The Girl With Golden Eyes

“Daylight,” Reggie said behind him, “it’s over. It’s closed.”

“What’s closed?” Stephen said, his voice soft.

Stephen could hear Reggie stand and approach him, stopping a few feet away, but not coming too near. “This house is a doorway, Stephen, I think you know that already. It opens once a year, Halloween night, when—“

“When the veil is lifted,” Stephen continued, repeating the story his mother had once told him, “and the dead are free to roam the earth. I saw them, last night, out there.”

“Then you know, too, that the spirits of the dead are the least of our concerns. They’re truly beyond the grasp of this world. It’s the others we have to worry about.”

“The others,” Stephen said, turning to face Reggie, “like him. Like Kirsahn.”

Reggie’s eyes widened in surprise, and his mouth opened, but he could not speak for a long moment. “You saw him, then? You saw your equal?”

“My equal?”

“In the Otherworld, we all have an equal, a soul equal, who mirrors our nightmares, or at least, our nightmarish perception of ourselves.”

Stephen’s eyes dropped to the floor. “Reggie, how do you know all this? How did you get into the—“

“The Otherworld is what we call it.”

“We who?”

“There a certain ones among us who fight against the threat of the Otherworld. We fight against those who would try to escape it. And I got there the same way you did.” He held out his fist and opened it. There, in his palm, was a pile of blue dust. He turned his palm over, and the dust floated to the ground. Stephen looked down, and saw the same dust sifting between his fingers.

“What do you mean by thethreat,” Stephen asked, “the threat of what?”

Reggie sighed deeply. “The Otherworld is a terrible place, man. What you saw was just the tip of the iceberg, paradise compared to what else is out there. There are beings trying to escape it every day, evil beings like Kirsahn and his crew, and others...”

“Like Cassandra,” Stephen said, his voice cracking.

“Just normal folks who want to live in peace. But if they come here, they disturb a very fine balance that we’ve trying to keep for longer than we can remember. If Cassandra had—if she had made it, she would have had to take the place of a soul on earth. And that soul, in turn, would have to take her place back in the Otherworld. If she had succeeded, it would have opened a very small door just a crack. And then someone else would have followed her through, then someone else after that, and so on and so on until the flood gates opened. She was endangeringher life, she was endangeringyour life, the life of your little girl, and every other life on this planet.”

Stephen looked away.If she had succeeded... howwould she? His eyes dropped down to the glittering pile of dust at his feet. The crystal. He knew now it had been the key to the doorway, the key that allowed him to slip through.

He looked past Reggie, into the other room. The table that had been covered in crystals, was now covered with nothing more than glittering dust.

“One soul for another, Steve, that’s the way it works.”

Reggie’s words echoed through Stephen’s mind, but he barely heard them.

...the life of your little girl...

“Oh God, Reg...”

Reggie stared at him intently. “What is it?”

“Casey!”

Reggie watched helplessly as Stephen bolted through the house and out the front door.

* * *

The highway was astoundingly barren as Stephen sped along at top speed in his car. He had blinders on, only seeing the highway before him. It came and went in a flash, and at the end of his drive, Julie’s house.

The neighborhood was quiet, the corpses of carved pumpkins littering doorways, sunrise creeping through the trees. Stephen screeched to a halt in front of Julie’s house and bounded out of the car without even turning off the ignition. He took the walkway at a full run, pounding up the front steps and slamming through the unlocked front door.

“Julie? Casey!” he called out through the silence of the house. He once again bounded up the stairs, ignoring the burning sensation in his already exhausted legs. He ran down the hall, and stopped at the first door on the right: Casey’s room. Without hesitation, he burst through the door, his eyes scanning the room desperately for his daughter.

“Casey? Oh God, Casey, where are you?”

His eyes stopped at a shivering bundle in the corner of the room, a tiny princess still in her gown, her head drooping between her knees. Stephen ran, knelt down beside her, placing his arms around her, savoring the feel of her warm, living body.

She wept uncontrollably, and her arms automatically went around him. He held her close.

“Casey, honey, are you alright?”

“I—I only tried to help,” she said between sobs, “I was trying tohelp Mommy.”

“Casey, I know, baby,” Stephen said, relieved above all that his daughter was alright. “Tell me what happened.”

“I—I—Mommy was so upset last night, after you left. She was so sad, she’s always so sad. And—and the lady, she said the crystal would give me good dreams...”

Stephen’s mouth went dry, and his stomach tightened into a ball. He picked up his daughter, holding her as tightly as possible, and carried her out into the hallway. He stood staring at the door to his ex-wife’s room for a long time, debating whether to move forward and open it, or to leave the house forever and take his daughter with him.

He had to know. Casey held onto him for dear life, pressing her face into his neck. Stephen approached the door and put his hand on the knob. From inside he could hear the sound of soft weeping, and he opened the door.

At first he saw the bed, empty, save for the overturned blankets and pillows. Covering one side of a pillow, an unmistakable gold dust that glimmered in the soft morning light filling the room.

“I put it under her pillow so she wouldn’t cry anymore,” Casey whimpered into his ear.

“Julie?” Stephen said softly. He cast his eyes around the room, and in one darkened corner, a corner the morning light had not yet reached, he found her. She was sitting much as Casey had been sitting, her knees drawn to her chest, her arms wrapped around them, her head down.

“Julie,” Stephen said, hugging Casey even closer in his arms, “Julie, are you alright?”

She raised her head slowly, and Stephen inhaled a gritty, hissing gasp. He stumbled back against the wall, but kept a tight hold on his daughter.

Beneath the eyelids of the woman who had once been his ex-wife, glowing, golden eyes.

“You—you tried to do this to my daughter,” he stuttered.

One soul for another, that’s how it works.

“Stephen,” came Julie’s voice, but it was no longer her voice, “Stephen, I’m sorry.”

One soul for another...

“Where’s Julie,” Stephen uttered through gritted teeth, “where’s my wife?”

The woman on the floor only shook her head, tears streaming down her cheeks, her face red with shame.

“WHERE IS SHE?”

“She didn’t—we switched—“

“You switched,” Stephen growled, “when?When? When did you switch?”

“When they started cutting.”

Stephen covered his mouth as a horrified yelp escaped his lips. He backed away slowly, those golden eyes watching him, pleading with him. But he slammed the door, carrying his sobbing daughter, away, away from her, down the stairs, far away from her, out the door, out into the light, out into the world

Out into a world that would never be the same again.