Giles breathed the stifling, dead air, knowing he couldn’t stand just outside the door for too long. The guard would look up from his magazine and come out to ask what was up.

Something was wrong, something more than the creepy deadness of the town.

He sniffed but there was no odor of decay, just hot air that dried out the nose. The Chaos overhead looked like it ever did. Down here on Earth, the light was late afternoon.

He moved to the left of the doorway to get out of the guard’s line of sight and examined the run-down building he’d emerged from. New Mexico Institute for Abiotic Research, a dilapidated sign said.

There was only a single car, a gleaming new wine-red Camry. He felt in his pocket: yup, car keys, and when he pressed the button, the Camry’s lights flashed. He clicked the lock closed again.

Only one car? Why was Ed’s car the only one there when the building was bustling inside? For sure everybody else didn’t walk to work from this dead town.

Still, he knew where he was, New Mexico. He could drive away … but where to go? He still didn’t know jack, a madman was going somewhere to rip open the sky…

He looked up at the Chaos, his eyes narrowing. The sky was already ripped open. He was more or less in the present. Robby’s wife had been pumping Ed for information but not so she could tell Robby and send him to that red rock mountain in time to see the sky ripped open. And the mad program director inside who reminded Giles so much of Killington, was he going to follow Ed’s track back to that day two years ago and then rip the sky open? And why?

He could get in Ed’s car and drive like hell for the Bay Area. Find RJ and Hiyako and Jazz, tell them everything he had learned. But this was still a world inside a story, maybe there wasn’t a Hiyako in this world.

Maybe he, Giles, didn’t exist. Maybe his mother, sweet Mary Hammond, was still alive and making her colcannon and her lemon curd scones…

His hands dropped weakly to his sides. Mary Hammond, still alive…

He had to go back into that building. He had to. Not only because he needed find out more, and stop Killington if he could.

He had to go back in. He could come up with some story for the guard.

He pulled on the door. The guard looked up in mild interest. “F’get something?”

Giles screwed up Ed’s face. “My pain meds. Back’s killing me. Left ‘em in the lab.”

The guard nodded in sympathy, went back to his car magazine. Easier than Giles had expected.

But this was his story. He stood on the stage right now telling this story. He should stop questioning when something was easier than expected.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Back down the hall with the worn tile floor, the safety reminders on the walls, back to the lab. Giles had not felt the presence of reporter Robby Baker while he stood in the lot but he felt him strongly again now, eager to see his ex-wife again.

When he pushed open the door, she was still there. Robby resisted the urge to put his arms around her. But Giles stared with sweet painful longing.

This was his mother.

This was not the silver-haired woman with weathered skin and a voice lined with rabbit fur. This was the vital, glorious mother who once had called him precious lamb.

She had become a character in his story.

It was dangerous to think of someone being a character in a story…

Just before he’d started telling, she’d appeared to him on the stage. (He stood there now, telling this story. What was the audience hearing? What were the Planners hearing?)

Mary Hammond had never worked for the government, not that he’d ever heard. But this was her all the same.

She had never talked to Giles about his father. Could he have been a reporter named Robby Baker?

She had to be just a character: she had not lilting Irish brogue, which the real Mary Hammond had cultivated to the end of her life.

From the doorway, Giles whispered, “Mummy.”

He hadn’t called her that since he’d started kindergarten and the other kids teased him, “His mom’s The Mummy!”

Her startled eyes, green and soulful, looked up from her report and seemed to see him for the first time. She murmured something that he could just barely make out: “A stór…”

Giles’s heart nearly burst. That was what she’d called as a boy. My treasure, it meant. Her Gran (but never her own mother) had called her that.

Robby was confused, like Doree had been when he let himself come out. Giles reluctantly prepared to sink into the background again and let the story play out.

But he had never told this part of the story! This was virgin territory, this was a story unfolding and he was a storyteller.

He had grown used to suppressing himself and letting the story come through. The Planners demanded that so they could find out about the Demon World. He’d almost forgotten how to shape a story.

Now he tried. As he let the door swing shut and approached the black-haired woman with the clipboard, he thought, as Ed approached, something about the way he moved was familiar to her. She knew him!

Robby stood in front of the woman who was his wife. Her face was soft and uncertain; was he shaping the story? Robby had courage to take her hand. She didn’t draw back this time; her eyes lifted to his.

“Mary,” he whispered. “It’s Robby.”

And so Giles learned that her name was Mary in this story.

“Don’t ask me how I’m in another man’s body,” Robby whispered urgently, “but I can tell you anything, any number of things to prove that I’m me.”

The silence stretched for five harrowing seconds. She studied him, and her face seemed to ripple. Giles kept himself from calling her “mummy” again and her features settled into determination as she nodded. “Ed would have tried to lure me into the broom closet with him in exchange for telling me what I wanted to hear. He would never have passed up that chance.”

Her Irish was faint but it showed in the delicious roundness to her vowels that Giles had noted earlier. Oh how he longed to let her hold him.

“Then listen to me,” Robby began.

The lab door pushed open.

Of course, there had been other people in the lab. Now that Killington was gone, they filed back to their work.

Giles tried thinking, they poked their heads in but they weren’t sure Killington had really gone, so they backed quietly out again.

But they were already in and he had no power to reverse that.

They glanced at Mary with shaking heads, as if asking why she hadn’t left with them. As one their heads snapped away when they saw she was in “Ed’s” arms.

Giles dropped his hands, blushing furiously.

But Mary whispered, “Follow me in a moment. Left out the door, first right, 2nd door on the left. We’ll make use of that broom closet.”

And she strode busily out of the room.