From Beyond to Here: Merendael's Gift and Other Stories - Softcover

Marr, OSB Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1475934580 ISBN 13: 9781475934588

Verlag: iUniverse, 2012

Inhaltsangabe

Beyond our wildest imaginations, other worlds and dimensions exist that are vastly different than ours. These worlds beyond both fascinate and frighten us, but more importantly, they have the potential to bring a great good we never could have envisioned. In this intriguing collection of stories that explores the ramifications of encounters with beings from the beyond, the appearance of a bewildering and elusive visitor to an eleven-year-old resident brings an unusual gift that turns his entire town inside out. Two young siblings-whose parents have just left them for a year with their callous aunt and uncle-soon discover they have an angry ghost to contend with as well. As a family moves into a strange house, they find the house a lot stranger than they bargained for. When a boy finds his school filled with the ghosts of fellow students and teachers, he is mystified when he sees these same people still alive in the flesh. From Beyond to Here is a compilation of stories for young fans of the supernatural sure to entertain and raise questions about intriguing parallel worlds.

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From Beyond to Here

Merendael's Gift and Other StoriesBy Andrew Marr

iUniverse, Inc.

Copyright © 2012 Andrew Marr, OSB
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4759-3458-8

Contents

Introduction.....................................1Merendael's Gift.................................2The Ghost of Swiss Castle........................95A Wand Full of Golden Leaves.....................135Haunted for a Time...............................174The Dark Window..................................213The Buyer of Hearts..............................263

Chapter One

Merendael's Gift

* * *

I felt something strange and exciting in the chilly spring air as soon as I opened the door. The same dreary scene I saw every morning when I started out to school gave me no reason to feel anything like that: small, plain houses; the gas station at the corner; and the industrial park that dominated our neighborhood. With spring coming late, the trees showed no sign of sprouting leaves. Surely nothing magical was about to happen no matter how much my body tingled. Not that I've got much in the body department. I'm just an average eleven-year-old with a freckled face topped by washed-out blond hair that doesn't scare anybody with the name of Eddie Peterson.

I was just a few steps from my house when a flickering, like little dancing lights, caught the corner of my eye. I turned my head toward the parked cars on the street, but the flickering was gone before I really saw it. I guessed it was only the sun's reflection on a car's windshield until I realized it was too cloudy for the sun to be reflecting off anything. I tried to shrug it off, but my body was tingling more than ever. I looked all around me but still didn't see any more flickering, just browns and grays and colors too drab to be real colors. I shrugged off the tingling as best I could, concluding that I was having delusions of grandeur from reading too many fantasy books about boys who save the world. Of course, saving the world would be a lot more interesting than going to school in a dull neighborhood like mine.

I'd gotten halfway down the block when the flickering caught my eye again. This time, I turned my head slowly to try to catch out the flickering before it disappeared. The little squeak I made at the amazing sight just a few feet away would have been embarrassing if any of my friends had been around. There's no way I can describe what I saw, but I have to try. I saw a conglomeration of sparkling lights zooming in all directions like a little space ship. Several fire-filled eyes popped out at me, and wriggling shapes that could have been arms or legs or tentacles reached out to me. When I took a couple of steps backward, the thingamajig started to look more like a white horse prancing on somebody's front lawn. Then the horse dissolved into a shape that looked something like a twisted human being dressed in white with a billowing purple cape. Something like a horse's head swirled into the mix so that I could have been seeing an alien human riding a horse, but just as I settled on that notion, the arms and legs and tentacles multiplied so fast that it could just as well have been a giant squid. In short, I was totally disoriented, thrown for a loop, and turned upside down.

Do you—Do you see me? I felt the creature ask.

The words buzzed in my bones more than I heard them with my ears.

"I see you," I said. "Who are you? What are you doing here? Where do you come from?"

I am Merendael, answered the flickering being. I need—I need help. I want to give you a Gift. I need to give you my Gift.

"Where do you come from? What is your Gift?" I asked.

Something about the way Merendael said Gift made it feel like a capitalized word.

I come from my home, Merendael answered. A wave of sadness washed through me. I want you to receive my Gift. You must receive my Gift before it is too late.

Merendael's eyes made such wild circles in his other circling shapes that I wasn't sure if I was being asked to receive the Gift or being ordered to take it. I was about to say something like "Sure, bring it on," when I remembered that I had to make sure I wasn't helping an evil being take over the planet or destroy it by giving me a bomb.

"What do you want to give me?" I asked.

"Hey, Eddie! Who're you talking to?"

Brian Morton's voice doused Merendael faster than a waterfall putting out a campfire. He was like that. My insides turned a somersault when I thought of what was about to happen to my reputation now that Brian had heard me talking to an invisible creature. His vote always counted double in every popularity contest and triple in every unpopularity contest. Brian's dark, cold eyes made his square, handsome face look hard. He wasn't the biggest kid around, but he was the bossiest. The bull's-eye sewn on his dark gray windbreaker by his mother added to this effect. A single mother, it seemed she spent all her spare time doing everything Brian asked her to do. I'd been so absorbed by Merendael that I hadn't realized I'd been surrounded by Brian Morton and some of the other guys I hung out with, but maybe not for much longer unless I could do some fast talking. I looked around the ring of faces that had closed in on me for the kill, the fate of any kid who fell out of step with everybody else. Charlie Parker and Peter Newton stared at me exactly the way Brian stared at me, while Mel Ryan looked puzzled.

"Do you need some help?" asked Linda Sweeney.

She had stopped just beyond our circle with Molly McDonald and Sally Jones, the tallest and most athletic girl in our class. With her long, light brown hair that fell into place naturally, Linda was good looking without trying to be. The problem with her was that she was always trying to be so nice. Whenever I saw her coming, I ran away from her faster than a speeding bullet.

"The best way you can help me is by getting as far away from me as you can get as fast as you can," I replied to Linda.

Her face crumpled. I might have felt sorry for her, but Molly, with her dark hair framing her even darker eyes, gave me a poisonous look for hurting her friend. Neither of them seemed to understand that a boy did not dare say anything nice to a girl in front of other boys.

"Sorry, I forgot that the male race doesn't believe in caring about anybody," said Linda stiffly. "I'm sure that a kind and sensitive boy like Brian Morton will help you recover from seeing whatever frightening sight you just saw."

"What makes you think I just saw a frightening sight?" I asked, worried all the more that my reaction to Merendael, or whatever that thing was that I had seen, was so visible to so many kids.

"Usually, one's eyes don't open wider than a dragon's maw while asking who or what somebody is unless there is a cause that brings about that effect," said Dominic Boulanger, the class nerd, geek, genius, and weirdo. As usual, he was standing at a distance from everybody else. His long hair was all mussed up just to prove he was different. Dumbinic, as we called him, was staring at me in a way that made me feel like an exotic exhibit in a museum and made him look like he was wearing three pairs of glasses when he didn't wear glasses at all. What else could anyone expect of a kid who pronounced his name Boo-lawn-zhay? We called him Booboo when we weren't calling him Dumbinic. My only hope was to turn Dumbinic's unpopularity to my advantage.

"What makes you think you know more about cause and effect than anybody else?" I asked him.

"My...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: iUniverse
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2012
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1475934580
• ISBN 13: 9781475934588
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 320
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: gpsr@libri.de; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Deutschland