The Portals of Sparkling Falls

By J. S. Bailey

"An entertaining read for fans of science fiction …" —Kirkus Reviews Magazine

 

What if you lost your memory and found yourself transported to a parallel world containing no electricity, no running water, and unkind villagers who keep dark secrets?

 

Those questions become all too real for sixteen-year-old Laura who awakens in an unfamiliar house before an unknown force whisks her to a seemingly parallel Earth where the residents worship a sinister deity. 

 

Disoriented and confused, Laura does her best to fit in with the villagers of Sparkling Falls while desperately trying to regain her lost memories and find her way back home.

 

When a little girl goes missing under bizarre circumstances, Laura and her newfound friends set out to find her. But someone doesn't like Laura digging into the village's mysterious past, and they'll do anything to stop her from discovering the secret behind Sparkling Falls.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BHC Press
• Release date: Oct 4, 2022
• ISBN: 9781643973159

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The Portals of Sparkling Falls

Copyright © 2022 J.S. Bailey

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please write to the publisher.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published by BHC Press

Library of Congress Control Number:

2021944667

ISBN: 978-1-64397-313-5 (Hardcover)

ISBN: 978-1-64397-314-2 (Softcover)

ISBN: 978-1-64397-315-9 (Ebook)

For information, write:

BHC Press

885 Penniman #5505

Plymouth, MI 48170

Visit the publisher:

www.bhcpress.com

For Nathan,

who encouraged me to finish

what I started.

22661849418521

The girl stood shivering at a window etched with jagged feathers of frost, squinting out into the raging gloom of the blizzard.

Pine trees in the front yard leaned to one side, their limbs drooping so much under the weight of the snow she was sure they would break off. The lane leading up to the house had vanished. She couldn’t even see the faintest outline of where it had been—the world was absorbed in white.

She swallowed a knot of fear. They hadn’t called for this much snow; her grandparents had had the TV on earlier in the day, so she’d seen the forecast herself. Six inches, they’d said. Six measly inches that would pile on top of the six that fell the day before. But with the way the snow was coming down, she wouldn’t have been surprised if it turned into six feet.

Hooray for her—she was now stranded in her grandparents’ house with no change of clothes and no way to leave.

She drew back from the window and continued pacing. Her mother still hadn’t called. It hadn’t been snowing so badly when everyone left hours ago, so she was sure they’d reached the hospital just fine. And they said that no news was good news, right? Still, her mother had said she’d call, and the woman wasn’t one to forget things.

Please help him, she whispered, unable to get the images of the accident out of her head.

It had all been her fault.

She hoped he would live.

The headache pounding behind her eyes was getting out of hand. She threw a glance at the satellite clock on the fireplace mantel, sent up a prayer that someone would call her soon with news one way or the other, and hurried up the stairs to the second-floor bathroom, where her grandmother kept her pharmacy inside the mirrored medicine cabinet.

Her phone started ringing the moment she reached the top of the stairs. Her heart in her throat, she raced back down so fast that her feet became tangled with each other and she lost her footing on the wooden risers.

She flailed briefly for a handhold as she fell, and then her head made contact with the hardwood floor below, sending her into abrupt darkness.

18568

A blurred image gradually took form. A light blue couch, just ahead. A great stone fireplace to the right of it, where flames licked the gnarled logs that had been piled on the hearth.

Beyond it all, a wide window that looked out onto a frosted twilight sky.

The girl blinked. Something smooth pressed against her cheek: a hardwood floor, and her whole upper half was lying on it.

Her legs felt like they were elevated above her. She craned her neck to see that they rested awkwardly on a wooden staircase. No wonder she felt bruised in a million places! She must have fallen down the stairs and gone in for a little snooze once she’d landed.

Wincing as she pulled herself into sitting position on the bottom step, she began to wonder about this place she’d found herself in so suddenly. The room smelled like smoke and pine with the underlying hint of something that might have been air freshener. The walls were all wooden, like this was some big cabin, or a chalet. The couch sat on a giant braided rug that had alternating bands of green and burgundy material. A stack of logs had been heaped against the wall near the fireplace, waiting to be burned.

There was something vaguely familiar about it all, like a scene from a dream she’d forgotten a long time ago. Only it couldn’t be familiar. She’d never even been here before.

She jolted to her feet at that revelation, heart racing as she swept her gaze over the room once again, desperate for concrete signs of familiarity and finding none.

If she’d never been here before, how did she get here?

Her abrupt change in position caused her head to spin and throb. She forced acid back down her throat and carried herself on shaking legs over to the couch before she collapsed all over again.

Her mind raced to recall her actions before falling headlong down the steps, but she drew a blank far deeper than simple forgetfulness.

The only thing she could remember was picking herself up off the floor just a minute ago, feeling like she’d been bludgeoned. And before that? Nada.

Oh, this is bad, she said in a small voice. Another spike of pain shot through her head, and the room blurred. She clapped a hand to her forehead and felt a painful lump beneath her hair. That explained it, of course. She’d hit her head when she’d fallen, and the impact had knocked her memory clean out of it.

A deep sense of dread began to gnaw at her like a hungry rodent. She needed to call for help, but nobody would be able to get through all that snow to take her to a hospital.

Knowing it wouldn’t hurt to try, she reached for the small black cell phone sitting on the coffee table in front of her and started to dial 911 when she realized that the tiny screen on the phone was unlit.

How silly of her. Here she was trying to make a call when the phone wasn’t even on.

She thumbed the red button, but the screen remained dark. Frowning, she shook the phone a few times to throttle some sense into it and tried hitting the button again.

Nothing. The phone wasn’t off. It was dead, and no charging cord lay in sight.

"This is very bad," she decided.

Trying to hold her panic at bay, she stood and walked into a kitchen furnished with ivory-colored countertops and dark wooden cabinets. A telephone hung on the wall next to the refrigerator. She plucked it out of its cradle and held it to her ear only to discover there was no dial tone.

I stand corrected, she said. This is horrible.

She drifted toward the nearest window. A whole world of white swirled out there, obscuring all. The storm must have knocked the phone lines down, but at least it hadn’t cut the power too. But what could she do now that she couldn’t call anyone? She couldn’t just bundle up and head out in search of help on foot; she’d freeze long before she’d ever make it to civilization.

Which was probably buried in snow too.

Well, she knew one thing she could do. She could try to remember who she was, and getting a good long look at herself might be a place to start.

A powder room on the first floor had a full-length mirror mounted on the back of the door. When she strode inside and flicked on the light, a stranger with long coffee-brown hair stared back at her with hazel eyes.

She frowned. She grimaced. She bared her teeth.

She still didn’t recognize herself.

What kind of person didn’t know their own face?

Her reflection’s eyebrows narrowed. I’m you, she said in a quiet voice, and you’re me. So could you be nice and tell me who we are?

She caught sight of a class ring on one of her fingers. She pulled it off and held it close to her face, making out the words Laura and Class of 2005 engraved in the metal around a light green stone.

Laura. Laura. That felt right—she doubted she’d been called Edna or Carol or anything like that. Her last name still eluded her, but at least this was a start.

Laura returned to the big window in the living room. Snow still came down in great clumps that made her think of white shreds of cotton candy. Could she make it through all of that and live to tell the tale? Probably not. Her best option for now would be to stay here. This was obviously someone’s house. Maybe it was her house and she just couldn’t remember it. Either way, somebody was bound to show up eventually and help her, assuming she didn’t starve to death first.

Just to be sure, she returned to the kitchen to check the cabinets and fridge. As she passed the front door, a pair of sodden white boots sitting on the mat caught her eye.

She looked down at her own feet, which were clad in fuzzy lavender socks. Could the boots be hers?

Why not? she said, and shoved her feet into them. They were precisely the right size, and her feet conformed to the contours in the lining.

This was a sign of progress. She knew her name was Laura, that she was supposed to graduate from high school in 2005, and that she owned a pair of white boots that had recently been worn outside.

At this rate, I should remember who I am in no time, she said, knowing it was silly to keep talking to herself like this but not wanting to stop because every time she fell silent, she could hear the house creaking and shifting in the wind, and it made her think that invisible pairs of eyes were watching her or that some hidden being would spring at her from behind a corner when she least expected it.

The lights flickered when she started toward the fridge, and another wave of dizziness made her grab onto the handle so she wouldn’t fall. She scrunched her eyes shut and drew in a deep breath. Please help me, she prayed aloud. Don’t make me die in here all by myself.

When her head was clear again, she opened the fridge and took note of its contents. Ketchup. Mustard. Mayonnaise. A block of cheese. A container of leftovers.

She pulled open the freezer, too, and determined that she’d be eating a lot of pizza until someone came to rescue her. She grabbed one and was in the middle of carrying it over to the oven when the lights flickered one last time before going out and plunging the house into darkness.

Okay, she said as her stomach let out a sad rumble. I’ll eat later.

18568

Laura felt her way back into the living room and curled up on the couch to watch the fire, and before she knew it, she drifted into an uneasy slumber.

Her dreams were filled with nightmare images. An icicle the size of her arm hung from a porch roof gutter like a dangling dagger, water trickling from its point in a steady drip. There came a scream and a crash, and all she could see were splotches of bright red blood splattered in the snow and a young man struggling on the ground.

Laura awoke with a start only to discover that the power had come back on. The mantel clock said it was midnight—she had slept for six hours.

And she still didn’t know who or where she was.

She rose, threw more wood onto the fire, turned off the lights, and snuggled back up on the couch with a blanket wrapped tightly around her.

She stared into the flames. The image of blood on snow wouldn’t leave her head, and she had the sense that her mind was replaying something that really happened so she might remember it.

But the harder she strained to think, the more obscure the dream became until she disregarded it altogether. Tomorrow was another day. Maybe she would remember everything then.

18568

Laura awoke the next morning alone, hoping her memories would come rushing back to her when she opened her eyes—but they didn’t. For all she knew, she’d been born as a fully developed teenager yesterday afternoon with a mind as blank as any newborn’s.

She picked herself up off the couch and tried to set aside her fear. After poking at the lump on her head for a moment in front of the bathroom mirror and deciding that it had shrunk a little in size from the night before, Laura ate half a sleeve of saltine crackers for breakfast and washed them down with ice-cold water from the sink.

She remained sitting at the kitchen table for a long time, watching bright sunlight stream through the frosted windowpanes and dance across the counters and floor, wishing that someone would return to the house to tell her who she was.

There was one good thing about this new day, however: the snowstorm was over at last, and now, just maybe, she’d be able to go get help.

She rose and tried the wall phone again, but it still didn’t have a dial tone. Shrugging, she stuffed her feet into the boots and dug a heavy coat and some gloves out of a closet. She wouldn’t walk far; she’d just see what it was like out there. If it was warm enough, she’d pack a bag full of food and set out. If not, she’d stay inside and wait for the snow to melt.

A blast of arctic air made her cheeks and nose tingle when she stepped out onto the wraparound porch. Snow had drifted over the boards, but it was shallow enough close to the house that she didn’t have any trouble walking in it.

She followed the porch around to the side of the house and discovered a wooden shed poking up out of the snow about ten yards away. Somehow, she knew it was full of chopped wood. She should bring in some more so the fire wouldn’t go out.

The snow in the yard came up to her knees when she tried to trudge through it to get to the shed door, and by the time she’d scraped enough snow away from it to pull it open, she was sweating from the strain.

It would be too hard to walk to a town in snow this deep. But there was wood in the shed, stacks and stacks of it, and since Laura had remembered that on her own, she took it as a good sign.

Wood piled high in her arms, she retraced her steps through the snow and went back inside.

18568

A day passed. Laura occupied herself by trying to dig a path from the front door to where she guessed the road to be but wore herself out after only twenty feet. She played solitaire for a while using a deck of cards she’d found in a kitchen drawer, grew bored and turned on the news to see if it was supposed to get any warmer, and then took a long shower in the upstairs bathroom while her jeans, sweater, and underclothes lay in front of the fire downstairs to dry after she’d washed them.

She’d explored the whole second floor too. None of the bedrooms gave her any indication that someone her age lived there. A stack of envelopes crammed into a desk drawer told her that the people who lived here were named Berger, only she knew deep inside that it wasn’t her last name, just as she’d known there was wood in the shed that she should bring in.

And still, even as the sun set that second day, nobody came.

18568

The next morning, Laura opened the kitchen pantry in search of more crackers and discovered a door set in the back wall.

She frowned. A door inside a pantry? Either the house had been poorly remodeled at some point in its history or this door was hidden for a reason.

Maybe there was a secret passage behind it.

Her curiosity getting the better of her, she shoved aside boxes and canned goods that had been stacked on the pantry floor and pushed the door open. It swung out over a pool of darkness, and in the light coming from the kitchen windows, she could see stairs descending into an unknown room below.

There wasn’t a light switch. Laura plucked a flashlight off one of the pantry shelves, pointed the beam down the stairs, and followed it to the stone floor that appeared at the bottom.

She shined the beam over shelves crammed full with boxes that had been labeled with permanent marker. It smelled musty and damp, and as Laura turned around to go back upstairs before she started sneezing, the memory of a voice entered her head.

If you ever go down into that basement, an old woman had said, don’t you dare go near the door behind the steps. It opens out into an old mine shaft and you’ll break your back and die if you fall down in it. I keep telling Clarence he needs to just wall it up so none of you kids get hurt…

Laura aimed the flashlight through the steps. There was a door behind there, covered in cobwebs and some kind of mildew—probably the source of the funny smell. Did it really lead to a mine shaft?

Laura glanced up the stairs into the kitchen. Whoever owned this house might be angry if she snooped around down here too much longer, especially when it might be dangerous.

It would just be a little peek, though. She’d check for the mine shaft, and if it was really there, she could count the old woman’s voice as another memory that had reappeared inside her broken head.

Laura tiptoed around a jumble of boxes and tried not to pay too much attention to the spiderwebs. The knob on the door she wasn’t supposed to open was coated in grime so thick she knew nobody had touched it for years.

She closed her fingers around it and tugged the door open, sending a shower of dust and who-knew-what cascading over her. Coughing, she aimed the light through the doorway and saw another flight of steps leading down to another basement.

She took a step backward and rubbed the lump on her head. This was no mine shaft!

Laura walked through the doorway, taking each of the wooden steps one at a time and hoping they weren’t too old to support her weight. She stopped two steps from the bottom and swung the light around, noting that both the walls and the floor were made of hard, packed earth. Shriveled leaves coated the floor, and over the thump of her beating heart she could hear a faint whispering sound like wind in a far-off forest.

Maybe this room really did lead to a mine shaft, and she was hearing a breeze whistle through it.

She stepped out onto the floor in her socks and turned.

A faint ringing began to sound in her ears—a side effect of her conk on the head?—and all the hair lifted up on her arms. A wave of dizziness made the room go gray, and she swayed where she stood.

Something was happening inside her head. Something bad.

Don’t let me die, she whispered. Please don’t let me—

A blinding white light filled her vision.

Then she was gone.

18593

Something rustled nearby, like a small creature scuttling through a bed of dry leaves. Laura rolled over to ignore it—she just wanted to go back to sleep—but then something sharp and pointy dug into her side. She sat up with a yelp and let out a gasp.

It appeared that she had somehow transported herself to the middle of a forest clearing. Not only was there no trace of snow on the ground, the air felt thick and humid like it was the middle of summer.

She touched the lump on her head. If she’d been hurt badly enough to lose her memory, then she could be having hallucinations too.

But it didn’t feel like a hallucination. It felt like she was really here on a summer day all dressed up in winter clothes like a crazy person. Birds cawed to each other up in the treetops. A black-and-orange butterfly landed on a flower that had sprouted near a fallen log.

She tucked her hair behind her ears and stood up, wishing she’d been wearing shoes when…well, when she’d been brought here. Something strange had happened in that room with the dirt floor, and right now she wanted to find out what it was even more than she yearned for her lost memory.

Another rustling sound behind her gave her a start. What the—

Two young children wearing clothes made of homespun brown cloth stood no more than ten feet away from her. The older one, a boy who might have been five, held a basket full of tiny purple berries and wore a look of astonishment. His younger sister’s face was smudged with dirt. Both children had dark brown hair and facial features indicative of East Asian ancestry.

Hi, Laura said, knowing they were just as startled by her presence as she was by theirs. Can you tell me where I am?

At first the boy didn’t say anything, and Laura was beginning to wonder if he’d understood her at all, but then he said, You’re in the forest, as if that were the most obvious answer in the world.

His voice held a slight accent that she didn’t recognize. What forest? she asked.

The boy squinted at her. It doesn’t have a name, but this is Maribu Clearing. Old Man Maribu went missing here and never came back. That’s what Mama says.

The name meant nothing to her. Okay. She decided to try another approach. What state are we in?

His forehead scrunched in confusion. What’s a state?

Oh boy. How was she supposed to put it in a way that he might understand? A state is like a little country inside a bigger country, only different. There’s West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee… She stopped when his eyes seemed to glaze over. You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?

He shook his head.

Does the place where you live have a name?

For the first time, the boy