Chapter Five
The Birdcage
“Storm, Storm, wake up,” Uncle demanded urgently in my ear.
Sheesh, time to get up already, I wondered, not wanting to open my eyes.
“Is she in pain?” I heard Andrew ask Uncle.
“How should I know,” Uncle hissed at Andrew.
“Yes. She is.” I heard Luke answer confidently.
As if on command, their talking about pain woke up that sleeping dragon and I could feel the burn start in my side. The warmth of the stones I lay on seemed to soothe it. Stones? Why in the world would I be laying on stones, I wondered? This had to be the weirdest dream I had ever had.
“She’s waking up,” I heard Luke pronounce with certainty.
Then suddenly the vision of the vortex crowded out every other thought. Oh my God, I thought. The waterspout!
I opened my eyes and stared up into Uncle’s worried face. “There you are,” Uncle grinned in relief. “Back from the dead.” I could feel his warm hand clasped in mine.
“We’re . . . alive?” I asked, trying to clear the cobwebs away. “How long have I been out?”
“We’re not sure,” Uncle admitted. “Our watches don’t work here. A few minutes, maybe?” He shrugged.
Andrew and Luke’s faces came into focus above me. I tried not to notice that Andrew’s eyes looked red-rimmed as if he’d been crying.
“You’ve been out for a while now,” Luke said aloud, as if he had heard my thoughts. Behind them, the most extraordinary sky outlined their worried faces. I had never seen a sky quite that color before. It didn’t look natural. Then Luke’s comment caught up to my brain.
“What? What did you say?” I asked, distracted from the puzzle of the sky’s color by what Luke had said.
“You were thinking about how long you’d been out,” he repeated, “and, of course, the sky. Weird, isn’t it?”
“What’s going on here?” I asked them all, shifting my gaze from one to the other, and then to the weird sky behind them.
“Yeah, ain’t it cool?” Andrew blurted before Luke could answer for himself. “I wish I could read minds, like Luke.”
I shifted my eyes to Luke’s. Luke gave me a rueful smile and shrugged. “I don’t know why, but when I woke up, I could hear what everyone was thinking. It must be this place.” Then he turned to Andrew.
“And it definitely is not cool, Andrew,” he growled. “If you think I want to be subjected to anymore of your adolescent fantasies, you’ve got another think coming.”
Above me, Andrew’s face turned crimson, contrasting unpleasantly with the sky that framed his red face.
“Up!” I demanded. “Let me up!”
Suddenly, pain or no, I felt stupid laying here on the floor with them all looking down at me, framed by that alien sky.
“You’re not stupid, Storm.” Luke blurted suddenly. “You’ve been out like a light. You’ve had us all scared. And, yeah, purple seems to be the dominant color here.” As if to emphasize his words, he glanced up.
“That’s enough of the instant replays, Luke. I want up!”
“All right,” Uncle spoke up. “But, take it easy, Storm,” he cautioned as he and Luke helped me into a sitting position. “Don’t move too suddenly. I’m pretty sure you’ve got some broken ribs there. The last thing we need is a punctured lung, too.”
The thought of punctured lungs instantly sobered me as I remembered the agony I’d experienced inside the vortex. I found myself mentally checking myself out, and the pain felt half-way healed.
“let’s see if you’re able to walk.” With that Uncle stood up and got behind me and slid his hands under my arms. Luke and Andrew followed suit and stood.
I grunted with pain as Uncle stood me on my feet. Uncle was right. We needed to get out of here so I tried to endure it. I didn’t have time to be sick right now.
“I’m OK,” I assured Uncle. “It’s OK, Lu . . . ,” I stared dumbfounded around me. “What the . . . Oh! . . . My! . . . God!” I stammered.
“Welcome to the birdcage,” announced Andrew glumly.
“Oh my God. You’re right, Andrew, I said as I turned slowly around in a circle.
The open air room we stood in looked exactly like a giant birdcage. That is, if you can call a Grecian alter crossed with Stonehenge, and barely twice the size of a bathroom, (speaking of which, I could really use one of those at the moment), then that described our location perfectly.
Is this where the vortex had brought us? Why to this place, I asked myself? Is this where all those other souls, lost in the Bermuda Triangle, wound up?
Pale, marble-white columns soared over my head at least thirty feet into the air, and surrounded the edge of the platform like tall, slim soldiers. The columns held up a marble frieze with strange runes carved into them. The runes looked vaguely similar to Egyptian hieroglyphs I’d studied about in World History in high school.
This room made high school, Lakahatchee, and Storm Runner seem very far away right now, I thought with a pang.
“Uncle?” I asked, staring up at the columns. “Where are we?”
I turned in a slow circle again, this time studying, not the birdcage, as Andrew called it; but the land it sat upon. A mist-shrouded plateau that might be a quarter-mile across, squatted on top of a small hill not high enough to really be called a mountain.
“Some kind of an island, I’m thinking,” Uncle answered.
“Of course,” I said absently, trying to take in my surroundings.
The thin mist gave me veiled glimpses of a horseshoe-shaped mountain range stretching out in either direction for miles.
In the distance, I could see the dim outline a much larger landmass across from the open end of the horseshoe. Definitely an island, then. The whole place appeared to be surrounded by purple water--as far as I could see through the mist, anyway, echoing the lavender sky above.
Lavender sky? Oh yeah. You bet. A shade of lavender never seen on earth. I can’t begin to describe how I felt looking out at that alien sky and sea, in a day absolutely filled with Weird. However, I had a bad feeling that the color of the sky would not the worst thing we would be facing here—where ever here was.
“Hon, I wish I could tell you where we are,” Uncle said, interrupting my morbid thoughts. “The truth is, I have absolutely no idea where we are. This is where we woke up. That’s all I know.”
Uncle gazed thoughtfully up at the birdcage as if at a puzzle he could decipher if he stared at it long enough.
“I thought the runes might be even earlier than Egyptian,” Luke interrupted. He had intruded into my thoughts again.
“Maybe we should try to get out of here,” I suggested to Uncle before whirling on my older brother. “Luke I don’t even want to think about you reading my thoughts again. It’s freaky. Even if you can do it; don’t!”
“That’s why I wanted you awake,” Uncle said. “We’re out in the open here--where ever the hell here is. I don’t like it. Not at all.”
“Do you reckon it is some kind of space warp, time rift, or space/time continuum breech?” Andrew asked, hesitantly.
“You mean that brought us here?” Luke asked, intrigued.
Uncle eyed Andrew doubtfully. “I think you’ve been watching too many Star Trek re-runs there, Mr. Spock.” Uncle glanced over at Andrew then back at me.
Andrew jammed his hands in his pockets and walked over to the edge of the room.
“Did you notice?” Andrew asked, looking back toward where Uncle, Luke, and I stood. “It feels different when you move around. Like there’s not as much gravity as on earth or something.” He flexed his knees a few times, and walked around on the balls of his feet to test his theory.
Luke imitated his movements. “You’re right, little brother,” Luke admitted. “I do feel lighter. Weird.”
“Maybe. But we can worry about that later. Right now I’m getting claustrophobic in this canary cage, and I want out of here,” Uncle grumbled.
“You got that right,” Andrew agreed, and resumed walking towards the columns.
Pow! An explosion-like sound filled the air, accompanied by a shower of sparks, followed by a zapping sound that buzzed like a tesla coil. Andrew flew backwards as if he’d been punched by an invisible fist. A smell of ozone had me grabbing my nose.
“What the hell!” Uncle exclaimed, staring down at Andrew’s prone form on the floor. If Andrew had suddenly turned into an alligator, Uncle couldn’t have looked more shocked.
“Andrew,” I screamed, rushing over him.
“Whoa, Bro.” Luke beat both Uncle and me to Andrew’s side. “What happened?”
“You’re guess is as good as mine,” Andrew moaned, sounding dazed as he struggled to sit up. “Whatever it was knocked me for a loop, that’s for sure.”
““Are you all right?” Concern made my voice come out hoarse. Andrew and I don’t make much of the extra closeness we feel being twins. It made Andrew uncomfortable. Sissy stuff, he called it. Only our fear brought out those filial feelings now. I looked down and realized he clutched my hand.
He realized it the same moment as I, and eased his hand away from me. Andrew folded his arms and propped his elbows against his knees. He rested his forehead against his palms.
“I’ll be OK, Storm.” He twisted his head towards me and tried to grin to lighten the moment. Then he glanced up at Luke. “Give me a hand up, Bro?”
“Sure.” Luke reached down and grasped Andrew’s hand. “Yes, of course. You’re right,” Luke told him as he pulled him to his feet, unaware he’d answered Andrew’s thoughts rather than words he’d spoken aloud. “I hadn’t thought of that,” he said letting go of Andrew’s hand. The two of them seemed to be lost in their own little world of thoughts; forgetting Uncle and I couldn’t hear them.
“Do you mind sharing . . .?” I sniffed, totally uncomfortable with Luke’s sudden psychic abilities. What was that all about anyhow?
“Sorry,” Luke said, embarrassed. “This is strange for me too, you know, Storm. How about cutting me some slack, here?”
“Whatever,” I shrugged, feeling so out of my element in this strange place.
“I am thinking it’s a force field,” Andrew clarified sheepishly.
“You might be right,” Uncle agreed. “Maybe it has a trigger to open it, or even a gap or two. There’s only one way to find out.”
Uncle slipped off his belt and swung one end towards the open space between the columns closest to him, flinching when sparks and another zapping sound startled him with its strength. That didn’t stop him, however. He began swinging the belt like a bullwhip at the invisible barrier.
Luke and Andrew quickly shrugged out of their shirts—they hardly ever wore belts--and went around all the columns slinging one end of their shirts at the open spaces, searching for an opening; all with the same results--zilch.
I still sat where Andrew had fallen, with my chin propped on my knees and watched them silently. There was no furniture at all to sit on in this place—not even a convenient rock; only an open stone floor.
Actually, a very beautiful stone floor. The thing that made this floor feel other-worldly, however, was an unearthly warmth radiating up through the stone, through my jeans, and into my butt. The warmth felt pretty good. Soothing. It made me wonder if deep below the surface of the plateau radiated a volcanic heart.
As I watched the three of them walking around the birdcage and the resulting Pow and Zap, I concluded the force field had us totally surrounded.
“Looks like we’re trapped in here,” Uncle sighed finally, admitting defeat as he slipped his belt back on: “Unless,” Uncle paused, glancing up, “we can go over it.”
As if Uncle looking up had called upon some ancient gods to clear the mists surrounding us, they dissipated, revealing the harsh glare of, not one, but two, suns shining harshly down on us. I blinked several times, thinking I was seeing double, until I heard my brothers awe-filled cries.
“A binary star system,” Luke and Andrew shouted simultaneously, totally blown away as they high-fived each other like they’d discovered something wonderful.
“A different galaxy?” I heard the excitement in Andrew’s voice.
“Has to be,” Luke grunted, staring up at those twin suns thoughtfully.
“I always knew the Bermuda Triangle was real,” Uncle breathed heavily in the oddest, I think I’m going to be sick, kind of voice, as he stared up at the sky.
I followed Uncle’s gaze and found out the weirdest thing overhead wasn’t a lavender sky or the twin suns. Low on the horizon hung three strikingly-colored moons that could write an entire chapter in a book entitled: A Really Weird Sky.
I looked past Uncle at all those way too many heavenly bodies in the sky and felt my stomach lurch. I’d heard of binary star systems all my life. Planets with multiple moons, too. I’ve watched Star Trek re-runs like everyone else. I just never thought I would see them with my own eyes.
“Just how far away from earth have we come?” I asked feeling sick myself. I had never even had the desire to leave Lakahatchee, let alone, travel to another galaxy.
All three moons were full. One moon, as scarlet as a cardinal’s wing, humongous, and so close, it scraped the horizon; had rings—-all different hues of red--surrounding it, like some psycho version of Saturn.
The other two moons were more the size of earth’s own moon. One, stark black, the other, startling blue.
The very presence of those alien satellites would be a constant reminder that I was definitely not in Kansas anymore for as long as I remained here. A sobering thought.
“You’ve got that right, Dorothy,” Luke agreed without thinking.
Luke suddenly being able to so easily read my thoughts just exacerbated the wrongness of this whole place.
“Luke,” I huffed. “I swear, if you don’t get out of my head--and stay out--I am going to punch you one!”
“Storm, you don’t know how hard it is to keep what everybody’s thinking, and what they’re saying separated. You should hear what I’m hearing. It’s like being tuned in to three different radio stations at the same time.”
“Sorry, I’m just so freaked out over all this.”
“Talk about a freak,” Luke commented. “Why me?”
“I don’t know, Luke,” I mumbled as I put my hand over my mouth to hold in the scream I felt building inside me. Maybe I’d been too protected all my life. Feeling real fear of any kind—-let alone this level of shock after shock was as unnatural as this place. I sighed heavily.
I let my arms flop down over my knees and laid my head down on them. “This whole place—this whole… whatever’s happening to us,” I mumbled from beneath my arms, “This whole… everything … is just freaking me out!” I ground out. “Why did the Bermuda Triangle have to be real? Why did it have to be us to discover that?”
This couldn’t be happening, I thought. Not to me. Not to my Uncle and brothers.
“Why not us, Storm?” Luke answered tightly, as if trying to convince himself to believe the philosophy he spouted at me. “If the Bermuda Triangle is what sent us here, then I doubt if we are the first to discover that fact.”
What had become of my nice, safe world where I had been so happy? I want to go home, I thought miserably. I wondered these things to myself, forgetting my thoughts were no longer sacred.
I stiffened when Luke said gently “Feeling sorry for yourself isn’t going to help right now, Storm.”
He laid his hand on my shoulder but I shook it off. “Don’t!” I glared up at him, hating the compassion in his eyes. “Just—don’t!” I repeated, unsure if I was saying don’t to his sympathy or his mind-reading.
Disgusted with him and myself and this place, and damning the Bermuda Triangle to hell and back, I covered my face with my hands.
Then I did something I hadn’t done in a very long time. I cried.