by John Wilson
“Sure. I’d like that. Thanks.”
“I’m not sure you should thank me, but it’s probably better to have some idea of what’s going on than to be totally in the dark.”
“It’s certainly less scary.”
“Perhaps,” Cate said. Before Howard could ask her what she meant by that, she squeezed his hand and then let go. “Don’t forget to put Bes under your pillow.”
Howard almost made a stupid comment about the tooth fairy, but Cate’s serious expression stopped him. “Thank you for explaining everything,” he said instead. “I’m going to have to think about it all. Visits to other dimensions will take a bit of getting used to. Still, it’s been cool to hang out with a witch.”
He was rewarded with a smile and a punch on the shoulder.
“Adept,” Cate corrected. “Sleep well.”
Howard stood and watched as she and Heimao disappeared into the darkness. The idea of spending Saturday with Cate thrilled him. She was very weird, and he wasn’t certain he believed everything she’d told him, but he felt comfortable and safe when he was with her, and those feelings were increasingly rare these days. He shivered and turned toward his house.
“I’m so glad you’re home.” His mom hugged him the moment he walked through the door. “Your dinner’s on the table. Come and eat and tell me all about your day.”
“Just let me drop my backpack in my room,” Howard said. He was starving, so dinner was a good idea, but he wasn’t about to tell his mom what his day had really been like.
“Who’s the friend you were hanging out with?” she asked when they sat down to piping-hot bowls of chili.
“Just someone from school.”
“Invite him around for dinner one night. I like to meet your friends.”
“Sure.” Howard had no intention of telling his mother that his friend was a girl. She’d be picking out a dress for the wedding before he’d finished the sentence.
“So what did you two do?”
“We hung out at the cafeteria,” he said. And before his mother could ask more, he added, “Dad was good. He even said a few words.”
“What? What did he say?” his mom asked eagerly.
“They were just random words, Mom. They didn’t mean anything.” Howard couldn’t very well tell her what had really happened, but when he saw the disappointment on his mother’s face, he added, “Dr. Roe thinks it’s a very good sign. He called it a breakthrough and said it was common in cases like Dad’s for a recovery to begin this way.”
It was stretching the truth a little, but Howard was happy to see how his mother immediately brightened up.
“That’s wonderful news. I’ll go out and visit him tomorrow. Maybe he’ll be able to come home soon.”
To keep his mother from getting totally carried away, Howard quickly asked, “How was your meeting?”
It was an old trick he used to sidetrack his mom, but it never failed. And while normally Howard didn’t care about his mother’s flaky groups, his interest in things different and weird had increased dramatically in the past few hours.
“We learned about the universal life stream, which in our world takes the form of the honeybee,” his mom said. “Did you know that the ancients in Atlantis used the honeybee as the symbol for the sun god Solareh? Hardly surprising, since honey bees are the purest form of solar angelic energy in our world.”
Once his mom got started, she needed nothing more from Howard than an encouraging nod between mouthfuls of chili. Normally he zoned out when she got going about her latest fad, but this time he realized that what she was saying was not any weirder than what Cate had told him that afternoon. Even so, Howard was more inclined to believe that his new friend was a witch who could access other dimensions than that his mom’s group was able to communicate with inhabitants of the lost island of Atlantis. Maybe if his experience in the basement had involved light and honey bees instead of darkness and terror?
“Of course, that’s just mainstream cosmic harmony,” his mom was saying. “Our group in Aylford broke away many years ago. Our full name is the Cosmic Harmony of the Light of Atlantis and the Nine Dimensions—Aylford Chapter—the CHLANDAC.”
Howard nodded, awed by the name and the idea that there was such a thing as mainstream cosmic harmony.
“We understand the Atlanteans,” his mom continued happily. “They could travel cosmically to distant stars and between the different dimensions.”
This caught Howard’s attention. “They could travel to different dimensions?”
“Oh yes.” His mom beamed at her son’s sudden interest. “There are some places on earth where the barriers between the dimensions are thinner: Atlantis before it was destroyed; Göbekli Tepe in Turkey; Nazca in Peru; Callanish in Scotland; the City of Masks in China; and, of course, Aylford.”
“Aylford?”
“Absolutely. There’s a lot of cosmic power right here, all around us. If we could access the ancient knowledge, we could even travel back and forth through time. Sometimes I dream of finding The Golden Mask in an old bookstore somewhere.”
Howard choked on a mouthful of chili and collapsed in a fit of coughing.
His mom leaned over and patted him on the back. “Are you all right, dear?”
“The Golden Mask?” he gasped out eventually.
“Yes. Walt—he’s the leader of the CHLANDAC—says The Golden Mask was the most important book to the Atlanteans,” his mom told him. “Of course, it would be a translation. The original would have been written in Enochian—that was the Atlantean language—or maybe even something older than that. Anyway, it was copied into many different languages over the ages. It was lost centuries ago, but we all dream of finding a copy somewhere. That would be so thrilling!”
“Jinse de mianju,” Howard couldn’t help whispering under his breath.
“What, dear?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“The Atlanteans had many ancient books of spells, and their high priests knew which ones to recite so they could journey back and forth at will. Apart from fragments, they were all lost long ago. The names were in old languages, and I’m not very good with languages—unlike your father. He can read books in French, Spanish, Latin. He even knows some Russian, I think.”
His mother went off on a rambling tale about how Howard’s father used to go to archives around the world to read old documents for his archaeological research. But her son wasn’t listening. He was wondering how it was possible for his mother’s weird friends to know about the same book he’d been told to read by Madison and his father and that Cate knew as a lost work written by Adepts. Was there a link, or was it all just coincidence?
“What dimensions could the Atlanteans visit?” Howard asked.
“There are nine dimensions,” she explained. “The medieval alchemists knew this, but we seem to have forgotten. The CHLANDAC tries to keep this ancient knowledge alive.” A wistful look came over her face. “Sometimes I think I was born five hundred years too late. How I would have loved to sit with the great magus Dr. John Dee in his alchemical laboratory in Mortlake and communicate through crystallomancy with the angels of the Enochian dimension.”
Howard shook his head to clear the jumble of words his mother had just thrown at him, then asked, “Do we know anything about the other eight dimensions?”
“We know a tiny bit about the Enochian through the wonderful work of Dr. Dee—even though almost all his work was destroyed after he died. Five other dimensions are alternative versions of our own world or worlds that existed or exist on Venus and Mars.”
She stopped talking, and her face sagged into an expression of unutterable sadness.
“What are the other two dimensions?” Howard prompted.
“It’s such a terrible tragedy,” she said. “In the last age of the Atlanteans, there were two high priests—Amshu, which means ‘light,’ and Claec, which means ‘dark.’ Amshu was filled with the bright energy of the sun, but Claec followed the darker forces o
f the moon. In an attempt to increase his power, Claec journeyed to those last two dimensions. They were places that priests in a time ancient even to the Atlanteans had decreed were never to be visited. From those hellish places Claec unleashed horrors that destroyed the gentle Atlantean civilization. All that wonderful truth and knowledge lost.”
Howard’s mom seemed to have wandered away from talk of The Golden Mask. Howard tried to steer her back. “So if the Atlanteans were destroyed and their books lost,” he asked, “how does your group know so much about them?”
“A few traders and travelers survived the cataclysm, and they wandered throughout the world, telling tales of their vanished continent. Of course, the tales have become horribly corrupted over the centuries, but the ones that were written down long ago may contain a germ of truth. We must be careful though.” She looked at Howard seriously, as if she were telling him to wear his helmet when out on his bicycle. “It was not just the solar knowledge of Amshu that was preserved. Some of the survivors were followers of Claec, so there are dangers in the knowledge too.” She closed her eyes and concentrated. “We learned an incantation this evening.”
Filleadh abhaile.
Duisg.
Filleadh abhaile.
Duisg.
His mom opened her eyes and smiled at Howard as if this was supposed to mean something. When he looked blank, she said, “It’s a charm that will protect you and get you home from wherever you are.”
“Wouldn’t a taxi be easier?” He couldn’t help himself. His mom had looked so serious as she chanted that nonsense.
“Very funny,” she said. “I thought you were interested.”
“I’m sorry, Mom,” he said. “I am interested in the Atlanteans and their culture, and I’m glad you have something to protect you from…Claec.”
“Thank you.” His mom brightened again. “Of course, the only true way to understand more about the Atlanteans is through the CHLANDAC. You should come along to a meeting.”
This was a step too far. “I’ll think about it,” he said.
He had no intention of joining his mom’s group, but he would talk to Cate about all this and find out if there was a link to what she knew. Maybe what his mom had said could help them find a way through to his father’s hidden mind.
Standing up from the table, Howard said, “Thank you for sharing all that stuff. It really is fascinating, but I’ve got a history essay due on Monday. I should get started on it.”
“Okay, sweetie.” She began to pile up the dinner dishes. “Don’t forget to invite your friend around for dinner soon.”
Howard smiled at an image of Cate at the dinner table, dressed in her goth outfit and telling his mom that she was turning into a platypus. Actually, his mom would probably be totally fine with the other dimensions/witch thing.
“Okay,” he said over his shoulder as he retreated to his room.
Instead of firing up his computer, he sat and thought about what his mom had said. Her group was flaky, for sure, but the similarities to all the other stuff he’d discovered that day were striking. Howard looked forward to talking to Cate about it the next day.
As he sat staring at the top of his desk, the bouncy little incantation his mom had told him ran insistently and annoyingly around his brain.
Filleadh abhaile.
Duisg.
Filleadh abhaile.
Duisg.
Without knowing what language it was in, let alone how the words were spelled, there was no way to look up what it meant. Howard pushed it to the back of his mind and went over all that had happened that day. The day before, his only worries had been a few disturbing dreams and the complexities of daily life at school. Today he had met an extraordinary person, and she had turned his world upside down.
No, that was not quite true. The inexplicable things that had happened to him would have happened even if he had never met Cate. In fact, she had helped him a lot. He shuddered at the thought of experiencing the horror of the basement without her calm support. Howard didn’t know what was happening, but it seemed there were only two choices: either he was going insane, like his dad, or Cate’s story about other dimensions was at least partly right.
The former was the explanation any normal person—or any doctor—would go for, but it terrified him more than being in the tunnel had. And it didn’t explain the physical evidence he had brought back from the experience.
On the other hand, to accept all that Cate had told him, he’d have to completely rethink the world he lived in and almost everything he had ever learned. Howard smiled at the thought of joining his mom’s group—communicating with ancient lost civilizations, exploring other dimensions alongside reality, accepting the idea that some people can be in two dimensions at once and that monsters that can control dreams. Howard would have to be insane to believe all that, wouldn’t he?
He sighed. Maybe a good night’s sleep would help him see things more clearly. He dug Bes out of his backpack.
“Will you keep my dreams away?” he asked.
Bes just smiled as Howard slid the small idol under his pillow.
AYLFORD
AN INVITATION
Bes kept out the bad dreams but let in the good, so the first one Howard had was a world away from the darkness he’d become used to. He was cheerfully walking through Aylford on a delightful sunny day. There was nothing in the world to worry about, and he was so happy he felt he could fly. Thinking about it, he decided he should be able to swim through the air just as he could swim through water. His hands grew bigger and flatter, and as he began to sweep them around as if he were swimming the breaststroke, he slowly lifted off the ground. By moving his arms faster and kicking his legs, he gained height, sped up and learned how to swoop and dive.
It was a superb, glorious, sublime feeling, and he soared high into the atmosphere, banking, spiraling and wheeling between puffy white clouds. Aylford looked tiny below him, and he could see the cliffs of the coast and the white swell of the ocean waves to the west, as well as the dark forested landscape of the Black Hills and the spires of Arkminster to the east. He flew faster and faster, laughing wildly as the fresh air rushed past his face and ruffled his hair. He shouted hello to a startled V formation of geese beside him and zoomed over the surprised, earthbound humans below. He spotted his parents walking arm in arm through the park beside the Bane River. They both looked up, smiled and waved.
Then Madison was flying beside him, swooping and diving elegantly. “Follow me,” she said with a laugh, and dove back toward Aylford.
Soon they were flying over C.D.W. High. There was Leon, driving around in his little sports car like a Lego character.
“Let’s scare Leon,” Howard suggested.
Madison just smiled and banked around over the other side of the school. There was Cate below them. She was waving frantically. For a moment Howard felt a twinge of guilt at being so happy with Madison, but he pushed it away. “Come up and join us!” he shouted. “It’s easy. Just like swimming.”
Cate shook her head. Her lips were moving, but he couldn’t hear what she was saying. It didn’t matter—he was having such a wonderful time that he never wanted to stop.
“Let’s see the world,” Madison said, taking his hand.
Holding hands didn’t prevent them from flying. As long as they kept moving their other arms, they soared higher and higher. Howard could see everything. The whole of North America was below him. Europe was across the sparkling blue ocean in one direction, and Japan and China in the other. He could see how Africa and South America had once fitted together, and in the hazy distance he could make out Australia and the white of Antarctica. It was incredible, fabulous. Howard felt like a god.
Madison turned to look at him. She was so beautiful. “Isn’t this wonderful?” she said.
Howard could only agree. “It’s the best day of my life.”
“And mine. I hope you can come to the party at Leon’s this weekend. It’s the event of the year, and I�
��m really, really looking forward to getting to know you.”
“There’s nothing I would like more in the world.”
“Good,” Madison said.
Howard’s world was perfect—his dad had recovered, there were no more dark dreams of threatening dimensions, and he was not going mad or having a stroke. There was nothing to worry about, and he was going to the party of the year with the most popular girl in the school.
Still smiling, Madison let go of Howard’s hand and waved at him. He began to fall. As Madison became a smaller and smaller figure above him, Howard’s sense of blissful euphoria dissolved, and he hurtled through the air. He moved his arms harder, but he kept falling, faster and faster. He thrashed wildly, but his hands had shrunk back to their normal size. What had ever made him think he could fly?
Terror grew as he tumbled down. It was taking forever, but North America was growing, until finally it filled Howard’s view. Suddenly, Aylford, his street, his house—all were rushing toward him at horrifying speed. He wanted to scream, but he couldn’t. His dream had become a nightmare.
He hit the ground—and woke up, soaked in sweat, on his bed at home.
Howard’s arms ached, and he had kicked his sheets and blankets into a tangled pile at the foot of the bed. As the sweat on his body cooled, he hauled up his bedclothes, wrapped them around himself and wondered why Bes had allowed his pleasant dream to become a night terror. Then, in an instant, he fell back into a deep sleep.
Suddenly Howard was on the same terrifying beach he’d visited that day in the basement of the AIPC. He could smell the ocean, hear the waves breaking and feel the cold wind on his skin. He was dressed in his baggy sweatpants and T-shirt, immobile in the frigid air, shivering with more than the cold. He knew what would come next: the sickening, crawling noises of creatures edging toward him through the shallow water.
He looked up to see the white ship, now close to the end of the peninsula. Out in the ocean, the island with the mysterious ruined city and the threatening dark arch was still there, even larger than before. To Howard’s dismay, a horde of the disgusting sea creatures rose from the surf in front of him.