The Five Dimensions Part 1: Shadow World

Chapter 5

Hailey sat in the middle of the woods. On a moss-covered rock. But it wasn't a rock, it was her rock. It was next to the top of a small waterfall which splashed into a miniature lake. It wasn't really that far from her house but in her mind, it was a different world.

It smelled like the forest, and it smelled like the water, but it didn't smell like damp forest, the way it smelled around her house. It was entirely different. It wasn't one scent that combined the smell of water and trees and any other kind of forest-like smell. It was more like thousands of different scents, all independent on their own. They wouldn't have been special separately, but together it formed this swirl of aroma that swept Hailey's mind to a faraway place. It made up Hailey's favorite smell in the world.

There wasn't any sense that could make her feel more at home than smelling this. Although it wasn't just that. Right on that spot, she felt like herself, like the person she really was. As if the smell stripped away all her protecting walls and only left the purest part of who she was.

She came here whenever she needed to escape and that was a lot. Especially the past years. She never understood who she was and coming here helped her understand that. If there ever were a place where Hailey's heart lay it was here, that was why she was the only living soul to know about it.

Hailey had been sitting on the same spot for a while now and even though it was the end of fall and therefore pretty cold, she didn't much care. If anything, she preferred the cold to the warmth.

Her dad hated the cold. There were lots of things that they didn't have in common. He had once told her that she was a lot like her mother, but that had been a long time ago and Hailey didn't think much about her mom. But now she didn't mind filling her mind with whatever topic, if it just wasn't about what happened at school earlier.

When it began to get harder to keep her mind off things, Hailey decided to take her bow and start practicing. It was already getting dark, so she couldn't stay much longer. Standing up slowly, she could feel a wave of air going through her hair, planting its scent into it.

Putting one of her arrows to her bow, she chose a focusing point on the bark of a tree across the water. She put the bow up, pulled the string and the arrow back to her face, aimed and shot. The shot wasn't perfect, but it was in the bark. Hailey tried again. Pull, aim, shoot. Pull, aim, shoot. Pull, aim, shoot.

After a while she was almost completely satisfied with her shot. She pulled again, aimed and... There was a dark figure in front of the aiming point, the point where her arrow was flying at right that moment. She gasped and quickly half climbed half jumped down the rocks of the waterfall. She ran toward the tree she'd been shooting at.

When she got there, the figure was gone. Together with the arrow she had shot at it or him or whatever. She was absolutely sure it had been the same figure from that morning.

"Hello?" Hailey yelled, looking around her to see if there was any movement. But there wasn't and it seemed like there hadn't been a figure at all, just like it had vanished that morning.

She pulled her arrows out of the bark and put them back in her quiver. After looking around one more time, she headed back home.

§

Hailey opened the backdoor of her house and put her bow and quiver against the wall. It didn't feel right that she didn't have the same number of arrows she had left with, but she tried to ignore it. She was usually so careful about not losing any arrows though, knowing that she couldn't keep replacing them.

She walked to the front door to put her coat on one of the hooks next to it. When she looked out of the small window next to the door, she saw someone with very familiar curls sitting on the front step. Nolan. She froze.

He's not supposed to be here. Hailey thought. Not now.

She hesitated to open the door; his back was turned to her, so he couldn't see her. Nolan knew that Hailey trained with these kinds of weapons, but she never showed them to anyone outside of training camp ― Camp Eagle. It didn't really have anything to do with the weapons themselves but with her state of mind. Training was Hailey's way of dealing with her issues, to build her emotional wall back up where someone had damaged it. She turned around to go to her room and change but Nolan must've seen the movement behind him, and he jumped up at seeing her. She opened the door and came inside.

"I know you know where the secret spare key is," Hailey said quickly making her way to her room anyway, not waiting for Nolan.

"I know you do, and I've been inside. You just weren't there, so I figured I'd better wait for you outside," he replied, hanging his coat on one of the hooks too. "Because if you're not inside, you're outside, and... geez that sounded dumb, never mind, I'll shut up." Hailey picked up her bow and quiver and walked towards her room. She tried to suppress a smile for Nolan's awkwardness. He followed her, not looking weirder than normal ― which was weird enough ― but she shut the bedroom door before he could come in.

"Wait outside," she said.

"Why?" he said, surprised.

"Well, I'm ―" She thought about what to say for a second. "Getting changed."

"Oh right, I'll wait here then," he said, without further comment, looking a bit embarrassed.

She opened her closet and pushed her clothes aside. She found the loose floorboards and beneath it the big black box. She opened it and looked at her weapon collection with adornment. It wasn't really a collection at all, beside her bow and arrows she had some small throwing knives. They were a bad quality and not in a good state because Hailey used them so much, but she didn't have any money to buy new ones. These she had won at fighting camp, which was where all the money she earned went to. She put everything back in place and grabbed a clean long black shirt and some blue ripped jeans from her closet. She threw them on the bed with a sigh. She hadn't really planned on changing – her clothes really weren't that dirty – but Nolan was sure to notice if she hadn't. Hailey was just very private about her weapons, and she didn't like anyone seeing them, or where she'd hidden them in her room. She trusted Nolan more than anyone, but this was something that belonged to her alone.

"Are you done yet?" Nolan asked impatiently.

"Almost," Hailey replied, quickly pulling off her dirty clothes and throwing them in the clothes basket in the corner of her room. Then she put on the other clothes and closed her closet. She walked to her door and opened it.

"Finally!" Nolan replied, walking into Hailey's room.

"What are you doing here anyway?" she asked. They went to sit on her bed like they always did, her bed was big enough.

"You were gone after lunch, and I heard some rumors..." he began uncertainly.

"What rumors? Nothing happened. I just wasn't feeling well, probably something I ate." This was true, she had felt like she was going to throw up and rather than having that happen at school she went home.

"Jayson was bragging about how you had declared your love to him, and he had to pull you off of him. He provided very detailed descriptions." Nolan made a face, telling Hailey just how animate the storytelling had been.

"Does that sound anything like me?" Hailey said angrily. She wasn't mad at Nolan and usually she couldn't care less about rumors going around about her. This time however Jayson had taken it one step too far.

"No." Nolan's expression told her that he had already expected this reaction. "But I thought maybe you did something to make him angry."

"No, not that I know―"

That's when she saw it, the figure. Standing in the shadows of the trees closest to her window. She gasped, jumped away from Nolan and walked to the window, then she closed the curtains firmly. She turned around to look at Nolan, his eyebrows forming a line.

"What's wrong?" he asked.

"It ― it's ― nothing. It's nothing," she replied, deciding not to tell Nolan about the figure this time. She was so distracted by the reappearance, that she didn't see Nolan's confused and slightly worried look.