I may have gone through a portal between worlds twice, but it in no way prepared me for the third trip. Especially since the first two times, my body had done me the favor of knocking me out. I wasn't so lucky this time.
It was utterly terrifying. Blue lighting crackled all around me, and it was absolutely blinding and burned my skin without actually burning it. I could feel my body being bent and stretched in odd and certainly uncomfortable ways. Pretty sure a foot wasn't supposed to go in your ear and out your mouth, and if it was, someone should change that because son of a banshee did it hurt! And let's just say the channeling weapon that I was holding went into some uncomfortable places. But even worse, it felt like a game of tug of war was going on within my body. It was almost like the universe was trying to rip something from my body.
Then suddenly I had the sensation of being shoved through several layers of broken glass, and then I was face-first in dirt and grass. I groaned and slowly pushed myself off the ground and onto my butt, and looked around. The sky hung blue and bright above me with a scatter of clouds. A stray wind picked up my curls and gently tossed them around.
The pink shirt that Emily had lent me was utterly ruined. It was utterly caked in mud and had small rips everywhere. The pants hadn't fair much better.
I was in some sort of park. I could tell this from the benches artfully placed here and there, as well as a playground set up a few feet away. The park was surrounded on all four sides by a road lined by buildings. On the road and in front of the building, cars were scattered about, and there was no one in sight. Some of the cars were parked neatly against the curb of the road, while others were crashed into various things like trees and um what were they called...oh yeah, mailboxes. One was even crashed through a large window of one of the building's front.
The sound of several small explosions filled my ears, and I stumbled to my feet. I knew what they were; they were gunshots. And look around, but I couldn't find the source of them. Then, there was the sound of a loud, frightened screaming coming from a man that was abruptly cut off, and then the scariest sound of all, silence.
I waited for the feeling of a soul leaving a body because surely what I heard was someone dying, but I felt nothing. Then I remembered Lacy's words about the soulless monsters I would have to fight. The souls weren't leaving because they were circling a monster.
It was then I heard another sound and realized I wasn't alone. It was the sound of something being dragged across the ground. I looked and saw that several feet away from me lay one of Arnold's dolls. It had a nice, clean split down its middle, with one end lying on the side of the small park and the other lying on the other end of the park. I watched while the bottom crawled towards the top, which was lying near the playground.
Alright, so I was sitting in a park, in a seemingly abandoned town, I had just heard screams and gunshots, and I was with one of Arnold's creepy dolls. Yep, just a typical day in the living world.
Well, it was time to search for everyone. They surely were scattered around this area. When Henry and I had gotten separated the first time I had accidentally crossed over, we had ended up only miles apart. He had woken up in the middle of a field of cows two miles outside the town I had ended up in.
The doll's two ends finally connected, and I watched it fuse. Arnold's doll stood up quickly with surprising agility. I saw that it had the channeling weapon in its dried, cracked clay hand. I was actually half surprised to see it moving at all. It had been a lucky guess that they would still be animated when they crossed over. I guess the channel weapons did really in fact, channel the elements from our world and were therefore still channeling Arnold's powers.
The clay man began to walk out of the park and towards one of the abandoned roads before it was standing in the middle of it. It turned and looked at me with eyes that glowed dimly in the bright daylight. The message was pretty clear to me. Follow me.
I began to move towards the clay man, and when it saw me moving towards it, it began to walk away. Maybe it knew where Arnold was and was heading towards him, not that I was too thrilled with the prospect of seeing him again, but hey, I kind of needed that creepy little kid. So, I began to follow the doll.
We had only been walking for a minute when I noticed a sensation. Almost like a slight pounding in my body, like little men were drumming rhythmically on my insides with their fingertips, and it only seemed to grow worse with each passing second. It was at that point that I began to notice stains on the black tar road we were walking down. Some were a reddish brown color, and some were scarlet red. It was blood, I did not doubt that. Except, where did the victims come from?
The sound of snapping sticks caught my attention while we were rounding a bend in the black road. My eyes flew around my deserted surroundings, but I couldn't find the source.
Up ahead from us was a group of people just standing there with their backs facing away from me, but they were too far away to be making a sound that crisp and loud of a sound. And that's when, suddenly, something jumped in front of me, and I was immediately staring into a gaping mouth full of oval-shaped teeth. I didn't even scream, I couldn't a cold hand had wrapped itself around my throat. The thing stared into my eyes with its cloudy pupils, and with the sound of snapping twigs, it opened its mouth wider. It began to lean towards me.
The little pounding sensation within me suddenly increased tenfold, and my head began to spin. But despite the dizziness, lack of oxygen, and the monster's foul breath on my face, I knew what I had to do. I raised my weapon to plug it into the monster's skin when the soundly the soulless man was yanked away from my face.
I looked to see that the clay giant held a soulless man dressed in a ragged green shirt and ripped pants in its grip, and the clay man was repeatedly stabbing it with the channeling weapons, while the soulless man thrashed around. Every time the weapon was plugged into the creature's skin, it would let out a shriek, and its struggling became less and less.
I felt someone tugging lightly on the back of my shirt. Great, what now? I whip around to see that the people we had seen in the distance had caught up to us, except they weren't people, at least not anymore. A middle-aged woman in a green shirt stared at me with cloudy eyes while her mouth hung up and drool trickled down the side of her mouth. She had a bunch of pink fabric in her hand and was weakly trying to pull me closer to her. I did what was only natural. I wound back my hand and punched the monster that had my shirt in its pale hand in the face. It groaned loudly, but it let go. It wasn't as strong or aggressive as the soulless bodies that had come from my wood. I was going to take that as good news.
I jumped away from her and the hordes of drooling, cloudy-eyed people that were all reaching towards me. I turned back to the clay man and saw that he dropped the soulless monster, and the thing was starting to crawl away on all four legs. The clay man began to walk towards me.
"No! No! Finish him off!" I commanded and tried to run towards the retreating monster, but the drooling shells of people behind me had other ideas. A couple more of the drooling people behind me had grabbed my shirt and the back of my pants and were dragging me towards them, this time more effectively. One even shoved some of my hair in its mouth.
I had to still that monster. As Lacy had said, the souls of these other people were circling it and would hopefully be returned to them once I ended it. I'm not sure how many of them would survive their souls returning to them, though. Some of the bodies had horrific injuries. One of the male drooling people had a huge dent in the side of his head that went at least a half inch into his skull.
That's when the clay door reached down, grabbed me around my middle, and yanked me out of the horde and placed me gently on its shoulder. By this point, my voice was going hoarse from shouting at it to go after the soulless monster from my world an excessive amount. Either that or four hundred years of not speaking really affected the stamina of my ability to use my voice. Maybe it was both.
The drooling people around me began to reach up towards me, but the gigantic clay man dangled me high in the air, well out of their reach. I felt like I was a fairy being dangled above a hungry group of gnomes. The stone-like man placed me on its shoulder, and I quickly wrapped my hand around its neck and hung on tight so as not to fall.
I waved my hand in front of the giant's bright glowing eyes until it turned to look at me. I then pointed to the thing, the escaping monster that was now attempting to scale a building, but with little luck. It would make it halfway up the building before gravity would yank it down again.
The clay man, seemingly, finally understood what I was trying to get across because it finally began to move towards the direction of the monster at an incredible speed. The monster must have heard us coming because it turned around and hissed loudly and gave up its attempt to scale the building, and began to scuttle away.
The clay man soon caught up with the thing and ran it down. It crushed its misshapen limbs beneath its feet. What was once a living man who had probably fought against Greta and the unwarranted grip that she had wrapped around our land before he had been forced through the portal into the other world under Greta's command at the wrong moment, and had his soul yanked away from him? But speaking of which. What had happened to the souls that had been the force through that had come here and still been intact? A handful of them had made it through before Santana had yanked me back. I knew this because I had dragged the souls across the plains to balance them out.
As carefully as possible, I slid off the clay man's shoulders and landed on the dead man's back. It bulked under my weight, but I managed to maintain my balance and crouched down. I held up the channeling spear in my hand. The glass bulb briefly swirled with black smoke. I raised it above my head and plugged it into the man's back. The man went still, and behind me, I heard a loud shriek.
I spared a look behind me to see that the drooling people weren't drooling people anymore. They were just people... and dead, not animated people. I saw several of them lying motionless on the ground while some looked around in confusion like a flock of startled chickens.
There was one person who was not looking around in confusion for sure. It was a woman, dressed in a purple top that only covers half her torso, leaving most of her stomach exposed. She wore a pair of very short jean shorts. She had separated herself from the rest of the people, and she looked calm and focused. She held a metallic object in her hand and was pointing it towards Arnold's doll and me.
Before I really registered what was happening, a loud bang, similar to ones I had heard earlier, filled my ears.