A Vision of the Other Realm
by Rebecca Fyfe
Gabby had been trying to sleep, but she couldn’t seem to
rest her mind enough to fall asleep. She
tossed and turned with no actual sleep in sight. Sighing, she sat up in
bed. Might as well go get something to eat
since she wasn’t going to get any sleep anyway.
The night was stormy out, with winds howling against the
windows and rain pelting the roof. As
Gabby wandered down the stairs, she could hear a dripping sound somewhere
ahead. As she got to the bottom of the
stairs which led into the foyer, she turned and saw the source of the sound.
The roof was leaking and water was dripping and running from
the ceiling onto the floor. The foyer
didn’t have anything above it, as everything else in the house upstairs began
from the end of the foyer. This house
had been leaking in different places each time it rained. Where the leaks would show seemed to depend
on which direction the wind was blowing and directing the rain.
Connor had bought some supplies for fixing the leaky roof,
but he had to wait for dry weather in order to go on the roof or he risked
falling. They hadn’t even thought about
the roof until the rainy weather had started and shown them that there were
several leaky parts of the roof that needed their attention.
The dripping rain was creating a large puddle on the
floor. Bella sighed. She figured she’d better go and get some pots
or bowls to put under the leaks before she grabbed a bite to eat. She could have walked through the puddle and
gone directly into the kitchen from the foyer, but she was barefoot and that
water looked cold, so she detoured around it by entering the living room to her
right and entering the kitchen that way. There was a large bowl of fruit on the
kitchen table that looked like it would do the job for some of the leaks. She took the fruit out and set it all gently
on the table, making sure none of it rolled off.
There had been more than one leak from roof over the foyer,
so she searched in the cupboards for some more bowls or pots. She found the large pot that they used for
boiling potatoes and another slightly smaller pot. She carried them all back through the formal
dining room, living room and into the foyer.
The puddle had grown. The leak must have been a pretty bad one for the puddle
to have grown so much so fast. She
walked towards it and leaned over with the fruit bowl to place it under one of
the parts of the roof where a leak was coming in.
She set the bowl down and looked up. No.
The leak was a little more to the right. She leaned down to move the pot
over to the right. As she leaned down,
some of the water from the puddle touched her foot. Brrr! She looked down at her foot and saw her
reflection in the water.
But her reflection began to fade and be replaced by another
image. Gabby felt as if she was frozen
in place. She felt as though she should
look away, but she couldn’t move. The
image that was forming seemed to draw her in somehow. She could see shaped forming in the water,
things taking form. Another world was
opening before her eyes.
As she stood there, the pool of water spread until it
surrounded her and she stood completely in it.
It appeared as if there were living creatures swimming in the water, but
it must have been the world she was seeing into through the portal that was
opening. She didn’t know why she
couldn’t tear her gaze away, but it suddenly felt as if she was slipping. It felt like she was sinking slowly into the
world below her.
In reality, she still stood there looking down into the
water. But Gabby had never done things
that way that others did them, and so it was only her consciousness that
slipped into the portal. Some might call
it her spirit, that internal part of a person that cannot be seen but that
makes them who they are.
She sank into a world that was entirely underwater. She started to panic at first, thinking that
she would drown. But after a few
moments, she realized that she was not holding her breath. She didn’t seem to be breathing at all, and
yet she felt fine. Creatures darted past
her and into surrounding foliage. She
didn’t catch a good enough glimpse of them to see what they were, but she could
tell they were small.
She swam over to some floating seaweed and peered around
it. She was amazed by the tiny creature
behind it. It was only about a foot
tall. It looked exactly as Bella had
described the sea creature she’d seen in the aquarium when she’d gone into the
Other realm. She was actually seeing one
herself!
Even better, she was seeing one of these tiny mermaid-like
creatures in its own environment and not some artificial scene created for it
in a tank of water. She looked around
her, and she could glimpse shadows of these creatures flitting everywhere. There must have been hundreds of them! She couldn’t tell if some of them might be
male or not, but the one before appeared to be female. She had to concede that she didn’t know
enough about these creatures to know what the female of the species looked like
and how it would differ from the male.
There were other creatures under the water here. Strange and colorful fish swam by her, and
she decided to swim further. None of the
creatures here appeared to be paying her any notice. She was beginning to believe that she was
invisible to them.
She swam lower and saw a funny looking crab in the sand at
the bottom. It was purple in color and
it had four arms with pincers, which it waved and snapped angrily at her. It had long legs covered in fur and what
looked like paws at the end of them. She
swam on and came across two dolphin-like creatures playing a game. They were different from dolphins in that,
instead of fins, they had arms with fin-like attachments, sort of like a flying
squirrel would have between its arms and body, and completely formed hands at
the end of their arms. They were
throwing a rather large seashell back and forth, sometimes swimming great
distances in order to catch it.
A thought occurred to her.
How would she get back? She
didn’t even know exactly how she had arrived.
Would she be able to find the portal again? She had swum pretty far from it in her
curiosity to see everything that this world had to show her. She decided to try and retrace her path through
this other-worldly sea.
As she swam back the way she came, she noticed a large
number of sea creatures swimming past her in the same direction. They were all going quite fast, and their
pace seemed quite urgent. She got a very
bad, sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach and reluctantly looked over her
shoulder.
Behind her and gaining ground towards her was something that
terrified her. It had all the appearance
of being a shark, except that the fins in the front were arms like those she
had seen on the dolphin-like creatures.
It looked at her with the eyes of a predator. Between her and it was one of those small
mermaid-like creatures. The little
creature was terrified and swimming with all of its heart to get away. The shark creature overtook it, and, its eyes
still on Gabby, grabbed it with one hand and bit its head off. It kept coming at her, while it chewed and
chomped on the head of the now dead little mer-creature.
Terror seized her even harder. It was obvious that this thing could see
her. And there was no way she could swim
as fast as she needed to in order to get away.
Then something big shot past her like a bullet, heading straight for the
shark creature. One of the dolphin
creatures rammed head first into the shark-thing, and the shark creature was
thrown backwards. Then the other dolphin
creature hit it from the side. A cloud
of blood burst from the shark creatures mouth and it began to drift in the
current, motionless and lifeless.
Gabby wanted to thank them, but they had swum away almost
immediately. She began to swim back in
the direction she thought she’d come from, hoping she was going the right
way. She had definitely seen enough of
this place.
Her momentum was stopped again when something swam in front
of her and stopped. She saw a very large
tailfin, and her eyes followed it up to where the dark green fin ended in light
green skin. A light green muscled chest
was before her, and she was almost afraid to let her eyes look any further, but
she looked up and was surprised that what was before her was not as unusual as
she had expected. The face before her
was a man’s face, though the skin was light green and the eyes were coal
black. He had seaweed-like, short, spiky
hair. He looked similar to the tiny
mermaid creatures she had seen earlier, but he was human-sized.
He motioned to her to follow him, and she did because she
did not know where else to go. She
wasn’t even sure she was going in the right direction to find the portal again,
or even if she could get back through the portal.
He led her back to where she’d come from. She looked up and could see herself standing
and looking down into the water. This
surprised her as she thought she had come into the portal completely. The merman grabbed her hand and placed a
shiny black pearl in it, closing her fingers around it. Then he pointed upwards.
He opened his mouth as if to say something, but she heard
his thoughts instead. He told her to be
careful and that someday in the near future he would send her a message when
she needed it. And then she was floating
upwards without having to swim. And the
next thing she knew, she was again standing with her feet in the pool of water
that had formed because of the leaky roof.
She looked down at the merman who faded from sight and was replaced by
her own reflection.
Gabby placed the other two pots down under the leaks from
the roof and, forgetting having come downstairs originally for a snack, she
went back to bed and slept soundly, a shiny black pearl clutched tightly in her
hand the whole time.
When Gabby woke the next morning, she looked in her hand and
the shiny black pearl was still there.
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