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[https://i.imgur.com/iRyKGiL.jpg]

This again.

The shortest, weirdest recurring dream ever.

Well, it had been a busy day and Ned decided that there was no pressing need to answer immediately. He had to be badly hurt, right? There was no pain yet, only a vague sense of comfortable coolness. Indicating a yes might change all that. No, thank you.

Was he laying in sand?

It felt like sand. No beach sand either. It was coarser. Larger grains. It was tantalizingly familiar.

He must’ve been flung clear of the car, but where was he now?

“Okay, okay, yes,” he said. There was an odd quality to the sound. Was he even still outside? An indoor beach? Did they have those in Ohio?

He had a brief image of himself, flying through the air with a sour expression, glass tinkling around him, soaring through the window of some mansion to land in the middle of some rich person’s manufactured beach party.

He snorted.

It was difficult to open his eyes. It was like trying to wake up after surgery.

Could he be in a hospital?

Damned odd hospital room. I don't think I'm even in a bed.

Pull.

It was always like this after surgery. Gall bladder, appendix, tonsils when I was ten, his knee when he was thirty-two. Ten-pound lead weights on my eyelids. The longer they put me under for the harder it is for me to come out of it. Well, the girls are waiting, dammit.

Pull.

Slivers of light appeared though the light was dim and its source was distant. Dark walls. The floor too close. “I'm on the floor?”

His eyes began to focus. He was in a cave. Not one of those huge things that wormed far underground and produced pale, eyeless versions of life, but something like a glorified overhang that water can carve from sandstone. There'd been two of them in the woods around his house where he'd grown up. This one wasn’t much different. He lay at its rear wall, the heavy rock domed above him, the sandy floor rose up to the walls from a shallow pool. From above, water fell in a trickle, some of it running in rivulets down the sides of the walls, adventuring into cracks, sometimes disappearing, the rest piddling down into a shallow pool where he would find, no doubt, salamanders, minnows, and crawdads flitting from rock to rock. Preteen Ned had played in a place just like this for hours and hours as a boy and he felt at home and at his ease on a level he found disturbing.

There was no pain. No car. No dying boy.

He turned his head. No one else was here.

He lifted his head. The pool at his feet thinned to a creek that wound through thick woods. He heard birds and the leaves in the trees.

There should be nothing comfortable about waking up in a cave with no idea of how he'd got there. He felt fine. He double-checked himself and found no injuries. He wasn't even hungry or thirsty.

He wasn't cold, even though he was in a cave, on the ground, with no bed or blanket, and he’d been there for a while? Maybe? He had been sleeping. He had no idea how long he'd been there. Hours? Days?

My God, the girls must be hysterical.

Had someone brought him here?

"Hello?" he called.

"Hello!" The voice was all around him.

Ned, startled, gave a little leap, pounded the back of his head against the rock wall behind him.

"Sorry about that," came the voice. It was deep and warm. Welcoming, and all the scarier for it. "If you can come up with an idea how I can do that without scaring people, will you let me know?"

Ned could find no source for the voice whichever way he looked, no direction from which it might have originated. "You want to tell me where I am or what I'm doing here? And who the fuck are you? And where?”

There was no immediate answer. “Where's kind of important. I mean, caves, or whatever the hell this is, can do weird shit with sound. Might have odd acoustics, but that's not what's going on here, is it? Is it? Best quality P.A. system I’ve ever heard maybe. You know what? Pick a question and answer it, goddammit!"

He knew he was being rude but he was frightened. Somebody had brought him here. They should expect that, whoever they were. Doing this to people for whatever reason. Ned felt they were getting off light. This was some bullshit right here.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

The voice indulged in a low chuckle. "Mr. Cartwright, you cannot be blamed for your confusion or your manner of speaking. Not right now. Please, do not think I am offended or upset. I mean you no harm. You are perfectly safe, though, and I do not and would not blame you for any skepticism you may have on your part regarding the matter."

Ned stood, scraping his back as he used the wall behind him for support. He hated being rude, however provoked. He never failed to feel guilty and over-correct. "You have me at a disadvantage, sir," he said. In more ways than one.

This time the voice laughed. "That could not be helped. I hope you'll forgive me for it. First, are you happy with the voice I'm using?"

Ned blinked. "You know, I'm sure I'll get used to how fucked up things are right now, eventually, wherever I am, but I'm just not there yet, if you’ll pardon me."

Ned could hear the smile in the voice as it said, "We'll table that for now, then. I'm going to appear to you now, just beyond the pool there. Ready?"

Ned shrugged. "No? But go ahead, I guess."

In a patch of light undiluted by the surrounding forest, there appeared a large black bird. It flicked his head, ruffled his feathers, and cocked an eye at Ned.

Ned muttered, "Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he; but with mien of lord or lady-"

"Lord, I think," said the bird in the now familiar deep voice. "And a crow. A raven would probably be a bit too on the nose for most folks."

Ned giggled, startling himself. "Apropos, you're saying?"

"Apropoe.... Good one."

"Look, I’m sorry, where the fuck am I? What’s going on?"

The crow took a faltering step, facing Ned, and bowed his head. "What's the last thing you remember, Mr. Cartwright?"

Ned, not wanting to step on the little guy by accident, took a step backwards, but the ceiling curved down low at the edges, so he wound up sitting back down. That was probably more sociable anyway, given his guest’s height. Or was the crow his host? He passed a hand through his hair.

“I was in a car accident,” he said.

“And before that?” asked the crow. “Take your time and try hard to remember.”

It did seem fuzzy and indistinct somehow. More than it should have.

"I was walking into the building...."

Autumn is always a beginning time for a teacher and for their students. A time for renewal as a new school year begins full of hope and wonder. Seven weeks into the term and the great oak outside the main entrance looked just as it had for the last twenty-five years, like it was rolled in cinnamon and butter. He liked to park in the student lot. It gave him a long walk when the weather was nice, which gave him time to collect his thoughts and savor the suspense of the day ahead. Mr. Cartwright made sure the kids saw him and his great black bag hanging from his shoulder like it had a gravity and ferocious will of its own to pull him to the right. These days all you were likely to find inside was his lunch, an odd snack, and his school laptop now that most of the work lay waiting for them all in cyberspace. The walk also gave him an opportunity to seemingly walk out into traffic, his nose in his book or his head in the clouds. Horns honked, heads shook, and Mr. Cartwright, who was never in any danger, laughed, smiled, and apologized with a wave before going on inside. It was all part of a carefully constructed persona, tailored to a precise amount of amusement, intrigue, and sympathy Ned used to push his students as far as they could go.

The school bus.

Mariana Plimpton. Her big ass headphones.

She was a happy kid and often burst into song upon the slightest provocation. The happier she was, the louder she got, and the sourer became the notes, and the quicker the whole Mariana Plimpton experience would be interrupted by her own giggles that left her, and a number of those around her, folded in half and breathless. She was the kind of pleasant that spread. Even the goth kids smiled at her.

Bopping to her tunes.

In glorious bliss, she stepped in front of the number forty-five school bus that had, moments ago deposited its thirty-eight underclassmen to Andrew Johnson High School, and was rolling out for the garage.

Ned saw and started moving before he realized it. He shrugged out of the strap of his bag, causing it to fall to the blacktop with an expensive-sounding crash, and in almost the same motion, he hurled The Nickel Boys at Mariana's back.

It hit her high in the shoulder. She took a step as she turned, the wrong way to see the bus, to look at the crazy man charging at her. Her face writhed in confusion. He couldn’t blame her. Mr. Cartwright was throwing books at her, running at her. It was weird. She screamed as Ned grabbed coat and bra strap and the flesh of her upper arms to spin her away.

Then Ned fell.

The tire.

Ned looked away. He looked at the roof of the cave. He looked back at the crow. “Wait,” he said. “Just wait.”

“The tire did hit you, Mr. Cartwright,” said the crow, its tone somber. “I’m sorry.”

“But the car accident?”

“We do that, I’m afraid. I know it seems cruel, but it is necessary.”

“What?”

“The car accident never happened. It was a like a dream we gave you.”

“That was no dream.”

“No, it wasn’t. But it was like one in that it happened to you and it didn’t. Not really.”

Ned focused on his breathing. He didn’t want to start screaming. “The tire hit me?”

“Yes.”

“In the head.”

“Yes.”

“You’re saying I’m dead.”

The crow cocked his head. "Not exactly. No."

"I'm not?"

"The creators of this place... my creators... watch sentient species from, well, quite a ways away in every direction. They look for people they feel could be special here, then, when they are irrevocably about to pass on, they bring you here."

"So, I am dead or I'm not dead?"

"Your consciousness was brought here before it could be lost. Your old body is gone."

"I'm a copy? Uploaded somewhere? I've read cyberpunk."

"No," said the crow. "You are not a copy. My creators are really against that. It's an abomination to them. They have the capability, yes, but they think it the most indulgent form of narcissism. No, your mind was rescued, a process that renders you unconscious, transported here, and then imprinted into a clone of your biology prepared ahead of time for this eventuality."

"I'm a clone." Ned was skeptical.

"No. Your body was cloned. Your mind is the original. You feel like yourself, don't you? Though, of course, you are not fifty-five physically. The body is the equivalent of maybe twenty-five years of age."

Ned could say nothing.

“We’ve been watching you, Ned Cartwright. You’ve read enough Philip K. Dick to soon wonder if this is real, if you haven’t already. How much of this is really a dream? Are you really awake? If my creators can do all this, what can’t they do? What can’t they make it seem? I can only assure you that you are you."

Ned leaned his head back against the wall and shut his eyes. After a long moment, he said, "My wife and kids?"

The crow took a moment. "They believe you died a hero. Mr. Cartwright, they are far from here, as inaccessible to you as if you were really dead. I'm sorry, but this is something you must accept."

The things the crow was saying faded into the deep background noise of the forest and the sounds of Ned's grief. There was something about taking all the time he needed, another thing about the pool being hot and cold and potable, that he would return, that there would be food. That this place was designed for this kind of thing. Something else maybe.

Ned was there a long time.