Gateway to December

Gateway to December

Light thinks that it is the fastest, but it is not. Light arrives only to find that the dark, is always there first, waiting for it…

The shrill sound of the alarm clock is what woke Alex up. She blinked open her eyes, still thick with sleep. She stared at t he alarm clock for a long time – either she was fascinated by the red flashing lights, or she was having a contest with the machine to see who would give in first.

As always, the alarm clock won.

Alex tapped the SNOOZE button with the palm of her hand, ending its nasally buzzing. Her head tried to find the pillow again while her legs swung over to the side, the rest of her sitting up on the edge of her bed. She cursed herself in unintelligible slurs as she heaved herself up and trudged, half asleep, towards her bathroom.

“Morning, Peach,” she mumbled as the orange cat burst into the room, stopping her at the bathroom door to rub against her legs. He meowed a bright and optimistic, “Good morning, Alexandria, dear! Lovely day, isn’t it?” She scratched him behind the ears before shutting the door on him.

One shower and a fight with overly-tangled hair later, and Alex jumped down the steps two at a time into the kitchenette. Peach flicked his tail and meowed another greeting from atop the kitchen table. In between his paws was a dead baby rabbit, its neck bitten and still bleeding.

Alex petted him again, wrinkling her nose at the little body at the cat’s feet. “Listen, Peach, I know you appreciate me feeding you when critters are scarce and not keeping you out in the cold in the dead of Winter, but I don’t need any more dead rodent carcasses left on the porch or on the table or especially in my bed. I provide the food and shelter; you provide the company, deal?”

Peach still looked disappointed when she picked up the rabbit with a paper towel and tossed it down the garbage chute. It was as if that rabbit, like all the other things he had brought in for her, would give enlightenment to match a Zen monk’s if consumed. Weird cat, she thought.

After disinfecting the table top and pushing the feline off of it, Alex grabbed a quick breakfast of pop tarts, chased it down with milk, and grabbed her backpack. Peach stopped her at the door, latching a paw and his teeth into the leg of her jeans, tugging fiercely.

“Peach, quit it!” she ordered, shaking him off of her leg. “Jesus, what’s gotten into you? I’ll be back at lunch, same as always, okay?”

He meowed pitifully, as if his golden eyes were pleading her to stay. They could curl up in the living room – she would have the fluffy sleeping area from which he is not allowed, and he would climb up on the heater-with-pictures-and-voices for a nap. She could stare at the moving pictures all day, and he would not bother her, not one bit. Just stay.

Alex was disturbed by the cat’s sudden, strange behavior, and opened the door to the blustery winds outside. She glanced back one last time at her feline roommate to find him looking similar to that Puss in Boots off of that one movie with the talking donkey and the big green ogre. She looked away quickly, locking the door behind her.

What’s with that cat? she wondered, crossing her arms and bracing herself as she walked into a straight headwind. He had never done that before when she was leaving the house to help with the garage sale. When she left, he would usually just either go out the door with her to torment another poor creature, or he would take a nap on the rug in the bathroom for five and a half hours. She could not remember for the life of her when Peach had ever been so desperate as to beg her to stay home.

Alex shivered, but she knew that it wasn’t from the cold, unforgiving wind.

“There you are, Alex,” Laura exclaimed, juggling three small boxes in her artificially-tanned arms. “Can you take some of these?”

Alex rushed over and took two of the boxes from her younger cousin, using her chin to clamp them in place as they walked to the open garage to arrange the things properly. “Am I really that late?” she asked, struggling a little with the boxes.

“No,” Laura said simply, setting her lone box on the floor and making sure her bleach-blond hair hadn’t moved a single strand out of place. “Mom wanted to get here early, to see if there was anything in the basement she might want.”

Alex stifled a growl. Laura was not so bad once you got to know her – sure, the thirteen-year-old was a little too intoned with keeping herself looking like Malibu Barbie, but who’s perfect? It was her mother that made Alex sick. Aunt Cindy was tall, naturally blond, had blue eyes, was statuesque – something you would probably think a Roman empress might have looked like – but she was not as morale as her thousand-year-old look-alike.

Aunt Cindy was a shop-lifting, pick-pocketing, side-winding business woman. But, since her line of work (tricking the elderly out of retirement money, falsifying wedding licenses for young, inexperienced couples who wanted to run away together without being traced, etc.) did not pay as well as it used to in the good-old days, she had come down to just being a thief.

Sure, she had her excuses: “They don’t need this,”; “I’ll just take this old piece of junk off your hands,” or, her latest “She’s dead, anyways – what are you, Egyptian?”, every single one more infuriating than the last. Aunt Cindy would take anything she got her hands on, too – let it be a priceless men’s watch or a toilet seat with the words “Eat Shit” written in cursive on it, you had better lock it up tight.

Laura opened her box and started labeling the prices of its contents, Alex following suit. The blond tween babbled as she worked, talking about school and parties and friends and how this idiotic old bat had given her an “F” in some class because she had skipped the period about twenty times and just about everything else but Corvettes and water beetles.

Alex “ooh”-ed and “no way”-ed when necessary, not paying any intimate attention to her cousin’s personal life.

Suddenly, some kind of up-beat, inappropriate rap song exploded from out of nowhere. Alex jumped to her feet, looking around frantically.

Laura gave her a weird look. “Damn, Alex, chill. I got a text.” With that, she pulled out a tiny, sleek cell phone that probably had a make-up applier hooked to the back somewhere, pressed a few buttons at rapid speed, and started laughing hysterically.

“Ha ha! Alex, come look at what Champaign sent me! It’s totally sick!”

Now it was Alex’s turn to give the weird look. “Um, no thanks; I have a pretty weak stomach.”

“Uh, duh.” She rolled her eyes, like her older cousin was mentally challenged. “Sick means completely and utterly cool. C’mon, look!” she urged, holding up the cell phone.

Before Alex could comprehend what it was, the most annoying voice in the entire world echoed around the walls of the garage.

“Alex, I’m glad you’re here,” Aunt Cindy called, a fake smile plastered on her conniving features as she clicked in high heels across the concrete floor over to the girls. Laura hardly noticed – she was sending a partial-conversation two hundred miles an hour to a person called “Campaign”.

Alex smiled; more like grimaced. “Hello, Aunt Cindy.”

Aunt Cindy appraised her briefly, disapproval clear in her beady blue eyes. From what Alex could gather, her lack of beauty and fashion, compared to the mother and daughter, was like comparing a monarch family to a street beggar.

“I want you to bring the rest of the things in the attic down and mark them accordingly. If you find something interesting, go ahead and take it. Hurry up.”

She must have already gone through the attic for anything remotely valuable earlier to be so generous as to leave her niece with the choice of some old quilts or a broken China doll from seventeen-hundred-something. Alex sighed heavily, getting up again and walking past the Ice Queen to the door leading into the house.

The laundry room was completely empty, not yet dusted or vacuumed since Grandma Bridgett had cleaned it a few months ago before she had died. When Alex opened the second door into the living room, this was bare as well, save for a few boxes marked DO NOT SELL – Aunt Cindy’s findings no doubt.

Alex climbed the staircase that wound around in a circle in graceful patterns, memories of sliding down the banister flooding back, deepening her depression. Grandma Bridgett had been one of the few people in her family that was not made of Botox or Silicon; she was more concerned about comfort than style. She used to use the fashion magazines she got in the mail to line the cage of her faithful old cockatiel, Benjamin, whom Aunt Cindy had already sold. The sight of bird droppings on the once-beautiful women made the younger Alex disgusted of fairness, not wanting a bird to poo on her own face.

A smile crept across her face as she remembered when she and her grandma had gone down to the ditch after it had rained to collect earthworms, feeding them to Benjamin.

The best, prettiest, smartest grandmother in the entire world was on Earth, and the People in Charge had suddenly decided she was too good to keep out of the Pearly Gates.

Alex made it to the top of the stairs, and flicked on the dying lights. The dim yellow bulb did not help much, but the dusty room was visible by the sunlight that shone through the round window in the back of the room. She had been right, of course – Aunt Cindy had taken everything interesting from the attic and had either sold it or kept it for herself. All that was left were old rocking horses, splintered; soiled Raggedy Ann dolls; old chests left open to reveal hundred-year-old quilts; a broken Lay-Z-Boy that stubbornly refused to put the footrest down; and an old chessboard on top of a table painted white to reveal more dust and only three legs.

She walked over to the crippled table first, intrigued by the chessboard and its ancient figures of horses and castles. The white figures were probably made of oak; the black might be the same, only painted.

Taking the smallest box in the corner, she brushed all of the pieces carefully into it. She picked up the board, and a flash of silver made her do a double-take.

Lying on the table, clear of dust in an impossible manner, was a necklace. It was expensive-looking. She could tell because the gem was not plastic but actual crystal, and the band seemed to be made of real silver.

Instead of a simple string or chain to hand around the neck, there was a thick strand of silver with an intricate pattern, slimming down gradually until it ended by attaching the two ends with an oval. In the middle of the oval was a glistening sapphire. Something like silver veins twisted around the crystal, making wondrous streams of chrome across ocean-blue stone.

Alex gaped at the jewelry, wondering in amazement if it could possibly be real. It must have cost a fortune. How had her grandmother, a woman of simplicity and middle class, kept something so incredibly breathtaking in a musty old attic?

Unable to find a reason, she set the chessboard in the box, not capable of tearing her eyes away from the necklace. She hesitated, reached for it, hesitated again. Alex was not sure of the reason why she did not just snatch it was the fear of disappointment that it indeed was not real, or….She could not put her finger on it, but something was wrong about the necklace. It was beautiful, dazzling – but also foreboding.

Finally, she convinced herself that if she did not take it, Aunt Cindy would get her greedy, manicured claws on it, and she could not bear the thought of something so pretty being worn around that woman’s neck.

She picked it up. Nothing happened.

Alex sighed, trying to calm herself down. It was just a necklace. No big deal, it would not try to choke her when she picked it up or wore it or anything.

The thought of wearing it made her curious – in a more devious way. If Aunt Cindy saw her wearing something so valuable as the necklace, it would really make her blood boil. Even with the concept of making her thieving aunt green with jealousy and red with anger, she could not bring herself to put it on. No matter how many hues she would like to see the Roman imposter downstairs, she could not make her hands move the jewelry to her neck.

“Alex, hurry up! This isn’t time to dawdle – I have to drop some things off at my office before I take Laura to her party, and I’m the one who had to lock up!”

Hearing the voice of the woman she despised gave her new strength, and she quickly wrapped the band around her throat, hooking the tiny latch in the back with a click that sounded louder than usual; much too louder than usual.

Several things happened at once. It did not happen in slow motion, like in the movies, but it definitely happened.

Aunt Cindy stopped yelling up the stairs very suddenly, like someone had clamped a hand over her mouth to finally make her shut the hell up. All time seemed to stop, yet it still played in motion.

A source-less wind suddenly came in a powerful gust, chasing itself around the attic, shrieking, howling, laughing, knocking things over with its playfully dangerous romp. Alex put her arms over her head protectively, falling to her knees and crouching down to avoid being hit with flying objects. The powerful wind blew for a few more minutes, and, just like Aunt Cindy, abruptly stopped. Alex looked around warily, searching for what had caused it all as she stood. The window could not open at all, and the attic was air-tight. Only scattered and broken items were strewn about the wooden floor; the box had tipped over and all the little people of the chess set had spilled out. A knight rolled to her feet, using the toe of her shoe as a stopper, and looked up at her with sightless eyes.

Unnerved, but not daring to kick it across the room, she nudged it slightly so it would roll away from her.

Alex absently reached up to finger the sapphire in the hollow of her throat.

“Ouch!” she whispered, instinctively putting her index finger in her mouth. She tasted blood. She immediately looked down at the necklace. Tiny silver and sapphire spikes had sprung up where her fingers had touched it, looking more like snowflake fuzz than something that could pierce skin. As she watched, wide-eyed, she little lances receded back into the necklace, like melting ice. The sapphire shone with a curiously luminous light.

Suddenly, there was a huge explosion from downstairs, as if a cannon had gone off or a bomb had been placed in the lower portion of the house. Alex jumped at the sound, her heart ready to burst from her ribcage as she gasped for air. Watching the doorway to the attic, the hair on the nape of her neck and on her arms rose. Something was coming. Something very bad.