Kaelynn's Tale

By S.M. Muse

Most know me as Kaelynn Carroll, Theo’s fiance and curator of the New York Museum of Art. But what they don’t know, what few can even see, is the darkness that stirs within me, a Pandora’s Box of hunger and anger and disease. What began as a simple trip to Britain to catalog a 16th Century Art collection would soon turn into a nightmare beyond anything I could imagine. For you see, between the darkness beneath and the return trip home, I lived another’s life, another reality. Inadvertently I set something free.

And all the King’s horses and all the King’s men could not quench the terrible darkness that rages like a fire within...

• Language: English
• Publisher: S.M. Muse
• Release date: Oct 31, 2014
• ISBN: 9781311611376

S.M. Muse

After meeting Frank Herbert, author of the acclaimed Dune Series, I decided the life of writing was for me. That was about 30 years ago, I've been writing ever since. Heir of Nostalgia is my first published novel, and thanks to the encouragement of my loving wife Janet, is the first in a series chronicling the trials and tribulations of young man in search of his family, his country as well as his place in the world. I am pleased to present it here, for your reading pleasure. I truly believe in the gift and wonder of reading, I hope you do as well.Here's to the land of wonder, an air of Nostalgia, and childhood memories. May we never grow too old to dream...Got a question, comment or review, I'd love to hear from you. Simply drop me a line at: [e-mail].

Book preview

Chapter 0

Some stories are fully formed, others grow in the telling. Kaelynn’s Tale is one such story.

I have always been amazed at how strong the character of Kaelynn Carroll has become throughout the story of Theo and Phillip. Her beginnings were simple, a love interest for Theo, but as she grew on the page, her character began to deepen and broaden in character development.

As an author, I suspicioned what had occurred to her, from those tense, dark moments beneath the British Museum of Art until she found herself on a plane above the Atlantic on her way back to the States. Afterward there was darkness on her soul, a stain, as it were, from what she experienced on the ‘other side.’ I thought it was time the rest of the world caught a glimpse of what cast that shadow.

I’d like to say that her story ends here, but as you already know, dear reader, that simply is not true. Kaelynn lives on, and continues to affect all who encounter her, struggle with her, as she continues to journey forward to defend the man she loves and the family she will become.

I hope this story answers some of your questions regarding past enemies, present villains, and the situations that birthed them. I also hope it creates some new questions and mysteries as well. After all, what good is it to know everything when mystery drives life?

In order of reading, this book falls somewhere between Book One, Heir of Nostalgia- A Gathering Darkness, and the concluding volume yet to be written.

The story of Valerian continues to grow with each new telling, as more storylines are overturned and brought to the surface. It has always been my intention to uncover each new gem as it is revealed, bringing to light the lost times and places and people of Nostalgia. I hope you enjoy.

S.M. Muse

May 2014

Chapter 1- A Gathering Darkness

When: Thirteen years ago… almost to the day.

Where: British Museum of Antiquities and Arts

Circumstances: Prior to Kaelynn’s flight back to the States

For a moment it was all she could do not to break out in hysterical laughter. Something’s definitely wrong, she repeated, looking down at the three paintings before her. As if on cue there came another thump, this one seemingly much closer than the last. Again, it was followed by a general dimming of the lights overhead. That can’t be good, can it? she observed.

Much like the insanity of the paintings before her, like this entire situation!

At the same time Henson’s eyes widened, his hand going to his throat, as if his fear needed a physical expression. We need to get out of here! In his rush to get around he clips her knee, causing them both to stumble. As he fell, clipboard, papers, and pen fly from his hands.

Before she can say or do anything, the door bursts wide open- darkness engulfs them like a tidal wave.

Instant chaos and pandemonium, muffled shouts and scrambling abound, mostly hers.

In one corner of the room something large topples, knocked over by whatever accompanies the darkness into the room. The sound of its breaking echoes throughout the chamber like rolling thunder.

Without warning, wings, claws, and beaks seem to fill the space around her, scratching and pecking at her arms, hands, and face. She raises a hand to protect her eyes; with the other she keeps a tight grip on Hilliard’s book.

Henson was right; they needed to get out of here.

Funny now, but in the midst of all the chaos, she thought she’d freeze. However, with effort, she neither freezes nor screams helplessly, instead she manages to crawl towards the direction of the door, even as the presence and sound of many bodies begin to surround her, filling all the remaining space.

In that next moment, the room feels crowded, to the point of being claustrophobic.

She manages to exit the room and enter the just-as-dark, but much-emptier-feeling, hallway outside. Still blind, eyes wrapped in darkness, she manages to stumble towards the elevators (or so she hopes), before catching her foot and tripping over something sprawled before her unseen. She falls so quickly and unexpectedly, that she makes little effort to catch herself. As a result, sudden and intense pain lances from her knees where they cracked against the floor. She cries out, but the sound of her voice is drowned out by the larger struggle within the room she just exited. She considers crying out to Henson, but decides against it at the last second. Since the darkness fell, she hasn’t heard a peep from the Englishman, either by design or by accident.

This should tell me something… as in I should keep my big mouth shut!

Perhaps the darkness works to her advantage as well.

Biting her lip against the pain, she manages to stand, using the wall to steady herself. She has time to draw a couple of deep breaths, before she is startled by muffled cries from somewhere behind her.

Henson!

More cries, and then there is no time to scream, as a roughened hand closes over her face, choking off her airway and causing her head to snap back.

Violence fills the air. Someone is behind her. She steps back, hoping to catch them off guard!

No good-

She leans forward, hoping to pull them off balance- suddenly a heavy thud from behind, so heavy it reverberates through her assailants bones-

Now!

She struggles to break free, her assailant hangs on. Her chest burns for air, eyes watering, in the midst of all this someone, or thing, begins tugging at Hilliard’s book. Desperate, and with her waning reserves of energy she strikes out with her foot, striking the leg of her assailant. An ear-splitting scream and then she is free!

In the midst of all this a sudden memory crashes in, a childhood dream, or a vision perhaps, of a time when giants tried to save her from the wretchedness of night and all she could do was cry out for her mother and father to save her.

Fevered dreams?

The memory fades as a series of blinding flares cut the darkness reminding her of sparks from a metal grinder. Once again she topples forward as the floor is torn from beneath her.

She lands on her knees in the sand.

Sand?

Sudden light, clarity- what she sees- nightmare!

She is no longer in the hallway, or even beneath the museum—she has been cast into purgatory instead.

This can’t be real. This can’t be happening…

But it is. Two skies vaulted overhead, and neither made sense. They reminded her of two gigantic wheels tipped up on their rims. As such, they appeared to be grinding, one against the other, like two tremendous dinner plates slapped back-to-back. In that space where they met in eternal battle, where one wore against the other, madness and fire literally rained from the sky in showers, white-hot streaks of fire trailing into darkness and night. The wheels were like two sides of the same coin, one side wearing darkness as pitch as night; the other, and visible, radiated bright, illuminating light.

All she could do was stand there, and attempt to make sense of what she was seeing. All the while a singular thought, ‘This can’t be happening. This can’t be real…’

In the distance, off to her right, a featureless plain, flat and desolate as a desert. An endless, burning vista of waste and stifling heat.

Behind her the exact opposite, an overly-healthy jungle of dark green, massive and sprawling. A place as primitive and primeval as any she’d ever seen. A murky haze seemed to grip this darkened land, and beyond the haze, what appeared to be mountains, an entire range of needle-sharp rock formation stabbing up from the earth in defiance of the sky. On the sides of those mountains, a series of dark forbidding keeps. Keeps that were at once, gigantic and frightening, horrendous in size and proportion, they reminded her of some nightmarish scene from a 1930s black and white horror flick.

And they were moving…

This can’t be happening. This can’t be real. Please God, I just want to go home!

Mr. Henson? Words that seemed to fall from her lips, to lie lifelessly at her feet. It was as if the air itself were void of life.

She might as well have been screaming in a vacuum.

Mr. Henson… she tried again. Same result, an eerie and flat silence her only answer. A sudden thought occurred to her, even as fear wrapped its cold, bony fingers around the base of her skull. What if I am all alone? What if Henson never even made it out of the museum?

What if…?

A quick look seemed to confirm this. She was alone, absolutely alone. Not one sign of the Englishman.

Obviously, we’re not in Kansas anymore, she realized.

Out in the open left her feeling vulnerable. She needed to find cover, shelter, anything… in other words, the cool, darkened, confines of the nearby forest.

The nearest tree, its trunk twisted and gnarled, loomed before her draped in darkness, an eerie sort of night that seemed to muffle her every move, every breath. The darkness both beckoned and repelled her, a siren’s song of seduction and deception.

Only then, under its canopy of night, did she realize she had been weeping the entire time, tears running down her cheeks, leaving salty trails on her lips and tongue. It was obvious, as she took stock of her situation that she was either stark-raving mad, or she had been knocked unconscious beneath the museum during the struggle and was hallucinating.

There was a third possibility as well, one she hated to even contemplate—that she was dead, as in dead-as-a-doornail dead.

Then again, she admitted, there could be another possibility as well— one that had her trapped beneath the museum, blinded by darkness, helpless to move—trapped in a living hell.

So pick your poison, Mrs. Contestant… chose your fate. Which one will it be? Door #1 and insanity? Door #2, tripping on LSD? Or Door #3, being really, really, dead?

She had to start somewhere, so she pinched herself on the leg- Ouch!

She obviously wasn’t asleep. She also realized that maybe next time she shouldn’t pinch herself so hard.

Next- she placed two fingers just beneath her chin, feeling for a pulse-

.. .. ..

Yep, a definite heartbeat, so she obviously wasn’t dead either. Which was a good thing…? Then again, if she were dead she could just be imagining a heartbeat… It certainly felt real, from the blistering heat in front of her to the cool, shivery, shade behind. In that moment a line from Dante’s Inferno rose unbidden to her mind bringing with it another possibility:

"Midway upon the journey of our life,

I found myself within a forest dark,

For the straightforward pathway had been lost."

Great, just great. The last thing she needed was to be comparing this place to Dante’s Inferno.

From beneath the trees she took a good long look around, hoping to spot anything at all that might tell her where she was or how she could possibly get out of this place—only to see nothing obvious; nothing, that is, except for the aforementioned vistas of blistering heat and sun and the choking forests of darkness and gloom.

The sands before her stretched all the way to the horizon, and had been bleached bone-white by an unforgiving sun. Within its confines nothing stirred, nothing moved, its vacancy reminding her of the Great Salt Flats in Utah. Her parents had taken her and her brother there, on their last family vacation, in what seemed a lifetime ago.

The forest, on the other hand, was the exact opposite.

From within its confines, cool breezes tugged at her hair and clothing, bringing with them the sickeningly sweet aroma of jasmine and rose. Undercutting these scents, even deeper scents like shadows cast at midnight; hints of cinnamon, cumin, and curry. There was something else as well, more than just a simple current or a breeze, something that seemed to lurk just beyond her senses, hidden by the darkness of the trees—something terribly primeval.

The dampness permeating the air left tiny drops of dew behind, coating her clothing, forearms, and face. As a result, she began to shiver, whether from terror or coolness she could not tell, possibly a combination of both.

As noted before, the trunks of nearby trees were thick, dark and gnarled—twisted—as if suffering from paralyzing arthritis. Clumps of pale lichen clung to their sides and waved from overhead branches. Each tree bore a weighty crown of thick, green foliage, leaves the size of her palm, some bigger.

Beneath her feet, the soil lay rich, dark, and dank, bringing to mind images of spilt blood long since dried.

Her mind began to play tricks, leaping back to a time when she used to play a particular game with her brother and parents, the very same game she would go on to teach visiting groups of schoolchildren visiting her museum.

It was a game her father liked to call Survival.

The premise of the game was simple—you were one of the lucky (or not so lucky, depending on how you looked upon it) survivors of a recent plane crash. The object of the game was to gather various supplies, in order of importance, while waiting to be rescued. Gameplay consisted of each child being given a sheet of paper listing approximately twenty to twenty-five items, from flashlights to matchbooks, blankets to compass. The idea was to list those items in order of importance, starting with the most important and ending with the least important, that would be necessary for survival. One wrong decision and you die a gruesome death!

On your mark, get set, go…

This time though, it was for real, though. This wasn’t some childhood pretend game, this was the real thing! She really was stranded- And a long, long way from home, she mused. That and she had no supplies to speak of, other than Hilliard’s sketchbook, and a few odds and ends she managed to pull together in her mad rush from the hotel.

Feeling her mind start to wander, she resisted the urge to run even further into the woods. Something in her gut told her she needed to stay put, that danger lurked just beneath those outstretched limbs. So she stayed put, caught somewhere between two realities- literally. She was beginning to feel an awfully lot like Alice after falling down the rabbit hole.

The last thing she clearly remembered was being in one of the rooms beneath the British Museum of Art with its curator, Mr. Henson. They had been looking over some of Hilliard’s more questionable paintings—paintings that showed Theo, Phillip, and a few others, including herself, dressed in 16th-century garb and posing like Royalty. The thing was, they had never posed for such pictures, not even in spoof or for fun. Second and more important was the fact that she hadn’t been alive during the 16th century. She’d been born in the twentieth century; late 70s to be exact, a good four hundred and some years after the supposed paintings had been created!

Deep breaths, Kael, deep breaths. Just close your eyes and get your crap together… come up with a plan, and get your behind out of here!

Wherever ‘here’ might be.

She closed her eyes, took a couple of deep breaths- and hoped that when she opened her eyes once again, she’d be back in the labyrinthine hallways beneath the museum with Mr. Henson, and all this craziness would go away. With this singular thought in mind she slowly opened her eyes to see what she might see.

Chapter 2

The trees remained. The plains and the heat remained.

The madness in the skies remained.

The book in her arms remained, as well as the sickeningly sweet smell of roses. Where did that come from?

The madness in her head remained, much like the pain in her knee where she had fallen during her escape from beneath the museum. In fact, nothing had changed around her, in what she saw, what she smelled, or how she felt, not one iota— except that now there was a large furry creature kneeling in front of her, studying her with a look of deep concern. A figure with horns on its head and cloven feet.

It couldn’t be, but it sure seemed to be—

Boo, said Puck.

Chapter 3

After an indeterminate amount of time she finally came to, not that she’d been asleep or knocked unconscious, mind you. No, that was part of the problem; she’d been awake the entire time. On top of all that, she was intimately and painfully aware of all her surroundings as well.

No way!

No way in hell what I’m seeing can possibly be real. This has to be madness—pure and simple. And now I’m face to face with a mythological creature, an honest-to-goodness satyr.

I am so screwed…

All she could remember after opening her eyes, was running. Clasping Hilliard’s book so tightly against her chest, and running for all she was worth—anything to escape the mad, dancing creature frolicking before her on satyr song and cloven hoof.

Trees and branches had flashed by in streaks, their skeletal-fingers reaching out and clawing at her in an attempt to slow her down, scratching at her face, ripping at her tee-shirt, leaving behind streaks of muted green lichen and blood-red sap.

Still she ran.

She ran until the air burned in her lungs and spots filled her eyes, until it felt like her heart was about to explode from the confines of her chest. She ran and she continued to run, sobbing and screaming like a mad woman, eyes and face hideously distorted. She ran until her legs gave out and folded, causing her to fall and tumble head over heels, down a long and ridiculously soft hillside covered in a carpet of fallen pine needles and soft fragrant grasses. How long she lay there at the bottom, sprawled without a care to the open sky, she didn’t know.

She only knew that the running and the madness surely had to end sometime.

Didn’t it?

Slowly… ever so slowly, her senses returned. But they were brittle, brittle in a way she’d never known before, as if Fragile- Handle with Care had been stamped on her forehead. Only then did she realize just how thin the line between sanity and madness truly was.

Separated only by a simple realization

At the moment she lay in the shallow vale between two green-carpeted mounds rising