The Legio Twins Saga: New Day Dawning/Chapter 2

Mark

The car ride to Aunt Susan's Halloween party was a silent one. From where I was in the backseat, Uncle Vader's expression as he drove was unreadable, but I could tell that his jaw was clenched, his focus on the road unwavering. Mom was so quiet that she could've been asleep. Beside me, but with as much space between us as possible, my sister sat with her chin resting on the Vader helmet on her lap. I stared out the window, ignoring her pointedly. So what if I was acting childish? She was no better. The tension it the air was almost palpable.

Not that it usually wasn't at least awkward; none of us ever really wanted to go to these parties, anyway, because Aunt Suzy's family was the most obnoxious family on the face of the Earth- we only ever tolerated them because of Mom's insistence that we go and because Aunt Suzy was a great cook. Usually, though, Dad was the one driving, not Uncle Vader, and my arm wasn't severely bruised enough to cause me to wonder if I had internal bleeding.

But that had been before the accident. Back then, going to these parties had almost been fun. Back then, Steph, my twin sister, hadn't been as much of a bitch (but she was still a bitch, though, just not at much; she was happier then). But everything was different now; even the car ride to the party was quieter. We didn't even have the same car, for obvious reasons, but it wasn't until now that I realized how much I missed the strange noises our old car used to make...

The day it happened all seems like a blur in my mind now; I think I tried to block it from my memory forever, but the moment when you find out that your father is dead... well, that's not something easily forgotten.

What I do remember is finally starting to eat dinner at almost 7:00 on that unaturally cold February night, later than usual, even considering how busy our lives were. We had spent more than an hour waiting for Dad to get home from work, when Mom finally decided to start without him, having "remembered" that he had said he would be late for some reason. But we hadn't even started eating yet when the knock on the door came...

I think time must have slowed down in the moment it took my mother to get up and walk down the hall to the front door. Slowed down just enough to give me time to realize that something was horribly wrong even before her strangled cry had be uttered.

Black ice, we were told at the hospital. Dangerous enough to have sandwiched Dad's car between a tree and an 18-wheeler. Enough to cause the numerous fractures in his spine and skull. The doctor said that he had felt nothing, but inside, I screamed, How do you know that? Were you in the car with him? No! How do you know how it felt for him to die? How? HOW?

"Mary! Hi! Good to see ya, sis!" Aunt Susan promptly attacked my mother with a bone-crushing hug as soon as she answered to door. Insufferable cow. I hoped the semi-darkness was enough to hide my scowl. Oh, sure, she'd been sad enough at the funeral, but my mother's sister could never stand to be anything but obnoxiously cheerful for more than five seconds of her perfect life.

She had a hard time getting through said door, considering the height of her massive crown or the width of her hideously sequined Pepto-Bismol colored dress. She must have been Glinda the Good Witch from "The Wizard of Oz", which I knew for a fact since she wore this costume every other Halloween (the other costume being a vampire). A horrible realization struck me: if my Mom was dressed as a witch and had green makeup, and her sister was wearing that thing, then had this been part of some kind of plan? I sure as hell hoped not; if anyone else inside was dressed as the Tin Man, I would just get in the car and drive home as fast as I could. Seriously.

Thankfully, Aunt Suzy had no idea what I was thinking.

"Aww, just look how grown up you two are getting!" she exclaimed as she always did every time she saw Stephanie and me.

"Hi Aunt Suzy," we said in unenthusiastic unison.

"Hmm, looks like the whole Skywalker clan is here tonight, eh Jim?"

Uncle Vader grunted in response; he never liked her much, a fact which our Aunt seemed completely oblivious too. "Yeah, I guess," said our uncle. Aunt Suzy giggled nasally.

Inside, my sister and I were promptly abandoned by our mother and uncle (I guess they had gone to see Grandpa Henry), and were confronted with a Halloween horror: our cousins Katie, Ashley, and Eric.

"Hi, Katie," said Steph. The spoiled eight-year-old rolled her eyes. Of all the bratty little cousins in the world, our Aunt Susan and Uncle Ken's kid was the brattiest and the littlest. Her weird pink costume looked like pajamas, but the shiny boots, head bandana, and plastic sword told me that she was either a ninja, a lazy Power Ranger, or had very little imagination.

"What are you supposed to be?" she asked. Steph looked shocked, and I laughed.

"I'm Princess Leia, from 'Star Wars', " she answered, "Jerkface over here is Luke Skywalker." I guess she was still pissed at me; my bruised arm ached, and I reached over and flicked her on the back of the neck. I would've done more, but Eric and Ashley started giggling a little too loudly, and Steph fixed me with a death glare. I didn't want any unnecessary attention from parents.

"Hmph," said Katie, "I hate Star Wars. My Dad says that your Uncle Jimmy of all people should get his head out of the clouds and stop trying to turn you guys into younger versions of him. My Dad thinks that Physics professors shouldn't be running around Star Wars conventions with a bunch of crazies like he does, and he thinks that by filling your heads with garbage with stuff like that, all he's doing is pretending to be your dad and trying to raise you. He told me your parents always spoiled you, letting your uncle fill your head with garbage and playing with lightsabers with you like a little kid. That's why he my Dad doesn't like your Uncle Jim very much, and that's why he never liked your dad, either."

My blood began to boil as she spoke. How could even a little bratty kid like her say something so terrible? It wasn't what she said about Uncle Ken that bothered me- he had always been a bigoted, ultra-conservative workaholic, but I had never known him to be this crazy- it was the last thing that she said about him that made me so angry. Steph and I looked at each other in shock and hurt. At that moment, a shared desire to make Katie and her Dad pay for what they had said united us again. I was about to open my mouth and chew out our cousin when little Eric tugged on my sleeve.

"Ugh. What, Eric?"

The four-year-old beamed up at me with big, pleading eyes. "Pway hide-and-seek wit us!" he demanded, clapping his hands together.

Stephanie sighed, no doubt remembering last year when the rotten little kids had begged us to go hide, then had trapped me in a closet, only to be chewed out in front of everyone later by my Mom for making too much noise. "Maybe later. Isn't it almost time for you three to go trick-or-treating?"

Eric stamped his foot. "No! No! Wanna pway now!"

"Now! Now!" his sister Ashley chimed in.

Steph looked at me, eyebrows raised. I sighed. Fine, if we were going to end up locked up somewhere this time, it better not be that closet.

"Oh, alright," she told them. Katie walked away in a huff, but Eric and Ashley cheered and promptly latched onto our costumes and dragged us up the stairs.

"Stephie can count!" Eric exclaimed.

"Yeah, let's start in the attic!" His sister pushed past us and hurried to open the attic door.

The attic? Great, I could just picture it now: an old, musty, tiny room with the kind of door that locked on both sides. Perfect for aggrivating older cousins. As we went inside, though, I couldn't help but smirk; at least I didn't have to stay here and count. Stephanie look simply infuriated.

Two things I didn't count on, though: 1) those little brats were faster than I expected; and 2) my sister wasn't about to let them have their way. Just as I was about to run from the room after my cousins, Steph sprung from her "counting place" and locked the door on Eric and Ashley. She was too late, though. Before either of them could start whining, there was a click as a lock on the other side of the doorknob engaged, and the malicious giggling of two little kids running down the steps.

"Hey! Come back here you little...!" I shouted, but gave up quickly.

"Well, you could at least turn the light on," Steph said drily. Stumbling in the dark, I reached up and turned on the flickering light bulb above. To my surprise, the light revealed a room full of boxes and overflowing trunks.

"I wonder what that is," said Steph as she opened the nearest trunk. She gasped, then laughed, "Hey, check this shit out!" I looked over to see her holding a Princess Leia dress to herself, old and off-white with age, but otherwise identical to the one she was already wearing. Ignoring the smell of mothballs, I looked in the trunk to find and amazing, albeit wrinkled, array of "Star Wars" costumes.

"Dude, this stuff has to be at least twenty years old!" I found a Luke costume and compared it to my own in the mirror standing in the middle of the floor.

"Yeah, whoever thought Aunt Suzy and Uncle Ken were closet Star Wars fans."

There was another trunk next to the one we had opened, tightly shut and obviously very old. There was something strange about it... it looked almost familiar in a way, and something, I don't know what, compelled me to open it. I hesitated.

"I wonder what's in that one..." my sister's voice trailed off mysteriously, and I saw her go over to open the trunk. The lid wouldn't budge. "It's stuck." She tired harder to pry it open.

"I don't know if we should open it, Steph..."

Suddenly, her fingers seemed to slip and the lid burst open. Startled, she stumbled and fell backwards on top of me. Annoyed, I shoved her off of me and she shoved me back, but before either of us could do any more, things started to happen.

The lightbulb flickered, dimmed. The musty air suddenly seemed strange, hot and arid, and breezy, too. The curtains of the lone window billowed a bit, then harder.

"Hey, could you close the window?" I asked my sister. She looked at me strangely, a strange excitement in her green eyes.

"But Mark, the window isn't open..."

We got up off the floor, which was hard to do in the now gale-force wind, and found oursleves brushing dust from our clothes... only dust wasn't this gitty... but it couldn't possibly be sand...

The light wnet out. Half-blind, I could barely see my sister as she tripped backwards over something on the floor, about to crash into the mirror! I rushed forward, not because I thought I could catch her, but because some powerful force, stronger than gravity, was pulling me towards the mirror, too.

"Steph!" I cried, but it was too late. In the split-second it took for my sister to fall, I realized that the mirror had ceased to be solid, and she was literally falling into it, me along with her. Desperately I tried to grab her wrist, or anything else that might stop us from falling, but she fell from my grasp with a terrified shriek, flying away into a vast expanse of white fog.

Screaming, I fell for what seemed like an eternity, until I seemed to hit a wall of blinding white, hot air, caught up in swirling winds and flying dust that stung my face. At last I think I landed, my head hitting something that must of been hard and painful, but before I could feel any pain, everything started to go black.

The last thing I remember before passing out completely was the feeling of dry sand between my fingers...