The Disappearnce

Chapter One

                “Aw, come on Mom!” Nerine implored. “We could hit ten or even more of those fantastic costume shops before dark!”

                “Dear, I’m quite tired now. We can come back in the morning.” I sighed, exasperated. She’d been like this all day.

                “Just one more shop?” she wheedled.

“Alright, one more shop. But that’s it young lady!” I chuckled tiredly. Teenagers always had so much energy! Especially her. It matched her red hair and fiery hazel eyes, eyes that changed color with her mood.

 Typical teenager. Well, not so typical. She seemed to be developing differently from most teenagers, for some reason they didn’t know yet. Her thighs were the only part of her that seemed to be growing. She was fourteen and still wasn’t getting breasts. It was quite worrying to a mother who had got them at eleven.

There was also how that orphanage had said they’d gotten her. My eyes darkened. My jury was still out on that subject. Not that we hadn’t wanted a child. We’d been devastated to find out that Alfred was sterile. We dearly loved children.

They said that she had shown up in the tide, playing with a fish, a mysteriously dry note lying next to her. They hadn’t interfered with it because they were scared of it. They’d given it too me-hesitantly and with trembling fingers-to examine, because I was curious what sort of paper stayed dry in water. I’m not a particularly superstitious person, but when I did some tests on it, I took every precaution I could think of. I first carefully copied the message on to another piece of paper, in case this one was destroyed.

To begin, when Alfred was out doing errands, I placed it under the faucet, and turned it on. When I picked up the paper?

It was dry. Completely and utterly dry.

I then tried burning it, but when it was drawn out of the fire it was utterly unharmed. Since then I have tried numerous ways to damage it, as curiosity turned into fascination and fascination into wonder. I happen to be a molecular scientist, and a good one at that. I studied it as closely as I dared.

I discovered that the outer layer encased the paper with high-grade asbestos while in fire, and a tough, flexible plasticized material in water. In sulfuric acid it turned into ceramic! I looked closer and discovered that the process was instantaneous, it adjusted seamlessly to its environment.

To this day I could not find why. It appeared to be some sort of bacteria reacting to the environment, but what sort of bacteria could react that quickly? More importantly, what sort of bacteria could actually change the molecular structure of a solid just by touching it? It didn’t seem to ingest any chemicals.

Yet what worries me more are the words on the paper…

Children of four shall come together,

With two to help them on their quest,

Yet one shall turn to the Dreamer’s side,

 But the truth is within his chest.

 

This is the child of open sea,

With a jewel of aquamarine,

She shall lead the group of six,

Her name…is Nerine

“Mom! Come on! We’ve got some serious shopping to do!”

“All right Pumpkin, I’m coming.”  I sighed again. There was time to worry about all of that later. For the here and now? Shopping awaits!

“What about this one?” She said looking at a light chainmail.

“No, it doesn’t look quite… armory enough.” I wish my stepmother would get a clue.

“What about this one?” She held up a silvery gray suit with a neon plume.

“Gray? Yech.”

“You barely even glanced at it! How do you know you don’t like it? Do you really want my help?”

“Look, it’s not your fault. I just don’t see anything ‘warrior mermaid’ type. Can I poke around by myself for a little?” Please?

“….Ok Sweetie. If it makes you happy”

“I’ll meet you by the Café.”

Now I can finally get down to business! “Hello?” I called to an employee. “Do you have anything that could be categorized as ‘warrior mermaid’? I need it for a school play.”

“Sure! But I’m not sure we have any more in stock. This thin, wiry guy came in and bought up most of our stock.”

“That’s all right! I only need one. I’m the lead part. There’s this warrior mermaid that was sent by water spirits to learn about the mortal world… anyway, do you have it?”

“Here, I found one!”

She took it from him and held it in utter awe for a few seconds. It… it’s stunning.

The armor part was sea foam tan, and it had creamy peaks at the shoulders. At the bottom of a shallow v-neckline was a jewel that shifted colors, dancing like the sea itself. The chest had a built in place for breasts that was covered by a clamshell design. It flared gently at the waist, and attached there were some leggings.

They were all the colors of flame, and would seem to flicker as she walked. They had a shallow arc of a fin reaching from just above the knee to mid-calf, and a triangular fin curved sharply out from two inches below the mid-calf, then reattached at the ankle.

“I’ll take it!”

“Okay. It’s 29.95$.”

“Here you go!” I can’t wait to tell mom! She’ll just love it!

I was waiting in the Café, sipping a milk shake when Nerine walked in, and carrying a large package and a silly grin. She showed it to me through the plastic.

“So… Do you like it?” She asked timidly.

“Why, it’s lovely! Have you tried it on yet?” I said excitedly.

“No…” She rubbed her toe on the floor. “Aren’t you going to chew me out for going over our usual price limit?”

“No! You finally find something we both like and you think the price matters? We may be teaching you the value of money, but my work with the government on cancer treatments brings in enough money that we can splurge a little on things like this.” I carefully placed it in the cart.

“Let’s go home.” She looked around nervously, scanning the crowd. “You’re not supposed to talk about it in public. There could be spies here!”

I rolled my eyes. Really? Spies in a mall? That was the silliest-

“Mom! Behind you!” she cried out. I turned around just in time to see the girl vanish in a whirlwind of glittering water. All that was left was a few shining droplets.

“Sandwich baggie!” I snapped.

“Here, I’ve got one!”

I carefully brushed the liquid into the bag.

“Now let’s take it back home.” I stood up. Unsurprisingly, a crowd had formed.

A mall cop sauntered up to us, occasionally taking a bite out of his doughnut.

“’scuse me Ma’am, but I be’lieve thets oors. We need it for testin’ in th’ lab.”

“And why exactly do you think that?” I said scornfully. “For your information, I am Clara L. Barkly of the NCI, specifically in the Division of Cancer Epidemiology and Genetics, working on molecular mutation!” spittle flew from my lips as I raged on at the officer. “What makes you think that your labs are any better than mine?”

The officer realized his mouth was hanging open, and snapped it shut. “Well nothing… Except yer a wimmen. Yer not fit fer yer post.” He said condescendingly, like being male was the only qualification needed.

“Not fit for my post?” I said in a dangerously silky voice, the one I used at my most furious. My pitch and volume climbed as I went on with my tirade. “I spent the twenty-six years since I was eighteen working up to my post and now you, a minor policeman seems to feel that, because he’s male, he knows my job better than I do.”

I said the word male like it was something dragged out of the compost bin that I didn’t really want to touch.

“Does being male mean that you inherently know something that I, with twenty-six years of hard work, sweat, and tears behind me, don’t? Does it make you have a stronger will? Have a more flexible mind? A higher I. Q.?”

“No Ma’am!”

“Then stand back and let me deal with this as a member of the legal police force should.”

“Yes Ma’am!” He said, snapping to attention.

“Much better.” I snipped. I lowered my eyebrows and pitched my voice more deeply and said with an air of quiet menace “Now. My daughter and I are going to checkout. We are going to then go home. We are taking this” - I waved the baggie in front of him - “With us. We are not to be stopped. We are not to be in any way, shape or form, killed. Do you understand?”

“Y-y-es m-m-ma’am!” He stammered, looking as nervous as a politician hooked up to a lie detector.

“Good.” I said in a voice that could cut diamonds. “And goodbye.”

“Mom?” I asked tentatively, as she was still fuming over how that cop had acted toward her. “Are you sure he deserved that? I mean, he was presumptuous and all that, but still…”

“He got what was coming to him.” Mom said shortly.

“Well… He just had a different point of view, right? What’s so wrong about that?”

She twisted in her seat and glared at me, not a particularly safe thing for the driver to do. “He was technically breaking the law, for one thing. Also, he offended just about every woman there. Any action other than the one that I took would have been most commonly perceived as weakness; therefore I took the only available action that wouldn’t leave me a social outcast.” Mom shrugged. “To put it simply, I did what I could.”

“But don’t you wonder if there was a better way to do it? I mean, that man won’t be able to show his face again!” I thought out loud.

“Actually,” said Mom thoughtfully “That may be a good thing. I know that the mall will pay him a large enough severance package that he could move to somewhere that he would be a total unknown. It would give him a chance to remake himself, a chance he now sorely needs. Also, he might actually gain some-“

“Mom! The costume is gone!”

“What?”

“I just realized! It disappeared when that girl did. That girl was around six, right? She must have seen the ‘shiny’, and touched it out of curiosity. It was what caused all this. It’s the logical conclusion.”

“You’re probably right, but we need more evidence. Tell me everything you noticed.” Mom was now in interrogation mode. I didn’t leave out a thing.

“Well, she was looking our way, then…”

                Hm. According to Nerine, the girl had looked, flashed out a hand, and touched a hole in the package; then disappeared in her own personal hurricane.

                She wasn’t lying. That much I could definitely tell. I would need to think about this…

                I felt a sense of relief as we pulled into the driveway of our house. It wasn’t much of a house, but it was theirs. It was a simple little Victorian affair, painted light yellow.

My room was the only unusual thing about it. My room was a turret off from the second story. It was obviously meant to be a chapel of some sort, and it was clearly old. It still had the original stained glass in it.

My dad had offered to remodel it for me, but all I had let him do was scrape the cheesy yellow paint off the walls, revealing the clean white cedar I’d known was the cause of the soft, spicy scent that lingered in the air.

The stained glass was clearly quite old, and made by hand. It had those little imperfections in it, showing that a human had made it, and made it with love, for the imperfections were truly tiny.

But what had made me beg for this room, this room out of all the others, was the pictures. There were five, one for each side of the heptagonal tower that faced outward.

The one farthest left as you entered the room showed an undersea reef, teeming with life. The window next to that one showed a bubbling Hawaiian volcano. It looked like it was about to explode. The rightmost one was a mountaintop with pines, and next to it was a canyon of great beauty. And the middle one? It was full of pink mist, and in it floated a lovely Asian woman with a pale blue ball. It hovered between her palms, one on top, and the other on bottom. There was one thing that made me wonder. There was a round socket above each picture, like there used to be a jewel there. Also, the molding was shaped like a tiara around each socket.

The relief I felt was really two reliefs, one of being in a familiar place, the other of not being interrogated by my mother any more. She had asked question after question, with no end I could’ve seen. She’s a wonderful person, but she liked to get all the details. She could have made a wonderful detective.

The relief had a companion, though. It was excitement. Her friend David was coming over! I’ve known him since preschool. He was an orphan, just like me. However he was from a different orphanage. He had light brown hair and liquid golden eyes. He was quick to anger, but quicker to laugh. And over the last few months our friendship has grown into something a little… more.

When I look at him, my blood runs hot and quick. My heart pumps faster, seemingly to make sure that I couldn’t think about anything but his strong muscles, toned and rippling golden from playing on his soccer team, the Hamsters. His deep golden eyes, that seemed to look right through me. His-

Doorbell! I was up and running in a flash.

My first thought as she answered the door: God she’s lovely. From her creamy skin to her fiery freckles.

“What do you want to do?” She asked, blushing.

I felt my own face turn red.

“Just sit in the gazebo for a little.” I said, rubbing now-pink ears. Something flickered in my peripheral vision. I looked. It appeared to be a paper, stuck to a window by excessive use of tape.

“What’s that for?” I inquired.

“I don’t know.” She replied. “Let’s go and look.”

We went over and read the following:

‘Do not worry. The girl is safe. To find her, the first place you need to go is Puget Sound. Let us say this: Neither of you is what you appear.’

“All right.” She said after a pregnant pause. “Now how do we get there?”

6:30 already? My sleepy head thought as the alarm blared. Then I realized what day it was. I leaped out of bed and was downstairs and ready for school in record time.

“Hi Mom! It’s school fair day today. Can I get some money?”

“Sure thing, honey! Will fifty dollars do?” questioned Mom.

“Yeah, that’s plenty! I’ll be sure to bring you back something.” Just maybe not what you expect, I added in my head. I didn’t like lying to my adopted mother. I liked her. She took me in and fed, clothed and educated me for the past eleven years. Also, lying didn’t come easy to me. I wasn’t that kind of kid, nor did I want to be. I had force each word out through my paper-dry mouth, and simply hope that it sounded plausible.

Last night, I’d filled my back pack with everything I thought of as necessary, form sandwiches to a length of cord. Now, I quickly stuffed in the money.

I felt prepared for anything.

David and I had it all planned out. We would hitchhike to the Rock Springs airport, after taking the bus to the first stop. Then we could catch a flight to Seattle on a corporate plane.

“Hurry up, you’ll miss the bus!”

“Glad you made it.” I said, slipping into the seat next to David.

“Almost didn’t.” he chuckled. “Had to slip some skunk juice into the car.”

“Oog.” I said, wincing. “Couldn’t you have done something a little less… permanent?”

“Yes but you should have seen the look on Shelly’s[1] face!”

We almost fell out of our seats with laughter at the thought of his older sister wrinkling up her prim little nose in disgust. She hated bad smells.

“Anyway, -Oh, we’re here! Come on you!” I tugged on his arm. He just laughed and let me tow him along like an overeager puppy toward the airport.

Well, that was an interesting trip. I thought, glancing over at the fidgeting Nerine sitting next to me. We had been taken pity upon by a sweet old granny, who drove us all the way there, chatting cheerfully about the ‘good old days’. Then when we’d gotten there, she’d grabbed both of our right wrists in one hand, and with her other given us each a strange, ancient coin. ‘For luck’ she’d said with a wink.

“Relax Nerine, our flights due any minute now.”

“All right.” she said, but she didn’t stop wriggling. She was terrified of heights.

I sighed. It was going to be a long trip.

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[1] Shelly was David’s adoptive older sister. They got her so he would have a better example of maturity, but she ended up being so prim that even they played jokes on her. And you know what? She just walks away, her nose in the air.

Author's Note

The first chapter of my first book. Be kind.