The Author

Chapter Three

            On the other side of the gateway the weather was warm and sunny. The sky was the palest blue Alice had ever seen. The flowers in the field were purple, blue, pink, yellow, green, red, orange and every shade in between. There were green and red maple trees lining the field which stretched several hundred yards in either direction from where Alice stood. Directly in front of her was a sleepy little hamlet which looked as though it came directly out of a fairy tale. The buildings had thatched roofs and were nestled in a valley created by the convergence of several gently sloping hills including the one on which she stood. She noticed her skin felt soft and smooth and slightly greasy, as though she had just put lotion on it. Her red hair was silky and her curls were falling in large ringlets around her face; the frizz had been moisturized away. Alice turned around and saw the gateway with its soap bubble surface. The computer room was visible through the swirl of pastel color. That must truly be some kind of oil, she thought. Then another thought struck her: This must be where all of the ghost stories about the library come from! She smiled and walked behind the gateway, but there was nothing on the other side. Where she expected to see computers, all she saw were flowers. She walked around to the front of the gateway again and there it was still.

        Tearing herself away and taking a deep breath, she turned and began walking down the hill toward the group of buildings trying to think what she would do when she got there. Suddenly, there was a flash of bright white light and an extremely loud crack. Alice stumbled at the sound and sight of the lightning and looked up toward the origin of the light and noise. There was a lone gray cloud in the otherwise clear sky moving quickly toward the hamlet. She could see flashes of lightning inside the cloud. “That’s odd,” she said to herself. But, not professing to understand anything about weather, she shrugged and continued walking. The cloud dissipated over the hamlet and she thought no more about it.

After walking approximately a hundred yards, Alice noticed a rustling in the flowers to her left near the tree line. She made a slight alteration to her course to investigate more closely. As she neared the movement, she could make out a tail and two pointed ears. Her quarry was an orange tabby cat. The cat was assuming the usual pouncing stance of crouching in the front and slightly elevating the rear and shaking it back and forth. Predictably, the cat leapt in the air and came crashing down again. What Alice did not anticipate was the following exclamation.

            “Damn it!”

            Alice stopped dead in her tracks and looked around. There were no people around and the voice came from the direction of the cat. It was a man’s voice she’d heard, but where was the man? She moved toward the spot where the cat had landed. It was half sprawled in the tall flowers and was picking itself up when Alice’s shadow fell over it.

            “I’ll have you know you just cost me my breakfast with all of your noise!” he raged, turning to face her.

            “I-I’m s-sorry,” Alice stammered back.

        “Ah, well, that mouse was probably tough and wiry, anyway. Of course now I’ll have to go down to the village and scavenge for food again. That’s about as happy a prospect as a tough mouse. Then again, maybe someone made a nice juicy mutton chop last night, and then didn’t want it. It’s been known to happen. It could take a while to find. Like looking… for a… a needle… in a haystack what are you looking at?” The cat had noticed Alice’s gob smacked expression and inability to blink her eyes. She immediately closed her mouth and tried to appear as though she’d met hundreds of talking tabby cats.

            “Nothing,” she replied unconvincingly.

        “Uh-huh, and I was weaned yesterday. You were staring at me!”