Timeline: Present
Point of View: Ralph
Location: Earth
Ralph Hughett saw things that no one else did, and for a long time he thought himself crazy because of it.
It started when he was five years old. He’d always been a fairly independent child. He had three older brothers and a younger sister. His parents frequently joked that they’d kept going until mommy got her little girl. Ralph didn’t find it very funny, however, because it meant he wasn’t particularly wanted. No matter how much mom and dad said they loved him, he knew it was only because they had to. They kept going until mommy had her little girl. It was a sentiment that would go on to define his whole life, in a way.
Ralph was a bit of an outsider, even to his own family. His older brothers would get to do the fun things like hang out at grandma’s or go to the park, but little Ralph was never big enough to go with. By the time he was old enough to go with, grandma no longer had enough room in her car for everyone and it was just too hard bringing all these damn kids everywhere. So Ralph got used to being by himself, keeping himself entertained while everyone else got to do the fun stuff.
Little Ralph, at five years old, on that eventful day of the first appearance, was playing with the leftover toys. Jonathon’s mega blocks with most of the good pieces already thrown away, and Wes’ cars, the ones not swept up under the couch or buried in the dirt outside. He was playing with a winter stocking cap that was left out of storage, and a bug net for a kit that had been broken because Nathan had ADHD and liked to hit things against walls. Little Ralph was scooping all these little knick knacks together, all of these forgotten toys, into the winter cap, pretending that he was making a potion. What kind of potion? A magical potion, a potion that would do magical things, a potion that he would give it to dad, who was sitting in his recliner watching a basketball game on television Ralph would say, “Look at what I’ve made!” And dad would say, “Oh that’s cool, thank you,” with only a passing glance from the television and little Ralph would go back to doing little Ralph things, as no one paid him any mind.
It was late that night, about an hour or so past his bedtime (mom was at work, and dad wasn’t as insistent about getting the children to bed on time), and little Ralph was making that potion while dad watched television. Ralph’s older brothers, as rambunctious as they were, were in a bedroom upstairs testing the strength of the floor joists. There were crashing and smashing sounds rumbling through the sheetrock ceiling, the whole house quaking, and little Ralph just kept on mixing. A few cars here, a couple blocks there. And, oh, look at this! A leftover sucker stick. Into the potion it went.
Crash. Smash. Boom! continued the sounds upstairs.
“Shut the fuck up!” Yelled his dad, feet kicked up on his recliner, eyes not leaving the television, sweaty white tube socks with sweat stains adding an aroma to the room that Ralph wasn’t yet old enough to appreciate. The game carried on behind Ralph, his father’s eyes watching the screen intently, periodically fist pumping the air with excitement.
Ralph had the potion fully into the hat now, and he was still mixing. The cars inside rattled and shook, the sucker stick poked from the rim of the hat then disappeared again. This is going to be the strongest one yet, Ralph thought as he shook.
Boom. Boom. CRACK. went the sounds upstairs. Then there was crying.
“You goddamn mother fuckers,” dad said, lowering the foot rest of the chair. “I’m gonna beat you little shits. Why can’t you play nicely and quietly like your baby brother, you goddamn…” his voice trailed off as he pounded up the stairs.
Ralph didn’t really care about all that, though. He was in his own world, making the best potion ever for his father, because he was a powerful wizard. The most powerful wizard in the whole world. His father would drink the potion, and then he’d be under his control, and it would only start there. Because Ralph would control armies, and they would listen to his every command. Ralph didn’t really understand what an army was, just that it was something from one of his brother’s games, but it didn’t matter. He would control them and they would listen because he was an all-powerful wizard with the all-powerful potion.
The potion was complete, and he looked up to give it to his father, but his father was no longer there. Ralph remembered that dad had gone upstairs because his brothers were being naughty, so he decided to go up there, too. So Ralph took his potion and he walked toward the stairs. Maybe he’d give the potion to each of his naughty brothers and make them all be nice and quiet like dad wanted. His dad would like that a lot, to have them all be nice and quiet.
He walked around the couch and stopped. The room looked different. It felt different, too. The word he’d use when he got older was that the room was in a different hue. It had a different vibe. As if he were no longer in the same place. Ralph could sense this (he was a great wizard, after all), but he didn’t know what it meant. He felt scared.
He looked up from the floor, because he walked places with his eyes down, walking from memory rather than from sight. This is when he noticed that he was in a different place. He was no longer in his own house at all. He was outside, and the aura (another word he’d use later to explain the feeling) of this new place no longer felt like home.
When he was older, he’d explain that the air people breathe, which is primarily made up of oxygen and nitrogen, felt chemically different in his lungs. It didn’t burn, didn’t hurt, just felt different. As he stood outside, looking on into the distance, he realized that it also wasn’t dark.
The house, when he’d still been there, had had that dark purple night quality, with the yellowish lighting of the ceiling bulbs layering everything in the way unique to near-bedtime. This outside, this different outside, glowed red. The sun was still up there, in the sky, but it was twice its normal size and was a deep, deep hellish red.
Then little Ralph noticed the trees, though the term was a bit of a stretch. They were long and skinny, reaching high into the sky, far higher than seemed possible, and they moved. Not with the wind, but on their own accord. They moved the way a cat might wag its tail, menacingly swishing back and forth through the air.
Ralph was alone here, in the middle of this unknown forest of moving trees, the sun burning in the sky feeling so close to his skin.
Ralph no longer felt like a powerful wizard. Ralph felt terrified. He dropped his potion to the ground. Its contents spilled out, and a little race car rolled through the forest until it hit a tree trunk. With the impact of the car, all the trees stopped moving.
Those long, swinging, moving tree trucks turned to Ralph and looked at him. Looked wasn’t the right word, because they didn’t have eyes, but Ralph felt as if they were looking at him, no longer swaying in the air looking for prey. They’d found prey. A little boy, sitting at their base.
Ralph screamed.
The trees, hearing the scream, started to flail, the sound of the boy's voice seeming to startle them, and flakes of bark fell off of them, flooding the ground with whatever it was that covered them.
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Ralph stopped, and again the trees stopped moving.
He wondered if he was controlling the trees with his voice, with his energy. Was he the all-powerful wizard after all? he wondered.
He screamed again, and the trees shook, the towering pillars of red bark quivering at the sight of him.
Ralph laughed, and the trees bounced to his laughter. He decided that he liked this new place after all. He would have fun here, playing with the trees. But the time for play didn’t last, because they found him, just before the vision faded. The singular scouts, always alone, always seeking, always hunting.
The scout broke through the trees, startling little Ralph, and Ralph was silent again. Reflecting back to that time, Ralph believed it to have been a kind of minotaur. It wasn’t, but this was the shape the beast would take in his dreams for years after the event. Remembering it, he didn’t think it to be either human or bovine, but a creature of another world that seemed to imitate the shape of something in his. Or this was the best way his mind could make sense of the thing.
The minotaur charged and Ralph screamed again. The great wizard fell to the ground crying.
He felt himself being picked up, now in his dad’s arms. Everything looked normal again. No scary trees, no red sun, no minotaur. He was in his house, his brothers standing around him as his dad held him. Tears were streaming down his cheeks.
“Ralph, what’s wrong?” His dad asked, but Ralph wasn’t yet old enough to communicate exactly what it had been.
“Monster” Ralph said, followed by, “Monster coming at me, red trees!”
His father, not knowing what all that meant, hugged his son close. The house was finally silent, as everyone paid attention to little Ralph for once. As far as he knew, his dad hadn’t told his mother about the incident, and Ralph didn’t bring it up again.
That was, not until it happened again.
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The second instance had been when he was in high school in the middle of the test for his driving license.
He felt confident, eager to ace the test. The evaluator sat in the passenger seat, mostly silent and sitting still aside from occasionally grunting and making notes on her grading sheet. Ralph thought the woman particularly rude, but felt she probably had to be. She had to come across as fair and consistent, and couldn’t show any favoritism. Ralph thought she had a pretty boring job, and that might impact some of it as well.
He parallel parked perfectly, coming to an easy stop along the curb without ever once having rubbed the tires. He was smiling. He’d have his license soon. Not that it particularly mattered (he was still third in line to get a vehicle from his parents, and didn’t yet have a job to earn his own money), but it was an objective to cross off the list regardless, one last step toward independence and moving out of his parent’s home. He was eager for it. The thought of his own space, quiet and away from the chaos, was enticing.
The instructor indicated he make a turn and he did so as instructed. He noticed they were on the road back to the DMV. He was minutes away from acing the test. He could feel it.
In an instant, the road and building melted away, and the hue and the aura of the world changed. It had happened in an eye blink. During one instant, he was in his world. During the next, he was in the other, the world he’d been certain he’d dreamed up as a kid.
This time, there was no blazing red sun. It seemed time in this world didn’t align to the one he was accustomed to. Back then it had been night in his world, day in theirs. This time, it had been day in his, and night in theirs.
Again he saw those odd shifting trees, their red bark, their moving branches, extending like skyscrapers into the night sky. The area he was in was different from the one he remembered as a kid. He didn’t see the minotaur (or didn’t have time to see it at least). This time, he saw what must have been some kind of town or village.
Houses on Earth were always different. In the U.S. Suburbs, they were two story wood structures. In the cities, they were multi-level metal boxes stacked on each other. Sometimes the boxes were concrete. Historically, they were dirt mounds or make-shift enclosures with wood and leaves. In all instances, the concept is the same: a box that separates outside from inside.
In the distance, this is what Ralph saw. A series of enclosures of a material he couldn’t identify far off into the distance. How long would it take to walk there? he wondered.
He didn’t have time to test his theory, because he was quickly thrust back into his world.
The thing about the jump into the other world was that Ralph didn’t know what was happening back in the real one. Yet, he was still in it, still doing whatever it was that he’d last been doing. In this case, he’d been driving a car, a car he promptly lost control of while away.
He awoke to being lifted into an ambulance. Awoke might not be the best way to describe it, really. He’d be thrust out of one place and back into his own, like being in a vacuum and sucked through a tube.
He’d learn later that, while he’d been away, he’d t-boned another vehicle going 75. Apparently he’d stepped into the other place with his foot still on the gas pedal. His driving instructor was in the hospital with broken ribs. The other driver had no injuries, as Ralph had rammed into the back of the vehicle, spinning it harmlessly in a circle, while Ralph kept going right smack into the side of a grocery store.
He did not pass his driving test.
He tried explaining what happened to his parents, but they didn’t believe him. They thought he’d blacked out or had a seizure. They took him to his doctor, who ran a blood test and a CT scan, but everything turned out normal. Ralph, knowing the futility of arguing his point, fearing he’d be sent to a psychologist next, conceded that he’d been up late the night before and had simply fallen asleep at the wheel. He’d lied about the other place because he didn’t want to get in trouble.
His parents ripped into him, which he understood because of the court appearances and fees they had to pay, but eventually everyone moved on.
Ralph, however, would never drive again. Not due to any external restrictions. He just didn’t trust himself.
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The third instance happened late into his twenties. He lived alone in an apartment that was a ten minute walk from a grocery store and his place of work as a team manager at an electronics store.
Ralph didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, so he wandered aimlessly from moment to moment. He did his job (remarkably well, according to his bosses), then went home to play video games and watch scary movies. His diet consisted primarily of microwave dinners and pizza pockets, yet he remained remarkably thin. He expected that would change when he entered his thirties, but he’d deal with that later.
It was late at night, halfway through one of the Saw films, when everything fell away again. He jumped up from the couch that was no longer there and looked around, heart racing. This time he was on the edge of the forest, closer to the city. He could see the square structures far off in the distance, illuminated by the bright red sun glowing in the sky above him. The trees seemed to wave at him as they saw him.
He turned away from the trees and faced the city. How much time would he have? How abruptly would he be kicked out of this place again? It had been about ten years since he’d last been thrust here, and another ten before he’d first seen this world. No one else knew of its existence but him. Was he the next Christopher Columbus, or Neil Armstrong?
One small step for man… He thought as he took a step on the red… grass? No, it wasn’t grass. The fibers below him seemed to be living, active organisms. It was grass-like, but not green. The brown tendrils of worm-like structures reached up into the blood-red sky, waving hungrily much like the trees had behind him.
He thought again of his world, of Earth, and about the soft pallets of colors. The green grass, the blue sky, the soft white-yellow sun. Earth was cool, and this world was hot, made of reds, blacks, and browns. He didn’t feel physically hot, but emotionally, this world felt…. Angry.
Violent.
He took another step and the tendrils of grass-like things crushed beneath his foot. Squished, almost. He lifted his foot and saw that his shoes were covered in a brown substance, as if the grass had bled. Yet, in a way, didn’t grass bleed, too, on Earth? Green stains were a pain to scrub from white sneakers, the blood of thousands of screaming blades of grass reluctant to relinquish their hold on the world of the living.
Something collided with him unexpectedly, throwing him from his thoughts. He’d still been staring at his feet, not observing the world around him. He thought again of the minotaur he’d seen years earlier when he was still a child, and wondered if it had found him.
He hit the ground of his apartment with a loud thud. When he looked up there was a woman in his apartment. She wore tattered clothing, her hair a faded green and knotted. Ralph could see that at one time her clothing had been a tight black tank top and black pants. She wore a pair of scuffed up black biker gloves. She seemed as if she were in her early twenties, if not younger.
“What the fuck?” She asked him, her voice high and soft.
“What the fuck?” Ralph returned the question.