Unreal City

by A. R. Meyering

  I anticipated the Wishing Tree to leave me feeling as empty as before. Instead, as Joy and Kyle scribbled wishes on scraps of paper, I heard a sound that was like hundreds of soft, slurred voices. My heart picked up tempo as I was assailed by a bundle of emotions, none of which belonged to me. It was like all the feelings, all the longing, aching, hoping, wondering, and hungering that people left by that tree, their wishes surging toward me. Powerful emotions wrapped around me, and my breathing grew laborious.

  Joy noticed my hand clawing at my throat and stopped writing. “You okay, Sarah?” she asked with a worried tone, and I tried to offer a convincing smile.

  “I’m good, but something just went down the wrong pipe.”

  Kyle scoffed, a cynical smile spreading across his face. “Hah. I think you mean that you’re experiencing pulmonary aspiration,” he said, raising his eyebrows as if this were common sense.

  I stared at him, deadpan, until his sneer faded and he resumed writing his wish.

  That night, for the first time since the day the police had come to the door with the news about Lea, I couldn’t sleep. Usually for me, sleep was a sanctuary of rest from my hyperactive twin demons of anger and depression. I ran to it willingly and fell into it effortlessly, but that night was different. I tossed and turned for hours, peeking up every so often to see Felix watching me.

  “Don’t you ever sleep?” I asked him around three in the morning.

  He prowled closer, looking thoughtful. “I can. Do you want me to?”

  “Well, yeah. It creeps me out how you just sit there and watch me. Quit that, will you?” I requested.

  Felix blinked his lantern eyes. “If you say so, Sarah.” He curled up and went to sleep without further ado.

  Feeling a bit more at ease, I lay my head back on the pillow and sighed. I was beginning to slip away when the sense that Felix was watching me returned. As I glanced over to check, a dark silhouette on the other side of my window startled me. I screamed as the blurred figure that looked like a man with antlers growing out of his head fled from my vision.

  Felix sprang awake, his gaze locked on where my shaking finger pointed.

  “Wh-what was that thing!?” I hollered, pulling the blankets closer to my chest. “Felix, go see!”

  The feline spirit obeyed at once, pushing his head under the curtain and peering out into the night. “There’s nothing out there,” he said after several tense seconds.

  “But you felt it too, didn’t you? There was something standing there. You had to have felt it.” My voice sounded like the shrieking breath of the wind whistling through a crack in the window.

  “I’m sorry, Sarah. I was sleeping.”

  I SLEPT THROUGH my class Friday morning, awaking without a hint of guilt but a great deal of anxiety. One day left. One day until I went back to Unreal City. One day until I was going to enact my plan to see my sister again, even if it was just a projection of my memories of her.

  I’d decided I would go through with it, though I’d say nothing to Felix about it beforehand. There were many things I found myself wanting to ask him, but every time I was on the brink of voicing them, a disquiet like the one I’d felt when I’d researched familiar spirits shut my lips for me. I was aware that the answers were there. I just didn’t want to know them yet. I didn’t think I could handle digesting all this new information at once, so I chose the peace that came along with ignorance, meager as it was.

  My afternoon class was almost unbearable. I spent the three-hour period doodling in my notebook, trying to render the scenes I had created in my garden on paper so I wouldn’t forget them. My artwork was less than amazing, and I gave up after I noticed that the bear looked more like a walrus. Maybe I’d commission Joy to draw them for me.

  The pent up anxiety in me decided to come out in the form of tapping my pencil relentlessly on my notebook until I got a dirty look from the girl sitting beside me, at which point I settled for tracing spirals over and over on the blank paper meant for taking notes. That was something I could draw. Spirals were easy.

  Class ended and I bolted from the building. In there, it had been stifling and I’d felt trapped. In there, we’d all been packed together like sausages sealed in plastic. Now I could break away, let the frustration and anger leak out.

  One. More. Day. One. More. Day. I repeated these three words in my mind every time my sneakers hit the ground. It became a mantra, until another thought rocked me.

  Why not tonight? What’s stopping me? The weekend’s here, and it’s not like I was getting a lot of work done anyway. I’ll give Felix my hair tonight.

  I stopped on the dirt path that was the long road through the woods back to Merrill, trying to think of a reason not to. As I was considering, a flashing of red and blue lights near the dorms of College Ten caught my eye. Suspicions aroused, I changed direction and slid down the fern-carpeted hillside to get closer. Even from hundreds of feet away, I could tell from the growing commotion that something terrible had happened. Muffled screams came from a crowd gathering around a parked police car and ambulance. I craned my neck to see what manner of calamity had occurred, and caught a glimpse of a stretcher being unloaded from the back of the ambulance.

  “What’s going on?” I demanded of a tall, lanky student obstructing my view.

  He didn’t look down as he answered. “A body was found. I heard them say he must’ve been there since last night. I can’t believe it took this long.”

  “What?” I breathed, pushing past him. I had to know exactly what had happened, who had died, and how. I didn’t understand why it mattered so much then, but I’ve come to realize that it was my built up regret that I hadn’t been there the night they found Lea, Stephen, and Isaac. I’d played out that scene in my head so many times, finding it suitable punishment for my absence. The concerned onlookers, the police sirens. I’d imagined in that scene that I would push through the crowd to find her there, and I suppose that rehearsed frustration had been enough to make me struggle forward when this uncannily similar incarnation presented itself.

  As I peered around a girl’s shoulder, I steeled myself, bracing to see any number of awful things—blood, burn wounds, or broken bones. Nothing could have prepared me for what it actually was.

  My stomach tightened as I caught sight of the dead boy’s face, sallow yellow in color, the skin tight but bloated underneath. His lips and eyelids were tinged blackish-blue and a stillness that could only be death had settled over his body.

  Something akin to a very intense form of carsickness gripped me, and I felt a scream bubble up from inside and escape. I grabbed at the girl nearest to me, unable to control myself.

  “Get off me!” she grunted, trying to break free from my grasp as I clung tighter.

  The paramedics were trying to block the scene from view and disperse the crowd, but I could see it all. He had been laid behind a building in the center of campus. They lifted the dead boy’s body, and the sight of his stiffened and lifeless limbs turned my grip vice-like. The girl was screaming, and her friend pried me off with tremendous effort as tears slid down my face.

  “How did he die?” I gasped, the reeling in my head causing me to stumble. I could feel the gaze of the crowd shifting to watch me now. “How did he die?” I repeated louder, my tears flowing with abandon.

  No one answered, but I didn’t care. All I could do was stare. The meat of his throat was bulging as if it were saturated with water. And dear God, that skin. Yellow. Black. Blue. The form of a human being desecrated by the onset of rot already creeping in. But it wouldn’t have acted this quickly. His lips must have turned black as he died.

  “HOW DID HE DIE?” I shrieked, looking from face to frightened face, pleading with them, begging them. I reached out for another arm to hold onto and everyone backed away. A policeman was coming toward me, unsmiling. “God, someone tell me! PLEASE!”

  My unbalanced behavior elicited a reply at last: “He drowned!”

  FROM THAT MOMENT until I woke
up hours later in the Student Health Center with a pounding headache, my memory is blank. Disoriented, I cried out, and a nurse came by to inform me that I had fainted. I tried to get my bearings, and noticed with horror there was an IV drip in my arm.

  “Did you drug me?” I demanded.

  “Just something to calm you. When they brought you in, they said you were pretty frantic. Now could you answer these questions for me, sweetie?”

  She went on, exploring my health history, asking personal questions and recommending I speak with the mental health counselor. I didn’t pay attention. My thoughts were haunted by the memories of the drowned boy. He’d been found in the middle of campus. Miles away from any bodies of water. Just the way Lea had been left.

  I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t know who to call or who to talk to. Should I alert the police? Wouldn’t they connect the cases? How could this be happening here, of all places? Sure, Monterey was close, but it was too much of a coincidence. It sickened me to entertain the thought that I was somehow connected.

  After I’d passed the gauntlet of paperwork and prying queries, I requested to be released on the basis that I was not ill, and the staff complied with obvious reluctance. I fled the health center, finding myself wanting to talk to Felix more than anyone else. Perhaps because he was my own imaginary friend, and being completely insane himself, I knew he wouldn’t judge me. Or abandon me. I still don’t know why that thought comforted me that night.

  Students were hanging out in the hall, but went silent as I trudged by, my head down and hood up. I couldn’t get the image of the dead flesh of the boy out of my mind. It was stuck there, following me like the moon follows a traveler making his way down the road in the night.

  Lea probably looked like that when they found her. Just like that. Black. Yellow. Blue. I tried my best not to apply that condition to the memory of my sister’s face.

  I burst into my dorm room and shut the door behind me to find Felix sitting placidly on my bed, staring at a corner of the ceiling. I was about to speak when something about that corner caught my attention, too. The longer I looked at it, the dizzier I felt, though there was nothing there to be seen. I felt a rising sense of anxiety—a feeling of something buried, something trapped. I shook this off and brought my attention back to the matter at hand.

  “Felix. Someone on campus died today. They were murdered. In the same way my sister was,” I informed him. I don’t know what I expected from him, but he only blinked.

  “Terrible news. I’m sorry to hear that,” he said, and sounded like he almost meant it.

  My breathing grew agitated, and I fiddled with my necklace in frustration. I was pacing now, back and forth across the small space between the desks and the bunk beds.

  “Does this feel like it’s connected to you? ‘Cause it does to me,” I cried, unable to articulate the core of what I was feeling but trying to get some sort of ball rolling in my mind.

  “Could be. I can’t say for sure. I wasn’t there,” Felix said, and I glared at him.

  “Are you always this goddamn vague?” I retorted and his needle-lined grin widened, pleased by my aggravation.

  “Constantly and without exception,” he cooed.

  I sighed and tried to think of what and how to ask him, remembering Mama Stella’s warnings about the familiar spirits. After a moment of going over her words in my head, something echoed at the back of my mind: It’s what the man in the library call it, so most of us Cunning Folk come to call it that too.

  “Felix, who did Mama Stella mean when she talked about the ‘man at the library?’”

  Felix perked up. “One of the Cunning Folk. His garden looks like a library and he seems to be well-connected with the others,” he told me. “He’s not very friendly, but he never turns down a conversation with one of the Cunning Folk. He seems to want to study you people.”

  “And if I told this man what was happening to me, do you think he might be able to help me?” It was a shot in the dark, but at least it was a shot.

  “Perhaps, if he’s in. He seems to be around most of the time, though, so chances are pretty good.” Felix’s whine was starting to sound hopeful, and he studied my hair with wide eyes.

  I was about to give it to him when another thought occurred to me. “Can—can I die in Unreal City?”

  “No. Not your body, anyway,” Felix said and I raised an eyebrow.

  “What do you mean? Tell me everything I need to know to stay safe there,” I commanded, hoping that wording was proper enough to get a straight answer out of him.

  “You cannot be physically harmed there, but when you are in another garden, you are under the complete control of the one who owns it. Should the person catch you and hold you there, and should they be a particularly unsavory person, they could submit you to any number of awful things. And they will all seem real. And you will remember them as real. If they are especially creative, you could lose your mind. Whatever psychological stress your consciousness endures there will remain when you return to this side of reality,” he explained and the pit that was sinking in my stomach plunged deeper.

  “But that’s rare, right? That hardly happens, I’m sure?” That might’ve been the reason the boy who’d wandered into my garden had run when he first saw me. He had no idea who I was or if I could be trusted.

  “Not as rare as you’d think. That City does strange things to people’s minds. The combination of human nature and unchecked power generally produces disaster,” Felix said, delighted at the notion.

  So if I did go see the man at the library, I’d have to hope he was of the sane and merciful variety, and if I did choose to create a shade that looked like my sister, I’d have to hope it wouldn’t be the first step down the road to total insanity. I sank into the computer chair, tormented by the possibilities of these dangers.

  But I had come this far. Stopping now seemed impossible.

  “All right, Felix,” I said, reaching for the scissors in my desk drawer. “Let’s go back.”

  GETTING THERE WAS easier this time. I didn’t get stuck on my way up. The brief period of blankness separating the two sides of reality faded without delay and I awoke in the autumnal forest I’d created during my last visit to Unreal City. The heightened perception flooded back into my mind, and I flexed my fingers, shuddering at the unlimited possibilities. As I looked around the clearing with its whispering shower of red and orange leaves, I itched to start weaving different fantasies, but held off for now. I didn’t know how much time I had, so they would have to wait until I saw the man at the library. Lea would have to wait.

  I ran my fingers over the lock of shortened hair I’d clipped. Felix trotted to my side, a spring in his step. He’d swallowed it up so voraciously, almost nipping my fingertip in the process. I stepped in the direction of the lane, stopping when I saw Felix bristle. His eyes grew wide.

  “Someone’s coming. Someone knows you’ve just arrived,” he told me, and I looked wildly around, waiting for my visitor to become visible.

  “Who is it? Can you tell?” I asked, creeping closer to Felix. “Felix, can you fight? Can you hurt people?”

  “I can, but only if you order me to. In this world I can trap or trick, and in the other I can injure or kill,” he explained, his confidence mixed with the nonchalant willingness to take a life both reassuring me and making my blood run cold. “But we won’t need to, right now. It’s Angus.”

  The face of the boy I’d seen before appeared over the top of the hill, his warm brown eyes studying me. We looked each other over until Felix broke the silence.

  “Hello, Aodh,” Felix called into the woods. The boy looked over his shoulder, a little panicked, but something he saw caused his shoulders to relax.

  “Hello, Pan. Or is it still Aoife?” asked a deep, resonating voice from the trees.

  “My name is Felix now, old friend,” my familiar spirit said to the trees. “I have a new master.”

  “Yes, Stella told us about you,” the boy said,
and I was surprised to hear his accent was Scottish. “She said your name is Sarah. Is that right?”

  “Yeah,” I said, still defensive. “And you’re Angus.”

  “I am,” he said, sliding closer to me, his body language revealing he did not trust me.

  It struck me as peculiar how careful he was being. I wondered if I looked like the type of person who would try to harm a stranger. Looking past the boy, I realized who Felix had been talking to. On the trunks of the trees, a face had appeared in the wrinkles on the wood. It looked like a warping of the wood, but I could sense a palpable knot of energy humming around it. The expression in the tree was one of melancholy, but not quite pain; if it were a human face it would have looked thousands of years old. Hanging from the branches on either side of the face, two glass lanterns had appeared, both alight with a dancing blue flame.

  Angus looked as if he was trying to say something, but just couldn’t get it out. My annoyance threshold had been surpassed.

  “You know, I’m not a psychopath, okay? I’m not gonna hurt you, so you can nut up and stop quivering like a child already.”

  He started a little at my verbal assault. “You’re definitely not what I expected,” he stammered, running his fingers through his shaggy hair.

  I raised an eyebrow, refusing to let up on him. “And what is that supposed to mean?” I hated people who got under my skin, and he was definitely doing that. I hate letting them get away with ruffling my feathers unless I’ve given them a suitable ruffling in return.

  “I-I don’t know, I really can’t say. I’m sorry for running off the other day. I just—this place. Got to be careful, you ken what I mean?” he tried to appeal to me.

  When his defensive look faded away, he was quite handsome, in a rugged way. That irked me even more, and I narrowed my eyes at him.