I'm sure you've read at least one of them. You know, those stories where the girl in the modern world wakes up in Middle Earth, meets the Fellowship, joins the Fellowship, falls in love with either Aragorn or Legolas(sometimes even both), destroys Sauron's hold on Middle Earth, and then rides off into the sunset with her true love? You know, those stories? Well you're about to read another one. To be fair though, my story is a little bit different. You see, I'm not a girl. I never was a girl. I will not be a girl (I'm terrified of gender bending. Thank God the author is too.) Hmm….let's see, where was I? Oh, yes. My story. I suppose I shall have to start at the beginning.
My name is Alan J. Cooper and no, that is not my real name. I was fifteen when all of that happened and I am eighteen now. I am exactly five foot tall and, although I will never admit this to anyone who knows me, I look like a girl. I blame my twin sister. I have a soft feminine voice and when I sing I am a soprano. I have straight black hair that reaches my ankles, pale skin with no acne thank God, pale lips, and different colored eyes. My right eye is a pearly white with pale blue edges (think of ice) and my left eye is violet, indigo, and purple whatever you want to call it. You know, I didn't even know that eye colors like that were possible.
I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "It's your eye color how could you not know it was possible?" That's true, but my sister and I are….. a bit…..different. You see, sunlight kills us. I never bothered to remember the fancy medical term for our condition, but I do remember them saying that we the most sensitive ones to light that they had ever seen. Lights, candles, dim lights, hell even those glow in the dark stars that you put on your walls were too much for us.
Since we couldn't use our eyes we had to learn how to navigate through our home by touch, sound, and memory. Since we couldn't do many of the things people take for granted we turned to sound based activities. We learned to sing, play musical instruments, and my personal favorite-speak different languages. I'll admit that I was and still am obsessed with different languages. I would spend almost all day with my tapes.
Ahh, but I am getting off track. When we were little, my sister and I would hear other people in the house and we would try to find them. It became a game to us. We would hear gruff voices laughing, talking, singing, and a couple nights age screaming. They stopped screaming on the third day at twelve. We haven't heard them since. Instead we would hear these horrible high pitched cackles and screeches. We wanted to find out what happened so we followed the noise till we reached the oval object on the wall on the fourth floor that we were told was a mirror.
My sister gasped and said, "Alan, I can feel wind coming from the mirror." I remember holding my sister's hand as we walked towards the mirror with our hands in front of us, but we never found it. We walked past where the mirror was supposed to be. For a moment we were afraid that we had miscalculated and walked through the doorway right next to the mirror, but when we turned around we ran in to a wall. A rock wall. An uneven, rough, rock wall. When we turned around and felt the wind blow on our faces again we got the shock of our lives.
"Alan, I can see the wind!"