In Between
By Greg Wilburn
Copyright 2015 Greg Wilburn
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IN BETWEEN
When Stacy Ludley was a child—age four years, two months, one week, five days, twelve hours, seventeen minutes, and fifty-two seconds to be exact—her imaginary friend Sophie was born. Or at least she thought she brought Sophie into being. As Stacy cried there in the disjointed foot and a half space separating the front and back of the house, letting her mother and father cry frantically after her, she thought she heard a small giggle in that dark space.
Then she wept bitterly as fear took hold and also because she still hadn’t found a way to escape. But no one could hear her behind the thick wooden doors of the house. She’d been trapped there for an exceedingly long amount of time—for a four year old to endure—and she had given up all hope of being rescued.
It all started when her mom had sold her favorite stuffed walrus at the yard sale yesterday. But it wasn’t an accident at all. Stacy knew her mom hated her with every fiber of her being, and that’s why she took all the pleasure in the universe in selling her favorite walrus—Mr. Tusky—for a wimpy two dollars. And as soon as she’d done that without asking Stacy, Stacy knew that all the spankings, time-outs, no’s to this and that, and the vegetables she was forced to eat were more evidences of her mom’s unending hate towards her.
Stacy refused to acknowledge that her mom had told her for weeks that it was her own responsibility to keep Mr. Tusky clean, and that if she kept taking him outside for his daily mud bath and trailing the ungodly sludge back into the house, she’d give Mr. Tusky away to someone who could learn to respect the rules of a home. She also refused to recall that not six minutes prior—a seeming eternity ago—her mom and dad had brought her a new stuffed walrus resembling the late Mr. Tusky for her in remorse for their hasty punishment and asked for forgiveness, but it was she that refused to let it go and said there could never be another Mr. Tusky in the world because the only true one had been betrayed by the family into the hands of a person who could never understand what Mr. Tusky should mean in their lives.
She’d given a small speech in anger to her parents, forcing the guilt of their mistake to run deep. Stacy told her parents of the horrors of the new owner that would have Mr. Tusky in their possession. She was a detective in those moments, deducing the person and their horrible nature down to the very last detail.
She imagined that the woman who had bought Mr. Tusky had snatched him away for the purpose of handing him off to some other girl who would torture Mr. Tusky. She would tape him to her closet door and throw knives into his stuffing, she would pour hot water over his soft smile and melt it, she would ask him math questions that were too hard to answer, she would make him wear a dress at the tea parties when it was all too apparent that Mr. Tusky was a boy, she would leave him outside on purpose when it rained so that he would get cold and sick, and she wouldn’t snuggle with Mr. Tusky over the covers at bedtime. Stacy said she was the only one who truly knew how much Mr. Tusky loved snuggles, and this new girl would put him on the shelf with the other animals, and those animals would bully Mr. Tusky until he cried.
All these horrific scenarios gathered from Grandpa letting Stacy watch too many gangster movies and dramas came to life in her words, and her parents could do nothing but stand there in shock themselves at the horror of what would come to Mr. Tusky, and at how well Stacy had put her words and sentences together to tell such a vivid story. Her mom and dad promised to try and retrieve the real Mr. Tusky for her amidst their tears, but she’ d already given up hope, saying that they’d never find him ever again because the new girl and her family were just as mean as the parents in her own home, and would do nothing but prevent her from seeing her beloved Tusketeer ever again. These hopeless thoughts brought tears to Stacy’s eyes and she ran from the sight of her parents, looking for a place to disappear from the horrible world in which she lived.
Although Stacy and her family had lived in the house for over five months, Stacy had never noticed the disjointed space that separated the two parts of the house. The only event that forced her to stop and see this space for the first time was the single wooden step there, which was two inches higher then the level of the house. Stacy was running blindly, her hands pressing the streaming tears into her face, and she misjudged the height of the step and fell flat on her stomach on the step in that foot and a half space, which also knocked the wind out of her.
She pulled her hands away from her face as she winced in pain and looked around. She was astonished to see the space that lied between the two parts of the house. It was a thick ribbon of darkness skirted between two planes of light. The darkness seemed to span on endlessly to her right and above her. She imagined the darkness expanding on into the sky, and hoped that if she was there at night she might see the Little Dipper and the Milky Way come out.
With a forgotten pain and a new look of curiosity on her face, she looked to her left where the two doors that opened to either side of the house were locked together, forming a sharp triangle that prevented her from seeing the other darkness beyond. Curious to see the whole darkness on all sides of her so that maybe the sky stars would come out early—like the glow-in-the-dark ones she had plastered on the walls and ceiling in her room—Stacy pulled herself to her feet and grabbed the knobs of both doors to separate them.
She gave a few hard tugs, but the doors would do nothing more than shake steadily in their places, like guardians to an ancient tomb. Stacy pulled a few more times, exerting as much of the four year old strength she could muster, but the doors wouldn’t budge. She stepped back in frustration, folded her thin arms across her chest, and gave a loud, “hmph!” As she turned to leave, forgetting about the doors and getting ready to go back to mom and dad, a small glint of light flitted across the knobs of the doors.
This drew Stacy’s attention, forcing her to return and examine the doors once again. As she came near, looking at the rust-patched knobs, she noticed that they interlocked together, forming something that looked like a head or skull or mashed up lump. Stacy remembered thinking that there was always something weird about how the knobs felt whenever she passed from one side of the house to the other, but she had no idea that they formed a complete set.
Stacy felt around the completed skull—which it actually was—trying to find some way of releasing the doors so that she could explore the darkness behind them. She pressed into a small indent on the backside of the skull at the base of the cerebrum, and the doors split apart with a soft clicking sound. Stacy giggled in delight at having figured out her mystery and edged the doors open a bit to look at the darkness she had longed to see. That particular dark space would normally have scared Stacy off—if only it had—but she was all too hyped up because of her accomplishment to notice that that particular space held a darker darkness than the rest of the space. Rather than making her draw back to find mom and dad, it drew her in, and Stacy slid into the small catacomb, closing the doors behind her and letting them lock back into place.
Stacy didn’t notice that the thick doors of the house had cancelled out all noise on either side, isolating Stacy and the world from each other, never to be reunited until someone would uncover the secret to the doors and open the entrance to the dark dimension she had trapped herself in. She was too busy feeling around at the dusty wood, realizing that the space was opening up around her, forming a triangular grave that held en
ough room for her to run around in. She came to a stop eight feet away when her delicate hands found the back wall of the pyramid space.
It wasn’t until she realized that she might miss lunchtime that she felt along the walls in the direction of the sealed entrance. Once she got there she felt along the entire lengths of the doors, feeling for the secret lever that would release her from her new favorite hiding place. She felt around for a minute, and then began to frantically claw at the doors.
All of a sudden, the once perfect space seemed a hell to her. The air felt stuffy, the small space made her claustrophobic, she could feel caked layers of dirt peeling off of the floor and walls—which would agitate her allergies—and the complete negation of sound, other than her frantic squeals and heavy breath, was all too much for her little heart to bear. She screamed at the top of her lungs for her mom and dad to rescue her, but her parents were too busy preparing lunch to worry. Her mom