Hunting Julian Read online

  “No, zini, I am not. Alien to your world, perhaps, but here you are the alien.”

  Panic infused her as her very worst fears were confirmed.

  Dorothy wasn’t in Kansas anymore.

  “Holy hell and damnation,” she uttered. “I’ve been kidnapped by aliens?” She scoffed and reached up to hit him, push him or, damn it, even flick him. Anything to reflect her fury with him for putting her in this preposterous position. All she managed was a weak flop of her hand against his chest. He made it worse by chuckling again.

  “I never would have taken you to have such an imagination,” he mused.

  “Get away from me,” she said. “When this drug wears off, you prick, I’m going to kick the shit out of you.”

  “I thank you for the forewarning. It is most considerate of you. However, you are not drugged. Merely exhausted. To be honest, I am rather surprised to see you awake. It is nothing plenty of sleep cannot cure, of course. Then you will be free to kick my ass if it is what will make you feel better. Experience tells me, however, that it is not likely to help you.”

  “Yeah, well, I’ll have fun with it just the same,” she grumbled. She paused in her temper, finding even strong emotions to be exhausting. She took the moment to look around at her surroundings. Above her was a sharp, conical ceiling, the shape and material quite surreal. It was as if it had been hand-woven. Some kind of fibrous material turned in progressive, tight patterns all the way up until it reached a perfect point about twelve feet above her. The shape reminded her of the cap to the tower where Rapunzel had been kept prisoner in her storybook as a child. She had always hated those “princess in a tower” stories. She supposed she had been an empowered female even as a child, circumstances making her old and wise before her time. Kenya had been a little more fanciful, but that was because Asia had raised her to provide her with a little more opportunity to be free to follow her dreams and desires.

  “Where am I?” she asked at last, though she dreaded hearing she was on some kind of funky, pointy spaceship.

  “You are Beneath,” he said, as if that explained everything.

  He looked like that was all he was going to say for a moment, but then seemed to reassess that plan. Asia realized he had judged her capable of handling the truth, no matter how shocking it might be to her, and she couldn’t help but feel surprised that he had intuited what so many men around her could never seem to figure out. Even the ones that had known her for years couldn’t help the constantly annoying urge they seemed to be born with to protect her from things that were, in the end, really quite trivial, or to condescend to her because of her gender. It gave her a chill that a stranger seemed to get what they had never been able to comprehend, and she’d barely had a real conversation with him.

  “I know this will be hard for you to believe, and you will only be convinced when you see it all for yourself. After all, to you I am not worthy of trust and I am a lowlife beneath the capability of truth. I realize this is your perspective. Just the same, I will explain. Earth…” He hesitated when he saw her eyes widen slightly at the reference to Earth as a place separate and apart from his pending explanation. “Earth is both much nearer and much farther than you may comprehend. We are Beneath. Beneath Earth.” He sat on the edge of the bed and held out a flat hand, palm down. “Think of it as levels of existence. Earth is a plane, or some would call it a dimension. Located here. In this sense, you have to imagine that Earth is actually flat. It’s a flat space running in an infinite line on its particular plane, one dimension within the universe, so to speak. There are planes both above and below the plane you know. Humans have a sense of them, actually, and mistakenly refer to them as Heaven and Hell. Heaven and Hell are actually very different dimensions beyond what I am about to describe, but let’s not confuse the issue. There are three planes above Earth, and three below. Each runs parallel to the one above or below it. You are here.” He indicated a plane far and low from the hand representing Earth. “Beneath. The lowest plane below.”

  “Great. I’m literally in the lowest level of hell,” she ground out. “I suppose you are going to tell me it all ‘looks just like Earth’?”

  “Hardly that,” he said with a frown. “In fact, I must warn you not to go outside of this house without me at first. It can be very dangerous for one who is unfamiliar with the nature of this place.”

  “How convenient,” she said with snide sarcasm. “If I believe you, I might stay here cowering in fear of the unknown and not attempt escape. Nice try.”

  “I’m quite serious,” Julian said sharply. “This is no ploy. I have no reason to keep you within these walls except to keep you safe from outside harm. It is not as though you can run back home or escape to somewhere else.”

  Asia couldn’t help but feel a little bit rattled by how off-the-cuff confident he seemed of that.

  “And you just happen to speak English here?” she asked shrewdly.

  “No. I know English from my time in America and other countries of Earth. Those who are native Beneath speak a language of the mind and of energy. Again, your species has a sense of it in things like body language. It may take a little time, but you will come to comprehend us quite well eventually.”

  “Like hell I will. There isn’t going to be any ‘eventually.’ I want to go back home.”

  “You cannot.”

  She’d known he was going to say that. Thirteen missing girls backed the truth of his words.

  Shit!

  “Kenya! She’s here? Beneath?” she demanded, struggling to sit up and being frustrated by the lack of her body’s response.

  “Yes, zini. Not in this village at the moment, but she is Beneath. She is safe, alive and really quite happy, I assure you.”

  “You’ll forgive me if your assurances don’t mean squat to me,” she hissed at him. “My sister loved her life just the way it was. She loves me. There is no way she would willingly go anywhere without me.”

  “Well, she isn’t without you any longer, now is she?” he pointed out. “However,” he added baldly, “she was not unwilling when she came here. Unlike your circumstances, she readily volunteered to come.”

  “You are a liar! This is all a bunch of bullshit! Let me up! Let me go!”

  She shoved against him, her fingers batting against him like ineffective little moths.

  “I do not lie. I may conceal certain truths, but I do not lie.” He had the nerve to sound highly offended. “In time you will speak to Kenya for yourself. For now, I can prove nothing to you until you rest and regain your strength. Take your time. If I am lying, you can prove me a liar just as well later as now. I will not harm you. I will not…” He hesitated and seemed to edit himself. “There will not be a repeat of what happened before without your permission. Had I any choice I would not have taken you like that. But there are laws here. Chief among them is that no one who learns of us can remain on Earth. The damage and danger it could cause to every plane would be horrendous. It is the one universal rule among the planes. Earth is to remain unaware of us…at least empirically. As I said, you have a sense of our existence. The trouble is that, as a species, humans are too volatile to enter the planes en masse. Very delicate creatures live in these places in a very delicate balance. These balances have been disrupted before, and even now we suffer for it. But I will explain that another time. Please rest.”

  He reached out to caress a thumb over her cheek, and Asia was glad to have the satisfaction of jerking away from his unwelcome touch. His tenderness was just as disturbing now as ever. She watched him rise away from her and there was a creak of ropes as his weight left the bed. As soon as he was gone, she inspected her surroundings. There was no solid door to the room. He had passed through a curtain of dense, heavy beadwork that shined and glittered like strung gems. The bed, she realized, really was like a hammock. Ropes secured it to the woven walls at several points on three sides, the only open side the one he had left from. The room was round, like the single leaf of a clover, ex
cept where it connected to what must be the rest of the house. It was unusual, to be sure, but hardly beyond the scope of a creative architect. Why anyone would want to build a round house was beyond her, but it had certainly been done before.

  Otherwise, the room was quite bare. It was clearly meant to only be slept in. She did notice that there were no windows, making it very much a prison to her. That made her very suspicious of his claims that this was a “home,” rather than someplace he took his kidnapping victims to. She had to admit, his explanation was creative. It was a bit unnerving, however, to realize that the alien psychopath might also be delusional. Odds were they hadn’t gone anywhere that a car couldn’t get to. He might be…different, but that was not proof that he was being truthful.

  The only question she had, as her exhaustion caught up with her and began to drag her back under, was whether Kenya was really nearby and if she was truly okay.

  When Asia awoke later on, she had no concept of how much time had passed. All she knew was that she was awake, able to move like normal, and starving.

  As if he had read her mind even before she had awakened, Julian came in bearing a tray of very unusual foods. She recognized only half of the things there. French fries and corn on the cob. Strange combination for an alien menu, she thought, looking up at him questioningly.

  “I got attached to certain Earth foods,” he explained almost bashfully. “It’s frowned on to bring them here, but it’s not illegal, so I stock up on my favorites. They are very unique to your realm. I thought you might find a little comfort in their familiarity. The other two dishes are called htinni and yogu. Both are local fruit and vegetable dishes. They are among the most flavorful of this culture.”

  He set the tray down on the bed beside her, and the look she shot him was positively scathing. “If you think I’m going to eat anything you give me, you are out of your freakin’ mind.”

  “It isn’t drugged,” he assured her, taking up a liberal clump of fries and eating them with obvious enjoyment. “Salt. I think it is the salt that makes both of these things so delicious. It is a shame it is so bad for human health. And yet, salt is a key part of your makeup. Is that not curious?”

  “Yeah. Fascinating,” she said, not sounding the least bit intrigued.

  He ignored her sarcasm, spooning up one of the two stranger dishes for himself. It was orange in color, steaming and fragrant like spice and curry was fragrant, but looked a bit like baby food. It was probably exactly that. Baby food spiced up to seem strange and alien.

  Julian did not avail himself of any more of her food to prove it wasn’t poisoned. She wouldn’t eat either of those untouched dishes, if she considered eating at all. He looked for a moment like he wanted to say something more to her, but then he simply turned to leave. It wasn’t until he reached the beaded curtain that he finally spoke up.

  “You have the run of the house. I must leave for a short time, but you need to remember not to go outside as yet. I will take you out when I return. Please heed me at this if nothing else. I only ask a little patience, and then I will show you my world. I would stay, but I have to…I have things to attend to. If you need anything, Ariel will be here.”

  He hesitated again, his pause quite pregnant with things he wanted to say but did not. It only served to irritate her. He left her wondering who the hell Ariel was. Figuring there was only one way to find out a lot of the answers she needed, she pushed the tray aside and slid cautiously to her feet. She tested herself out for aftereffects of drugs, but she felt quite normal. She wasn’t unusually thirsty, weak, tired, or even hung-over, which supported his claims that he had not drugged her in the first place. But it was clear he had done something to her. She had gone on a hell of a trip, as though loaded up on Ecstasy, and it had been disturbingly out of character. She brushed a hard hand at her cheeks as they flushed red in anger and embarrassment. He would pay for stripping away her dignity like that. She would see to it.

  She waited a few minutes before she cautiously inched up to the curtained doorway. She hadn’t heard a door close, so she couldn’t be certain he had left as he’d claimed he was going to. He could be testing her to see if she would attempt escape. He had to know she would. He seemed able to intuit a great deal about her, so she had to assume he would anticipate her desires to go against his command and try and break free of him somehow. She slid quietly through the curtains, for the first time noticing she no longer had shoes on and that the floors were woven tight and hard beneath her feet. There was no splintering to the webbing beneath her, despite the fact that it looked almost like a layer of braided vines. The surface was treated, making it silky smooth while providing traction with its meshed texture.

  As she crept through the house, she realized that the woven material made up all the solid surfaces: walls, flooring, ceilings, and anything of substance to the architecture of the home. It was just weird enough to make her stomach clench with doubt and questions, but it wasn’t enough to convince her. As she searched slowly and quietly around her would-be prison, she encountered two bedrooms besides the one she had left. One had a decided feminine touch, the other was more dark and masculine. Not so much the color differences to the bedding, but also the nature of the décor. Julian had a history of taking rather posh, showy apartments in his travels, so it was hard for her to picture him in this more rustic environment. She did not step into the room, something inherent in her telling her to keep far from his bed and his belongings. She already knew him intimately enough, thanks. But she did take a moment to notice there were no photographs or artwork of any kind, not that she could figure how to mount such things on round walls. It was not absent of personal touches, however. There was a kind of personalization just in the way the bed and a slung-up chair in one spot were obviously designed for the specific comfort of one man. It was strange, however, that she saw no tables and no lights in any of these rooms. If there was recessed lighting, she couldn’t find it.

  She was wasting time, Asia lectured herself sternly. It was time to find out just how far Julian would let her go before bringing down the hammer. Would he let her make it all the way outside? It would be easy enough to explain away a suburb or remote cabin to fit his delusions, but it would be easier for him to leave her questioning. As yet, there was no sight of any windows. She found it curious that the place wasn’t pitch-black. In fact, it seemed warmly and diffusely lit from just about everywhere, although for the life of her, as she moved on through the house, she could find no switches, lamps, or bulbs to account for any of it. She quickly denied the idea that it was anything but some designer’s clever trick of technology and architecture.

  Things got really peculiar, however, when she reached the end of her search at a central circular opening in the floor. But where anyone else would have a spiral staircase leading down to the next floor, this was a wide, spiral, and gently graded…slide. Or ramp. It depended on how you looked at it. Perhaps it was designed for someone in a wheelchair? But wouldn’t an elevator be easier? She carefully stepped onto the slide and realized the mesh material provided much better traction than she had given it credit for. It made for a smooth, quick descent. When she reached the bottom, though, she looked back up and had sympathy for anyone who wasn’t in decent shape and sporting a good sense of balance when it came to the climb back up.

  Turning her attention to the newest floor, she became instantly aware of the presence of another person nearby. It was hard to miss, actually. The sound of feminine sniffles and softly hitching sobs was rather hard to overlook. Unable to help herself, fearing someone else might be in trouble in this surreal situation, she followed the sounds to the nearest room. Stepping through another beaded doorway, she found herself in what had to be a kitchen, although it wasn’t like anything she’d ever seen before. It seemed a strange cross between modern and primitive. There was an open fire pit, the shape and size of which reminded her of a normal-sized sandbox in a child’s backyard. It was roomy, about waist-high to the woman who w
as removing a pot from the grill set over the flames. She turned and threw the pot angrily into a basin full of fresh, sudsy water. It distracted Asia from trying to figure out exactly how the smoke from the freestanding fire was being vented out of the room.

  “Are you Ariel?” she asked.

  The other woman didn’t seem surprised to realize Asia was there. In fact, she didn’t even look up to acknowledge her. However, Asia knew she had heard her because she’d gone very still. She was a very pretty young woman, a redhead with a braid of hair that hung in a thick rope down to just below her bottom. She was slim in some places, but busty and lushly curved over her hips. She certainly wasn’t shaped like so many of the perfect-sized women Julian had taken back to his apartment night after night. She hadn’t thought him capable of being anything other than too shallow to appreciate a woman shaped in some other fashion.

  Then again, she was standing in his kitchen looking very domesticated. She was probably his wife. She certainly looked miserable and beaten down enough to find herself married to a beautiful man who did nothing but run around on her night after night, even going so far as to bring one home with him. Probably more than one. Maybe even fourteen. The little fool probably loved him to death and would likely tolerate anything he said or did just to stay close to him. The very idea made Asia ill.

  The bang of a serving ladle joining the pot in the basin drew her attention back up sharply to the woman in question, who rounded on her with obvious anger in her eyes.

  “You know nothing!” she spat, her accent far heavier than Julian’s. “You appreciate nothing! You make to judge me? After you rob me of my life?”

  There was a certain sharp, ringing sound that always seemed to occur when a knife was drawn in a kitchen. Ariel grabbed what was obviously a blade from the countertop nearest her and Asia was instantly on guard, holding out a hand.

  “Whoa! I didn’t do anything!” Asia instantly measured the space of the flooring, the distance to dangerous points like the knife and the fire pit. “You can keep your life just how you like it, whatever it is. Just show me the door and I am out of here.”