Asleep in Eden, Part One

I'm not much of one for long intros, but it's only fair to warn you that there are 2,240 words (~8 pages) in the post ahead of you.

If you have any questions about the story, feel free to ask! Also, since this story is almost completely polished, I don't need any critique on this one. Thanks kids! I'll get out of the way and let you read the story now.

Yes, I know that comic book shops are not the best place to hide from a rampaging fairy, but it wasn’t as if I had much of a choice. Cadence was approaching fast. I scanned the room, looking for anywhere to hide. There was nothing-- just a bunch of shelves full of cheesy superhero stories. I ducked behind one of them anyway, chest heaving out of habit. I’d just have to hope I could find some way to throw Cadence off my track before she noticed me.

        “May I... May I help you?”

       In my frenzy to find somewhere else to hide, I had failed to notice the confused, concerned cashier in front of me. I guess he didn’t get girls in frumpy dresses running into his shop for dear life every day.

       Bells tinkled. I glanced through the shelves of comic books just as Cadence removed her hood. Bonnie, her favorite goon, followed close behind.

       I turned back to the cashier.

        “Help her,” I whispered. He glanced up at Cadence, and then back down at me, unconvinced.

        “She needs help. Lots of it.” Go distract her. Please, please go distract her.

       He gave me a final frown and straightened up.

       I heard his footsteps approaching Cadence, and then his question: “May I help you?”

       I breathed a sigh of relief, mentally blessing the cashier for distracting her. I gathered up my skirts and snuck towards the back in a crouch. If Cadence had only brought Bonnie with her, I might be able to make a clean break.

        “I’m looking for a girl,” she said, in her clear, piercing voice. Don’t tell her where I am, cashier, please keep her distracted. But the cashier did not respond for a moment. If I had been able to make noises, I might have worried that she would hear me. Sneaking through shelves of comics was not easy, especially not in this dress.

        “A... A girl?” said the cashier. “You mean like Wonder Woman? Supergirl? Jean Grey from X-Men? We’ve got lots of comics about girls.”

       Distractions. Thank you, o merciful comic shop cashier. I had nearly reached the back wall. If the cashier could keep Cadence distracted for just a moment longer, I could slip through.

        “I don’t mean a girl in some book,” Cadence said. “I mean a live girl. Please don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about. I saw her come in.”

        “A girl?” the cashier said. His sneakers squeaked on the tile. “I don’t see any—”

       Darkness enveloped me as I slid through the back wall, grateful to be out-of-body for once in ten years. It has its moments. I cleared the wall and wished I could wear a pair of sunglasses.

       Sun beat down on the sidewalk behind the shop, and heat waves distorted my view of the parking lot. I squinted my eyes and scanned anyway. Sure enough, a couple of Cadence’s captured souls leaned on the brick wall at the back of the lot. Time to abort this mission. I slipped back through the wall into the shop.

        “Where is she?” Cadence’s voice was dangerously quiet. I ducked, wincing. I had to hide. Where could I hide?

       I heard only silence from the cashier.

        “WHERE IS SHE?” Bonnie shouted. Something crashed. I peeked over a bookshelf and saw Cadence standing nearby, arms crossed, calmly watching Bonnie wreck the shop in her hunt for me. I winced. None of Cadence’s goons are really bad people. Cadence has just made them desperate.

        “Ma—Ma’am. I really don’t think she’ll be in the poster display— really, ma’am, I promise you, she is NOT hiding in the poster display.”

       I could picture the cashier standing nearby, wringing his hands. Plastic poster containers slapped against each other as Bonnie flipped through them in a frenzy. I had to hide, and underground was not an option. No matter how hard I tried to sink downwards, it never worked. I glanced around, looking for anywhere to hide.

       There was a metal cabinet to my left. I slid inside. It was dark, and the shelves were full of some kind of toy-action figures? I was not sure. Bonnie was still breaking things outside, and I could hear the cashier frantically trying to talk her out of it. Their voices were muffled by the metal and the echoes bounced around in the cabinet. I could not tell exactly what they were saying, but I could hear Bonnie breaking at least half of the store. I winced and sent mental apologies to the cashier. Cadence kept Bonnie searching for another fifteen minutes. She even opened my cabinet, but by then I was sitting at the bottom, knees pulled tightly against my chest, where I would be pretty hard to notice. In the decade Cadence had been chasing me, I had gotten pretty good at hiding.

        “I really don’t think she’s here, ma’am.” The cashier sounded nervous, like saying the wrong thing would make Cadence let Bonnie break him instead of his shop. Sadly, it was not entirely off.

       I heard Cadence mumble something, but the cabinet made the words difficult to understand. Her heels clicked across the tile, the bells jingled and the door swung shut. I stayed hidden until I heard her engine start.

       When I came out, the cashier was standing at the store front, staring out the glass windows. Half of his store had been trashed. Bonnie had ripped several posters and t-shirts off the walls. A rack of comic books had fallen over and decapitated a Superman cutout.

        “What do you think this is?” came a distressed yell from nearby. “A battlefield?!”

       I jumped and whirled around. It was just the cashier. Just the cashier, not another one of Cadence’s souls.

        “... No, actually,” I said, after I had regained my composure. “Sorry about this.”

       I gestured at the wreckage that used to be his store. His hands crept up into his hair and he gripped it tightly.

        “I don’t know what I’m going to do,” he said. “How did this even happen? And how am I supposed to fix it? And why would she do this to these beautiful comics? Doesn’t she have any respect?”

       I felt sorry for the poor kid, but I didn’t know what to tell him. It was pretty much a total wreck... and it was also my fault.

        “I don’t know. Sorry,” I said, trying to keep the disappointment out of my voice. I really was sorry that Bonnie had trashed the store so badly. I understood why she was so desperate to find me, but I didn’t understand why she had to leave a wake of destruction behind her in the process.

       He sighed heavily at the torn posters and broken action figures on the floor. “I’m going to get fired. I’m going to have to move back in with my mom.”

       I checked the store front, to see if Cadence’s souls were still around keeping an eye out for me. Sure enough, one of them was standing at the end of the strip mall, positioned just right to see into both the back lot and the front. I sighed and sat down in an armchair in the back. I wouldn’t be getting out of here for a while.

       I could hear the cashier making a frenzied phone call in the storeroom. He sounded pretty upset. I kept hearing him say things like “Please don’t fire me,” and “I’ll do what I can,” and “No, I don’t know where she went,” and “I don’t know! I don’t know why she did it!”

       When he came out again, he looked even more stressed than before— if that was possible. He walked with his head down, moving slowly. It looked like the store meant a lot to him. Watching him work slowly through the mess it had become, trying to piece it back together, was a little bit depressing.

       I waited while carried broken action figures and torn comics out to the dumpster, repinned posters on the walls and reorganized the comic books in their slots. He hadn’t noticed me, and I wasn’t complaining. He was probably happier thinking I’d left.

       A loud bang made me look up. The cashier had dropped Superman’s shredded cardboard head as soon as he picked it up. His mouth was open and he was staring at me.

        “You’re still here?!”

        “... Yes,” I told him. It seemed pretty obvious to me.

        “Where have you been hiding? That girl looked everywhere for you!”

        “I’ve just been sitting here,” I said.

       He glared. “Um, no, you haven’t. You weren’t sitting in that chair when that crazy lady came through and trashed my store.”

       I shrugged. “Oh, then? I was just... you know, around.”

       I couldn’t tell him the truth— that I had been hiding IN the cabinet, where there was no room for a person to fit. That was a deeper conversation that I wanted to have today.

        “Right. ‘Around.’ Yeah, sure. I believe that one.” he said.

        “Sorry,” I said, and I meant it. I really wish I didn’t have to drag this poor cashier into my fights with Cadence, but at the very least, it was better than dying.

        “It’s not your fault.” He leaned over to pick Superman up again. “Completely.”

        “Still,” I said, but I don’t think he heard me. He had gone outside toss Superman and his head in the dumpster.

        “Do you mind helping?” he said, when he came back in. “I mean, if you’re just going to sit around... You know, it is kind of your fault.”

       That made me wince. I thought there would be a lot of challenges in being out-of-body, but pitiful questions from comic shop cashiers was not one of them. And of all questions he could have asked... the one thing that I felt obligated to do, and couldn’t.

        “Maybe I’ll just go.” I stood up and started heading for the door. “Get out of your hair.”

       I couldn’t leave the strip mall, of course, but maybe Cadence’s goons wouldn’t think to look for me in the tanning salon next door.

        “Wait!”

       I faced him again. Was he really going to do this to me? I hated seeing what Bonnie had done to this place, and it was my fault. I didn’t want to be reminded of that any longer.

        “I get it if you’re too lazy to help,” he said, glaring. “But that lady, who followed you in here— the one in blue. She’s bad news, I mean, really bad news. You should stay away from her.”

       I stared at him for a moment. Then I made a pointed, sweeping glance over the destruction Cadence had let Bonnie wreck on his shop.

        “I know.”

        “I mean,” he said, and cleared his throat, “worse than this. Really, she’s bad. You should get out of town as soon as you can.”

       I frowned at him. How in the world did a comic shop cashier know about Cadence?

        “I wish I could,” I said. Unfortunately for me, I had unfinished business in this tiny little town, and it was a whole lot older than this scuffle in a comic book shop.

       He frowned at me, and went to go get a broom from the storeroom. “What do you mean, ‘you wish you could?’”

       I sighed. “I mean that it would be great if I could leave, but this fight’s been brewing for a while, and it’s got to end sometime.”

       He paused and went back to sweeping.

        “Do you need help?”

       I blinked. “I’m sorry?”

        “I said, do you need help?”

       I stared at him. He must have noticed my gaze, but he kept methodically placing the containers back on the shelf.

        “Are you insane?” I said. “You saw what she did to your shop. It gets destroyed because of me, and now you want to HELP me?”

        “Um... Well yeah, actually,” he said, crossing the room to retrieve the dustpan. “I told you, that lady is bad news.” I wasn’t sure, but I might have seen him restrain a shudder. “I don’t know why she’s going nuts on you, but I do know that you’re in a whole lot of trouble right now. And, well, she’s got a lot of help, and you don’t have any. And yeah, I’m not happy that you had to pick MY store to hide in, but I sure am glad she didn’t find you.” This time he actually shuddered. “If she let that girl tear up these glorious comic books, I don’t even want to know what she’d do to you.”

       I didn’t know what to say to that. He was right. I didn’t want to imagine what Cadence would do to me either.

       I watched him sweep for a while. It barely seemed possible, but the mess Bonnie had left him was almost clean by now.

        “Well?” he looked up at me, and swept the last of the poster shreds into the dustpan.

       I knew I wasn’t useless, even if my body was stuck ten minute’s walk from here in the historic downtown sector. I had been holding my own against Cadence fine thus far, and in ten years I’d never had anyone else’s help. Even out-of-body, there was still a whole lot I could do. But I could not deny that he would come in handy. I occasionally needed somebody to throw Cadence off track and move physical objects.

        “Yeah,” I said, and it felt like somebody had lifted a lot of weight off my shoulders. “Yeah, some help would be great. Thanks.”

       He tried to smile. Given his state after Bonnie’s visit, I gave him an A for effort.

        “I usually have dinner at the Italian place down the street— do you want to talk things over there?”

       Food sounded great, actually, but no one needs to eat when they’re out-of-body.

        “I’ll go with you, but I already ate,” I said.

       He shrugged and tried to smile again. “As long as you’ll talk,” he said. “So what’s your name, anyway?”

        “Me? I’m Jane,” I said. “And you?”

        “Marco,” he said.

        “Nice to meet you, Marco.”

        “You too, Jane,” Marco said. He put the broom and dustpan up and surveyed the relatively clean shop. “It’ll be nice to get my hands on the lady who did this.”

         I had to agree with that one. Cadence had been chasing me for too many years. The sooner I could stop running, the better.