Parting The Veil of Worlds - John Stormm (red queen ebook txt) 📗

pond began to churn mightily. Bubbles, the size of Volkswagons, exploded to the pond’s surface where the children had been hurling stones and epithets. Peering into the froth from shore, Mel and her father were certain they could see the scaled torso of something huge and serpentine churning the water.

“Okay kids, BAD idea!” exclaimed their father. “It’s time to SCRAM, and I mean THAT way!” He pointed down a wooded trail away from the pond.

The Storm kids did not hesitate to bolt in the direction their dad had pointed. Mel brought up the rear, whilst her father paused but a moment to make some curious gestures at the pond. He caught up with them in a flash, and redirected them to yet another side trail off to their left.

“Wow!” exclaimed Jon, “I really hit the devil in the head with a rock. Wait till I tell the kids in church about this!”

“Jon, they’ll burn us all at the stake if you so much as open your mouth.” Mel chided, “and if they don’t, then I’ll make you regret it. Keep this as a family secret. They’ll only think you’re lying or crazy anyway.”

“Good point,” said Dad.

“Is there going to be a problem getting back to the car, Daddums?” Mel asked.

“Usually traversing a rift never lasts much longer than a couple hours at most, before you get snapped back to the appropriate plane,” Dad said. “Either way, I don’t think we’ll make our approach from THAT trail, just to be on the safe side. If I come back missing any kids, your mom and the church will certainly have ME roasting on that stake.”

“Good point,” said Tori.

Dad glanced at Tori sideways and lifted a brow, to which she just shrugged. Behind them, on the trail Mel exclaimed:

“PIXIE DUST! I forgot that I’m carrying camera equipment.”

“Did you lose something during the run?” her father asked.

“No,” Mel said sullenly, “but I could’ve gotten some interesting pictures at the pond.”

“Mel, you can’t exactly ask the devil to stop and say ‘cheese’ for a picture,” admonished Bex.

“It probably wasn’t the devil,” Mel rolled her eyes. “There were those strange pitcher plants that held still nicely.”

“Hold still,” said her father, unzipping her pack, “and I’ll pull out the Pentax. If you see anything interesting, take it’s picture. There’s a full 36 exposures in there.”

Hanging the camera strap around her neck, Mel felt ready for anything to happen. They moved up a trail that made it’s way to the top of a ridge of hills that skirted the far side of the Devil’s Bathtub. Her father was digging around in a leather pouch, attached to his belt with clan sigils burned into it. Out of it, he pulled a quartz crystal orb, about an inch and a half in diameter, which he held in his fingers and looked into as if it was a compass he was consulting. It may have been a trick of the sunlight through the trees, but the crystal seemed to flare up, and her father stopped.



     “Pull out the tripod, and set up here, Mel,” her father directed. “We’ve found our thin spot.”

Mel dropped the pack from her back and set up the tripod with the camera attached to it’s mount on top. Her dad was carefully moving around an area by a tree ahead and gazing intently at the crystal held out arms length in front of him. No doubt about it. It was glowing fiercely. Mel stood back about forty feet and focused the camera on her father and clicked a shot off.

“What do we do now, Dad?” she asked.

Startled out of his thoughts, her father remembered he had an audience for his experiment, and started to lecture.

“I’ll need you all to stand back a little,” he directed, “Mel, keep the camera on me. The rest of you kids, move out of the camera’s view, so we can get a clear picture before we run or anything.” He laughed at Tori’s startled expression, and continued, “I doubt there will be anything we have to run from. The druids’ charts assure me that the plane we’ll be opening into will be a very nice place. What I need to do now, is introduce a large enough pulse of electromagnetic energy to open an already unstable rift to Gwynydd. The crystal is piezoelectric and charged with my own energy. If I use a small mirror and get some sunlight bouncing around inside with all that energy, it will release some of it at the weak point of this rift and let us see what’s inside.”
Done with his lecture, her father adopted a square horse stance from his martial arts practice, and held the crystal about level with his fore head and held a tiny mirror next to it to focus an unbroken ray of sunlight into the orb.

The crystal blazed like a small star in Dad’s hands. The light appeared to envelope the whole upper half of his body. At this point, her father peered over his left shoulder at her and yelled.



     “This would be a good time to snap some pictures, Mel.”

Melanie had noticed some large sparks issuing out from the orb and was already snapping her picture. Jonathan was backing off behind a tree to her left as a ball of red fire seemed to fly in his direction only to be overtaken by an aggressive blue white bubble of light that chased it off into the woods. The light show lasted all of a few minutes before her father got distracted by all the activity issuing forth and broke concentration. In his hands now, was a plain crystal ball with some sunlight glinting off it’s polished surface. Her father stood there, dazed for a moment as if he needed a moment to absorb what had happened.

The Storm kids murmured a collective “wow.” Tori pointed out that there were still lights flying around in the woods ahead of them. Dad ignored her and started packing away his crystal and the extra gear as he seemed lost in thought.

“If we head in the direction Tori saw the lights go,” Dad indicated ahead. “We should come out of the woods somewhere near our car.”

All were silent and lost in their thoughts as the company traipsed back to the car. About forty minutes later, they were on a utility road that led to the parking area at the crater’s edge. The kids unpacked the food while Dad and Mel built a fire in one of the grills provided in the picnic area. Jon and Bex cut some green sticks to roast weenies on, and everyone ate lunch recounting their adventures. Dad had Mel use up the rest of the film so he could drop it off at a One Hour Photo kiosk on the way back.

The family got home and the kids removed any unused food and water from their packs. Mel got stuck washing the gear and throwing the dirty clothes in the washer while her father went to pick up her mother at work. He was going to pick up their pictures on the way home. She couldn’t wait to see them. She wasn’t sure her mother was going to want to hear about what they did today. It was going to be just another family secret she and her siblings would share about growing up in a genuine witch clan. She was sure she saw faeries in the rift that day. The pictures would confirm her suspicions.

The car pulled into the driveway and her brother and sisters rushed to greet their mom. Mel was more interested in the photo packet that her father was holding. The kids were shouting together, how they all saw faeries in the woods and almost got eaten by a water dragon in the Devil’s Bathtub. Her mother looked at her father with an unspoken “What REALLY happened today?” look, and the most powerful man in Mel’s world squirmed and shrugged sheepishly to her mother. He passed it off as a ‘piezoelectric’ scientific experiment that momentarily dazzled their eyes making them see spots. It seemed to mollify her mother’s suspicious looks at her father, and the kids ran to the backyard to continue playing till supper time. By the time her father handed her the envelope, he wasn’t saying much but the excitement in his eyes was undisguised as he gave her a sly wink.

Mel tore open the envelope excitedly. There were some pictures she had taken of the backside of the Devil’s Bathtub. Another one shown her father crossing a log with his arm extended and the crystal glowing white in his hand and a red curtain effect of light in the air in front of him. She didn’t recall the effect, other than the crystal glowing, but the film seemed to pick it up. Finally she found the picture of her father, enveloped in white light and what appeared to be a little red imp being chased by a blue white tiny angel in a bubble with a sword upraised in it’s hands.

“They’re faeries!” Mel exclaimed.

“They’re WHAT?” her mother asked from the kitchen, suddenly interested.

“Just sundogs, dear,” her father hurriedly interjected, “They’re caused by the sunlight on the camera lens.”
Mel felt deflated at that explanation. Her father said loudly for her mother’s sake:

“You can tell by the symmetrical shapes they assume, usually the hexagonal shape of the camera shutter,” as he handed Mel a magnifying lens and put his finger to his lips in a shushing gesture.

Mel looked at the picture again, under the glass, and there was no symmetry to be found in the shapes. They were a bit out of focus as Mel had the camera focused on her father and these were closer to her by a few meters. The red one appeared to be a hunched creature in a red ball of light, cringing away from the aggressive winged creature in the blue white bubble that was attacking it. Where they made contact with each other the blue white bubble had a red hue.

“What’s this mean, Dad?” Mel asked.

“I’m getting the negatives analyzed by a friend whom owes me a favor,” her dad said, again placing his finger to his lips.

A few days later, the report came back. Mel made her father promise to share the information with her when it came. He read the report, obviously amused at the jargon:

“Said picture is of a young white male holding a light source over his head in a wooded area. Two anomalies appear to be issuing from the light source, that at first glance, appear to be refractions of the light on the camera lens. Upon closer examination of the negative, it appears that these are not lens refractions caused by light focused into the shutter. The white male subject being the focal point of the picture is approximately twelve meters from the camera. The blue anomaly is in actuality, occupying a point in space, slightly to the left of the focal point and two full meters closer to the camera. The red anomaly is a full three meters closer to the camera and directly in front of the blue anomaly. In summary: the unidentified objects, tagged as ’red and blue anomalies’ are actual physical objects at a set distance from the camera and focal point of this picture, hence the resulting poor focus of each in their relations to the focal point.”

“Okay… now, what does THAT mean, Dad?” she queried.

“It means that my friend Paul, was deathly afraid to admit you took a picture of faeries.” Dad laughed, “But will admit that you DID take a picture of SOMETHING. To make it up to us, he sent us an enlargement of the blue faery.”



     All that week, Mel and her siblings reported that they caught glimpses of the blue faery zipping through the house, usually just before Dad