Woman of Silk and Stone (2 page)

Jerking out of my daze, I glanced around,
surprised to find myself on a desolate cross-street, standing in
front of an empty warehouse. Unease trickled through my
consciousness as I got to my feet, knowing I had somehow wandered
from the well-populated financial district of downtown D.C. to one
of those neighborhoods you hear about on the news; the ones that
become hives for gangs and underworld drug wars. Although the
streets appeared to be deserted at the moment, I had no doubt that
would change soon, and I was woefully unprepared to be caught in a
dangerous situation.

Hurriedly I shifted around and started back
the way I came, keeping my eyes peeled for a taxi, but nothing and
no one disturbed the quiet of the streets. After walking for nearly
ten minutes in absolute silence, I tripped on something again and
nearly fell. I steadied myself and glanced down, noting a wooden
plank in the middle of the sidewalk before turning to see an empty
warehouse that looking astonishingly like the one I had fallen in
front of before.

I swallowed, uncertainty a thick lump in my
throat, and looked around, registering how unlikely it was that in
fifteen or more minutes, I hadn't seen one person, heard a car
honking, or felt the rumble of the subway beneath the pavement. In
fact, the silence was oppressive, a heavy film over my senses,
unnatural and predatory. Unease morphed into true fear as I
continued walking, this time paying attention to my surroundings,
noting that the buildings followed a distinct loop, only to repeat
after each block, starting out every time with the abandoned
warehouse.

I don't know how long I spent there, walking
that same city block over and over again until blisters left me
limping and miserable, my head aching with confusion and terror. My
eyes burned from the countless tears I shed while screaming out for
someone, anyone to help me. My knees were torn and bleeding from
tripping over that same damn wooden plank time and time again while
I ran hopelessly along the cracked sidewalk. Every time I tried
going in a different direction, down one of the cross streets, my
head would spin and somehow I'd be right back there again, standing
over the wooden plank, staring at the empty warehouse.

Time lost all meaning, even as a purple
twilight coated the now all too familiar street with an anemic
glow. At last, voice hoarse, no longer able to walk, I sank down
onto the wooden plank, pulling my knees up to my chest. No tears
fell, and somehow the fear had given way to numbness, a complete
indifference to my plight. I stayed there for hours, days, I don't
know, just existing in a time of in-between; waiting for something
to happen, something to change.

I must have fallen asleep at some point,
because a loud
whumping
woke me, startling
me upright from my prone position on the ground. I opened my eyes,
hoping beyond all hope that I would see my own bedroom, the clock
on the alarm flashing, telling me that I had hit the snooze button
after all, that I had never gotten out of bed this morning, or
whenever it was.

But it was the unremitting sight of the
dilapidated warehouse and the vast desert of my abandoned city
block that greeted me.

Belatedly I realized I was hearing something
other than my own breathing. I scrambled to my aching feet and
looked around, trying to locate the source of the strange
whump whump whump
, like a huge rotor
stopping and starting, muffled by earth or concrete or brick.

It was coming from the warehouse.

Stooping over, I picked up the ever-present
wooden plank, holding it like a baseball bat as I moved forward,
ignoring the screaming pain in my feet, the exhaustion of my limbs.
The sound grew louder as I drew closer, and I began to feel it as a
vibration in my chest, like a bass-line played too loud in a
car.

I hesitated at the entrance to the
warehouse, a wide garage-style door left halfway down. Peering into
the darkness, I tried to make out the interior, but only a wall of
black waited for me, a yawning mouth of endless hunger. The noise
was indescribable now, pumping through my head and my veins
forcefully, as though trying to match the frenetic pace of my
pulse.

"Shit," I muttered, my voice barely more
than a whisper. Somehow I knew that walking into that warehouse
would lead me to something drastic, something irreversible, but the
thought of stumbling along that endless city block for the rest of
my life urged me forward. Yearning for an answer, an end to the
nightmare I had been trapped in for who knows how long, I stepped
forward into the dark.

And entered the void.

***

When I was ten, while playing Davy Crockett,
I fell out of a neighbor's tree and broke my wrist. I remember how
I sat there silently, just staring down at the raw, scraped flesh
of my arm, feeling completely numb, even as the neighbor came
running out to see what had happened. It was only then, when my
attention was pulled away from the injury for a second that the
initial shock faded and the pain set in. I cried for hours over
that broken arm, thinking it was the worst thing that had ever
happened to me.

But that moment, the most agonizing pain I'd
ever felt, was nothing. Nothing compared to what was happening to
me now.

The moment I stepped into the void, the
bottom dropped out of the world and I plummeted in a free fall, a
great black vacuum with no substance, just space.

Then the pain began.

It started small at first, just a tingling
along my skin, an uncomfortable sensation like accidentally
brushing up against a car door and being shocked. Then it
escalated, the tingling evolving into a burning; sharp stabs like
hot pokers driving into my muscles and bones. I opened my mouth to
scream, but nothing came out, just a faint whistling as my lungs
caught fire and blazed within me, devouring my oxygen and pouring
into my veins with malicious cruelty. It felt as though the sun had
been melted down and injected into my bloodstream, scorching me
from the inside out.

Incoherent with misery, I barely noticed
when something seemed to shift in the void, as though all that
great empty space had suddenly made a decision to become solid. My
very bone marrow still afire, I crashed against smooth, slick
walls, still unable to see or hear anything but the sound of my own
agony. For an eternity I tumbled there, thrashed against obstacles
I couldn't see, like a bead inside a child's rattle. After a while,
I didn't really feel the pain anymore, although I was aware that my
body was undergoing some monumental change; I think my mind simply
shut down, unable to cope with the magnitude of trauma I was
experiencing. And so I drifted aimlessly, wondering in a detached
way what could befall me next.

Then the voices began.

Soft and murmuring, gentle whispers slid
through my ears into my brain like cooling water, filling me up and
then somehow stretching me, making me more, telling me secrets. I
didn't understand at first, but after a while the words lost their
lyrical unfamiliarity and became intelligible, though muffled as a
conversation coming from another room.

Suddenly I was yanked back into my aching,
misery-laden body, feeling heavier than before, like I had gained a
hundred pounds while being bashed against the walls of the void. I
stopped knocking against things and my descent picked up speed,
hurtling me through a swirling mass of colors and light, beautiful
and terrifying, wild and shocking.

And then it was over.

And then I was here.

The first thing I noticed was that I had
managed to hang on to my wooden plank. This struck me as odd and
slightly funny until I realized that it had somehow fused to my
hand.

I stared in horror at the way my skin now
meshed with the wood, as though it had simply grown out from my
palm as a natural extension. My breaths started coming in sharp
waves, black spots dancing before my eyes, and I shoved my head
between my knees, squeezing my eyelids shut, hoping beyond hope
that when I looked again my hand would be back to normal, that
there wouldn't be a four-foot long wooden plank attached to my
skin.

Strangely enough, despite everything that
had just happened to me in the void, the excruciating pain I was
still feeling twinges of, my plank-hand was bothering me the most.
It just didn't seem like something from which I could come
back.

And there went my career as a speech writer.
I mean, how was I supposed to use a laptop now? And giving a
speech? If I gestured with that appendage, I'd end up knocking
somebody unconscious.

Eventually I made myself look. And lo and
behold, it was still there. I tried lifting my arm and was
surprised to find that it didn't really feel any different,
although there was some imbalance thanks to the huge hunk of wood
hanging off the edge.

Looking at it more carefully, I saw that it
no longer looked like the plain piece of wood I had absently picked
up by the warehouse, but was slimmer somehow, more condensed. It
glittered with threads of green and amber, as though streams of
precious jewels had been woven into the grain. Frowning, I placed
it in my lap and bit my lip to stave off the wave of dizziness
crashing over me.

This was definitely not the same piece of
wood.

It was smooth and cool to the touch, more
reminiscent of stone or maybe petrified wood than of a cheap
two-by-four. After my initial disgust, I found myself thinking it
was kind of pretty, the sort of thing I would buy from an oddities
shop and display on my mantel.

Just not something I wanted attached my
hand.

Curious, I tapped it on the ground,
shivering slightly at the mild vibrations that ran up my arm as it
landed with a muffled thud. Again, more like knocking a stone
against the ground than a thin piece of wood.

Though I was tempted to continue
experimenting, it belatedly dawned on me that I was no longer in
the void, or on the endless street of the warehouse. All around me
was a shimmering blue sea of what looked like tall grass. Reaching
out my good hand, I trailed my fingers along the grass, startled by
the silky strands that gently bowed beneath the pressure. My brain
felt thick and sluggish, and for the first time I wondered if I had
somehow ingested some new type of LSD or other hallucinogen. Apart
from the incongruence of my brand spanking new appendage, I
appeared to be sitting in the middle of a field of grass entirely
the wrong color and texture. I had no doubt that if I had any
crafty abilities, I could easily weave these leaves of grass into a
garment of some kind, something soft and airy, the sort of thing I
would've paid hundreds for back home.

Back home.

Apparently my mind had moved ahead of the
rest of me, because I was pretty easily accepting that, like
Dorothy, I was no longer in Kansas. Or D.C. Or Earth.

Unless I was on one hell of an acid trip, I
had somehow managed to wander into a portal of some kind, or fallen
through a wormhole. For the first time, I wished I had paid more
attention to those episodes of
Doctor Who
my college roommate had forced me to watch, thinking that my lack
of interest in all things sci-fi was now coming back to bite me in
the ass.

I've always been more of a cozy mystery kind
of girl. I favor books with plucky heroines and cat detectives in
them, but somehow I didn't think that was going to help me out
here.

A shout in the distance had me jerking
around, peering over the beautiful lapis landscape underneath
a...was that
violet?
...sky to seek the
source. Another answering shout, unintelligible, split the quiet of
the field and I started to get to my feet, joy and relief pumping
through me.

They appeared over the blue horizon, sitting
atop what at first glance appeared to be horses, but instead of a
lovely chestnut or palomino, these steeds were spotted like snow
leopards, long white manes hanging down to their knee joints.

My mouth dropped open, and I stared
slack-jawed as they approached, the riders cloaked in heavy furs
with hoods that obscured their faces. They were huge, or at least
appeared to be so, and at long last my survival instincts kicked
in.

I ran.

It was awkward, since my right hand was now
weighted down by the petrified baseball bat attached to it, but I
moved through the silk-grass swiftly, each step seeming to propel
me twice as far as I was used to. After a moment, I realized I was
moving at a rate no human could be capable of, least of all me, the
girl who had managed to fall off of three separate treadmill
machines.

My pursuers exclaimed and then I heard the
thunderous hoof beats of the strange horses on my heels. No matter
how fast I managed to run, or how endless the ocean of grass seemed
to be, they were gaining on me. My heart pounded in my chest, my
pulse thrumming in my ears as I pushed harder, forcing my abused
body to the absolute limit.

Amazingly, my pace quickened and now the
blue grass was nothing but a blur, a flash of color and then
abruptly there was nothing and I flew, hovering for a brilliant,
exhilarating moment over empty space.

And then I fell.

***

I was way too warm and I couldn't move my
arms or legs. Something shifted and rolled beneath me, and I was
pressed against something broad and unyielding. My head pounded and
there was a dreadful ache in my lower back. It felt like someone
had shoved a railroad spike in the base of my spine and then
forgotten about it. Moaning, I blinked my eyes open only to be
greeted by a wall of fur. Panic froze my limbs as I realized that
somehow I had ended up with my furry pursuers, and I couldn't
move.