NaNo '07. Rough, and most likely will be unedited for a long time.
Prologue: Reality
The nightly visitors that usually visit weren’t present this time. It had become a routine, their visits. They came to talk with her, play with her, cry and dream with her. Nobody objected their presence—in fact, she was the only one to be aware of it at all.
So when her step-mother led her up the whisper stairs, hushing her against that cold blue robe of hers, and the girl didn’t hear her nightly friends, she went into a state of panic. The step-mother of course took it that she had done something wrong. Stupid woman, the girl thought. It’s all about you, isn’t it?
“Adelyn, please stop crying,” the woman cooed, bending to the girl’s level. Shivers crawled down the girl’s spine as the woman’s cold hands gripped her elbows and squeezed tight. What precisely did she think she was doing? Did she believe that she actually was being a good mother? Foolish woman. Stupid, foolish woman.
“Adelyn?”
“Let go of me!” The girl yelled, hitching up her robe and running as fast as she could to her room a few yards away. She slammed the door open and yanked it closed, taking only a second of her time and lock it. She heard the mother wheedling in that nasally airy voice of hers… who did she think she was? Important?
She surveyed the room, but to no avail in finding her midnight visitors. Usually they scampered across the ceiling as little shadows of play and energy. Or the invisible ones snuggled close to her and purred, grumbled, and throb with life. A few had been known to talk to her. And, of course, there was him.
He had been the most intellectual of all the visitors she had. Appearing always as her size and age, he made her laugh and protected her from the nastier creatures around. He always came as a shadow for some reason, and never as a normal person would. She had a feeling he was Irish even though she knew nothing about Ireland. His accent made her giggle for he was the only person in town that said “oy” and “lassie” in one sentence and didn’t break out squeaking some old ballad. He was her friend and solstice…
Tonight, though… none of them were here. The mirrors stared blankly back at the girl. The bed tauntingly loomed near her, tempting sleep. The girl knew, however, the dangers of sleep. It was never safe to sleep when any moment a Monster could just come by and snatch you unawares.
Monsters were a strange lot, the girl reasoned. She never saw them often, but when she did they always were wrecking havoc wherever they went. They came as shadows and incomplete forms as well, mimics of the real world, phantoms with a heart of lead and gas. Monsters were evil, unlike her visitors. Monsters did harm.
Could the visitors’ absence be the Monsters’ fault?
That seemed like a likely possibility. The girl knew her friends, though… they were overly capable of taking care of themselves. Worrying about them would do nothing.
She crept over to the empty bed. Surely a few minutes rest wouldn’t do any harm… the window latch securely clipped together, the closet forever open to the world, but only the world in her room. Nothing could get in. Nothing could get out. A prison cell.
She giggled at that thought.
The bed, no matter how inviting it looked, didn’t seem appealing at the moment. The window radiated a much more alluring quality and she barely noticed how it tugged her to move one wobbly leg after another before she was peering out upon the world. Stormy clouds covered the full moon, which resisted them and burst out with lunar light in spite of it. All she could see for miles away and around was the forest… and something else.
Being so far away and distinct she couldn’t tell what it was. A lantern? No, that would have a reddish glow. Possibly a flashlight? She didn’t know… it moved slowly and deliberately in their neighbors sand garden. It could be a visitor, actually, she thought. Or a Monster. Or something completely different.
It drew closer and closer to the girl’s house. Yet… it kept getting blurrier and blurrier with each passing step, flickering on and off, a small wavering computer screen of light. The girl hugged her robe closer, edging away from the window. The light figure flashed a bright smiling grin at her and laughed a tinkling chortle of notes.
She’d heard of them before. They appeared in some of the older fairy tales, and occasionally in a modern one. Will o’ the wisps. Yet this one… it disturbed her for reasons she couldn’t describe. Just looking at it made fear compress her heart, making her breath come out in short gasps. You heard your heart thrumming out the beat of your steps as you ran away. Thing is, she didn’t have anything to run away too.
Something tapped on her window. Oh no… it’s coming up here! she pled. Buddies… where are you when I need you? Oh buddies… please?
Another tap, then a thump against the first floor wall. Instinct pulled her eyes wide, her lips thin, and sweat to roll down her face. She jiggled the stubborn doorknob. It broke.
Wonderful.
The only option left was to sit and wait to see what it wanted. She needed to have courage. What could one will o’ of the wisp do to her? Relatively everything next to nothing… well, waiting was the key.
Her eyes fixed themselves on the window, burning aching for her to close them overriding her worries. She sat in an uncomfortable position by the door, her legs screaming to be moved. Nothing, absolutely nothing could be changed about her state or the wisp would have her in its clutches forever.
A glow branched out from the lower reaches of the window and extended upward fluidly. She couldn’t breathe and her mouth felt icky and dry. Only one other time has she been as frightened, a time many years ago… and the similarities between the two incidents were frighteningly identical.
The tinkling laugh she heard smothered her ears from hearing that nail stabbing a hole into the glowing window, those long prong fingers pulling away the shards, bloodless. Her nose detected a rich smell of lilacs, but her logic said it really was something else. The infatuation covered simple logic, though… she saw only the good.
The wisp was surely a strange creature. Standing up it only reached her waist, and the girl was already a short person as it was. Red and pink tattoos spiraled from the head to toe, depicting war scenes and religious practices. Its thin body twisted into pretzals, arms and legs twisted not unlike poles, the head somewhat egg-shaped.
What was the worst were the eyes.
Everybody hears that the eyes are the windows into a soul. In a wisp’s case, however, eyes are the windows into the souls of the ones it has murdered. Two black holes bore into the girl, ripped edges and a small red fire burning deep inside its skull. If she looked hard enough she saw a million children’s eyes, a billion people that stared at her with watery expressions and faces twisted into anguish. If she looked really closely she see a face resembling hers, begging her to turn away.
The wisp stared at the girl perplexed then said, “Come with me, missus.” Its voiced went up several octaves as missus, and she noticed the wisp’s smile, a toothy grin of tombstone teeth, twitched every time it talked. It edged toward her, and a scythe blinked into his hands, the blade reflecting her face.
“Just one word, missus. I expect a dimension walker like you would know what it is,” it said while taking another step toward her. “You know, don’t you? You what it will do?” The look on its face send the girl crazy, for it was between half-arrogant and half-curious, twisting the little oval’s face into a sinister and somewhat irritating expression.
It waited for her to talk, but when she didn’t respond, it gave out a grating high giggle. Closing its eyes with eyelids that hadn’t existed before, it crossed its legs and shrugged.
“How… disappointing. The only quarry I’ve had that knows what I am and she doesn’t talk. You do understand plain humanspeech, do you not?” it said scathingly.
“Of course I do, wisp,” the girl replied, all too quickly.
“Then why can’t you answer my query, mud girl?” it asked.
“I—” The stopped herself just in time before she said the Word. Her mother told her about it when she had been… present. You never said the Word with Monsters or creatures present if you wanted to keep your soul.
She glared at the wisp, who was wearing a victorious grin. “You do know it. Then why don’t you say it? Oh, but you can’t. Your mentor probably hammered that rule into your head very well. ‘Say that word and you’ll lose your soul.’ Don’t tell me you believe in such nonsense.”
“You can’t trick me, demon. I know all about your tricks.”
“Do you now?” the wisp asked persistently. “Then have you seen this one?” Its scythe flashed through the air near the bed, twirling faster and faster to the wisp’s beat. A high piccolo cascade of notes twinkled, and then a rip creased through the bed sheet. The girl didn’t move an inch during the strange ritual.
“I believe you two are… familiar.” A shadow rose from the black hole… a human-shaped boyish form that was bounded by platinum chains and oppressed in a velvet blanket. The wisp snickered nastily and prodded the chained, floating captive in the stomach with the tip of the scythe. Yelping, the figure convulsed underneath the chains until the wisp smacked it on the head.
“Please… s-stop it…” the figure said feebly. “W-what did I do?”
The girl’s jaw dropped and tears welled up in her eyes. “Is that you? Monu?”
The faceless shadow’s face snapped up and inclined its head toward her. “Adelyn? What are you d-doing here? Get away!”
“I can’t, Monu… the door’s knob broke off…” she sobbed. “What did he do to you?”
“Sorry to intrude on this most touching reunion,” interjected the wisp, “but do you honestly think you know us now, Adelyn, is it? What doesn’t Gloomy here explain it to you?”
“Stop it, w-wisp,” Monu lashed. “She doesn’t need to know.”
“How can you be so cruel to her? She probably wants to know what happened to her ‘visitors,’ no?”
“Stop it!” Monu shouted.
“No need to become all loud, my friend. This is but a friendly deba—”
The girl barely had time to react as a rip appeared next to her and Monu broke from his bonds, unmercifully attacking the will o’ the wisp with a sword of his own. She hesitated, wanting to help her shadow friend, but she would doubtlessly get in the way.
Plus, the rip looked interesting…
Experimentally putting a foot through, she found out it was like dipping to a pool that was dry on the other side. She hastily entered the rip before Monu and the wisp got really close to her…
…and landed into almost perfect nothingness. No, not nothingness, but just darkness. The moon didn’t shine, nothing could be seen other than the girl herself, and even then she had a hard time believing that where she was was real. Could this be a dimension between reality and non-existence?
She was standing on something. That proved that this place was substantial. She could breathe and smell, so there had to be air. What this proved, though, was beyond her limit of thought process at that moment.
“Hello?” she called. Nobody answered… there was an echo, however… a voice…
