Forever Twilight, Patrick Sean Lee [christmas read aloud txt] 📗

nearest us, searching for their eyes in the shifting mist of their faces, wondering if they’d suddenly swoop down on us.

“Yeah. She’s out, though. Lashawna, wake up,” he said.

“Oh God, Peter, maybe she landed on her head and broke her neck! Pick her up. We have to get out of here. We shouldn’t have come. I’m so sorry!”

He jerked his head to face me. “How? They’re ev…” And then his eyes shifted to something over my shoulder.

“You are correct, Amelia. You shouldn’t have come,” a voice from behind me said.

I spun around.

Jerrick.

He stood a foot away, his hands clasped behind his back, wearing the same clothing he’d worn the night he left. His deep brown face glowed, but though his eyes were full of life, there was no welcoming sign in them.

Mari stood beside him peering down at me, shaking her head slowly, and then her gaze shifted up to the creatures surrounding us. Her eyes snapped shut for an instant, then opened and closed again and again, her lips moving almost imperceptibly.

I heard the Ferrari clump onto the earth—Cynthia murmur in relief mixed with anxiety. Munster’s voice. “The gun, Cynthia, find the gun!”

Pointless, I knew too well.

“Help her,” Peter blurted.

Jerrick turned immediately to Mari. She opened her eyes, returned his glance, and then shook her head in the affirmative to the wordless question he’d put to her.

Mari looked so different that morning, so…older. Taller, almost mature, like I might have imagined her five or six or eight years in the future. Her hair was long, resting behind her lithe figure, falling down to her waist. Her emotionless face had thinned. Her hands rested against her trim waist, the fingers covered slightly by the strands of hair. This change in her was shocking—way too advanced considering the length of time that had passed since last I’d seen her.

Jerrick walked forward toward his sister. The creatures backed away slowly. Mari shifted her attention plainly to me. The tiniest smile flitted on her full lips, and as suddenly disappeared.

“They’ll allow you to leave, Amelia.” Her eyes flicked toward Jerrick, who was leaning over his sister, touching her face with his long, musician’s fingers. Back to me.

“You must leave and never return.

“No,” she suddenly remarked, turning her head in a quick sideways movement. “Go back.”

I caught a glimpse of half a dozen figures in the distance a few steps outside the craft, or home, or whatever the tall spire was. At Mari’s command, each of them halted abruptly. For a brief second they remained motionless, but then one by one they turned and retreated, back inside.

What had possessed me to think that she and Jerrick were the only ones these monsters had selected for whatever their purposes were? And why had they spared our group? Bernie Beast’s? God knows how many others scattered from here to kingdom come, some of them as heart-ugly and devoid of decency as Bernie.

The veil of Aurora light far away to the north. What was it?

I had a million questions, the answers to each I was certain she knew. I’d made a mistake days ago when I decided to search out Jerrick. Maybe. Perhaps it had been she who had planted the suggestion in my head somehow. Mari the spirit. No, no. Neither she nor Peter wanted us here. That was plain enough.

I made a silent vow not to leave until I found the answers to all of my questions, even if Peter and the rest left without me.

“What’s going on?” I asked her. She stood before me statue-like, mute, indifferent. “I’m not leaving, not until you tell me what’s happened to you and me and all the others who’ve survived.”

Her eyes bore into mine. “Oh, you will leave,” she said with a tiny, fleeting upturn of her lips. “They’re not happy you’ve come…and neither am I. Take Lashawna. She’ll be fine. They’ll see to it. Just go before it’s too late. You are not welcome here.”

“Let them go, but I’m staying.”

She glowered at me.

“I can make you go.”

“But you won’t,” I hazarded foolishly. “Something of the little girl I once knew and loved is still alive in you. That part of you won’t deny me.”

She closed her eyes again. A brief conversation, surely. A split second later she sighed, stepped around me, and then without comment, walked to Jerrick’s side.

“Lay her in the back of the truck.”

Jerrick obediently picked up his sister’s small body, cradling it in his arms close to his chest. He made his way to the rear of the truck and lifted her over the tailgate. Jude, with Sammie locked tightly against her, sat warily, with her back shoved hard against the cab panel. Her interaction with the blind boy who played the cello, but spoke little—at least to her—had from the beginning bordered on indifference, if not outright disinterest. Those few times he’d noticed her presence and spoken to her, she’d kept her comments to him short, and only on the surface polite. In the banter and laughter at his often-funny or clever remarks at the kitchen table, she would grin, but then look away from his dark face and glazed eyes.

He was so different now. His eyes clearly beheld her, locked on her for a moment as he lay his sister gently on the black mat of the bed. She pushed herself harder yet against the panel, but she didn’t drop her eyes. I saw him smile at her. And then he returned to Mari.

She nodded, and then looked laser-like at me. It made me shudder.

“Get in the truck and leaves us, Amelia.”

Peter grabbed my arm as he took the first step away from her, but I held my stance.

“We’ve found them, Amelia. They’re alive. Let’s get away from here.” In the background I could hear Munster’s voice, but I couldn’t make out what he was saying to the young woman who had changed his impetuous nature in some ways, but had failed to bring him totally to his knees. I did hear her reply. “No. Wait.”

“Don’t play obstinate, Amelia. We have to leave!”

“You go. I’m staying.” I said this glaring at Mari, expecting her to slap me, or motion for the backed-off alien menaces to return and pitch me into the waiting truck. Or dispose of me. For the first time since her arrival into our presence, though, her dominating stare faltered. Her eyes lowered for a brief instant. She almost imperceptibly bit her lower lip. Glanced quickly at Jerrick, who shook his head no. She returned her oddly rattled attention back to me.

“Very well. But I warn you…” She cut her admonition short, shifting her eyes to Peter. “Get the rest of them out of here. Go. Now.”

“Not on your life! Not without Amelia!”

“I won’t tell you twice. Leave this place. Leave us.”

Peter yanked me to face him squarely. “Amelia, for God’s sake let it go. Get in the truck!”

“No. I promise I’ll return to the farm when I’m finished here. Please do as Mari says. Please. Don’t worry about me.”

“I can’t! I won’t! Not without you.”

Mari’s body moved a step backward, her left arm rising to block Jerrick’s possible advance. Jumbled movement. Mari, Jerrick—Peter. The next thing I remember before blacking out was a cold wind. A freezing blast of arctic frozen white. Consciousness flying away. 

Children Of A Greater God

 

I don’t know how long I was out, but when I finally woke, the images all around flew at me in shadows, pierced with stabbing pains of kaleidoscope lights…and then fingers brushed across my eyes. Jerrick’s muted voice, calming, even. In the second that followed I felt a thousand pins disintegrate deep inside, like as many ants scurrying in every direction. A sudden pop! in front of my eyes that extinguished the stabbing lights and darkness, and then the feeling of such strange peacefulness as his fingertips brushed down across my cheekbones, my lips, and then lifted.

“Well then, here you are, Amelia. Welcome back.” He spoke each word with such satin clarity, and in such a pleasant timber—other soothing voices from unfamiliar faces encircling me. I looked around, focusing on each of them in turn.

Children. Almost. Young, with the perfect skin of near-adolescence, but in their beautiful faces I perceived an intensity that somehow surpassed the innocence of youth. Their eyes; mirthful but penetrating.

Everything came into focus precisely, now. Everything except who they were, and where they’d come from. Older Sammies who seemed delighted by my presence, who giggled between comments, but who looked through me as though I were only a window separating them from a murky, hostile landscape.

The room I’d been placed in seemed endless in its expanse—if indeed it was a room. Whiteness extended in every direction, yet unlike cloud or fog, I perceived depth that rattled my senses. I had to be inside the structure we’d all seen standing majestically, but this place was so vast-feeling.

We’d all seen…my thoughts shifted instantly to Peter, who moments, or hours, or days ago had been standing beside me before the explosion of wind.

“Peter. Where is he? What happened, Jerrick?”

I heard the boy directly above my head sigh almost mournfully as he switched his eyes to Peter’s.

What? What!

Jerrick lowered his brow at the boy, then spoke to me.

“They…our, this world’s saviors…were displeased that Mari caved in to your obstinate demand.”

“What do you mean? Saviors? Those, those things?”

He searched for the next words. I could see him struggling. How to tell me that Peter and the rest had been…disposed of. Obliterated by these demons he called saviors. He tried to smile reassuringly, but his lips failed the second he started.

“I don’t know what has become of them. You shouldn’t have come here, Amelia. Mari told you! She warned you to leave!” He sighed in resignation. “Anyway, whatever, she’s with those who brought us to our new home. They allowed you to remain—that was Mari’s demand of them—and so, as they descended on all of you, she implored them to…to not injure you.

“Peter and the others vanished. I’m sorry, I wish I were able to break the news in a gentler way. Tell you more. I honestly don’t know their fate. Maybe…”

“No! They wouldn’t have murdered them just like that! No, no, no.

“I have to get out of here,” I said pushing with all my might into a sitting position, and then jumping to my feet. Run, run…into the white. Find the door, or the end of this mad place. Find Mari, the horrid creatures, and Peter.

I flashed on a terrible dream from several years earlier; a nightmare that reminded me of this place. I found myself on a white, featureless plain. I don’t know that there was anything behind me, but ahead of me the land stretched into eternity beneath a black, starless sky. I was walking across a nothingness, and I knew that a year, or two, or for the remainder of my life, the bleak vista would remain the same. No trees or buildings or people. Nothing but miles and miles and miles of the same dead white. I felt like an ant crawling across the Sahara. For what reason? To where? The nightmare haunted me, invading my sleep anytime it wished.

Of course I always woke with a shudder, dismissing it. Thankful for the