The Otherworld

Prologue

00- Prologue

Robin Elson couldn't breath. But she was smiling, her grin brighter than that of the flashing lights in her front yard. Yet despite her grin she wasn't happy, far from it. Her breath had caught in her shock. The smile that split her cheeks was the reaction of a person who had gone through all the emotions they contained in a period of time much too small.

She stood by her father's shaking form, watching the havoc from the safe distance of her childhood porch. The memories that clouded her mind clouded her vision. The memories were of her father, and running across the short expanse of their front yard. Playing and rolling on the sparse green weeds, waiting for mum to come home. These made her smile, made her transport herself from the reality she was subjected to.

At the tender age of seven, Robin was hazy with the thoughts that her frantic mind conjured to replace the scarring images she faced.

There was a car in her front yard, a crumpled silver excuse of transport. The license plate was four owners old and the last time the battered old creature was serviced was before her birth. And this was prior to the accident.

Now the car was a rumpled mess, wrapped and contorted tightly around the light post that wearily lit up her derelict neighbourhood. There was glass everywhere, pretty sparkles glinting under the trudging feet of paramedics that poked the wreckage.

The shining bright flecks that littered the ground drew her attention, and the leaking red that stained the shards did not go unnoticed by the girl. Her young mind imagined that the dark liquid was like the leaking night sky of another world, a bleeding horizon.

Exactly ten years in the future she still hadn't acknowledged what that entailed. She refused to believe that her mother's blood stained the tarmac of her childhood residence, bleeding through the glinting stars of glass in an innocently sinister sky of death.

~*~*~*~

Robin sat in her second room, the black and white themed one. She stared out of the expensive arch window, sitting on the floor by its width. Her hands were clasped in her lap, fiddling with the strings of her old band shirt. In a rare occasion, there was no music blasting through the multi-million sound system her father replaced a few weeks ago. The house was silent, no indication that anything lived in its cold expanses at all.

She contemplated what she should break next, maybe the cold granite of the new kitchen? How about that ridiculous pool-side bar? The tattered seams of her shirt were picked at fervently, even more so than before.

Who was ever going to be served at the forsaken bar anyway? She stood silently from her perch to wander the lonely halls of her two story fortress.

Her father promised that he would return from his work, that he would recognise the girl haunting his house was in fact his own daughter. But obviously, he lied. Again.

Robin tried to contain her tears inside a hard case of blame and anger. She didn't need to cry, it wasn't a big deal. It's not like this was the first time he stood her up. So what if she couldn't go to the movie without him, so what if she wanted to watch it? She'd just go without it, and consequently him.

When she felt her eyes prickling she hastened to her back door. The bar, she decided, was her next victim.