Brillica
an excerpt

1. Visions, Something More Than

It was like standing in the shadow of a jagged cliff, one crumbling and ready to crash down on top of me at any moment. It was always in the back of my mind. When I met a person, when I glanced at a tree, every time a bird trilled, it reminded me of that place. It haunted me.

It was fun once, new and exciting; something changed. I got scared. I became afraid I'd forget the way home. I was terrified of what would happen if darkness crept in before I made it out.

But I couldn't stop going any more than I could stop sleeping. I felt like a little kid who got her hand slapped every time she reached for the cookie jar. But I tasted the freedom and I couldn't give it up. I would have stayed forever, only, it terrified me to think of what might happen after dark.

I'm talking about the visions.

Yeah, I know. Lots of people say they have visions. I don't believe them either. But I don't believe them because I know what real visions are. I don't believe them because I don't see the haunted, scared, been-awake-for-days exhaustion lining their fake smiles. I don't see the rings of fear around their eyes.

And no person having real visions would dare speak about them. Would you? Try this for an interesting dinner topic:

Oh, hey mom, by the way... I've been traveling to another world in my sleep. No, not sneaking out the window, it's not like that. Oh, I don't go on purpose; I can't stop... something keeps drawing me there against my better judgment.

Now sit back, relax, watch your father hunt down and kill your boyfriend, and see what color straight-jacket your mom picks out! But that's just what it was like. I can't explain it. I couldn't stop. I had to go every night. I didn't want to, but I had to.

See, I didn't have visions. They had me.

I called the place Brillica, after our cat. It was a weird place and we had one weird cat. Besides, I think the cat knew when I'm gone. She was sort of like my alarm clock. She'd get worried and starts calling for me if I wasn't back before morning... More on that later.

The problem is, there is so much to talk about, I can't very well explain one thing without running into ten other questions that you're sure to wonder about. I guess there's no helping it. You'll just have to be lost, like I was at first.

Let's just go back to the beginning...

Our house was old, really old. It felt like a tree house, nailed together by a couple of ten year olds using old scraps of wood. The entire place was made of wood. Every wall, every floor, everything. When the wind blew, it seemed to come right through the walls.

My dad built the entire place himself. He even cut and planed the wood. As you probably guessed, he's no carpenter. He's worked as a forest ranger for forty-two years in the Ozark Mountains, in southern Missouri. It's an amazing place, a beautiful and wild place. That's my dad's real love: nature.

But I can't blame the fact that the home creaks and groans constantly on him. It wasn't his idea to build it. Kyt—that's my mom, remember—insisted. It had to be on this spot and it had to be built using the enormous tree that they uprooted to make the space. It was her house and it had to be perfect.

Obviously, her idea of perfect and mine don't play together. They just pick up their toys and go home.

Which is why, on my sixteenth birthday, I was huddled under a mass of blankets, cuddling with Buniony, my stuffed, red bunny, and wishing to be anywhere but that house. The moonlight winked in and out of my window as the giant tree outside swayed in the wind. The lantern on my night stand, which was never allowed to go out at night, sputtered with each gale.

Oh, did I mention we had no electricity? No television, no internet, no telephone. I was the only kid on the planet who literally had no friends. I saw other kids once a month, when my dad took me to town. I swear Kyt looked like she would cry, like we might never return, each time we drove off. I could have made friends with those kids, if I was ever allowed to sleep over at their houses or go to their parties, but Kyt was unbelievably protective of me. She never wanted me out of her sight and she never wanted to be anywhere but this house.

I couldn't even walk in the woods unless dad went with me. My room was the only place I was allowed to go without supervision, and even then, the door had to be open. And you could bet she would be standing in it from time to time to make sure I hadn't crept out the window.

She was standing in the doorway now. She never said anything, just stood there and stared at me while I slept. I always pretended to be asleep. It was a sacred moment for her and, no matter how irritated my mom could make me, I didn't want to ruin that: I was “her precious Min”, short for Mindy. I laid there and tried not to shiver, not feeling at all precious.

Brillica, our cat, perked up and Kyt slipped away silently. Not even the cat could move in that house without the floor creaking in protest, but Kyt always could. She was like a special forces elitist, and I wouldn't have been surprised to find her swinging outside my window with her face covered in shoe polish and wearing a pair of night goggles.

Brillica bounded off of the bed and padded downstairs. I didn't understand how that cat could get up in the middle of the night and go out in this to piddle a diddle. I would have frozen to death before I made it down the stairs. If five blankets didn't stop the cold, I didn't see how a little fur could.

I dreamed about Brillica eating flowers. She loved to eat Kyt's flowers. Kyt loved to grow flowers; she could grow anything. She was as at home out here, in this tree-hut-house, eating vegetables straight from her garden and walking around barefoot in the winter, as I was out of place. I hated this house. I hated this life. And as I fell asleep, I had a strange, sinking feeling, as if I were dropping right through the floorboards and into another world.

Brillica looked up from her flower-eating and mewed once. That odd cat showed up in my dreams all the time, out of nowhere. She was black and white and striped in a nearly perfect checker pattern. You could use her as a checker board if you could get her to lie still long enough. She faded away with the house, the cold, and with everything.

I felt cool stone beneath my bare feet. There was a cool breeze as well, but it felt like an oven after my room. The feeling of the stone was so vivid that I ran my hands over the polished gray rock in wonder. Then I stood and turned a full circle, taking in the distant peaks and towering mountains that surrounded the flat expanse of rock. They were miles away, at the least. There was nothing between me and them except bare, smooth rock. I walked in a circle, enjoying the feel of the stone beneath my feet, with Buniony tucked under my arm.

The stone was rough in places, in fact, most everywhere. I stepped back onto the smooth spot and studied it, then I walked a circle again. It formed an asterisk that extended in each direction as far as I could see. They were like paths worn into the stone. One headed directly towards a towering spike of rock that dwarfed the other mountains. It was so giant that it had other mountains sprouting out of it, like warts. Three of the paths disappeared into the mountains that circled the plateau and the last headed towards the only break in the mountains that I could see.

I didn't want to have anything to do with the giant peak and I didn't really want to go hiking through mountains, so I chose the last and started walking towards the break in the peaks. I suppose I could have stood there all night, but that hardly sounded fun. I was happy to be anywhere but that old house and I didn't want to wake up in that cold bed again. So I walked.

The path was easy to follow now. It ran ahead, reflecting the light of the sun in a perfectly straight line. Everything here, including my hands and feet, had an odd glow, as if the light were somehow more pure. The sun overhead was more white than yellow; so white it seemed blue. It reminded me of the moon, only much brighter. The light turned everything more white and brilliant than it should have been, as if it ran through a filter that screened away all the yellow.

Buniony was nearly maroon, my skin milky white, the pastel blue nightgown nearly as vivid as the sky. The stone looked tinged in green and the sky itself seemed washed of blue, like covered in a sheet of thin silk.

The walk was longer than I expected. By the time I reached the edge of the flat stone, my feet were blistered and my arms tired from shifting Buniony back and forth between them. The odd colored sun had dropped almost to the mountains, and the sky was brightening to green-blue.

The leaf was tinted purple by the odd light. The bottom side glowed neon green when turned up to the light. I dropped the leaf in the only pocket on my blue night gown and looked around. I was tired and the edge of the plateau was still some distance. I wanted to reach the edge of the plateau and see what was beyond, but dreams shouldn't be tiring and painful. The blisters on my feet were getting painful.

I decided to head back to the center of the plateau and try to wake up. It didn't make much sense, but nothing in dreams did, and if I thought it would work, it should. It was my dream, after all.

The walk back was long and tough. The light faded into a brilliant emerald sunset and turned the entire plateau into a shimmering lake of violet. The beauty of it helped me to forget my feet for a time and I reached the center just after it faded to darkness, wearied, swaying, and dying of thirst.

The stone felt nice and I laid back on it, staring up at the night sky. There were stars, but they were all in the wrong places. The moon was rising over the mountains in what was presumably the east, but it looked wrong too. It was red and angry, like the sun during a wildfire, and it was missing all its dark spots and patterns. I was too tired to wonder about it. I sat up and wondered how to get out of this dream.

The moon cast a yellow glow over the land, giving the scene the impression that it was daylight, but like it was being viewed through a piece of black cloth, or on a movie screen that just been turned off and hadn't faded completely yet. I studied the stone and the distant mountains, licking my lips and wanting of water. Then I saw something move.

I stood slowly, feeling worried for the first time. It moved again and I felt a cold chill. It was something alive. I had traveled an entire day and seen nothing alive. But now something was. It didn't move like a person or like a forest creature. It moved... something between the two. I saw it again, a hunched streak caught for a moment in the yellow light. It was running towards me and I decided that I didn't want to be here when it arrived.

I struggled to wake up, to imagine myself back in my bed, cold and covered in blankets. I curled up on the ground with Buniony and closed my eyes, trying to will myself back into bed. It seemed to be working, I could hear Brillica moaning at the foot of the bed. But I was still terrified and when I cracked my eyes, the plateau was still there, bathed in dimmed sunlight.

Then I felt my mom in the doorway. I could always feel my mom in the doorway. Her stare was like a weight that pressed on me in my dreams. I bolted upright in the bed and stared around the room. Brillica stopped mid-moan, sitting in the door to my room, and bounded into my lap, nuzzling her nose against mine and tickling me with her “whickers”.

Mom always called them “whickers” instead of whiskers, saying that I had called them that when I was a toddler. She thought it was cute as much as I found it annoying. Right now, she wasn't giving me a cute look. She tilted her head and walked over to me, her long streams of hair falling around us like a veil. Brillica pawed at her hair and let out a questioning mew. Mom stuck her tongue at the cat and pushed it away, then locked her eyes on me.

She touched my shoulder and my cheek, then ran a hand down my hair. Her hand paused, then reached into my pocket and pulled out the leaf. The leaf! My heart went cold. I couldn't decide if I was more terrified to see it or of what I would do when my mom asked where it came from. She flipped it over several times in her hand. In the lantern light, it looked almost normal, though it was still tinted slightly blue on one side and yellow on the other.

“Nice leaf,” she said. She didn't sound like she thought it was nice. “Don't let your father catch you with things like this in the house. You know how he is about clutter and dirt.”

I nodded. She kissed my forehead and pushed me back into bed. “Nightmare?”

I nodded again. It was the cat, of course. It always sat at the door and mewed when I had nightmares. But the leaf! This time it had been no nightmare. Thoughts blurred through my mind. Perhaps I was going mad. Maybe I had sleep walked. Maybe that weird cat had brought the leaf, and the strange dreams.

Mom tucked the covers tight around me and looked out the window, unfocused. “We should have built your room closer to the fireplace.” She frowned in a way that suggested she might go on all night about 'should haves'. Then she patted Brillica on the head and went out, with my leaf in hand.

I didn't sleep again that night...