Rediscovering the Dark People

Well guys, I'd told you I would write it, and finally here it is! The sequel to Try to Remember. This is Andy's story after she moves. Read it and enjoy. I'm creating a collection of short stories in Creative Writing, and I might actually end up publishing them. So there will be more where this came from. Tell me what you think. Constructive criticism is appreciated.

It was summer and the little village of Polarous was filled with the movements of everyday life. In the market people bustled to and fro buying food or trading various things. Little kids ran down the streets as the bigger kids chased them. Everything was absolutely normal. The people of the village were able to forget about the Dark People and the prophecy that had yet to come true. For once they were able to live their lives like they had before Regis and his clan of savages had come to power. Their hero had deserted them, they were completely vulnerable, and yet they were happy, for now.

Andy groaned and rolled over, pulling her blanket with her, it had been a long time since she had dreamed about the Dark People of Polarous and it worried her slightly that she’d dreamt of it now. Her eyelids were still heavy with sleep and she was desperate to keep them closed a little longer. The sun was bright and high in the sky, but it couldn’t possibly have been any later than eight or nine. The light and heat seemed to be magnified by the window in Andy’s room, and it created a box of miserably thick and heated air.

Sighing dramatically, Andy sat up. She opened her eyes momentarily, but shut them quickly as the light stunned her. Back in the dark Andy assessed her situation. Her mother was working today; it was Tuesday and it was two weeks into the summer break. Andy had the house to herself and she had finished all of her major work (mowing the lawn and cleaning her room) the day before. Andy had the whole day to herself and she needed to decide what to do with it.

There were numerous things Andy could do. She had meant to get started on her summer reading, but the sun was so warm and inviting that she knew she wouldn’t get anything done anyway. She could call her friends; there were plenty of them and there had to be somebody else with nothing to do. They could go to the mall or a public pool, or they could even rent a movie and hang out. They’d probably end up spending all of their money though, whatever they did, and where would that leave them for the rest of the summer?

‘Bad idea’ Andy thought. She lifted her hands to her face groggily and rubbed her eyes. After a moment she dared to open her eyes again. Slowly this time, her eyelids rose and she found that while the light was still too bright, it became more tolerable when taken in slowly. Andy looked around her room; to any outsider it would just look like an average teenaged girl’s bedroom, but to Andy it meant so much more than that. Andy grew up in this room. Sure, Andy and her mother had only moved into the house four years ago, but she made all of her important decisions there. She had decided it was time for her to grow up in this room.

Andy rolled off of her bed and landed on floor with a heavy ‘thunk’. She lay there for a while with her head turned toward her bed as her hands played with the soft, beige shag carpet on either side of her face.

As Andy lay on her floor she pictured the Oregon sunlight on days like these. Unlike the California sun, Oregon was always deceiving. Even on the brightest of summer days Oregon could be as cold as the Arctic. She had loved it there though; she had loved the forests, the rain, the beaches, and the mountains.

Eventually Andy managed to gather enough energy to pull herself up off of the floor. There was no way to tell how long she had been on the floor, but when she stood up and looked at her alarm clock it was almost eleven thirty. Her day was almost half over already and she hadn’t even left her bedroom.

There had been a time when Andy got up at six a.m. sharp every morning. She would get dressed and do her chores before eating breakfast, and then she would read or write until lunch. That had stopped three years ago; she had quit being so busy and productive about a year after she moved to California. That was when she grew up.

Andy dragged her feet across the floor toward the kitchen. Her stomach growled with ferocity of a lion hunting his prey. She had been so tired last night that she had fallen asleep while reading and never actually ate dinner.

“Hmm…” Andy sighed, opening the refrigerator and contemplating what to have for lunch. ‘When exactly was it,’ Andy thought. ‘That I decided it was time to grow up, time to stop playing my silly little games, and time to face the cold, hard truth?’ She couldn’t remember. One would think that a person would remember such and important moment, but she didn’t.

She knew she had been writing that day. ‘What was it that I was writing?’ Andy thought. Almost as if she was looking through a library catalogue, Andy sifted through her mind looking for the story that had changed the way she looked at life. ‘It didn’t have anything to do with the Dark People or Polarous.’ She thought, ‘So what could it have been?’

Then it was there, as clear as if she had just written the last word seconds ago. ‘It was the story of the girl, the one who was hit by a bus in New York. And the guy, the guy who tried to save her but wasn’t fast enough.’ That story tormented Andy’s mind even before she moved to California, and she had spent a lot of time on it. She hated the tragic ending even more now than she had when she wrote it. Those characters had been a part of her, she was connected to them. Celia and Eric had been the only people she had when she had moved to California.

The story had taken her completely by surprise, because it wasn’t fantasy. Almost everything Andy wrote was fantasy except for that story. As with sports there were rules to writing. A story had to be part of a genre and every genre had a set of rules all it’s own. The story about the girl who got hit by the bus did not follow the rules that every fantasy must follow. The characters, the emotions, the places, and the events were all so real that Andy almost believed the story to be a non-fiction.. In the end, when the girl died, Andy herself had the hardest time feeling alive again, and in that way the story had almost seemed like fantasy. It was magic, the way the characters got to her like a real person would was magic, or at least that’s what Andy had believed before she turned away from magic and fantasy. Magic wasn’t real. The stories were stupid things for people who couldn’t face the real world.

‘But what does that story have to do with anything?’ Andy thought, sliding a green, glass casserole dish out of the fridge along with a plastic bottle of ice tea. When Andy had finished that story and had written follow ups and backgrounds on some of the characters she felt like she had simply documented an event that had truly happened. It wasn’t long before she gave up on it though. She had grown up and thrown all her stories into a box that she now kept… Where?

“Does it even matter?” Andy asked herself. She had grabbed a plate out of the cupboard above the dishwasher and was now scooping some of the cheesy, gooey casserole out of the dish and onto the plate. “Who cares where that box is? It’s just full of lies created by a naïve little girl who couldn’t, and wouldn’t, accept that the world is not a place full of magic and happy endings.” It mattered though. Andy needed to know where that box was. She remembered the day she put the stories into the box, she remembered her rage and frustration, and she remembered how her mom had reacted to it all. Her mother thought it was a terribly sad thing that Andy would throw her stories away. Andy’s original plan for the box had been to let the garbage truck take it. Who cared if her stories were lost?

“They’re not real!” Andy cried. She was carrying a big cardboard box full of notebooks, papers, and drawing. She had been heading outside to throw the box away when her mother stopped her. She had seen Andy’s red, tear stained face and asked her what was wrong. “The stories aren’t real. They’re lies and they’re stupid, and I don’t want them anymore.” Andy was now yelling at her mother.

Her mother lifted a flap on the box and calmly looked inside. She knew Andy loved to write, and she was curious as to what had brought all this on. She loved Andy’s stories. They were always so full of wonder, magic, and adventure; they were the mind of her daughter, and she hated for Andy to give that up. She recognized that Andy used situations from her life to create these stories, but she had never seen any harm in it. “Andy, are you throwing all this away?” Her mother asked calmly. Andy just nodded curious as to why her mother was asking her about it. “These are your stories Andy. They’re wonderful. Why are you throwing them away?”

Andy almost didn’t know how to answer her mother’s question. “I wrote the stories to hide from the truth mom. I’m done hiding. I don’t want to be a stupid little girl anymore. I’m thirteen, and it’s about time I grew up.” She said looking up at her mother for the first time during the conversation.

“Andy, you don’t have to be a little girl to write your stories. It’s okay to hide sometimes.” Her mother had said beginning to look concerned. “You’re a great writer Andy. You can’t give up on something just because you think you’re too old for it. Andy you will never be too old for your writing.”

“I don’t want to write anymore, and I don’t want these stories anymore. I’m done writing mom.” Andy growled.

“Well, if you don’t want your stories lets find something better to do with them okay? If you don’t want them anymore I’ll keep them. I do love your writing Andy. I won’t give them to anyone else. I’ll just keep them for myself, would that be okay?”

Andy thought about it for a moment and decided that if her mother wanted the box full of lies then she could have them. Her mom could hide from the world all she wanted. Just because Andy was done hiding didn’t mean her mother had to stop too. She nodded at her mother signifying that it was ok for her to have the box.

“Alright. Now I’m going to go put this away.” She lifted the box that Andy had handed to her. “When I come back how about we talk about all this growing up stuff okay?” she smiled lightly and then left the room.

Andy frowned as she remembered the day. It had not been a pleasant one. She pulled her plate out of the microwave and went over to the table, grabbing a fork on the way. She sat eating and wondering about the box. Where had her mother put it? Did her mother still read the stories? Andy wished desperately that her mom hadn’t had to work today.

‘I wish I could read them. It’s been so long I almost don’t remember them anymore.’ Andy thought. It was weird that she wanted to read the stories. She hadn’t thought about them much in the last year, and now she needed them. ‘What had the stories been about?’ she asked herself silently. She remembered a passage from one of them.

Hundreds of years ago a seer had prophesized that there would be two children, a boy and a girl who would save the world from the terrors of the dark people. The girl would have fair blonde hair and eyes as deep and as blue as the ocean; the boy would have brown hair that rivaled that of the most beautiful horse and the eyes greener than any jewel ever discovered. They would meet on a carriage, and they would find that they had more in common than they could have ever dreamed. Both of them would be without a father. The girl’s was killed in the last war against the dark people, while the boy’s had joined the dark people during the last reign. Together they would travel and discover the wonders of the world, and then they would use their knowledge of the world to defeat the dark people. The seer had said it would happen, and so it did.

Andy had loved that story when she wrote it. It had been a story full of action, wonder, and love. The boy had been real. He had been her best friend in Oregon, her best friend ever. Griffin had been the boy in the story. His father had left them about two weeks before Andy moved to California, and after she found out about it she had written this story. It had been inspired by their similarities and their differences. Andy’s father had left her and her mother when she was seven. Andy had never known why, or what had happened to him, but she was sure that he had left for some noble reason. Her father had been better, more loving and kind, than Griffin’s father was.

All her stories mentioned something about either Griffin or her father. Most of them were about an amazing young hero who was taught by a brave knight who had saved many people during his own time. She wrote about Griffin and her father because they were the two men she thought she could trust. They were both good people. Griffin was surely doing wonderful things for people back in Oregon, and her father, wherever he was, left for a good cause and did good things for millions of people everyday. That’s what she had believed when she wrote the stories. She was hiding from the truth that her father was just like Griffin’s.

‘I need my stories’ Andy thought, suddenly desperate. She felt like she was having an attack. Her heart felt tight and she couldn’t breathe. She wanted to cry, but she couldn’t; her eyes were dry and she couldn’t force the tears. She needed to call her mother and figure out where those stories were, but what would her mother think? After all, Andy was almost sixteen. A sixteen year old girl should not have to call her mother while she’s at work. Andy had told her mother a million times that she was grown up, but she wasn’t acting like it now.

To any outsider Andy would look very calm. She finished eating in what seemed to be a peaceful silence and then put her dishes in the sink. After rinsing her dishes and placing them in the dishwasher she walked down the hall and into her mother’s room. That was the great thing about Andy’s relationship with her mother. They didn’t hide anything. The whole house belonged to both of them, and they didn’t mind having the other in their territory. Andy sat on her mother’s bed and turned on the television trying to get the stories out of her head.

The dark people lived like rabid barbarians. It seemed to Cecilia that there was no way these people could be as bad as they were said to be in the legends. When watched from afar Cecilia could tell that they were the farthest things from intelligent and civilized humans. She could not believe she was risking her life for this fight. To die with no purpose was something Cecilia would not do. Especially if it was simply because an old woman with a dazed look on her face had said so. Cecilia would not die without reason. She would show the world that she was just as good as her father.

To Andy this passage had shown some of her doubt in her stories. It showed that things weren’t how they were said to be. It was while writing this passage that the doubt had slowly began to sink in. It had taken more than a year for it to finally break her.

Andy couldn’t stand it anymore. She needed to read her stories. She needed some of the false hope that she had back before she drowned in the pain of the cruel truth. The feeling was the same as it was back then. She had let it take away her stories before and now she was letting it take away her strength. She couldn’t live knowing that her father was just like Griffin’s. She didn’t want to believe that her father hadn’t loved her.

Holding back the tears that threatened to spill down her cheeks, Andy reached for the phone on her mother’s nightstand. She sat up on the bed and dialed the number for her mother’s office. While the phone rang Andy played with blankets and sheets with her free hand. ‘Is she in a meeting today? I don’t remember her saying anything about a meeting. Maybe she just went out to lunch. I knew I should have called her cell, but then she would be worried. Should she be worried? Am I okay? I don’t feel okay.’

When there was a click as someone answered the phone Andy sighed with relief. “Wright Brother Publishing, Maryanne Peters speaking. How can I help you?”

“Mom?” Andy whispered. Her voice was thick with emotion and she was having a hard time speaking at all. She needed her stories.

“Andy, are you okay? You sound upset. What’s going on?” her mother was panicked. Any moment now she was going to say she was coming home. Andy couldn’t let her do that. She needed her stories and she needed to be alone.

“I’m fine.” Andy managed to whisper. “I was just wondering…” she was beginning to doubt whether this had been a good idea.

“What?” Maryanne asked. She was worried about her daughter. Andy had seemed so fragile lately. Something had been going on, and it seemed that Andy had finally broke under it all.

“Where are my stories?” It was so quiet Maryanne almost didn’t hear it. That’s what this was about. Andy had been thinking about her father. If only there was some way to tell her daughter what had happened with her father, if only she knew herself why he left.

Maryanne sighed. She had hoped that Andy would want her stories back, but she didn’t want her daughter to feel so hurt. “Where are you?”

“In your room. On your bed.” Andy answered.

“Look under my bed. They should be there. Are you okay Andy? Do you need me to come home?”

There it was. Andy had known it would happen. As much as she loved her mother she just needed to go through this alone. She needed to figure out what she wanted. “No, but mom… I can’t believe I don’t know this… I should have asked you before… What’s dad’s name?”

Maryanne didn’t know what to do. She didn’t know if it was a good idea to tell her. She didn’t know if Andy would be hurt by what she discovered; she didn’t know if she would be hurt by what Andy discovered. She had never tried looking for her husband, and he had never contacted her after he left. They were, in fact, still married. “His name is Marcellus Rex Peters.” There was a pause, and Maryanne guessed Andy was writing that down.

“How do you spell Marcellus?” Andy asked after a moment.

“M-a-r-c-e-l-l-u-s.”

“Thanks mom. I’ll let you get back to work now.” Andy sounded almost happy, and the sudden change in her emotions worried Maryanne.

“Okay baby. Be careful okay? I love you. I’ll be home at seven.”

“Alright. Love you too mom.” Andy smiled. When she hung up the phone she sighed. She had everything she needed now. ‘Marcellus’ Andy thought. It was a strong name, though she was sure he went by Marc. People didn’t call each other by names like Marcellus anymore.

Andy got up off of the bed and onto the floor. She looked underneath the bed and saw that there was nothing there, except a box. The box was the same one she had thrown her stories into almost three years ago. She pushed it out from under the bed to the other side and then went over to it. She didn’t know what she had expected, but she hadn’t expected the box to look exactly the same as it had three years ago.

Maybe she had expected the kind of thing you would see in a movie. The box would look old and worn almost as if it were decades old instead of just three years. Andy took a deep breath. She had been so desperate to have her stories just moments ago, and now she felt like she was afraid of them. She didn’t want to open the box. The pain these would cause was inevitable, but she had chosen her course of action and now she was going to move forward with it.

Carefully, as if it were a fragile piece of thin glass that would break when she touched it, Andy lifted the flaps on the box one at a time. Looking down into it she smiled slightly. There were about twenty or so notebooks in the box, as well as stapled bundles of paper, and a few lone papers with drawings and writing on them. These were her stories. Her whole childhood had been spent creating the work that was in this box. Andy looked for one notebook in particular and picked it up. It was a little blue hard covered notebook that was held shut by a black piece of ribbon glued to the inside of the back cover and wrapped around a quarter sized black button on the front. Andy remembered when she had decided that she needed a way to hold the notebook shut. It was about a week before she had started writing the story about the girl and the bus.

The notebook was about an inch thick and six inches long. She had carried this notebook with her everywhere when she lived in Oregon. It had been where she wrote all of her ideas, and it was the place where she had written the story of the girl and the bus. With trembling fingers Andy unwound the ribbon from around the button. She lifted the cover of the notebook and opened it carefully. The first page was titled The Dark People Part VII. She flipped past the pages covered in writing on both sides and in the margins until she came to a page titled The Clubhouse. She didn’t remember this story. She remembered writing it though. Griffin had gone to West Virginia to see his grandparents and Andy had been left with nothing to do for a week during the summer.

Andy had spent that week up in the tree house that they had built during her first summer in Oregon. She sat up there and wrote for a week and this story was what came out of it. It wasn’t very good. Her mother had even admitted it. It was just about a girl who built a clubhouse with her best friend. To a five year old girl it was magic, and so Andy had typed up a copy in a pretty font with pictures for Griffin’s little sister Amy when they got back. Andy smiled slightly and kept turning pages. The last twenty pages or so were titled Celia and the Doctor. This was the story about the girl who got hit by the bus.

Putting the notebook down, she grabbed another one from the box. This one looked almost the same as the last one, except it was purple and didn’t have a button or a ribbon. She remembered this notebook. She had written the first part of The Dark People in this notebook. As she flipped through the notebooks she saw the passages she had thought about earlier. She was surprised at how good her writing was; she had only been about eight or nine when she had began to write these stories.

Andy smiled. The stories were beginning to make her think. She didn’t have to leave them behind to be “grown up”. She could still write, and she could still believe her father was a good person without lying to herself. She didn’t know either way.

Maybe it was time to find out though.

* * * * * * * * *­ * * *

Finding someone online is not a hard thing to do. Andy knew this, and she was glad for it. Andy was sitting at the desk in her bedroom. She had brought the box of notebooks into the room and had set them on her bed. She was now waiting for her ancient computer to log on so she could open a web browser. Sitting on the desk next to her mouse was the piece of paper she had written her father’s name on.

Andy didn’t know what was going to come of this. She didn’t know if it was a waste of her time or if it was a good thing for her to do, but she was doing it. By the end of the day she would know where her father worked, possibly where he lived, what had happened to him, and maybe she’d even talk to him.

When she was completely logged onto the computer and she had a web browser open she was panicking. Maybe it wasn’t a good idea for Andy to figure out what happened to her father. What if he really was just like Griffin’s father? How would she handle that? Would he want to talk to her mother? If he did would he hurt her? What if he didn’t believe that she was his daughter?

Taking one last deep breath Andy typed “Marcellus Rex Peters” into the search box of her homepage and waited for the page to load. When the page came up Andy was amazed at the number of results she had. The first one was something about a conference in New Hampshire last year. After looking at that she figured out that her father was a big business man for some company that made and sold cell phones, computers, and numerous other electronics.

The next link was the company’s webpage. It mentioned a few things about merchandising and their local stores and such, and Andy was just about to give up when she saw an address and phone number for their main office in New York. Andy jogged across the hall into her mother’s room and grabbed the phone of the bed. Closing her eyes as she walked back over to her own room she realized she was incredibly nervous.

Sitting back at her computer desk she lifted the phone with a trembling hand and dialed the number on the screen. As the phone began to ring she held it hard against her ear to keep her hand from shaking. Her heart was beating as fast as the fan in her computer was spinning and her throat was chalk dry. For a moment Andy thought about hanging up, but she didn’t. She was frozen and she couldn’t even move the phone away from her face. When a receptionist answered Andy had a hard time finding her voice.

“I was wondering if you had a Marcellus Peters working in your office.” Andy managed to say after a moment.

“Uh…” there was the sound of long, fake nails against a keyboard before Andy got an answer. “Yes we do. Mr. Peters just got back from a conference and is currently in a meeting. Would you like to leave a message?”

Andy sighed. She had been so close to talking to her father. It was all over now because he was in a meeting. She would never get the courage to do something like this again. “No.” she answered. ‘Would they let me stay on hold until he was out of the meeting?’ she wondered and decided to ask. “Is there any way I could just be put on hold until the meeting is over?” she was desperate now.

“Alright miss. What’s your name?” the receptionist asked.

“Andromeda Peters.” Andy spoke into the phone.

“Are you related to Mr. Peters?”

“Yes.”

“Ok, the meeting should be over any minute now. I’ll put you over to his office.”

“Thank you so much.” Andy’s voice was full of sincerity. The lady just chuckled before putting her on hold.

Andy was almost hyperventilating now. Any minute now she was going to get to talk to her father. She thought back to getting up earlier this morning. Had it really only been an hour ago? Andy wished she could talk to Griffin about all this, but it had been almost four years, and there was no way he thought about her anymore. She wanted to tell him about the only secret she’d ever kept from him, and she wanted to tell him how sorry she was that his father had left them.

Then she thought about the story of the girl and the doctor. Wouldn’t it be grand if that were Griffin and her? Of course, Griffin would save her. He would be a better doctor than the one in the story. They would meet again, and they would talk, and Andy would tell him about her father and about whatever was about to happen.

Suddenly the dull hold music stopped and the phone was answered. Andy swallowed hard as a man with a deep, kind voice answered the phone. “Marcellus Peters with Youngblood Electronics speaking.”

Andy suddenly couldn’t find her voice. She didn’t know what to say. This was her father she about to talk to and she had no idea how to tell him who she was. “Hello?” Marcellus said again.

Andy took a deep breath.

“Who is this?” Marcellus again. There was silence before he spoke again. “Andromeda Peters. Is this some sort of joke? Who are you and how do you know about her?” He was angry, and she suddenly remembered all the times he had scolded her when she did something wrong when she was little.

Andy took another deep breath and then decided what she would say.

“Who is this?” Marcellus demanded.

Andy’s voice shook and she didn’t sound like her normal self.

“Dad?”