Marilyn Peake - The Other

Again, as in the airplane, odd foreign images flooded my brain.

Babies with green skin floating in glass tanks. Large black eyes. Women lying in beds, crying.

I rubbed my forehead.

Turning to me, Razkazeel asked, “Is your head hurting?”

I tried to swim up from the depths into which I’d fallen, tried to focus my thoughts on the here and now. I managed to say, “Yes.”

Razkazeel said, “I can give you medication for that. It will get better. You have the kind of empathic ability we need.”

Medication? Ability they need…? I feared I’d be drugged and held against my will, never let out of the compound.

Running. Running. My feet were too little, my brother’s even smaller. My father picking him up. My terror that I’d be left behind.

As though he had never switched subjects to address my headache and whatever kind of ability he thought I had, Razkazeel said, “Zyrielle did murder her baby girls. Hailey and Skylar, precious three and one year olds.” His eyes filled with sorrow. “But that’s not why the police are really here. Did you see the tanks?”

Nat shook his head yes .

Razkazeel said, “Those aren’t the police. The military is here to take that which frightened Zyrielle to kill her little girls. She was only trying to protect them. She feared that which is not an actual threat.”

Vial of poison. Not to protect, but to transport Crystal into another dimension.

Razkazeel said, “I need your help. I hope I can trust you. I have to take this leap of faith.”

I felt incredibly confused. My head was pounding with pain and memories and strange intrusive images.

Never one to turn down an opportunity to delve deeper into field research, Nat said, “Of course you can trust us.”

Making eye contact with Jaxon, Razkazeel nodded his head. He had obviously said yes to something.

Jaxon walked to the door behind Razkazeel’s desk and opened it. Gazing into the open space, he remained quiet.

As he returned to the middle of Razkazeel’s office, two humanoid creatures with green skin, large black eyes and bald heads followed behind him. At first, I thought they were nude. It took me a few seconds to realize they were wearing skintight green bodysuits.

My head exploded in pain and images.

Creatures bending space-time, folding one era onto another, pods skipping from one point to the next. Earth dying over and over again. Rivers drying up. Glaciers melting. Oceans rising into monstrous waves. Tsunamis drowning us, our screams swallowed by the void of death.

I found it difficult to breathe. I drowned in images, began losing my mind, lost the boundaries I had carefully constructed about who I was.

The shorter of the two aliens approached me.

My heart beat against my chest like a trapped bird.

As if in a nightmare, I tried to scream, but couldn’t get my throat to emit noise. It was as though I had become paralyzed. I don’t usually succumb to fear, but this was different than any terrifying situation I’d ever experienced in my entire life. These beings had taken over my brain, hacked into it and planted thoughts and images I couldn’t block. The loss of control over my own mind had stripped away my ability to function.

One of the green creatures bent down close to my face. She gazed into my eyes. I say she because her humanoid facial structure appeared feminine. Her eyes were reflective. I saw myself within the shiny black structures, looking small and petrified.

She reached a hand with long green fingers toward me. Placing her hand on the top of my head, she sang in what sounded like an ancient language.

My headache disappeared and my body relaxed. A sense of peacefulness and utter calm took over.

And then she communicated with me in the way that Crystal and I had communicated so many years before: through telepathy. She told me she was in danger of being captured and unable to ever return home. She was frightened that she would be experimented upon.

Her thoughts were clear and separate from each other, not the earlier chaotic jumble of information that had surpassed my ability to process.

I wondered if Nat was experiencing the same thing.

She communicated: “Being a twin, your mind is more open to this. You’ve had experience with this type of communication before.”

That freaked me out. I did not like her reading my mind. Crystal had been my identical twin. Our communication still held its own kind of privacy. We had split from the same egg. No one from the outside could break into our shared thoughts. Not even my mother who had born our single egg and birthed our tiny separate bodies into the world.

The creature with green skin and mesmerizing black eyes read my discomfort and backed off. She sent me information about herself instead: My name is Paloma.

I thought: Wait. Paloma? That’s an Earth name, a name used today on Earth.

Paloma communicated: Yes, I’m not from another planet. I’m from another time.

Again, I saw the bending of space-time. And this time, maps. There were complex maps and graphs… coordinates, places for crossing over from one space-time location to another.

Razkazeel interrupted. He said, “If the military barge in here as they’re most likely planning to do… my guess is they’re waiting for night when many of the news reporters leave and they’ll have cover of darkness… they’re going to capture Paloma and Zander. You know they’ll experiment on them and torture them and cause them great physical pain… for research. We thought the beings we believed in would come from somewhere beyond the stars, but I opened my mind and listened to them upon their arrival. The government won’t do that. Angry, fearful crowds won’t do that. These creatures are us. They’re no different than us except in certain aspects of their physical appearance. It’s up to us to save them, to protect the future of the human race.”

Not all of this made sense, but the smell of fight or flight filled the room and seeped into my bones.

Nat asked, “What do you want us to do?”

Razkazeel said, “Take our two visitors to your van. The officers outside don’t know you’re here. Drive them to a safe place. Contact me when you get there.”

I said to Paloma and the other creature whose name I now knew was Zander, “Are you ready?”

They both nodded their heads yes .

Jaxon led the way. Opening the door through which we had entered Razkazeel’s office, he led us out through the waiting room and down the stairs. Rather than taking us through the community room, however, he took us down another flight of stairs, straight down to the basement. From there, we moved quickly through the tunnel.

Running, running, my lungs and muscles burning. Escaping those who would kill us, their twisted precaution against irrational fear.

I’d just started a new job. My last one hadn’t worked out. I’d been working as a barista in a coffee shop. I’d earned my Bachelor of Psychology degree a few months before starting that, but soon discovered it was almost impossible to get a job in the field of psychology without a graduate degree. In order to support myself, I’d taken the first job I thought I could live with: coffee shop barista.

My new job was closer to the kind of work I wanted to do: Social Worker at the Archer-Knight Hoarding Center. I knew the name came from the two founders: Elizabeth Archer and James Knight, but I kept imagining that a knight and an archer presided over the place. I also pictured them secretly stockpiling arrows, devoting entire secret rooms to hoarding their own weapons.