Grace and the Revenge of the Drawl

GRACE AND THE REVENGE OF THE DRAWL

Written By

DALE CUSACK

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2010 Dale Cusack

Legal

This ebook is entirely a work of fiction, all events described are works of the author’s imagination any resemblances to persons living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Epilogue

Errata

Chapter One

Grace sprinted quickly through the front gate, down the hall and flopped onto her bed. She rolled over onto her back, kicked off her shoes and closed her eyes. School sucks, teachers suck and Grant Minke sucks, she thought. Stuff him. If he thinks I’m going to waste my time crying over him, or missing him he has another thing coming. There are plenty more cute guys out there. As Grace turned to lie on her pillow, she heard something crumple. She reached around and felt for it, her fingers closing on some kind of paper. Pulling it out she realised it was an envelope. The writing on the front was strong and simple and on the back there was a wax seal with an impression of a cat on it. Grace tore the envelope open, and removed the letter from inside. She started to read:

Dearest Grace,

As you know time passes much faster in our dimension than in yours. Although to you it has been six months since you left, for us it has been much longer. All was well for the first few months, cats started to forget about the Drawl. Scouts reported no activity in the third dimension. We thought the destruction of their anchor was a devastating blow from which they would never recover. We were wrong.

Two months ago they returned in huge numbers, it was a massive attack. We weren’t as prepared as we should have been and consequently we suffered large casualties.

Grace we need you.

The letter was unsigned. It had been weeks since Grace had thought about the cats. She hadn’t seen Boot since she’d returned home from the hospital and had actually started to think that perhaps it was all in her head. The therapist that had been treating her had suggested to Grace it was a coping mechanism from the trauma of her operation and the pressure on her brain from the tumour might have caused her to hallucinate. Yet the whole thing had seemed so real, the level of detail, the characters she had met. Surely the swords and spiders were far too elaborate for her mind to have conjured up. Grace hated making stuff up, even for her assignments. She preferred reading other peoples’ fanciful stories to creating those of her own.

In the time since she had left the hospital things had been difficult. People looked at her funny. Even Jason, her brother seemed to take a little more care around her. As if everyone thought she was crazy and the slightest misplaced comment would set her off again. Grace hated it, why couldn’t things just be the same? I’m the same person, nothing has changed. But they had. She had broken up with her boyfriend, without even really going out with him. Even her best friend Naomi was a little standoffish. Grace turned her attention back to the letter. If I did imagine it all, then this letter must be imaginary too. She jumped up off the bed and headed out to the kitchen to look for her mum.

Joyce worried about her kids, as all parents did. She worried about Jason and the trouble he got into at school. It was all normal boys’ stuff: fights, broken windows, incomplete homework. Hopefully nothing he wouldn’t grow out of in time. With Grace however, Joyce’s concerns went deeper. She was such a bright and cheerful child. But her life seemed to be marred by tragedies. When she was young she had fallen through the ice at Lake Pearson. The doctors had said Grace was very lucky to have survived, and it was only the extreme cold that had allowed her to be resuscitated. Grace had been in hospital for weeks in a coma. Joyce had sat with her daughter every day and read to her. One of the doctors had said that any kind of company would have positive results. And they had even allowed a cat to sit on the bed for a few hours each day. Then, last year, Grace had started hallucinating and fainting and once again had been admitted to hospital this time with a brain tumour. How much could a mother be expected to take?

‘Mum do you see this?’ asked Grace holding up her letter.

‘See what honey? Is that a new nail polish?’ She tried to show interest in her daughter to make her feel good about herself, but it sounded insincere even to Joyce. Why don’t we talk the way we used to? Why don’t we have the hot fudge Sunday afternoons with just the two of us when the boys have gone off to the game? There were no more candid discussions about guys, movie stars or juicy gossip.

Grace’s face told Joyce she had got it wrong. Grace tried to cover but her mother knew.

‘Oh yes, it’s a French polish, Naomi’s sister did it for me. Cool huh?’ Grace wandered off back to her bedroom. Obviously her mum couldn’t see the letter. So either I am crazy or this letter is from the cats in the fourth dimension. She inspected the letter once more. But why send a letter? Where was Boot? Why wasn’t he here? These were all good questions to which Grace had no answers.

‘How did I get to the cats’ dimension last time? I had some kind of….’

Grace hopped over to her dresser. It was covered in cosmetics, perfumes, hair sprays, creams and what looked like a small pharmacy of vitamin pills. She dug around moving things as she looked under magazine clippings on eye brow shaping, foundation bottles and hair gel tubes. At last, stuck to the underside of a perfume sample card, she found it. Her mother must have picked it up off the floor while Grace was in hospital and placed it on the dresser. It was the small silver amulet that Boot had brought to her. Grace examined it. It was still shiny although it appeared to lack solidity. She had seen mercury in the science class at school but this stuff managed to hold its shape rather than just dripping all over the floor.

Grace caught her reflection in the mirror. She looked a little older, and very tired. The last time she had made this trip it had taken a huge toll on her, the family and her friends. That couldn’t be allowed to happen again. But the cats sounded desperate. Why would they have sent her the letter if things weren’t really that bad? After all she wasn’t the army, she had fought the Drawl but it was the cats that did the real damage. Grace wasn’t a fighter, she wasn’t even a thinker. It was Yin and the other scientists that had all the brainy ideas. What difference could I make?

Well the cats seemed to think I could help, and I did find the anchor point for them. And I did help with the swords. It would be rude not to help, since they asked….

Grace had made-up her mind. But this time she would have to prepare better. She couldn’t go fainting on the floor and causing such a commotion. She needed some way of going without causing alarm at home. I guess I could go at night, when Mum thinks I’m asleep, as long as I’m back by breakfast they would never know. So it was settled, Grace would try and return to the cats’ dimension that night after she went to bed.

Grace sat watching TV with the family until nine, made a point of yawning a couple of times. This caught the attention of her mum.

‘If you’re tired honey, why don’t you go to bed?’ Grace tried to argue but one more, well timed yawn found her mum becoming adamant. Grace secretly smiled as she pretended to head off despondently to the bathroom to brush her teeth.

Firmly tucked up in bed with her light out, she grasped the pendant tightly in her hand. As she watched, a small speck of light appeared over the bed. It lengthened into a crack and reaching out towards it Grace was swallowed inside the void. Her extra dimensional component made its way back to the cats’ world and Grace’s body slept on peacefully in her bed.

***

Grace didn’t recognize the lab at first. It looked like a tornado had hit it. There was paper and glass everywhere. The room was dark but more importantly Grace was alone. There was nobody here to meet her. She moved cautiously about the building, from one room to the next but encountered the same thing, a complete mess and no sign of any welcome party.

‘How bizarre,’ she breathed, ‘where is everybody?’

Grace returned to the room that held the machine through which she had arrived in this dimension. She was no scientist but she noticed that a panel had been removed and some of the wires had been pulled out of the back. They ran across the floor into a small box which was warm to the touch and hummed away gently. Grace reasoned it was a battery, as a small light blinked steadily on the front and a meter indicated that the unit was a little under half charged.

‘So somebody was here to wire this up, but where are they all now?’ she mused excited by her own cleverness. On top of the battery Grace found a little jar of pills. She recognised them as the same ones Doctor Yang had given her on her last trip to ward off the terrible sickness she felt from the journey to this dimension. More importantly, they stopped Grace from drifting apart and being lost in