Imaginary Friends

by John Marco

  My keeper. My jailer. My only companion. He never came into the room. I had never felt the touch of his hand. Sometimes I wished he would try to touch me, just so I’d know that he was real and not an illusion created by a broken mind.

  “I’m not Eleanor,” I said, fixing my eyes on the mirror and the world beyond the stone walls.

  A silence that asked a question.

  “I’m the lily maid.”

  A different kind of silence before he said, “Ah. The Lady of Shalott.”

  I struggled not to smile, pleased that he understood the reference since he understood so few of them. Then I got down to the business of watching the world reflected in the mirror.

  Blue sky and some white, puffy clouds. No sign of rain.

  Maybe tonight, I thought. That would make the spring flowers bloom.

  Birds flashed in and out of the mirror. A man on horseback trotted down the road, heading for the village. Then a young woman on a bicycle rode by.

  After that moment of distraction, I saw Peggy coming down the lane. Plump and solid, her quick walk covered the distance and brought her to the spot where the lane met the road. She crossed the road, looked up, and positioned herself dead center in the mirror. Then she set down the satchel she was carrying in one hand and held up the bouquet filling her other hand.

  She was smiling, but even at this distance I could see a weight of sadness in that smile. She knew I was imprisoned in this tower. That was why she came and stood there every morning on her way to the village’s school. Maybe, unlike me, she even knew why I was imprisoned. But regardless of why I was there, Peggy would support a friend and do whatever she could to help—even if that meant standing on the edge of the road in all kinds of weather, waving to someone imprisoned in a tower that was set on an island in the middle of a river.

  Peggy held up one flower at a time so that I could see them clearly. Daffodils, hyacinths, tulips. Crocus. Wild iris. But . . .

  “They’re all white,” I murmured, trying to hold on to the pleasure of seeing flowers.

  “Shouldn’t they be?” came the question from the shadows.

  I shook my head. “They’re a celebration of spring. They should be yellow and orange and red and purple and pink. Even striped. And some,” I conceded, “should be white. But not all.”

  I ignored his thoughtful silence and focused on the scene.

  Robert rode up on his bicycle and stopped to chat with Peggy. He pointed to her satchel. She made a dismissive “it’s no trouble” wave of her hand that was so typical of Peggy it made me smile.

  Robert pointed again, insistent. After going back and forth a couple more times, Peggy put the satchel in the empty carry basket attached to the back of his bicycle. The satchel would be on her desk at the school when she arrived, but she’d have been spared the trouble of lugging . . . whatever she was lugging to the school that day to show her students.

  Another minute went by. Then Peggy waved to me and headed down the road to the village.

  I spent the morning watching the shadow world reflected in the mirror. Birds. The sparkle of sunlight on the river. Clouds. A few people on the road, but anyone who worked in the village had already reported to their jobs.

  Finally tired of staring at fields of grain, I stood up. In the moment before I closed my eyes and the lack of weight on the chair triggered the device that closed the shutters, the mirror reflected something else, something dark.

  Something terrible.

  A bad angle, I told myself. Nothing more. The mirrorwas positioned to let me see out the window when I was sitting. Ordinary things wouldn’t look the same when I was standing.

  Despite what I told myself, I kept my eyes tightly closed until the shutters covered the window completely. Then I turned and walked to my bedroom.

  “Will you come back to the mirror after your meal?” he asked.

  I paused in the doorway but didn’t turn around to look at him. “I don’t know.”

  The bed had been made, and there were clean towels in the bathroom. A meal had been laid out on a small table, a cover over the dish keeping the food hot. The book I was currently reading was next to the dish.

  I didn’t know who tended these rooms. I never saw anyone but my jailer, but someone kept things tidy and filled the bookshelves with new offerings on a regular basis. And . . .

  I lifted the cover on the dish and let out a whuff of pleased surprise. In the beginning of my imprisonment, all the food was gray and had a soft mealiness. It was nourishing enough but awful to look at. That was one of the reasons I began reading while I ate. Today’s roast beef, red potatoes, and broccoli and carrots were identifiable. Even their tastes were more distinctive.

  After the meal, I spent the rest of the day in my bedroom, reading, sleeping, and listening to the music they had scrounged from somewhere. I didn’t go back to the mirror. Maybe I was mistaken, but when he had asked the question, I thought there had been a hint of yearning in his voice.

  The next morning, when I looked in the mirror, Peggy held up a dazzling rainbow of spring flowers.

  2

  Weeks passed. In the evenings, I sometimes saw the moon reflected and marked the passage of days by its waxing and waning.

  Were there others like me, imprisoned in the other towers? Even imprisoned here? Some nights I stamped on the floor, hoping to hear an answering thump that would confirm there was someone else trapped in this place. Some nights I stood near a window and screamed—and wondered if anyone could hear me.

  Except him.

  On those nights, I felt his presence in the alcove, but he still didn’t enter the room. Didn’t even speak to me.

  Then one night . . .

  I had finished dinner and the current book. My keepers had found some Celtic music, which was more to my taste, so I listened to music for a while. I put another disc in the player, then went over to the bookcase that held the “new” selection of books. I now had a bookcase of favorites that was never disturbed by whoever tended the rooms and a bookcase that rotated on a regular basis, offering me an eclectic mix of fiction and nonfiction.

  A fat, leather-bound volume caught my attention. As I pulled it out, I noticed the cover was heavily stained and the pages had a rippled, swollen look. I opened the book and riffled through a few pages.

  Dark stains, as if the book had fallen near a puddle of coffee or tea and no one had pulled it away before it had gotten a good soaking.

  Not coffee or tea, I decided as I continued riffling the pages, not taking in the content. Then I hit a page . . .

  Splashes. A spray of dark blotches on the paper. Not dark like coffee; dark like old . . .

  Memories came back in flashing images, like seeing a fast slideshow of stills from a movie that had frightened you badly as a child.

  I dropped the book and screamed.

  “Not true,” I panted as I rushed out of the bedroom, stopping when I reached the chair positioned before the mirror. “It’s not true.”

  I took a step, intending to sit in the chair. Then I turned and looked at the window.

  Rage filled me and with it, an insanity that eclipsed madness. I’d been told I would be cursed if I looked upon the world directly. So be it. The answer could not be found in the mirror.

  Since the shutters had been opened mechanically each day, I had expected them to resist being opened by hand.

  Not so. They flew open with almost no effort.

  I looked. I saw. I screamed again, but this sound was full of denial and terror.

  I slammed the shutters closed and . . .

  “Eleanor? Eleanor!”

  He stood at the alcove’s threshold, scanning the room until he found me pressed into a corner, curled in a tight ball.

  “Eleanor, I’m sorry. They didn’t know, didn’t understand they shouldn’t bring you such things. The book is gone. Eleanor?”

  “Go away.”

  The shock on his face was real, but even that wasn’t enough to make him st
ep into the room.

  Or maybe he’s unable to step into the room.

  He studied the shutters over the window as if trying to decide whether they were in the exact same position as when he’d seen them earlier in the day. Then his body sagged. His head sank forward.

  “Eleanor,” he said as he took a step back.

  It wasn’t the sorrow in his voice that prodded me. It was the defeat that made me call out, “Wait!”

  Still there, but I knew with a heart-deep certainty that if he took another step back into the shadows, he would be gone forever.

  “Just for tonight,” I told him. “I need to be alone tonight. Come back in the morning.”

  A hesitation followed by a sigh of relief. “In the morning,” he said. Then he was gone.

  I uncurled slowly. Holding on to my heart and my courage, I went back to the window and opened the shutters.

  No fields, no trees, no grass or flowers. The river flowed sluggishly, choked with bloated, decaying bodies.

  Even after all these weeks—maybe months by now—the river was still choked with bodies.

  Had some fool finally pushed the button that began the end of the world? Had some storm been Earth’s answer to global warming and toxic waste?

  Something cataclysmic that caused a chain reaction. Unstoppable once it began. The end of the world I had known. Not even the damn cockroaches had survived.

  I couldn’t remember the how or why. Maybe that was a blessing. When you’re the only survivor, those questions don’t matter anymore.

  I turned away from the window and walked over to the mirror. It showed me the same image, the same desolation.

  Was that the curse? Had I torn away the veil of magic that had given me the illusion that a piece of the world had survived?

  What had I been seeing in the mirror?

  Now that I no longer blindly accepted what I’d been seeing, I remembered that Peggy had been killed in a car accident several years ago. And Robert? I saw him as I remembered him—a friend of my youth—when he should look middle-aged if I were seeing something besides a memory. As for the land . . .

  Country village just down the road. I couldn’t see it, but I knew it was there. Something more like the Avonlea in the Anne of Green Gables stories than Arthur’s Camelot, but pieces of both those places could be found in the streets and houses and public buildings.

  And what about him? He came to me most often as the Celtic horned god—the Green Man, the Lord of the Hunt. An earthy, primal male. But he came in other forms as well, and the only reason I knew it was him was because his voice didn’t change along with his face or body shape.

  What was he? Some old earth spirit that had returned to try to mend a broken world? An alien from another planet whose people were trying to keep the few surviving humans alive and sane for however many years they had left to live?

  When I told him to go away, I’d frightened him. Truly frightened him. Why?

  Because he needs something from me.

  I closed the shutters and returned to the bedroom. The book was gone, as he’d said. But the thought of selecting another book from those shelves made me tremble, so I kicked off my shoes and lay down on the bed fully clothed.

  Slowly I became aware of the music that was playing—had been playing in the background.

  Hammered dulcimer and other string instruments playing the songs of Turlough O’Carolan, a blind Irish harper and bard who had lived centuries ago. I recognized the song “Mabel Kelly,” which had been one of my favorites. I got up long enough to program the player to keep repeating that song. As I listened, the music lanced a wound that had been festering in my heart, and my quiet tears washed the wound clean.

  The world I had known was gone, but another world existed—a shadow world I could only see reflected in the mirror. A world that, somehow, had been layered over the real one.

  Real world? I was a writer and a dreamer. A storyteller. I had never been chained to the “real world.” And since I couldn’t touch either one, why should I let desolation be given the solidity of the word “real?”

  As the music and the night flowed on, I made some choices, found some answers. Perhaps they were not factually accurate, but they were answers I could live with. That still left me with a question.

  When he looked at me, what did he see? Who was I that he thought me so important to his people’s survival?

  3

  The next morning he was waiting at the threshold, wearing a different form.

  I walked to the center of the room and studied him, trying to determine if this was a message.

  The Celtic horned god was primal, earthy. This male had a youthful maturity and a handsome face with the Black Irish coloring of blue eyes and black hair. The white, feathered wings brushed the sides of the alcove, and the white jumpsuit he was wearing . . .

  “Angels are androgynous,” I told him.

  “Andro . . . ” He frowned as he tried to find the tail end of the word.

  “They have no gender.”

  “No . . . ?”

  I circled my hand at a height that vaguely aligned with his groin. “No.”

  As I walked over to the chair, knowing I was about to change the rules, I heard him mutter, “I don’t think I like this form.”

  Hope. If I’d had to guess at the reason he’d chosen this form from the myriad images or symbols humans had created over millennia, I would have said it was meant to symbolize hope. And hope must walk in the world.

  “It’s a good form,” I said. “As necessary in the world as your other form.” I hesitated, then added, “I’m not an expert on angels, so I suppose the ones who deal directly with people would need to look more like people and have . . . ” Again I waved vaguely at his groin.

  His sigh was gusty and heartfelt. Then he offered a hesitant smile and said, “Good morning, Eleanor.”

  I met his smile with a grim expression. “There is something I must show you.”

  I sat down in the chair and watched the shutters being drawn back from the window.

  I glanced at him and noticed that his skin had turned sickly pale as he realized what the mirror revealed. He made some inarticulate sound of despair.

  I focused on the image in the mirror. “This,” I said in a clear, firm voice that would turn words into the stones of truth, “is the Land of Armageddon. It is a dark place. A terrible place born of death and destruction. What oozes out of its festering skin is dangerous, deadly. Know the names of the creatures who call this place home.”

  “I will learn them,” he said, his voice stripped of everything, even hope. Especially hope.

  I nodded to acknowledge that I’d heard him. “This is the Land of Armageddon. It is a dark place. A terrible place. It is also far away”—I turned and looked him straight in the eyes—“and it will never again be seen in the mirror.”

  His eyes widened as he realized what I’d just told him.

  I stood up. The shutters closed.

  “I must rest today.”

  He hesitated. “I should come back tomorrow?”

  “Yes.” I smiled. “Come back tomorrow.” I headed back to my bedroom, truly in need of rest. But I paused at the doorway. “If they should come across books about gardening—books that have pictures of flowers and shrubs and trees, I would like to see them. And books on yoga.”

  “Yoga?” He tried out the word.

  I spelled it for him, and he nodded.

  He was gone before my bedroom door fully closed.

  Gardening and yoga.

  I wasn’t sure why I had survived or what I was doing in this place, but if I was going to keep the Land of Armageddon far away, it was time to start setting a good example.

  4

  During the afternoons, I did yoga. At night I danced to O’Carolan’s music and envisioned a gentler world than had ever existed. I pored over gardening books, fixing the look of flowers and trees in my mind’s eye, focusing on how they would look in their own particular
seasons.

  I remembered the faces of friends and family, conjuring them out of memory until I could recall their voices, their particular ways of laughing, the way each of them moved.

  And I saw each one of them walk down that little stretch of road that was framed by window and mirror, pausing to wave before they headed for the village and another kind of life.

  It wasn’t much different from world building for a story, I thought one afternoon while I was trying to figure out what fruits could be grown in this climate— and then wondered if that was even a consideration anymore. Then I thought, no, it was more like being a stage manager and director for an improv theater. I supplied a description and character sketches for the people and a stage and props that had as much detail as I could bring into focus. After that, it was up to the beings who took on the roles to interact with each other.

  So I did yoga, I danced, I studied.

  The sloppy fat burned away. The meals, once I concentrated on the gardening books that contained fruits and vegetables, became tastier and offered more variety.

  Every day he was there within moments of my leaving the bedroom. He alternated between horned god and angel, on occasion trying on other forms to see what reaction I would have.

  The minotaur form, after leaving a steaming pile in the alcove, was banished from the tower but was allowed to roam the countryside as a “natural disaster.”

  After all, even the most benign story had to have some conflict.

  The night I saw a unicorn cantering up the lane between the fields brought tears to my eyes and took my breath away.

  The seasons turned. The fields were nothing but stubble under snow. The river froze. Through the cold winter days, I talked to him about the feel of things, the smell of things, the taste of things.

  And then, when the first cracks appeared in the river’s ice, I tried to expand my horizon.

  5

  “Why can’t it show the fields on the other side of the village?” I asked for the fourth time. My frustration rose in direct proportion to his strained patience.