The girls woke up with the sunrise. A hot pancake-and-eggs breakfast was waiting for them downstairs. When they asked Uncle Jack about the night before, he said he thought it was a weather phenomenon. He called it a sky quake, but he wasn’t sure. Anna nodded in agreement, but she was sure he was wrong. The woman floating above the lake was no weather phenomenon. The lights, her dream, the sounds from the sky. All of it pointed to a larger mystery, and all directions pointed toward the lake.
Uncle Jack sat down and joined the girls for breakfast. The table was quiet at first. The three girls still had sleep in their eyes. But by the end of breakfast he had them all laughing with tales of Herbie, the farmhands, and the challenges of managing an international team. Soon after breakfast finished and plates were cleaned and stacked away, Fiona’s mother arrived to pick them up.
Uncle Jack and Anna stood shoulder to shoulder as they waved goodbye from the front porch.
“I’m heading into town to run a few errands. Want to come along?” Uncle Jack asked as he watched the car disappear from view.
“No, I think I want to explore here on the farm,” Anna said. “If that’s okay.”
“It’s exactly what I’d want to do when I was your age,” Uncle Jack said. “Let me know if you need anything.”
Anna looked up with a crooked grin.
“There is one thing. What’s the fastest way to the lake from here?”
The dust from Uncle Jack’s truck hadn’t even settled before Anna was out the door and across the dirt driveway to the empty field just beyond. She carried a backpack, her journal, and a thin coat of insect propellant. Uncle Jack had given her a rundown of where to go and what to watch out for, and deer ticks topped the list.
An irrigation ditch about twelve feet across separated the far edge of the field and the entrance to the woods. Anna walked along the ditch, keeping pace with a small stick that spun and bounced along with the flowing water until she reached a wooden plank that served as a makeshift bridge. The plank bowed in the middle and creaked as she walked across the irrigation ditch like a tightrope artist, but it held.
Anna took a step into the woods and felt as if she had crossed a barrier. Sound was muted, and the temperature was a good five to ten degrees cooler here. Light filtered down from the canopy of leaves, making patterns on the forest floor. The deeper she made her way into the woods, the quieter it became, except for the snap and pop of fallen branches she stepped on. How long had it been? It felt like an hour, but her phone showed only five minutes had passed. Then, just ahead, she could make out a clearing.
The trees and brush opened as she made her way down a slight embankment, revealing Tyson Lake. She climbed her way to the top of one of the large boulders that lined the shore and looked out. Across the lake, she saw the sensor and camera she had set up two days before. To her right was a large meadow surrounded by trees and no road access. She looked down from her vantage point and could see her reflection shimmering in the water below. The water was deep—perfect for diving, she thought. She’d have to bring her new friends here the next time they came over.
Anna scaled her way down the boulder. She picked up a large rock and tossed it as far as she could over the lake. The rock splashed off the water’s surface with a deep, satisfying kerplunk. She picked up a smaller rock, round and flat, and skipped it across the lake, sending out a succession of concentric ripples. She started scanning the shore for more skipping rocks, picking up and discarding rocks as she walked, until she looked up and realized she had made it all the way to the meadow’s edge. Her stomach tightened. This is where she’d seen the phantom woman the night before.
Wind rippled in waves across the tall grass and wildflowers. The whole landscape seemed to be shifting—or at least everything except a strip of grass that ran from the water’s edge to the middle of the meadow.
“Weird,” Anna said softly.
Across the clearing, a bird flew along the treeline, then disappeared for several seconds before reappearing above the lake as if someone had spliced out frames in a film. A glitch in reality. Anna blinked, took in a deep breath, then tried to take in the landscape without focusing on any one thing. Everything looked normal, but something felt off.
Then she noticed it: a small egg-shaped patch halfway across the meadow. It looked like a smudge on a camera lens. She could see the grass move behind it, but something was definitely there. Transparent, almost like the air was thinning.
Anna picked up another rock and began tossing it back and forth in her hands. Something was out there. She was sure.
The meadow was at least three hundred feet across. Maybe four. The weird smudge-like thing was maybe halfway across. One hundred and fifty feet away. She had thrown a baseball that far before, but the rock was a little heavier, and its edges created drag. Anna calculated the vertical angle of the throw and wind speed and figured it was a stretch, but doable. She spun her arm around a couple of times like a pitcher warming up, then took a deep breath. She brought her arm back in a smooth throwing motion and let it fly.
The rock arced gracefully across the sky a good sixty feet before it stopped in midair with a metallic ping. It seemed to float for a second then fell straight down to the earth.
“Huh?” Anna said out loud.
Had she hit a bird? Impossible. The sky was completely clear. Anna picked up another rock and chucked it across the meadow.
Ptinnng!
The rock stopped midair, just like the one before, and fell straight down to the patch of unmoving grass. Part of Anna wanted to turn and run. The other part, the one that drove her to build rockets and leap from the edge of her house onto a trampoline, told her to move forward. Anna made her way out into the meadow. Ten steps in and Anna heard a dull hum and felt an electric charge. The hair on her arms began to stand up, just like the night before. Thirty steps in and her face banged into something rigid and cold and invisible.
“Owww!” Anna grabbed her nose and fell back hard on her butt.
She looked up, rubbing her nose. Nothing but sky. Anna slowly reached out with her hand and touched an invisible surface. It felt smooth, almost wet, and cold like glass. But there was nothing there. A glass wall?
She began to scale along the wall, tapping on the surface with her knuckles and trying to make sense of what she was experiencing. Who would build something like this, and why? The invisible wall seemed to curve as she made her way closer to the shoreline, but she couldn’t tell. Her hand left no prints on the surface. There were no smudges, no imperfections. Then, her left hand felt an electric charge emanating from the surface. It was the blurry patch she had seen before, but up close it didn’t look blurry. It just looked dim, like the lights had been turned down slightly.
Anna reached her hand out toward the dim patch of air. As she neared the surface, the electric charge grew more intense, her fingertips tingling. Her hand felt resistance like a repelling magnet, then the tips of her fingers disappeared. Poof.
Anna let out a shout and yanked her hand back. The tingling stopped. She was afraid to look down at her hand, but she could feel the tips of her fingers. She held her hand in front of her face. All digits accounted for.
“Oh boy,” Anna whispered.
There was no way she was turning back now. Not now. Not this close. She planted her feet and pushed both arms through to the elbows. The air felt the same on the other side. Her arms were still attached. All good. She shook her head and took in a deep breath before plunging her head through to the other side.