Lost and Found - Book 1

Epilogue

Rain poured outside and pop music played softly on the TV. Rex stood in the middle of Alm's living room, her friends sitting on the couch in front of her. They stared at each other for minutes. They had so many questions and yet no words.

Alm looked at her laptop, sitting on the floor next to a glass of warm juice. She picked it up and tested the track pad. It was dead.

"What..." Mik started, her voice croaking from the tightness of her throat.

"I..." Alm swallowed hard, "I don't know."

They both looked to Rex, the only one who wasn't in their original position when they had played the game. She still couldn't speak. And then she remembered something.

Rex dug into her pockets. Sure enough, she pulled out a rolled up pair of fuzzy socks. Her breath left her at the sight of them. She looked up at her friends, shock and sorrow in her eyes.

"What are those?" Alm asked apprehensively.

"...It was real." Rex could hear Ivan's voice in her head now. A reminder that sometimes things fix themselves.

And then it really set in.

"No... No, no!" Mik shook her head. Her teeth clenched, trying to keep her expression calm, but she couldn't hide anything when her face turned dark red. "This can't be real."

Alm held her hand to her chest as if she was trying to calm her heart down. She frowned deeply. "It doesn't matter if it was real."

Mik looked at Alm, her eyebrows knitted deeply. And then she saw her expression and she knew exactly what she meant. What they all felt was very real.

"Oh my god," Mik exclaimed, covering her mouth. "I... while I was there I... with... oh my god." She covered her face.

Alm got choked up next. "I didn't... want to leave."

Mik looked at Alm. "Neither did I."

Alm stared down at her lap. "I didn't get to say goodbye."

Mik gasped, her breaths ragged. She pulled a cushion into her lap and buried her face in it. Alm continued staring at her lap, her glasses fogged over and her chest too tight to speak anymore.

Rex still stood in the center of the room, watching her friends. She didn't want to move.

As if her mind was censoring them for her own sake, the image of her friends blurred, their voices became muffled. Rex stared ahead at the mirror on the far wall. She looked as numb as she felt, eyes wide, mouth ajar. Unlike her friends, she trapped her devastation within her body. She felt her own pain and theirs. And the guilt that came with knowing that she was the one that brought them back. But she couldn't tell them that. How could she?

And now her reflection blurred. The window just a couple feet behind her came into focus. Over her shoulder, He smiled. He would disappear into the rain before her friends ever noticed Him. She wouldn't tell them He was there. How could she?

5 months later

The girls had no choice but to go back to their lives. Bitter and distraught, they hardly spoke of those few days they spent in other worlds. The experience changed them, deep down. They tried to forget it in hopes of forgetting the pain.

They finished high school a few months after returning. Graduation was the biggest sign that no matter what happens, life really does go on. They were starting to heal. Alm and Mik would be starting a local university in the Fall. Rex would be leaving the country in a few weeks to settle in before her university began its classes. However, she had one slight problem that followed her back from the other world.

Rex woke up in the middle of the night as she did every night since returning, screaming and covered in sweat. It took her a few seconds to realize she was awake. She sat up with a sigh. Her feet poked out from under the blanket. She had started wearing Ivan's fuzzy socks to bed as they gave her some comfort.

Her nightmares were always the same. There was a man, THE man, the Weaver of Reality. He had long red hair, but she couldn't remember what his face looked like when she woke up, even though she saw him every night and sometimes when she was awake.

He'd always be standing in the dark, four small planets floating in front of him. With a toothy, sadistic smile, he'd wave his hand and the planets would smash into each other with an explosion of bright white light.

They'd been getting worse lately. The only thing different was that there was a laugh now. His face would never move, and yet she could hear him laughing. It had started faint and increased in volume over the last few weeks. It was unbearably loud now.

Rex had no plans to tell her friends about her nightmares. Since they'd returned, she'd been making the call as to what her friends should and should not know. She felt guilty for it sometimes, but she also felt like she was doing them a favor.

She had hopes that the dreams would stop when she moved away, but it didn't seem likely. The dreams had been happening more often and she'd been sleeping less and the man outside her window kept getting closer. If he could follow her from another world to this one, he would follow her out of the country. Or worse, he'd move onto her friends that stayed behind.

Rex rolled over and pulled the pillow over her ears. She tried to go back to sleep even though she knew that the shrill laughter would have her screaming and very much awake in the next few hours.