A Brown-Eyed Girl

Chapter Five

Chapter Five

Appalled, Kelsey closed her eyes and counted to ten. Maybe she was in denial, but this couldn’t possibly be happening. Not again. What had Peter called it? Transporting. Which involved the magic and…her hands being in contact with dirt?

That made even less sense than anything that had occurred in the last two weeks. She had been at Josie’s, indoors. A whole box of dryer sheets to the wind, yes. But at Josie’s nonetheless. The Seltsen family was fairly rich. They didn’t live in a hovel with dirt floors like medieval peasants.  

Kelsey pressed a hand to her head. It was starting to ache, as if someone was repeatedly tapping it with a two-by-four. Her thoughts were fragmented, skittering away from her as she tried to organize them. The last thing she remembered was agreeing to something Josie had suggested. Her temples pounded harder as she tried to pull up a memory from beyond that point.      

 It came to her disjointedly, in random flashes of the night before. The two of them hanging onto each other, stumbling into a glass door….being mesmerized by spinning pricks of light on a dark backdrop….their glow reminding her of magic.

A few of the pieces shifted together. Josie had decided they should go star-gazing. Something about shooting stars being the answer to life’s problems. They had wound up outside in the huge yard. By the fire pit. The dirt fire pit. Where so she must have passed out. Or rather ended up doing the casting thing that Peter had been rambling about. Except it wasn’t rambling, he had showed her. Most of all he had said it was dangerous.

Ignoring the sunshine that was piercing her brain like daggers even through her eyelids, she reopened her eyes. It was like being hit with a grenade. She quickly reduced them to slits. Ooo-kay, squinting was better. She forced her arms and legs to move. Sluggishly, they responded, and she lurched forward onto her knees. More than anything, she wished she could stand. She felt too vulnerable on the ground. Like that one weakened zebra that always died first on the Discovery channel programs.  

Muddled as she was, Kelsey was rapidly becoming aware of the same negative feelings that had driven her flight over the boulder field, the first time she had been there. She flicked her gaze around, trying desperately to find a way out. She was on the sandy beach, the water’s edge only two feet away. The dock was off to her left, the rocks behind it, all a good thirty or so feet away. With the state she was in, she wouldn’t even be able to crawl that far. There didn’t appear to be any easy route to escape this time.

As she came to that heartening conclusion, everything went still. Not the still that froze animate objects and robbed away senses, but the kind of calm that preluded a storm. Her sixth sense rocketed into overdrive.

 Knowing the effort would be futile, she tried to struggle to her feet anyway. Failing dismally, she got one knee off the ground and collapsed back onto the sand. Thrown off balance, Kelsey went face down and came up spitting out grit. It was bland and salty at the same. Although, the unpleasant taste of the sand had gotten rid of the more unpleasant, gross after taste of her own vomit. Still, disgusted that she had partially ingested anything from the beach, she wiped at her mouth.

Panic quickly overpowered her squeamishness. Bracing herself with shaking arms, she pushed herself back into her kneeling position. Ironic that whatever was approaching would find her that way, like a supplicant at church. She had spent her adult life fleeing from all forms of religion, and now her wandering mind wondered if that was coming back to haunt her.

It was as if that two-by-four was shattering each new train of thought as she developed it. Every time it smashed the links holding the thought together, derailing the train completely and reducing her to a semi-coherent, internally rambling state. The only permanent thought was that she wasn’t safe but at the same time there was nothing she could do about it. And that was such a terrifying idea, she almost wished it would crash and burn as well. Almost.