Written By Ivan Overmoyer
Illustrations by Nikki Leeper
Copyright (c) 2014, All Rights Reserved
Chapter 1
Dr. Wallace lived
alone ever since his wife had passed. Having retired in his old age
to a small house out in the country, he spent his days in quiet
solitude, gardening or walking in the woods, communing with nature.
Often he would read, and sometimes he would write. He often wrote
letters to friends he had met in his younger days, or to his
children, who had all long ago moved away to have lives of their own.
He would go into
town every few days for the few provisions he needed to survive and
couldn't make himself. He would catch up with his acquaintances,
maybe stop for a conversation over coffee, go to the post office and
take care of some of his other errands and then go home. Most of his
evenings were spent reading poetry.
He thought
frequently of his wife and of the life they had shared, making a home
in a small town after the war, setting up a small family practice
and, eventually, starting a family of their own... They'd done well
for themselves, and despite the occasional argument had had a long
and happy marriage. When she grew sick in her old age he'd stayed by
her side, loving and caring for her as best he could, ever the
faithful husband. Often he dreamed of her, still beautiful in her
old age, floating in through the open bedroom window like a ghost or
an angel, smiling upon him as her long white hair hung in the air
about her as if in water. The window would fly open and in she would
come, alighting down next to him to embrace him in his sleep.
This was his dream.
He never once imagined it would actually happen.
Strictly speaking,
it didn't. Not exactly, anyway. But, one night in midsummer,
somebody did come through his window, much like in his dream but
louder, and with more broken glass, thumping painfully into his bed's
footboard as she hit the ground.
He jumped and, with
a surprised yelp, inadvertently tossed the volume of poetry he'd been
reading by lamplight several feet into the air, catching it a moment
later as it fell back into his hands. His head roared with
adrenaline as his eyes flicked from the shattered window to the
broken glass scattered across the floor, and his jaw flapped in
useless shock for a moment before he was finally able to speak.
“What in the hell was that!?” he finally exclaimed, crawling over
the covers. As he did so, he saw his unexpected guest sit up and
shake the glass shards out of her short, feathery white hair.
Before he could
reach the foot of the bed she was up again and stumbling across the
room, clearly struggling to keep anything that vaguely resembled a
sense of balance. As she skittered across the room, all he could
really make out was a head of messy white hair above some kind of
tattered white cloak with a furry collar before she slammed into his
dresser, not quite knocking it over but still pushing it several
feet. She bounced off of it and veered toward the floor lamp. “Oh,
no no no no no DON'T-” he reached out a hand to stop her but it was
already too late. The lamp knocked into the wall, crushing the shade
and shattering the bulbs with a noise he thought was a bit louder
than it ought to be, and the room flickered into darkness. There was
a thump followed by something sliding against the drywall, and then
silence as Wallace finally made it to the edge of the bed. He swung
his feet down toward his slippers, then stopped himself and picked
them up instead. He shook them over the edge of the bed to make sure
they were empty of glass. Nothing came out, so he slipped them on
carefully and stood up, trying to calm his pounding heart. He could
hear somebody groaning as he went across the floor, crunching
occasionally, to flip on the light switch.
She was an impish
girl, pale skinned with feathery white hair that stuck out
haphazardly around her head. Under her odd cloak she wore a
sleeveless dress that hung about to her knees made of some silvery
material he didn't immediately recognize, with a cloth belt around
her waist and a small pair of shoes that matched her dress. She was
holding her head and wincing.
Still shaking,
Wallace looked from her, to the dresser, to the window, then back at
her, trying in some small way to figure out what had just happened.
He tried going through it step by step, but the only two steps he
could think of was “Reading Ogden Nash's “The Smelt”' and “Girl
Crashes Through Window for No Apparent Reason.” Of course there
was no correlation between the two, and the more he tried to find any
the more he realized it was a pointless endeavor. And at any rate
there was now a girl sitting in a mess of broken glass on his bedroom
floor, possibly with serious head injury. He did his best to collect
himself and recall his medical training. “Are you alright?” he
said, reaching down to help her up. “How are you feeling?”
She looked up at
him as she took his hand and he flinched almost imperceptibly when he
saw her eyes-- they were a very dark blueish grey, almost black. It
was a little shocking, but in light of recent events it was something
he could handle. She looked up at him like a stray cat, fearful, but
still willing to accept assistance. “Confused, mostly,” she
said. He pulled her to her feet and her cloak rustled.
“I meant
physically,” he said. “Do you feel dizzy? Nauseous?”
She stumbled again
and he caught her. “Something like that,” she muttered.
“Come on,” he
said, guiding her carefully to the door and turning the light off
after them. “Let's get you downstairs.” He closed the door as
they left the room. There was nothing he could do for the bedroom
now, but if he could keep moths and bats from getting into the rest
of the house, he would. He walked her slowly down the stairs and
into the kitchen, guiding her carefully through the darkness,
supporting her with an arm around her back.
“Where am I?”
she asked as they reached the base of the stairs.
“Uh oh,” he
murmured. “You experiencing memory loss?”
She shook her head
and winced. “No, I just don't recognize this place,” she said.
“Should I be?”
“Well I don't
know about should,” he
muttered. “Do you remember how you got here?”
“You
mean aside from...” she gestured vaguely upward.
“Aside
from the window, yes.” He sat her down in a chair next to the
kitchen table and turned the lights on low.
“No.”
“So
you are experiencing
memory loss.”
“Yes
but I think that happened before I hit my head.”
Wallace
blinked. “What?”
“I
don't really remember anything before coming through the window,”
she explained.
“Oh.
So... you remember breaking through the window, but nothing before
that?”
She
shook her head and winced again. “Ow... no, no I remember I saw
the light through the window, and... and going for it...” She
trailed off, nodding slightly.
Wallace
couldn't tell if she was confused or not. Certainly what she was
saying didn't make a whole lot of sense, but she sounded as if she
was thinking clearly. Maybe she was remembering a vivd
hallucination? He shook his head. There were more pressing things
to attend to at the moment. He fetched a pen light from a nearby
drawer and placed a gentle hand on the top of her head, turning her
face up toward him. “Try to hold still,” he said. He clicked
the light on and no sooner had he pointed it into her eyes than she
snatched it from him with a delighted squeak.
“Ooh,
that is lovely!” she
exclaimed, staring into the little light and tapping at its lens.
“Hey!
Do you mind? I need that!” He snatched it back from her.
“But...”
He held it out of her reach.
“Please
control yourself, I'm trying to help you.” She looked up at him
pitifully, her big grey eyes staring dolefully into his. He sighed.
“You can have it back when I'm done.”
She
sat up straight, seemingly satisfied with the arrangement, and as he
returned the light to her eyes he could see her straining to keep her
hands in her lap.
Aside
from their peculiar color, her eyes seemed normal, and as soon as he
was satisfied that there was nothing wrong with them he straightened
again (as much as his back would let him) and held out the pen light
to her. She immediately brightened and snatched it up again,
inspecting the
light it emitted at every possible angle, cooing over it all the
while. He regarded her for a
moment, scratching his head, then took
the
opportunity to feel around her neck for any pain. As completely
engrossed with the pen light as she was, she didn't even seem to
notice when he applied pressure around her neck, so it was probably
safe to assume that he wasn't hurting her. She was similarly
responsive when he tested her reflexes with the handle of a table
knife. If she was aware that her legs were jerking out at the knee
seemingly out of her control, she certainly didn't care. Usually
people jumped, even when they were paying attention to what he was
doing. Apparently she was really
into the penlight.
“Well,
you seem alright,” he said, putting the knife away. “Just a mild
concussion, nothing too serious. I'm going to get you some Tylenol
for your head.” He started to leave, then stopped. “Don't go
anywhere, okay?” She looked up from the pen light at him and
nodded, but then he saw her get distracted by the light fixture above
the kitchen table. As a precaution, he shut
the kitchen light off as he left, leaving her in the dark with her
penlight.
Dr.
Wallace walked through the darkened house, still unsure if he was
dreaming or not. It didn't feel like a dream (aside from the fact
that he had been forced to recall some of his medical training in a
fit of panic), but he could think of no other way to explain what was
happening. But then, he hadn't even bothered to ask the young woman
her name. She might be able to answer at least a few of his
questions. Maybe.
The
sudden light as he flipped the switch in the bathroom made him
squint.
He shaded his eyes and felt his way to the medicine cabinet. It
didn't
take long for his eyes to adjust and he found the Tylenol
with little difficulty. Then, as he turned to leave, he saw
something strange outside the window. Indistinct movement on the
other side of the glass. He squinted through his reading glasses,
trying to make out some shape or form, anything to identify, but at
this distance...
He
set down the bottle of Tylenol and leaned over the toilet, pressing
his face up to the glass. He saw a multitude of tiny wings and
tinier legs, fluttering and scrabbling at the window, fighting to get
through a barrier their owners' little minds could never comprehend.
Moths.
Huh. That was a lot of moths.
He didn't think he'd ever seen that many one place before. Odd.
Just a weird night, he
guessed.
He
returned to the darkened kitchen, Tylenol in hand, to find the pen
light glowing redly through the girl's cheek. She looked up at him
when he turned the light back on, the handle of the penlight hanging
casually out of her mouth.
“Taste
good?” he asked dryly, crossing to the cupboard to get a drinking
glass. He heard a quiet “bleah...” behind him, making the
correct assumption that she had spit it out.
“Not
as good as I thought it would,” she replied.
“How
did you think it would taste?” He filled a glass up at the faucet
and looked up at the window to see more fluttering.
“Well
I don't know, but better than that...”
More
moths... He shook his head and
turned around, water glass in hand. He set it on the table next to
her and shook a couple pills out of the Tylenol
bottle, setting them beside the glass. “Well, maybe these will
taste better,” he suggested. She picked up one of the pills and
scrutinized it for a moment before popping it into her mouth. “Wait
don't-”
Crunch.
“...chew
it. What- have you never taken Tylenol before?” She cocked her
head at him, still chewing. “Aspirin? Nothing?” She shook her
head slowly and he sighed. “You're supposed to swallow it whole
with water.” He wasn't completely sure, but he was at least fairly
certain that he'd never had to explain this to anyone before. Her
white brow furrowed.
"It's
not bad...” she said
around the medicinal powder
in her mouth, “but it's not very good either.”
He
handed her the water. “Here, try washing it down with this,” he
grumbled.
She
took the glass from him and sniffed at it before she started
drinking. About halfway through the glass he handed her the second
pill. “Now try to swallow this without
chewing it,” he said.
She
lowered the glass from her lips. “Why do you keep telling me to do
things?” she asked.
“It's
for your own good, I used to be a doctor,” he said, then paused.
“You do know what a doctor is, don't you?”
She
snatched the pill out of his hand with a scowl. “Of course I do!”
she placed it in her mouth, swallowed it with some effort, then
drank the rest of the water. She smacked her lips a couple times.
“You're right, that was much better.”
“Where
did you come from, anyway?” he asked finally.
“What
do you mean?” she continued.
“I...
well you're not a local is what I mean.. At least, I've never
seen you before. You obviously came here from somewhere and I want
to know where that is.”
“Well...”
she reached up and scratched the back of her neck underneath her
cloak. “I'm not sure how I can explain it.” She looked around
as if for the first time. “Hang on, where am I?”
“You're
in Euclid, Pennsylvania and, more directly, my kitchen,” he
answered.
She
silently mouthed the words as he finished them, slowly like they
didn't fit on her tongue quite right (but that may have just been
remnants of Tylenol dust). “Well where's that?” she said
finally.
“Pennsylvania?”
“Sure.”
“North
America.”
She
shook her head. “Not following you.”
“Alright,
what's your home
called then?”
“Uh...
The third tier, Olympian Valacia,” she said quickly.
“And
that is...?”
A
smile played at her lips like she thought he was joking. “Where
else is there?”
“I...
don't know what you're talking about.”
It
took a few seconds for her smile to disappear as her predicament
finally started to dawn on her. He felt bad, but at least they stood
the chance of getting somewhere now. “Wait...” she said. “If
I'm not... and this is...” she pointed at him. “Then who are
you?”
“Ed
Wallace,” he replied. “Most people just call me Wallace.”
She
gripped the seat of the chair. “That's it??”
“You
expecting more?” He glanced at the window again. There were still
swarms of moths beating themselves against it and wondered briefly if
there were any coming in through the window upstairs. The girl was
still talking.
“Light-master
and keeper of... of pills or something, I don't know!”
“Well
what's your name?” he asked, trying to sound a little more gentle.
The poor girl was obviously distressed. It couldn't be good for her
in this state.
She
looked forlornly up at him. “I'm Cosmia, maiden of moths,” she
said.
Wallace
blinked. “Maiden of what?”
“Well
officially I'm a goddess, but nobody ever seems to call me that.”
She slumped back in the chair. “And if I am where I think I am,
well... it hardly matters now.”
Wallace
pulled a chair slowly out from the table and sat down, still staring
at the girl, whose name was apparently... Cosmia? Probably a hippie
child. A delusional hippie child. That might explain a few things,
but... “How did you get here?” he asked cautiously.
“I
don't know,” she said. “The last thing I remember I was out
dusting a cornfield... then next thing I know I'm flying around in
the dark all confused.”
“Flying,
huh?” Drugs probably.
“How
else would I have gotten through your window?”
Wallace
looked slowly toward the stairs again. He had to admit that her mode
of entry hadn't made a whole lot of logical sense, but... well that
was just impossible. How would she have flown? She had to be lying,
either that or there was somebody out there with a hang glider having
a good laugh over all of this. The more he thought about it the more
it seemed like some sort of elaborate prank. Well, it had to be.
The only alternative was that the girl was crazy, and to set up
something this intricate, and not realize the truth? Well, nobody
was that crazy. He
would check outside later, he decided, to see if he could find the
ladder.
“Look,”
he said with a sigh, “you've had a rough night, regardless of what
happened. Probably the best thing for you now is to get some rest.
Are you feeling any better?”
She
looked absolutely dismal, but she nodded. “My head doesn't hurt as
much,” she said.
“Good,”
he said, standing up. “Come on, you can sleep in the living room,
there's a blanket on the couch.” She got up to follow him out of
the kitchen.
As she turned, her foot caught the leg of the chair she was sitting
on. Alerted by the sudden noise, Wallace turned just in time to see
her stumbling over the chair. He reached out to catch her as quickly
as he could and she grabbed onto his arm, clinging to him as if her
life depended on it.
She
looked up at him, trembling as the back of the chair bounced against
the linoleum. “Sorry,” she muttered.
He
pulled her back to her feet and she loosened her grip. “You're
very accident prone, aren't you.”
“Apparently,”
she said with a bashful shrug. She didn't let go of his hand as he
led her into the darkened living room, not even when he turned on a
floor lamp. She lay down on the couch, pulling her cloak tightly
around herself,
and he threw an old knitted blanket over her.
“I
apologize if it's a little dusty,” he said.
“Oh
that's alright,” she replied. She sighed deeply and closed her
eyes.
“Now
just try to relax and get some rest. We'll sort all of this out
tomorrow.”
She
nodded, snuggling under the blanket. “Okay.” Wallace sat down
in his recliner near the couch as she turned onto her side, facing
the back of the couch. “Thanks for being so nice to me,” she
said after a pause.
“You're
welcome,” he replied, picking up the previous day's paper from a
side table. A few minutes later she was snoring softly.
Wallace
stayed there for a while, re-reading his paper in the dim lamplight
and looking over periodically to check on the girl. When he was
satisfied that she wasn't about to stop breathing he set the paper
aside and went to quietly back into the kitchen. He looked around
for his penlight but couldn't find it, and realized that Cosmia was
probably still holding onto it.
He
picked up the chair she
had knocked over and set it up next to the counter, where he stood on
it and retrieved an old lantern from the top of the cabinet. It was
a kerosene lantern, one of the relics his wife had kept around for
sentimental reasons. He'd seen her use it once or twice on those
occasions when the power had gone out in
the middle of the night. He
hoped it still worked.
He
got down from the chair and sloshed the lantern around a bit. It
still had some fuel in it. He grabbed a match from the stove and
tried lighting the lantern with it. It sputtered to life reluctantly
once he'd fiddled with the knob on the side for a bit, and he
lowered the hood a little to keep the light low. He turned off the
kitchen light and went to the door. With so many moths about he
wanted to try to avoid attracting them into the house. He opened the
door and slid through as quickly as he could, shutting it again as
soon as he was through. Then, in the black night beyond, he opened
up the lantern.
Moths
as far as he could see. From the side of the house to the edge of
the forest, the air was full of soft, fluttering bodies, casting
shadows from the lantern light onto each other and the surfaces
behind them, covering the world in a roiling darkness.
Wallace
stood in amazement at the insects around him. His jaw fell, but he
quickly reconsidered as he felt a velvety wing brush against his
cheek. He turned slowly, gazing up into the sky, only to see more of
them scurrying above him. There were flitterings of white and grey
and brown, the odd reds and blues and very occasional light green,
but mostly white. Like her hair,
he thought, then shook his head. No, that was crazy... she
couldn't...
Something
was off, but he couldn't
quite put his finger on what. What had he come out here for again?
He had been so stunned by the sheer volume of moths that he had
forgotten. His eyes led him to the side of the house. Ladder.
That's right, he'd come out to try and find out how she'd gotten
through the window. He looked up.
There
was his bedroom window, still broken open from the outside. Above it
was the shear peak of the roof. She couldn't have descended from
there into the window without a rope or something, and even then he
would have heard her mucking about up there. Below the window was
the wall, the side of the house, unmarred by a ladder. Well
someone could have taken it... she couldn't have been alone in this.
The yard was damp, the ground
squishy. He walked, still in his slippers to the wall under the
window. There were no marks on the ground, not even a dint on the
grass from ladder or footprint. There was nothing.
Wallace
looked bewildered at the sky. “That... that's impossible,” he
murmured. Where could she have come from? She had to have come from
somewhere... he searched what little of the air he could see through
the bugs for anything, a low hanging branch or a cable of some
kind... anything that could reasonably explain how this girl... this
“Cosmia” had come through his window.
There
was nothing. He scrambled about the yard searching for any clue of
anything... footprints, marks of a dragged ladder or scaffolding, or
tire tracks from a cherry picker maybe. He searched
all the way around the house in the mist and the moths twice by
lantern light and found nothing but his own footprints, eventually
collapsing breathlessly onto the wooden steps in front of the kitchen
door. The lantern dangled from his fingertips. Moths danced in the
air around it, occasionally bumping into the glass. One landed on
his leg and crawled up his pajamas for a moment. A little white one,
with a mane of feathery white and two leafy antennae by its dark grey
eyes, its wings like a cloak of tattered cloth.
Wallace
put his hand in front of it and it crawled onto his finger. He
lifted it up to eye level and it sat there, shaking with nervous
energy for a moment before it fanned its wings and flew off again.
He watched it go and disappear among its brothers and sisters.
After
a little while longer the lantern sputtered out, leaving him in the
darkness. By starlight he could still make out the moths around him
as his eyes adjusted. Crickets chirped in the distance and Wallace
realized that he didn't know what time it was, but he supposed it
didn't matter very much. He eventually stood up and went back to the
house, leaving the serenity of the outside behind him.
He
left the lantern on the kitchen table and walked carefully through
the darkened house. In the living room he clicked on the lamp to
check on the girl sleeping on his couch. She was still there,
sleeping soundly, though she had stirred since he'd left her there
and she was now absently chewing on the blanket in her sleep. He put
the back of his hand in front of her mouth to check her breathing,
and felt it soft, warm and, more importantly, regular on his speckled
skin. She was a pretty girl, he thought, almost angelic in a way.
He felt a compulsion to ruffle her hair, but didn't. He went to the
lamp and turned it off, then sat down in his recliner and pulled back
the lever, leaning back as far as he could. In a few minutes he was
asleep.
Nikki Leeper is this month's featured artist. Check out more of her work on her blog, on her Facebook page, and at behance.net.
