INDIGO FLORES - the BORDERLANDS

��The Borderlands are an experiment in Fiction (so to speak) and consist of four 'Books' ; West, South, East and North.� These stories are somewhat autobiographical in the sense that they draw from real life experiences and are then severely altered into fictional events, They incorporate Science Fiction, Fantasy, Metaphysics, Horror and bits of real life experience, those of you who know me will recognize bits here and there, as well as certain individuals (of course names and certain identifying traits have been changed to protect the guilty... I laugh)� as well.� At the moment the I'm focusing in The Ruby West (Book One)

Enjoy.

take note!
** The borderlands is copyright Indigo Flores 2007. **

THE BORDERLANDS�
THE ADVENTURES OF�
DANIEL ANTHONY SWIFT

Spirits of the Ruby West
*
Ghosts of the Silver South
�*
Specters of the Emerald East
� *
Phantoms of the Golden North

As told by�
The Witness of strange evolutions

************************

�All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream�
~Edgar Allan Poe
* * * * *

Do you know at this very moment you are surrounded by eternity? And do you know that you can use that eternity if you so desire?

~Don Juan (Carlos Castaneda)

* * * * *

If this world is wearing thin
And you're thinking of escape
I'll go anywhere with you
Just wrap me up in chains
But if you try to go alone
Don't think I'll understand

In the silence of your room
In the darkness of your dreams
You must only think of me
There can be no in-between
When your pride is on the floor
I'll make you beg for more

Stay with me

You'd better hope and pray
That you make it safe
Back to your own world
You'd better hope and pray
That you'll wake one day
In your own world

Because when you sleep at night
They don't hear your cries
In your own world
Only time will tell
If you can break the spell
Back in your own world

Stay with me...

Shakespear�s Sister (Fahey/Detroit)

�SPIRITS OF THE RUBY WEST�
PROLOGUE
Northern California, 1983.

�� No October leaves, the trees had all gone to sleep and their branches were bare.� The wind howled mournfully as it wove its way around the houses that line Canal Avenue and making its way up through the neighborhood past Main Street and carefully moaning around the quiet Police station.� The wind had its purpose.� A destination.� It slid carefully up and up whooshing through the branches of the Oak and Eucalyptus trees up higher into the clear cold sky to refresh its cold icy nature.� And back down the wind descended into the neighborhoods and dark backyards past barking dogs that retreated to their wooden houses in terror of the cold icy visitor of autumn.� The winds howled yet again and screamed as they encircled the large yellow house. A house of beauty and calm safety, a house that sat quietly among its new fashioned neighbors near the ends of a dead end street.��
As the wind spiraled around the Old yellow two-storey home it howled louder as it passed the large picture window on the second floor that faced the street, It howled as if to catch the attention the young boy whose face peered out into the night.��
�� "Here I am!" The winds screamed against the pane of warbled glass that had protected the innards of the upstairs bedroom for the past one hundred-eighty years. �"I see you!" It teased.� But the boy could not hear the playful element as it hollered and screeched at him.
�� A boy that has had his ears plugged with the beeswax of silent solitude and could not remember how to listen to that which really mattered. He had forgotten how to listen.
�� "Come dance with me!" The wind tried one last time.� But the boy, Daniel only stared out into the moonless night his hazel brown eyes glistening from the rays of the streetlamps and his jet-black hair falling across his pale gold brow.� And so the wind went on its way to tease the dogs and cats and torment the late evening pedestrians making their way home from the corner markets and the teenagers smoking cigarettes in the park. �"I'll come later when you can hear, when you can see, little one." it promised and began its sojourn into the October evening leaving Daniel alone in his room, staring out into the darkness, and then he lowered his head in sadness it seems, as if he had been abandoned by the wind he could not hear.
�� His head though, was not lowered in sadness.� Daniel regarded his toes, and then wiggled them and then continued to stare out into the dark neighborhood noting the cold darkness and the wind ruffling the trees in the distance. He went to his dresser and pulled out a clean pair of white tube socks and sat on his bed to put them on thinking about how he disliked his feet, feet in general. Ugly.� Good thing people kept them covered in socks and shoes.� It was a random thought really, one of those thoughts that suddenly appears and wreaks havoc on the mind for a while then goes just as quickly as it comes like one of those horribly catchy songs that replays itself over and over again as if the eardrums weren't really drums at all but record players with the volume knob turned all the way up to the 'tenth' level.� One random thought leading to another and another, a thought about the room he was in seemed to put a brake on the swirling cycle.� A slight chill made its way up Daniels spine and he hurriedly got up and turned out the light as the thought led to a clouded and vague memory of disliking his room and that there was something wrong with it.� He switched on the alarm on his bedside clock; the red flashing diodes read 11:33 p.m., slid beneath the blankets and lay there just staring at the ceiling, thinking that the angles of the room somehow looked wrong, slightly skewed� off.� He screwed his eyes shut tight all the while holding his breath, and then opened them.� Imagination?��
�� Daniel closed his eyes then and prayed to the Lady Magdalene, it was his way when he felt like this, boxed in-surrounded by something he couldn�t put his finger on. So he closed his eyes and prayed to her and asked her to protect him.� Whether she was real or not didn�t matter to him at some level, yet it always seemed to help the feeling subside when it happened which in truth never was that often.� As he began to drift off into sleep he could see the faces of his friends from school, one in particular stood out among them and he smiled before all was lost to the world of sleep. The slow deep breathing of the little 'Death' regulated by the autonomic systems the brain still functioning and creating below the surface of the midnight winds howling outside and inside.��
When he opened his eyes again sometime in the middle of the night he found himself standing at the foot of the stairs that led to the rooms on the second floor and the angles of the building seemed to be skewed again, he looked up the staircase and could see moonlight streaming from his bedroom window and illuminating the second floor landing-but the light was funny and the stairwell seemed slightly twisted to the right, this effect reminded him of the description of the architecture of Hill House by Shirley Jackson; every inch of the house had been built just off center causing a disorienting effect of displacement, making the inhabitant feel as though they were lost within the walls of the massive mansion.� That is how Daniel felt as he stood at the foot of the stairs; lost within his own home. He turned to the left and observed the kitchen drenched in the midnight blue highlights caused by the light of the full moon as it filtered through the window, the shine and glisten of the soft light reflecting on and off the sink fixtures, and the steady drip of the faucet echoing with an uncanny and louder than possible reverberation. And yet somehow there was a silence that he could not explain or describe with his mind.� The silence was more of a physical sensation he decided, like being wrapped in dense bushels of cotton tufts.� Out of the corner of his eye he sensed movement in the dining room, he peered to the left and noticed that his mothers fine lace curtains were fluttering and dancing in the moonlit rooms that led to the living room. A warm gentle breeze began to churn past him causing his hair to flutter that made him shiver; a warm summer breeze and the world outside basked in the throes of autumn cold, it made no sense.�
�� For the slightest moment he remembered a time when he was very young, not yet three years old, and had come awake in the middle of the night, frightened by a dream he could not remember.� He did recall making his way out of his room and through the kitchen that let to his parents room.� Just outside his room on the wall was a corkboard where his mother would pin up her yellow rubber gloves along with random business cards, bills and a bland calendar. As he hurried past the corkboard those yellow gloves had seemed to move, to shift ever so slightly as though they were alive.� And Daniel, then a frightened toddler hurried to the safety of his parents room to sleep safely with them even though he would dream of those gloves, empty of fleshy hands and full of nothing, crawling onto the bed and quietly murdering his mother and father; leaving their eyes wide and glassy as wet saucers, their necks bloated and bruised - then slowly, thoughtfully and ever so gingerly, moving like spiders across the bedcovers to grasp at his throat to strangle the life out of him.
Ghosts.
�� He shivered the thought away and decided that his room, the bed and the cold unconscious dead of sleep would be better than prowling around the house at midnight while everything seemed so weird and deformed. He turned from the dining room and just as he passed through the doorway to the staircase there come from the top of the stairs a loud pounding sound.� Looking up the stairwell he saw that his bedroom door was shut- he scratched his ear and his eyebrows furrowed in thought; he was sure he left the door to his room open.� He was immediately torn from this reverie as a succession of deep bass pounding blasted from the opposite side of his bedroom door.� His body paralyzed and his eyes shot up the stairwell and he was sure the door itself seemed to be rattling on its hinges shaking and creaking with each pounding blow. He put his hand to his ears to filter out the hammering sounds and he quickly forced his body to move, he turned about face and nearly slipped and fell on the tile floor as the sheer feeling that whatever was pounding down that door at the top of the stairs would be at his heels at any moment. And again he found himself frozen on the spot as a bright golden explosion of light erupted from what would have normally been the back door of the house that led into the yard.� If there was ever a door it was long gone, all that remained was a blinding light that radiated in glow and color.� And now the frightened trapped feeling overcame him completely, the feeling that he remembered so well from the bodiless gloves that had strangled his parents.� Crawling over dead bodies to get him.� Trapped between the constant earsplitting Pounding from behind him and the blinding ball of gold sunshine ahead of him he sunk to his knees as the fragmented silhouette of a human shape began to emerge from the explosion, its arms outstretched as if to grab him and pull him away from his sanity. � � � Then there was a silver sharp thunderclap of darkness.
�� Darkness.
�� Daniel's eyes shot open, his breathing labored and rapid - his body sharply pained and freezing cold as his pajama trousers and t-shirt had been soaked with sweat from the strange dreamlike experience. He closed his eyes and calmed himself as best he could, and it was his mind that actually did the trick, as his reason kicked in and did its best to explain what had happened.� Eventually his mind settled on �a particularly vivid dream, nothing but a vivid dream� and his breathing evened and the shivering subsided, he climbed out of bed and switched on the light so that he could change out of the wet clothes. After he was changed he got a book off the shelf near his closet and slipped back into bed doing his best to avoid the cold sweat dampened area to the far left where he had been lying during the nightmare. As he read his book, he failed to notice the red flashing diodes of his clock, blinking the time out in its regular fashion.� It read 9.57 p.m.