Between by Kerry Schafer Page A

by this sudden intrusion of the ineffable on her attempts to order her life, her worry over her mother and Brett and her failure in losing the globes to Jehenna so stupidly, a secret exultation began to grow. Her childhood belief that there were realities beyond this one, whole unexplored realms of space and time, began to reassert itself, as though all the years of unbelief had been the dream.
    Little by little her mind quieted. She felt her body go easy, breathing slow and regular, heart pumping blood on a journey through arteries and arterioles and capillaries, then returning through the network of veins. A constant, smoothly repeating cycle as rhythmic as the movement of stars and planets beyond.
    Never had she felt more awake and aware, tuned to a precise focus of attention that included the sounds of her body, the tiny noises made by the apartment at night, the humming of a quiet town outside her windows.
    She came to understand that there was another sound. Not new, although she’d never noticed it before. It had always been there, beneath all of the other noise, but she had not been tuned to it. Now it drew her, and she stepped out of bed, slipped into sweatpants and her favorite big shirt, and padded out of her bedroom to investigate.
    A stone wall stretched across her living room. High as the ceiling, it reached from wall to wall, intersecting the sofa right down the middle.
    Surely this was a dream.
    That was her first thought, but she felt too awake for a dream. Her hand sought out the pendant and found it. As she enclosed it in a fist, it pulsed against her fingers. The sound intensified, a low vibration matching the rhythm of the pendant. A rectangular shape appeared in the wall. A door.
    Vivian approached, laid her hand against it, and gave a tentative push.
    The door swung open. Instead of the rest of her apartment—the other half of the sofa, the computer desk, the window—a dark cavern lay before her. The entrance was illuminated feebly by the electric lights of her apartment, the rest of it an inky blackness into which she couldn’t see.
    Behind her, warm light, an ordinary world. An instinct told her that if she turned away now, climbed back into bed and pulled the covers over her head, the wall and the cavern would be gone by morning. There was no need to take a single step into the unknown waiting for her.
    Except for this: Isobel missing. Arden burned from the inside out. Brett freezing under the power of something unseen. These things could not be ignored, and neither could the reality of this dark chamber.
    Clutching the pendant for courage and luck, Vivian entered the cavern. Her bare feet slid a little on smooth stone. The air smelled of minerals and eons of time. For an instant a whiff of something hot, there and gone. Over her shoulder she caught one more look at her apartment, neat, ordinary, familiar.
    The door snapped shut.
    Only then was she able to see what had not been visible before: filaments of light, winding about each other in a complex dance, chiming like rung crystal wherever they touched.
    Too beautiful. Too intense. A glass must feel like thiswhen the high note strikes it, in the instant before it shatters. It was impossible to move, to think, to do anything other than stand there as the woven symphony of light and sound vibrated through her body.
    After a time she became aware that her feet were moving, following the play of light through the darkness.
    Summoned.
    The thought came to her from somewhere outside herself. This was no accident. This door had always been waiting for her, waiting for the moment when she was able to hear the call. With every step the lights grew brighter and more vibrant, the sound louder. Nothing existed outside the light and sound.
    Until there was also heat.
    A gentle warmth at first, radiating from ceiling, walls, floor, growing in intensity. And with it, a smell of hot rock, of a clean and smokeless burning, every step hotter and hotter until the