The Magic Hour

Chapter 9: The Outside Land

THE LAND WAS barren, a desert flat to the horizon, covered with small rocks and boulders. Above him was a white sky.

    “Hello?” he shouted, but the words fell and disappeared. The silence was absolute.

    “Wait.”

    He spun around. No one was there. The heat was intense. What the hell was going on?

    “Nathaniel, it is all right. Come with me.”

    He saw her ahead of him, emerging like a mirage.

    “Naliv.” His voice still sounded flat, without pitch or timbre. Like a line drawn on a page, he thought, two-dimensional. He was dreaming again.

    “This is our outside land,” she said, indicating the desert with her hand. “It is very beautiful, is it not? For now it has no depth. We have only created it recently. There is more work to do here.”

    “What do you mean?”

    “Hurry. Everyone is waiting.” She walked away from him.

    For a moment he stayed where he was, feeling as if he were made of stone, but he had no wish to stay anywhere alone. He took a few slow steps and then ran to catch up with her.

    “Good,” she said, with a smile that dazzled him.

    “Where are we going?”

    “Where else do you think? Here, take my hand.”

    As he did he felt a rush of energy go through him and closed his eyes from the force of it. When the sensation stopped he opened his eyes to find that they were standing once again in a high place looking down on the place she called Elaimat. It was dusk and lights flickered all over the city. It made him think of stars in the sky, or precious stones against velvet.

    “I can answer any questions. We did not know if we would see you again, though we wanted to. You are one of us now.”

    “This is a dream,” Nathan said.

    “Perhaps, in a way. Yet so is where you are when you leave us. Which one do you prefer?” She laughed again, the light ring of it entering him, bringing with it a sense of peace and joy.

    “We will visit with the others now,” she said, and once more she took his hand, and in a moment they were inside the walls of the city, in the same courtyard where he had been before. The walls again were in subtle motion around him.

    “I can show you more of my home this time. I know you can stay longer with us.”

    “I can do whatever I want in my own dream.”

    “Oh, yes, that is true. Yet this is not only your dream, you see. That is what I want to tell you.”

    The red flowers were still there in the lamplight. Their symmetry pleased him. He heard voices approaching and in another moment a crowd of people appeared at one end of the courtyard.

    “So this is our stranger, is it?” A man stepped out from the group and approached them. The others kept talking quietly.

    “I am glad we have the chance to meet this time. It was uncertain whether you could return. Our effort to allow you the possibility had to be done so quickly, and left much room for error.”

    Nathan felt a sudden apprehension take hold of him. It all suddenly felt out of his control.

    “There is nothing to fear,” the man said, reading his thoughts. “Not here in Elaimat. I am Marn, and husband to Naliv. I was worried, yes, when she accessed your world. I thought I might lose her. Yet she managed everything for us, not only in retrieving the source but in acquiring you.”

    “Why?” Nathan said. He wanted to wake up. The night air was filled with a fragrance he couldn’t identify. It reminded him of the freesias Jenny had grown on the side of the house where the sun reached all the time.

    Jenny.

    Marn touched him lightly on the head. Nathan stepped back.

    “It is all right. I just wanted to relieve you of your sadness.”

    Marn was right. The old, familiar grief had left him in a moment.

    “That’s not what I want,” he said, anger rising in him. “You have no right!”

    “No, we do not. Forgive me. I only wanted you to feel at ease. Here, come with us. We can explain.”

    “I’ve conjured you,” Nathan said. “You don’t exist.”

    “To you, your memories are more real than we are. Yet the opposite is true,” Marn said.

    The courtyard was gone. He sat at a table in a room that was filled with mirrors. His own image stared back at him, receding over and over again into the distance. Light came from crystal chandeliers. The table was translucent, showing him a luminous deep blue river flowing past below. The reflections were dazzling everywhere he looked. He felt suspended in a world of light.

    “Everything is created in the mind,” Marn said. “That is why we gave you the conduit. We could see that your own temperament would be open to the reality of that concept. Very few have succeeded in this way. We are glad to have you here, and want you to know our home well, to visit often.”

    “There’s only one reason you and I are in the same place,” Nathan said. “I have something in my head causing me to hallucinate and it gives me headaches that are driving me crazy. One of those hits me, whoosh, here I am in your Elaimat. Like I said, it’s all pretend, and for some reason I know that fact while I’m here, which is the only piece of the puzzle I haven’t worked out. There’s a doctor who wants to pry open my brain with his instruments—he says I have an anomaly. Why am I explaining any of this? I’m just talking to myself!”

    “Well, you are talking to quite a few versions of yourself, then,” Marn said with a smile, and he gestured around the table. More than forty people were seated in its circle, all of them occupied in conversation, sometimes looking over at him with an expression of interest but making no effort to communicate.

    Nathan didn’t answer. Apparently he couldn’t stop the sequences or control the events. All he had was awareness of the images.

    Naliv sat beside him. “You control everything. It is true, what you have said. You imagined us into being, and we have created you at the same time. You and all of us in Elaimat have agreed to this, you see.”

    “So I am in your dream?” Nathan tried to laugh, but the idea terrified him. The aspects of his own life were tenuous enough. He didn’t want the nightmare of theirs.

    “I don’t accept that,” he said, shouting the words. He felt the pain return and closed his eyes, holding his head with his hands, rocking back and forth.

    “We must help him,” he heard Marn say. Then there was only silence.