Daughter of Time 1: Reader (2 page)

I couldn’t help it. I was only eleven, and it was too much for me. That demon face – I had seen it before. In another dream. Dreams within dreams. His face was part of a foggy future vision, one I had forgotten and that rushed back through me like nails in my veins. Flashes of future memories whipped through my mind of pain, and fear, and loneliness, and horror – all connected to this face grinning back at me like some fiend from hell.

I ran. I jumped from my seat and ran like I’ve never run in my life. Behind me I half-heard the shouts of my parents calling my name and the harsh barks of this man to his soldiers. “Get her!” Then the horrible screams of my parents behind. But I could not stop running. That terrible sense in a dream of a monster approaching from behind grew within me, and I could feel its breath and fangs approaching, gaining ground, nearing to grapple at my back and legs.

I ran so hard I thought my chest would explode. Across the manicured green of our backyard, into the high fields of corn that spread out like a sea on all sides, grown thick now near harvest season. The stalks slapped me in the face, on my arms, across my chest as I ran, my breath like deep wheezings from some dying thing. Where was I going? I didn’t know.
Away. I had to get away
. “On the other side of the cornfields,” something screamed in my mind. There was safety, if I could just get through the fields, to the road, I would find a car, someone to take me to get help and protect me from the monsters following behind. I was close. My panting was like a windstorm in my mind.
So close.

And then a sharp pain, a bright light like a flash in my eyes, and I was on my back, a dark figure towering over me. Warm liquid trickled down from my nose, and I felt too weak to move.

A second figure stood over me, blocking out the light of the day. In the shadow of his body, I saw that demon face again, smiling, laughing as he stared down at me.

“We’ve been looking for you for a long time, little girl. Don’t think you can escape. Don’t
ever
think you can escape from us. We have plans for you.”

I couldn’t respond: fear, pain, and nausea swept over me, and the world above me shrank to a small point as darkness filled in the sides. In a moment, all was black, and the sky was gone.

The same dream. Experienced countless nights. Memories of the past recreated. But this time it did not end with the darkness.

In that absolute black, I heard voices.
Your
voices. Millions of them, rising like an ocean of sound, a chorus calling to me across the ever-changing fabric of Time. And in that half-asleep state, moments before waking, when inspiration meets the practicality of day, I
knew
.

The answer was clear before my mind.

2

In the world's audience hall, the simple blade of grass sits on the same carpet with the sunbeams, and the stars of midnight.
—Rabindranath Tagore

Nothing is ever as it seems or is as it might be.

Stay with me for a while, hear my story, and then you’ll understand. Understand just how different everything around you is from how you now believe it to be and maybe come to terms with just how important you are to what might someday come to be.

On the cover of this book you’re reading is an author’s name. He believes this story is full of his ideas, born from his own mind. It’s not.
I
am writing it
through
him. In his reality, it’s all part of a clever plot he’s stitched together, even down to this very sentence that says he
isn’t
writing it. Instead, it is the effort of my mind reaching out, back through what you call Time, and inspiring his mind, shaping his thoughts, convincing him of this reality.

Sounds crazy? It is. I know it is. And
I’m
the one doing it. But you should look down, grab the buckle and fasten your seat belt, because it’s just going to get worse.

I don’t enjoy doing this, playing puppet master with this citizen of your time. But our need is hopelessly desperate. More than you can imagine has been lost. And we are left with nothing but ashes in the cold of space.

I’ve done worse. This is dangerous, both for his mind and my own. Already, I have failed many times to send my message, and my efforts wrecked the receiving minds, driving them to madness. At other times, what has come out of the author has been a story so distorted, so warped by his own imaginings, that the message is lost, and can’t achieve its purpose. Your libraries hold some of these disasters. I can only hope that this, my last effort, will not fail.

There is so much to explain, so much that you need to understand before you can accept the message, and take the step we so desperately need you to take. So many things— strange things, horrible things. Things that can’t possibly be true, but are.

You will also need to understand something about Time. This may be the greatest stumbling block. Alone, it’s like a monolithic stone, an arrow marching forward like some godlike unstoppable force, rolling through history. What has happened is frozen in the Past, untouchable and unchangeable, and what will happen, the Future, is determined by the Now. But the Universe laughs at such simplistic ideas.

The first thing you need to let go of is the idea that Time
is
alone.
Space
and time go together, and feed off one another, in grand loops and dances that change both. I know this, because this dance plays before my mind’s eye like a rainbow in the mist.

Because of this, you must let go of the idea of the Past as set and the as Future something that does not exist.
Space-time
is an ever-existing clay trapped inside the great bubble we call the Cosmos. Like clay, it can be shaped, changing past, present, and future. Always with rules. But not yet with rules any creature has come to fully understand.

Sadly, these are only abstractions, colorless phrases that teach little and distort much of the living experience. I hope that you will understand more as you hear the story.

But it is only because of these truths that I can even reach you now, and only because of them that I need to. You see, as much as the future can reach back into the past, the
past
can reach
forward
into the future. And in our time of need, we need you of our recent past. You have a part to play in righting a terrible wrong, saving billions of lives, and reversing the horrific fate that has descended upon humanity. Somehow in these pages I must convince you of this. May I be forgiven if I can’t.

My parents called me Ambra Dawn, and I am a Reader. But this is
our
story.

3

Wisdom leads us back to childhood. 
—Blaise Pascal

I was born in the yellow-green cornfields of Nebraska.

My father was an independent farmer, one of the last not bought up by the great agribusiness corporations of the twenty-first century. When I knew him, he was a tall and lanky man in his mid-forties of Scottish heritage, his fair skin always reddened and hardly tanned in the long summer seasons. He had crisp blue eyes and large hands that could tear open an ear of corn in a single fluid motion. When I was a small child, before I was taken from my parents, he would hold me in those huge hands like a small ear of corn, often tossing me high into the air as in my dream and laughing until a thousand lines creased his face.

He had a real gift for predicting the weather. Not trained in any meteorological sciences, he was a more accurate forecaster than the US Weather Service, which saved more than one harvest. It was one sign of the terrible genetics that would combine to produce me.

My mother was from a Celtic background too—an Irishwoman new to the United States. She
found
my father more than she met him, with a sense of destiny that she helped make come true. She looked like a stereotype out of a book of fables—a classic lady of the Green Isle, pale and redheaded, fiery in spirit and with her tongue. The recessive genes just keep adding up.

Even more than my father, she
forecast
, but she forecast broadly into many areas of life. Maybe four hundred years ago they would have burned her at the stake for witchcraft, but my mother was a devout Catholic and used no spells or prayers to divine the future. Such things just came to her. As I would learn painfully, they came not from the supernatural but from the all too natural, buried deep within her brain, in a soft spot of unusual tissue and blood vessels that any neurosurgeon, had he taken a look, would have dismissed as a small cyst – an unnatural growth of little significance.

Two years after they were married, I was born.

I got my mother’s red hair and green eyes. Both parents’ skin seemed to combine in me to the palest white possible outside of albinism. The real kicker, though, was a combination of genes that led to a tumor in my brain in the same place that my mother’s small psychic cyst lay. We’ll get back to that soon, because without that tumor, none of what I am going to tell you would have happened.

In the beginning, I was just a normal farm girl. Well, maybe
normal
isn’t the right word. I was
definitely
a farm girl, though. By the time I could walk, I was playing with the animals, rolling in hay, and happier out in the air with the earth under my feet than anywhere else. How cruel is the irony when I think back on what has happened to me. What I would give now to see the sky again, to feel the earth underneath, or to run through my hands the fresh soil after it was plowed. To even know it was still there, that it existed
somewhere
—that would be enough, more than I would ask for after this terrible journey.

But normal, no, I guess I can’t say I was ever really normal. Normal means seeing things and reacting to things like most people. Looking like most people. Being treated like most people. One after the other, I lost all these things.

First to go was seeing things like most people. Even early on, I think my mother knew something was different about me. When I got old enough to notice such things, it seemed that she was always looking at me like someone would an artifact from another world. She loved me, but she sensed there was something
other
about me that even a mother’s love couldn’t get beyond. Maybe it was her own sixth sense. But somehow, she
knew
.

In a way, that was good, because I never had to worry about surprising her or letting her down. I don’t think my dad ever really knew, not even when they came to “cure” me. Which was good in its way, since his love never had to get through any walls and always reached me.

But the first time I realized I was a freak was when my dog died.

When I was eight years old, I was already experiencing many wild and strange dreams. After I described a few to friends and my parents, I learned by their reactions that some of my dreams disturbed them and were best left inside my own head. Crucified unicorns, roaches crawling out of my eyes, light beams causing holes to sprout and blood to pour from my arms—that kind of thing. But I had learned by then the difference between reality and dream. Or so I thought.

One night I dreamed that our sheepdog Matt died. Matt had been with us from a few years before I was born. In the dream, he was running around in a thunderstorm, barking like he does at the deep subsonic roll that drives some dogs crazy, and in a flash of lightning, he seized up, just fell over, dead. In the dream, I could see inside him, saw the clot in his heart, watched the life like some light dim in his mind. I woke up shaking and afraid, but I didn’t tell anyone. Another dream to keep to myself. One I could slowly forget.

Three weeks later, a storm front rolled in from the west. When relatives would visit from other parts of the country, my dad would always talk about the weather and make his flat joke (as my mom called it): “Well, it’s really flat out here this time of year.” Nebraska is
really
flat, and you can see the storms coming for hours in the daylight, an express train made out of dark, gray mountains pushing like a tidal wave across the planes. I started shaking again, not because I am afraid of storms, but because I was afraid of
this
storm. Because I had seen it before.