by Tammy Walsh
I had no idea where I was heading.
The deeper I descended, the thicker and denser the mist became, until I was smothered by it.
I paused a moment and turned to look back the way I had come.
It was no good.
I could head back but there was no clear path, no sign I had even passed through it.
Trying to return to the spot I had begun was a lost cause.
I needed to push on because there was no going back.
Isabella needed me to push on.
And I’m not about to let her down.
I wandered through that curling mist for what felt like hours.
Was time different here? I wondered.
Was it different from the regular passing minutes of each day in the conscious world?
I sensed it was but there was no way to tell.
And so I pushed on.
And on.
And on.
Every step revealed another field of endless mist.
I began to wonder if I would ever get out of that place, or if I was doomed to exist here for all time.
Most of all, I feared I would never get to see Isabella’s face again.
I had descended into some form of internal hell without end.
I began to panic.
“I want out!” I said to no one in particular. “I want out! Let me out!”
I didn’t know who was supposed to be listening, if anyone was meant to be listening, and what could anyone have done even if they were listening?
But I had to do something.
I sped up and ran into the mist, consuming it stride by stride as I powered through it, certain I would come to its edge…
At some point.
I ran and ran and ran…
And still found no edge.
I shifted and bolted in a random direction.
Surely there was a way out of there?
I’d managed to put myself in there, after all.
There had to be a way out.
I came to a stop, puffing and panting, eyeballing the mist like it might attempt to infiltrate my body at any moment.
I gasped with exertion and cast around again.
I jumped, leaping like a performing dolphin as high as I could to peer over the mist.
I saw nothing but endless darkness that stretched beyond the horizon.
I was imprisoned.
A prison for my mind.
There was no escape because there was nowhere to escape to.
Or from.
I was in a snowglobe, traipsing on a treadmill that never ceased or gave way to anything new.
I fell to my knees.
“Please let me out of here!” I begged. “Please show me the way out! I swear I’ll never come back in here again!”
There was no response.
The mist continued to curl and the darkness didn’t respond.
I pummeled the plain floor with my fists and it took the aggression without any reaction.
I feared I would never see my darling Isabella again.
I would never see her smiling face or touch her soft skin.
I eased into a memory of us on the farm, hugging and kissing, exploring each other, uncertain about where our relationship might lead.
Somewhere?
Nowhere?
Nowhere now if I remained trapped in this abyss.
I distracted myself from that haunting idea and conjured the feel of her skin beneath my fingers as I gently stroked her, teased myself with the softness of her lips on mine…
I smiled.
Despite the fear, I realized the truth:
There was no way for anyone to take her from me.
She was a part of me now.
I felt her in my chest with that ceaseless pulsing light.
I would much rather she was out there than stuck in here with me.
At least out there she was free to live her life and be happy.
I didn’t want her trapped in this hell with me.
I opened my eyes and found a pair of white irises staring back.
I flew back and scrabbled across the floor on my hands and feet, on the fringes of the mist threatening to take that haunted face away from me.
I came to a stop.
I recognized that face, that delicious curl of her lips in an unmistakable cheeky grin, and the long hair draped over her shoulders…
It was Isabella.
Her features were perfect, but the colors were off.
She was pure white, hardened, and smooth as if carved from marble.
“Isabella?”
Her expression began to fade.
“No!” I yelled.
I got to my feet and rushed toward her.
I bent down to scoop her up but she broke apart in my arms and disintegrated through my fingers.
“Isabella,” I said. “No… Come back to me.”
But she was gone, merging into the mist once more.
I reached into the mist but it’d already taken her from me.
“Isabella? Where are you? Isabella?”
Wherever I looked, she wasn’t there.
I slowed down and wondered if my subconscious was working against me, torturing me.
Or was I losing my mind?
I had seen her, hadn’t I?
I didn’t only imagine her.
She’d been here, a beautiful statue that mimicked every aspect of my memory of her and—
That was when it struck me…
The expression on her face…
Her eyes shut, her lips pursed…
Leaning forward with keen expectation…
Exactly the way she had looked the first time we kissed.
It was my memory that created her…
The gentle curve of her face and the delicate wisp of her lips.
Exactly the way I recalled.
The memory didn’t exist until I re-created it.
I’d discovered a pathway that should have been there all along.
I focused on that same memory and glared at the mist, commanding it to turn into her beautiful body once more.
The mist swirled and began to turn in on itself, forming a smooth surface like porcelain beneath my fingertips.
Just the way she felt when I touched her.
The stroke of her cheek appeared beneath my fingers, turning solid and yet soft and pliable.
I marveled at it, like a fine sculpture by Ralphael or Michelangelo.
I concentrated and, from a single touch of my finger, the scene burst into life, spreading from that single point, like a ripple on a still pond.
It revealed Isabella first, then the fence behind her, a handful of cows in the field beyond, munching grass and staring morosely at the scene as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
And it had been.
Then.
Not now.
Now, it’d been fashioned by me.
It was the recreation of a real moment in time, a moment I treasured.
The mist filled in the other details, forming a porcelain reenactment of the farm.
It was incredible.
I leaned forward and brushed my lips against Isabella’s.
She responded how I recalled.
No, I thought. Her hands had been on my waist…
And just like that, her hands were there!
I gave myself to the kiss, reliving the moment again like a fine wine.
When I opened my eyes, I found her still there, smiling regally at me.
I ran a hand down her cheek.
I knew the moment wasn’t real, but I could still pretend like it was.
I imagined how many people had gotten trapped in their own moment of perfect happiness like this, dwelling on it every moment of every day for the rest of their lives…
I could feel myself easily succumbing to the same sensation but I pulled away and let the memory disintegrate.
My heart yearned for it to remain in place, but the moment was fle
eting, even if the emotions attached to it weren’t.
I summoned another memory, the next one that came to mind.
The mist reformed into a muddy verge on the side of a lake and the headlights of the pick-up—Isabella’s pick-up—illuminated the set like an important scene in a stageplay.
I lay unconscious on the ground with my head in her lap.
She cradled me close.
The scene was much smaller and more intimate than the last, the edges rough and difficult to make out.
Probably because I was mostly unconscious at the time, fading in and out as she nurtured me.
But there was one part clearer than the others.
Her face.
It glowed in the headlamps, similar to the porcelain it was now, glowing like an angel.
“Are you an angel?” I heard myself say.
I blinked at my insight even when I was half-dead or close enough to it to make no difference.
I remembered only scraps of this memory, like pieces in a puzzle that fit themselves together as I watched them play out.
Yes, I thought. This was how the scene played out.
This was how it happened.
I frowned.
But wait…
There was something else…
Something before this moment…
What was it?
Something I had said?
Something I had done?
The rain paused in its descent before reversing up into the sky.
The wind unnaturally fluttered Isabella’s dress.
I spoke, but the words were unintelligible.
Was time running backward?
Then the scene worked forward.
Isabella ran her fingers through my hair soothingly, making me ache to feel her touch again.
“The Shadow!” the injured version of me rasped. “The Shadow! Beware of the Shadow!”
The Shadow?
What did that mean?
I had no idea.
But it was clearly important to me at the time.
This was the last thing I remembered from my old life before amnesia buried its claws deep inside my subconscious.
But this couldn’t be all I remembered.
There had to be more.
What happened immediately before this?
The crash?
The fall?
The scene rewound once more.
I watched as Isabella dragged me toward the lake and I sank beneath the surface.
Isabella reversed out of the water and skipped back to her pick-up as I struggled on the lake’s surface.
The entire scene shifted on its axis.
It was a lurching movement that made me almost lose my feet.
I fell beneath the water and despite knowing better, I couldn’t help but hold my breath.
I watched as my figure struggled through the water and swam backward, toward the twisted metal hull of the plane I’d crashed and left at the bottom of the lake.
Down, down, down I went, before struggling back through a hole in the twisted wreckage.
I followed my earlier self down and joined him in the flooded cockpit.
He reversed into the pilot’s chair in the middle of the room and strapped himself in.
He peered around at his surroundings as if surprised to find himself there.
The water level lowered until the cockpit was empty and washed back through a hole in the hull.
The pilot took a deep breath as the entire ship shivered and shook violently, before slowly rising to the surface.
It broke through the top and a huge wave pushed the ship back up into the sky.
The ship flew backward, swerving to avoid Isabella’s pick-up, and reversed at a terrifying speed into the clouds and the awaiting storm.
The computer system wailed and the lights blinked.
My earlier version shouted something—in reverse, so I couldn’t understand it—and the ship shuddered even more violently as a bright light ejected from the side of the ship and out toward the dark clouds overhead.
It wasn’t a bolt of lightning that struck the ship as Isabella had informed me.
It was something smaller but just as powerful.
“Clint!”
It was Isabella’s voice, coming in loud over the entire scene again.
I was so engrossed in the scene I forgot she was still out there in the real world.
“Liam’s coming!” Isabella screamed. “He’s coming here right now! If you can hear me, you have to get up! Get up!”
“Hold on!” I yelled. “Not yet! I need to see what happens next!”
My ship reversed through the storm, the rain pelting the screens and making it almost impossible to make anything out.
Something flashed behind a storm cloud and a bolt of green light reversed into my ship.
Immediately before that, the pilot yelled:
“!eriF”
“Fire!” I thought.
This wasn’t a thunderstorm.
It was a battle between two ships.
Mine and…
My breath hitched in my throat.
Liam’s.
Or the thing that had morphed into him.
And if it morphed into him, it couldn’t be a creature of this world.
And that meant…
The technology I saw on this ship didn’t exist on Earth yet not because it had been developed by scientists holed up in a bunker somewhere, but because it’d been created on another planet.
By another civilization.
One more advanced than humans.
The blood drained from my face…
And that meant…
Did that mean…?
I was an alien too?
The scene froze and shuddered like a corrupted computer file.
“No, no, no, no, no!” I said. “I need answers! Don’t make me leave yet! I need to see more!”
The scene exploded into a frozen wall of snow.
The mist swirled about me in a torrential tornado and floated up into the sky.
I lost my feet and was sucked up with it.
I scrabbled to grasp at the mist to make it form the shapes I wished but it slipped through my fingers.
I spun end over end as I floated further and higher into the sky.
The darkness absorbed the mist’s dim light, turning it black.
I wound upward faster and faster until even the floor that’d been beneath my feet drifted so far away I could no longer see it.
Then I reached the apex of my ascent and began to lose altitude.
I spun end over end once more, this time descending and speeding up to crash into the mist below and the ground beneath it.
I stretched my arms out to brace for impact.
Those final few yards passed in the blink of an eye as I careened toward the floor and slammed—
My ass hit the seat and I jerked back, throwing my arms out wildly to reduce the impact of crashing into the floor…
Except there was no floor.
Only a dirty window that looked out on a layby somewhere in the country.
Red lights made long tails as a truck passed along the motorway beside us, making our pickup shake.
“Clint?”
It was the sweetest voice I had ever heard, from the most beautiful creature in the whole galaxy.
Isabella lurched forward and wrapped her arms around me.
“I was so scared!” she said. “I didn’t think you were coming back to me!”
I felt her warmth and peppered her face with kisses, savoring every last inch of her.
I tangled my fingers in her mousy brown hair and balled it into my fist.
I sniffed her in, subjecting myself to her with all my senses.
I knew how important these moments were, how much they mattered in both the small and grand scheme of things.
I was making memories and would record every moment to enjoy and savor later in case I ever found myself in that memory hole again.
I shivered.
God, I hope I never saw it ever again.
But there were more pressing matters—and questions—that needed solving:
“How am I in the cab of the pickup? And why are we parked by the side of the road? What happened to the motel?”
The story she told me was incredible.
I admired her for her quick thinking in getting us out of there.
If she hadn’t, I would never have woken up and might have been trapped in that memory hole for all time.
The thought alone sent a shiver through me.
I took Isabella in my arms and hugged her tightly.
“What happened to you when you were hypnotized?” Isabella said.
I wondered how much I should tell her, how much she was ready to learn, how much I really understood about what happened.
I told her about the mist and the memories…
I decided to leave the dogfight in the storm cloud for later.
Isabella
“How did he manage to track us down?” Clint said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
I looked at Clint and then turned away sheepishly.
I’d never been the best at concealing my emotions.
“Isabella?” Clint said. “Is there something you know about this that you’re not telling me?”
I shuffled my feet.
“Um…”
“Um?”
“I might have… accidentally unlocked something.”
“Unlocked something? What?”
“I’m not sure exactly. I was keeping lookout, making sure Liam wasn’t going to crawl up our asses… which was a total joke, by the way, because he ended up showing up anyway… and then… I… I…”
He braced my shoulders and smiled calmly at me.
“No matter what you need to tell me, I’ll never blame you for it.”
I looked up into his eyes, my eyes shimmering with tears.
I wiped them from my cheeks and nodded.
I filled my lungs and let it out in a single long breath.
“I was keeping lookout when Liam appeared. But right before that, I was thinking about you and me and the amazing memories we have together—even after just a few days—and I felt this pulsing light in the middle of my chest. It feels sort of like an umbilical cord. I don’t know what it is or what it does but it connects us somehow. I bet if we split up and you went into a maze I could find you easily without making a single wrong turn. I’m not sure how much better I can explain it than that.”
“You don’t need to explain it any better. I know exactly what you’re talking about.”