing and seeing are only two ways of being aware of my presence.”

  “But...”

  “Alec. It is only a few days since you first heard me. Don’t you think you have a lot to learn?”

  Did he ever! He was again embarrassed by his possessiveness.

  “It’s not that. It is just that you are here, on Earth, to live your life. Not to escape into dreams. It is all right to dream, in fact it is very good, but not all the time.” She sounded quite adamant.

  “But I don’t dream all the time.” He felt offended.

  “But wouldn’t you like to?”

  Of course, he would like to. He would like to spend all his time with Sandra, even if it meant saving her from a dozen dungeons. Or from anything or anybody anywhere else, for that matter. No matter how hard, how difficult. He needed to be with her.

  “But we are together all the time,” she admonished.

  “...like two peas in a single pod,” he remembered.

  “Exactly!”

  “So how come I feel alone?”

  “It’s an old habit. You just don’t know how old. All people think that they are alone all the time. In fact they never are. Not one of them. It’s just that they don’t know it.”

  Now Alec wasn’t sure he liked that. He could just about tolerate other boys having their Princesses (whom they probably never saw or heard), or even girls having their Princes, but everybody? Everybody—that’s an awful lot of people. There would have to be millions and millions and millions of Princes and Princesses all over the place. They would be virtually... virtually... He couldn’t quite say the word ‘common’. His Princess would never, never, be common. No, sir. Not as long as he was her knight.

  “It doesn’t quite work like that,” she spoke in her kindest tone. When Alec didn’t react, she continued, “You now begin to understand how you and I seem quite different and that only together do we form a complete unit. Two peas, one
pod.”

  She stopped. She seemed to be waiting for a response. None came. Alec was churning the idea of zillions of Princesses gallivanting all over the world, being chased by zillions and zillions of boys.

  “Sorry,” he said, finally. “Sorry, I just thought...”

  “...that you are unique.” Her presence smiled. “You are, Alec. You are quite unique. There is no one the world over who is anything like you,” she assured him, her voice full of conviction.

  Alec recovered most of his composure. Even if there were zillions of Princes and Princesses, none were likely to be as beautiful as his Princess. Nor as clever, he suddenly realized. She sure knows a lot for a girl!?

  There was that giggle again. He blushed, the first time in four days. He was getting better at controlling his emotions but not yet his thoughts.

  “Well, even as you are an individual different from anyone, anywhere, and yet you and I are sort of... one, so it is with other people. But all the Princes and Princesses also fit into a… into a... pod. All together they form a… a King and Queen.”

  Now this was more than Alec could stomach. He had spent three days waiting for her. And before that, all his life. That’s right, all his thirteen years and seven months. That was a long time to wait. And now he discovered that she was… well, she was…

  He was filled with very mixed emotions. He couldn’t help holding Sandra in the deepest chamber of his heart, but he refused to let other people in there. Something was going very wrong with this setup.

  Hey, maybe Sandra doesn’t know everything. Not everything?

  But the other side of his heart told him that Sandra cannot lie. Not even if she wanted to. Not even to him, so as not to hurt him.

  This time it was he who left his daydream. He was a little angry, terribly disappointed. Almost cheated. All he ever really wanted was a real friend. A secret friend. Someone he could count on. All the time. Always. Someone with whom to share his dreams, his travels. To go where no man has ever been before… With those words Captain James T. Kirk had sent him on many of his jaunts.