Chapter 4

  Elizabeth

  Elizabeth Eddison awoke bit by bit. She became aware of a familiar soft warmth in her arms. She hugged it, thinking that something bad had happened, or started to happen, perhaps in a dream. Yes, a dream. She recalled it as though glimpsed through a room full of fog. Two strange people, talking about angels and keys and museums. Blood, death, explosions, fear.

  Callie was warm in her arms, but she felt goosebumps over the exposed skin of her hands and neck. A crisp, refreshing cold crawled over her. Where had she fallen asleep, for it to be this cold when she awoke? And why had she fallen asleep with her contact lenses in? She never did that, because they would be sticky and grainy when she awoke, just as they were now.

  She sat up and took in her surroundings as she began to stretch. She blinked a lot in an attempt to re-lubricate her contact lenses, and she remained calm even when she realized that she had no memory of this place. The stretching continued, patiently, according to her typical morning routine, as she gathered data on her surroundings.

  White, cold, and quiet. The air smelled of petrichor. Small bright things floated in the air, scattered like snowflakes except they didn’t fall, more like glowing motes of dust caught in light from an unseen source. The surface upon which she stretched burned cold against the exposed skin of her calf. Stone layered in frost. Most importantly, Callie sat regally at her side, in classic sphinx pose, watchful of their surroundings. With Callie on the job, Elizabeth didn’t think she had to worry about unpleasant surprises in this new place. Not immediately dangerous ones.

  She transitioned cleanly from a stretch into a standing position. Smooth creamy columns (trees?) marched into a pale, hazy distance in all directions. An arrangement of viridian ivy-like vines snaked up from the stone floor to the heights above on each of these columns. Elizabeth didn’t recognize the species of vine; it had glossy green serrated leaves and tiny, brilliant red blossoms. Some of these blossoms, no larger than her fingernails, drifted down like a sparse crimson snow from far above. The fallen blossoms lay scattered upon the frosted stone at her feet. Judging from the small number and unwilted condition of those on the stone floor, Elizabeth guessed they had begun falling not long ago. The place where she had slept was visible as a darker shape melted into the light dusting of frost.

  Her breath clouded in the air before her. “Callie,” she breathed. “Where is this?” For some reason, she thought Callie would know. This didn’t look like a place that should really be able to exist, in the same way that her teleporting eyeless pet lynx should not really exist. Callie did not respond.

  She stood for a moment, twisting her silver ring in thought as she looked around. She wore blueish khakis and a grey jacket with sandals. The butterfly brooch, which she was sure she had been wearing not long ago, was missing. Wait, had she broken it? Why? She couldn’t quite remember.

  She still had her phone, but neither service nor wi-fi. The time was 31:&N. She caught it just as it changed to 31:&G. The time function doesn’t work here, Kate had said. So Kate really had been asleep; probably this meant that Elizabeth herself was now also asleep. But this was certainly no dream. What else had Kate said? Not much. But she had replied instantly. And in the group text, Banana Quest 2, she had been…what? Responding to things no one had said yet? So…some kind of dream world temporally disjunctive from Earth? She felt silly just thinking that. Surely Isaac knew some fancy science-fiction term for this. It would be her working hypothesis for now.

  Kate’s phone had worked here as well. Apart from the lack of service and the very incorrect time, Elizabeth’s seemed functional. A quick check confirmed that the CHIME app seemed operational.

  She tried sending Kate a simple Hello. She waited a full minute, using this opportunity to test the timer on her phone. The timer worked fine.

  She zipped up the grey jacket, called for Callie to follow her, and set off through the pale columns and falling blossoms.

  She stopped when she saw the first words written on the columns, written at eye level in hand-high letters, in black ink, in a delicate, refined handwriting that Elizabeth recognized as her own. As though the sky were bleeding, it read. She recognized this as her own thought when first seeing the falling crimson petals.

  She continued on to the next ivy-wrapped column. Here she had to brush some of the soft green foliage out of the way to read the words: Like a blank page with green veins. She remembered thinking this, that the swaths of ivy wrapping up and around the many columns looked like veins.

  The script on the columns became a regular occurrence. Most of them reflected poetic thoughts that she had had–just fragments, bits and pieces of what might become a poem if she remembered them later:

  The snow, like stars

  They fear no fire, nor dark of storm…

  Five hundred, five hundred

  Like the sails of a hundred thousand ships upon the sea

  Some of these fragments she recalled from months, years ago. Others, many, she could not remember at all. Were they even hers?

  At first, she tried to avoid crushing the fallen blossoms underfoot. When this became difficult, she turned it into a challenge, a dance. She twirled through the forest, stepping with delicate precision around the fallen flowers. But soon it became unavoidable. A thin layer of scarlet petals covered almost all the frosted stone floor in her vision. The crushed blossoms produced a subtle, pleasant scent.

  Her ears grew cold; she wished her jacket had a hood. Callie ranged here and there nearby, sometimes stalking through the forest of columns, sometimes appearing first to Elizabeth’s right and then to her left without really having moved. Callie looked natural. She belonged here among all the red and green and white.

  She walked for a half hour before seeing the black column. Like the white ones, it reached up to the faded red-speckled haze of a sky overhead; unlike the others she could trace it all the way until it was nothing but a thin black line, perhaps breaching the atmosphere and transcending into the void of space or whatever the hell was up there.

  It was another twenty-minute walk to reach it. The temperature noticeably dropped as she approached. Here, even the fallen red blossoms wore fringes of frost. Here the blossoms were larger, striped with silver in amongst the red.

  The black column was twice as thick as the others. The ivy wrapping around it, somehow finding purchase on the smooth curvature of the surface, was metallic silver. The lettering was gold, and for the first time it was not in her own handwriting.

  It came, a flower bright,

  Amid the cold of winter

  When half gone was the night.

  She knew this one. It was from a hymn. Lo, How a Rose E’er Blooming, one of her favorites, not that she had many favorites when it came to hymns. She knew this one because of Christmas, and she had not failed to notice that the color scheme of her surroundings could be appraised as Christmas-like.

  Callie joined her in gazing at the gold lettering. Beside the black column, Elizabeth felt the cold of winter indeed. Walking had kept her warm, but now she hugged her arms around herself and wished she had been wearing more than a light jacket when she’d fallen asleep, assuming that was how it worked. She still couldn’t remember the circumstances of her last minutes of wakefulness.

  Callie stood and sashayed around the black column. Elizabeth followed. An open archway on the far side revealed a dark and winding stone staircase extending both up and down.

  Elizabeth chose down. Up looked like a long, long way. She had taken only a few steps down the steep, narrow stairs when Callie made an angry hissing noise behind her and darted past, squeezing through the gap between Elizabeth’s knee and the black wall, putting her off-balance. Elizabeth managed to steady herself before falling. Blood pounded in her ears and a shot of adrenaline burned through her veins. Falling down these stairs could be critically disadvantageous to her health.

  She heard Callie down there somewhere ahead of her, hissing. Elizabeth couldn’t remember if she’d ever seen Callie upset like this before. A dog began barking.

  She descended as quickly as she dared and emerged into a warm dark space, the air dry and dusty. A wind blew from her left, carrying sand along with the sounds of a yowling lynx and a barking dog. Elizabeth stepped in that direction and ran right into a soft black curtain. The fabric felt warm, and more like some kind of living tissue than like fabric. It made her skin crawl, but she pushed her way through.

  Callie and a white dog chased each other around a dimly lit nighttime desert scene. It really was a scene–the backdrop was a painted sheet twenty yards distant, complete with oasis and standard-issue vaguely Arabic spires and palaces with lit windows, all set against a starry sky. Some prop palm trees littered the area before her; one had fallen over. Some rugs (flying carpets?) lay nearby, mostly rolled and stacked. The sand was real; it lay in heaps before her. Every miniature dune boasted a different color of sand. All of the colors glowed faintly in the dark. The multi-colored sands mixed where the dunes touched. Callie and the dog kicked up trails of this luminescent sand as they scampered about, scattering it wherever they went.

  Callie ran about normally, using only her legs. The white dog teleported randomly all over the set, often falling awkwardly onto piles of sand and sliding down. Callie attempted to move with some amount of dignity while trying to dodge the overenthusiastic canine. The dog looked like it was having a great time. Callie did not.

  Something tugged at her memory, something about this dog. It seemed familiar, except that this dog had perfectly white fur, just like Callie, and no eyes.

  “Hazel?” she said. She didn’t say it very loud, but Hazel froze in a crouch at the sound of her voice, head down, tail up, perfectly still. Then he looked at her, and the act of doing so repositioned his body so violently that he almost fell onto his side. Elizabeth raised an eyebrow. She had never met Hazel, but she had heard the boys describe this dog to her.

  The-dog-that-might-be-Hazel reared up, pawed the air in excitement, and charged at Elizabeth. He suddenly appeared a few feet off to her left, where he floundered directly into the strange black curtain. He growled and wrestled with it for a while. Callie appeared beside Elizabeth and licked a paw with nonchalance as it watched, as if to say, what lowbrow tomfoolery is this? I am not amused.

  “Hazel,” said Elizabeth, with more confidence this time. The seething mass of black curtain and white fur froze again, just as before. The curtain deflated, empty, and a bark sounded from behind Elizabeth. She and Callie turned and saw Hazel atop a mint-green dune. The faint glow of the sand lit the flawless fur of his underbelly green as the dog gazed into the distance against the starry backdrop. For just a moment, the dog appeared majestic. If Elizabeth hadn’t known better, she might have guessed that she had in her sights a sage and mystical creature. It didn’t seem aware of this. Elizabeth smiled. Hazel, if indeed this was he, was a good fit for Jimothy.

  Then Hazel hopped a foot or two directly up in the air, and upon landing he tore off to the left, offstage. He stayed in place for the first few seconds, kicking sand backward rather than moving himself forward. But once he got going, he sped away at an alarming speed, no teleport required.

  Elizabeth and Callie followed at a more leisurely pace. Hazel kept running back to make sure they followed, and occasionally the dog literally ran circles around them or teleported to random locations. Sometimes he zoomed through the darkness around them, occasionally colliding with random movie-set props or picking fights with inanimate objects.

  Hazel escorted them in this manner through what looked like a vast and empty film studio. They passed many sets, each seemingly unrelated to the rest. Several, like the Arabian-Nights setup in which they had begun, were about as cliché as movie sets came. With others, she had no idea what she was looking at. Each set was lit in the appropriate manner, be it dim or dazzling, but each also represented an oasis of light in an immense field of shadow. Those strange black curtains separated them all from each other. There were no people, nor any sign of them. The silence and solitude soon became unnerving.

  They found Jimothy on a train. Not a real locomotive, but a smaller one which might perhaps move tourists through a theme park. It was bright red, two cars long, lit with colored Christmas lights draped around the edges. Jimothy Whyte sat in the back seat of the second car, looking thoughtful. Elizabeth recalled how he had been crying the last time she’d spoken to him.

  He noticed them coming thanks to Hazel’s frantic barking. He gaped at Elizabeth in a way she might have taken as rude had it come from anybody else. The train didn’t stop; it kept rolling along at a steady jogging speed; Elizabeth easily caught up and hopped into the back car across from Jim. Padded benches, oddly comfortable, faced each other.

  “I’m glad to see you,” said Jim as though he were stating a simple and obvious fact. He leaned over and gave her a hug. Surprised, she began to hug back just as he pulled away.

  “I…am glad to see you too,” she said.

  So was Hazel. The dog tackled Jimothy from the side, nearly knocking him out of his seat and off the train. Hazel licked Jimothy’s face with a white tongue and pawed at him eagerly. Jimothy laughed and seized the dog in an awkward hug. Such obvious love on display warmed Elizabeth’s heart. Whatever this place was, however strange and mysterious it might be, it all felt okay now that Jimothy sat across from her.

  Hazel froze in place, then looked somewhere off in the distance. He vanished. Callie glanced indifferently in the same direction, decided it wasn’t worth her time, and made herself comfortable on the plush red seat beside Elizabeth.

  “Hi, Callie!” said Jim. Callie briefly acknowledged him before beginning to knead at the fabric of the seat with her oversized fluffy paws.

  Elizabeth felt that something more than a simple greeting was in order, but she stood at a loss as to what it might be. Bombarding Jimothy with questions didn’t seem right, but she thought that one or two would suffice.

  “Do you know where we are?” she asked as the train carried them away.

  Jimothy rubbed his chin as though tracing a goatee. Jimothy did not possess even the slightest hint of facial hair; this habit he must have picked up from his brother Michael, who apparently had tried out the beard thing for a while. “Some kind of movie studio, I guess,” he said. The unsteadiness in his voice (“his tongue’s got a limp,” said Isaac) was less pronounced in person, but still evident. The words were all there, and in the correct order; they just tripped over each other on the way out.

  Indeed, they still rolled steadily through appropriately-lit sets divided by long reaches of total darkness. The sets looked to be increasing in size and complexity, and the train now went through them instead of beside. All still empty; all deserted.

  “I mean, beyond that,” she said. “In general. Where are we?”

  “Oh!” said Jimothy. “Sorry. We’re in the Museum! The Dream Museum, I think it’s called.”

  “Called by whom?” She had yet to see another person here.

  “Kate,” said Jimothy.

  That struck a chord of familiarity. Yes. This was Kate’s place. This was where she came sometimes when she slept. “Can you see the future here, Jimothy?” she asked. “Is that how Kate does it?” Is that how you do it, she almost added, but she already knew that one. Jim would say he didn’t know. He’d told her that before, and Jim couldn’t lie.

  Jimothy thought about it. “Maybe. I’ve never been here before, so I don’t really know. We could ask him.”

  “Him?”

  “The guy who lives here. The Dark Man.”

  “The…Dark Man?” Somehow that did not strike Elizabeth as a wise idea.

  “Yeah,” said Jimothy, “but he doesn’t talk too much. Mainly he just watches, I guess.”

  “Is he in charge of this place?”

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  “Uh. Maybe?”

  “Does this place really exist? Is it a physical location?”

  “Jeez, so many questions!” But he smiled. “I do–ooh! Look at that!”

  The train had taken them to an aquatic set. Its tracks descended along a beach and into the sea, where the water parted for it as though at the bidding of an unseen Moses. Strange, Elizabeth thought, that the set incorporated the train. As if they were no longer movie sets at all, but attractions designed specifically for the passengers on the train.

  Their two-car Christmas-light-festooned vehicle rolled down between the waters. Fish, many of them clearly imaginary, schooled through the clear water on either side. Jimothy reached out a hand and drew it through the wall of water nearest to him. Much to Elizabeth’s surprise, he made direct contact with the water. That which he touched spilled out and onto the dry ground by the tracks. Some of the brightly colored fish swam up to inspect this occurrence and kept pace with the train. Jimothy laughed with childlike glee. Elizabeth noticed his cane there on the seat next to him.

  A big white fish paddled awkwardly up to the wall of water, trailing swarms of bubbles. Hazel burst right through the wall ahead of them, fell a few feet onto the ground, and then got up and looked around with utter bafflement. Elizabeth knew that if his fur was anything like Callie’s, he wouldn’t stay wet for long. Callie watched this happen and twitched her tail disapprovingly, but Elizabeth hadn’t missed her cat’s eyeless face tracking the movements of nearby fish, and a stance which indicated she was ready to pounce should any of them come within reach.

  The train soon left the bright waters behind. Back into the darkness of the movie studio. It took a moment for her eyes to readjust.

  “This place is great,” said Jimothy. She could hear the grin in his voice. “It’s always so interesting! And colorful.”

  “How did we get here?” she asked.

  “I don’t really remember,” said Jim. “I think it…there might have been something bad, though. Like, something scary happening. I’m kind-of worried about Mike.” Now he sounded worried.

  It reminded her that she was a little worried about AJ, and she told him so.

  Jimothy began to respond, but then a big wet dog appeared between them and shook itself off. Elizabeth and Jimothy cried out in surprise; Callie hissed. Elizabeth almost scolded the dog, but then Jimothy laughed and bent over to hug Hazel’s still-soaked neck. Hazel panted and swung his eyeless head as if he could look around at them. Elizabeth found it impossible to be mad at that clueless, goofy grin.

  The dog disappeared again; Jimothy almost fell out of his seat as his support vanished. “I think he’s still excited about how he can, like, teleport,” Jim told her as he righted himself.

  “Has he always been this…excitable?”

  Jimothy grinned and nodded. “At the park he just runs around and chases everything,” he said. “Sometimes he’ll bite the overhang of our porch and just hang there. Michael says he’s ‘touched,’ whatever that means. Isaac says he’s possessed by–”

  “-the spirits of Looney-Tunes characters past,” she finished with him. Isaac had told that joke several times.

  “One time he got his head stuck in a plastic bin, you know, the ones that are full of those little cheese balls.” Jimothy cracked up at the memory. “He…he never slowed down!” Jimothy interrupted himself again by laughing, and his laughter was infectious. “He just kept running around like crazy…and like…banging the plastic on everything…” Elizabeth saw tears forming at the corners of Jim’s eyes. “Then…then he tried licking the cheesy stuff off the inside…while he was still running!” This seemed to be the climax of the story; mirth overwhelmed Jimothy, who collapsed into his seat with laughter. Elizabeth joined him, and they laughed together in the darkness while Callie watched them warily.

  Elizabeth smelled and heard rain approaching. She twisted in her seat to look forward and saw the biggest set yet up ahead: a misty, rainy city, the type with gas lamps and cobbled streets and possibly wayward gangs of chimney sweeps prancing about the rooftops. A rack of umbrellas stood just to the right of the tracks up ahead. How thoughtful. Elizabeth reached out and plucked two, a blue one for Jimothy and a yellow one for herself.

  She had to help Jimothy unstrap and then put up his umbrella. It reminded her of seeing Michael Whyte helping Jimothy out of his coat at her house a few months ago, the first time she had seen either of the Whyte brothers in person. Isaac had helped Jim put his coat back on when they went outside later. Jimothy was likely to fall over just putting a coat on. He concentrated so hard on getting his arms in the sleeves that he forgot to balance. Jimothy needed help to do things; she had to remember that while she was here with him.

  Jimothy looked sheepish and a bit embarrassed to have her help him with the umbrella, just as he had with the coats months before. He knew, or at least he believed, that he should be able to do it by himself, and he hated putting others to any trouble.

  “Uh, thanks,” said Jim, and she realized that she had been staring at him for a few seconds. “Really. It’s not…I mean, I don’t mind if you help me with things.” He looked right back at her. Had she been that easy to read?

  Jimothy shifted his gaze over her shoulder and wordlessly reached out with his umbrella to put it over Elizabeth. At that moment, the train moved out into the rainy city. Jimothy grinned as the rain pelted him.

  Elizabeth sighed, grabbed the umbrella, and moved across the little train car so they sat together, the umbrella covering them both. Callie appeared at their feet, no more keen on rain than most cats.

  They watched the city slide by. London, Elizabeth guessed. It looked like old-town London. Maybe another European city, but she had only been to London. The streets had no names here; neither did the shops and storefronts that glided by. Empty, all of it. A blank slate. No cars, no noise beyond the rain, no life . But beautiful flowers bobbed in the rain, and the buildings were ancient and lovely, grown with ivy, and a mist shrouded the distance, lending the scene a sense of discovery and mystery.

  “It’s beautiful,” said Jimothy after a few minutes. He gazed wide-eyed and awestruck at everything they passed. She had seen him look the same way at a little frog that he’d found in a creek behind her house. She had seen him look that same way at a small gray rock, indistinguishable from every other small gray rock in her backyard.

  “You said you’re worried about your sister?” he asked, still looking out at the cobblestone streets.

  “I am,” she said.

  “Mike was worried about her too,” he said. He looked at her with a knowing smile, and she laughed.

  “Well,” said Elizabeth. “She was more than a little worried about him as well. Especially when she learned what happened to your house.”

  Jimothy’s smile broadened. “I think he would like to hear that,” he said.

  “Yes?” she replied. “Well, I think Amber Jane Eddison might like to hear that.” Her laughter caused Elizabeth to shift the umbrella, momentarily allowing a patter of rain to fall on Callie. The white lynx looked up at her in disapproval, then analyzed their surroundings carefully, perhaps wondering where a certain crazy dead Australian Shepherd had gone.

  Jimothy’s voice became more thoughtful. “I would like it if they could meet up again,” he said. “I think Mike gets lonely. He doesn’t have a lot of friends.”

  Elizabeth nodded in understanding. “AJ is the same way. She is amazing, and she knows a lot of people, and everybody likes her. But I don’t think she had many close friends to talk to.”

  “I’m worried about my mom, too,” he said.

  “She’s in…an assisted living home?”

  “Yeah. She doesn’t remember us, usually, but we still go to see her.”

  Elizabeth almost made an unhelpful remark about how her own mother seemed to conveniently forget about her daughters all the time. It felt that way sometimes, but the truth was that Elizabeth was worried about her mother too. For a fleeting moment, Elizabeth also wondered about where her father might be, but she already knew that she and Jim were alike in not really caring about that.

  Elizabeth, momentarily lost in thought, started in surprise when she realized that the train had left the ground. For one scary second, she thought they were falling, somehow. Then she realized that the tracks ahead angled upward on a course to take them above the rainy city. Around this point she understood that they had left the movie sets behind.

  “So…” said Jim. “The sky broke, didn’t it?”

  The sky? She recalled Elmer, Elmer Sky, saying something like that. And she remembered the sound of it happening. No, not the sound. The sensation. An atavistic snap, like the end of the world, but quiet. She nodded.

  “I think Mike is probably in danger,” said Jimothy in a small voice. “Mike and AJ and probably everybody who’s still there.”

  “Still there? What do you mean?”

  He shrugged. “Still, like, back on Earth I guess?”

  Back on Earth.

  They cleared the rooftops, cleared the fog, and were treated to a vista of a vast cityscape spread out before them. Twilight had fallen, and the many streetlights of the city gathered beneath a low layer of gray haze. The scent of fresh rain still hung in the air, but the steady drizzle had stopped, so Elizabeth put away the umbrella. The lights reflected on the ceiling of clouds. Some lights, such as from clock towers or taller buildings in the distance, stood up above the rest. If it weren’t for the total absence of other people so far, Elizabeth would have been genuinely surprised at the lack of a flying Julie Andrews with an umbrella of her own.

  “Jimothy…” she said. “Can you…”

  She had no idea how the Line worked. It had been Mike’s idea, but according to Isaac, even Mike didn’t really know what it was, or how it worked, or to what extent it was even a real thing. She did know that Jim was uncomfortable talking about it. It was a reminder of that fact that he occasionally couldn’t tell what was real and what wasn’t, which was not very many steps from being insane. She knew that the possibility of being insane frightened Jimothy.

  She steeled herself and asked. “Jim,” she said, “can you see the Line here?”

  Jimothy closed his eyes and nodded. “Yeah. It’s real. You’re real.” He smiled. “I checked as soon as I saw you. I couldn’t believe it! I thought maybe you just showed up because I was hoping you would.” The limp in his tongue came out more when he said this.

  Elizabeth was considering how to reply to this when a sound came to them. It was the first sound besides the rain, the distant thunder, and the soft whir of the train since they entered the city. It was the sound of music. Distant music. Was it…organ music?

  “You hear that?” asked Jimothy, excited again. “I was wondering when we’d have music.”

  It came from the distance, back and to their left. It grew steadily louder, approaching them.

  Jimothy frowned and tapped his cane on the floor of the train car. “What kind of music is it, though?”

  Elizabeth was thinking the same thing. Music it was indeed, but chaotic. Frenzied. Atonal? Elizabeth thought that she was hearing either the work of a brilliant modern masterpiece by the likes of Schoenberg, or an amateur trying to sound like him, or an ape gleefully banging on random keys, delighted by the sounds. Any of the above. And there was something else, as it became louder…an electric bass?

  The music increased in volume until it passed overhead, the source rocketing into the distance somewhere above the dark clouds, trailing a bizarre funky bassline like a sonic wake.

  “Woah,” said Jimothy.

  Elizabeth shook her head. This place. Was someone just messing with them?

  Hazel appeared in their car, tried to lick Callie, and got a pawful of claws to the face for his kindness.

  “Hazel! Fetch!” cried Jim as he hurled his cane out over the rooftops, an act which sent him jostling into Elizabeth. Hazel blinked out into the gray distance and plummeted with a yelp into the fog. “Oh,” said Jim. “Oops.”

  The train pulled into a station above the rooftops. Jimothy led them off as though he knew where he was going. Hazel returned with the cane, which Jim reluctantly took as a replacement for the relatively unsteady umbrella he had been using. Somewhere, off in the distance, something like an explosion sounded.

  They descended a set of polished cedar stairs into a warm, dry, well-lit lobby. Circular, with an abstract statue in the middle and about a dozen doors placed evenly along the wall, separated by open hallways shooting off in a fan of directions.

  “This way,” said Jim, heading for one of the carpeted corridors that looked no different from the rest. When she asked how he knew, he replied that he was just guessing.

  They traversed a series of richly decorated galleries. They saw the Dark Man once, only glimpsed him really, watching them from down a side hall. He gave Elizabeth a scare, turning away and disappearing as soon as he was spotted, until Jimothy reassured her. The Dark Man wouldn’t hurt them, he said. He was sure of it. Unless they broke the rules. What rules? When she asked this, Jimothy shrugged as if it didn’t matter. The thing that Elizabeth later remembered about the Dark Man was that he had a cane, like Jim, only he didn’t seem to need it.

  They passed a pair of restrooms here, which she and Jim both needed. For some reason, this surprised her. It hadn’t really been that long since she’d woken up here, but…this place was so dreamlike and strange that the normalcy of needing to go to the bathroom seemed incongruous. The bathroom was nice, nothing strange about it whatsoever. So normal that it wrapped back around to being bizarre, unnerving. There was no evidence in the bathroom that anyone else had ever used it before.

  They continued on and came to a set of double-doors, really no different in appearance from the rest they had passed except for the symbol. It was a hexagon, divided into six equilateral triangles. This jarred something in her memory, but she couldn’t quite recall what.

  “This is it, I’m pretty sure,” said Jimothy. He looked at the door with something like awe. He reached out a hand to touch it, but hesitated.

  “What is it?” she asked as she stepped up to the door beside him. She noticed that both Callie and Hazel, behind them, watched the door at full attention.

  Jimothy looked nervous. Elizabeth offered him a hand, a little worried but trying to project confidence. “It’s all right, Jim,” she said. “We’ll just go through together, okay?”

  He thought for a moment, then nodded and took her hand.

  They reached out and pushed through the door.

  A hexagonal room waited on the other side. Gray stone floor, plain white walls, maybe twenty feet across at the widest. The white walls went up and up until lost in a haze overhead. Clean cracks divided the stone hexagon of a floor into six equal sections, just as on the door. Each triangular section had a symbol. (You know, the big hexagon on the floor, with the symbols in it.)

  Six doors, one on each wall. (And there’s like…doors? At the edges?) Callie and Hazel sat side-by-side, uncharacteristically interested and calm, respectively.

  Jimothy proceeded to the middle of the room, the intersection of all the lines. His cane clacked on the stone. At one point, he attempted to look around at the doors while walking, and lost his balance. Elizabeth was there in an instant, steadying him by putting a hand on his shoulder. He smiled at her. “You’re so fast!”

  “Nevermind that, Jimothy! Where…” She rethought her question. “What do we do now?”

  Jimothy gestured with his cane at the symbols on the floors in a sweeping gesture that put him off-balance again. “You know which one is yours, right?” (You know how we each have a hexagon? And we each have a triangle inside the hexagon?)

  Elizabeth took a closer look at the symbols on the floor. Six of them: paintbrush, flower, heart, cube, snowflake, compass. She knew hers, all right. So did Callie. The lynx waited in front of a door, tail twitching. The door adjoining the flower-inscribed triangle was painted eggshell white, with a bright brass doorknob and a pattern of fogged diamond-shaped windows. A cheerful-looking door.

  Jim, of course, had selected the paintbrush-adjoining door. This door was an ominous black slab of stone. It had a vertical metal handle with no apparent latching mechanism.

  “Wait,” said Elizabeth, “why are we going through different doors? We should stay together.”

  He looked surprised, as though this thought hadn’t even occurred to him. Then he frowned. “I don’t know…I think we’re, like, supposed to go through these…and I kind-of want to see what’s behind mine.”

  Elizabeth thought Jim’s door looked foreboding, but she kept that to herself. She shook her head firmly. “We’re staying together, Jim. Let’s go through my door.”

  “Why your door?”

  “Yours looks…”

  “Scary?”

  She nodded.

  “I don’t think it’s actually scary,” he said after a moment of thought. “I think it’s sad. But okay. I think I’d like to stay together too.” He took a few steps over to her door. Hazel followed, but reluctantly. The dog clearly wanted to go through the black door.

  Elizabeth put a hand on the bright brass doorknob and at once recoiled in surprise. It was freezing cold. Now that she looked more closely, she saw that a layer of frost encrusted the fogged windows, just like the cold ground where she had woken up. She scratched some of it off and wondered if she, not to mention Jim, were properly dressed for whatever wintry occasion lay on the other side of the door.

  She didn’t realize this until later, but she never once considered trying one of the other four doors that did not belong to her or Jim.

  Elizabeth pulled the sleeve of her coat down over her hand and used it to turn the doorknob. It turned easily. She opened the door. Callie darted through. A force, like a powerful magnetic attraction or a strong wind that moved only her body, pulled her through and into the brightness beyond. The door slammed behind her. She and the umbrella she’d been carrying tumbled onto something cold and hard and bright.