The World Between Blinks

by Ryan Graudin

  She pulled herself over the barrier, landing in silky sand. Jake clambered up after her, and Marisol used his life jacket to tug him over, grabbing at the straps and throwing her weight back to heave. Both cousins were breathing hard: inhale, exhale, terror, relief.

  They were safe.

  They were shipwrecked.

  “Oh, Jake . . .” Back at the dock she’d been afraid of getting caught, but that was nothing compared to what Marisol felt now. “What did we do?”

  He didn’t answer, going wordless the way he always did when something was too hard to talk about.

  “We’re trapped.” As far as Marisol could tell, they were stuck in the middle of the blue, no treasure in sight. She could see Folly Beach across the inlet. What was left of Morris Island was closer, but it was still too far to swim. “¡Vamos a estar trancados aquí para siempre!”

  “Not forever.” Jake walked toward the lighthouse door. It was nothing more than a gate, really, with bars and a lock that belonged in an old-fashioned prison cell. “Maybe we could climb up to the light and find a way to shine it to let someone know we’re here.”

  Up close the building looked even shabbier—filled with cracks and holes and dents, bricks crooked enough to crumble. But nothing moved when Jake shook the gate. The sound startled some birds, who spilled out of the nearest window, sailing off on stark white wings.

  Jake rattled the lock again.

  Marisol swallowed back the sob building up in her throat—the one that had been growing since yesterday, when the beach house’s emptiness seemed too much to bear. She’d give anything to know that she could stay there. To escape this island safely and have something of Nana’s to go back to each summer.

  “Any other ideas, Mari?” Jake’s tone was encouraging, and perhaps he was pretending not to notice how upset she was. “What would Nana do?”

  What would Nana do? She’d been out here before, after all. The thought helped Marisol breathe easier. This wasn’t the end of the world. It couldn’t be, if their grandmother had returned from it.

  “She would collect rocks to write a message in the sand for passing planes, or she’d hang the bright life jacket off the side for sailors to see. Or . . .” Marisol paused. A new feeling had just washed over her, tugging for her attention.

  There was something lost here. Something that needed finding. She knew because she was still shivering, but only in her fingertips.

  “Good thinking.” Jake began unclipping his life jacket. “I’ll hang mine on the Folly side, you hang yours toward Morris.”

  There was something buried by the door. The door! Just like Nana’s note . . . Marisol absently pulled off her life jacket and handed it to Jake, and then with her heart dancing in the roof of her mouth, she knelt down and started digging. For all her talk of treasure, the wish only now seemed possible. As if the next scoop of sand might reveal gold.

  What if there was something valuable here?

  What if the Berunas didn’t have to lose the beach house?

  Lose their last piece of Nana?

  Marisol’s fingers flared as she dug, urging her deeper.

  Shells, sand, more shells, more sand . . .

  Something shiny.

  It wasn’t gold but a key. When Marisol brushed it off, she found that there was an etched into the side. Its soft edges matched the map’s handwriting, curling like a pair of back-to-back Cs, as Nana’s always did.

  “Is that . . . ?” Jake blinked at her discovery. “How’d you find that?”

  The buzzing feeling had vanished. She’d never explained the details of her talent to Jake, just as she’d never told anyone else in the family. Not even Nana, though her grandmother had somehow known anyway. Whenever they walked the beach together she’d tell Marisol to “flex her magnet fingers.”

  Had she left this key for her grandchildren to find?

  It sounded like the fairy tales Victor teased her for believing.

  It sounded exactly like Nana.

  “The map said door, so I started digging beneath it,” she explained, and handed the key to him. “Jake, I think . . . I think this belonged to Nana.”

  He didn’t laugh at her the way Victor would have. He studied the key so intently his eyebrows almost collided. Then he pulled out the map and compared the two Xs—sure enough, they looked identical.

  The sight made Marisol feel better. Braver. As if Nana were standing there next to them.

  “Try unlocking the door,” she told Jake.

  When he did, the key fit perfectly and the gate opened with one easy twist.

  The two of them stared into the darkness, eyes struggling to adjust. Slowly, the lighthouse interior took shape: a wrought-iron staircase twisted up the pale brick walls. Rust had found its way in here too—eating some steps all the way through.

  “Does this mean there’s really a treasure?” Jake asked.

  “I hope so.”

  “We should’ve eaten Uncle Pierre’s biscuits when we had the chance,” he mused, peering up at the staircase. “Treasure would be nice, but what I’d really like to find up there is a bakery.”

  But Marisol knew better. Something was up there. The pins-and-needles find me feeling sparkled all over, calling her inside. Now that her vision had adjusted it was easy to see, and even easier to imagine what the place had looked like with a fresh coat of paint—Marisol could almost catch this sight in the corner of her eye.

  Jake started for the stairs. “We should try to reach the light, at least, to see if we can signal. Or find doughnuts.”

  The steps felt sturdier than they looked, though Marisol was careful to follow her primo at a distance in case the extra weight made a difference. She pressed down on each corroded metal ledge before she stepped properly onto it, feeling the crunch of sand beneath her sandals, the steps flexing a little.

  Their climb coiled like a shell’s insides—round and round. Jake called out whenever he came across a hole, which was good, because it took her an extra blink to spot them.

  “Careful!” he said from above. “This step is gone!”

  Marisol paused, but not because of his warning. The first window opened up across from her, and its view wasn’t at all what she expected.

  Palmetto trees swayed where there should be water. And beside these sat a house, with chimneys and shingles and a pristine picket fence.

  “Jake?” She gripped the railing, dizzy. The stairs felt more solid and then suddenly less, depending on where she looked. “Jake!”

  “Huh?”

  “Look outside!”

  A flop of blond hair appeared at the overhead banister. “Um, where did the ocean go?”

  The water wasn’t completely gone—the sea still sparkled through the window on the other side of the lighthouse—but it wasn’t where it was supposed to be.

  “I think we’d better head back down,” she said.

  The steps shook less as the cousins descended. Somehow the walls seemed just as shivery as Marisol’s skin.

  She’d never found anything as big as a house before.

  When they reached the bottom of the stairs and peered outside, the building was still there. It sat only a short walk away, looking like a dollhouse rescued from an attic and turned life-sized.

  “Whoa. . . .” Jake paused in the doorway. “Did it just drop out of the sky? Where did it come from? There’s supposed to be water here, not land!”

  “I don’t think we’re in South Carolina anymore, Jake.”

  The more Marisol looked around, the more she believed this. Nana’s hidden key was gone, along with the gate it had unlocked. And the sand. And the barrier. In their place was a stone staircase, which led down to a boardwalk, which then led into a neat yard with white flowers bobbing in the breeze. The blustery wind that had sunk the boat was no more, and though Morris Island seemed to have moved, it had also shrunk. Ocean hugged them on every side.

  This must be where the lighthouse keeper lived . . . but how could he have? Why was there l
and all around the lighthouse now?

  “Maybe the door Nana wrote about wasn’t the gate at all,” Marisol reasoned. “Maybe we slipped through a door into the past.”

  “You mean time travel?” Jake should have laughed at her, but instead he sounded interested. It was a little hard to mock the idea when a house and garden had appeared where only water was supposed to be. “There’s only one way to find out.” He cupped his hands over his mouth and shouted, “Hello! Anyone home?”

  Waves whispered.

  Palmetto fronds prickled the air.

  The curtains in the windows stayed still.

  “Guess not,” Jake said. “Come on! Let’s investigate. Maybe there’s something to eat down there, even if there aren’t any people.”

  There were no handrails to grip, but Marisol felt steadier once she stepped outside the lighthouse. She followed Jake along the boardwalk, noting every detail she could. There were no footprints in the surrounding sand—only marks made by birds. An old-timey car was parked nearby, but it didn’t look like it had moved in a long time. A chicken was pecking its steering wheel.

  They both stopped to examine the bird. Up close, it was clear the vehicle was completely rusted out, and the hen was nesting inside it.

  “Maybe she’ll give us a ride out of here if we get the engine started,” Jake suggested as the chicken clucked what was clearly a warning to stay out of her car. The porch’s rocking chairs tilted with the breeze.

  She smiled for a moment at his joke, but this place felt . . . creepy. If Victor were here, he’d make another joke about the place being haunted, the way he had with Nana’s house. This time he might’ve been right.

  “Jake, wait!” Marisol halted. “I don’t know if we should just walk up to the house.”

  “Why not?” Jake turned. Then his eyes went wide. “Um, Mari . . .”

  She turned too, and right away she knew why he looked so shocked.

  The Morris Island Light had faded. No . . . faded wasn’t the right word, but Marisol couldn’t think of a better one. Most of the lighthouse was gone, except for a few bricks floating in midair. Stray steps from the iron staircase hovered with nothing to hold them in place.

  It wasn’t a lighthouse, but the suggestion of a lighthouse, like a jigsaw puzzle just starting out.

  “We’re definitely not in South Carolina,” Jake said softly. “I don’t think we’re in the past either. Unless things used to float back then and they forgot to mention it at school.”

  Marisol looked to her right, where Folly Beach was supposed to be. But it was gone, vanished more completely than the lighthouse.

  This wasn’t some past version of their world.

  It was a different one altogether.

  Marisol and Jake waited for the Morris Island Light to un-fade, counting the bricks over and over to see if any reappeared.

  They didn’t.

  And they didn’t.

  Not even when the cousins climbed the front steps to where the lighthouse door should be. Marisol stretched both arms as far as she could, trying to find the key. Her fingers stayed dull. All she grasped was air. Jake tried leaping off the stairs, but whatever portal they’d entered through remained shut.

  He tumbled to the sand below, a sheet of it flying up as he rolled down a small hill, coming to rest on his back in the sunshine.

  “I’m okay!” he called up. “It’s okay! We’re okay!”

  The more Jake said the word, the less Marisol believed him. Tears began blurring everything. Nothing had been okay since Nana died, and this felt just as unreal. This was much worse than losing the dinghy.

  “We’re really trapped this time.”

  She punched at nothing, then sat, unable to hold back her sobs.

  “Hey, hey!” Jake circled the staircase, climbing up to her, still trailing sand. “Chin up! We’ll figure this out. I promise.”

  Putting on a brave face, like always. Marisol wished her cousin would admit how he really felt. The only thing worse than crying was crying alone.

  “All we’ve got to do is get our bearings. First thing I do in a strange place is study a map!” Out came the paper, edges more crumpled than before. It danced in the breeze after Jake’s unfolding. “Let’s see here. . . .”

  “That’s not here!” she sniffed.

  His finger landed on the . “This is.”

  The sight of their grandmother’s handwriting anchored Marisol: heavy but calm. Had Nana meant for them to find this world? Had she been here? The beach—with ribbons of sand rippling on and on—seemed too deserted to imagine it.

  “Everything’s inside out,” Jake announced. “There’s land where there should be ocean. Ocean where there should be land.”

  “This makes no sense,” she wailed. “Where’s Nana’s house, Jake? Is it ocean now too? Is this some kind of reverse world?”

  “We’ll figure it out.” Her cousin’s smile faded as he spoke, and though a moment before she’d wished for him to cry too, now Marisol just wanted Jake’s confidence back.

  She glanced back where the door should be. There was something new on the water past the lighthouse’s invisible walls. The longer she stared at the speck, the larger it got, until the shape took a clear ship form. The vessel looked like it belonged in a museum, with white sails billowing out in front, square-edged and stacked one atop the other, the sun gleaming off its dark wooden hull.

  “Someone’s coming,” she warned Jake.

  He peered over the map, eyes narrowed against the sun. “Pirates?”

  “I don’t see a skull flag,” Marisol said, relieved.

  There was a long strip of white along the bow, as if the name of the ship had been roughly painted over, but the crew milling about on the deck didn’t look particularly pirate-y. One of them—a woman dressed in a long pale gown—was waving.

  At this, Jake shifted his assessment. “Maybe they’re ghosts.”

  “They look pretty solid to me.” Solid enough to come to shore.

  Indeed, when the boat drew closer, its sails began to quiver and shake. The long tangle of ropes reaching up to their corners slowly slackened, letting the wind spill out. A huge chain rattled deafeningly as the anchor dropped with a splash, and then the boat was stationary, slowly swinging around to face into the wind.

  As the cousins stood watching, mouths open, a rowboat was lowered with pulleys, and the white-clad woman climbed down a rope ladder and into it, followed by four sailors. She took a place in the bow, and they sat down to fit their oars into the rowlocks on either side of the little boat.

  They were coming ashore.

  As the rowboat neared, Marisol could see that the woman in its bow was squinting through a monocle. She smiled and called out to the cousins, “Ahoy, foundlings!”

  “That sounds like something a pirate would say,” Jake whispered.

  Marisol’s heart started pounding when she spied a pistol in one of the sailor’s belts. Pirates or ghosts or not, these people were strangers. “Do you think we should run?”

  “We’re on an island,” Jake reminded her. “Without a ship or a magic door, the only place for us to go is in circles.”

  When the boat scraped into sand, the lady climbed out, hoisting her dress so it wouldn’t dip into foam, and marched toward them. “I do hope you haven’t been waiting long. Winds can get tricky in the World Between Blinks. They slip in from all sorts of places.”

  Marisol looked at Jake.

  Jake looked at Marisol.

  Neither of them could find anything to say.

  “Ah, forgive me. Where are my manners? I’m . . .” The woman trailed off, turning to one of the sailors by the rowboat. “Would you happen to remember my name?”

  “You had so many of them.” The man grunted and pulled his own monocle out from his pocket. It made his eye look like some starstruck planet. “Says here you’re the daughter of the US vice president Aaron Burr, who incidentally happens to be the villain of a very popular Broadway musical. You slipp
ed into the Unknown with the good ship Patriot and her crew in 1813. It was a cold January day—”

  “My name, dear sir! You are boring these children with such dross.”

  Marisol was anything but bored. 1813? That explained the woman’s strange accent and flowy dress, but it also opened up so many other questions. How was this possible, if they hadn’t time traveled? What was the Unknown? And what, exactly, was the sailor reading? What did he mean, says here?

  The sailor squinted through the monocle’s clear glass. “It says Theodosia Burr Alston.”

  “Ah, yes! Of course! Theodosia! That was my name!”

  Theodosia Burr Alston seemed strange and certainly forgetful, but now that she was up close, Marisol didn’t think she was dangerous. “Shouldn’t it still be your name?” she asked.

  The lacy edges of Theodosia’s neckline twitched as she shrugged. “We let the Curators worry about labels. They’re the ones who keep everything sorted: doing all of that dreary paperwork and situating new arrivals. They’re going to want to examine you two at once.”

  “Examine us? Hold on a moment,” Jake interrupted. “Where in the world are we?”

  “Yes, that’s right!” the woman said, beaming approvingly. “You’re in the World.”

  “The what?”

  “The World Between Blinks,” Theodosia explained.

  “The World Between Blinks?” Marisol repeated. “But what does it mean?”

  “Yeah, how do you fit a whole world between blinks?” Jake wondered.

  “Well . . .” Theodosia’s eyelashes fluttered. “Have you ever blinked twice in a row, quickly, and between the two of them—just for an instant—believed you saw something?”

  “Maybe?” Jake screwed up his forehead. “This one time when I was seven, Mom was working in Australia. And we were down at the beach playing pirates, and . . .” He paused, looking almost . . . embarrassed? Marisol had never seen his cheeks flush like that before, except from the wind. “I saw an old ship flying a Jolly Roger flag. Everyone laughed and said my imagination had gotten the better of me. But for a moment, just for a heartbeat, that boat was there. I knew it was there. Somehow. Magically.”