Best to read 'Ancient Lies', too. This'll make more sense in the later chapters if you do.
A fresh breeze tore through the quiet moment, rippling across the grass and pulling the scent of sycamore straight to a small figure in the shade.
It was hard to tell how the girl ended up in this middle-class neighborhood, full of shiny BMWs and perfect little lawns. Crouched under the shadow of an old, wide palm tree, she resembled a small heap of garbage more than anything else.
Stringy blonde hair hung limply around her like a protective curtain, nearly brushing the leaf-littered concrete in its attempt to hide this little child from the world. A baggy, stained orange shirt hid the girl’s near-emaciated body, clashing fiercely with her ripped grayish-brown skirt – which may or may not have been white at some point.
She was bent over a small scrap of notebook paper, deliberately writing with long, slow strokes. The words mightn’t have meant anything to other people, but they were what had kept her alive, these few past years.
It must have started back in the summer of nineteen-ninety-two, when two kids started coming down to her hangout. She stayed here to weather the storm of a workaholic dad and an often-drunk mom, not doing much but wondering about things people never told her, things she knew were impossible to discover on one’s own. Or, if they were learnable, ended up being somewhere in a book or on the Internet, two places she didn’t have access to.
How did spiders make webs? Why couldn’t animals talk? Was there any way to catch a really wild mountain lion and tame it, if you were a eight-year-old girl?
And so, one day in mid-July, while she was leaning against her favorite tree, Tramant (Who, she proudly announced to no one, had been named by her and could never be called anything else), there came a strange noise from up the slightly-slanted street. Voices. Kid’s voices. They were laughing and talking about something, and the whir of bikes joined these noises through the relatively small and quiet neighborhood without restraint.
“So you’re saying we couldn’t make voodoo dolls out of clay?”
“Ben – yeah, that’s what I’m saying.”
Frowning in annoyed confusion, the girl crawled behind Tramant, heart thumping with no-longer ignorable excitement. What were they doing down here, in this boring place of absolute silence? The wind and the trees had always been her only company, and although she wanted to say that was all she needed, it really wasn’t true.
“What is this place, anyways? Kinda quiet, isn’t it?”
“Yeah,” Replied a more boyish voice, and our little spy could only guess he was Ben.
“Ooh, creepy! What’s that little trail back there?” Asked his friend – a girl.
Everything tuned out abruptly, and a small but rushed argument broke out in her head.
Go on, introduce yourself! You don’t look that terrible, anyways.
Who are we kidding, you dummy? They’d run away like frightened animals if the kids saw this wreck of a girl.
It’ll be easy! ‘Hi, my name is Galyda! What’s yours?’
No, stupid! Do you want to let everyone know how ugly and dumb we are? Just listen for awhile. Maybe if we can get some nicer clothes or something, but right now, this isn’t gonna happen.
Last words in an argument always itch to be contradicted, but there wasn’t much else to say. Galyda couldn’t hear them anymore, and knew that, even if they’d gone back into the hills, she couldn’t return to her broom-closet bedroom until her mom’s hangover was mostly gone.
So here we’ll stay, she said to herself, and the nastier, more cynical voice snapped back without delay.
Duh.
“I’ll get the mail, Mom!” Galyda called back into the house, not even a slurred reply to spur her along. She wandered down, in the general direction of their mailbox, sure to be stuffed with bills her miserly father didn’t plan on paying. Every once in awhile he would snap, have a large-object throwing fit, and give ‘those damn fools’ their money. It never seemed wise to ask him exactly who these fools were, but then again, nothing was a good question to her parents.
Wondering vaguely if she’d see Rose and Ben down at the cul-de-sac, her nearly constant hideout, Galyda entirely forgot the mail key in her hand. She was wearing her only presentable outfit, of the three she had - a simple, long-sleeved, evergreen tee, and grass-stained jeans, which still hung slightly on her gaunt figure. Whenever she glanced in the mirror, Galyda told herself the stains matched her shirt, however ridiculous it seemed.
“Oh, good. The strangelings haven’t arrived yet.”
She liked calling them that – somehow, it wasn’t almost endearing, a secret name for her ‘friends’. Who, in truth, she’d never actually met.
It was nearly a month from the time she’d first seen them, and somehow it didn’t seem possible. Observant by nature, Galyda knew a lot about these two kids, however odd it seemed. Ben, the ten-year-old with curly brown hair, was oddly entranced by his friend’s ability to turn everything into a crazily awesome something-or-other. Rose could hear a flag flap in the wind, and swear that someone was hidden in shadow, creeping towards them with knife in hand.
An oil print became old blood, dirty puddles were suddenly the fountain of ultimate healing and protection. Most important of all, writing in the concrete became two men, constantly waiting to pounce on Rose and the boy constantly at her side.
She took her Pokémon game back into the bike-trail, (“If we have something from our dimension, they can’t steal us away,” She had reasoned) or, as Ben called it, the path to other worlds. They would often come dashing back out into the sunlight with excited and terrified faces, chattering like little squirrels.
Most of the time, they spoke of these two men, who simply waited for them to stop believing. Then they would swoop down, and carry away their captives to far-away places, never to be seen again. Rose shivered with delight at the thought of this disappearance, always painting vivid pictures of a scratched-up and bent bike lying in the street, claw marks riddling its paint and leather seat.
Ben simply stared, horrified fascination riddling his pixie-like face, stray brown curls bouncing near his eyes. He, a skinny boy of ten or eleven, was always energetic and ready for anything, and didn’t seem to mind what they did, as long as these stories kept coming – and anyone could tell that his friend was abundantly supplied with imagination.
Rose was oblivious to so much, in her own way. She didn’t care what she wore, often coming down in bright pink shorts and a deep red, slightly ragged shirt. Her dark brown hair was always pulled back in a tight ponytail, bright face smiling and tanned from so much time under the summer sun. The two eleven-year-old companions were such a weird pair, yet so perfectly matched to each other. They adored this place, and hardly a day went by that Ben and Rose weren’t down at the cul-de-sac, having a great time.
Until today.
