Hunting Julian. Jacquelyn Frank

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      “I never would have taken you to have such an imagination,” he mused.

      “Get away from me,” she said. “When this drug wears off, you prick, I’m going to kick the shit out of you.”

      “I thank you for the forewarning. It is most considerate of you. However, you are not drugged. Merely exhausted. To be honest, I am rather surprised to see you awake. It is nothing plenty of sleep cannot cure, of course. Then you will be free to kick my ass if it is what will make you feel better. Experience tells me, however, that it is not likely to help you.”

      “Yeah, well, I’ll have fun with it just the same,” she grumbled. She paused in her temper, finding even strong emotions to be exhausting. She took the moment to look around at her surroundings. Above her was a sharp, conical ceiling, the shape and material quite surreal. It was as if it had been hand-woven. Some kind of fibrous material turned in progressive, tight patterns all the way up until it reached a perfect point about twelve feet above her. The shape reminded her of the cap to the tower where Rapunzel had been kept prisoner in her storybook as a child. She had always hated those “princess in a tower” stories. She supposed she had been an empowered female even as a child, circumstances making her old and wise before her time. Kenya had been a little more fanciful, but that was because Asia had raised her to provide her with a little more opportunity to be free to follow her dreams and desires.

      “Where am I?” she asked at last, though she dreaded hearing she was on some kind of funky, pointy spaceship.

      “You are Beneath,” he said, as if that explained everything.

      He looked like that was all he was going to say for a moment, but then seemed to reassess that plan. Asia realized he had judged her capable of handling the truth, no matter how shocking it might be to her, and she couldn’t help but feel surprised that he had intuited what so many men around her could never seem to figure out. Even the ones that had known her for years couldn’t help the constantly annoying urge they seemed to be born with to protect her from things that were, in the end, really quite trivial, or to condescend to her because of her gender. It gave her a chill that a stranger seemed to get what they had never been able to comprehend, and she’d barely had a real conversation with him.

      “I know this will be hard for you to believe, and you will only be convinced when you see it all for yourself. After all, to you I am not worthy of trust and I am a lowlife beneath the capability of truth. I realize this is your perspective. Just the same, I will explain. Earth…” He hesitated when he saw her eyes widen slightly at the reference to Earth as a place separate and apart from his pending explanation. “Earth is both much nearer and much farther than you may comprehend. We are Beneath. Beneath Earth.” He sat on the edge of the bed and held out a flat hand, palm down. “Think of it as levels of existence. Earth is a plane, or some would call it a dimension. Located here. In this sense, you have to imagine that Earth is actually flat. It’s a flat space running in an infinite line on its particular plane, one dimension within the universe, so to speak. There are planes both above and below the plane you know. Humans have a sense of them, actually, and mistakenly refer to them as Heaven and Hell. Heaven and Hell are actually very different dimensions beyond what I am about to describe, but let’s not confuse the issue. There are three planes above Earth, and three below. Each runs parallel to the one above or below it. You are here.” He indicated a plane far and low from the hand representing Earth. “Beneath. The lowest plane below.”

      “Great. I’m literally in the lowest level of hell,” she ground out. “I suppose you are going to tell me it all ‘looks just like Earth’?”

      “Hardly that,” he said with a frown. “In fact, I must warn you not to go outside of this house without me at first. It can be very dangerous for one who is unfamiliar with the nature of this place.”

      “How convenient,” she said with snide sarcasm. “If I believe you, I might stay here cowering in fear of the unknown and not attempt escape. Nice try.”

      “I’m quite serious,” Julian said sharply. “This is no ploy. I have no reason to keep you within these walls except to keep you safe from outside harm. It is not as though you can run back home or escape to somewhere else.”

      Asia couldn’t help but feel a little bit rattled by how off-the-cuff confident he seemed of that.

      “And you just happen to speak English here?” she asked shrewdly.

      “No. I know English from my time in America and other countries of Earth. Those who are native Beneath speak a language of the mind and of energy. Again, your species has a sense of it in things like body language. It may take a little time, but you will come to comprehend us quite well eventually.”

      “Like hell I will. There isn’t going to be any ‘eventually.’ I want to go back home.”

      “You cannot.”

      She’d known he was going to say that. Thirteen missing girls backed the truth of his words.

      Shit!

      “Kenya! She’s here? Beneath?” she demanded, struggling to sit up and being frustrated by the lack of her body’s response.

      “Yes, zini. Not in this village at the moment, but she is Beneath. She is safe, alive and really quite happy, I assure you.”

      “You’ll forgive me if your assurances don’t mean squat to me,” she hissed at him. “My sister loved her life just the way it was. She loves me. There is no way she would willingly go anywhere without me.”

      “Well, she isn’t without you any longer, now is she?” he pointed out. “However,” he added baldly, “she was not unwilling when she came here. Unlike your circumstances, she readily volunteered to come.”

      “You are a liar! This is all a bunch of bullshit! Let me up! Let me go!”

      She shoved against him, her fingers batting against him like ineffective little moths.

      “I do not lie. I may conceal certain truths, but I do not lie.” He had the nerve to sound highly offended. “In time you will speak to Kenya for yourself. For now, I can prove nothing to you until you rest and regain your strength. Take your time. If I am lying, you can prove me a liar just as well later as now. I will not harm you. I will not…” He hesitated and seemed to edit himself. “There will not be a repeat of what happened before without your permission. Had I any choice I would not have taken you like that. But there are laws here. Chief among them is that no one who learns of us can remain on Earth. The damage and danger it could cause to every plane would be horrendous. It is the one universal rule among the planes. Earth is to remain unaware of us…at least empirically. As I said, you have a sense of our existence. The trouble is that, as a species, humans are too volatile to enter the planes en masse. Very delicate creatures live in these places in a very delicate balance. These balances have been disrupted before, and even now we suffer for it. But I will explain that another time. Please rest.”

      He reached out to caress a thumb over her cheek, and Asia was glad to have the satisfaction of jerking away from his unwelcome touch. His tenderness was just as disturbing now as ever. She watched him rise away from her and there was a creak of ropes as his weight left the bed. As soon as he was gone, she inspected her surroundings. There was no solid door to the room. He had passed through a curtain of dense, heavy beadwork that shined and glittered like strung gems. The bed, she realized, really was like a hammock. Ropes secured it to the woven walls at several points on three sides, the only open side the one he had left from. The room was round, like the single leaf of СКАЧАТЬ