When he found magic in himself… So young a child he was. So naive. In those days he fell for their delusions, too, but it didn’t last long. Exposed to the other side as often as he was, he knew better. The enclaves of magical blood saw none of the advancements in science, medicine, and weaponry.

He did not, however, idolize them. When it came down to it, they were much the same as their hidden counterparts; in many ways, far worse and even less intelligent. Willing tools to enrich one another, all for the sake of convenience.

She was yet to speak again.

Rather than begin a conversation, he delved further into his own mind, hoping to find a solution beyond the most obvious.

On his prior point of convenience and stupidity, exactly how shallow did people need to be to assume that others had their best interests in mind? It was clearly untrue and proven so often in daily life that it should be impossible to miss the glaring signs, yet there it was. They took pills to hide symptoms while destroying their bodies with salt and grease. They wore shirts small enough to accentuate the bulge, handcrafted by slave labor and bought for six dollars and change.

He hated humanity. He hated their stupidity, their false ideals. He hated how quickly they vaulted from one emotional decision to another and how they disdained him, as if he were the problem and not themselves, when he chose logic over feeling.

If he’d acted on feeling they would have been dead long ago. Power was not hard to come by, but it was difficult to keep because most were corrupted within moments of attaining it.

Hubris brought with it mistakes and mistakes were deadly.

He would not be proud until the day he could truly be called an undying god.

The child. He looked at her again because now he was her prisoner. Locked in a motel bathroom for no reason other than her belief that they could not leave without the permission of her prostitute mother. She did not know that this world was her own and there was some danger in making her aware of it, but not as much as the other option.

“We can leave if you want to,” he said. “Because this place isn’t real.”

She stared.

“We are in your memory, or something like it. This is not the real bathroom. Rather, it is an approximation. Look,” he picked up a generic, small, square soap that was the wrong color. Instead of an off-white, it was neon, glittery blue. “This is wrong. You haven’t seen these soaps often, have you? You’re too small to see it up on top of the sink, but you know it’s there. Your mind has filled in a gap.”

She pursed her lips.

He continued, pulling back the shower curtain. “Look there,” he pointed to the head from which the water fell. “You haven’t connected it to the wall. In your mind, the water is simply there and doesn’t come from anywhere.”

He stopped, allowing his words to settle.

Patience.

“Okay, Donner.”

…

Donner?

She opened the door and on the other side was not the motel room, not the woman with pink hair, not anything he’d seen before. They stood on a train in outer space.

Donner?

The train was going nowhere fast and as he looked out the window the vast emptiness of space was all to be seen. Distant lights, burning balls of gas, and he didn’t understand any of this. Before them was nothing. True nothing.

He hated it.

“This is no better than the bathroom,” he said, a slight edge to his tone. “We are still locked in one place.”

“Well, Donner, if it’s my brain I can go where I want.”

“And this is where you want to be? Why?” Why in the world would a child, perhaps three or four years old, have any ideas about the outer reaches of the universe and what lay beyond?

She opened another compartment door and clambered onto a seat to see out the window. “It’s quiet here. There’s no water here. I think it’s cold outside and I can see Ink Pen from here.”

“What is Ink Pen?” he wasn’t sure he wanted to know, but all knowledge was a step toward power.

“That,” she pointed to the nothing, “is Ink Pen. It wants to win, but when he wins, he loses and so does everybody else so I can’t let him win. Since you know about him now you should join the fight, or risk a fate worse than death.”

“There is nothing worse than death,” he said flatly.

“That’s what you think.”

But this was getting him nowhere. He didn’t know where he needed to go to get out of her mind, but this wasn’t it. There was no exit here at all! Even as he walked the hall it kept extending and all doors led to compartments in the same position as the first. She was there in all of them.

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“Your imagination is very limited,” he said drily.

That got a response.

She turned suddenly, glared, and all at once they got off the train and on the street outside a burning building.

“That’s me,” she said, pointing upward.

Dangling out the window was a child held by the woman with pink hair. The fire raged behind them, spitting out adjacent windows and raining glass on those below.

“I think I died. But you couldn’t be in my head if I was dead. I must be asleep.”

The child in the window fell, the woman was gone an instant later swallowed by flame, and everything went dark.

Finally, some key details. She wasn’t dead, she was in a coma.

Yet a new question came now.

She’d said nothing, and showed no signs of remembering, where they met in the first place.

He didn’t mention it and when she turned to walk away from the scene he followed. It was better not to wander a mind unguided by the one it belonged to. Dangerous business. More than he liked to think of were driven to insanity after spending too long in the hallways and backrooms of their targets and the mind of this child was unlike any he’d entered before. There were many things wrong here.

This street, for example, wasn’t close to what it should be. They now stood on the edge of a highway, cars zooming past, and though he knew it was a construct of the mind it was still unsettling. Fire trucks screamed and an ambulance followed.

He couldn’t handle this anymore. All the patience in the world wasn’t enough for the cacophony that was this kid’s head!

“What if we could make a key?”

Drawing her back to the bathroom, behind the locked door waiting for her mother to open it and release them. It was the type of suggestion he would never make under normal circumstances because it opened the way to many other things, but this was not normal. He wasn’t here under his own power. This wasn’t a quest for something bigger, something of value. He’d taken hold of the child when the man presented her as a potential escape route and he wasn’t sure it’d been worth it because now he was trapped. All the power he'd worked so hard to gain was worthless here.

A simple mistake with disastrous consequences.

“You can make a key,” he told her as they sat once more in the cramped room with the rushing water.

“I've seen car keys and room keys. I've never seen a bathroom key before.”

“It doesn’t matter,” he insisted. “Any key that you want to make you can. It doesn’t matter how it looks. You can make it work and once you’re out you can wake up again.”

“And then you can leave?”

That startled him. He’d purposely said next to nothing about himself.

“If you’re here, then where is your body?”

He folded his arms across his chest. “I don’t need to answer that.”

“Listen, Donner, we’re in my head not yours. You said I can open this door with a key? Well, I’m not doing it until you tell me more.” She crossed her arms, too.

“My name isn’t Donner,” he ground from behind clenched teeth.

“Who cares? You're in my head, I’ll call you what I want. You want to know why I’m calling you Donner, Donner?”

“Not particularly.”

But she was going to tell him, he could see that. “You wanna know how I got these scars?”

“No.”

“You’re like the Donner Party. They were a family trapped on a train in a snowstorm and had to kill and eat each other to survive. That’s got to be the worst luck in history. You look like you’ve got a family like that. Since it’s my brain, I can see you clearly.”

Everything about her was alarming, but he wasn’t going to let her know that. “No. The Donner Party was a group of pioneers heading west who had the misfortune of making a fatally incorrect decision regarding the route. Yes, some were reportedly eaten, but only after they died naturally.” Most of them. Reports were conflicting, but it was a sight better than her version!

Not that it mattered to her. He wasn’t sure she heard him at all as a strange conglomeration of keys materialized in her palm and the keyhole in the door flipped upside down.

This time the door opened to an empty motel room that quickly stretched and morphed into that of The Shining. Fortunately, it was empty as far as he could tell. That was the single good thing to come out of all this so far.

“This tastes like trash,” he groused. They sat inside a restaurant, buffet tables full of delicious-looking food that smelled like nothing and tasted worse.

“No, it doesn’t. It tastes like microwave.”

They were one and the same.

He could understand how it happened. She’d seen this food before but had never encountered it in real life. She had no idea what it should smell like or how it should taste. She knew nothing about anything, which wasn’t surprising given that she wasn’t even school-aged yet.

She had incredible confidence, though, he would give her that.

“What you need to do,” he shoved the plate away. Crab legs that were nothing like the real thing. “Is wake up.”

“Can you leave if I’m awake?”

He hated the answer. “I don’t know,” a deep sigh. “But I certainly can’t while you’re comatose.”

“Well, how do I wake up from a coma?”

He was silent.

“You don’t know that either? How can you tell me what to do if you don’t even know what to do?”

He dearly wanted to tell her to shut up. “Do you think adults know everything? Did your mother seem to have all of life’s answers?”

“No. I don’t think Pink knew much about anything and I know grownups don’t have unlimited brain power, but don’t you have a cell phone or something?”

“Not. In. Here.”

“Oh. Yeah, well, too bad for you.” She looked around. “I’ve never noticed the inside of my brain before. It’s a weird place.”

Skeletons sitting in the chairs as if they were patrons. Eye sockets mindless and staring at the ceiling painted in golden, geometric motifs. The room itself was opulence personified, if not for the dead. All through her mind were the dead; they were the one commonality strung throughout eternal causeways of obscure horror film references, most of which he didn’t understand and hoped he never would. The other things were more recognizable, moments of life from the height of a toddler. Irrationally large pieces of furniture and everything was either too bright or too dark. The few common children’s characters found themselves starring roles in morbid acts of cannibalism and murder. In no particular order.

“Weird is an understatement.” But he didn’t want to go into it with her. She didn’t need to know, in fact, the less she knew the better. With any luck she’d wake from the coma, he’d get out, and she would be none the wiser. This meeting was taking place without her permission and deep within her subconscious, wherever people went when they were in a state deeper than sleep. As it was, she hadn’t said anything about the afterlife, though she’d mentioned dying.

“Hey, Donner.”

He refused to look at her.

“Who are you?”

“No one.”

He would tell her nothing, she would live on as if this never happened, and so would he.