I’m tired of scary things. I’m tired of dark images that invoke fear, and I’m sick of hearing those awful, frightening stories. Stories of dread, of loss. I’m tired of constantly running for my life, of seeing worlds crumble around me. I wanted peace, I wanted to see people that looked like me, smiling, happy people. I wanted to take a stranger by the hand to comfort them, and I wanted to be supported by others for no reason. I wanted to experience community and kindness. For that, I came to earth.
That’s what I told Lorne and Reginald Redwater as I was lying tied up in their basement. Reginald, a gaunt man going on seventy with hard eyes and grey hair, was the one who had shot me down. He’d put a bullet in my thigh and it ripped straight through. Blood had instantly begun spraying out of it, and there was so much of it that Lorne had to kneel on my leg to stop it until he was able to tie it off. The makeshift tourniquet he’d fashioned out of a rusty metal rod and one of his pant legs was so tight that it had removed all the feeling from my leg, leaving behind numbness and a rhythmically throbbing pain that was almost worse than the initial pierce of the bullet.
“You came to the wrong dimension then,” Lorne whispered into my ear. My head was resting in his lap and he was towering over my curled up body protectively, a shield between myself and his trigger-happy father.
“Where are you from?” Reginald inquired sharply. I strained my ears to listen as his voice seemed to wane. I had been fading in and out of consciousness for a while. I couldn’t muster up the power to respond. My throat was as dry as hot sand. Reginald lifted his foot as if he wanted to stomp on me, but Lorne cried out to stop him.
“Are you fucking crazy? Don’t hurt her!”
“Not this again,” the old Redwater growled. “Son, just because you haven’t banged anything in a while don’t mean you gotta jump to nursing a beast from another world.”
“I’m not—do you even have a clue about how powerful she might be? She’s a god. The things she could do to us, or for us! And she’s never laid a finger on me! She protected us! She’s innocent, and if you hadn’t shot her, maybe we could have asked her to close the portal! Hell, if I’d known you were gonna gun her down, I’d of never chased after her in the first place! This ain’t worth it.”
“I’m not a god,” I muttered.
“Shh, it’s okay, rest,” Lorne answered softly, brushing me off as he raised his head to face his father again. “We have to get her to a hospital. She’s lost a lot of blood. I don’t know if she’ll recover.”
“You’ve always been way too naive. If you had any brains in that hair you would have known she was a Cloudbuster right away. She looks like a human, and she sounds like one, but that’s it. She feels all wrong. Couldn’t you sense it?”
“You never taught me how.”
“My point is, her body’s not fragile like ours. She’ll be just fine.”
Lorne whimpered. “But she’s still in pain! And why does she keep passing out then?”
“She’s playing us, you dumb pig.”
“She’s not. Dad, she’s really—wait, no, don’t fall asleep,” Lorne addressed me once more, his hand moving up to my cheek to repeatedly pat on it before daring to give a light slap. I groaned.
“I told you I was tired,” I pressed out. My eyes felt like they were going to seal shut any moment.
“Dad, get her water or something! Now! Lilja, I am so sorry…”
I drifted off. People keep saying that when they have a near-death experience, they feel at peace or they see their entire life flash before their eyes or something. Neither of that happened to me. All I could feel was an intense loneliness and loss of hope, but more so than everything else, I felt fear. I’d come all this way from a dark place, and I’d barely seen the sunrise before being sent back to one, now one I wouldn’t be returning from. It was like I was hanging onto a cliff’s edge, my legs already dangling off the deep end. I was losing my grip, slipping away further and further while trying desperately to hold on. What was beneath me I didn’t know, but it was drawing me ever closer.
The horrors of Taurus-Caprici were reaching out for me.
Then, there was the taste of cool water on my lips. I swallowed greedily. My eyelids were still as heavy as lead, but when I willed them to stay open, I could make out Lorne’s kind face hovering over mine. He was holding a glass to my mouth, steadily tilting it as I drank to help me. He was continuing to confuse me. How someone so confident and true in one moment could be so cowardly and deceitful in the next was simply beyond me.
“There, stay with me… good…” He placed the empty glass on the floor beside us. “Here, let me… I know you hate me but can I touch you? I just wanna lift you up to make you more comfortable.”
I sighed defeatedly. “Sure.”
Lorne nervously wrapped his arms around me and halfway carried, halfway rolled me onto a small mattress that had been placed in the corner of this small, dingy basement room I had been thrown into. I groaned when he leaned over to tuck me in, though I was sort of glad there were pillows and blankets there for me. As absurd as it was, this was the best bedding I’d had in a while. After sleeping in my car for the better parts of two weeks preceding that day, this rather comfortable sleeping place was quite welcome, except for the wound in my leg and the mental country cousin watching me.
“I didn’t mean for any of this to happen. I was desperate, so I started chasing you. I just wanted to talk. I never would have tried if I’d known my father was watching. He can tell whether someone is a Cloudbuster much more accurately than me. He just straight-up started shooting and he’s old but he’s got great aim, and I—I’m just sorry, I’m so sorry… All I wanted was your help,” Lorne explained.
“My help?” I repeated.
“Uh… uh-huh. You keep saying you’re not a goddess, but you really are, right?”
“What makes you think that?”
“You know, just… none of the other Cloudbusters can disguise themselves as humans. Not as well as you at least. You’ve got to be powerful, really, really powerful to do that. And I’ve heard the stories! That there’s gods from other dimensions, mighty beings that can potentially change, well, anything. Everything.”
“So if I was a goddess, what would you want me to change?” I asked.
“Close the portal. Shut the door that allows interdimensional creatures, the ones we call Cloudbusters, to cross over to earth. My family has already unleashed way too many of them. We’re most likely responsible for hundreds of deaths.”
“Tell me everything.”
“They come during the storm. That’s why we started calling them Cloudbusters. The monsters that break through the clouds, you know. Back when it was only my mother’s family living here, they killed them on sight. They didn’t know very much about these creatures. For a long time, they figured they were demons from hell. But then my father came along and he started exploring the phenomenon. He found out that the creatures came in through a portal, like an invisible door that only opens during a thunderstorm. And he also realized that the visitors were from other dimensions, other worlds. Some simply stumbled into this world by accident, others knowingly traveled to earth to… well, I don’t know. They all had their reasons, I assume. Some of them were pretty violent. My Dad started to differentiate between them. The ones that were sapient and could communicate with him, he allowed to pass. Given they paid him a fee. He’ll take all kinds of shit. Currency, riches from other dimensions, sometimes even resources you’d never see in this life. Not every species lives off of oil and water.”
“You don’t have to tell me.”
“Yeah. Figures. Can I ask where you’re from? And did you know where you were going?” he inquired curiously.
I sighed. “Taurus-Caprici. That’s my home. I doubt you’ve ever heard of it. There’s only a few who ever make it out of there, two in fact. My mom and myself. I don’t know about any others. It’s the most nightmarish place anyone can imagine. That’s why I wanted out. That’s why I came. So yes, I did indeed know exactly what I was doing and why. My car out there? I rebuilt it. I’ve been working on it for a long time, to get it to drive again. Mom brought it back from one of her visits here. My mother, she’s very strange. Even though she’s been here countless times and hates Taurus-Caprici, she doesn’t want me leaving there. She doesn’t even know that I’m gone.”
“Don’t you miss her?”
“Of course. But I there’s sacrifices you gotta make if you want to be free. She was controlling me in that way, holding me back. I’ve made the decision to leave a long time ago. I’ve already gotten used to the idea of parting ways with her,” I explained, pausing shortly before adding, “I know that might sound really cold right now. Maybe I was wrong about everything. Maybe I should have never left.” I shifted my injured leg on the mattress and yelped. “I probably shouldn’t have left,” I corrected myself.
“I’m very glad you’re here,” Lorne argued.
“I’m telling you, I’m not a deity. And I can’t help you with any of this. Besides, your old man got himself into this mess, he can get himself out.”
“But he doesn’t want to, that’s the problem!”
“Well, then off him,” I prompted. “You know you guys are risking other people’s lives by letting potentially hostile creatures enter this world. You know your dad’s evil as shit. But you don’t do anything yourself. You just hope some holy ancient creature comes along and relieves you of your duty as a person, as someone who should act according to their morals. Them’s the facts, right?”
Lorne bit his lip.
“You need to help yourself, man. You’re a good guy, I can see that. I think,” I told him.
“I can’t hurt my own father!”
“He had no trouble hurting me. A lot of folks, probably.”
“I know, I know…” His voice faltered. “I get what you’re saying, I understand, but it’s way more difficult in practice. Especially since the Stormchasers got wind of us.” He paused and grinned. “Heh. Wind. Get it?”
I groaned and shook my head. “Now, what the hell are Stormchasers?”
“That’s what we call people who come to us to visit other dimensions. It goes both ways, you know?”
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” I muttered.
Silence.
“What’s Taurus-Caprici like?”
I thought for a moment, a chill running down my spine. “It’s deserted. There’s no towns, no communities, not even families that live together most of the time. The beings unfortunate enough to be born there are usually immediately abandoned by their parents. They’re not like you guys over there. Everyone’s just roaming around on their own. They’re like animals with their own territories. They avoid each other, when they fail to do so they either fight or copulate. No two creatures there look the same, and most… most I find terrifying. Deformed, hostile monsters, almost as aggressive as their environment. You’d think I wouldn’t be scared of them considering that I grew up among them, but I am. My mother looks like me, she looks human. Well… not quite, but mostly. So when I was little, I saw her, and I saw my own reflection, and I knew that we were unlike everyone else. She told me who my father was, where I came from. That’s how I knew there was a kinder, more beautiful existence in a place where the people looked like us.
“There’s barely any water on Taurus-Caprici. When it rains, it rains blood and that flows into the oceans and the lakes. That’s why all the seas there are dark red. The only water that the likes of you and me could drink is located in grottos deep beneath the surface. That’s where my mother had me, by the way. I was born in a cave. These caves are the only beautiful thing you’ll ever find on that plane of existence, let me tell you.” I paused to give him a meaningful look. “So no, I’m in fact not a god. I’m a human in a place where humans should not exist, and that’s why I’m miserable, and that’s why I came here. That’s all there is to me.”
Lorne averted his eyes. “So you can’t do anything.”
“Well, I never said that.”
| [Part 3 | Stormchasing](https://www.reddit.com/r/nosleep/comments/w9d95f/strange_things_happen_on_the_redwater_familys/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share) |