by J. M. Wilson
THE RUBY RIDD ADVENTURES
OTHERWORLD
J.M.Wilson
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The Ruby Ridd Adventures
‘Otherworld’
When 10 year old Ruby’s parents die and she has to go and live with her grandparents, little does she know that she is about to discover her mother’s secret.
Ruby’s whole life changes in an instant when she is sucked into an ‘Otherworld’, the world of the Manushi, a race of magical people, who, unbeknown to the Human race, live in quiet areas of the countryside. This is the beginning of a mystical and fabulous adventure, filled with danger for her, and her new friends, Dena, Berty and Silverton.
Ruby needs to find out what her mother’s secret is. Maybe then she can find out why she is here, how she got here and most importantly, how to get back home. Now the size of a bug, she possesses new magical skills, but these don’t help her when she is captured and imprisoned by FarFrom - a mad, banished scientist. All Ruby can do is sit tight whilst her friends battle FarFrom, and his twisted mix of science and magic, as they try to rescue her.
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First Published 2012
Copyright © Jill M Wilson 2012
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, or otherwise circulated without the authors prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
To my niece Kate for inspiring this story, for oohing and ahhring in all the right places.
To my husband Kevin, who has pushed and cajoled me into writing this book, his love and his belief in me is a never-ending wonder.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jill M Wilson.
Jill was born March 1967, the first born to Michael and Victoria, the eldest sister to Peter and Gail. She was educated in a small Lincolnshire town school, until the age of 8, which taught, until 1974, a phonetic form of reading and writing, known as ‘ita’. At the age of 8 she had to learn how to read and write again properly. Some children coped with this, but Jill struggled and from here believes she lost her confidence and belief in herself academically. Her school career became a daily chore for her and her teachers, until she left in May 1983.
Jill walked straight into a 1980’s YTS scheme, ‘ Youth Training Scheme’ and quickly learnt the joy of earning money. By 1984 she had gained employment at the local newspaper, The Grimsby Evening Telegraph, and it is from here that she began to want to learn the art of reading, writing and spelling. At the age of 24 years old she decided to go back to college. By the age of 37 she had gained a BA Hons at her local university and has achieved numerous academic qualifications since.
Jill believes that all children have potential, for some school age children this potential is not visible, but it is there. She states that, ‘you should never let a teacher or an adult make you believe you cannot do something, that you’re not capable. You are, and one day you will achieve whatever you set your mind to’.
‘Mums and Dads, believe in your children. Children believe in yourselves! You can do it!’
CONTENTS
CHAPTER 1 - THE BEGINNING
CHAPTER 2 - BIG CHANGES
CHAPTER 3 - STRANGE HAPPENINGS
CHAPTER 4 - A NEW FRIEND
CHAPTER 5 - THE MANUSHI
CHAPTER 6 - NEW POWERS
CHAPTER 7 - ON THE RUN
CHAPTER 8 - PLANS TO FIND RUBY
CHAPTER 9 - ‘THE WOOD’
CHAPTER 10 - THE CLIFF
CHAPTER 11 - A FRUITFUL DAY
CHAPTER 12 - FARFROM’S REVELATION
CHAPTER 13 - THE END WITHOUT CONCLUSION
THE RUBY RIDD ADVENTURES
Journey to Otherlands
CHAPTER 1 - WHEN SECRETS END
CHAPTER 1
THE BEGINNING.
‘A mother’s love for her child is like nothing else in the world.’
( Agatha Christie 1890-1976)
OMG what had just happened? Ruby sat in a strangely familiar room. It had white fluffy rugs and white furniture with feathery cushions. The walls were white and the windows glistened like water with the sun on it. The lamps had clusters of what looked like diamonds, collected and hung around them. It was the kind of place where your mum would tell you to take your shoes off before you went in. However that was not an option here. Ruby had been thrown in.
Ruby tried to move the silver shiny door handle, but it stayed steadfast. She looked around for another exit. The windows were like portholes on ships. She manoeuvered herself higher to look for a way to get out. The windows did not open, so she could only look out. It was a strange scene. The sizes of things did not seem right. Some trees were huge like skyscrapers, others where small like weeds and, if she was right, the species’ of plants, were wrong. Some of them were tropical? That was so not right, but then, what was right lately?
Ruby slumped down defeated. She put her small hands on her knees and rubbed them like her Gran might if she was upset. Her Gran had rubbed Ruby’s leg or arm, or just cuddled her a lot over the past few weeks, since the accident. When Ruby thought about it, or talked about it, she said ‘accident’. She hadn’t quite got to saying it yet, but she knew she had to. Still, saying died or death was so, well ‘The End’ and she wasn’t ready for that, or at least ready for saying it. The fact remained, it was ‘The End’. Her mum and dad had recently been killed in a car accident and Ruby had had to move to her Grandma and Granddad Ridds’.
Ruby moved her hands from her red skinny jeaned knees up to her head. She took her blue NY baseball cap off and brushed at her forehead, which had her untidy blonde brown fringe sticking to it. It was getting warm in here with all the white fluff stuff. She moved her hands over her closed blue eyes and just sat for a moment. Tears threatened, the sting of the eyes and the dreaded lump in her throat that had been there a lot lately, signalled a possible downpour.
Ruby took a deep breath.
“No! I’m sick of crying.” She said out loud, and she stopped the tears in their tracks. She pulled at the bobble that tied her hair into a long pony tail.
It had started out on the top of her head, but with the wind whipping through her hair today, it was now somewhere at the base of her neck and needed tightening.
She used her fingers as combs as she absently re-did her hair and thought of her mum.
“Why mum? What is your secret? Why am I here like this, and how will I get back?
It happened again, the tell tale sign. The sting of the eyes.
No absolutely not, she was not going to cry.
She was going to stay positive.
Things weren’t that bad. She had friends, albeit it ones she had only just met. They knew she was here, wherever here was? They were following her, she was sure of it.
Ruby had checked the door and the windows.
She couldn’t get out of here without help.
She caught her reflection in a dazzling mirror.
She hovered as she looked at herself. Red jeans, blue baseball cap, pink zipped sweatshirt and Converse, her prize buy baseball boots. Her golden brown ponytail hung over her left shoulder and her fringe needed cutting. Her cheeks were slightly pink and her lips naturally raspberry red. She thought she looked normal. She looked like she did before all of this happened, that’s of course if you could ignore the fact she was not standing on the floor, but hovering above it, oh, and the fact she was now the size of a bug!
No! She wasn’t just ‘a girl’ anymore. She didn’t know what she was, but she knew she was a lot more now. She could f
ly, at speed too!
For now she had to sit tight, be brave and wait for the others, take advantage of the fact she had a moment to draw a breath, and think about what had happened.
Crikey, it was only a couple of weeks ago she was a normal kid, with a mum and dad, and a Gran and Granddad who visited, and the school holidays were about to begin. Then she thought again. She hoped she did have another moment to draw breath. Whoever and whatever had imprisoned her here, well, it wasn’t about to kill her, was it? What did it want with her? She slumped back into the white fluff and tried to think. What did this have to do with her mum? When did this begin?
She thought back to before the accident. Things were all normal then, weren’t they? She thought of her dad, Peter. What did he have to do with this, if anything? Ruby’s dad had been a painter, and even though she had never explored Gran and Granddads garden ever, she felt like she knew it, and the meadows and fields of the Lincolnshire countryside beyond. Her dad had painting after painting of beautiful landscapes and many of them from around here, well not here here, but definitely around the place where she had changed!
Maybe her mum knew how dangerous it was around here?
After all, she thought, look at what has happened, but then, how would her mum have known?
Her mum, Ellladore or Ella as her dad had called her, she didn’t even come from around here.
She didn’t know where she had come from.
That was all a bit mysterious.
They had all thought that.
Only the other day she had been talking about the very same subject with her Gran and Granddad.
They’d been packing away the things at her mum and dads house. Some bits Ruby had gotten to take with her to her Grandparents home. Some things were packed away for her for when she got older, and other things had to be sold or given away to charity. It was a sad and a funny time for Ruby and her Grandparents.
Every little something brought back a memory.
On occasions these memories had had them in tears, and then on others in fits of laughter. One photo had them all laughing. Obviously Ruby couldn’t remember, but Gran had told the story of the photo she was holding in its frame.
“Your dad said you should have your first paddle. You were only about four or five months old. Him and your mum walked out over the stepping-stones in the river and lowered your feet into the water. Granddad took the picture. The water was obviously cold, but how you protested! I have never heard such a massive noise come out of such a tiny thing. You screamed and hollered. It scared your mother so. She fussed so much, with such panic, we couldn’t understand what she was saying. It was another language!”
Gran turned to Granddad and said. “Do you remember that Bones,”
It was a nickname she had for Granddad. She said she called him this because when he was younger he didn’t have any meat on him.
“It was like she spoke a foreign language, none of us had ever heard before.”
“I do,” Granddad had said,
“That’s what spurred our interest in getting Ella to find out where she had come from, remember?”
Ruby had known all about her Mum being an orphan. Although her mum did not like talking about it, she had told her a few things. She’d had an accent, just a slight one. It wasn’t Scottish, Welsh or Irish; none of the family could pin down where her twang was from. She did her best to lose the accent, but when she was happy or cross, sometimes it could just be heard. As far as the family knew, she had tried to find out where she was really from, but she said it just wasn’t meant to be. The last orphanage she could remember staying in, she told them, had had a fire. The fire had gutted the building and it had had to be pulled down. All and any paperwork relating to Ella, had, it was presumed, been burnt. Ruby thought her mum never seemed to mind that she didn’t have a mum or dad, but her Gran had thought it sad. She tried to make it better and used to say ‘It didn’t matter, for her mum could be who and whatever she wanted to be, the daughter of a Prussian king if she pleased.’ Maybe a little far fetched, but her Gran`s heart was in the right place.
Ruby got up and hovered around her fluffy prison. It was like being in a cloud. Maybe, she thought, when she escaped from here, she would be able to fly up as high as a cloud.
She squashed her face against the shiny window looking to see if anyone was coming yet. They were taking their time. It had only taken her seconds or, so it seemed, to get here, and thrown in this room by a strange smelly woman.
What was that woman wearing?
Ruby thought she must have been as old as her Gran and was wearing a silver ‘onesy’?
And she smelt of alcohol.
Her Gran never had alcohol, so Ruby didn’t really associate old ladies and drink.
To her it just seemed wrong, like, she thought, as she looked outside, nettles that were as tall as trees? She did not want to get stung by one of those!
She moved away from the porthole and reflopped on the fluffy white sofa.
The fluff and cushions all moved and bounced about, landing very untidily.
Ruby knew her mum would shoot her if she flopped on her settee like that!
She thought of home again and the things she had picked out to take back to her Grandparents.
Ruby had picked a framed photo that used to be in their front room. It was of her and her mum and dad holding a puppy. The puppy had belonged to one of her dad’s friends. She could still remember the day they’d gone to see the puppy and having the photo taken. The puppy had just kept barking at her mum. She thought it must have been a few years ago, as she didn’t have all of her teeth in the picture. Ruby stroked her finger over the face of her mother, wanting to feel her warm skin. Looking hard and trying to remember, she saddened at her mum’s image.
It never showed in photos she thought. Now she would never see it again. That warm pretty glow that surrounded her mum, an almost rainbow-like haze that normally she didn’t think about. She didn’t think about it because it was just a normal part of looking at her mum.
She had asked her dad once if he could see the rainbow glow.
‘What do you mean?’ he’d asked.
All she could really compare it to was what she saw on the advert for `Ready Brek`.
“You know! The `Ready Brek Kid` Dad, the one with the orange glow around the boy when he eats it. Well, that’s what it’s like when I look at mum, except its not orange, its all colours, kind of like a rainbow.”
Her dad had smiled and kissed her forehead.
“I think” he said, “You must love your mother very much.”
They never talked about it again, after all, it had seemed a good explanation.
Ruby thought about it now, well, it had seemed a good explanation at the time, and, at the time, she had been much younger. She was however eleven now, and right at this minute, as she sat in this white room, it really didn’t seem that good an explanation now. In fact, if she was honest, based on what had happened so far, and her mums involvement, it was decidedly suspicious.
Who else had a mum that glowed?
Then she felt bad. Disloyal to her mum.
She couldn’t question her mums nature or being, not when she was?
She stopped, not ready to say it.
Even in her head, not when she wasn’t here anymore.
That’s what she settled on saying to herself.
Ruby had a stomach ache. She felt like she had swallowed a brick and it now sat inside her, somewhere between her ribs and her belly button. Her stomach felt hard and uncomfortable. It had a lot since she’d been told her parents had gone to heaven. That’s how she had been told, and she knew what it meant. She’d heard a lot about heaven before this. Some of her friends had grandparents who had gone there. When she’d thought about it before, she’d imagined it to be a place in the sky, sort of like in Gods garden. It, Heaven, was a good place she’d thought then, where perhaps people’s best dreams came from. A place where there would be angels and saint
s and where furniture was made from white fluffy clouds, all squidgey and very comfortable. The carpets were probably made of white feathers, all soft on the toes and there would be no walls. All the people there would have their own cloud to live on, floating around and probably eating as much chocolate as they liked.
Ruby cringed at what she had thought then, and asked herself a question, it began with, ‘and’.
And how old was I when I had thought this exactly?
Lots of her questions had started with ‘and’ lately.
It had driven her parents nuts.
‘If you want to ask a question, ask it properly!’ she could hear her mothers voice in her head and the brick in her stomach twisted painfully again.
Heaven didn’t seem like a good place now, just a place that separated her from her mum and dad. Now, when she thought of Heaven, it wasn’t white. She knew her mum would never allow chocolate to be eaten near white furniture. She didn’t think they would like to float around on a cloud either.
No, she thought absently, she’d have to have a rethink on that one.
She rubbed at her belly, and then it hit her.
‘OMG!’ she looked around her.
What had she just been thinking?
White fluff and Heaven, she couldn’t be dead, could she?
Ruby got up and hovered around. That’s why this place was familiar. She had imagined just a place, many times.
No she couldn’t be.
Like she had just thought, she was separated from her parents now.
If she was, you know, she would be with them?
Of course she would.
Anyway thought Ruby, my Heaven never had giant nettles in it.
That was more her idea of Hell!
Oh No!, she wasn’t in Hell was she?
It didn’t seem likely, but the truth was, she was in a dangerous position. She didn’t know where she was, who she was with, why she was there, or how she would get back to normal.
The brick feeling in her belly lurched and now she felt sick.
She lay back holding her stomach.
