Keeping time, time, time,

In a sort of Runic rhyme,

To the throbbing of the bells—

—Edgar Allan Poe,

"The Bells"

1

It was now 5:54 p.m.

The moment Leslie passed the threshold, she found herself in the middle of an overgrown forest beneath a canopy of large trees overhanging her head. Moonlight streamed into her surroundings in jagged shards of chiaroscuro as she groped her way on sandaled feet. Shapes flitted by her through the darkness, and the crunching sounds of her own footfalls capered behind her like a stalker's tread. She fought the urge to turn and look for fear of phantom eyes leering at her when she passed, leering with intentions that struck drumbeats through her heart.

Then a howl arose from afar, somewhere up ahead towards her left, and the night woke up with a thousand eyes. More howls echoed through the night from afar, somewhere behind her to her right side, and the night stirred and breathed around her with every step she took.

A wave of goosebumps washed over her limbs, and she cursed.

All at once, the howls gave way to distant footfalls crunching on the forest debris, and just beyond her range of hearing was something else wafting on the whispers of the wind.

She halted, thinking of the clang of bells.

And with them came the half-heard silences in the nighttime breeze that interspersed the lulls, whispering wordless premonitions in the air. She walked on in hurried footfalls, crinkling dead leaves and dirt under foot, looking for a clearing in the trees or even just a gap in the canopy of fluttering leaves and swaying branches. And so, she walked and skipped and walked and skipped, peering up at the rustling canopy for big gaps of moonlit sky, as images of predatory wolf-eyes kept flashing through her mind.

"What time is it?" she said under her breath, wishing she had taken her watch with her. It was probably still early in the evening, but time tended to get weird in dreams without a watch or a timepiece to ground her astral senses.

For a time, she kept looking for a clearing of sky before halting at something in the distance.

Something like running water and maybe . . . crying.

"Hello?" she said. "Is anybody there?"

She paused when the crying stopped for a moment. When the crying resumed, she said, "Helloooo?"

The crying stopped for another moment.

A child's voice said, "I'm here."

"Where?" Leslie said, walking towards the sound of running water. "Are you hurt?"

"No," the voice said. "I don't think so."

"Tell me where you are, sweetie," she said, walking towards the sound and crunching through decaying foliage. "Just keep talking, okay?"

"Okay," the child said.

Leslie kept on walking, trying to peer through the moonlit darkness of tree trunks and overhanging branches. "You there?"

"You're getting closer."

"Just keep talking okay, sweetie?"

"Okay," the child said.

She kept walking, crunching over leaves and listening to the running water getting stronger in her ears, and spied an opening near a brook. And on the other side of that brook at the water's edge, where it pooled and widened into a gentle current, she saw a little girl with long dark hair, wearing what seemed to be a Sunday dress and skimmer hat.

She waved her hands, catching the girl's gaze, and said, "Hey, I'm over here." The girl stood up, and her eyes shimmered in the darkness. "Don't move, sweetie. Just stay still, and I'll come over there, okay?"

"Okay," the girl said.

Leslie walked along the margin of the brook, spying a narrow part of the brook a little ways downstream from where the girl was, and skipped over the running water at a single bound. She then hurried along the bank of the brook toward the girl.

"Hey," Leslie said, walking up and squatting down and facing the girl at eye-level. "Sweetie, are you okay?"

"I don't know."

"Are you lost?"

"Yeah," the girl said.

"What's your name?"

The girl paused for a moment, as if wondering if she should talk to this stranger, then said, "Auna."

"Okay, Auna. My Name is Leslie. You're not hurt, are you?"

"No," Auna said. "I don't think so."

Her words made Leslie pause, and when she got a close look at the little girl, she said, "What's wrong?"

"I'm scared!" And the girl cried again, wrinkling her brows, squinting her eyes full of tears, and grimacing her cheeks. "I don't want to be alone!"

"Oh, sweetie, it's okay. It's okay."

"No, it's not!" Auna said, pushing her away and wiping her eyes with the hems of her dress. "Please don't hurt me!"

"I won't, sweetie. I won't."

"But you might," Auna continued. "He hurts me when I cry, but please don't hurt me!"

Leslie gulped, feeling her heart skip a beat, and looked at the little girl. "Who hurts you?"

The girl said nothing.

"Who hurts you?"

Again, the girl said nothing.

"Sweetie, I won't hurt you, okay?" Leslie said. "I'll never ever hurt you."

"Even when I cry?"

"Even when you cry."

"Promise?"

"I promise, so it's okay," Leslie said. "Tell me who hurt you."

"Dad," Auna said.

"What does he do to you?"

"He pinches me," she said.

"When you cry?"

The girl nodded and said, "He hates me."

Leslie gulped, feeling her heart beating drumbeats in her chest, her heart going out to this little girl. "Why?"

Auna stayed silent, but tears trailed down her cheeks.

"Sweetie, I promise I won't hurt you, okay?" Leslie said, reaching out and wiping away the tears from her face. "You don't have to tell me if you don't want to."

But she said, anyway, "Dad hates me because of what I did to Mom. He hates me because I . . . I . . ."

And the import of the girl's meaning flashed across Leslie's mind like a snapshot of a cruel fate. Losing someone so close was hard for anyone to take, let alone for someone at such a young and impressionable age, only to face the bitterness of someone else for something she had no control over. So she kneeled down on one knee and hugged the little girl close to her, rubbing circles around her back to comfort her.

"I'm sorry you had to go through that," Leslie said.

"You won't tell Dad I cried?"

"No, I won't tell him. Listen to me," Leslie added, eyeing the girl in the face. "I'll protect you from him, okay? I won't let your father hurt you anymore, okay?"

The little girl paused for a moment, then reached out a hand and wiped the tears from Leslie's eyes, and said, "Did I hurt you?"

Her words broke Leslie's heart, and tears flowed from Leslie's eyes. She grasped the girl's hand and kissed it, then hugged her close, saying, "No, sweetie. It's okay."

She lied. It wasn't okay, not when the words of such an innocent little girl could cut her so, not when this girl's dread lurked on the edges of her words and capered on the tip of her tongue. But for this girl, Leslie suspended all pain, wiping away her own tears and then the girl's tears, and gave her a reassuring smile even when it felt like agony. And if she could, even for just the span of this very dream, she'd protect this girl from all things that hurt her so.

For the next hour and thirty minutes, she comforted the girl with reassuring words, till her words and her dream sequence faded into the oblivion of slow-wave sleep. And for a time, she lingered on the cusp of oblivion as words from an old poem filtered through her mind:

Lo! 'tis a gala night

Within the lonesome latter years!

An angel throng, bewinged, bedight

⁠In veils, and drowned in tears,

Sit in a theatre, to see

⁠A play of hopes and fears,

While the orchestra breathes fitfully

⁠The music of the spheres.

2

It was now 7:55 p.m.

Before she could make sense of these words, Leslie found herself in another dream sequence, accompanying the little girl along a yellow-brick path through the forest. The moonlight streamed through the canopy above their heads along the path, and a river of twinkling stars peered through the leaves and swaying branches, lighting their way as Leslie asked Auna about her family and friends. At first, Auna was reluctant to tell her, so Leslie introduced her own, starting with her daughter Colbie, then Colbie’s friends Kendra and Celia, and then Celia’s sisters Katherine and Madison. Leslie told her of their many misadventures when they were all little, especially with Celia and Colbie antics driving Kendra and Katherine and Madison crazy.

This seemed to break through Auna’s reluctance, but when asked about her father, she paused and just said, “Rubin,” and when asked about her mother, she paused and just said, “Bridget,” and started crying before wiping tears away with the hem of her dress.

Leslie dwelled on the name, ‘Bridget,’ feeling a sense of nostalgia wash over her at the name. She then got a closer look at the girl, who bore a resemblance to someone from her past, till she realized that this girl was referring to a brief acquaintance she had met years ago. So she apologized for making her cry and said, “Your mom’s name is Bridget? As in, Bridget Barton Wenger?”

Auna’s eyes lit up, and she said, “You knew my mom?”

“A little bit.”

Auna paused, as if wondering if she was lying, then said, “What was she like?”

Leslie thought of her words in conjunction with her first and only meeting with Bridget Barton Wenger seventeen years ago when she had asked to join the Sisters’ Brigade, but Leslie didn’t want to dig up painful memories, so she said, “I only met her once. She was pregnant at the time, but she was a strong woman, and I’m sure you’ll grow up to be as strong as her some day.”

For some reason, Auna stayed silent, but when Leslie asked about Auna’s friends, she got a different reaction. Auna lit up with a smile, and Leslie wondered at Auna’s imaginary friend as she went on and on about her with the imaginary games they played, as though they were more than just friends—more like sisters.

During Auna’s account of her imaginary adventures, Leslie remembered to ask and said, “What’s your friend’s name?”

And like before, Auna paused, as if wondering if she should tell this acquaintance of her mother’s the name of someone so close to her, then said, “Alice.”

Leslie noted the girl’s one-word answers to her questions about names (the names of her mother and father, as well as her imaginary friend) and thought of the reason why. Names singled out who people were, so speaking someone’s name was a kind of invocation. And knowing someone’s name (even just the first name) gave the knower power and influence over the one bearing the name, such as parents giving their children given names, or women adopting the surnames of their husbands in marriage, or strangers introducing each other’s names to become acquaintances and later friends. Yet Auna’s reticence raised goosebumps on Leslie’s forearms, as if her friendship with this “Alice” left the girl at a disadvantage somehow.

“Did Alice ask for your name?” Leslie said, feeling her heartbeats quickening at the hunches churning like knives through her stomach, wanting yet fearing to know.

“She knew my name,” Auna said, but said no more.

Leslie paused when a chill tingled through her stomach, but she still couldn’t pinpoint its source. “Did you ask for her name?”

“She introduced hers first.”

Leslie stopped at this detail and grabbed her hand, looked at the girl before her, and said, “Did she do anything to you?”

Auna remained silent, shaking her head and looked up at the older woman with curious eyes and said, “What do you mean?”

Her question was a tell of something far deeper than Auna was letting on, and as far as Leslie was concerned, she had a hunch that Auna’s imaginary friend had done something.

“Did she make any promises if you did something?” Leslie said, rolling more questions through her head. “Or did she—”

She stopped herself short when a breeze of howls rustled through the forest, coming closer on silent footfalls over the forest floor, their huffs closing in around them yards away from the moonlit yellow-brick path, their shapes like hallucinations somewhere within the curtain of shadowy woods. Yet their howls never approached them, only ran past them to a different animal sound up ahead of them.

“Stay close,” Leslie said, gripping Auna’s hand in a firm grasp and walking at a brisk pace down the yellow-brick path in the opposite direction, looking out for the flash of glowing predatory eyes and wishing Colbie or Celia were here. Either of them could teleport Leslie and Auna out of here in an instant, but they were nowhere in this dream sequence. She and Auna were on their own, but when Auna struggled, she said, “I know it’s hard, but we have to keep going, okay?”

But that didn’t stop Auna from yanking herself from Leslie’s grasp, halting the forced march down the path.

Leslie turned. “Why’d you stop? We have to keep going.”

“They won’t attack me,” Auna said, “but they might attack you.”

“What do you mean?” Leslie said, grabbing at Auna’s hand. “We have to—”

Growls resounded beyond the bend of the yellow-brick road ahead of them, growls that didn’t resemble any canine Leslie had ever heard. Instead, they sounded more like a tiger’s growl, but deeper somehow, like that of a lumbering bear. More howls rustled through the curtain of trees, again running past them to the source of the ambiguous sound—the growl of a tiger or a bear.

“What are we dealing with here?” Leslie said under her breath, tightening her hold on Auna’s hand, but her hand dissipated from Leslie’s grasp. Leslie turned this way and that way, but saw no sign of the girl anywhere. “Auna? Auna, where are you? Where did you go?”

Leslie cursed. She looked down at her hand, still feeling the warm tingling sensation of Auna’s presence lingering in her palm, so she said, “Oh Winds, show me Auna’s whereabouts. To the West, to the East, to the North, to the South, where is she?”

And she took a deep breath and blew over her hand as if she were blowing a dandelion into fluttering pieces. So out of the fluttering pieces of Auna’s residual warmth misted the Auna’s image in Leslie’s mind, but it dissipated in an instant, followed by a voice.

“She’s not yours, Leslie.”

Leslie turned behind her and saw Aaron Rancaster a few yards off with another girl, an older girl who seemed around Colbie’s age standing beside him. This older girl had bobbed hair, but when her gaze lingered on her face, the resemblance clued Leslie in on who she was. She took a step closer and said, “Auna, is that you?”

At the sound of her name, Auna manifested a gun in her hand, aiming it at Leslie’s head, and said, “Don’t come any closer.”

“Sorry, darling,” Rancaster said to Leslie. “This child here is a bit of a coquette.” Then to Auna: “Be more courteous to one of my old acquaintances, bambina. She did manage to find you for me, for which,” he added, facing Leslie again, “I am eternally grateful.”

“What did you do to her, you bastard?” Leslie said, her words steely and cold, all of her hatred directed at the ‘bastard’ before her.

“I have a heart, too, you know,” he said, then placed his hand over Auna’s gun and lowered the muzzle to the ground, dissipating it in her hand. “I only saved Auna from a ghastly predicament.”

“And how do I know you’re not lying?”

“Were you there when it happened?” Rancaster said, waiting for Leslie to respond, but she never did. “Can you make judgments on things you haven’t seen?”

“What happened to her?”

“It’s not for me to say,” Rancaster said, then raised Auna’s hand and kissed her knuckles like a prince from a fairy tale. “Auna here is a woman now. She can make up her own mind on how much she wants to say to a stranger like you.”

Auna said, “But, father, I don’t—”

“Go on and say what you need to say,” he said. “She’s the closest thing to a mother you’ve ever had, bambina, even if it’s just a dream. I’ll be waiting when you’re finished.” With that, Rancaster left the girl and walked off into a shrouding mist and disappeared out of the dream sequence.

Leslie ran up to Auna and found her crying and said, “What did he say to you?”

Auna stayed mute, but her brows scrunched up as if she were digging up words from an unhallowed grave, words she had been meaning to get off her chest since the day she was born.

“Auna, what happened?” Leslie said, placing her hands on Auna’s shoulders and looking in her eyes, and saw the light snuffed out like empt lamps. “What did he do to you?”

“He saved my life,” Auna said, “because my mom wasn’t there to protect me.”

“From who?”

“From my father,” she said, “from my real father.”

Leslie gulped at the implications of her words, words that dug through her insides like knives, words that opened the door to all kinds of atrocities. She thought of saying, ‘What did your father do to you?’ But with every pulse of her heartbeat, she knew. She knew the way she knew something had happened to Colbie this morning when she woke up at 5:10 a.m. in a panic, dragged herself out of bed in search for her phone, and called Colbie’s smartphone before Colbie and Celia and Kendra decided to go to the nurse’s office to talk to Connie Davis. She knew, even when Colbie tried to assure her that nothing had happened when she woke up, that something had happened, and she knew, even when Auna tried not to show her vulnerable self to a stranger like herself, that something had happened—something painful for anyone to bear.

“I’m sorry,” Leslie said, and hugged Auna close to her as though she were her own daughter, shedding tears for the tearless Auna. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there to protect you.”

“Why does my dad hate me?” Auna said.

“I don’t know, sweetie,” she said, “I don’t know.”

“Was it my fault? Was it because—”

“No, sweetie,” Leslie said. “Don’t ever think that.”

“Then why weren’t you there to protect me?”

Leslie paused on those words, feeling the weight of a crime she herself knew nothing of, a crime of absence linked in the mind of a despairing daughter between Bridget Barton and herself. She weighed the truth in her mind, took a deep breath, and said, “Listen, I’m not your mother, but I’m sure your real mother loved you more than you know.”

“How do you know that?” And the first traces of Auna’s humanity welled up in her eyes.

“Because you’re alive, and her blood beats through your veins,” Leslie said. “She gave her own life, so that you can live.”

That’s when Auna let go of her deadpan facade long enough for tears to trail her cheeks. When Leslie let go, Auna looked at the older woman’s face, wet with her own tears, and said, “If I was your daughter, would you have protected me?”

“Yes,” Leslie said.

That one word was all it took for the dream sequence to desynchronize, for the spell of bitter nostalgia to break and fall apart around them like shards from a broken dream that was never to be. Leslie lingered on Auna’s tear-stained face, blooming with the residual traces of Auna’s younger self.

“Will I see you again?” Leslie said.

Auna shook her head. “The next time you see me, I’ll be a different person. When you see me, when you see Alice, remember me as you see me now. Goodbye.”

And the image of Auna cracked and shattered into shards and dissipated into nothing, but her words lingered on through the doldrums of Leslie’s unconscious sleep. For a time, Leslie lingered on the cusp of oblivion as Auna’s words faded into another set of words from the same old poem filtering through her mind:

Mimes, in the form of God on high,

Mutter and mumble low,

And hither and thither fly—

⁠Mere puppets they, who come and go

At bidding of vast formless things

⁠That shift the scenery to and fro,

Flapping from out their Condor wings

⁠Invisible Wo!

3

It was now 9:56 p.m.

Before she could make sense of these words or the implications of Auna's goodbye, Leslie found herself in another dream sequence, walking along the same yellow-brick path through the forest in a daze. When she snapped out of it, Leslie realized she had been sleepwalking the whole time she had been in slow-wave sleep, her astral body wandering down bricks of yellow while her mind was off to the land of Nod.

She stopped along the path that had since widened into a yellow-brick road, like the one in L. Frank Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. By now, she had walked for four hours, and her feet began to ache with every step she took. She went off to the side of the road and sat under a tree growing beside it, took off her sandals and massaged her feet. After some minutes of this, she put her sandals back on and got up and stretched.

The thick curtain of woods around her had thinned, letting more of the moonlight in through the canopy of leaves and lifting the lugubrious claustrophobia of rampant foliage from her surroundings. The effect settled her nerves, but she still kept a lookout for wolves or those beasts that sounded like tigers and bears mashed together.

And so, for a time, she walked down the woods thinking about Auna's last words, that the next time she would see her, she'd be this other person named Alice. Was this Alice a different persona Auna had adopted?

While she dwelled on this thought, a movement caught her attention, and she waved at a faraway silhouette almost a football field ahead of her and said, "Hey, do you know where I am?" Then she yelled, "Hello?"

The figure stopped and turned.

And for a moment, Leslie thought she saw the girl who had left her and started running towards her. "Auna! Auna, is that you?"

But as she got closer, the glamor of Leslie’s thoughts drifted away like wisps of fog. Leslie stopped just feet before the figure, wheezing from an impromptu sprint, her perceptions clearing to reveal a face from the past. It was none other than Auna’s mother, Bridget Barton Wenger, a mere shadow of the spritely young woman who had wanted to join the Sisters’ Brigade seventeen years ago during their self-imposed three-year hiatus to start their families, with Ramona still recovering after giving birth to Kendra weeks before and Leslie and Lima both in the early stages of their pregnancies with Colbie and Celia, respectively.

At the time, after Connie had introduced Bridget to Leslie, Leslie had promised to bring Bridget (also pregnant) into their fold after everyone had finished their pregnancies and were fully recovered. As such, Connie had continued as the only active member of the group for about two months, till Ramona recovered enough to rejoin the Sisters’ Brigade on a regular basis. Then, after Leslie and Lima spent two months recovering from giving birth to Colbie and Celia in late October and early November, respectively, Bridget was the last one. Yet there were complications during Bridget’s delivery that resulted in the young mother losing her life soon after Auna was born in early December. Leslie and Lima and Ramona and Connie all attended her funeral later that weekend, and all three resolved to make Bridget their second ghost member, who shared that epithet with Amelia Hearn, their founder and mentor. But when Ramona died during a case three years later, Leslie and Lima called it quits and disbanded the Sisters’ Brigade as a group. . . .

"What are you doing here?" Leslie said.

"I'm looking for my daughter," Bridget said. "She was here some time ago, but she's gone again. Do you know where she went?"

“I don’t know,” she said, and stared at the wandering ghost before her. A pale cast had misted over Bridget’s youthful appearance. Only her eyes retained the vivid clarity of life, while the rest of her had sunken out of reality like that of a shade or even a shadow person, like a reflection through a foggy mirror. “Why are you still in limbo?”

“Don’t know,” Bridget said, and she raised her hands to touch Leslie, but they only passed through her shoulders. “If only I had survived, then . . . maybe it wouldn’t have happened the way it did. Maybe Ramona and I would still be alive, and none of us would have to—”

“We can’t change the past,” Leslie said.

“I know. By God, I know!” Bridget said. “Don’t you think I know that already? I can do nothing for my Auna, not as I am now, but I can still feel her heart beating in my breast. She’s alive,” she continued, tears streaming down her face, “but something has overtaken her. I feel her pain in every pulse, but I can’t be there to dry her tears.”

"Bridget."

"What happened to her?" she said, trying to grasp a hold of Leslie, but her hands passed through. "By God, what happened to my baby girl?"

At her question, Leslie lingered on the cusp of telling, wondering if she should tell her the gist of her suspicions even when she herself was not there to see it. In the end, though, she only said the truth: "I don't know, but I have my suspicions. That bastard husband of yours will pay for what he did to her—that much I'll tell you for certain."

Bridget paused at her words, and Leslie thought she had said the wrong words, but Bridget said, "Can you take me to her?"

And Auna's last words, 'The next time you see me, I'll be a different person. When you see me, when you see Alice, remember me as you see me now. Goodbye,' flashed through Leslie's mind. She looked into Bridget's eyes, trying to see hesitation there, but Bridget's gaze held firm.

Leslie said, "Are you sure?"

Bridget nodded.

So Leslie manifested an omamori charm in her hand and left it floating in front of Bridget’s face, then blew on the charm and let her full name imprint on the paper, then said, “Bridget Barton Wenger.”

The pale cast lifted from Bridget's ghost, and she regained her former life-like appearance before her death.

When Leslie saw this, she took a deep breath and leaned closer and put her lips to Bridget's and blew her essence into her, kissed her eyes and pressed her hand to her bosom, and said, "My voice is your voice, and my eyes are your eyes, and my heart is your heart. When I see her, you'll know."

Afterwards Bridget began disappearing into the floating charm, but she said, smiling through her tears, "Will you let me speak to her? I want to—"

And her voice and her heartbeats drifted apart and collected into the floating charm floating before her. Leslie took the charm in her hand and kissed it, making her name, "Bridget Barton Wenger," shimmer with a newfound hope.

"Don't worry," she said. "When I see Auna, you'll have your chance to speak to her."

And at those very words, the image of her daughter Colbie flashed through her mind like a premonition. Her heart skipped a beat, then went on beating as though a double premonition of both mothers (herself and Bridget) was beating through their hearts over the whereabouts of their daughters. And for a time, she lingered on the cusp of her daughter's whereabouts, her mind lingering on the cusp of oblivion, as words from the same old poem filtered through her mind:

That motley drama—oh, be sure

It shall not be forgot!

With its Phantom chased for evermore,

⁠By a crowd that seize it not,

Through a circle that ever returneth in

⁠To the self-same spot,

And much of Madness, and more of Sin,

⁠And Horror the soul of the plot.

4

It was now 11:57 p.m.

When Leslie regained her senses, she found herself in another part of the dream sequence, wherein the moon lingered in the night sky without a canopy of forest foliage shredding its rays over the yellow-brick road. And in her hand, she was grasping a silver cord and following it down these yellow bricks, on which she had traveled for the past four hours, into a road made of gray paving stones that lead to the outskirts of a harbor town overlooking a wine-dark harbor.

She followed the cord through the streets of the harbor town, empty of people and, as far as she could tell, empty of stray cats and dogs. Unlike the forest, where howls and other signs of life rose up in the distance, this place was like a ghost town, devoid of life except for Leslie walking alone. She wandered down the narrow streets and stairways toward the shore, where the waters of the harbor lapped against the boardwalk running along the water margin.

Following it towards the boardwalk and into the pier stretching endlessly into the harbor and out to sea, Leslie took a closer look at the cord in her hand and paused, where she stood at the entrance to the pier. Laced in its silver threading were faint strands of red and white twine.

“Whose cord is this?” Leslie said to herself.

She had no idea, at first, but the more she thought about Auna’s last words, the more she felt that it was Auna’s. She had seen people’s cords in their dreams before, but these other colors told her something else: those suffering from dissociative identity disorder had silver cords with other colored strands woven into it, as if their dream selves had other distinct personalities when they dream. Based on first impressions, Leslie wondered if Auna had some form of dissociative identity disorder.

Leslie pulled from these thoughts when shapes caught her attention, and she threw her gaze towards the pier, stretching towards the horizon, and spied two figures in the distance.

At first, she couldn’t make them out, even with the full moon shining, so she ran towards them, saying, “Hello? You two know where I am?” She stopped once she got close enough to recognize their faces, both wearing crinoline dresses, one red and one white. “Auna, is that you? Why are there two of you?”

Both manifested knives in their hands and pointed their blades at her, and the one in red said, “Let go of Auna’s cord.”

Leslie noticed that she was still holding it in her hand, then noted the one in red referring to Auna in the third person.

“Who are you?” Leslie said.

The one in white said, smiling in derision at Leslie, “Listen to her, missy, or you won’t get another chance.”

"Drop the cord now," repeated the one in red.

So Leslie dropped the cord and raised her hands, palms forward and open, wondering if these two were manifestations of Auna’s psychic barrier before she noticed something else. Behind each of their backs, she spied a cord attached to Auna’s silver cord, one red and one white. Her thoughts were confirmed, so she said, “I meant no harm, okay? I just want to know where Auna is.”

Both traded glances with each other, and the one in red said, “Why do you want to know?”

“Because I’m worried about her,” Leslie said, “and so is her mother. We both want to know if she’s okay.”

The one in white took offense and stalked up to Leslie, as if getting ready to stab her, but her counterpart grabbed her arm and shook her head, saying, “She hasn’t done anything yet.”

But she ignored her and said, "What makes you think Auna's not okay?" She then raised her knife and pointed it at Leslie's chest, a hint of bloodlust in her eyes, and said, "Answer carefully now. You're suspicious enough as it is."

Again Leslie thought of Auna's last words to her, to remember her as she saw her right then and there before her dream sequence desynchronized and fluttered into unconscious sleep. She wondered if she should let these two aberrations of Auna's personality in on her thoughts, then said, "Auna told me about someone named Alice, and—"

At that name, both doppelgängers charged her, but Leslie dodged and rolled far enough to avoid their attacks. She got to her feet and raised her hands and said through raspy breaths, "Look, I know it sounds 'suspicious,' but you have to believe me."

"Why the hell should we believe you?" said the one in white.

"How can an outsider like you know that name?" her red counterpart added.

"Unless," the one in white said, "you duped her in some way. Am I right?"

“Look, I don’t know what you’re thinking right now,” Leslie said, taking a stand and manifesting an omamori charm with Auna’s full name, ‘Auna Wenger,’ “but I can show you, and you’ll know.”

Leslie placed it on the boardwalk for her two skeptics to see and said, "Oh Winds, show Auna to my disbelievers. West Wind, East Wind, North Wind, South Wind, be my witnesses," and she took a deep breath and blew onto the seal as if it were a burgeoning campfire. Out of the seal arose Auna's image in a whirl of wind—

5

(It was now 7:55 p.m.)

Wherein Leslie said, "I'm sorry," and hugged Auna close to her as though she were her own daughter, shedding tears for the tearless Auna. "I'm sorry I wasn't there to protect you."

"Why does my dad hate me?" Auna said.

"I don't know, sweetie," she said, "I don't know."

"Was it my fault? Was it because—"

"No, sweetie," Leslie said. "Don't ever think that."

"Then why weren't you there to protect me?"

Leslie paused on those words, feeling the weight of a crime she herself knew nothing of, a crime of absence linked in the mind of a despairing daughter between Bridget Barton and herself. She weighed the truth in her mind, took a deep breath, and said, "Listen, I'm not your mother, but I'm sure your real mother loved you more than you know."

"How do you know that?" And the first traces of Auna's humanity welled up in her eyes.

"Because you're alive, and her blood beats through your veins," Leslie said. "She gave her own life, so that you can live."

That's when Auna let go of her deadpan facade long enough for tears to trail her cheeks. When Leslie let go, Auna looked at the older woman's face, wet with her own tears, and said, "If I was your daughter, would you have protected me?"

"Yes," Leslie said.

That one word was all it took for the dream sequence to desynchronize, for the spell of bitter nostalgia to break and fall apart around them like shards from a broken dream that was never to be. Leslie lingered on Auna's tear-stained face, blooming with the residual traces of Auna's younger self.

"Will I see you again?" Leslie said.

Auna shook her head. "The next time you see me, I'll be a different person. When you see me, when you see Alice, remember me as you see me now. Goodbye."

And the image of Auna cracked and shattered into shards and dissipated into nothing—

6

(It was now 11:57 p.m.)

But Auna's words and emotions lingered in the thoughts of Leslie's two skeptics. For a time, the two stood speechless over the residual spectacle repeating in their minds and weaving through their hearts, and Leslie knew that her efforts succeeded. Leslie's thoughts were their thoughts, and her feelings for Auna surged through the hearts of her skeptics like a wellspring, like a conversion to another God.

"Do you believe me now?" Leslie said.

Indeed, they believed, but the revelation came too late for these two converts when this very dream sequence shook with two simultaneous explosions in the sky, like two thunderbolts from God’s wrath.

Then the boardwalk pier on which all three stood shook beneath their feet, toppling them to the boardwalk as waves churned up the harbor and rolled foaming waves over the boardwalk.

Leslie scrambled back to her feet, but the two doppelgängers never got up, so she ran towards them, saying, "what's going on? What's hap—"

That's when she saw their cords dissipating behind their backs, as if death had cut their strands from Auna's silver cord. The two were barely breathing now, their bodies lying limp over the boardwalk and bleeding out of the center of their chests and staining their bodices amid a churning whitewash of foam from the harbor.

“What happened?” she said, dreading their answer.

"Auna," the one in red said, tears welling from her eyes and down her cheeks, putting a hand to her chest and feeling the lingering traces of Auna's life force getting fainter and fainter. "She's . . . She's . . ."

"Gone!" her white counterpart said, feeling at the same wound and feeling Auna's essence disappearing for good. And when both doppelgängers began fading away, first the white one and then the red one, she said to Leslie, "Beware of the Queen who comes after us," and she disappeared.

"Who?" Leslie said.

"Alice," the remaining one said, "Alice . . ." And she, too, disappeared before Leslie's eyes.

Her gaze turned to the silver cord that was Auna's lifeline, and reaching for it, she grasped it in her hand and saw no trace of red or white strands woven into it, fearing the worst. Her thoughts again reverted back to Auna's last words, to remember her as she saw her then and there, not as she would become—not as this 'Alice' or whoever this other persona was.

The moon overhead began to crimson into blood, throwing a ghastly hue over the pier and the churning harbor washing against the boardwalk. When Leslie threw her gaze towards the harbor town, she saw a shadowy void swallowing it up like an enormous curtain on some unseen stage.

From this devouring curtain, Leslie ran along the pier in the opposite direction, following Auna's dissipating lifeline, trying to keep Auna's image in her mind, trying to keep her last words from dissipating like a fading memory.

She ran and ran and ran, pushing her body to its limits and becoming one with the Four Winds, picking up speed along the pier through a curtain of darkness gaining on her like Death on a horse swiping at Leslie with its scythe. Her feet began kicking up a swirl of hurricane gusts along the pier, picking her feet up from the boardwalk as she now ran on air, but even her Four Winds were not enough.

Try as she might, Leslie could not outrun Death, for Death claims all in the end as it had claimed Auna's life and the lives of her two doppelgängers, enveloping Leslie in its shroud of endless night and sending her into a free fall through the sleep of death. And for a time, she lingered on the cusp of oblivion as words from the same old poem filtered through her mind:

But see, amid the mimic rout

⁠A crawling shape intrude!

A blood-red thing that writhes from out

⁠The scenic solitude!

It writhes!—it writhes!—with mortal pangs

⁠The mimes become its food,

And the angels sob at vermin fangs

⁠In human gore imbued.

7

It was now 1:58 a.m.

The next thing Leslie knew, she woke up to a child’s scream in an altogether different dream sequence and found herself on a sidewalk of some neighborhood street, the incandescent street lamps blinking above her head. Leslie cursed when she recognized the voice as Auna’s, picking herself up and noticed the same silver cord she followed along the pier still shimmering in her hand, but it was blinking and getting dimmer and dimmer.

She took off down the street, following Auna’s lifeline towards the source of the scream, when the sound of sliding grates echoed through the night. Several howls, like the ones in that forest on the yellow-brick path, sent chills through Leslie nerves.

“Fuck, you can’t be serious,” she said, pushing herself now, summoning the Four Winds to her aid, turning corners and picking up speed again down a seemingly endless array of blocks and sidewalks.

The howls grew louder, and their footfalls—silent as phantoms over the forest floor—pounded down the pavement, till she saw the outlines of a pack of wolves running a block ahead of her.

“Fuck!” Even with the Four Winds, she knew she couldn’t make it in time before those things reached Auna’s house.

So she imagined a ramp made of wind going past the roofs of each house, and she sprinted up past the roofs and saw Auna’s silver thread gleaming in the shadows of the lamplights below.

Some of the wolves then caught sight of Leslie and leaped onto the rooftops and leaped into her path, almost taking her down, but Leslie skidded to a halt and changed her direction, then over-corrected and stepped off the platform of wind and fell to the street below.

She summoned more wind and flung it like a baseball pitch to the ground, cushioning her fall under hurricane turbulence, shaking shrubs and trees and rattling windows and doors of nearby houses, but this slowed her down.

Just as she touched the ground, she saw one wolf ahead of her blocking her way to Auna’s house, one wolf behind her, and on the roofs of the houses on either side, she saw a pair of wolves grinning and growling down on her. Each wolf seemed poised to attack her, but something (or someone) held them back.

She sensed someone to her left and turned.

That someone was Aaron Rancaster, leaning against a street lamp under its light like an old black-and-white noir movie, the shadow of his fedora casting his face in shadow.

“Why are you here?” Leslie yelled.

“I should be asking you that question,” he said, waving the wolves to back down as he walked like a nightmare stalking her. “This is not your dream realm, and Auna is not your daughter, so what are you doing here?”

“Fuck you,” she said, gripping her hands into fists. “You wouldn’t understand if you tried!”

“Oh, but I do,” he continued. “Do you know what you’re trying to do? Do you know why you feel so attached to Auna, almost as if you were her mother?”

“What are you talking about?” Leslie said.

“I’ll give you a hint,” he said, then raised his hand and snapped his fingers, and a table plopped onto the pavement before Leslie. He snapped his finger again, and a mirror plopped onto the table, face-down. “Take that mirror and see for yourself.”

Leslie reached for it, but paused before touching, feeling trepidation running through her heartbeats and settling into her stomach like a moving snake. Pictures ran through her mind, detailing her previous interactions with the younger and older Auna and Auna’s mother in this dream sequence, and lit her thoughts onto a revelation, but she hesitated.

“Go on, Leslie,” he said.

She took up the mirror, peered into it, and dropped it to the ground where it cracked into shards. She put her hand to her face, not Leslie’s own face, but that of Bridget Barton Wenger’s. At that moment, Leslie knew the reason behind Auna’s initial reluctance of telling names, the reason behind Auna’s last words to her, the reason behind Leslie’s promise to Auna’s mother, and the reason behind Auna’s two doppelgängers.

“Now do you understand?” Rancaster said. “Those very feelings you thought were yours were really those of Auna’s deceased mother. It’s a pity, too. Bridget Barton Wenger would’ve become a great member of your Sisters’ Brigade, had she survived birthing Auna into this world.”

“You bastard!” Leslie screamed. “How could you do this to her?”

“I did nothing to her,” Rancaster said.

“Bullshit!” she said. “How many people have you killed?”

“More than you know,” he said.

His words left Leslie silent for a spell, as vague connections emerged from her memories of a gruesome televised tragedy, so she said, “Did you kill Edmund?”

“I did,” he said. “He was a meddlesome fool.”

Leslie gritted her teeth and glared at the man, balling her hands into fists as she now thought of dead friends, and said, “And Ramona?”

“She was meddlesome, too,” he said. “In fact, you all were.”

Leslie then breathed in and out in an effort to calm herself, closing her eyes and remembering Ramona and Lima and herself as the happy trio of childhood friends before the death of Lima’s mother shattered their world of innocence, and said, “And Amelia?”

“Now’s not the time for old grievances, darling,” he said, looking at his watch and tapping the dial. “The time’s a-ticking. Now’s your cue.”

“And what if I don’t?” Leslie yelled, refusing to move from her spot in the middle of the street, refusing to do his bidding.

“You’ve made a promise to the dead,” he said. “Even I would fear going back on my word if I had kept it with the dead.”

Though Leslie hated to admit it, he was right. Auna (poor soul) deserved so much more than the lot she’d been given, so Leslie sprinted up towards Auna’s house and kicked down the door, then bolted up the stairs to the upper hallway and into Auna’s bedroom but saw nobody there. So she doubled back into the upper hallway and checked every room, hoping against hope that she was still alive, still breathing, still—

Her thoughts were cut short when she reached the master bedroom and opened the double doors.

A half-naked man lay face down and motionless over a young girl on the bed, so Leslie bolted into the room and pulled the man off and rolled him over the bedside, till she jumped back at what she saw, even as the man fell on the carpet with a thud. His throat had been slashed and had bled out, but his face still wore a look of horror, his eyes still open even in death.

Leslie then looked at the girl on the bed.

Auna was lying on her back, half-naked on the rumpled bedsheets and clutching a bloodstained knife in her hand, and the sight brought tears to Leslie’s eyes. Her legs were bare save for her panties clinging to her ankle, and her bloodstained nightshirt had been raised above her prepubescent breasts, and her face was splattered with her father’s blood.

She began crying and sniffling, wondering why anyone would do such a thing to a child as this.

She pulled the nightshirt back over Auna’s body, hiding the atrocity of what had been done to her from view, and took the knife from her hand and placed it on the drawer beside the bed and wiped the blood from her face. She then came over to the other side of the bed and sat there by Auna’s bedside and placed her hand over the girl’s chest and felt her heart, still beating but getting weaker and weaker. She climbed into bed and raised Auna up, hugging the girl close to her body, and took the child’s limp hand and pressed it to her bosom that was now beating for the both of them.

Auna’s eyes fluttered open, and she said, “Momma?”

“I’m here, sweetie,” Leslie said, kissing Auna’s forehead and shedding more tears over her pale face. “I’m here for you now.” She tried to say something else, but nothing else came to her, her words tongue-tied, so she only repeated what she already said: “I’m here, sweetie. I’m here for you now. So don’t you worry, okay?”

And Auna’s eyes lit up, her smiling eyes like the eyes of a wayward daughter finally returned to her heartsick mother. And Leslie looked in those eyes as Auna’s breathing dwindled, lingering on her eyes till their lights flickered out and her eyes closed, leaving Leslie and Bridget Barton Langley alone to cry over her.

There both mothers stayed, two souls in one body holding onto the violated body of their child, a child Leslie never had.

“Thank you,” a voice said.

And when Leslie raised her head, she saw the ghost of Bridget Barton Langley holding an infant Auna in her arms.

Bridget said, “Thank you for allowing me to see my child one more time,” and she kissed Auna’s forehead and gave her back to Leslie's arms, then began to dissipate into nothing. “But it’s not her time yet.”

“What do you mean?” Leslie said, then looked down and saw the older version of Auna in her bloodstained school uniform, her head cradled in Leslie’s lap. “You mean she’s alive?”

Bridget nodded. “My child’s alive, because you keep her alive. Keep her in your thoughts for me, and find out where she is. I fear she has changed, but I still feel her heart beating in my chest.”

“But how?”

“I don’t know how,” Bridget continued, dissipating till she became a disembodied voice, but as long as Auna’s alive, there’s still hope for her. Save her for . . . And her words and her voice and her spirit drifted away into the void of forgotten memories, forgotten to all except Leslie and God, the Keeper of dreams from now till the end of all dreams—

Wherein she lingered on the cusp of oblivion as words from the same old poem filtered through her mind:

Out—out are the lights—out all!

And, over each quivering form,

The curtain, a funeral pall,

⁠Comes down with the rush of a storm,

And the angels, all pallid, and wan,

⁠Uprising, unveiling, affirm

That the play is the tragedy, "Man,"

⁠And its hero the Conqueror Worm.

8

It was now 3:59 a.m.

For the next several moments, her mind played all five stanzas on repeat till the last two words, 'Conqueror Worm,' snagged at her memory and fished out an obscure title from Edgar Allan Poe,

"The Conqueror Worm,"

that she had memorized when she was still in Shad-Row Academy. It had been over twenty years since Leslie last read that poem for a poetry recital in American Literature I, but the gist of it still remained: that our lives were a joke, that we were in denial of it, that our pursuit of beauty in this world was a romantic notion we used to hide the boundaries of an insane world, and that our dreams were but blurry reflections of our place in that world. Woe be to anyone clear-sighted enough to view such hideous vistas of reality and stay sane enough to understand its implications.

For all the world's a stage, Leslie thought, and all the men and women merely players, and all the angels merely spectators.

The moment Leslie realized this, she opened her eyes and found herself in yet another dream sequence, one that she knew by heart. It was Colbie’s dream bedroom, but the lamplights were blinking, and someone had slashed the padding and the pillows and the sheets and left bed feathers and tufts of foam scattered throughout the room.

Leslie's breath hitched in her throat, but on feeling the torn sheets and the padding, she found no sign of blood anywhere and said, "Thank God she's okay."

But no sooner had she said those words when she felt chills on her body—first on her brow, then on her thigh and lower back, and then a massive wave of chills across her stomach. An image of Colbie flashed across her mind, and Leslie raised her hand to her head and felt blood trickling down her brow. Another image of Colbie wrapping her leg and stomach with makeshift bandages flashed across her mind, and something seared across Leslie's thigh and lower back as she gritted her teeth and felt the blood flowing from each wound. Then yet another image of Colbie fainting to the ground flashed through her mind, and a wave of pain dug into Leslie's stomach with blood pooling against her shirt.

"Colbie!" Leslie screamed. "Colbie, wake up! Wake up!"

Against the pain, she scrambled to the door and turned on the knob, but it wouldn't budge. She yanked on it, propping a leg up against the wall door jamb and leveraging her weight against the door knob, but she wasn't strong enough.

Something must have held the door shut, but before she could guess at the source, Leslie began to lose her footing and levitate off the floor just as Colbie's bedroom cracked into shards around her like a broken mirror.

Behind those broken shards was Colbie's body, illuminating the darkness and floating motionless into Leslie's arms. Leslie caught Colbie in her embrace and pressed her body against herself, feeling her daughter's heart beating like a drum against her bosom and feeling her blood warm and wet in her hands. And for a moment, Leslie and Colbie were left in suspension in a flutter of Leslie's tears, mother and daughter afloat amid the currents of Colbie's unconscious slow-wave sleep.

"Colbie," Leslie said, "I'm here, sweetie. I'm here."

Together, they both lingered in weightless suspension.

Then, as if someone had turned on the gravity switch to ON, mother and daughter fell down the rabbit hole of dreamless slow-wave sleep.

9

It was now 4:32 a.m.

Leslie awoke with a gasp on the couch and noticed the television tuned to a commercial program about some hair product. She felt at herself, feeling for the blood stains where Colbie had been wounded but found no trace of them on her body.

She then turned her head towards the kitchen at something moving around upstairs, then bolted off the couch but tottered on her feet, feeling the aftereffects of a hangover beating through her head where Colbie had kissed her hours before.

When she regained herself, she ran through the kitchen and across the hallway and up the stairs towards Colbie's room, yelling, "Colbie? Colbie, what's going on?"

After pulling the door open, she saw Colbie struggling with something in her sleep, rumpling the bedsheets and flailing her fists as though trying to fight off an invisible monster. So Leslie braced herself and bed-wrestled her daughter into waking up, grabbing her wrists to keep her from walloping her a good one, and said, “Colbie, wake up! Come on, snap out of it! Wake up! WAKE UP!”

10

It was now 6:00 a.m.

Fifteen minutes before sunrise, and four hours after telling Leslie to find her daughter Auna, Bridget Barton Wenger (née Langley) had been walking for another four hours along the dismal stretch of yellow-brick road beneath a canopy of thick foliage and a curtain of sinister trees keeping the westering skies above her head from view. Even when it was fifteen minutes to sunrise, she still moved with the sleepy dullness of the walking dead as she wandered aimlessly in search of her missing daughter.

Save for rarities like Leslie, the only other visitors to cross her path were the lions and tigers and bears of the wood that kept her from straying off the continuous loop of the yellow-brick road. Yet as she had walked for hours on end, she grew weary and stopped by another tree beside the road and sat down upon its bark, then slipped off her sandals and massaged her feet, thinking of her daughter and wondering what sling and arrows . . .

She looked up and discerned the form of another woman in the darkness, who said, “Are you Bridget Barton Wenger?”

Bridget put her sandals back on and got up.

“Fear not, child,” this woman said. “I mean you no harm.”

“Who are you?” Bridget said.

“You might have heard of me,” she said and summoned a mirror before her, which glowed in the darkness and revealed a careworn woman, somewhere around her mid-forties, who still possessed the bearing of a living woman even after death. “In fact, I’m sure you’ve heard of me, for most people have known me as the Blood Rose Witch.”

Bridget put her hand to her mouth, saying, “Amelia Hearn? Could it really be you?”

Amelia nodded and smiled.

“Of all places, why are you here?” she said.

“Because I’ve been looking for you,” Amelia said, “since your daughter’s disappearance.”

“What’s happened to Auna?” she said and attempted to grasp Amelia’s hands in her own, yet her hands passed through. “Tell me, please! What’s happened to her?”

“Patience, child,” Amelia said. “You’re still in limbo, it seems. How long have you been here?”

“Since I died,” she said.

“No wonder you’re so hard to find,” Amelia said under her breath. “Mrs. Wenger, put your hand against my mirror.”

So she did, and Bridget felt a wave of energy passing through her, lifting the dullness of her wandering afterlife from her mind and removing the trance of her endless wandering from her eyes. And all at once, the dark and foreboding atmosphere of the woods around her lost its edge, and the westering sky overhead became visible through the thick dappling of foliage.

“Can you see me better?” Amelia said.

Bridget nodded her head, because the features of her visitor gained more definition and focus.

Then Amelia pressed her hand over Bridget’s and said, “I want you to keep your hand on this mirror, understand?” And when Bridget nodded, Amelia continued, saying, “Now close your eyes, Mrs. Wenger, and think of your daughter Auna in your mind. Think of her image in your mind as alive and moving as if she were standing before you at this moment.”

And in her mind, Bridget imagined her daughter standing before her, dressed in pajamas as if she had just gotten up from bed.

"Do you have her in your mind?"

"Yes, I do," Bridget said.

"Now imagine Auna taking out a key," Amelia said, "a very special key to her own heart. Imagine her handing that key to you in your mind."

And in her mind, Bridget stretched out her palm and saw her daughter reaching into the pocket of her pants and pulling out a long antique key and placing it on her palm.

"Can you feel that key in your hand?"

"Yes," Bridget said.

"Close your hand around that key," Amelia said, "and open your eyes when you feel like you have it."

And Bridget did just that, clutching the key and opening her eyes, at which the image of Auna disappeared from her mind and from the reflection of Amelia’s mirror. Bridget pulled her hand back from under Amelia's palm against the reflection and looked at the key that Auna had given her, then looked at Amelia and said, “How did you do that?”

Amelia smiled again and put her finger to her lips and said, “I have my secrets, Mrs. Wenger,” and took her own hand off the surface of her mirror, which stopped glowing at that instant, then grabbed her hand. “Keep that key with you, okay?”

Bridget nodded and placed it in the pocket of her pants, then said, “Where are we going?”

“We’re going to see an old acquaintance of yours,” Amelia said and put her other hand on the reflection, making it glow again.

“Who may that be?” Bridget said.

“You’ll know when you see her,” Amelia said. “Now hold onto me,” and she passed into the mirror, which shimmered in her passage, and Bridget followed after her.

つづく