Beatty & The Beast

TWENTY-SEVEN: Where the Beast Wakes in Another World

The next day, three days until prom

When Mrs. Featherstone gave her a quick jerk in the shoulder to wake her up, Andie had been at the end of a wonderfully pleasant dream.

In it, she had just finished punching her fist through Becca Wolf Fang's head and watched with glee as it exploded like a balloon, only to release a burst of little air-filled bubbles that floated up into the sky.

She had never been so pleased.

So when Mrs. Featherstone had given her brief wake-up call (she always jostled her awake before promptly leaving the room), Andie was in a rather agreeable mood.

It came to a halt when she opened her blurry eyes only to find darkness.

This couldn't be right.

Her window had white curtains and therefore always let the morning sunlight come blazing through. It was one of the things that actually got Andie out of bed in the morning, the blinding light, one of those chagrined necessities.

This darkness was something she wasn't ready for. For one moment of sleep-induced-delirium, she thought Mrs. Featherstone had woken her up in the middle of the night, as some sort of joke or something. But Mrs. Featherstone never joked like that, especially if it harmed the health of a child. An interrupted night of sleep would be something Featherstone would consider as harmful to the health of a child.

Andie pushed the headphones off her head, with the tune of the Ting Tings fading into the distance, and sat up. She couldn't understand why her eyes weren't clearing, no matter how much she blinked them. Why was it dark? Why was it fuzzy? Did she just see a flash of blue in the darkness? Purple? She saw what looked like a small group of blurred white lights in front of her too.

"What's going on, Friedrich?" she said, not even looking in the frog's direction.

She heard him splash in the water a little, but nothing else. Evidently, he didn't know the answer either.

It took a little time, but the sleepy confusion faded and she realized the fuzziness was actually something hanging all around her. She was surrounded by what looked like a sheet of long, translucent gauze hanging from a circle above. It floated out like an airy curtain and smelled a little dusty. Andie reached forward and felt it. It was old, fragile and soft.

A mosquito net! It was an old-fashioned mosquito net shrouding her bed! But it hadn't been there when she went to sleep, where did it come from?

Puzzling, she found the opening and slowly pulled the net back, ready to stand up on her bed and investigate, but her eyes were instantly caught by her surroundings. She forgot her investigation of the net.

Surely this couldn't be her room, her bed.

"What is going on?" she muttered.

Pushing her eyes to focus through the darkness, Andie turned to the window only to find a thick black curtain had been hung over her white ones, covering any and all of the morning sun. The light had been purposefully shut out. But why?

Then the noises began to register. Crickets. She heard the chirping songs of crickets, along with the smooth rhythm of a babbling brook. There was something else there too ... panpipe music? It was soft, almost impossible to hear over the light nature sounds, but she could've sworn it sounded like someone was playing a panpipe in the distance.

Where in the hell was it coming from?

Her eyes finally clearing, she realized she was in a forest - a beautiful, swirling forest stretching across what used to be the walls of her bedroom.