Otherland

OTHERLAND

By

Almondie Shampine

This is a work of fiction. Names. Characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright ©2016 by Almondie Shampine

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned,

or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not

participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the

author’s rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

Printed in the United States of America

FIRST EDITION

NewAge Publishing

PO Box 85

Durhamville, NY 13054

www.almondieshampine.com

DEDICATION

Dedicated to my Light soul, Grandpa (Robert) Bargabos, who died while I was writing this book; the Light knight to my Grandma (Sharon) Bargabos. Their love taught me what true love looks like, so that I have never settled for anything less, as their undying love has shown me that it is definitely worth waiting for, even if it’s not something found in this lifetime or this dimension.

PROLOGUE

"Please. Please don't …" The words were drowned in gasping sobs. "Please don't leave me! Please stay. A little while longer, then I promise I'll let you go." She ran to him, tears streaming down her face.

His heart broke. She was but a child, smaller than most. He wanted always to protect her. Appearances revealed that the world would swallow her whole. So petite, so innocent, so pure. It is not how she'd come. The beat of his heart picked up. He squeezed her tighter in recalled memory of how he'd found her. Seconds away from fallen.

Now, as he lifted her chin and stared into her tear-glittering ocean eyes, he knew beyond a doubt she'd been cleansed, purified, wiped clean. As untainted as a child first born into the world. Oblivious. And this particular child had been born with the soul of an angel, a heart full of gold … and a mission.

It is not the first time she'd been reborn, nor the fifth. The world was getting worse and they were simply outnumbered. Too many fell - too many fallen. The most difficult thing to endure was not giving up - nor giving in.

She had to go back. They both did, "There, there. It's not so bad. It won't be long. A mere second in eternity."

"But what if I lose my way? What if I can't find my way back? When will I see you? What if you forget?" she said, almost hysterically, her questions rapid-fire.

He heard the low rumbling in the distance, growing louder, coming closer. The light was dimming, gradually it seemed with eyes open, but rapidly with a blink. He did not answer her as he did not have the answers.

"We must go now. It's time," he urged, pulling on her fragile hand. "Now. We must go now!" he said more urgently, seeing beyond her, seeing what she could not.

She crossed her arms and set her face stubbornly. "Not until you tell me your name."

The ground shook beneath him. "Please, little one, we must go now!" She couldn't see the wrong, the changes around her. She'd been here too long. So good and pure was she in soul that she was completely oblivious to the crumbling of their world.

"I won't move an inch until you tell me your name so I may find you again." And there she plunked down right on her behind while behind her everything was being cast into Nothingness. If the Nothingness reached them, they'd be lost.

"I demand you get up and move, little one."

"I will not lose you. I will not! Tell me your name?" And if her body was small and unremarkable in strength, her voice rose over falling mountains, shattering ground, and reverberated throughout the Nothingness.

"You know we do not speak names, little one. Names will bring about the curse."

"Blah the curse. I don't care. I will take any curse if it means I will find you again."

"You know nothing! You are a child!"

"I may be a child, but my power is my love and love conquers all. Even the power which is yours. I will die without my love, and if I cannot find you again, I will perish. Do you hear me? I will lose!"

Tears pricked his lids. How could he have, moments ago, believed her weak and too pure to survive? All the battles he'd fought and won …

"My power is duty. I will not defy the High master by telling you my name."

"Love is more powerful than duty. Succumb to me!"

"I will not! Duty is more powerful than love. I will not defy the High master as you defy me. You'll be the ruin of both of us, but at least I'm being true to my duty," he said firmly, marking the sign over his heart.

Her eyes luminescent suddenly, almost blinding. He shielded his face as she lifted her eyes to him. In that moment, she was not a little girl. She was all wisdom, all knowing. The pain he thought she oblivious too showed fierce and deep in the huge globe of her eyes. "And I'm being true to my heart," she whispered.

Whereas he thought her so innocently unaware to the disappearance of their world, she turned to the Nothingness, her face that of an aged woman, beautiful and tragic. She sobbed deeply once, allowing her shoulders to fall with the burden of the knowing that she carried. Sadly, she knew what she had to do.

"Little one?"

"If my love cannot overpower your duty, nor your duty my love …" Then she lifted her brilliant face, a single tear glimmering like crystal on her cheek, and spread her arms. "In the name of love, my name is Aliyah Destiny Demonica!" And she jumped.

"No!" he howled as he dove for her, but They had already snatched her away into nothingness, giving them the power in the knowing of her name, as it echoed throughout infinite miles of the emptiness. Aliyah. He crouched on his knees, his torment great. He faced the light, the darkness at his back. "High master, forgive me. I have failed you," he cried.

As quickly as he'd been humbled, he stood and nodded his head - the firm features of his face set in the knowing of his duty. He stared out into the beautiful gardens, the earth, the animals, and all that was divine and plentiful. The lighted path that would have brought them to their final destination. And he turned his back.

His duty was to protect her. He knew that now. And so he stepped into the Nothingness, of the purest of black and the starkest of silence, and walked blindly away from the light, knowing and feeling deeply that he'd never return in the absence of her.

As much as the world required his duty, so too did the world require her love. They'd never been meant to go against each other, rather, to unite harmoniously to create synchrony amidst the All and the Nothing. He had something she did not. He possessed the power of her name. She'd crossed the Forbidden, but only in that crossing did she set the path.

Her name was Aliyah. Her power was love, and his duty. It is what kept them alive. One could perceive that she'd been consumed by the Nothingness, but it only takes one to disperse of none, just as one microscopic mass will demolish the empty.

And now there were two.

CHAPTER 1

SIGNIFICANCE IN THE AWARE

I’ve always wondered if perhaps I speak a different language, as though my dialect on the sound waves directed to another’s ears are somehow altered during their transport.

So much the words I say go misunderstood.

Or perhaps like the animal that can hear sounds and pitches our own ears cannot, my spoken voice cannot be heard but by a select few.

So much the words I speak go unheard.

I’ve always wondered if perhaps my frame is not solid, or rather my skin not opaque, most part of me translucent, invisible to those common eyes, as though there is a part of me ghost or spirit and another visible and solidly human.

So much the good of me goes unnoticed.

We all have a field that surrounds us, an aura of energy of sorts, and these fields are intuitive to the fields of others. I’ve always wondered if perhaps there are others dominating my space, an attraction of dark entities with faces and bodies pressed to my globe, trying to get in to blacken my white spirit.

So much the good that surrounds me goes unfelt.

Am I surrounded by mirrors that distort my features so that those things I express are deformed and disabled as those reactions typical to each expression are not provided to me in kind to what I display and depict.

So much of my expressions are misinterpreted.

These are the questions I have always asked of myself as I walk my path alone
.

Lydia kicked her feet against the bed, rhythm-mically flexing her calves to ease the restlessness. She ignored the tingly-crawlies she felt all over her body, and refused to change positions, no matter how much her body was telling her to.

Tick-tock, tick-tock
. The tick she didn’t mind so much. It was the tock that bothered her; to her, it was a formidable sound that marked the passage of time, time that should have been spent sleeping. She measured her breathing to inhale at the tick and exhale at the tock.

“Focus on the paralysis of your body, Lydia,” her sleep Doctor had told her. “Remember my voice, the gentle lulls up and down like the gentle tides of the ocean, pulling you further and further from the shore. Embrace the comfortable tingling starting at your toes, and as the tingling moves toward your calves, your toes become numb, and as the warm, fuzzy tingling moves toward your knees, your calves become numb, upward to your thighs and to the very tip of your fingers and the top of your head.”

COO COO! COO COO! She nearly jumped out of her skin. 2 am. She’d been lying there for four hours.

“No, Lydia, don’t get rid of your Cuckoo clock. If you do, you will keep opening your eyes to look at the time, and will come full into consciousness again. You will be further exacerbated with the anxiety of not knowing what time it is,” she mocked the specialist angrily as she got up to get a drink of water.

“Drink water only, sip it slowly, half a glass so you won’t be interrupted with bathroom breaks in the middle of the night. No tea, no coffee, no soda, and
no more alcohol!
Self-medicating is only a temporary fix to your sleep problems; it doesn’t create restful sleep, which will only prolong and make-worse your sleep issues. WELL, AT LEAST IT ALLOWS ME TO
FALL
ASLEEP!”
she yelled in frustration.

She turned the TV on to low-volume, a
Merlin
episode on Netflix, against the specialist’s advice, and began the processes all over again. She counted Mississippi’s backwards from 10, forward to 9, back again, while imagining herself stepping further and further back into the darkness.

‘Do not fear the dark,’ she heard, perhaps from the TV. She kept strolling further back into the trenches of unconsciousness. As usual, ghastly images presented themselves in front of her and in her peripheral. Images that had previously frightened her and kept her constantly waking up. Images that she didn’t have to face when she’d been drinking in order to pass out. She saw dolls with crying eyes, angry, scary faces, bleeding porcelain masks.

They can’t hurt me. Not real
, she told herself.
Keep walking.
A purple pony with its neck broken. A ghost swinging from a beam, a rope around its neck. Her heart picked up in that old childhood fear that if a ghost knew you could see it, they’d follow you.
Creak, creak, creak
, it sounded.
Keep walking. Eyes straight forward. Don’t look back!

All of a sudden, the area opened up, and a vast array of colors permeated the darkest of darkness. Now enthralled, she kept moving forward, as it seemed only a few feet away. It was like looking out through a huge stone and glittering blue emerald crown. There were 8 points, like the directions of a compass – North, Northeast, East, Southeast, South, Southwest, West, Northwest, all made of stone with little embedded blue emeralds, with the end of the point marked with a large blue emerald.

The sun on the emerald tips provoked a whirlwind of colors across the immaculate sky that looked like a sunrise. Different from the earth’s sunrise, it was marked with darker shades of oranges, blues, pinks, and purples. The sun was a deep orange, and appeared to be captured in a huge glass globe.

“Magnificent,” she breathed.
Remember this when I’m awake,
Lydia sent back to her conscious mind. She kept walking forward, wanting to see more than just the sky. Suddenly, an eyeball covered up the entire view. It was large with perfect white surrounding the beautiful green iris, with black outlining the bottom and top lids. It looked almost as though she was being looked at through a telescope, and she was looking through the telescope at the opposite end. It blinked. She stared at the eye for quite a long time, memorizing the green, a green she’d never quite seen before. Perfection. She wondered what the eye saw of her? Did the eye looking at her see her blue, bloodshot, sleep-deprived eye?

Hello
, she thought.
Who are you?

The eye abruptly left, momentarily shedding into her view what she’d previously been admiring. She felt peace, surrender even. Then swiftly there was darkness and a roaring growl, “Go back!” The sudden cutting off of light left her completely blind and disoriented. She didn’t want to go back.

She didn’t want to go back to the dead eyes, the bleeding masks, the creaking, pendulum-swinging ghost. She didn’t want to hear the Cuckoo clock alert her to 3 am or 4 am. She was sleeping and she was going to stay sleeping, dammit.

So she pushed forward toward where the beautiful land had been, the air growing heavy and thick, until there came a point where she felt she couldn’t breathe. Still, she pushed forward, her body growing heavier and laden until she was on her hands and knees, crawling.

“You must go back!” A different voice, a child’s, full of alarm.

“No,” she tried crying out, but without breath she was without voice. She felt like she was squeezing herself through a narrow tunnel that was getting narrower with each movement forward.
Must .... Not … Wake … Up.
She moved her hands further, but then the ground was gone. She somersaulted forward, willing herself not to scream and be frightened. Everyone knows that the fear of the catapulting off a cliff in one’s dreams always wakes one up before they hit the ground.

I’m not going to die. That’s just a
myth, she told herself, then willed herself to open her eyes a tenth of a second before careening into something white and fluffy.
Is this what my subconscious mind thinks of my new foam mattress?

She laid there, feeling as though she was cocooned in a cloud, staring up at the brilliant sky, feeling the warm caress of the globed deep-orange sun, and she sighed happily. Blessed sleep, finally, and she closed her eyes.

But then she felt a gentle jab to her side. “You’re not supposed to be here. How did you get in?” It was the child’s voice that had urged her to go back. She opened her eyes and this time saw a pair of those beautiful green eyes, connected to a flawless face that looked about 11 or 12 years old.

She sat up, “You! I saw you looking at me! Tell me, boy, what is this place?”

“You must leave now!” he said, pointing his finger at an impossibly small black tunnel that looked so off-putting in this beautiful world of colors.

She laughed lightly, not remembering when she’d last felt this good. “Why would I go back to that place of nightmares? I want to sleep here. I have a very important meeting at work tomorrow that I can’t miss, so please, just let me rest for a time and I’ll be gone before you know it.”

He stomped his foot, which on a cloud-like substance was as futile as stomping one’s foot into a pile of fluffy snow. “You don’t belong here. If They find out -.” Suddenly, the winds picked up in a fury, alerting her to open her eyes again.

She saw black and white figures circling in the air, and plunging down toward them, which was creating the mild tornado-effect. Three black and three white surrounded them in a circle, not quite touching the ground, rather floating a few inches above it. They should have scared her, but in this land of beauty, they didn’t. Their figures were each uniquely different, as were their colored eyes that glittered as brilliantly as the blue emeralds.

“Hello,” Lydia said, intent on not having her peaceful slumber disturbed. Her issues with insomnia weren’t just the inability to fall asleep, but the inability to stay asleep, and the constant waking would then result in the inability to wake while her desperate body demanded the needed sleep.

“She’s alive?” a white figure with piercing indigo eyes said in surprise.

“You! You let her in,” a black scrawny figure with a deep voice and beaming, dark, yellow eyes pointed at the boy.

“I – I swear I did not,” the boy’s voice pitched. “I was doing my rounds, as usual, and saw her headed in this direction, so I activated the switch. She shouldn’t have been able to get through, but she did.”

“He’s lying! No living human can navigate here without direction and without being let in,” a stouter black figure with grey eyes said. “There is only one possible conclusion. We never should have trusted a human boy. He let her in, which by the Bylaws means imprisonment.”

“Check the switch. It’s activated,” his voice whined.

A tall white figure with dark pink eyes raised what could be attributed to a type of arm, stopping the black figures’ movements toward them. “Check the switch,” it commanded.

“See, I told you I activated it. I didn’t do anything wrong. I did my job just as instructed. I even told her to go back.”

“He could have activated the switch
after
he let her in.”

“Human.”

“Huh?” Lydia re-opened her dreaming eyes.

“How did you get in here?”

She yawned. “I just fell through into this dream wonderland. Best sleep I’ve had in a decade.”

“She couldn’t have just fallen through without it being open,” the grey-eyed dark figure said.

“Yes, yes, I do agree that this requires an investigation and a consultation. In the meantime, we must follow the Bylaws,” the white-figure with the indigo eyes said.

“Wait. I’ll go with you without resistance,” the boy said. “But let her return. You heard her. She thinks she’s in dream wonderland, all just a dream. She won’t remember anything.”

“It’s a bit late for that, human, don’t you think? The pathway has now been inked into her subconscious, and she bypassed all the things meant to frighten her and turn her around. She will return, and next time, she may not be alone. Like you, boy, she can never go back. Human, you are to come with us. If you fight us, you will be restrained.”

“You’re actually a quite adorable demon with your orange squinty eyes,” Lydia smiled, lazily picking herself up, feeling as though she weighed lighter than the air itself. Well, almost, less she be floating or flying like them. “My Doctor was so right. He said that once I start confronting my fears, instead of running from them, then I’d stop waking myself up full of panic and adrenaline.”

“Silence, human. I’d rather spend an eternity as I am than spend another minute in the idiotic human mind,” he/it mumbled.

“Looks like the woman’s freedom movement hasn’t reached dreamland. You’re all males. What kind of government is that? Every government needs a female touch, less you wouldn’t all be so grumbly. I don’t need any more miserable males in my life, thank you very much. My boss is quite enough, even if you are spirit-demons-whatever-you-are.”

One of them snorted in irritation.

“Does anyone have the time?” she asked.

“Otherland possesses all time and no time, encompassing and balancing precariously the past, present, future, and the Nothingness,” the white plump figure explained.

“Well the past, present, and future time for me is 8:00 precisely, or I will wind up with nothingness if I lose my job.” Lydia chuckled at her own joke.

The boy’s head was down, pointed at his sluggish feet.

“Cheer up, little man. You’re too young to be so unhappy. You’ll have plenty of adult years to have that,” she scruffed his thick blonde hair. He did not lift his head, nor did he smile.