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Andwan’s Collection of Campfire Tales

1^st Adventure – Andwan’s Samhain Fright

By Andwan Wingsweep

Chapter One

            I stood in the middle of a gaggle of my peers.  All of them were in their late teens and early twenties.

            And all of them were waiting for me to step into the Vanishing Circle.

            It had all started that morning in the school cafeteria.  It was a Friday with a week-long Halloween vacation following, so the students had been given a half a day off that day, and had been allowed to wear their Halloween costumes to school.  We’d been having the usual lunch on such a day – Friday was pizza day, and, as it was a holiday, we were also eating whatever candy and soda the kids had bought beforehand for the occasion.  I always either read a book or joined some of my friends at our usual round table for a game of cards over lunch; this time, I’d been reading a book my best friend Jennie had given me two Christmases ago in 2002 – the twenty-fifth anniversary, silver edition of Faeries by Brian Froud and Alan Lee, who had done the concept design work in Peter Jackson’s film version of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings series, which I absolutely adored.

            While I’d been reading, Jeremy had peeked at my page (the tale of O’Donoghue) over my shoulder.

            “Do you actually believe in that stuff?” he asked me, glancing at the torque, necklace and costume I wore. 

            I had stared Jeremy coolly in the eye.  “I’ve never seen anything,” I told him, “to make me believe in it or not.  That includes our own gifts.” 

            Jeremy had grinned, the way he did when he was about to make one of what I call his PG-13 jokes.  “In that case,” he said, “I dare you to enter the Vanishing Circle, today, after the last bell.”

            I usually have better sense than to take Jeremy of all people up on a dare, but he’d threatened to put it about among the 5^th and 6^th-grade history classes I taught twice a week that I was a wimp if I didn’t, and that would totally destroy the credibility I’d built up with the children.  I needed them to respect me if I was to get anywhere with them, and given grade-schooler status politics, Jeremy was quite capable of destroying it if he wanted.  I didn’t think he was quite up to following through on that particular dare, but I didn’t want to take the chance.  Besides, if I came out again, alive and unharmed, I could tell people the truth about the Vanishing Circle, and my status with the grade schoolers might even go up a notch or two.

            And that was how I’d come to find myself in an abandoned lot across the street, standing outside a circle of pavement around an abrupt, sharply-demarcated circle of grass as thick as a carpet that was twenty feet across at its widest point, surrounded by all my friends who attended this school with me, still in my Inu-Yasha costume, with all my school textbooks packed back up in my locker and my backpack filled with leftover pizza, candy, soda, and that book Faeries.  My costume had its advantages, though – I’d managed – somehow – to get my hands on a real katana made of live steel, and had sworn never to draw it from its sheath on school grounds.  As it happened, I didn’t plan ever to draw it in my life except for swords practices (which were not held on school property) or to save lives, so that hadn’t been a problem.

            But the Vanishing Circle was somewhat of an exception to that rule – stuff that wandered into it had always somehow vanished as it crossed the boundary of the demarcation between the grass and pavement.  It was weird, watching a basketball vanish – it was like it had been swept through some kind of invisible wall.  Not over it, through it – there was a vertical line going straight up from the boundary, and as the basketball flew over the boundary, you could see it vanishing along that vertical line.  Nobody knew what its limits were; nobody had ever crossed that boundary before.  Local rumor was that it was a dimensional portal much like the ChronoGate I generate as part of my primary Differential, but again, nobody was sure – nobody had ever crossed over it to see what lay on the other side of that invisible boundary.

            That was why my Time Teens and the other people who had heard the challenge posed and accepted had come along; they wanted to make sure I didn’t wimp out and come back without crossing the boundary.  This way, there were people to tell if I’d gone or not.

            I adjusted my backpack so it hung on my shoulders more comfortably and adjusted my katana sheath on my left hip (I’m left-handed, but I’ve learned to be ambidextrous with swords so that I can fool my opponents and then switch hands and get in under their guard when and where they least expect it).  Then I squared my shoulders, stepped across the boundary, and was gone.

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