THE DARK WORLD

By Sonia Vela

It is a fantasy novel about the adventure of five people in a parallel world. It is about true friendship,  love and  the relationship among people.   

• Language: English
• Publisher: Sonia Vela
• Release date: Jun 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781507142875

Book preview

To my mother

My reflection

My light

To my father

My role model

My mentor

To them

Who have always kept

A window open onto my dreams

1

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In that cold December morning, the sunshine rays falling palely on the window glass, struggled their way through the satin curtains of the kitchen. Sara was sipping the last drop of her hot chocolate. Breakfast over, she washed the cup and headed to the corridor.

Then she took the house keys from the dresser in the hallway.

C’mon Mum! Are you ready?

Here I am, darling!.

The two ladies walked to the crowded subway station. The train cars were packed with angry people looking for the last Christmas gift to grab, before everything was sold out.

A few stops and the two women reached the downtown market. Sara approached a pictures seller, she had always liked oil paintings on canvas.I, too, should try painting, she thought.

Since she was a child she had always enjoyed creating, drawing and inventing. It was a great fun.At present she was collecting oval, drop bulb, round- shaped, clear light bulbs.

On that morning she was thinking of buying some acrylic paint and some glitters to paint them and decorate the Christmas tree as she gave a look at the shop windows at the back of the stalls trying to catch a glimpse of an easel, a case of special coloring pencils or a palette to smear colors on, but there were no fine art shops nearby.

The colorful shop windows followed one another and countless, small, warm lights lit up the main street even in the day light. The town thronged with heavy–clothes enveloped figures window- shopping to buy presents.

A more than nine -feet tall Christmas tree stood in the middle of the mall. Gold and silver glass balls excelled on the various colored ones. At eye level, fanciful letters written by children to Santa Claus were hanging from every branch. Some of them simply expressed the wish to have toys as presents, and others struck you by the tenderness and naivety, Sara noted, moved by the letter of a child who only wished his father healed from a serious illness.

Once out of the mall, Sara and her mother continued their strolling along the shop windows and the market stalls.

Sara looked around dazed, enveloped and almost lost in her thoughts as she followed her mother, Mrs., while following her mother, Mrs. Miriam Bassi who was now approaching a stall with perfumes and cosmetics.

These essences come from far away countries you have never heard of... the lady seller was saying while enwrapping bath foam with Argan oil and iris scent.

Sachets of every shape and color stretched on the lilac fabric that covered her stall. MrsBassi bought an ivory flower- shaped soap with a scent of vanilla. She would place it in the lingerie drawer, as she used to do in winter. Opening the chest of drawers, she loved to be enveloped by the scents that, floating around the bedroom, made the atmosphere intimate and dreamy.

Where are you, Sara?", suddenly Mrs. Bassi cried, since  she had just lost sight of her daughter; her voice lowered by the crowd that in the middle of the noisy market was struggling to buy something, even if unnecessary, for the impending Christmas.

The costly dressed women’s high heels joined the worn-out sneakers of university students and school teen girls. You could also see loafers, cowboy boots and then...Mrs. Bassi found herself watching the main street, a pedestrian zone for quite many years now, full of all those fretting feet.

She reckoned a familiar voice among the others, not far away.

Hey Mom, look at those beautiful bags! Sara was calling her in the distance, and Mrs. Bassi approached her.

You know, I bought mine here, last week," Sara was telling her pointing to her beige bag. A nice Christmas present in advance! , she said to herself.

Mrs. Bassi asked the seller for a similar one, possibly in a dark color.

The seller stared at her for a moment before answering, as he had never seen a woman like that, as if she were the most attractive or the weirdest woman in the world. This model is almost identical." He said after a moment.

Actually the seller was showing her a cream colored bag, but too light to her taste.

You have to wait a couple of hours for a dark one, meaning that a new stock was to arrive later; however he uttered those words pronouncing them clearly and slowly as if the sentence was a magic or a cautionary formula, Sara thought.

Her mother, unwilling to wait, bought the cream eco-friendly bag, which, however, was very nice. While Mrs. Bassi was paying, Sara noticed that the seller was carefully placing the bag into a green recyclable plastic bag. I hate that color she thought taking her mother by the arm and away from the several ones she would have liked to buy.

Let’s have a look at the pockets inside!" she prompted her.

The two women set at one of the inside white, wicker coffee tables covered with periwinkle tablecloths, and ordered coffee. Then Mrs. Bassi opened the bag and realized that there was a flyer among the crumpled newspaper pages to fill it; the flyer had a coupon to cut out for a discount on a cosmetic product, just the line and brand Sara liked best, and handled it to her. All the other papers thrown away, she looked at the inside of the bag.  It had two zips on one side and a cell-phone holder pocket on the other. Inside something glistened: a golden expensive lipstick.

The bag was surely secondhand or worse it had been stolen, Mrs. Bassi thought while sipping the macchiato she had ordered.

We have to give it back right now! she said in disgust to her daughter while drinking the last drop of her coffee

In a few minutes the two women were back again at the stall. Or so they thought. Actually all the bags had gone and now the stall displayed a beautiful stretch of wallets, purses and beauty cases of which, earlier, there had not been any trace.

Mrs. Bassi tried to recognize the seller who had sold her the bag. She saw him watching her in a calm, apathetic way at the back of the stalls. However, all f a sudden his expression changed.

He raised his upper lip on the right in a hinted, mischievous smile. The look of his blue eyes was as penetrating as an unexplored abyss, disturbing and alluring.  Mrs. Bassi didn’t notice it, but Sara was terribly struck by it.

Wait here, I’ll have a word with him, she said in a resolute way while heading to the back of the stall. She went onto the sidewalk where the seller seemed to be waiting for her.

Yes, he seemed to be waiting for her, Sara thought in a fleeting way; but that thought, barely perceptible and fain was replaced by a new worry that settled into the young girl’s mind.

Where are they going? she wondered watching her mother walking away with the young seller. She waited for some moments, then, out of curiosity and surprise, she followed them onto the sidewalk.

Her mother and the seller were already in the distance. Mrs. Bassi was walking behind the guy in a constant, slow and mechanical way.

Sara started to fear, she felt something was wrong; the thought that had slipped away from her mind a few moments before, came back again. He was waiting for her; he knew she would take the bag back, once she had realized it was second hand. How come that her mother so shy, always cautious and reluctant, was following a perfect stranger with no hesitation?

Thoughts flooded in her mind seeking and, at the same time, rejecting every feasible explanation as she ran towards her mother, who was now taking Via dellaSperanza around the corner with the boy.

She reached the crossroad in haste, but no one was in the street. She seemed to catch a glimpse of two shadows disappearing in the distance around another crossroad, and ran that way.

She soon realized that she was leaving the city center faster and faster when she took the long tree-lined avenue with those mysterious shadows that she hoped might be her mother and the seller. She would have cried, but something made her lips clenched in a spastic grip of rage and fear. What was going on? Who was her mother actually with? And where was she?

The reddish leaves on the ground creaked under the dark rubber soles of Sara’s shoes as she ran stepping on them. The lines of trees on the sidewalk with their large, crimson and yellow falling leaves seemed to warn her that it would be a long way to go.

The path was slightly uphill; Sara had been walking fast for quite some time and had lost the sense of time; she began to pant and cold sweat was dropping from her forehead onto her burning cheeks when she realized she was completely alone. The street was empty.

She slackened her pace and, turning back, saw the last houses disappear in the distance. She wondered whether she was going the right direction, even if, somehow, she knew she was. Though she had only seen two shadows turning onto the tree-lined road, she knew her mother was there, somewhere ahead.

Mrs. Bassi was climbing the stairs of a fortress on the hill.

The building was ancient and abandoned. Weeds grew among the wild cobblestones of the high and irregular staircase that led to the drawbridge to enter the castle. No flowers, no plants; no animals but the lizards climbing the old lonely walls.

Only the seller was in front of her, leading her higher and higher towards the entrance of the fortress behind the walls.

Some time earlier at the market she had approached him to protest about the secondhand bag; however when he had stared at her, eye to eye, she had got lost. She had felt drained.

Now she was walking in a sort of passiveness, pushed ahead by a will that wasn’t hers.

It was as if she was looking at herself from the outside and saw her own body slowly desert her.

A sort of transmigration, she thought. In that moment she remembered the high school years, when she was still a girl and got lost among the pages of her book on philosophy. Somewhere she had read about the existence of the so called twilight states of our mind. Later on, she had studied the subject at a child neuropsychiatry class she had attended for a while at the Social Work Sciences Department. The psychodynamic psychiatry textbook talked about the possible twilight alteration of the consciousness. Something of the kind was happening, something she had never experienced before. Mrs. Bassi was so involved in her memories that everything else had lost importance. The day, the time, the place she was heading to, had no relevance at all. She looked at her legs moving forward, but her mind was travelling back in time.

Suddenly a clear image took shape in her mind.

She was seven. A thunderstorm beat the town. In the dead of the night, awakened and scared by the thunders, she had taken refuge in her mother’s bed. Her father, coming home after a long business trip, turned the key of the doorway and came in. He had a chocolate box in his hands. She jumped out of the bed, and met him in a big hug. He was home, at