Learning to Spell
by GirlyCheerBoy
Chapter 4 - A Total Eclipse of Reality
It had been almost eleven weeks since Kaitie had been "born" into her new life. Every day was a reminder of how things had changed so drastically, literally over night. Sarah was immensely helpful in her time of need during this adjustment - when she needed it. It wasn't but a few days that all of the girls, who began to meet weekly at the very least, noticed that it was hard to remember certain details of that night and before. Some things were just different, and felt true and proper - even when they knew they weren't.
Stacy was the first to realize it, having been experiencing a more mild version of this same phenomena herself already. Kaitie's life was being melded into the fabric of reality... Just as her's was reshaped when she was regressed in age when the girls were first learning to cast. She called this a "reality flux," a term she had gotten off the internet on ESP and Astral Projection websites. Basically, she explained to the rest as she could, this meant that Kaitie's past life as Kurt had been erased when he was changed, and that when Kaitie was made, she had had a life behind her as Kaitie - and what they were feeling was some sort of pull between the two realities they knew.
The idea was mind-boggling and made more than one shake their heads in wonder... But none of them denied that something was unusual about these memories and thoughts. Other things were different too. Kaitie and Sarah's father was alive... This had come as a shock to the girls the first several times they saw him, but now it was a sense of awe and bizarre curiosity over the reality of it. But the most bizarre changes were among their friends. Ashley and Tara seemed to simply vanish into thin air just days after the event. Beth had been the first to make the assumption that the solar eclipse had something to do with the timing, but the four of them couldn't figure out why or how...
As the summer dragged on throughout the hottest weeks on record things slowly settled for the girls. Slowly the life before their miraculous accident (A term they coined from the miracle of Sarah and Kaitie's father being alive again and from the accident from the apparent loss of two friends and that it was completely unplanned.) began to fade into nothing and they found it harder and harder to recall what that life was like, or what from it was real. However, time can not steal what the heart holds on to - only what the mind wills to be let go... It is during the second week of school that the girls got the biggest shock yet...
"Hurry up!" Stacy yelled up at the wide-open window on the second floor. "Kaitie!"
Kaitie dashed to the window and poked her head out. "I'm coming. I'm almost...EEEK!" She shreaked, jerking herself back in and a hand across her chest, covering her not completely buttoned up shirt. "I'll be right...." Whatever else she had said was lost to the softening of the sound by the house, and the deafening crashing and clattering. Kaitie had knocked over her CD tower and jewelry box... again.
"Kaitie..." Sarah said, coming to the open door that joined their rooms, via a common bathroom. "Calm down." She knelt down and helped pick up the 'critical' things - what Kaitie was using right then, or that would stain the carpet. The rest, she decided, could wait until later. Other than that her room was immaculate, as always. "Stacy is early, she is every morning." Sarah turned and walked into the bathroom to finish fixing her hair - not that it appeared it needed it.
"She is?!" Kaitie murmured, scrunchies held in her mouth as she wrestled with the first of what would be two pigtails she was doing her hair in this morning. "That little!" She stomped her foot in mock anger, but in certain frustration. "She changed my clock settings again!" This had been going on for about two weeks now, and Sarah really wished it was over with. Just some phase, she assumed. These two were hardly the poster children for your typical "tween-to-teen" girls.
"Kaitie?" Sarah paused, having a mild ache behind her left eye - the kind that you only get when you eat entirely too much ice cream in entirely too little time. There it was again... Something about Kaitie and Stacy...
"Yea?" She said, pulling her second pigtail tight into the scrunchie and leaning to see if they were even in the mirror. "What's up?" She rolled her eyes upward to peer up at Sarah through the mirror.
"Nevermind." Sarah said, suddenly soft and demure, as if she had just forgotten the entire conversation instead just the question she had to add to it. "I don't remember what I was going to ask." She forced her tone to return to somewhat normal. It wasn't enough to fool Kaitie, but enough to prevent her from pressing.
"Ok." Kaitie said, in a cheerful and giddy upbeat manner. She always seemed to get like this when Stacy was around, or soon to be. No one could quite understand what the two shared that made them such good friends and so uniquely solitary in their conversations and time out of the house. Aside from their weekly meetings with Sarah and Beth, the two were rarely seen... anywhere - and almost always together.
Despite this, Sarah and Kaitie had maitained their long-time pact to write in their "sisterhood book" every night. As Sarah turned she saw this very book, the most recent one. A large ledger with literally hundreds of wide and tall pages... It'd take years to fill it up with their little daily diaries... But they had only just started on this book. There wasn't any other like it... "Hey Kaitie..." She started, feeling that ache return. "What did we write in before this book?" She pointed at the large ledger on the desk that it seemed to fill in the corner of her room.
"Um..." Kaitie knew what she meant, it was the only thing in that corner of Sarah's room, but she couldn't remember. There was nothing. No book, no desk... no sisterhood stories at all... "We didn't have a book." She said, after a second, shaking her head as if it occurred to her that they shouldn't have anyway. "Why would we?"
"What?" Sarah asked, starting to feel an immense piercing in the frontal lobe of her head. "What do you mean? We've done this .... for...." She fell to her knees, bracing against the chair for support. "for..."
"But Sarah, I've only-" Kaitie said, turning and seeing Sarah again for the first time since she pointed. "Oh my god!" She ran over, letting her glitter powder blush fall to the floor. A shattering of crystal went unheard and a small cloud of sparkled dust leapt into the swirling air Kaitie had just vacated.
"Sarah!" She said, kneeling and wrapping her arms around her sister to help her. "Sarah!" Her eyes were twitching wildly back and forth and rolling upward, and her skin felt very cold to the touch. Kaitie, being completely disoriented in all the commotion did the only thing that came to mind... She screamed.
Her mother was first to come into the room and she jerked herself out almost as fast as she'd come in. Moments later their father came in. He had just gotten over to the girls when their mother returned, on the cordless phone. "Yes, we have an emergency." She said, flustered, but not panicked. "My daughter, she's unconscious and she's..." She paused a moment fighting back tears brought on by fear and distress as Sarah began to jerk in wild spasms, her father having trouble just restraining her arms. "She's having some sort of convulsion or spasms all over or something..."
"I AM calm!" She snapped at the phone. She caught herself before she lost her composure and got the address out to the 911 operator as quick as she could. Following the woman's calmly given advice she took Kaitie out of the room and kept talking. They talked, more calmly now, almost all the way to the front door when they heard a single hard knock. "They're here!?" Their mother was surprised, it seemed too fast.
"No, I heard someone knock..." She said to the voice on the other end of the phone. "No one else would be here this early and knock-" She was cut short losing all the breath she had in her lungs as Kaitie opened the door... Kaitie, for her part, was just as shocked, but the reaction it pushed her to was the complete opposite. Stacy collapsed onto the floor sprawling across the threshhold - in the same spasms Sarah was displaying upstairs! Kaitie stood, well leaned against the wall actually, a moment or two dizzy and nauseated from the mirror image of the tremors that wracked her sister upstairs at this very moment.
Her composure broke, her fortitude not up to the task of pushing off all this sudden distress and she collapse. Her mother stammered to the bewildered operator the changes in status in her home, and sat down right there in the entry way, on the floor... She cradled the phone in her arms held tightly against her chest. She was rocking back and forth there when the emergency crews arrived...
Slowly the steady beeping made itself known to Kaitie as she lie in bed. Her arm hurt, her head hurt, she was exhausted but felt restless at the same time. She blinked a few times, slowly getting her eyes to open and adjust to the flourescent lighting the hospital room was equipped with. "Kaitie?" It was her mother who whispered to her in response to her soft moans. Her voice wasn't yet prepared to come out in the form of words. "Kaitie, can you hear me?" Her mother asked again, Kaitie couldn't get herself to think through a reply, but the groaning worked for the moment. Words could come later. For now, anyway, she just needed to know if Sarah and Stacy were ok.
"Kaitie!" Her mother leaned over hugging her tightly and kissing her cheeks and forehead repeatedly as she began to cry. She reached over and pressed a button on the wall just out of Kaitie's area of view.
"Nurses station." A voice said from a speaker somewhere on the wall following a short buzz. "Nurse Hall answering. Can I help you?"
"Please, get Dr. Malcom!" Kaitie's mother said anxiously. "Kaitie is awake!"
The commotion seemed to rise out of nowhere, much like that morning... was it the same day? Kaitie found herself rushed out of that room on the bed, to be rushed somewhere else in a wheel chair, only to eventually brought back to her bed - somehow already returned and waiting for her in her room. Sarah, Stacy, Beth, and her mother were all present when she got back.
"Well hi everyone." She said with a wry grin, trying to be suave and act as nonchalant as she could. "Sorry to keep you waiting. But life as is so hard when you're in demand." She grunted under the strain and pains of walking, catching herself in a bad step before she fell over.
"Here," Stacy was closest and got to her first, Sarah right on her heels. They put her arms around their necks to giver her support. "Let us help you." It wasn't a question, just a statement - which Kaitie wasn't going to argue anyway. "You've been asleep longer than you realize, I'm sure."
"Yea," Sarah said. "Sleeping Beauty didn't take as long a nap." She grinned, trying to make light of the situation - which Kaitie hadn't quite pieced together yet.
"When I found you," Beth started.
"Found me?" Kaitie interrupted.
"Yea." Beth said, looking puzzled. "You don't remember being out by the pond?"
"By the pond?" The pond she refered to was near their house, on the land that their family owned after Kurt's industrial accident. As the question formed on her lips the recollection of things she'd done and lived as Kurt flowed steadily through her mind. The pond was, ever since that accident, a favorite place for Kurt to hang out and 'get away' to think from time to time. He'd play his guitar on the old wooden dock he'd built with his best friend, Bryan.
"Yea, you never showed up for school so we got worried." Beth said, just trying to 'fill in the gaps' for her friend. "So Stacy and I decided we'd skip the afternoon classes and go with your mom and sister to look for you. We'd looked all over and I was just about out of ideas when I heard guitar strings." Kaitie didn't play guitar, everyone knew that - even Kaitie right now.
"So I went back onto that little trail behind your house to see what it was, thinking maybe whoever was there had seen you or something. When I got back there, you were just curled up as tight as you could pull yourself in a ball on the very end of the dock. Some crows were picking at the guitar, must have been testing it to see if they could eat it." Beth shrugged.
"When I got down there you were still rigid and stiff." Sarah said. "We didn't know what was wrong."
"We called 911 from your house and you've been here since." Stacy said.
"They had to give you a muscle relaxer to get your body to loosen up. It was all they could do to get you into the ambulance in some sort of controlled fashion and get you settled on the gurney." Her mother added. "And you've been, asleep, until today."
"What is today?" Kaitie asked, sitting in bed with the covers just now being brought up over her legs by Stacy and Sarah. She declined anything else when they'd asked quietly.
"February 29th." Her mother said. Kaitie's eyes got wide and took on that glossy far-off look for a second before she blinked it away, followed by several brief sighs of relief, before looking at Stacy.
"Yea, our birthday." Stacy said. "What a day to wake up." She smiled.
"I just think you're doing it for the attention and to get all the extra presents." Sarah said, obviously teasing. "Well it won't work sister. Sympathy doesn't make me break my $1 rule." She winked.
"Stop it." Her mother said, slapping her on the side. "Quit picking on her." She stood up and stretched a second before moving towards the door. "I am going to take a quick ladies room break. You girls keep an eye on our little sleeping kitten." She smiled as she walked out the door.
The door barely had time to shut before Beth rushed to it and quickly locked it. The three girls all came up to the bed and leaned in close. "Ok, what do you remember?" Sarah asked.
"Of?"
"Everything." Sarah said.
"Well they did an MRI-" Kaitie started.
"No!" Stacy tapped her forehead much like a light slap. "About the magic."
"Does the name 'Kurt' ring a bell?" Beth asked.
"You remember too!?" Kaitie was surprised. It was her old name, before that spell had gone off badly that night... Suddenly it rushed back to her...
"So, what do you remember?" Sarah again asked, "Quickly, everything before someone realizes we've locked the door."
"Do you-" Stacy started to ask her something.
"No!" Sarah said, cutting her off. "We need to see what she knows without our 'contaminating' her memories. It's the only way!" Stacy nodded in agreement, realizing that her innocent question could have been harmful.
"Please, Kaitie..." Stacy said. "From that night onward..."
"Well," She was nervous over all the fuss about this but somehow managed to straighten things out somewhat in her mind. "I was casting something from a spellbook Bryan and I found that was supposed to make..." She paused. "Somebody... I forget who, fall in love with me; well sort of, I think...
"And then I saw the bracelet you gave me," she looked at Stacy, "And I felt bad about being so thoughtless of the feelings of others. You obviously cared, and you didn't need any intervention. That basically talked me out of it. Despite that I had ignored your feelings just because of your age...
"Well I was about to say the invocation without naming, the book said that that would nullify the invocation. And then... BOOM...
"I woke up in the morning as Kaitie..." The next few minutes were a brief recap leading up to, and including the incident of Sarah and Stacy's siezure-like attacks - none of which happened according to them.
"Ok, ready for a huge shocker?" Stacy asked, hesitantly.
"Um..." Kaitie paused trying to read their faces to determine if this was for real or some big, practical joke. "I guess."
"None of that was real." Sarah said.
"What?"
"None of it." Beth said.
"None? Not the slumber party? The other girls..." Kaitie was just irritated to no end that the names escaped her still. "There were more of you, us... And you... we..." She cast a forlorn look for affirmation; from someone anyone; that these were not all just dreams.
"None." Stacy reaffirmed. "I'm sorry Kaitie." She leaned over and hugged her. Somewhere deep inside Kaitie felt a special connection to Stacy, beyond the friendship/'object-of-my-crush' bracelet Kurt had worn - and that Kaitie still wore now.
"So?" Kaitie was at a complete loss for words. Were the last few months of her life, and the events leading to it, and the time she'd been unconscious for all really nothing?
"You and Bryan found that spellbook segment and did use it some." Stacy started. "And when you got to be almost good at casting little things you two tried for something big..."
"And you tried to make on the cheerleaders, we think, fall in love with you; apparently." Beth said, the tone of her remark seemed as if Kaitie's testimony filled in the gaps they had in the story as to why Kurt would be using magic, and what he was casting. The expressions of the others seemed to support this, even if no one spoke it.
"But we had a scrye out on the book and when you began to use the spell from it, we realized who and where it was, and rushed to your house." Stacy said.
"We didn't mean to bust in on your ritual." Sarah said. "We had no idea you were doing something so sensitive and so powerfully advanced."
"What would you have done?" Kaitie asked.
"I don't know." Sarah said plainly. "We didn't know what you were casting or if you were willingly or unwillingly casting, or if you were 'tainted' or not."
"Tainted?" Kaitie asked.
"Our term for it." Beth said.
"It?"
"The touch of the shadows." Stacy said. "Think of it as some sci-fi idea, where the world has magic and nifty powers like ESP and all, but some evil force has blanketed a lot of the magical energies..."
"Like Sauron in 'Lord of the Rings'?" Kaitie asked.
"Yes!" Stacy said. "Just like that, but only completely non-physical in form and nature - and pure magical energy, bent on it's own means. The shadow is, or well they are, intelligent."
"Plurarl?"
"We'll fill you in on that part later. First, the important stuff." Sarah said, taking that 'take-charge' tone and attitude she'd always had since she could talk. She was a natural leader and calm-under-fire kind of person, Kurt envied that since the day he realized the quality became her shortly after their father had died. It had been what led her to him, and ultimately enabled her to help him- and saved his life.
"Wait." Kaitie said, tears starting to well up in her eyes. "Is Daddy?"
"Kaitie?" Sarah replied slowly.
"Is he dead again?"
"Again?" Beth asked.
"He never was alive to begin with." Stacy said. "That wasn't real." She looked towards Sarah, "She's likely remembering the time she's been seperated from this world. Shaelytir and Breannys said this could happen."
"Shay-lit-rear and Bre-and-hiss who?" Kaitie said, really butchering the sounds of the gaelic names.
"Shaelytir and Breannys." Sarah said, properly saying the names. "Two... faeries, for lack of a better term, that have been helping us."
[[ :: Author Note :: ]]
- shay-lee-TEER with emphasis on the start of 'teer' at in the last syllable; this is a hybrid of two words meaning "pure/innocent/holy" and "light/good"
- bree-an-ISS with emphasis on the "sss" sound, but NOT drawn long like a hiss. Hybrid of three words, two meaning "honor/honored", "dream/prophecy/foresight", and the third a name of a fairy princess/queen of gaelic legend.
- Faery/Faeries is said "fay-ree" or "fay-reez" with a only a slight twinge of 'fair' in the 'fay' portion. No one piece is more or less heavily spoken than any other. Most emphasize the latter syllable (as is common with most words in the English language).
[[ :: End Author Note :: ]]
"Faeries?" Kaitie asked.
"Yes." Stacy said. "And moving right along..." She motioned for Sarah to hurry up.
"Anyway, we scryed the book, you started to cast, we burst in... Yes, that's where we are... We burst in, not realizing what you were doing... And basically, all hell broke loose." Sarah said.
"The shockwave threw me back out the door and caused me to tumbled down the stairs." Stacy said. "If I hadn't run into Beth, well been knocked into her, I'd likely to have gone all the way down too."
"And by the time we came to it was morning. We were all scattered on the floor in your room, Kaitie, as if a slumber party was centered there. That day, a Saturday I think..."
"Yes, it was." Stacy said. "Eigth past six AM." She added. When Kaitie looked at her surprised she simply replied, "Eidetic memory."
"Well the weekend was mostly playing recover and rest. We tried to sort out the odd memories we 'felt' we had for you, and the ones we knew we had of Kurt. And you were more or less out of it, I mean you were like a zombie. You would talk and interact, but you were really quiet and reserved, almost to the point of creepy. Monday morning we got ready for school... What choice did we have?
"We left at different times, I was running late and you, with some personality finally, said you'd get going so you could meet up with Stacy where you two always met. This is one of those fake memories we were talking about - apparently you had them too... Well Stacy didn't know, or forgot, or something... And she never met up with you, in fact she never saw you, assuming we were together.
"We got to school and met up... no Kaitie... We started looking all over school and couldn't find you. By lunch time we'd decided to skip school. Mom, by this time, had gotten the phone call from the office that her youngest daughter wasn't there, and to my surprise met me in the hallway as I was sneaking out to skip class. Kinda convinient, I got away with skipping school because my mother caught me." She couldn't contain the grin.
"Anyway, Beth and Stacy skipped class to help Mom and I look for you. So we were all looking and-" Sarah was quickly chattering on when Stacy cut her off.
"Your forgot the eclipse." Stacy said.
"Oh!" Sarah said. "I can't believe I forgot that!" She shook her head in disgust at her own lack of recollection of the major event. "Yea, I had just left the house when that silly solar eclipse started, the one that had geeks all over the state coming in late to school so they could stay and watch it, plot it, and all that stuff. I mean it got really dark, not like that lunar eclipse weeks before where it got darker at night, I mean it was really spooky dark."
"Ok, so there was a full lunar and solar eclipse." Kaitie said. "Big deal. That happens every 75-80 years or so?"
"How do you know that?" Beth asked.
"She's right." Stacy said. "But the times that both are viewable and not over some ocean or Antartica or something; much less both viewable from the same place..."
"You knew that too!?" Sarah looked at Stacy even more surprised.
"Um..." Stacy didn't know what to say. "Yea, I guess I did." She grinned, and Kaitie did likewise.
"Well, anyway... we think these had something to do with the magic and all. Shaelytir and Breannys first appeared during that lunar eclipse while we were looking for the other spell book portion - that you apparently had." Sarah said. "And then the morning you go missing is the day of this solar eclipse, and around the same time frame... just too astronomical to have that all be coincidence."
"Wow." Kaitie was wide-eyed and couldn't believe it. Everything she knew was a dream? It wasn't real? How could she be sure? Why was she so sure already? There were just so many questions and too much conflict between the reality she knew, the one she thought she knew, and the one that she now knew that she was overwhelmed... It was no surprise to anyone, the doctors included, that the excitement of the first day awake again wore Kaitie out so quickly.
For now, she'd rest and recover. The following days she gained her strength and coordination back; amazing the doctors and hospital staff with how quickly she recovered. Her lack of substantial physical movement for the better part of 3 months would have had much longer last effects on most anyone, but it seemed like Kaitie had been sick in bed for days, not in a coma-like state for months... By the second week of March she was discharged from the hospital. Home, despite looking and feeling slightly different, was home. Some things, no matter how dramatic, just didn't seem to be all that different. Kaitie wasn't sure if it was how the fabrics of reality, or realities, worked; or if it was just her own mind trying to make a rationale out of everything. Surely this was beyond what the average human brain was wired to contemplate... Yet, she stood on her porch looking into her home doing just that...
She paused a moment, looking at her shadow being cast through the door onto the carpet of the entry hall; where she'd stood when Stacy fell, where she'd stood to get a last once-over by the girls before taking a cross-dressed Kurt out for pizza, where Kurt had stood giving one last look at his hair and face before going out to woo that girl... The name still evaded Kaitie's memory. Why?
As she stood there, suspended from time passing around her she became aware that her shadow was being overtaken by that of the familiar shape of her mother's. Everything has been changed. But, somethings haven't changed at all. As her shadow was eclipsed by that her of her mother's she smiled and looked over her shoulder. The warm affection in her mother's eyes was all she needed right then... The bonds of love eclipsed the worries and confusions of the mind. An eclipsing of the mind; a total eclipse of reality itself...
[~ to be continued ~]
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