Queen of monsters the va.., p.1
Queen of Monsters: The Vanished Book 1, page 1
Queen of Monsters
The Vanished Book 1
Jay Barnson
Copyright © 2022 by Jay Barnson
All rights reserved.
No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
Contents
1. Vanishings
2. Arrival
3. Interface
4. Glitched
5. Interview
6. Flight
7. Capture
8. Camp
9. Betrayal
10. Beast
11. Training
12. Graduation
13. Frontier
14. Report
15. Lowry
16. Storm
17. Worm
18. Ashley
19. Elite
20. Competition
21. Conspiracy
22. Secrets
23. Bird’s-Eye
24. Cats
25. Invitation
26. Revelations
27. Calm
28. Desertion
29. Paula
30. Queen
31. Transfer
32. War
33. Loman
34. Judgment
Afterword
About Author
Chapter one
Vanishings
The pile of my past, stacks of boxes destined for either the trash or the thrift store, was depressingly large and smelled of aged paper and cardboard. I sat on what had once been my bed and asked, “Are you sure you don’t want any of those games, Trish?”
My sister, sitting in an office chair making a slow 360-degree spin, looked at me and rolled her eyes. Her hair and eyes were brown, like mine, but beyond that I wasn’t sure there was much of a resemblance. “For the last time, no. You are the one who liked those games about pushing tanks around in the desert in World War II. Maybe if you had games about normal stuff, like anime or fantasy.”
“The fact that you consider anime and fantasy ‘normal’ speaks volumes about you, Trish.”
“Whatever. Like you’re any different.” Her slow rotations faced her away from me. As she turned back, I half expected to see a fourteen-year-old version of her, as she’d been when I graduated high school. I hadn’t seen much of her since then, even when I was going to community college for eighteen months and still living with my family. Now she was almost eighteen and about to enter college herself.
We’d grown up, and things had changed. My parents had decided to do something with the house that didn’t include me using my former walk-in closet as a cheap storage facility, and I’d spent the last hour sifting through the remnants of my youth trying to decide what was worth taking to an apartment that didn’t feel much larger than said closet.
Trish stood and walked to the ‘to be thrown out’ pile. “It’s your own fault for being such a pack rat. Still, it wasn’t fair for mom to invite you to dinner tonight only to deliver an ultimatum like that. You should negotiate for more time.”
I laughed. Trish would say, “I would like to negotiate for an extra cookie” when she was six years old. While it was definitely cuter when she was that young—especially since she absolutely understood what she was saying—I thought it was endearing. It had to be brutal on any guy she dated.
“I’ve been negotiating for more time since I got into the apartment near work. She said she’s tired of storing my old stuff, and I figured she was going to push it when she offered to make lasagna. But she’s right. You’re right. I’m a pack rat. I have trouble letting go of things. It’s probably good that she’s forcing the issue.”
Trish idly browsed through some items in one of the cardboard boxes. Her mouth opened wide as she pulled out what looked like a custom-bound book. I knew immediately what she’d found without looking at the cover. Trish read the cover for me, anyway. “Unexplained Vanishings—Where Did They Go? By Aiden Holt. Mr. Flock, 8th Grade English, Period 3. You were obsessed with this stuff for years. And you only got a B+?”
I rolled my eyes. “Yeah. It was supposed to be a research paper, and I couldn’t avoid speculating about what happened in some cases of people vanishing without a trace. I had a theory about some of them going to a parallel dimension. He told me the research materials did not support my conjecture, and neither did abduction by UFOs.”
“When you started getting into this, I was like eight or nine years old, and you scared the shit out of me with these stories. I used to have nightmares about this, you know.” She thumbed through the pages. I’d written it like an encyclopedia of missing people. “Diderici. What, this guy vanished right in front of guards and prisoners while they were watching?”
I nodded. “Legend says he just kinda faded from view, and his manacles dropped to the ground in the courtyard.”
She wrinkled her nose and raised an eyebrow. “For real?”
“Nobody knows. It could have just been a story they told to prevent anyone from getting into trouble when he escaped. These stories all have a logical explanation, although most of the explanations come down to a variation of somebody lying.”
She thumbed through several other pages. “Dang, did you have to make it so huge?”
I laughed. “Nope. That was all me. I think that might be another reason Flock didn’t give me an A.”
She pointed to another page. “The Bennington Triangle? Like the Bermuda Triangle?”
“Yup, several people disappeared there over several years, including a husband and a wife, several years apart. It’s uncommon, but not unheard of, for family members to disappear some time apart like that. And then there was a college freshman named Paula Jean Welden.”
She was already past that, only half paying attention. “The prime minister of Australia is here too, huh? How about Amelia Earhart?”
I shook my head. “Nope. Her disappearance isn’t exactly hard to explain.”
“So where’s your girlfriend?”
“What?”
“You know, that girl you were in wuv with.” She drew out the pronunciation of ‘wuv’ to make it sound even more childish.
I feigned ignorance. Of course, I knew damned well who she referred to. Ashley Corr—the story that started my obsession with unexplained disappearances. “That’s creepy, Trish. Everyone in this paper was presumed dead when I wrote it.”
“The Phantom Cheerleader, or whoever it was. The one who went to Glover High.”
“The Vanishing Prom Date? She’s in the section at the end.”
I’d heard the story when I was in the sixth grade. It had caused a stir because it had happened in the next county over. Initially, everyone believed that her boyfriend, Tyson Adams, kidnapped and murdered her on prom night. Nobody bought his story that he parked the car, got out and walked around to open her door for her, only to find that she had vanished in those few seconds. However, no one could prove wrongdoing. Her disappearance triggered something inside me, and I went berserk playing boy detective with no clue what I was doing.
My sister turned a page. “You even have pictures of her. Dang, she’s a hottie. I wish I had boobs like that.”
I rolled my eyes heavenward. “Sheesh, Trish.”
“Where’d you get all this information?”
“From her high school yearbook and some news articles.”
Trish laughed. “You wrote that she liked anime and D&D, and she organized a food drive for the homeless.”
“That’s what her yearbook said. Well, the food drive was in a news article.” It had been an article of remembrance. Not an obituary, it stressed. The family wanted to believe she was still alive.
“Why did you include it in a report about missing people?”
I shrugged.
Trish chuckled, but it was softer this time. “I see why you were obsessed with her, then. She sounds like a cool person.”
“Her sister teaches at the community college in Madison. Or she used to, a couple of years ago.”
Trish sat on the bed and set my old report to the side. “Do you still believe they went to another dimension?”
I snorted and shrugged. “It’s nicer to believe that than to think somebody murdered them, I guess.”
“That’s not an answer.” Her tone was serious.
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and brought up a video. The focus of the video was on a couple dressed in extremely well-made costumes of Lord Larudac and Lady Crimson from the movie Las Vegas Bites. I handed the phone to my sister.
“Oh, man, awesome cosplay! I loved that movie!” Trish said.
“Keep watching. Look at this kid in the background,” I said, pointing. In the background, the crowd of convention-goers milled about in the hall, but one guy in his late teens in a superhero costume slowed and looked around as if confused. As people walked by, oblivious, he faded from view, disappearing completely in the space of a few seconds.
Trish restarted the video and asked, “Is this for real?”
“The internet said it’s a hoax, but a lot of people think it is legit. It was just treated as a normal interview video for a couple of weeks until someone noticed the kid and identified him as Jefferson Phelps. He went missing that day and never returned from the con. People claimed the interviewer doctored the video. The Phelps family was upset, and the original uploader ended up deleting his account.”
“So… what do you think?”
Trish shivered and made a sour face. “Okay, now I’m gonna have nightmares about this all over again.” She handed my phone back to me. “Aiden, promise me that if I suddenly vanish into thin air like that, you will find me.”
I laughed, but her face was serious. “Sure. I promise. You will be my new obsession, and I’ll search everywhere to find you. Even another dimension, although that probably won’t be the first place I look.”
She smiled. “Good! That’s a promise, then. Although if someone posts a video of me vanishing, leave it up. I might as well get famous for it.”
Before I could respond, Trish turned and pointed to one of the game boxes. “That one. With the spaceships on it. I’ll take that one.”
I raised an eyebrow, and pulled the over-sized box from the stack. “Um, even though it’s science fiction, it’s a pretty detailed game.”
She took the box from me. “I’ll learn it, so we can play it together.”
“There’s a computer game version of it out that we could play online…”
She shook her head vehemently. “No, I can kick your ass playing video games online with other games. This is one we’ll play in person.”
I smiled. “It’s a deal.”
I packed my car with the few things I thought I could comfortably store in my apartment, and hugged my family goodbye. The four of us promised to get together for Sunday dinner again next month.
My new apartment was about a half-hour drive from my parent’s home. I hadn’t planned on staying so close, but the job I’d picked up after graduation was in the area. Working as a software engineer making mobile apps and simple games sounded exciting, even if we only made very simple apps for marketing purposes that were nothing like the kinds of games I preferred to play. The hours were often long, and trying to impress the jaded senior developers was exhausting, but I enjoyed the work and it paid the bills.
I parked the car in my assigned spot, which thankfully remained unoccupied. Too often, visitors ignored the numbers and “residents only” signs. As I pulled the key out of the ignition, vertigo hit, and I felt queasy. I wondered if the sausage in my mother’s absolutely wonderful-tasting lasagna had been off.
I reached for the car door, and things got worse. A strange dissociative feeling came over me, like I wasn’t really there in my car, but watching the scene from… somewhere else. Something was wrong, but while the feeling alarmed me, part of me observed it with emotionless fascination. My inner Mr. Spock, I guess.
Then things went dark.
I awoke in darkness on a cold stone floor. My head throbbed, and I tasted ashes. For some reason, a foreign phrase I’d never heard before was stuck in my head like the chorus of a bad ear-worm. “Ballal nal hallis.” It sounded like gibberish.
I coughed, and pushed myself into a sitting position. Vertigo hit, and I waited several seconds for the room to quit spinning.
Starlight glimmered through an arched open doorway. The doorway was huge, more than fifteen feet tall. Beyond it, a brilliant river of stars gleamed in the night sky. There was no moon, and the starlight wasn’t enough to make out fine details of the room. From the curvature of the walls before they blended into the shadows, I guessed it was circular chamber about as wide as my high school basketball court.
And before you ask, no, I wasn’t on my high school basketball team, but I did try out. Average height and slightly above-average skill wasn’t quite enough to make the cut.
I stood carefully, still feeling unsteady, and willed myself forward. My legs moved awkwardly at first, as if they’d fallen asleep, but I didn’t get the pins-and-needles of returning circulation. I lurched to the doorway, leaning against the stone wall for balance as I got there. The stone was surprisingly smooth against my palm.
Ballal nal hallis? Was that even a language?
The horizon was a jagged line where the sea of stars gave way to darkness, although there was the tiniest glimmer of light to my right. I didn’t know if that was sunrise or sunset, but it made the rough edge of a treeline on a distant low hill visible. A scattering of thick, puffy clouds marred the otherwise brilliant night sky that held more stars than I had ever seen in my life. There was no distant glow of light pollution from a city, and in my field of view, only two pinpricks of light dotted the flat darkness below, the only signs of possible civilization I could find. As the ashy taste in my mouth faded, I noticed the crisp, clean smell of the air. This place was far away from car exhaust and factory chimneys, which would have been refreshing if it wasn’t so terrifying.
I had no idea where I could be.
I couldn’t recognize any of the stars, but I’d never been much of a stargazer. Normally I could recognize the Big Dipper and find Polaris, but that was because they were among the few visible stars. Out here in the middle of nowhere, I didn’t know where to begin. Without being able to find the North Star, I had no idea if the barely visible glow on the horizon was coming dawn or falling night.
I checked my cell phone. It picked up no signal, and of course that meant no GPS to give me a clue of where I was. I switched to the flashlight mode to get a better look at my shelter. A quick sweep revealed nothing I hadn’t guessed at a few seconds earlier. It was a circular stone room around forty feet in diameter, with only one exit. Dirt lined the threshold of the doorway, but within the tower it was almost spotlessly clean.
Four deeply-engraved symbols on the walls marked points at ninety degree intervals, like the points of a compass, but the symbols meant nothing to me. After a minute of searching, I turned off the light to conserve battery power.
It was dangerously stupid to stumble out into the darkness and get even more lost in unfamiliar wilderness. However, whoever had dumped me in this place might be back soon, and I had no reason to believe they were friendly. I convinced myself there was nothing else to do but wait until dawn, but as the minutes ticked on in the dark emptiness I fought back successive waves of panic. I was screwed, and it would be hours before I could even learn how screwed I was.
Ballal nal hallis. Seriously, what did it mean, and why was it stuck in my head? Maybe I had misheard something on the radio on my drive home. I spent the next few minutes trying to remember how I arrived inside the stone building. I remembered feeling sick in the car, and I had awakened feeling sick and disoriented, as if I’d been drugged. Nothing else specific came to mind. As far as I could tell, I’d blacked out and woke up here some time later.
The sky lightened. It was still dark, but I could see some new details on the ground. The thin glow to my right was definitely brighter, which meant it was nearly dawn, and I faced north. I must have been been unconscious for a few hours, but in that time, I’d been transported to who-knows-where without phone service, and I had no recollection of any of it.
As I focused on the horizon, waiting for more details to become visible so I could learn where I was, I became aware of a sound behind me. Breathing.
I turned, but I saw nothing in the darkness. My mind’s eye filled with shadowy images of wild animals, but I couldn’t see anything. The breathing was faint, but amplified in the silence of the stone chamber. I fumbled for my phone, fighting the shakiness of my hands and my urge to run out of the building. I tapped on the flashlight again, and swept the beam of light over the room.
A young woman was lying on the floor, not far from the spot where I had awakened.
Chapter two
Arrival
The girl looked to be around my age or a tad younger. Her sharp features were accentuated with makeup. She had long, curly brown hair, and wore black slacks and a white blouse with kind of an abstract blue floral print on it. The blouse was half-unbuttoned over a light blue tank-top. Her shoes had mid-sized heels that tapered sharply. If I had to guess, she was dressed for a night on the town, like for a casual party. Not that I’d been to many myself.
