The Blade of Shattered Hope

Chapter 3

Lorena Higginbottom sat in the chair where she always waited for Atticus to come home from his visits with Mr. Chu at school. Her constant worrying over the boy had done strange things to her. She couldn’t sleep, couldn’t concentrate. She rarely laughed anymore. Sometimes-not often, but sometimes-the worry turned into utter misery, engulfing her like a horrible, eating cancer.

Her boy. Her one and only boy. Mixed up with the Realitants and plagued with a burden of power that no one understood yet. Something was terribly, terribly wrong with him.

She’d gone through all the usual phases. The denial, the blame, the guilt, the despair. She’d run the whole gamut of emotions over the last few months, and it had all come to a head this morning. When her husband, Edgar, had left for work, and Atticus had disappeared into his room to study, she’d sat in her room, crying, sobbing, a sorry sack of gloom and grief. It had taken every ounce of willpower in her body to pull her anguish back inside and hide it away. But she did, for Atticus’s sake.

With a smile on her face, she’d seen him off to his appointment with his former and favorite teacher. She’d been sitting in her chair ever since, counting down the minutes until he returned. I should’ve gone with him, she thought, just as she did every single time Atticus left the house. But she couldn’t. She knew that. She and Edgar had long since agreed that they couldn’t exist in a constant state of terror and fear. Atticus needed time alone, time to grow, time to learn how to bear his burden. Still, he was only a child, only fourteen…

A rattling sound from the back of the house snapped her mind alert.

Like a shot of pure caffeine, adrenaline rushed through her body, and she jumped out of the chair before any thought had time to form. Wondering why Atticus would come home the back way-and feeling the slightest fear that it might not be him-she ran out of the room and down the hallway, into the kitchen, toward the door leading to the patio behind their home. The rattling noise continued. Someone was pulling at the knob, twisting it back and forth in vain because it was locked.

The trickle of fear turned into a gush; she pulled up just short of the patio door.

“Atticus?” she called out.

No answer. But whoever was out there quit trying to open the door.

“Atticus?” she repeated, louder.

Still no answer.

The door had a large window, currently covered by the drawn yellow curtain. Alarmed, she grabbed the side of the stiff material and pulled it back an inch, peeking outside.

The thing standing on her back patio wasn’t her son.

~

When his house finally came into view, Tick somehow found another burst of energy and ran faster. The loud thumps and waves of energy had stopped, but he couldn’t rest until he made sure everything was okay at home. A fresh spurt of panic squeezed his insides, and he picked up the pace yet again.

He was only two houses away when he noticed a car coming down the road from the other direction. His heart skipped a beat when he saw that it was his dad’s.

Then his heart almost stopped beating altogether when the car suddenly accelerated, the engine screaming, the tires squealing. The car swerved off the road, over the curb, and onto his front lawn. It shot across the grass until it reached the driveway, picking up speed instead of slowing down.

Tick watched in horror as the car slammed into the garage door with a thunderous crunch, then disappeared in a pile of shredded wood and dust.

~

In her head, Lorena couldn’t reconcile the thing she saw through the door’s window with any semblance of reality she knew or felt. It looked like something out of a science fiction movie-a man-shaped, shimmering ghost made out of clear liquid, its rippled surface glistening. The face had no features, but it seemed to be looking at her all the same.

For a bare instant, she actually considered unlocking and opening the door. The creature seemed so harmless, so peaceful, the water rippling like the gentle, lapping waves of a Caribbean beach. But her hand froze halfway to the latch, and a shudder of fear snapped her out of her hypnotized state. Her mind kicked into gear, reminding her that creatures made out of water were not normal, that although she’d lived a life believing only in things that were normal, not supernatural, seeing this creature probably changed things forever.

The sparkling water creature she saw through the window could not be a good thing. And most likely, it had something to do with her son.

She stepped back, her hand rising involuntarily to her mouth as the shock of her visitor hit home. Somehow she knew that something terrible was about to happen.

The creature’s watery hand reached out and grabbed the outside door handle, rattling it again. Lorena couldn’t actually see the knob from her angle, and she wondered how the thing grasped objects if it was made only out of liquid. Then better sense told her that now probably wasn’t the best time to figure out the physics of the situation, and that she’d better run.

But just as she took a step away from the door, the creature melted right in front of her, the water crashing to the pavement outside with a loud splash. It was as if a force field or an invisible membrane had been holding the thing together, and it had been abruptly taken away, leaving nothing to hold the body together. She realized she’d been holding her breath and sucked in a huge gulp of air in relief. Whatever it had been, whatever purpose…

Her thoughts were cut short when movement down by her feet caught her vision.

In the thin space between the door’s lower edge and the short strip of wood that kept out the wind and bugs, a three-foot wide sheet of water began pouring through and onto the kitchen floor. A puddle formed in a matter of seconds, somehow deepening into a narrow pool on the flat linoleum surface.

Before Lorena could react, a horrendous crash rocked the house, the sounds of crunched metal and shredded wood thundering through the air like a sonic boom.

Even as her hands rose to cover her ears, even as the beginnings of a scream formed somewhere in the back of her throat, Lorena saw the puddle at her feet bubble and churn, swirling, coalescing into a bulbous glob, like a huge see-through water balloon about to burst.

And then the glob rose toward the ceiling, slowly reforming its human shape.

The scream finally escaped Lorena’s mouth.

“Dad!”

Tick had faltered when the car hit the house. He was too stunned to move. Of all the things he’d expected to see when he came home, it wasn’t this.

He shook himself out of his daze and ran for the mangled mess of the garage. A hissing sound came from within, the engine letting out its last, dying breath. Smoke and dust billowed out, attacking Tick’s lungs with a vengeance. Coughing, he kicked at the loose metal and broken boards, digging his way in to see if his dad was okay.

“Dad!” he yelled again.

He’d just moved a big chunk of something heavy when the front door to the car popped free, a horrible metal groan screeching through the air as his dad forced it open all the way.

“Dad! What’s going-”

Tick’s voice stuck in his throat when he saw the large body of Edgar Higginbottom stumble out of the car and fall onto the garage floor.

He was covered in… goo. Clear goo.

~

Frozen by fear. Not able to move. Your mind screaming at your legs to run, but your legs not listening. This was why Lorena had left the Realitants long ago, hoping she’d never have to experience it again.

She stared as the mysterious, impossible thing formed, water sluicing upward from the floor, defying the law of gravity in the process. Legs, then torso, then arms, finally a head. The entire process took less than twenty seconds, but it looked unnatural, like a time-lapse film of a geological event that had taken thousands of years.

When the creature finished reforming, the watery demon stood silent for a long moment, staring at her despite the lack of eyeballs or even eye sockets.

Lorena stared back, frozen as much by stubborn disbelief as fear.

Without warning, the creature moved toward her.