The girl who travels through paintings

Serephine Levy had always been a unique girl.

She knew there was something different about her, but she never could quite figure out what it was. It was the summer of 96' in small town Okin, New York, that she first caught a glimpse of her powers. Her and friend had made the decision to buy LSD from a boy at school, and were an hour into the trip when things got crazy.

They were floating in her friends heated pool while her parents were away on a business trip, when Serephine decided she wanted to go underwater to meditate. While she was under there, something crazy happened to her. She had a vision, or what she could only describe as a vision, where one of her ancestors gifted her with the power to see what others couldn't, in places they'd never think to look.

The day after that trip, they had gone to the museum right outside of town. That was where she discovered her new power.

Her and Katrina, her best friend whom she had tripped with on LSD, were staring at the largest painting in the museum, a floor to ceiling masterpiece of the deep blue sea. It had an eerie feel to it, but it was beautiful, filled with all the sea creatures and coral you could imagine, with the sunlight filtering down from above. It looked so real. Serephine could have sworn she was there, in the water, she felt like she could touch it. She decided to reach out, and before she knew what happened, her outstretched hand touched a piece of coral. Not a painted piece of coral, an actual piece of coral! It was rough, and just as magnificent a Scarlett in person as it was in the painting. She looked back, ready to question if her friend could see what was happening, to see herself, through a cloudy haze of ocean water, standing there just as she was before, looking back at the painting next to her friend.

How was she fully submerged in an ocean that was only a painting two seconds before? How was she still standing there, physically next to her friend? She had heard of astral traveling before, but she didn't think she could do it. Was this the power given to her by her ancestors? She began swimming, further and further away from the world she came from, deeper into the painting. How far did it go? Was this an actual portal to the entire ocean? She felt she could keep going forever, there seemed to be no end in sight. She felt extremely calm, but it wasn't her calmness she was feeling. It was someone else's. Was it the artist's? Then, classical music started playing in the water. Where was it coming from? She was channeling the sound that was happening whenever the painting was made! That would mean she was capable of traveling through space/time! She couldn't believe it. Then she remembered what her grandma had told her about things like this. `

The devils visions, she called them. "Used to lure you from your body and into another realm, so a demon from the underworld could come and take over your body while you were gone, to do the devils work out in the world." This thought was enough to send her spiraling back through the water, right back into her body within a split second. Katrina never even knew she was gone, in fact- she was in the middle of the sentence she was speaking when Serephine first reached out for the coral.

That didn't stop her from being consumed with her new power, though. It was too amazing to pass up. Instead she created a set of rules to follow that would keep her safe while traveling. For one, if anyone tried to talk to her, she ignored them completely. Conversation left you vulnerable. Best to stay cut off from the rest of the world while doing this. For the rest of the summer, Serephine visited every museum she could drive to. Her days were filled with standing in front of paintings in one world, and exploring the depths of the universe in another. Once she mastered exploring landscapes, which was amazing beyond any travelers wildest imaginations; she found herself in the most remote places of the world, in holes underneath swamps with mermaids; inside of mushrooms the size of trees in forest surrounded by insects and fairies (yes, they are real!), and standing on top of rocks floating in the air; she decided if she could go there, she could go into abstract paintings too. The landscapes were mostly calm, because when people paint landscapes they usually remain calm. But abstract paintings were an entirely different feeling. Most artists doing abstract work had more emotions going on than others.

Once, she looked at a painting which had nothing but different colored triangles of different variations. She went in that and was so uncomfortable it almost made her pass out. She heard scary sounding techno music and heard voices laughing, crying and screaming all at once. The artist must have had schizophrenia. Soon, the voices noticed she was there, and alerted the artist. She had traveled through time again, back to when the painting was being made, and directly connected with the artist. When she came back out of the painting, something had been added to it. The letters 'S.O.S' ever so small, in red lettering down in the corner. She was somehow able to make the artist physically change the painting in the past. She felt she had too much power, but she couldn't stop.

She began doing it in friends and families homes, with their art as well. She once found herself staring a painting of a fruit bowl, before long she was falling headfirst into it, the size of an ant! There was cool jazz playing in the background.

Once, she was in Katrina's house, in the hallway between her bedroom and her older brothers bedroom. He was listening to heavy metal in his room- Metallica, she guessed. She noticed a painting near some family photos. It was a dark street, with a small house far off the road, with a porch light on. Or.. looking closer, she saw, not a porch light, but a flashlight. Someone was standing on the porch with a flashlight in their hands. Hm, what an odd painting, she thought. She decided to go into it, as she was at the point of being able to control when she went into them, if at all. She learned that some paintings are simply not worth going into, or if she did, she ended up regretting it.

This painting, however, was calling to her. She fell in, and immediately heard screaming, and felt sheer terror. Terror, mixed with hatred. Seething hatred. She smelled metal. She began running, towards the house. She wasn't scared, but curious. She had to know what this painting was about, as she was pretty sure her friends brother had painted it. She walked into the house, slowly, and realized it was a real house, in their town. She didn't know whose, but she had seen it before when they were riding around after school. Then, she saw Katrina's brother, Jonas, standing in the kitchen, with a bloody knife in his hand.

She took a deep breath, and floated slowly towards him, over him, to see he was standing over a dead body. It was a girl. She was pregnant. All of a sudden, he looked up, he made eye contact with her. She panicked, but before she could do anything, she was back in the hallway, Katrina calling her downstairs to eat. Her heart was beating a million times a second. She peeked at the crack in Jonas' door, he was still playing on his computer and listening to music, unaware of what she just found out.

As she walked away, she wondered how he could have seen her. She knew it wasn't actually him, maybe it was a demon. His demon, that lives in another dimension, only accessible through the painting he made in memory of it. The demon that made him kill that girl. And that girl, who was she? She looked so familiar... As she walked downstairs, she could still hear the screaming in her head. Or maybe it was the music from his room. Or maybe..... It was the painting she'd just left.

The thing nobody ever told her about astral traveling is that it always leaves a portal open. Whether that portal is your body being left unattended while you travel, or an actual hole ripped in the fabric of space/time. Little did she know, every painting she'd been into so far had been left open. Slowly, they began to seep out.

The town was in for an interesting summer. They would all get to experience what it was like to travel through other universes, whether they wanted to or not.

Downstairs, Katrina looked for something to go as a side to their eggs and bacon, when an apple fell out of the sky. She looked up, confused, as there was no shelf holding apples above her, just a painting of a bowl of fruit.

Upstairs, Katrina's brother heard crying. It wasn't in his song. He turned off his music, and the hairs on the back of his neck stood up. He slowly turned around, and saw his ex girlfriend, covered in blood, holding out a tiny, screaming, bloody baby. "Forget something, Jonas?"