Epilogue

Epilogue 3.13

---Em---

     I wake up to a dark room. My dark room. My dresser and my desk have switched places and my posters are all dead because they've been translated into Latin, but that doesn't bother me. I can't see. Well, actually, I can see perfectly, but my mind tells me that I can't. So I stumble out of bed and go to turn on the light.

     I flick the light switch. Nothing happens. Must be a dead bulb. I try the light switch again, as if I'm expecting it to have magically fixed itself. An uneasy feeling creeps over me as I step into the hallway. I don't find it at all odd that, upon leaving my bedroom, I wind up walking down the third-floor hallway at my old elementary school.

     Again, I try to turn on the lights. Same deal—no matter how many times I flick the switch, the lights won't come on. I stare down at my hands, and they're not there—I see only two stumps. It occurs to me then that I'm dreaming, and my whole body starts to tingle, like I'm mind out of millions of shifting grains of sand. Growing dizzy, I lean against the wall for support. But I pass right through the wall and plummet into a black abyss.

     At the top of the abyss—I'd been falling upwards, apparently—I find myself in a room where the walls are all upside down. Don't ask me how I know this. I go and sit in an old wooden chair, but when I sink into the soft cushion, I realize it was actually a lima bean bag. I switch on the fan; this turns on the TV.

     I'm playing a video game where I have to climb to the top of a castle to rescue Olivia. I challenge a balloon monster to a muffin contest, and I manage to kill it before my health bar turns elastic. A bunch of text pops up on the screen—it's supposed to say Level Clear, but every time I blink it says something different.

     The text drops on me (the real me, not my in-game avatar), and I die. Olivia grabs the controller from me—apparently she was playing as the text. "Hello..." she starts to say, but her voice doesn't match her lips.

     "I don't know what you're trying to say!" I shout, tearing the paper in half.

     "The key."

     Something smells like pancakes and sea salt. I would ask the gopher what that's all about, but he's in a pissy mood. The gopher takes a sip of diet cola and says, "You can't trust it, you know."

     Does he think I'm some kind of idiot? Of course I know that. Everybody knows that! "Shut up," I tell the meatball, and it rolls away.

     "Him," says Olivia—actually, she's Gail now. "He'll betray you."

     "That's diagonal."

     "Backwards," says Gail, taking my hand as we walk through the ravine. It's a lovely Noonday evening. "The word you're looking for is backwards. You're walking backwards."

     She's right; I am walking backwards. I turn around, and when I do, she's Olivia again. She grabs me by the shoulders, and the dream all starts melting together in a psychedelic haze. "Listen closely. They're trying to stop me from talking to you. You can't trust Colby. He wants to destroy the key."

     I reach into my pocket. "I lost my keys," I tell her, feeling sad about it. My keys were a present from the mayor—I didn't like them, but it was the thought that counted.

     She shakes me, sending the dream into chaos. "Eloise," she says. "Eloise is the key."

     "The key to what?"