Wednesday, April 26, 2001
In another land, there was a war. The things feared most in this war weren't weapons of mass destruction; they were children. Young girls were chosen to be the bearers of magical bloodstone rings. These girls would walk through the battlefield and touch the wounded. At the girls' touch, all of the blood would leave their bodies through their wounds, and they would die.
One of these girls was tortured by what she did. She walked through the battlefield killing, her eyes seemingly indifferent to the carnage. In reality, she was simply too full of pain for the addition of her victims' to show. As the battle ended, she stood untouched in her blood soaked, white gown. Slowly she made her way to the edge of a stream flowing red with blood. One of the other girls saw her and shouted, "No!" but she was too far away. The girl knelt at the edge of the stream and drank the bloody water. It was a violation of the rules the gods had set about the killing. They were not to partake of the dead. The punishment was death.
The girl wanted death. She longed to be free of the killing. When the pain began to wrack her body, she stumbled off into the woods alone.
The next day, word had travelled to the leader of the people. She came to the battlefield with the intention of finding the girl's body. Before she could begin the search, the girl walked out of the forest. She was transformed. Her skin and hair had become as white as her dress had been. Her eyes were a somehow vibrant gray. Beside her stood one of the dead. If he had once been handsome, the leader couldn't tell now. Dessicated, dry wounds gaping, he stood at the girl's side as she put her arm around him.
"I am Liah," she said, and the leader gasped, because she recognized the name of the queen of the dead. "And the dead are mine. You have abused my gift. It was meant to be wielded by warriors--those who dealt in death--not by innocent children. You have called death to live among you." Liah smiled. and the leader shook. "And so I shall."
Liah came to the palace and took a section of it for her own. She installed herself there with a coterie of dead lovers.
On another planet, fairly recently settled, there was a women's prison. The warden was strict but fair, and her name was Lindsey. Under her supervision were about a dozen women. Two of them were Sarah and Natalie. Sarah was in jail for murder, and the attempted murder of Natalie. One day Sarah broke out of prison with the help of some old friends from outside. Sarah refused to surrender even when her life was threatened. It was only when her friends were threatened that she consented to return to the prison.
Meanwhile, the prison was in lock down because of the escape and because one escape usually inspired other attempts. While the prisoners were kept together in the dining room, Lindsey interrogated one of Sarah's friends. He told a story she hadn't expected. When Sarah was only four years old, her family had left on a ship for the colony planet, but along the way their ship was intercepted. Sarah's family was slaughtered and eaten, and she only survived by hiding. The killers were aliens who then took the form of humans in order to infiltrate the colony. Humans they considered free-range livestock. When Sarah was older, she tried to hunt down the aliens that had killed her parents. With one, she failed. Natalie still lived. Now, Natalie wanted Sarah dead to keep her secret safe.
Lindsey had trouble believing such a wild story, but Sarah had always struck her as very honest for a criminal, and she knew Sarah was really afraid of something. She ran to the dining hall as fast as she could, but it took a while because of the lock down. Finally she pried open the dining room door and found Natalie over Sarah on the floor. Natalie's intent and hatred were obvious. Lindsey pried them apart (with help) and took Natalie to the government to reveal to them the alien killers mong the colonists.
In the end, she helped mediate negotiations between the head of the alien race and the head of the colony. The aliens agreed to no longer feed on humans and to admit that they were equals.
Afterwards, a scientist pulled Lindsey aside. He told her that he had been studying the aliens since she had revealed them. He showed her films of some of his experiments. He said that they reproduced asexually and relatively often. In the end, he said, they would probably breed us out.
Thursday, July 26, 2001
This morning I dreamt that I was in Costa Rica again. We were on the bus, flying along those gravel and dirt roads, taking the mountain curves at suicidal speeds. It was getting dark, and we kept going in and out of thick fog. In the fog, I could hardly see ten feet, but the driver never slowed.
My friends, the closest to me being a girl named Chelsea, were drifting off to sleep when I saw shapes moving in the forest off to the right of the road. I nudged her awake and made her look.
“What are they?” I asked. “Deer?”
“No,” she answered, “look. They’re horses.”
And I could see that she was right. It was a whole herd of horses running roughly parallel to the road. They seemed unaware of us. As they drifted closer, I gasped. Their manes stuck straight up in spots, and were two different colors. They were roans, but their manes seemed to be a deep purple in spots and bright green in others.
Chelsea explained that they were young, and their manes hadn’t yet finished turning from the green of colts to the dark mahogany of adults. She said it was the yellow of the bus’s headlights that made them seem purple.
We drove on in the darkness, and I can’t remember the rest of the ride.
I know that we arrived at our hotel on the side of the volcano at either dusk or dawn, likely dawn. We were exhausted. I was one of the few who accompanied the adults to the reception building. The others dozed on the bus. At reception, there was a kind of general store set up and I amused myself by browsing. I saw a pair of boots, and I slipped off my shoes to try them on. When I turned back to retrieve my shoes, they were gone. I thought I had been wearing my canvas slip-ons. They were a kind of ecru or tan with a floral pattern. No such shoes were on the floor in front of me. There were two pairs of regular canvas keds, however, and I thought that maybe I was just tired and mistaken about what I’d been wearing. I grabbed the shoes and walked to the suite I was sharing with Chelsea and two other girls. There, Chelsea and another girl claimed the shoes I’d brought. They couldn’t explain how they’d ended up at the store.
Tired as I was, I marched right back to the reception desk/sales counter and demanded that the manager produce my shoes. He was very apologetic and offered me my choice of pretty leather shoes from some elaborate shoetree set-up. I shook the tiredness out of my head and refused. I pointed out that the shoes he was offering had permeable soles, which would do me no good back in the states when it snowed. He responded that he didn’t have my shoes to give me. For some reason this upset me greatly. I don’t know if I was simply tired enough that any little mishap seemed like a disaster or what, but I was devastated.
Meanwhile, while this whole conversation had been going on, the manager’s wife and another apparently local man were in the room, listening. They paid very close attention for such a trivial subject. It was like there was a whole subtext going on that I couldn’t pick up on, and it was driving me crazy. I didn’t want to leave the room because it felt like I was letting them get away with some sort of conspiracy, but I had no excuse to stay.
I went to a party at the Twohigs with lots of exotic food and volleyball and a visiting volleyball team coming on a bus and there was a van and a button near the door of the house that kept it open while the van was being boarded. There was some sort of competition going on among the other girls and me. I had to kind of show them up at every opportunity. Eventually Colonel Twohig was throwing empty, small, soda bottles in the air for me to hit. I had to aim them just right. If I missed, I would lose. I didn’t miss.
Saturday, July 28, 2001
We were down the shore (although I’m not a hundred percent sure I was myself, and part of the time I was with someone who might or might not have been my cousin Scott). At one point we were walking north along the boardwalk toward our hotel. There was another building along the way, an older Victorian building that you could tour. We decided to explore it. There were spiders and we had to duck under some of the webs.
When we got to the second floor it was some sort of museum-type-place. It was all dusty. There was a shooting gallery on the street side, and then the room turned back and to the right to a few stairs and the exit to the upper balcony.
In that section of the room there were wax figures of people, men and women, in turn-of-the-century dress apparently having some fun in a bar. There was also a lectern with a dusty old book on it. We went over to look at the book, but as soon as we started reading it something happened. Suddenly we weren’t ourselves. We were these other people in the story. I remember that I was taller. My hair was heavier, and I weighed a lot more. I also had a much larger chest, and that finally convinced me that it wasn’t just a change in costume. We lived these other people’s lives for a long time…a very long time.
I remember a party in South Philly in the twenties where a man got shot and we were and weren’t involved. I can’t remember much except this: I went to the ladies’ room and in one of the stalls I heard a girl talk about her part in the murder. I hid in another stall so I wouldn’t be a witness. Turned out that she was a stripper and she was going to distract the target by giving him a blow job. When he wasn’t paying attention, and no one else in the room was either, they would shoot him through the back of the head from a car outside the big, plate-glass window. Everything went as they’d planned it, and the two of us left in a hurry before we could be questioned, going down a back hallway with a red carpet into the adjoining hotel.
Eventually, of course, this role-playing ended. We kind of shook ourselves awake and we were back in the dusty room upstairs. The caretaker had disturbed us (luckily). We put the book back without even glancing at it and got out of there. It turned out that we’d been gone nearly a week, and everyone was frantic.
The next day we walked down the sidewalk to the beach, passing lots of brightly colored snails on the pavement. At the beach, I didn’t go in the water, but the other person with me did. Around lunch time the tide turned and the he(?) came out of the water and said there were too many things in it to swim. I looked and he was right. The water was soupy with seaweed and kelp, and on top of that were what appeared to be sea turtles. They clambered onto the beach and, sure enough, they were sea turtles, but toward the back of their shells were metal plates painted a bright yellow with writing on them. The turtles started having sex right there on the beach, but it was disturbing because it seemed so sterile and artificial because that part of them was metal.
The two of us decided to get a better view of the whole beach for some reason. I followed him past a group of well-dressed people giving awards to little children and up a hill. We climbed around the old Victorian building. On our way, we saw one of the caretaker’s assistants in an apartment across the street get busted for sniffing whip cream. He was a college age, big, black man, and we couldn’t figure out why someone that old would be doing something so childish.
Finally we got all the way around the building by a pool and got our view. A woman from the awards ceremony asked us why we were there and “Scott” told her the truth, then explained to me after she’d left that he couldn’t think of a more legitimate excuse. Eventually we got bored and wandered back to a parking lot where we sat on the curb under one of the streetlights and talked for awhile.
Monday, July 30, 2001
I was driving in Pennsylvania, somewhere in the Lehigh Valley. I was coming down a hill when I came upon a huge barn-like building. It was all boarded up and obviously in falling down, but it was still imposing. A banner on one side of the building proclaimed that soon the building would have a haunted hotel tour.
I went farther down the road and entered the town proper, with buildings ranging from colonial to 1920’s. In the center square was a gift shop, and I stopped to look inside. They had all sorts of souvenirs from that same time range, plus some T-shirts. I ended up talking to the lady who ran the shop about some of the items, especially the tin soldiers, and she told me that the whole town was being renovated. Each building would represent a different decade and have period actors. She asked if I wanted a job and I said yes.
I ended up working in the old hotel. I was supposed to drive back up there with another girl. I sped on the road and crashed, but no one was hurt, and the girl and I drove on.
When we got to the hotel, we had to get to the other side of it, but outside they were playing country music. We decided to avoid that and cut through the large dining room. Unfortunately, when we opened the door we were met by live music and square dancing.
Eventually, I got where I needed to be. I was supposed to interact with a female ghost from the twenties. Some famous politician’s son had been in love with her, and he’d written her a letter. Her mobster boyfriend found the letter and killed her. I was supposed to keep that from happening in the hopes that it would let her rest.
I found the woman and was talking with her. A messenger from the front desk knocked on the door and handed her a letter. I tried to grab the letter from her. Just then her boyfriend stormed into the room. He grabbed my wrist. As his hand touched my watch, there was a loud bang and a flash of light. When I looked up from sitting on the floor, I realized to my horror that the people weren’t ghosts anymore and that the room looked freshly decorated.
