Richie wasn’t sure when Coral Road ceased to be what it was, but he was vaguely conscious of having passed through cyan drapery of the sky itself, as though the horizon had been wallpaper plastered in a newborn’s crib room. He no longer stood on a highway carved out over the ocean expanse, but was tracing the catwalks of docks and piers not unlike those that made up Tide Town across the sea. Here, it was daylight, and there was a similar indistinct haziness about the backdrops that mirrored the blurred memories of his own mind regarding the Backyards. But what struck Richie immediately was the uncanny resemblance his recently-arrived destination bore to the apartment complex he had occupied in Station Bay.

The sunken, flooded town of Blue Terminal was composed in bulk of those same sky-blue wooden duplex structures with their enclosed front porch balconies and distinct heavy doors. Random shrubberies and grass lawns drifted across the calm aqua depths that took the place of what should have been streets and parking lots as though the vegetation were giant lily pads that were right at home. Quaint little Victorian houses, a fire station, a church with a bell tower, a video rental store, and a schoolhouse among many other nostalgic small downtown area staples were spread across the sea that Richie was beginning more and more to think of as a lake or river instead, without knowing why. What solid ground there was took the form of sloping green hills and squared-off concrete platforms that rose out of shallow sections of water, bearing miniature fields of flowers or tilted stop signs and streetlights. The shimmering surface of the flood reflected the dreamy light cyan of the sky above, softly marbled with spongy white clouds the texture of sheep wool. Large, Olympic-style golden braziers easily the size of radio dishes crisscrossed each city block intersection, dark azure flames roaring with a halo of incandescent distortion radiating through the air around them.

Richie was slicked with sweat and his body was racked with tremendous aches and pains. His calves and quads burned like flesh trapped in napalm, and his feet felt like they had been crushed with hammers from the soles up. His arms were dangling sausages at his side, dead weight with twitching fingers. The tightness in his chest had become a spiderweb of strain and impending doom. Thick cords bulged out on his neck and in his shoulders. Veins were visible in his biceps, dangerously red, the muscles and skin around them flushed and inflamed. He had a massive fever that made him sway dangerously on his agonized feet, vision graying in and out in lengthening gaps in time. He knew that a good night’s sleep was one of many factors that helped the body regenerate itself and stave off things like bacterial infections, and it seemed that running four straight days without it, on top of the limits he had pushed his body past with the double dose of green potion, had opened the floodgate for any throng of microscopic refugees who felt like boarding him. He didn’t need a mirror to know that his eyes were bloodshot - he saw Blue Terminal through a transparent pink filter.

“I… made it…” he panted, then collapsed to his knees and hurled on the dock.

He watched his upchucked bile and churning stomach acid seep through between the boards, and dribble into the sea. He zoned out looking at the little bubbles that formed in the spreading ripples from this spill, and let his consciousness flutter. There was a distant but noticeable sense of contentment and grandeur intertwined with the pain. He had set a course and kept it, come hell or high water - literally. If he had learned one thing from Leon, it had been his air of composure and subtle grandiosity. Truth be told, he was as concerned as anyone else that the overdose of health potion would kill him as readily as it would pump him up to make the long marathon before the tides could close off his exit, but he had already been thrown to and from strange and deadly situations like a ricocheting pinball. He hadn’t even considered how powerless he had truly felt, and how bitter that had made him all his life, until he realized his own agency. Bringing down the phantom pain was the first spark, but the toppling of the shade-possessed sea god was when that flame showed the potential to become a raging inferno. At the very least, if he was going to risk his life, he was going to do it on his terms from now on. He would choose which hill to die on if it came to that.

But as things stood, his body had held itself together, albeit barely. His gambit had paid off, and the prize would be an earlier return home, one that might make a world of difference for the one - ones? - he left behind, depending on the circumstances left in his unwitting departure. He dimly wondered if O’Gravy had drowned, or if his body might even now be laying at the bottom of Tide Town. He had no idea, but regarding Cuppy, he knew in his gut that the puppeteer was alive. That said, more than once he had felt a sinking sensation that something bad had happened. Who was with Cuppy?

He didn’t realize right away that he was already standing again, and that the spit hanging from his lips had begun to recede. There was something soothing in the air of Blue Terminal, like his body was being cradled in a dry spa bath or a relieving massage. The stress, tension, and aches were gradually working themselves out of his body, and calm was beginning to edge the panic out of his heart. He was heading into a strange feeling that wasn’t quite euphoria, but something like a tranquil detached observation, like one in a deep daydream might feel. He remembered as a kid that he had sometimes fallen almost asleep in front of the TV, still left on, and that the sounds and images on the screen made their way into his nearly-unconscious mind. They were almost like lucid dreams, and might have become them fully if he had more chances to isolate that sensation and train himself to enter that state of awareness on command.

That was what it felt like now. His pain was a quiet series of waves washing over a distant shore, still audible but far away. He walked without knowing where he was going, but trusting his feet to guide him automatically as their soreness crumbled into a painless sense of numbness with a twinge of tickling. Joining this dreamy sense of predestination and calm detachment, Richie found answers beginning to bleed into his mind from behind a dark curtain. He remembered a bit more of his time in the ivy tunnel - the first wandering corridor, as he had come to think of them - that he inferred since then connected to the place others were calling the Backyards. He had spent an uncertain amount of time in the Backyards with the nice black wolf with the pretty blue eyes. They danced and pranced about fields of flowers under a clear blue sky, like partners in a choreographed dream unbound by cumbersome double left feet and missteps as would have been expected in the concrete, known reality. There was a preordained grace here, that same feeling of being cradled and guided, as his feet guided him now. He was going with the flow, but it did not feel like the fetid rip current of the sewer that had swept him away, or any other number of metaphorical currents that had dragged him through the mud. This was a lazy river ride in a waterpark, that was all.

Freyja. Her name was Freyja. We hung out and talked a lot, for days, here and there. There was a lot of quiet, but when we talked, we talked long and deeply. About our lives, about our backgrounds. Our favorite foods, places we wanted to go, the nicest dreams we had. We didn’t always talk with our mouths. We could just think or feel things, and we would pick up on each other without having to open our mouths. Like a shared dream. Richie recalled.

It was a strange but gratifying feeling to feel his psyche merged with someone else’s. Rather than invasive like he would have expected while awake and alert, there was comfort and understanding in the liminal overlap. They had expanded senses in that state, senses that reached beyond the limits of their mortal bodies and the seeming laws of physics themselves. They saw the particles of creation, heard the echoes of big bangs, tasted evolution. They were like digits of a greater, final consciousness, stuck into small vessels to experience all the sensory information stored there. Of course Richie wouldn’t have retained his memories of the Backyards when he returned to the physical world - he was firmly returned to a body unequipped to perceive the memories his soul had collected. He felt now that the longer he stayed in this place, the more the memories would come back to him, as he felt the beating of that other’s heart.

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Richie placidly watched a slick, bulky hippo walk by, stout limbs disappearing just at the ankle under the water’s surface. A street light turned red, asking Richie to stop at the dock standing in for a sidewalk, and he obliged. He gave a polite little wave to the semi-aquatic mammal, and it returned the gesture with a neighborly head nod. Then the light turned green, and the way was clear again. Richie walked across the channel, stepping stones rising out of the water under his feet to bridge the gap between rows of docks and floating walkways. In the distance, a bundle of gorgeous ripe balloons - red, green, blue, yellow - floated over the clouds on a warm breeze.

Richie came to a waiting bench under an angled half-shelter against possible rain, and sat here to await the coming train. He expected that any moment the tracks would come up from the surface, waters parting like retracted cover to release them, and the train would climb up with them. No wonder the details of the station from those who had found their way to Tide Town by Coral Road were so vague - Blue Terminal itself seemed to be a lynchpin between it and the Backyards; and possibly other realms as well. One of them could be Station Bay.

No, one of them was definitely Station Bay. Richie would believe that, would make it come true in his heart the way he might have achieved lucid dreams if he had not been turned out onto the streets by misfortune before he could identify that potential. If the killer could make connections between his dreamspace and the city, then Richie could too. Right now though, the killer and the stress of the inevitable clash with him was as distant to Richie as his fading aches and pains. This was a sacred place, unspoiled by fear.

The chimney, jet black, was the first thing to poke up out of the sea as the train rose on the floating rails Richie knew would be there. A red and black steam train, like the one Richie had a model of as a kid, idled there, quietly going chugga chugga and opening a hatch in its side. Smooth, comfy-looking velvet seats waited inside, but a gangplank had not yet bridged the train to the waiting station. Richie looked up at the train curiously, and saw that the open driver’s box at the wheel was occupied by a figure cloaked in electric blue robes patterned with stars and crescent moons, an unseen face squashed down into the popped collar and capped by an obscuring pointed wizard’s hat, matching the cloak.

“Do you have your ticket?” the Conductor asked.

Richie blinked. No one had said anything about a ticket. He searched his pockets.

“Not money. It means little here.” the Conductor explained, the voice more like an echoing rogue thought in Richie’s mind than an actual physical sound.

“How do I get a ticket?” Richie asked.

“You can make one. The materials are already inside you.” the Conductor said.

“I don’t understand.” Richie numbly shook his head.

“This place is always here, but only few choose to look. Everything has a cost, even if that cost is never known, just like every person whose path you’ve crossed is affected by that connection for it, and they in turn are affected by having passed you. These tracks, like those chance encounters or quiet thoughts, connect one state of being to another - any, even, if you can afford the price. What have you learned? What epiphanies do you have that are of equal value to the distance to your home, and your friends? What are you willing to realize to make it there?” the Conductor asked.

Richie drew blanks. “That’s not fair, I just got here. What do you want me to say or acknowledge?”

“I can’t decide that for you. Your perceptions and freedom are your own.” the Conductor shook his head.

“I don’t have time to be delayed any longer. Do you take I.O.U’s?” Richie said.

“...No.” the Conductor said. “Debts to memory aren’t something you should incur. Too easy to backfire.”

“Memory?” Richie repeated.

Everything he had experienced in Tide Town flashed through his mind - his arrival and defeat by Leon, his awakening in the hospital and official introductions to the man and his friend Kokumo, the shade attack, the desperate scrambles from junction to junction only to be suckerpunched and drained by the shade taking his mother’s form, the ascension up the Sniper Tower, the line in the sand they held, the revival of the sunken ship and the crew it took to the seafloor with it, the return of his runes, and ultimately the defeat of the deep one - and through it all, he couldn’t sift the pearl from the sand; he couldn’t grasp the discovery of his own strength as he had in the heat of the moment, dealing the decisive blow to the sea god. Forgotten was his vow to climb to the heavens, overshadowed by more concrete, immediate necessity - like his return home, and his reunion with Cuppy and the black wolf. The reunion with his friends, who were his only earthly attachments for now. His lofty ambition, strengthened in the heat of the moment and elevated by his mother’s memory, was subsided into the humble fog of his detachment. It seemed that his conscious, ego-driven desires that were clear on Earth were as ephemeral and difficult to grasp here as his unconscious desires were to comprehend in the waking world. As above, so below. In fact, the closer he came to remembering the final being - the Other that he and all things belonged to - the more he would forget Richie, and having been a single human with such finite memories and power.

Tide Town isn’t your responsibility. Leon seemed to echo in his head.

Richie had promised he’d bring help. Or had he? He couldn’t say for sure. Even if he had never verbalized that vow out loud, to throw away the memories he had of Tide Town now felt like it would be no less than a betrayal. Its denizens weren’t here to reassure him that he had done more than enough, and given them lasting hope. He looked to his dragon runes, coiling languidly about his arms.

You guys carried me, so it’s my turn to return the favor and get us home. I know I’m asking a lot, but I need you to hold onto memory - even if it’s just a little bit - of what we’ve done in Tide Town. It doesn’t look like I’ll be able to have my cake and eat it too. I’m entrusting my - our - memories to you. Protect them. he thought to his dragons.

As you wish. they whispered solemnly.

Richie nodded, and looked at the holy silver knuckles adorning his hands. “When I get home, these will just be pricey keepsakes. But even if I can’t remember these happenings with my head - I’ll keep their memory in my heart. I know I will.”

He looked toward the Conductor again. “That’s enough, isn’t it? For a ticket?”

“You choose to relinquish your memories of having come to Tide Town? If you make that transaction, all that has happened between your plunge in the city, and the moment you step off the train in it once again will be nothing more than an empty dream, as had been your first step into this world.” the Conductor warned.

“No. Not all.” Richie crossed his arms. “There’s no way this will ever be empty.”

The Conductor nodded slowly. “All aboard…”

The bridge was made, and Richie stepped onto the train.

…

As the steam puffed and the wheels rolled over the tracks, Richie looked back out over the sea. As he was right at the edge of memory, when the flooded backdrop of Blue Terminal would fall away from the tracks like a distant, shrinking blue planet in endless space, he saw a figure standing on the water’s surface. It was the man in the cobalt cloak, the one who had chided him after his first brush with the albino alligator. The Faceless Man. The Boogeyman.

Its empty hood watched Richie roll away, and it raised a pale, clammy hand to quietly wave goodbye.