The Welcome

Page 6 of 8

They spoke to her in a strange mixture of voices, a ransom note of sound, pieced together of clips and phrases of conversations she'd never been privy too, spoken among people she'd never met.  Children, men, women, some laughing, some crying, some yelling while others whispered, but the volume level remained roughly the same, as if it was recorded for a television show.  In spite of the difference in timbres and pitches, the voices flowed smoothly together as one, with phrasing and inflections scattered and insensible, but cohesive, like a collage that appears as a single picture viewed from afar but with each piece entirely distinct up close.

"Rachel, please do not run anymore.  I do not mean to scare you, nor do I mean you any harm."  

Terrified beyond tears, Rachel leaned against the wall.  The eerie patchwork voice curdled her blood, but she could do nothing, not even hold herself standing as gravity slid her down the wall to seat her on the floor.  She struggled to find her voice, to ask something, anything, to keep her feeling like she might have some control, but could barely find her breath, let alone a whisper or wobbly speech.

"I am glad to see that you have taken my invitation.  I felt that you wouldn't at times, but you have arrived and I feel you will be a welcome addition."

The words made no sense to Rachel, but she felt that, between the laptop and the flickering lights, the incoherent ramblings of a disembodied quilt of voices were of little consequence.  Suddenly the lights stopped flickering and the hallway was dark, darker even than the ambient light coming through the windows should have allowed.

"I would like to show you something Rachel," the voices said as the wall across from her started to glow a pale, light blue, like the edge of a clear morning's sky, so empty and depthless it gave her a strong sense of vertigo.  "It may make no sense to you at this time, but eventually you will come to understand it."  The wall started to flicker, and suddenly became a grainy replica of life, like a home movie that was being shown on a projector.  

The wall flickered through still images that passed before she could fully grasp them, the continuity (if it could be called that) broken by scenes of lives she had never known, some lasting only long enough to detect movement, others lasting a second or two.  None of it made any sense to her.  A tree dying in a field, a black man and a white woman holding hands in front of a house on fire, a young man standing in a forest clearing, another young man walking to a car.  She saw what appeared to be a plane that crashed into a forest, several images of a bright red, crystalline substances that seemed to flow like a liquid, the ocean, an elderly woman hanging from the edge of a roof, a young girl picking flowers, an aerial view of a forest receding into the distance, a view of a snow capped mountain that she almost recognized, destroying itself with a large explosion.  Countless images, both horrid and beautiful, awe inspiring and awful, threw themselves from the wall at her, and then stopped with a  purple glow.

For a brief moment she figured this purple glow was the opposite end of the blue light that had started this little film, that this was the end and the voice would start speaking again.  Then she noticed a slight texture to the glow, creases and crevices, and they grew smaller as though the camera (although she had her doubts this was something actually filmed) was pulling away from some extremely closeup view of an object.

Instead of pulling out to show some larger object, the glow grew less distinct, then clearer, fuzzier then with more definition, and she realized that she was seeing some unearthly landscape, canyons and valleys and arroyos, hidden behind a non-terrestrial fog or cloud.  With the suddenness of a roller coaster, the scene on the wall plummeted, driving her senses towards the ground being displayed so quickly that she actually felt a sense of tremendous speed, and a fear as though she were looking out the cockpit window of a plane in a suicide dive at full throttle to a final, explosive stop.  The fog disappated from in front of her, now below the cloud line she assumed, and she could distinctly see yellow desert hills and ravines stretching out below her.

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