I'm in her arms, and we're flying.
One minute, my eyes soak in the view on a cliff overlooking a gaping hole in the earth made bauxite-mining. The next, the Star Man appears, grabs my arm, and I notice his aura grow into a portal to space. Surprised, I'm pulled through this amazing vibrational field filled with soft yellow and orange lights, and I speed upwards, as though I'm flying. What else would you call it?
I lose the sense of momentum that startled me enough to cry out. Feels like an amusement park free fall ride, except I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT'S HAPPENING TO ME. “Alien abduction” is the only thing that comes to mind, based on the flaming light man with the strange turquoise eyes, the Star Man. I swear I thought he was just in my imagination when I saw him in the sky, but the next instant, my world's inside out. Then I feel the arms, a distinctively human embrace. All control of myself flees, and now I am gently but swiftly levitating towards the framed light of the sky's night.
Then I feel liquid clearly all around me, though I am not drowning. Am I even breathing?
We veer through a room made of stone and timber, as the waters part and splash explosively. A very tall man in a rich green garment charges two smaller men with a large shield, to my left. I lock eyes with...a woman, I think. She's got a bow knocked. She's covered in crimson and burgundy. She registers me; she seems to be thoughtfully making some sense of us. A mustachioed man in blue, unmistakably some Viking, points to us as we go through the roof. Suspended, I gaze down at a pool filled with shimmering reflections of the stars, freshly disturbed. The man in blue ducks and throws another man, with a knife, wearing black, hard into the wall behind him. The red one pulls something out of a pouch and glances at it, then me. Then a tunnel comes from nowhere, blackness, stone coldness, broken by a whiteness filled with drifting threads of color, as though dissolving in water.
It's funny how I worry about losing my shoe, into some God-knows-what.
Breathlessly, my human elevator ride stops. As she settles me down, I resist the urge to say “you've got me...who's got you?” I don't know if I would stop babbling if I said a single word. Paradoxical, how utterly disoriented I feel, compared to the lucidity of my perceptions.
Only now do I get a decent look. Her white clothing doesn't fit any ethnicity I know of, but she does seem completely human. She brushes strawberry blonde hair over her shoulder, and watches me with cobalt blue eyes. Her face fascinates me. I feel trust. I have a strange sense of bonding, while my rational mind screams I have just lost control of my life. I wonder if my sanity will go with it, but I don't think I can afford to dwell on that possibility.
A scintillation occurs, to my mind's eye more than my physical pair. I feel her opening to me, to receive my thoughts. I feel the attraction, but I feel how I will have to direct what I think towards that attraction.
“Are you reading my mind?” I ask.
The look in her eyes seems to understand everything I feel. Maybe what I think, too. I feel she needs me to receive her, to get her reply. I wonder how we might simply use our mouths, but something distinctively Other is happening, in spades. I feel a bit like someone who's slipped off a boat deck, deciding the shore is the only hope.
Again, I feel I've willed...something in this exchange. I wonder if I called for her in the first place.
But I sense it's her strength with this skill that's again rescuing me. Or kidnapping me. Right now, I don't see what I can do about it besides shut down and wish, wish, wish it away. The Ruby Slippers craving makes me even more scared than trying to understand what's going on in the moment.
“Only what you're sharing,” she says. “I know how to leave your thoughts to yourself, too. It's just a fact now people don't always share their true thoughts completely.” She looks a little sad about that. I honestly wonder why she'd be disappointed with what I think of as an indisputable fact of life. The kind of thing you should have figured out by the time you're nineteen, like me.
"Merriwyn" says her alto voice in my mind. The word is her name. She continues.
“We'll work on how to speak each others' language when we're not in a rush,” she says. “At least, we're going to have to turn all our concentration on getting out of here.”
“And here is...?”
“My friends, when we find them, might help you comprehend,” she says, turning now towards a darkness-filled shaft of stone stretching before her. “And you may never understand. You may have to live with that. But we are going to get you out of here alive.”
Interested so far?
As ficticiously presented in SUNSTRIKE #1, October 1974 "cover date."
Yes, I used the device of plotting my story and pretending it was a comics series written and drawn by Lue Lyron for seven years, 1974-1981. Now, bear with me. That entirely made-up-by-me series is then the prelude to the events in my novel KEEP IT DARK.
I'm experimenting with maybe writing out the prelude in novel form instead, and possibly presenting some of it to a comics company in script form, in five-to-eight page installments, depending on their format.
No comments:
Post a Comment