When Roland regained consciousness, he was surprised to find that he was not among library shelves. Instead, he stood under a shower, fully dressed in the jeans, sweat shirt, and cross training shoes he had resurrected from Windglow’s attic for the trip home.
The shower stall was small and, unlike his dorm shower, sprayed a less than adequate stream into a slightly rust-stained tub. He threw back the shower curtain, stepped out and peeled off the wet clothes as fast as he could, curious to investigate his surroundings. There was a sofa with lumpy cushions and badly frayed armrests in the middle of a tiny living room. It faced a cabinet dominated by a stereo and one of the largest televisions screens had ever seen in his life, both of considerably higher quality than the sofa.
A newspaper lay unopened on a cheap plastic coffee table. He checked the date. Time had been given a number. If the date was correct, roughly fifteen months had passed since the blustery day he had gone to the college library. He had spent more thany a year in the realmlands. Apparently, time passed at a very similar, though not equal, rate in both places.
What am I going to tell people? My parents? Anna? The long-forgotten name of his older sister rolled off his tongue so easily. Roland wondered if a person could handle only one set of memories at a time. Would his memories of the realmlands now retreat as thoroughly as this world’s memories had in the realmlands?
No. Visions of Raxxars and Seraphim and Gnomes remained clearly etched in his mind as if he had encountered them yesterday.
He returned to the problem at hand. A person did not just disappear for over a year and then show up without a good explanation. What would he say? Who would believe what he had been through?
As he took inventory of the apartment, however, the frozen spigot of his mind loosened. Memories seeped back: the long, frustrating search for a reasonably-priced, off-campus apartment; his relief upon finding this two-bedroom unit; the landlord, a kindly foundry worker who lived on the ground floor and had generously invited Roland to eat supper with his family on his first night.
How could I have done all this when I was away in the realmlands?
The phone rang. He picked it up cautiously. “Hello?”
“So you still exist. We were starting to get worried about you. I can’t believe you didn’t call us on Easter.”
“Mom!” gushed Roland. “It’s so great to hear your voice!”
The was a moment of silence. “Roland? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Nothing. It’s just nice to talk to you.”
More silence. “Roland, you’re scaring me. What’s wrong?”
As the conversation continued, Roland was able to assure his mother than there was no new crisis in his life. Memory flowed back to him as he needed it. He recalled the spring finals, the family vacation to the Carolina coast, and his return to the University of Wisconsin-Wolf River. He could even remember returning to his room after studying at the library way back on that fateful December night. Some of his dorm mates had popped popcorn, and they had played ‘500’ to the sound of ITunes until well past midnight.
Strange as these memories were, Roland greeted them with relief. He apparently had no explaining to do after all. He need not explain anything because he had never been missed. He had never been missed because apparently he had never been away.
For weeks, he mulled over this impossibility. He grabbed for explanations and reluctantly discarded them as each proved inadequate. Were the realms nothing but a dream? Then why could he see the details in such sharp focus--sharp as a Third Realm landscape? If he had gone to the realms, then when and how? And why had it taken these moments to redevelop a memory of what he had done in this world while he had supposed himself to be in another? Could a person be in two places at once?
It was all too bizarre. Roland began surrendering to the same conclusion that he had formed at the beginning of his adventure--the notion that he was mentally ill, seriously so. He was drowning in a sea of surrealism--a spectator watching sanity slip from his grasp and disappear into the ether. Terrified of losing his mind, yet fearful of what a psychiatrist would say about his alleged tales of Tishaara and Point Harrow, he kept his tortured thoughts to himself.
If only he could reach Delaney. Then he could find out if she remembered being in the realms. If she even existed. If he could simply settle the question of whether she was real or not, that alone would tell him what he needed to know.
But the Delaney he had met in the realmlands had recalled almost nothing of her past. Roland had a vague impression that she lived on the West Coast, probably California, now that he considered the matter. But by the time he had met her, Delaney did not even remember her last name. How could he possibly find her among 40 million people?
By April, Roland was sinking into depression, barely able to generate a smile or a coherent thought. His grades sank. He seldom left his apartment. Most of his time was spent in light reading, trying to escape a reality that might or might not be real.
One evening when he was feeling especially glum, his cell phone rang. Roland did not always answer the phone these days. He let it ring four times. Just before his voice mail clicked on, he picked it up. “Hello.”
“Roland Stewart?!” squealed the voice on the line.
He squeezed the phone as though it were a lifeline. “Delaney! Is it really you? Delaney! You’re real! How did you find me?”
“Listen, hot shot, it wasn’t easy. All you ever told me was that you lived up in the woods where it snowed like five months of the year. I figured it probably wasn’t the West or East because you didn’t know squat about mountains. Berch used to tease you about being a college man, so I researched every small college in the upper Midwest, checking both student and alumni lists because you never told me how old you were, you creep. I went through Minnesota and North Dakota and Idaho before I finally hit the jackpot in Wisconsin.”
"Idaho's not in the Midwest. Don't you mean Iowa?"
"Like I care. I didn't call to argue geology with you."
"That's geog—never mind. I'm so glad you called. I was starting to wonder if you were just a dream." But even though he was thrilled beyond words to make contact, he still was baffled as to what it all meant.
“No, I’m not a dream. And now that I know you’re not, there is actually hope that I won't go totally insane. Who knows, I might even get some sleep in the near future. So what’s up?”
“The usual. Classes. Senioritis. One of my profs reminds me of Glenleaf, the Tishaaran Chamber president.
“Oh, Roland,” said Delaney, her voice choking.
“Delaney, what’s the matter? Are you crying?”
“Get real, I never cry.” She said nothing for a few moments and then, “Crap! I can’t understand it. I never was a sappy person until I hit the realmlands. Roland, it’s just so good to hear your voice!”
“You have no idea. I think you just saved my life.”
“Really?” Delaney gushed. “Good. Because that means you owe me, and then you’ll have to do what I ask.”
“Me and my big mouth,” said Roland. But he was pleased to hear that Delaney had some sort of plan in mind. The substance of it did not matter as long as it involved both of them.
“Meet me next Saturday morning in Gordon, Nebraska.”
“What? What are you talking about? Where in the world is Gordon?”
“Listen, if I could find you in your Midwestern haystack, you can find Gordon, Nebraska, you lazy piece of--”
“But I don’t get it. Why do you want--” He stopped as he remembered the third “side effect” of Ishyrus’s experiments: Ron Berch. Had Delaney found out something about him?
“Not now, Roland. You’ll be there? Next Saturday?”
“Sure--” Before he could say any more, even ask her phone number or address or anything, she hung up. “Somebody’s spent too much time around Digtry,” he muttered as he switched off the phone.
All week, the glorious image of Delaney holding a telephone and saying his name wrestled for control of Roland’s mind with the haunting image of that tough old farmer. For awhile, Berch won. He had come from Nebraska--in fact he had even remembered the name of the state when he was in the realmlands. He had not returned from the realmlands with them. Roland’s father had broken a vow of silence on his tour of duty in Vietnam only once, talking about the one who did not come back. Their company had gone out into the delta on a mission, one of the last missions of the war, gotten separated in an ambush and a firefight, and one of them did not make it out. He was never found. Disappeared like Berch, without a trace. The helplessness, the speculation about what happened to him, the acid of uncertainty eating away day after day, had taken its toll on Dad. More than 30 years later, he still felt the ache. Not a day went by that he did not still wonder about his missing friend and what he could have done to find him.
Roland realized, shamefully, that he had been thinking only of Delaney as his partner in travel. Somehow, he had relegated Berch to the cast of realmlanders. But the three of them had gone into another world together. One had not come back. He could not help but think his omission reflected poorly on him.
He gained little in the way of useful instruction at school the next week. On Friday, he watched the second hand grind through its monotonous circuits of the clock face against the concrete brick of the classroom wall. He skipped his last class altogether and dashed to his already-packed Dodge Neon. As with everything he owned, it had been well-used.
Although he had a good 600 miles to cover without the benefit of a tape deck (not working) or Ipod (lost or stolen) or CD player (unavailable in this junk heap of a car) or coffee (available but unpalatable), he ran no risk of drowsiness. As he whirred down the interstate across the rich farmlands of southern Minnesota and then onto I-35 into Iowa, memories of the realmlands propped him up, had him leaning forward into the steering wheel. Mostly, he focused on Delaney--any positive word she had ever spoken, any expression or gesture she had ever made to him, any visual image he could recall. He replayed those moments time and again, the intensity of the exhilaration losing nothing in the repetition.
In the meantime, he relished the green that sprang from the ground and spilled over the fields and into the ditches. He felt far more than the typical spring exhilaration over the rebirth of nature. This seemed a pulsating, living color, as though a breeze had scattered dustings of Greenrafter’s lodestone over the fields. On the other hand, the patch of fog he drove through after sunset near a river bottom just west of of Des Moines seemed a cheap, carnival dry ice prop compared to Cloudmire.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
In the early morning hours, he exited off westbound I-80 in the flatlands of Nebraska. He crossed the Platte River and stopped for gas at an all-night station where the steady flow of semi rigs roaring through their gears at this ridiculous hour called to mind the unquenchable flame in the eyes of the sleepless Droom.
The two-lane tar roads that he followed were deserted. Flicking on the dome light periodically to consult his map, Roland drove in silence and nearly total darkness except for the path cleared by his headlights.
At 3:30 a.m., he spotted the proud, hand-painted sign that staked out Gordon’s claim to existence. Population 223. The streets were empty, lit only by a pair of street lights that glowed a sickly yellow over the only stop sign within 20 miles. A hick town. So pitiful it would be swallowed up without a trace if it came within the shadow of even a medium metropolis. The kind of place that everyone at school made fun--even those who came from such places.
But now Roland saw it in the light of the community of Tishaara, whose plainness he often scorned. He saw the weathered wooden structures as evidence, not of inferiority and poverty and ignorance, but of honest craftsmanship whose strength laid a foundation that shamed the inflated marvels of modern technology.
The Creator put what is weak in the world to shame the strong.
He passed through the town and drove out of its skirmish line of lights into the country, looking for a place to pull over and sleep. The road had no shoulder, but he found a dirt path heading off into a freshly cultivated field. He turned onto the path and found that it led to a small cemetery. Thoughts of Droom and Raxxars, and especially of Draxis and the Fifth Realm and Nephilim, made him rather edgy in the darkness. Rather than sleep so close to the bones of the dead, he spun his car around and turned onto a gravel road. A half mile later he stopped with his right tires on the grass. Although isolated from humanity, he locked his doors from force of habit and drifted off to sleep to the smell of manure.
When he awoke, he drove groggily, yet nervously back into Gordon.
A bright red Laser was parked in front of a diner.
She was there.
Even though the car had Wyoming plates, he had no doubt that it was Delaney. The car looked as out of place on the main street as a Raxxar in Orduna. She must have flown into Cheyenne and rented it. That’s just the kind of car she would rent. Wait a minute; she's not old enough to rent a car.
Roland pushed open the cafe door. His heart pounded as it had not since the days of peril at Point Harrow.
She waved at him from her table.
Her hair had grown out and was curled into soft ringlets, and she was wearing a hooded sweatshirt that read "Banana Slugs Rock", but other than that she looked as though she had stepped from her guest house in Tishaara. That wide, confident smile with that cute feline lip lit up her face.
Their reunion drew suspicious stares from the five early breakfast regulars and the waitress filling their coffee cups. Those stares became far more intense at Delaney’s first words. With her mouth still half full of sweet roll, she said, “Roland, we have to get married!” Then she stood and enfolded him in a long embrace.
Roland was too flabbergasted to respond. What was she babbling about? They had never done anything. Besides, she said it in such a strange way. Not in despair, or passion, or joy, or worry, or any other expected emotion. She spoke the words in astonishment, as if she had just solved a baffling mystery and was staggered by the result.
Roland felt the heat of a room full of stares. He smiled awkwardly at a grizzled old guy in overalls chewing on forkful of scrambled eggs. “Actually, we’ve never even . . .”
Delaney grabbed his arm. “You don’t have to explain anything to these people.” She glared at the few onlookers who had maintained eye contact. “To whom it may concern, Roland and I have never had sex. Now that this information has made your lives complete, please enjoy your breakfast in peace.”
Roland was appalled by her brashness. “Delaney, I don’t think you’re making any friends here.”
She waved away the patrons with her hand. “As if I came here to make friends.”
“But do you have to make a spectacle of yourself everywhere you go?"
She glared at him. “I do not make a spectacle of myself.”
“I think there are a few thousand Ordunese who would back me on this.”
The glare softened. She smiled and her face reddened.
“I’m sorry, did I embarrass you, Delaney? I didn’t know that was possible.” He failed to duck quickly enough to avoid the half of a sweet roll flung at his face. "Delaney,“I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I just . . . what is this about having to get married?”
“I can't believe I said that," she said, rolling her eyes. "It didn't come out the wait I wanted it go. I didn't mean that I want to get married now, or ever, for that matter. Roland, what I mean is that if either of us ever does decide to ger married, it'll have to be to each other. Don't you see?"
The undisguised gawks of the locals returned with renewed force and bore down on him like a desert sun. Instinctively, he began to shrink under their inspection. But he found that he was able to resist that instinct. He straightened up, looked out over the room and met their guarded expressions with a sheepish smile.
“Can we talk about his somewhere else?”
Delaney nodded.
He bent down to pick up the roll. “Are you done with this?”
“No, as a matter of fact, I’m not.” She accepted the pastry from him, giggled, and then threw it in his face again. Roland wiped himself off. As he reached for his wallet, she slapped his hand and went to the cash register to pay her bill.
She is acting strange. Or maybe this is her normal behavior in her normal environment. Maybe the intimidation of the realmlands had softened her edges and maybe those edges are back. Maybe I can’t stand the real Delaney. She always was a bit pushy. What if it turns out she’s the most obnoxious person on the entire planet.
She returned to throw a dollar tip on the table and took his arm. As they pushed open the glass door of the diner, she said, “Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?”
“No. Half of me thinks you proposed to me just now while the other half thinks something came loose while you were traipsing through Morp.”
“That’s just it!” she shouted, pounding on his chest with glee. “Who else knows anything about Morp? Really, Roland, if you try telling anyone else in the world about the realms, they’ll think you’re totally whacko. Believe me, it’s true. I tried. You can’t possibly share it with anyone but me. And what would your wife think of you stotally freak! So if you wanted to marry anyone else, you’d have to forget about the realms. I don’t know about you, but I could so never do that.”
Roland pondered this as he approached the driver’s door on his car. “Are you kidding? I couldn’t forget the realms if I wanted to. This is awful,” he said, leaning on the car door. “It’s just like one of those arranged marriages.”
“Awful?” She stood holding the passenger door open, looking as if she was having second thoughts about getting in.”
“Yes, awful," he insisted, meeting her glare. "I wouldn’t want to marry someone because I had to. I’d want to marry them because I wanted to.” His voice trailed off, “You know, if I ever got married."
He slid into the car seat and turned on the ignition. “Come on, you have to admit it’s not very romantic.”
She plopped down into the seat, shut the door, and glanced coyly at him. In a low, husky voice he had never heard her use before, she said, “I can be very romantic.”
In that instant, all the air seemed to have been sucked out of the car. Roland’s head grew so light and dizzy that he could hardly keep her in focus. But before he could react, she burst the moment. “We need to find out about Berch,” she said, turning away.
Roland tried to collect his scattered thoughts and emotions as he turned on the ignition. “All right. By the way, is that your car? Where did you get it?”
“I borrowed it from a cousin. She's a senior at the University of Wyoming. That's in Laramie—see, I'm a bubblehead—I know my geography!"
"What did you tell her you needed it for?"
"I didn't tell her. Just said it was an emergency. Makes it sound more urgent and dangerous. Maybe we should just stop somewhere and ask questions. In a small town like this, everyone will know Berch. Or at least his family. Back to the diner.”
“No, Delaney, I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
That triggered her smile, much warmer and deeper than she had shown so far. “Begging your pardon, you fleak-livered mugwallop, but have you got a better idea?”
Roland was about to suggest they make inquiries about Berch at a gas station when his grin disappeared. “I have an idea.”
“Well, what is it?”
“Trust me.”
“Come on, why won’t you tell me?”
“Because it makes it sound so much more urgent and exciting this way. Besides, if we’re going to be stuck spending the rest of our lives together in eternal bliss, we need to establish some trust.”
He made a U-turn on the empty main street and headed north. As they bumped along the rough road, he looked straight ahead with a sense of purpose that was beyond serious, as though he were on a mission or a sacred quest. Delaney did not interrupt his thoughts.
She gasped when Roland pulled into the cemetery entrance. The car bounced crazily on its mushy shocks as it plunged in and out of the shallow ruts between the highway and the tiny burial ground nestled back among the tilled rows of a corn field.
He killed the engine. Silence overwhelmed them as they got out of the car. Neither dared break it.
He reached out to her as he lifted the squeaky latch on the black wrought-iron gate. She took his hand and gripped it tightly. Up and down the rows they walked, reading the names inscribed on the marble slabs, bending down to decipher the carvings on the flat, weathered stones.
In the far corner, near the the row of cedars that lined the wrought iron fence, a cluster of simple white tablets shone brightly over a carpet of fresh sod. Side by side, no more than a foot high.
Roland read the closest one. Another tight squeeze at his hand told him that Delaney was reading at the same time.
Eleanor Louise Berch, May 30, 1943 - March 4, 2005.
Silently, they shifted their eyes to the left. Roland sensed what was coming, yet the words seared him like a hot iron.
Ronald Hiram Berch, July 6, 1938 - May 22, 2003.
Delaney began shaking. Roland put his arm around her. At the same time, he transposed dates in his head. That would be more or less about the time he disappeared at Point Harrow.
A sob lodged in his throat and his vision blurred. "You were right, Berch. Death brought you home."
"Berch," whispered Delaney. "My 'fren'." With that, her tears flowed freely. "Here I go again. Roland what is the matter with me? I acted like a complete jerk in the diner, and now here I am, Betty Basket Case.
"
Roland pulled her close, wiping her and then surreptitiously wiping his own. "Emotional overload, Delaney. That's all."
They sat all day at the edge of the grave, alternately dampening the seats and the knees of their blue jeans on the moist sod as they shared memories of the cranky old farmer. Sometimes the emotions they evoked brought Berch into the conversation as if he were present.
The longer they spoke, the more Roland found himself mulling over Delaney’s initial greeting at the restaurant. Plucking a dry stem of grass left over from last summer, as an excuse to break eye contact, he said, “I’ve been thinking over your marriage proposal.”
Delaney punched him on the arm. “Have I told you how much you suck?”
“Probably. No, really,” Roland went on. “I've been thinking about it, and you're right. That doesn't necessarily mean we'd be right for each other. And I know for a fact I'm not marrying anyone who thinks I suck and keeps punching me and throwing food at me."
Delaney grabbed his arm. "I'm sorry."
"Where did you pick up these weird habits? I don't remember you doing that in the realms. No wait, I remember you throwing pillows at Digtry that last evening when he broke the news about our going home. I didn't realize it was such a habit."
"Yeah, it was a habit I had before the realms. And I had plenty of even worse ones," she admitted. "I never knew I had them until I went to the realmlands. Somehow I managed to get rid of most of them there, so I'm pretty sure I can do it again. Just give me a little time."
"Okay," said Roland softly. "But you are right about one thing: you may be the only person in the world who is young enough for me."
“What's that supposed to mean?”
“Something that Berch said that night at Point Harrow.” He looked at the headstone, and nodded as if in salute to their old companion. “About getting old and losing traction. The more world-wise you become, the more you lose the wonder in life, until nothing connects, nothing moves.You just spin, taking it all for granted. Berch said that was the worst part of growing old, and he was grateful to the realmlands for giving him his tread back. He could touch life again and feel those miracles and latch onto them the way he remembered doing when all the world was new to him.
“If Berch was right, Delaney, then you and I are too young for anyone else. And I can prove it.”
“Prove it to me, darling, and I’m yours,” Delaney teased, puckering her lips.
“I will,” said Roland, seriously. “Last night I thought about gravity.”
“Gravity? This is how you're going to win my heart? And you said I could kill a romantic mood!”
“Listen. I thought about the Tishaarans and the Ordunese and Meshoma sitting at supper tonight with their whole sense of reality pulled out from under them. Tucking their kids into bed tonight, reassuring them that everything is fine, everyone is safe. All the while they’re just shaking inside at how the natural laws that had ordered their world from the instant they were born suddenly vanished. And I was thankful that, at least for today, when my feet leave the ground, they return safely just as they always have. I was so grateful that gravity had not disappeared overnight. Now what other adult in the world could get so worked up over gravity?”
“Me, Roland,” said Delaney, quietly. “Just me.”
They lingered at the cemetery as a low bank of clouds cooled the setting sun to a soft purple. At last, when darkness spread over the fields and coaxed out the stars, they brushed the grass from their damp clothes and started down the row toward the gate.
Delaney glanced around nervously at the headstones. “Do you suppose we have realm bonds in our own world?” she asked. “I mean, is there a Fifth Realm out there, a world of Seraphim and Nephilim and everything? I wonder if God has set out some kind of shield for us, protecting us from those terrible things, just like he protected the realms. Or better yet, like he protected the Morps. And people who dabble in the occult and all that are poking around at the shield, letting that stuff leak in.”
Roland shuddered. “That’s a fascinating idea. But the dark of night in a cemetery is not the best time for pondering it.”
“I beg your pardon.” She laughed at her own comment. "I never said such a nerdy phrase in my lifetime until I met a Tishaaran." She paused a moment and gazed into a sky that pushed back the horizon farther than she had ever remembered seeing. She saw for the first time that the clusters of twinkling dots that formed the constellations were but a thin picket line. Behind them, phantom shadows of galaxies rolled on to infinity.
“I wonder if Windglow and Shaska and Digtry and all the rest are looking up at the same stars from a different angle. Do you remember, Roland? Are those the same stars we saw back in Tishaara on Christmas night?”
“You mean Vyarlis?”
“If you’re going to get picky--”
Roland could only shake his head as he thought back to that evening, so ordinary and yet so magical. “I should have looked more closely at the stars.”
A stomach growled and Roland could not tell if it were his or Delaney’s. “You hungry?” he asked.
“Famished. We haven’t eaten all day.”
“Not since you kicked off your political career at the diner.” She raised her clenched fists, but stopped herself this time.
“If you’re starving, how come you haven’t touched those M & M’s in your shirt pocket?” he asked. “Knowing how you crave chocolate, I’ve been wondering when you were going to crack into them.”
“These? Never,” said Delaney, patting her pocket. “Never.”