Gazette 99, Fear Of Darkness

Fear Of Darkness   A serial novel by Joe Lake.

(So far: Julie meets Susan, the social worker, who says that she is from five hundred years in the future. Susan gives her a ring to travel in different dimensions. They step into a parallel universe and return. Susan leaves but warns Julie not to turn the ring as this could be dangerous. Julie tells her husband of the ring and they go for a short excursion into the void. When they return, her husband, John, is tempted to turn the ring while she is asleep, hoping to get some advantage from the journeying. He is taken by Susan’s friend, Starina, to Saturn and its moons where he finds that he can fly like a bird.)

          

 John woke suddenly and was lying next to his wife Julie in their mobile home at Cooee beach. He shook his head as do animals to rid themselves of water or metaphorically from some negativity, only what he had just experienced was the most intense dream. He stared at the ceiling of the van to clear his mind. He saw in his peripheral vision at the end of the bed a figure which couldn’t be made out clearly in this early morning light.

        “Am I still dreaming?” he asked aloud.

        “No and you are in big trouble. You turned the ring on Julie’s finger.”

        “No I didn’t,” John said with indignation. “This woman came when I was about to turn the ring and she took me way out into the solar system, somewhere near Saturn.”

        “I know where you went,” said the indistinct figure at the end of the bed. “Why did Starina appear when you didn’t call her?”

“I don’t know but I’ll show you that I didn’t. I’ll turn the ring now.” John took the sleeping Julie’s hand and quickly turned the ring on her finger to its inverse position.

Suddenly he was blinded.

“I should leave you in this limbo but for the sake of your wife who is one of us, a chosen one. What I’ll do is make you fly with me over the Earth at an altitude where you’ll feel the cold as punishment until you promise never to touch the ring on Julie’s finger.”

Blind, John suddenly felt a woman’s hand in his.

“Come, we must step outside.”

They did and then he was taken by the woman into a tornado spout that spun him to dizzying heights above the clouds as the air became freezing. The woman held him by his left hand with an iron grip and with his right he kept hitting his chest to get the blood flowing. Then the whirling stopped and way down below he saw  the coastal outline of the lit-up Burnie port and its mountains of woodchips.

“I apologise and I promise,” John shouted into the freezing strata. “I’ll never do it again, ever” but he knew that one day he would travel amongst the stars once more.

(To be continued next month)