by J M Fraser
The butterflies took flight.
She leapt into Bethany’s head, searched the same somnolent region, and found enough vague images of forestland—and a crossbow leaning against a tree—to suggest the woman might have visited the other side of the portal, as well. Gabriella collapsed onto the bench.
“Do you mind if I share that?” Bethany asked.
Did she mind? Gabriella slid over. “Please do.”
The woman settled beside her. “You seemed preoccupied when we came along. I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“I’m a little off today.”
“Are you worried about a test?”
“Yes. No. A what?”
“In school.”
“School?” Gabriella’s mind swirled into a maelstrom. How could anyone on one side of the portal still have a clone on the other? Yes, the world split into equal parts when Herod’s soldiers killed the baby Jesus on the Sanctimonia side, duplicating every man, woman, and child. Yet two thousand years had come and gone! Surely the butterfly effect would have been too extreme for a mother and daughter in one world to still have a match in the other. “Christianity completely changed history, didn’t it? Take the Crusades, for example.”
“So it’s a history test you’re worried about.”
“No, I—”
Bethany cupped her hands to her mouth. “Stay where I can see you, Carla!”
No point counting the children in the playground. They had to be forty in number.
“I’m a history buff, and you’re right about the Crusades. They did change everything.” Bethany’s babble seemed muted, as if she spoke from a great distance.
Great indeed! Gabriella’s mind had wandered two thousand years away. Crusades, inquisitions, pogroms, deaths, marriages, births—all would have been different on one side of the portal than the other. The elimination of Christianity in her dark, parallel world should have swept through the genealogy lines like an avalanche. She couldn’t fathom how a single mother-daughter pair there could have mirror images here. “This must be the hand of God.”
“The Crusades? The Muslims would argue against that idea.”
“What?”
“Are you religious? So few teenagers are anymore.”
“I’ve struggled with my faith at times, but I’m coming around.” Gabriella needed greater focus to get the conversation back on track, but a new question pushed her ever deeper into thought. Even if a line of identical clones had survived on both sides of the portal, how were a mother and daughter able to pass memories from one world to the other? They shouldn’t have had any connection.
Unless…
Her conversation with Herod might have triggered the birth of a new physical world, but perhaps only God could create the unique form of self-awareness known as a soul. In that case, she hadn’t duplicated every soul alive two thousand years ago. She’d cleaved them in half!
Each half soul would have split its awareness between two bodies—compartmentalized, awake on one side while asleep on the other, or perhaps flitting back and forth from moment to moment. Reality waxes and wanes. A person could spend a full day in one head over the course of a three-minute catnap in the other. And perhaps some memories seeped across whatever firewall separated the two—apparently the case with Maynya and Carla.
But how could half souls still exist two millennia after her act?
Through choreographed butterflies, the number forty, and all things holy.
Through the hand of God. Gabriella forgot how to breathe.
Carla raced over, all flushed cheeks and shiny eyes. “Let’s go swimming!” She grabbed her mother’s hand, and the two of them headed away.
“Good luck with summer school,” Bethany called over her shoulder.
“Thank you.” Before they got out of range, Gabriella picked a home address out of the woman’s head.
* * *
Midnight
Gabriella crept through the ground level of a raised ranch while Bethany and Carla slept upstairs. She deciphered notes scrawled on calendars, lingered before crucifixes on two walls, riffled through a few bills strewn across the top of an antique secretary, and opened a side door to examine the many carpentry tools in the attached garage. A family’s trappings can provide a more reliable picture than the distorted perceptions carried in their minds.
She had a handle on these people by the time she climbed to the second floor. Happy, hard-working, middle class, Christians. A likeable family.
Upstairs in the bathroom, fluffy blue towels hung from racks. The ceramic floor was handsomely arranged in a herringbone pattern and the walls were papered with seahorses and coral. Everything gleamed—the basin, the tub, the faucets. These trappings added color to the portrait she’d sketched downstairs. The man of the house was a carpenter who kept up his castle. The woman was tidy. Nothing in the room suggested anything but a modern American family. Nor had she seen hints of other worlds in the living area downstairs.
The woman, Bethany, tossed and turned alone in the bedroom to the left. Gabriella probed her mind and found trouble. A new construction project in Buffalo kept Bethany’s husband away for days at a time. Alone at night with her worries, she focused on his health. The doctors had been reassuring about his cancer remission, but she stressed over whether he’d live to see their daughter grow up.
Gabriella made a mental note to do something, perhaps leave a prayer card for her. Prayer was the best solace during hard days.
She headed to the bedroom on the right.
“Oh my,” she whispered.
Bethany must have been influenced by hazy Sanctimonia memories when decorating her daughter’s room. A forest-green quilt covered her sleeping daughter. The wallpaper displayed woods and log cabins and Hansel and Gretel wandering where they didn’t belong. On the top of a bookshelf, where one might expect to find a Pinocchio figurine or a wax Snow White, an Amazon warrior stood guard with a spear in her hand.
Carla stirred. “I want to sleep with my mommy.” She looked up with drowsy eyes, unfazed by the unexpected appearance of a visitor standing just outside her bedroom.
Gabriella didn’t need to look inside the girl’s mind to realize the world of any three-year-old presented a steady stream of surprises. Small ones such as the random appearance of a vaguely remembered ponytailed friend didn’t necessarily evoke a response.
She approached the bed and ran her fingers through the child’s hair. “Your mommy’s proud of a girl so brave she sleeps alone in her own room.”
“Is she proud of Cassy, too?” Carla held up the typical, well-worn child’s doll. A stuffed deer.
“She’s mostly proud of you. Now close your eyes and take me for a ride.”
“Where?”
“The forest would be nice.”
Carla snuggled tighter into her stuffed deer and drifted off.
Gabriella stole into her mind.
* * *
Minutes later
From her prone position on a cot, Gabriella looked down at a dirt floor and across a small room to a rough wooden table and two chairs. Embers glowed in a stone hearth off to the left, the remnants of a fire that had burned three logs to dark chalk. Blackened pots hung above the mantel. On the right, a crescent moon and stars shined through an unfamiliar half-open window—not the one in her cabin and not the window in Carla’s bedroom.
She could have burst into song. Not only had the dream portal worked, leading her into Maynya’s head, she now beheld a place beyond the boundaries of her Sanctimonia cabin grounds.
Gabriella gathered her essence and prepared to leap from a dream to reality, just as she’d done countless times before.
But she couldn’t move.
“Pssst. Maynya.”
The girl offered no response.
“Maynya, let me out!” As much as Gabriella hated to admit a mistake, she couldn’t deny overlooking a critical supposition. Since she’d never had any powers on the Sanctimonia side of the portal, why had she expecte
d to play the supernatural angel and leap from Maynya’s dreams into the waking world?
Gabriella gasped for breath. She’d gotten stuck inside the head of a young child.
The room went black.
Was this how the inside of a closed coffin felt? For the first time in her life, Gabriella knew claustrophobia. She trembled at the thought of the worst-case scenario. After forty years of purgatory, God had banished her to Hell for her sin. Perhaps He let Maynya die in her sleep, trapping a wayward angel in her lifeless head. They’d turn to dust together.
But no. Wait. What was that?
A snore?
Maynya’s breathing steadied. She hadn’t died. She’d closed her eyes and fallen asleep.
“Wake up!” Gabriella tried to calm herself and think. “Carla?”
Two eyelids fluttered open, revealing a beautiful sight—a modern American bedroom once again. She couldn’t scramble out of the girl’s head fast enough.
“Can I have a drink of water?” Carla gazed at her with sleepy eyes.
“Give me a second.”
“Why are you crying?”
“I had a bad dream.”
“Monsters?”
“Worse.” Gabriella escaped to the bathroom and buried her face in a towel. After a long moment, she gathered enough strength to fill a Cookie Monster cup with water and bring it into the bedroom.
The girl accepted the offering with two small hands, stole a sip, and shifted her gaze to her stuffed animal. “Cassy’s thirsty, too.”
“We don’t want a mess. Let me help her drink it.” Gabriella took the cup and made a show of holding it to the deer’s mouth before setting it onto the bedside table.
By then, Carla had closed her eyes again.
The courage to plunge back into the girl’s mind didn’t come easily. Many minutes passed before she took the leap.
Maynya must have gotten up, for Gabriella now stared out the window through the eyes of a girl whose nose pressed against the glass. The child stood peering into the darkness alone but with no sign of fear. Odd for one so young. Then a hint of motion in the gray light of early dawn provided the reason for such fortitude. Maynya’s mother, Carmella, held a position outside, guarding the girl from twenty yards away.
More likely than not, the woman protected an entire village. She stood with a spear in one hand and a crossbow slung across the opposite shoulder, sporting the leather tunic and high boots of a warrior. This woman was far more than the simple peasant she’d seemed when she brought her daughter to the cabin. No wonder she’d been so self-assured about traveling alone. Guardians were widely acclaimed for their fearlessness.
Gabriella had heard numerous tales of valor about these warriors. They’d been stationed in scattered outposts along the edge of a thick forest separating Sanctimonia from Virtus. Many a barbarian raider had stolen through these woods in the past, usually during the dead of night. The guardians watched for them.
A woman such as Carmella held a revered position in the Mystic tribe, one inherited, perhaps from a husband who’d been killed. The job would pass to Maynya one day.
Carmella looked toward the window at Maynya and shook her head. She began creeping sideways, shooting glances at the woods while closing the distance to the cabin. When she reached the window, she glared with such ferocity a timid girl would have scampered away in terror.
Instead, Maynya raised an insistent voice through the open window. “Ego sum siccus.” I am thirsty.
Her mother’s expression darkened further. “Servo vestri own postulo!”
No help would be coming from that quarter any time soon.
Maynya headed to the table on her own. She hauled herself onto one of the chairs, stood upright, managed to keep her balance, and scooped water out of a basin with a tin cup. After she drank her fill, she scrambled back down and returned to her cot.
The girl closed her eyes again.
Gabriella fought off a new onslaught of claustrophobia. If she wanted to travel beyond her cabin grounds, blindness would be the price she’d have to pay whenever Maynya slept. She calmed herself with the rhythm of the girl’s heartbeat, the chirp of crickets out the window, the whisper of wind against the cabin walls. To pass the time, she put her mind to work on the puzzle of God’s recent signs, but pieces still seemed to be missing. Best to be patient and let Him play His hand.
Eventually, Carla awakened, cracking her eyes open.
Gabriella gasped at what could only be described as Dali’s version of the Syracuse bedroom. A half-opened dresser drawer melted to the floor. Cassy the deer floated toward the ceiling. The room brightened. The ceiling turned from off-white to lavender.
An eye-blink later, everything reverted to normal.
She probed Carla’s mind for the reason and beheld something so rare and beautiful she could scarcely believe her eyes. The fleeting illusions had been caused by an extra brain lobe—the type found among only a few blessed mortals, such as Henry Stoddard. Though microscopic in size, these lobes gave their hosts the ability to project massive illusions…a gift or curse, depending on the local reaction. Although some societies revered those gifted by God with extrasensory abilities, history held many examples of illusion casters persecuted as witches…or sorcerers. Henry spent most of his time as a hermit for a reason.
Spiritualist or demon? Carla wouldn’t likely be regarded as either. She had the lobe but lacked the sharpened cognizance required for casting illusions. Not that she was a dull girl. She simply didn’t know she possessed her gift. And telling her would do no good. She had to feel the power within.
Gabriella blamed herself. Two thousand years earlier, she’d split every soul in existence. Suppose she’d weakened those with special powers to the point they didn’t know they had any? In that case, those descendants still divided would cast only the dimmest of psychic glows, like too many lamps plugged into the same socket. Only if merged together might Maynya serve as the switch and Carla the light.
Then she considered the opposite possibility. What if Carla were the switch and Maynya the light? Gabriella collapsed onto the edge of the bed.
Oh, what a light show Maynya might be! The ramifications exploded like multicolored fireworks in Gabriella’s head. They tasted like chocolate, smelled like perfume, and warmed like crackling logs in a fire.
Within the woods of the Mystics, or better yet, the much darker desert home of the Virtus barbarians, an illusion caster might be regarded as a miracle worker. Maynya could mesmerize a following, inspiring them to look upon her as a true messiah, if she harnessed her power. Thrust into a leadership role by this circumstance, she could preach a message of love and altruism guaranteed to etch itself into her followers’ minds.
God had lifted His elusive whispers to a roar when He sent the girl to Gabriella, providing—at last!—a solution to a forty-year-old riddle. Why had the Sanctimonia cabin been placed where it was?
For Maynya to find.
Gabriella needed to bring the two half souls back together, igniting their lamp to warm the cold universe across the portal. She glanced over her shoulder at the smoke. Suppose she snatched Carla out of bed and carried her to her twin, where the two girls might merge into a single messiah?
No. She could never steal a woman’s child.
Could she?
Well, maybe, but the portal had never admitted a mortal before. The Mystics had always flinched away from its heat.
Besides, she needed to bring the girls’ souls together, not their bodies.
A hint of an idea tickled the back of her mind but darted like a dust mote each time she tried to grab hold of it.
A scream rose from the other bedroom.
Gabriella hurried across the hall.
CHAPTER 6
A moment later, in the bedroom across from young Carla
The girl’s mother, Bethany, leaned against the headboard of her bed, still fast asleep but with eyes wide open. She stared sightlessly through the tangle of dark hair hanging
down her face. “Make them stop!” she rasped.
Gabriella touched the woman’s wrist. “Shh. You’re just having a bad dream.”
Bethany slumped down to her pillow. Her breathing slowed. “Visions,” she muttered.
Visions? Gabriella’s heart beat faster. Visions could be messages from God!
She dove into Bethany’s subconscious.
Gabriella squinted at the glare of a bright, sunny day. She and Bethany stood on an unusually empty Manhattan sidewalk. In the near distance, flashing emergency lights and blaring sirens diverted the normal crowd of people. Whatever the reason—a traffic accident, a fire, a mugging—the two of them were left alone, at the head of a stairway leading down to a subway station.
The immediate cityscape had undergone a surreal transformation from 1980s Manhattan. Porn shops and strip clubs had been whisked away, the storefronts modernized, the entire skyline updated, all like a Hollywood set for a science fiction movie. Buildings gleamed. Cars on the street were sleeker than Gabriella knew them to be.
She swallowed. Bethany’s vision had pulled them into the future.
Gabriella found confirmation in a newspaper discarded on the sidewalk. The tabloid’s headline spouted nonsense about an inconsequential presidential debate, but smaller font in the upper corner whispered earth-shaking news—October 23, 2012.
Bethany groaned beside her. She’d gone pale. Terror hollowed her eyes.
Gabriella took her hand. “We’re fine. I’ll protect you.” But how could she protect anyone in a future she didn’t know? She tightened her grip.
Bethany stared down the subway stairs as if she’d seen a ghost. “She…she…”
“Who?” The stairs were empty.
“My Carla. She’ll die down there. I’ve seen it three times!”
Three, the biblical symbol for completeness. Gabriella’s stomach fluttered. Was God ready at last to reveal the tapestry He’d been weaving since Hiroshima? “Slow down. Your toddler died?”
