Senna’s house. It had a high privacy hedge all around the street side. On the beach side it had a stone fence. Easier to go over the fence.
I scrabbled up and over it and landed on their manicured lawn. No lights on. I knew, though, which was Senna’s window.
April had said her room adjoined Senna’s.
It was on the second floor at one end of the house.
Extending out beneath it was a wraparound screened porch.
The supports for the porch roof were thick beams, pedestaled and ornate.
It wasn’t an easy climb, but it wasn’t impossible, either.
It occurred to me that I was acting crazy. By anyone’s standards. But I had to know. I had to know right then. As long as someone didn’t see me and call the cops. Senna wouldn’t mind.
Probably.
Nah, why should she? Some guy she’s just started dating comes creeping into her room in the middle of the night? Man, she’d scream and have her dad and stepmom throw me in jail.
I had lost my grip on definitions of normal. I was back in a world of logic and reason. Or if not reason, then at least consistency, predictability.
No stopping, not now, too late. I was committed. Climbing. I had to know, had to. Sleep would never have come, anyway. I couldn’t have Everworld burning away in my brain and not know, know for sure if I was sane or mad.
I crept along the porch roof. I found the window. I tried it cautiously. It was unlocked.
I slid it up with infinite care. Inch by inch.
Then I reached inside and parted the gauzy white curtains.
Was she there? Was she in her bed, warm, waiting for me?
Would she wake, surprised but not alarmed, ready to give way to the moment, draw me down into her arms, stretch her body against mine?
I swallowed. Which Senna was I looking for? Which dream of Senna?
“Senna?” I whispered.
No answer.
Then, “It’s me. David. Don’t be scared.”
I stuck my head inside.
“I wondered if this would be your first move,” a female voice said.
A small light came on. April had her hand on the lamp.
“She’s not here,” April said.
I looked at her. She looked at me and slowly nodded.
“Yeah,” she said. “It’s real.”
Chapter
XXIII
Senna’s bed was a double. The room was plenty big for it. A down comforter was folded, all puffy, stuffed out of the way in a big wicker basket. The bed wore only a thin cotton blanket, two pillows.
Her desk was missing the computer almost every student’s desk had. The mahogany surface was polished. Schoolbooks, notebook, pens, and pencils.
I leaned over to open a drawer, feeling I had no right, but feeling spiteful, too. It was locked.
The walls were decorated with a small number of framed posters. Framed posters, generic vintage advertising posters, nothing she’d have chosen. Decorator-chosen. No thumb-tacked posters of favorite bands, no photographs of friends taped to a dressing table mirror.
No dressing table mirror. No mirror at all.
“Senna disappeared three days ago,” April said in a whisper.
“Three days? What do you mean, three days? It was today.
Yesterday, I mean.”
April nodded, an action that set off a cascade of auburn hair. “It seems like yesterday here and yesterday there aren’t the same day. Just to confuse things further, I don’t know how long I’ve been here. I was asleep. But search your memory, David.
You’ll realize you remember being at school yesterday while we were in Everworld.”
I stared at her. Probably I looked a little nuts. But it was a lunatic world. The weird thing was, she was right: I did remember going to school the day before. I remembered both: Loki’s castle, the Viking feast… and getting up and going to school like any normal day.
But the normal part of my memory, homeroom, the gym, talking to some guy named Tony about whether I’d change lockers with him because he wanted one closer to most of his classes — all that, all that everyday, day-in-day-out stuff was like remembering a still photograph. The Everworld part was in vivid color, full-motion video.
“Is that bathroom through there?” I asked, and without waiting for an answer, tried the door, flicked on the light. It was private, not connected to any other room.
No medicine cabinet, no mirror.
There was a wire bin on a shelf. I looked in. Toothpaste, a brush, a comb, Band-Aids, matches. No makeup. Matches.
“Tell me you’ve figured this all out,” I said to April.
She formed one of her patented half smiles. “Not me. I’ve figured nothing out. Except that I don’t think any of this is a dream, even though it should be. I woke up in my room next door. And I had memories of knowing that Senna had disappeared. I had memories of us being down at the lake, watching her out on the pier. And memories of my folks asking whether I knew what had happened to her.”
“They must be worried out of their minds.”
“You’d think that, wouldn’t you?” April said, eyeing me shrewdly. “We have the same dad, different moms, you know.
Everyone’s kind of vague about what happened to Senna’s mom. I mean, you know, I kind of filled in the blanks, but no one ever just came out and said that she ran off. So maybe you could figure my mom, Senna’s stepmom, wouldn’t care all that much, but my mom’s not that way. She treats us both the same.
At least I think so.”
I led the way back into the bedroom. “Wait a minute. I’m losing this here. You’re saying, what? You have memories of the last two days and you remember your folks noticing that Senna was gone. But neither of them is worried?”
“They act worried,” April said.
“Emphasis on ‘act’?”
“Yeah. Act. As in not real. As in concealing some other, truer emotion.”
“What emotion?”
“Relief.”
We both just kind of looked at each other. This was way deep. Way deep for David Levin. Way over my head. One day there was three days here. We — me and April for sure, maybe Jalil and Christopher, too — were not missing. We were still here. And there. Living our lives in both places.
I pressed my palms against my head and April laughed a quiet laugh. “Head exploding?”
I put my hands down, feeling sheepish. “Yeah. Major exploding head. Like I felt when I was in that physics class before I bailed out. I don’t think that way. I mean, I do okay thinking in a straight line. Point A to point B to point C. you start talking about a lot of ‘if this, then that,’ I lose it.”
“The question is: Will the ‘real world’ us remember that we were here, sitting here, talking about Senna?”
“You assume that we’ll go back to Everworld.”
She shrugged. “I assume that when we wake up there, we’ll be back there.”
“So this is a dream.”
April seemed to be searching her memory. “Something someone told me once: ‘Maybe dreams aren’t in your head.
Maybe dreams are memories of another universe.’ “
“Some New Age guy?”
“Senna. I had a nightmare once. Woke up screaming. I was maybe ten, eleven. My dad came in and said, ‘Don’t worry, dreams aren’t real. They’re just neurons firing randomly in your brain.’ As soon as he was gone, Senna came over. Told me it wasn’t in my head, it was real, but real in a different way, in a different place. It wasn’t exactly comforting.”
I remembered the dream of her coming to me. Kissing me.
Calling me names she didn’t like to say. I remembered the coldness of her, and the greedy way she’d told me I would always be hers. And I remembered what followed, what I felt, and what I would give my life to feel again.
I scanned shelves of books. School assigned reading. I don’t know what I expected to see. The room was a blank. It was devoid of personality. It could have been a hotel room.
<
br /> “Senna’s not a comforting person,” I said belatedly. “So now what?”
April sighed. “Damned if I know.” She sat down on the bed and absentmindedly stroked the blanket beside her.
“It’s like no one lived in this room,” I said angrily. I’d wanted some clue, some explanation. Senna had given me nothing.
Again
“She didn’t give much away,” April said. Then, “You know what’s stupid? I woke up thinking I needed to get in some serious studying on chemistry. There’s a test tomorrow. But guess what? No chemistry book. Also no backpack. It’s all over there.”
I nodded. My own real-world memory told me I had a paper due. It was ludicrous. Tomorrow would either involve me making excuses to my teachers, or waking up in a Viking barn next to cows. Or both. Or neither. Or…
I sat down beside her. She was real. I was real. This room was not. Every piece of it, every detail was real, from some store or catalog, all of it merchandise, all of it matter, but in the aggregate, all together, it was a fake.
“I wish we could load up on some firepower and take that back with us,” I said. “I don’t know if you can hurt Loki with a nine-millimeter hollow point, but I’d like to try.”
“You’re such a boy,” April said. “Why not wish for a tank while you’re at it?”
Her laugh drove the weirdness away for a moment. “Not a bad idea,” I said with a smile. “An M-1 Abrams tank would be the perfect way to travel in Everworld.”
“Good lord, you even know the tank’s cute little name.”
She was awfully attractive. I felt it suddenly. I mean, she was close, we were whispering, sitting on a bed, and we were both scared little puppies, despite all the calm talk. She was very beautiful. April was.
“You know—” I started to say. Then I changed tack. “You know, before yesterday, the night before, I was with Senna.”
“With as in with?” April asked in pretended shock.
“No, no. Just with. She said… I mean, she knew something was going to happen. She told me so. Something awful. I thought she was nuts.”
April wasn’t smiling anymore. The charged moment was over. She looked deadly serious. “What do you mean, David?”
“I mean, she said, “Something is going to happen.” And then—” I hesitated. Somehow it was just between me and Senna, what she’d said. And it would sound insane. “Never mind.”
“Uh-uh,” April said. “No. We’re all in this. That was me hanging by my wrists, right alongside you. Tell me.”
“Yeah. Okay. She… she asked me if I’d save her. ‘Will you save me, David?’ That’s what she said.”
April’s green eyes went cold. “That bitch. She’s done it again.”
“Again? What again?” I asked. But I asked it of the cow whose white face was looking down stupidly at me as it munched the hay around my ear.
Chapter
XXIV
“Damn it!” Christopher yelled.
He turned his head and looked at me furiously. “You woke me up. Why did you wake me up? I was back home. I was just about to carry out a serious refrigerator raid. My mom made a cheesecake! A strawberry cheesecake, and I don’t mean one of those things from a mix; the woman can make cheesecake.”
Then he looked at me again, more dubious. “David? Are you spooning me?”
To my abject horror, I was. In the night — actually day, but it was dark in the barn — in our utter exhaustion, I had cuddled up with Christopher.
I pushed him away and jumped to my feet.
April and Jalil stuck their heads around the corner, looking into the stall.
“Oh, you’re up?” Jalil asked. “We’ve been up for a few seconds, but we didn’t want to disturb you two. Frankly you…
well” — he said with a not-at-all-innocent grin — “you looked like you might want some more time together.”
“That is just so funny, Jalil,” Christopher said, climbing to his feet.
“I thought so,” April said.
Christopher brushed straw from his jeans. “So let me just ask: Anyone else have, shall we say, interesting dreams?”
“I called you, David,” Jalil said. “Woke your mom up. She was pissed. She didn’t seem to want to get you to the phone.”
“I wasn’t there, anyway,” I said. “April and I went to look in Senna’s room.
“She’s missing,” Christopher said. “Everyone at school has been talking about it.”
The cow nosed me, pushing me aside so she could reach the hay I’d slept on. The milking was long since over. Dim exterior light penetrated the barn from the far end, where the door stood open.
It was day. Day here, anyway. Maybe back in the world it was already a week later.
I walked toward the light.
“Parallel universe,” Jalil said.
“What?”
“I think that’s what it is. How else are you going to explain it?
We’re here, we’re there, simultaneously. Only not, because time here and time there are running at different speeds.”
“It’s magic,” April said. “Enchantment.”
“Magic, my ass,” Jalil said.
We stepped out into brilliant sunlight. The grass was a green fire. The sky looked like that blue-sky wallpaper you get on Windows computers: perfect, with a perfect mix of fluffy white clouds.
Most of the cows were off on the upslope, munching grass.
Cows in one loose gaggle, sheep in another. A stream I hadn’t noticed earlier tumbled and leaped down the slope —whitewater, but far too narrow and shallow for even a kayak.
“Hell of a coincidence having two different universes where so much is the same, don’t you think?” Christopher pointed out.
“Sheep and goats and cows and grass, and the sky is blue, and the water runs downhill, and the local big shots are all mythical gods, and, oh, by the way, everyone speaks English?
Very Earthlike for being a parallel universe.”
“The Hetwan are not Earthlike,” Jalil pointed out mildly.
“Neither are the laws of physics. We fell too slowly, but gravity seems the same here as always. Loki changes size whenever he wants, wolves talk, and a giant snake calls Loki ‘Daddy.’ That snake can’t exist, you realize. No way. Not on Earth. Not in our universe. Neither can that wolf. Animals are a certain size for a reason. That wolf, that big? He should have elephant legs to carry the weight. You increase height and length, you increase weight geometrically. You’d need a different design. You can’t have some tiptoeing wolf that’s the size of a Seismosaurus. Laws of physics, man. Laws of freaking physics, which do not change anywhere in the universe.”
“Anyone else notice anything weird about that one horse?
The one grazing off by himself?” April asked.
I squinted. Aprils must have good eyes. But when I squinted harder, I saw it. The horn. The single horn, like a ten-inch spear, that stuck straight out from the horse’s head.
“Okay,” I said as calmly as I could. “That’s a unicorn.”
Jalil nodded. “Yep. That’s a unicorn.”
“What’s keeping the fairies and leprechauns and the Keebler Freaking Elves?” Christopher demanded. “Any minute now some little toad-boy with a shamrock hat is going to pop up out of the grass and say, ‘Always after me Lucky Charms.’ I want to go home. I want my mommy. Or at least her cheesecake.”
I spotted Thorolf. He was coming downhill from the nearest sheep. He was walking in giant steps. Happiest guy in the world, from the look on his face.
“The ewe is pregnant and the wind is fair!” he bellowed.
I glanced at Jalil. “Say what?”
He made a ‘search me' face.
Thorolf galumphed on over and slapped me on the shoulder. “The ewe is pregnant, hah-hah-hah, I knew Ildric’s ram would do his duty by us. She’ll have a fine litter come spring.”
“Oh,” I said, trying to sound interested. “So… baby sheep, right?”
He
stroked his beard thoughtfully. “I must make a sacrifice to Frey before we sail. I can’t leave something like that to Gudrun.
She’ll decide to be thrifty and offend Frey with a paltry sacrifice.”
“Sail?” Christopher asked. “ ‘We sail.’ You mean you and the other Vikings.”
Thorolf looked at Christopher, perplexed. “And you as well, of course.”
“We have to sail somewhere?”
Thorolf tilted his head indulgently, like he was dealing with not-very-bright children. “You are free to sail or not, as you wish,”
he said. “But these are Loki’s lands, now that he rules the castle.
And when Olaf Ironfoot has moved on with his host, the priests and creatures of Loki will soon find you.”
“Ah,” Christopher said.
Thorolf clapped a big hand on Christopher’s back. “You don’t fear battle, do you? Ah hah-hah!”
“Me, no. Love battle. Who are we, who are we battling?”
“The sun-worshipers, of course. Crafty, cruel, and hard men,”
Thorolf said. “They slaughter prisoners like pigs, making sacrifices of thousands at a time. Though they tell tales that they first adore them, feeding them delicacies by the bucket and wine by the barrel. And, ah, the women… “
“The sun-worshipers?” April asked.
“Yes, yes. We go to seize a ransom for the All-Father. We must free wise Odin. With Thor lost to us, who else will save us from the Hetwan?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know.” I’d been wrong. The Hetwan were becoming my problem.
“These sun-worshipers. Do they have another name?” April asked politely.
Thorolf nodded. “All peoples have more than one name, child. The sun-worshipers are also called the Mexica, the blood-drinkers, the man-eaters, the Aztecs.”
“Aztecs? We’re going to hop in a bunch of Viking longboats and go kick butt on some Aztecs?” Christopher asked incredulously.
Thorolf mistook that for enthusiasm. “We will trample out the vineyards where the grapes of wrath are stored, ah-hah-hah!”
Chapter
XXV
The village was a swarm of activity. Shaven-headed slaves were rushing back and forth, mostly shuttling enormous loads down to the dock. There they dumped their burdens off into boats rowed by more slaves. The supplies moved out to the ships, all to the encouraging bellows of Viking petty officers.
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