Burying the Past

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Whitney sat on her bed, alone, quiet and in her dark and silent world, contemplating what to do next, fingers dancing in her old familiar way, pinky, ring, index, middle, while she contemplated the move she was about to make.

For some inexplicable reason, that Whitney could not explain, nor could she fathom; Decker had taken the blame for what she had done. At first she had contemplated telling Tommy the truth. The idea of allowing Decker to take responsibility for killing Cree had seemed almost as bad to her as doing it had been. But as the police began to arrive, and the questions began to come, everything seemed to play out on its own. Everyone seemed to just accept that Decker had killed Cree and everyone in the clearing was pointing their fingers at him. It wasn’t just Decker that was saying that Decker killed Cree, everyone was.

There was a part of Whitney that wanted to believe them. There was a part of Whitney that was so horrified by her actions and wanted to believe what they were saying so badly, that she kept the truth to herself.

But it was more than just that.

She was still very much aware, and she was very much aware of a lot of different things. Whitney still wasn’t privy to all of the facts that were involved. The exact truth to her situation was still a little beyond her grasp, but she knew that there was much more to her and Tommy’s situation than they were previously aware of.

The first of which was that she and Tommy were not from this world.

On the surface that realization seemed crazy to her. But that sense of danger, being in a life and death situation, had awakened something in her. Her mind had stretched out in ways that it had never stretched out before, accumulating data in her environment, but also accumulating things from an environment that was so far away, it could not be touched completely by her mind. There were flashes of things that did not exist in this world, and upon inspection, they were flashes of things that did match some of the things in Tommy’s dreams. She had copies of his dreams with her. What had previously only existed behind Tommy’s locked door, now also existed in her mind.

She could understand why Tommy would want to keep those things from her. He wanted to keep them from her because he didn’t believe she could handle them. He wanted to keep them from her because he didn’t understand what he was dreaming. Those dreams would not make sense to him, but they wouldn’t make sense to him because he was thinking in the wrong terms. He viewed the world in a very logical way, a what you see is what you get, way. In Tommy’s world monsters didn’t exist and many of his dreams contained monster like creatures that were so deadly, and so powerful that bullets didn’t seem to penetrate the armor that was their skin.

But Tommy’s world wasn’t the only world that existed. They were from another. Whitney knew that now, and somehow the awful creatures that existed in the world where they did come from were going to end up in this one. For some reason they were in this world either to combat those creatures or, if at all possible, prevent them from even coming, but that was for later in their life. His dreams confirmed that much too. They had years to prepare for it.

And that meant something else too.

Whitney had years to live with what she had done to Cree Duffman. Cree may not have been the nicest guy on the planet. He had foolishly followed his cousin Decker, foolishly faced off against a seemingly weak littler girl, and foolishly tried to kill her despite her ability to demonstrate that she wasn’t as weak as she appeared. The warrior in her said that he got what he deserved, but the human girl in her was condemning her for what she had done. She would have to live with that guilt, the guilt of allowing Decker to take the blame, and the guilt of not confiding in Tommy.

Or would she?

Whether or not it was his intention to do so, Decker had given Whitney a way out from having to live her daily life with the knowledge of what she had done. She reached into her pocket and pulled out the necklace that he had been wearing in the clearing. She didn’t know where he had gotten it, or why he had chosen to make sure that it ended up in her possession. Her awareness told her that the stone on his necklace was a vessel. She knew enough to know that it was used in that other world to store things and she knew enough to know that she could store her entire consciousness in it if she so chose to.

She didn’t want to store her entire consciousness in it. And some day the memory of what she had done, what she could do, the fact that she and Tommy were not “earthlings” and the other things that she now knew about herself, would come in handy. But that day was not today, would not be tomorrow, and wouldn’t come for years.

She had already begun to execute her plan. She had already committed another act of invasion on Tommy. She had altered his memories; replacing the ones she didn’t want him to have, with others that were more convenient. In the new memories their days of fighting in the arena were over because in her heart those days were over. Her future was not a bright one. Later in life she would have to fight tooth and nail for her life and for her brother’s but for now she wanted to enjoy a simpler existence, an existence free from guilt and from fighting so she made that possible. From that day forward she and Tommy would remember that their fighting ended because she almost killed him in the arena and, in both his mind and hers, Decker was the one that did the killing in the clearing.

Whitney brought the stone to her forehead and stored the truth inside of it.

When she was done she couldn’t remember why she was holding the black stone. It wasn’t a pretty stone. It was just a black stone with rough edges that might have the potential to be more, but wasn’t. She got up from her bed, walked to her dresser, and placed the stone, with its necklace, inside of it–leaving the past that she didn’t want to remember behind her.

And that was that.

The End

Author’s Note:

If you have come with me this far, then I hope you have enjoyed yourself. I hope that both Whitney and Tommy’s story have sunk their teeth into you as much they have into me. If that’s the case then I would offer the opportunity to read a little more of their story. The ebook version of the novel, Twinfinity: Nethermore will be available for $.99, today starting at 8 am Eastern Standard time, only on Amazon. The discount will continue tomorrow for $1.99, and on Monday June 23rd it will be $2.99. Check it out if it interests you.