World of Shadows
Once Upon a Dream, Book 1
Emily Rachelle
Red Geraniums Press
World of Shadows/ Emily Rachelle. -- 1st ed.
©2016 by Emily Rachelle.
Cover ©2016 by BetiBup33 Design
Edited by Kathryn Hiegel
Formatted by Zara Hoffman
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law.
Publisher’s Note: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Locales and public names are sometimes used for atmospheric purposes. Any resemblance to actual people, living or dead, or to businesses, companies, events, institutions, or locales is completely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Dedication
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Acknowledgements
About the Author
To Grandma E
My number one fan and head cheerleader.
One
I take a deep breath. This is it. No turning back now. For better or worse, my life is about to change.
I stand back, not sure if I should be elated or depressed, as Dad slides his key into the lock of the front door. When my sister Viviann and brother Damien follow him inside, I stay where I am, just looking for a minute. Yellow, paneled outside walls. Rough, brown wooden porch. Long, winding gravel driveway. I breathe in the rural summer scent of pollen and livestock—not our livestock, of course, but the animals in the fields located a short drive past our house in any direction. Only when the sun on my bare arms and the top of my head becomes too hot for comfort do I step through the door of my childhood home, bracing myself.
I only offer a quick glance around the empty rooms and bare white walls around me as I pass through the front room, the hallway, the living room. I don’t even bothering entering the kitchen, although I can see the refrigerator and the tiny window above the sink by glancing over the breakfast counter between the hall and the kitchen. While Dad and Damien carry luggage and boxes into the room by the stairs that was once Dad’s office, I follow Viviann up the stairs to the bedrooms.
The air upstairs is hot and dry, and a bit stale. It smells like a stuffy, abandoned motel, but that’s not really a bad thing. Even when we lived here before, it always smelled like that upstairs in the summer. The ventilation in this house was never the best.
I pass the master bedroom and Damien’s room on my right and the bathroom on the left before coming to the end of the hall, where there are two rooms right across from each other. Viviann has already flopped across the floor in the right-hand room. She’s got her phone out and is texting someone—probably one of her many school friends in the city. I start to tell her that texting can wait until the moving trailer’s unpacked, but think better of it. She won’t listen to me anyway. Dad will probably just ask Damien to carry her things up for her.
I drop my backpack on the floor of the last bedroom as I walk in. Just like the rest of the house, this bedroom is devoid of furniture or decoration of any kind. But it doesn’t feel as empty or sad. I walk to the windows, first the big one across from the door, then the little one in the corner, and pull the bottom panes up to open them. I know I probably shouldn’t open the windows until we can replace the torn screens, but I want to feel the summer country breeze for a minute. Standing in the middle of the room, I cross my arms and close my eyes, just breathing in deeply. To anyone else, this is just a hot, stuffy room that smells of old house. To anyone else, the breeze just brings in more heat and the stench of cow manure, not to mention plenty of annoying summer bugs. But to me, with my eyes shut and the realities of a New York country summer surrounding me, I can imagine this place is home again. All that’s missing is Mom calling me downstairs to help shuck corn, or the baby babble of a younger Viviann as she tries to figure out her way past the baby gate on the stairs. Tears start to well up behind my closed eyelids; I try to think about something else. I envision the furniture that, with my eyes shut, could easily still be standing around me—a wooden kids’ bed to my right, matching dresser to my left, a little nightstand by the bed, a toy box with a crammed-full bookshelf on top in the left corner.
“Beila, will you come tell your brother which of these boxes are yours?” Dad’s call up the stairs echoes strangely in the empty house, breaking the moment. I sigh and try to physically shake off the sadness settling on my shoulders. After I pull the windows shut, I head downstairs to help unpack.
Without Mom, I’m not sure this place will ever feel like home again.
Five weeks later, a week after school starts, I finally get a call from my friend Cecelie. I used to see her almost every day, since we lived in the same apartment building—that’s how we met, actually, on the day my family moved in to the building. I would’ve called her the minute we moved in here, but her family’s been in Italy for the summer. Her parents wouldn’t let her get an international phone plan because they wanted to focus on “family time.”
“Hello?” I have caller ID, obviously, but I still like to answer the phone the way people did before caller ID was invented. I’m not really sure why…it’s not like my caller ID has ever been wrong.
“I still can’t believe you left me.”
I laugh and toss the shirt I was folding back into the laundry basket with the rest of the clean clothes. “Not like I had a choice.”
“Not like you were complaining.”
“I wasn’t exactly itching to move back here.” I sigh and lie down on the bed, staring at the patterns in the paint on the ceiling while I talk. “I just…I remember being so happy here, I thought for a while it’d be nice to be back.”
“But it’s not?”
“I don’t know. It’s not awful or anything—the house, anyway. The school is awful, and knowing nobody around is awful, and I know what I said about being a country girl but after three weeks the smell is awful—”
She interrupts me to squeal, “Our girl finally admits it!”
I smile but try to sound annoyed. “Just because I don’t like the smell of manure doesn’t mean I’m not a country girl.” We used to have this argument all the time, Cecelie and me and our other friends at our school in the city. Jen would insist that not owning cowgirl boots meant you couldn’t be a country girl. Cecelie would declare that the country stank, and besides, “Bey could never last a day without The Write Place!” That was the calligraphy and drawing supplies store down the street from our school. When Keith would start debating my idea that a person could be both country girl and city girl simultaneously, I would usually give up and change the subject.
There’s a pause. “I miss you.”
“The city’s not the same without you, Bey.”
“I’m not sure I’m the same without the city anymore.” I glance around my room. “I never realized how much the city changed me. This place just seems different now. I’m not sure I really like it anymore.”
“Well, you’re older now. And more sophisticated, I hope.”
I giggle a little before getting serious again. “Yeah, but it’s not just me, I think. I mean, obviously the whole family’s older, too. But th
e dynamic’s different. The family, the house…it’s all different without Mom.”
“It must be hard.”
“It is. I knew it would be. I keep glancing out the kitchen window and feeling a little sick when she’s not crouched over her garden out there. The garden’s not there anymore, either, but you know what I mean. I know she’s been gone for a while, but we always had her here. I just…I didn’t realize…how much we’d feel her absence.”
“I know.” Cecelie’s never lost a parent, so she doesn’t really know. But she’s lost her grandpa, and she’s my friend, and she’s trying. And that’s enough. “Maybe you could replant her garden, make it yours. Then the garden would be there again, and you could be close to her that way. I know she’d like that.”
“She would.”
Neither of us says anything for a minute, so Cecelie asks, “Tell me about this awful school.” It’s nice to have a friend who knows how to handle the tricky topics.
I’m running, tripping, clawing at the trees around me to climb back up, losing my grip on the slippery moss. My breath rips out of my chest and throat. I never look behind me—I’m not running away, I’m running toward. Toward what I don’t know; I pray that it’s home.
A tree root catches my foot and I tumble down. My body flings arms over legs over feet as I fail to protect myself from the roots and twigs that tear my skin. The scant moonlight disappears as the sticks do, and suddenly I’m rolling over cold, hard dirt with no light whatsoever and no idea where I am.
I collide with a cool dirt surface. Light like that from candles reflects off the dirt around me, causing it to look reddish and alive. Slowly, I push myself off the floor and look around me. I’m alone in a tiny dirt room that looks like a hollow cube, with nothing on each wall but a single tree-branch torch. In front of me a low-ceilinged dirt tunnel stretches out, with similar torches hanging at intervals. I crane my neck to see another dirt tunnel above me, the one I fell through, lacking torches, and curving so that the other end is blocked from sight.
I feel a hand, calloused and firm, grab my arm and whirl to view my captor—but I’m still alone. Another hand traps a scream in my mouth and desperate, foreign whispering tickles my ear. It’s a woman’s scared voice.
“Je suis une amie! Tais-toi et suis-moi — dépêche-toi!” I struggle against the hands I can’t see and swing out my own, seeking any form of contact but finding none.
“Friend!” The voice sounds pleading and strangled now, and I barely recognize the English, but I stop moving. After a moment, the pressure on my mouth dissipates. The hand on my arm slides down to my hand and pulls me to my feet, then begins dragging me along the length of the tunnel. The end of the tunnel curves to the right and I continue stumbling behind the incredibly fast invisible woman. This tunnel has carved wooden doors in between torches, but the place seems to be completely empty.
A terrifying noise, reminding me of some animal, echoes through the dirt halls, and for a moment my guide freezes. After barely a few seconds, she pulls me forward even harder than before. I nearly fall from the sudden movement. The noise grows louder—it’s some cross between screeches and a roar, and I know it’s nothing I’ve ever heard before. I struggle to keep moving. The strange, monstrous noise is joined by cries that jump-start my pulse to twice its normal rhythm. These sounds are too familiar, and I cry out from the realization that they’re the sobs of humans.
I stop and jerk my hand away from my unseen guide. How can I continue to run when there are people here, somewhere down in these tunnels, crying out? But the cool hand takes mine again and tugs over and over, frantically begging in that strangled, broken voice.
“Hurry! Come! Nous devons nous dépêcher, s‘il te plaît!”
I submit and again we’re running, past two more tunnels, until we take another right and tightly packed dirt walls give way to smooth stone. We’re in some sort of cave. There are no torches here, but the hand continues pulling and I follow, more slowly now. We’re partly walking and partly climbing, slowly going in an upwards direction. The further into the cave we walk, the less the torchlight from behind us reflects on the stone walls. After a short while we’re in complete darkness. We’re barely inching forward, until a new source of light starts reflecting into the cave ahead of us. The next time we turn, I can see that it’s sunlight. The hand lets go of me and I turn toward it.
“Wait! Where am I? What do I do now?”
There is no answer, but a firm push on my back makes me stumble toward the light. After a minute I walk forward and climb out of the cave into—
Incessant blaring forces me out of bed. I sigh in frustration. It’s been two months since my family moved back into this house, and six weeks since school started. I’ve had the same nightmare for the past twelve days. This time I had actually almost stopped to investigate the noise in the tunnel, and yet I still ended up going to the cave. One of these days my dream-self will find out what the strange creature in my nightmares was—maybe even be brave enough to stop it and save the terrified people. I push off the bed and stumble past the last of my still-packed boxes toward the bathroom to get ready for school.
A few days and nights pass without any new developments in my dream. I’ve almost given up hope of ever being the hero or learning the source of the noise, much less getting rid of the dream for good. Then, something Dad says at breakfast one day catches my attention.
It’s a normal morning based on the routine set the past six weeks. Damien, the ever-responsible, early-morning businessman at just twenty-six, gets up first and makes coffee. The smell eventually gets Dad up and moving, although not before he’s hit snooze at least three times. His alarm could wake half our building in the city some mornings. Here, since we moved back into the house, Damien always sits in front of the sliding glass doors that open onto the two-story wraparound wooden porch. He’s usually reading emails or the latest news on his tablet. Dad sits to Damien’s right, in front of the three-sided window, and reads a book. He rarely turns the page; I’m completely certain that, if it weren’t one of Mom’s top household rules when she was alive, he would have had a TV installed in the kitchen as soon as we moved back. Once I’m out of the shower and ready for the day, I join them and sit in my place across from Damien. Eventually a groggy but made-up Viviann completes the family group, across from Dad. We’re sitting around a white wooden square with matching chairs in our white-and-yellow dining corner. Plenty of country sunlight already pours through the glass door, framed by pale yellow curtains Mom picked out when we first bought the house. I love to look out past the same curtains on the three-paned window and see the many trees that block out the highway and filter the sunlight.
“How’d you sleep?” Dad asks this morning, as usual.
Mumbles and nods pass for answers from Viviann and me. Damien takes a swig of his coffee before responding amicably.
Dad closes his book and sets it on the table. “Well, I had a rather peculiar dream. Would you like to hear it?”
Viviann ignores him and I don’t really care about his dream, but I can tell he’s eager to tell a story. I shrug and nod. Damien sets down his tablet and fixes his gaze on Dad—ever the quiet, attentive listener.
“Well, I was walking in the woods—for some reason I was lost, wandering, maybe trying to get home—when I fell and ended up in these tunnels.”
That’s when I start really paying attention.
“They were all really dark and dirty, lit by this eerie flickering firelight sort of thing. I’m sitting at the end of these tunnels with nothing but a pitch-black hole above me, when I feel someone grab me and pull me up. It feels like a hand, but nobody’s there! I think it wanted me to run—it was pulling and all. But I didn’t get the chance to, because next thing you know this great big creature is blocking the tunnel!”
I drop my spoon into my cereal bowl, coughing and sputtering. A few gulps of milk drain my bowl dry and calm me down.
“You all
right, Beila?” Damien’s intense, dark eyes are suddenly directed at me.
I nod at my brother and motion for Dad to continue. “Um, you were saying, a creature?”
He grins and resumes. “Well, I’m not quite sure what it’d be called.” He gestures to the three of us, his little audience. “Maybe you can help. It had a head like a giant predatory bird, with these giant, wild golden eyes. The color reminded me of a cat, but they were definitely a huge bird’s eyes with their round, beady shape. The eyes are the first thing you notice, before the beak. Man, that thing had a beak! All hooked and shining yellow, it just screamed predator. Not to mention the claws! Talons, really, I guess—they were a bird’s, too—huge, curved, gleaming black. Very black. They curled under a lot. Now, this thing had the head and talons of a bird, but his chest was puffed out and furry. Really strong and powerful, this thing—with massive hind legs and paws.”
School, breakfast, time, life all fades away. There’s nothing but me and Dad and the monster I’ve been seeking for weeks.
“See, the back half of his body wasn’t bird at all. It was more like a…give me a minute to place it…a lion! That’s it! A sleek, golden lion. The legs were just massive—oh, and it had a tail, this big long curved tail that’s all really skinny and odd-looking, with a fat bit of hair on the end. It didn’t have a mane or anything, though. The craziest part, now that’s the worst of it. Can you guess?”
Viviann still couldn’t care less, and Damien’s being the polite listener. I’m completely wrapped up in the terrifying image taking form in my mind, and I want—I need—it to be finished. I need to know what keeps plaguing my mind and my sleep and those poor souls crying out. “What? What was it?”
He smiles and reaches out with his hands to illustrate as he talks. “Wings! This great, savage predator had wings! Didn’t match the head and talons at all, though. These weren’t just some skimpy flappers or even an eagle’s wings. Oh, no! I’d say they were more like a guardian angel’s wings! Spread out and massive layers—layers and layers of brilliant white feathers!
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