The Ithaden’s Slave

by Daniella Wright

  The fact that her mood swings had not dissipated, combined with the fact that her appetite had not returned to her normal levels, frightened Kate as well. It frightened her to the point where one morning, when she was alone at home, she actually dialed up the clinic’s number to ask if it was normal to keep having pregnancy symptoms after an abortion.

  “Was there a chance, any chance, that the procedure could have failed?” Kate asked, the panic raising in her voice at the mere thought of having to go through all of this again. She could hear the nurse at the other end of the line, typing on her keyboard and whispering to her colleagues.

  “Well, miss Stoltz”, she was told after a big pause, “failed abortions amount to less than 5% of the cases for women who have had them around the 12-week mark.” Less than 5% would be a reassuring number to someone who hadn’t been working in Wall Street for years: for Kate, it was still a number. A number that was greater than zero.

  When she said so, the nurse half-heartedly suggested that she could stop by the clinic again, for an ultrasound. Or, “if she didn’t want to make the trip to the city”, she could take a pregnancy test… but no sooner than three weeks after the procedure, “to avoid false positives”. Just before Katie was about to hang up, the nurse felt the need to reiterate that the chances for something like that are really quite small. Infinitesimal. The symptoms are probably psychological. Perhaps she should try talking to a mental health professional, to help ease her mind?

  Kate thanked the nurse, told her she was already seeing someone, hung up the phone and threw it against the wall. Thankfully Margot had insisted on a protective case after seeing that her daughter was now prone to tantrums, so the phone didn’t break. Moments later, Kate was going through her online calendar, trying to figure out exactly when the three-week mark from the day of her procedure would be. Lo and behold, it was just in two days! For the first time in a while, Kate was happy to wear outdoor clothes. She went out of the house and headed straight to the supermarket to buy a pregnancy test. And maybe, just maybe, some non-vegan bacon.

  It’s funny how life works out, sometimes. If Kate hadn’t gone to that particular supermarket on that particular day to buy a pregnancy test (which came out negative, by the way), she wouldn’t have noticed the “Now Hiring!” sign at the register. Eager to start a job, any job that could keep her off her parents’ couch and stop her brain from plotting conspiracy theories about her abduction, Kate applied.

  Of course, the HR lady thought she was pranking her at first, what with that CV filled with Wall Street appointments and all. But Margot knew the owner (no big surprise, as she knew most people who owned a business in Great Neck Gardens) and she called him to explain that her daughter, overqualified though she may be, was simply looking for a way to get back on her feet after surviving a terrible ordeal. A mere few days later, Kate was wearing a pale yellow and blue uniform and worked at the supermarket as a cashier.

  Punching out numbers all day was actually surprisingly relaxing for her. Especially because these numbers, she didn’t have to lay awake at night trying to figure out how to make them bigger for her clients. She could just do her job, and then go home and not think about her job anymore — which was a real novelty for Kate. Her family seemed happy about it. Not because they considered her a burden, as Kate jokingly suggested when she first told them she applied, but because they saw it as a sign of her getting back to her former self. The good old Kate who hated being idle and always loved a new challenge... Even her psychologist agreed that this change would be good for her. For one, less demanding working hours meant that Kate would have enough time to rest during the day. For another, Kate working close by and living with her parents was probably the most safe and therapeutic option for now, as she was still mentally and physically recovering from trauma.

  Of course, her dad was secretly worried. He and Kate were too much alike for him not to see this move for what it really was: fear. Fear that, after being out of the game for eight months, she wouldn’t be as relevant to the Wall Street circuit. Fear that all her colleagues and future clients from now on would see her as “the girl who was abducted”. A victim, not a kick-ass professional whom they could trust with their money. But while her dad was right about that one, he was blissfully unaware of the whole picture. Because being unable to get back to her Wall Street life wasn’t the only fear Kate had. Her main fear, the one that still kept her up most nights, was that she was going crazy.

  Maybe it was PTSD. Or maybe during those eight months of captivity her brain sustained some trauma, somehow altering its chemical balance along the way. Kate couldn’t think of any other explanation for the hallucinations she’d started having lately. By now, it was pretty clear that nobody was following her — nobody that was visible to anyone but her, anyway. After the first few times where she could have sworn that a red-headed man with piercing blue eyes was looking at her from across the street, only for him to disappear when she would try to get a closer look. Kate started asking the people around her, just to make sure. (She had been kidnapped in the past, after all. Better safe than sorry.) But no one ever saw anything, apart from Kate’s cheeks reddening from the shame of disturbing strangers for absolutely no reason.

  The weirdest thing was, she wanted him to be real. Not because that would mean she was not crazy. And not because it would mean the police could arrest, interrogate him and perhaps shed some light on what had happened to her (although the thought did cross her mind, of course). No, it was worse than that: somehow, Kate was feeling an uncanny draw to that man. Ghost. Hallucination. Whatever he was. Every morning on her way to work, every evening that she was walking back home, she found herself secretly hoping to encounter him once again. She was certain, without knowing how, that this man would never harm her. In fact, seeing him would somehow make her feel safer, as if he was there to protect her from the real people who would cause her harm. If that’s not crazy, Kate didn’t know what was.

  Besides, the stranger (ghost, hallucination, whatever) was a sight to behold. His beige trench-coat always seemingly unaffected by the wind blowing around him; his curly red hair reflecting the sun, giving the impression that his whole head was on fire. If he was just a figment of Kate’s imagination or troubled psyche, then her psyche and imagination were far more creative than she’d ever give them credit for.

  It was one of those afternoons when she was going home from work, that Kate saw the stranger again. Only this time, the street was empty — no one there apart from him and her. So she decided to treat crazy with crazy and go talk to him.

  Even long before anything remotely bizarre had happened to her, back when her biggest fear was not getting an A+ on the latest exam at Cornell, Kate wasn’t great at initiating conversation with men she liked. All her boyfriends, few as they were, approached her first. Later on, online dating made things a bit easier; Kate could be really witty and fun in texting, where she had the time to think through and revise what she’d written. It was strange how the same person who was so fierce and cool in a meeting room filled with hedge fund managers and executives, could become so tongue-tied whenever she tried to casually chat with a guy at a bar… But that was just how it was for her. In a way, the fact that this mysterious stranger probably didn’t exist made it easier for Kate to run after him.

  She certainly didn’t expect to catch him though. And yet, while he and his trench-coat were about to turn around the corner and presumably disappear, Kate reached out her hand — and grabbed real fabric. The stranger stopped moving completely, as if frozen in time. Then slowly, very slowly, he turned around and looked at Kate with these blue eyes of his. The sadness in them took her by surprise, as did that sudden flare of… something, something unmistakably stirring inside her. Her mind briefly flew to that pregnancy test; deep down she still wasn’t convinced she wasn’t pregnant anymore. But right now, her attention was focused on him. Because unless she was having a full-blown psychotic episode, this man was very real. So what was he
doing, watching her?

  Kate took a big breath, like she used to do before a big presentation or meeting, and centered herself. Trying to sound as authoritative as possible (which was very difficult when all she wanted to do was make these blue eyes less sad somehow), Kate said: “Who are you and why the heck are you stalking me?”

  Two very strange things happened just then. First off, the man said something to her — in a language that was definitely not English (or Spanish, the other language Kate could somewhat communicate in). Secondly, Kate realized that she understood completely what that man was saying, even though she still had no idea what he meant: “I can’t say much here. If you want answers, here’s where you need to be.”

  He reached in one of the pockets of his trench coat and, after seemingly fumbling about for a second, pulled an oddly shaped piece of paper (it was almost conical, Kate thought afterwards) and gave it to her. Strange graphics seemed to be swirling on that paper; graphics that Kate, once again to her amazement, recognized as letters. By the time she looked up from the paper, the man had vanished.

  “Ith-rassil, ptet sirihis ra roross. Hroussil htemtep ra grassil, ith-ihadentet ra.”

  While dazedly making her way back from work, Kate kept repeating that phrase like a mantra. It was an old Wall Street trick for dealing with foreign clients: she would spend some time repeating one or two key phrases they used a lot during the meeting, to familiarize herself with their vocabulary — because, ultimately, that revealed a lot about how their brains worked. In any future communication with those clients, Kate would make sure to carefully insert the phrases when possible, to make them feel a sense of kinship. It was a low-key manipulation tactic taught in elementary business psychology courses, but it worked wonders.

  This case was very different though. For one, the kinship was already there. And inexplicably so! To think, this was a language she’d never heard or remembered studying ever before in her life, spoken by a mysterious man who apparently wasn’t a hallucination (although he could certainly vanish like one). And yet for some unfathomable reason, Kate’s brain could translate this language into English without much ado. She could pronounce the words, even.

  Sure, they didn’t sound quite as elegant as when he spoke. Mystery Man’s voice was deep and raspy, effortlessly sliding its way through the weird sentences like a professional skier criss-crossing snowy terrain. When Kate tried repeating them, it felt more like that time she went skiing for the first time in Vermont as a kid: clumsy and awkward, but hey, at the end of the day, still standing. And elegance didn’t matter anyway. She kept repeating the words so that she wouldn’t forget them, in the hopes that something would start stirring in that bizarre brain of hers along the way.

  “Ith-rassil, ptet sirihis ra roross. Hroussil htemtep ra grassil, ith-ihadentet ra.”

  Kate was almost at her parents’ house now (she still couldn’t think of it as “home”). Walking in a trance-like state as she was, she failed to notice the nice old couple from two houses down who had taken their dogs out on their routine afternoon walk. Suburbia life was still relatively new to her. So when the old woman greeted her, it took a hot second for Kate’s tongue to switch gears from whatever the heck that language was to plain old English. “Ith-r…err, hi”, she said awkwardly, aware that she wasn’t scoring many normalcy points with her neighbors. Poor sight due to old age and all that notwithstanding, they had clearly seen her talking to herself just before. And for the good people of Great Neck Gardens (most of them retired and not overly familiar with things such as bluetooth headsets and the work-crazed New Yorkers who wore them to be able to yell on their associates en route to the office), talking to yourself on the street was a sign of either insanity or Alzheimer’s. But Kate didn’t really care. So what if her neighbors thought she was crazy? At this point, all that mattered was that she knew she wasn’t — and she had the mystery note to prove it.

  That note… That note was a whole other mystery wrapped in an enigma dressed in a trench-coat. Kate remembered how earlier, when Mystery Man pulled it out of his pocket and gave it to her, she was puzzled by the cursive writing that seemed to be glowing and moving. So puzzled, that it took her a minute to realize he’d also pulled yet another one of his (signature by now) disappearing acts on her. Because she could read the graphics on that paper as well as she could comprehend the words coming from his mouth — only these here weren’t words.

  They were numbers. Sixteen of them to be exact; grouped in a repeating sequence of two and six digits. And then, there was the issue of the paper itself. Kate had seen all kinds of bespoke stationery back in her Cornell University days, but none of it ever seemed to grow hotter in the sun as if it was made from metal. As she reached her parents’ home and unlocked the door with one hand she could still feel the note, warm in her other palm. She was literally itching to get to her laptop and start investigating.

  Thankfully, it was a slow night at home. Her dad was catching up with his financial news and her mom had gone to New Jersey to spend the night at Jennifer’s, as apparently she liked to do every now and then. According to Margot, this was happening for reasons completely unrelated to the state of her marriage or her husband’s mood swings. (“No, of course I didn’t have a fight with your dad, Kate. Don’t be silly! I just want to have a few cocktails with my daughter. I mean, oh, you understand what I mean, don’t you love? Just make sure to remind him to take his heart medicine.”) Kate was a big girl and knew that some things are better left unsaid. Especially when they involved a couple sadly growing apart after losing a child… only to get said child back and living with them after eight months. In any case, she was grateful for the peace and quiet; she had a whole bag of mysteries to solve! After giving her dad a kiss on the cheek and checking that he had indeed taken his heart medicine, Kate headed straight to her bedroom, closed the door and cranked open her laptop.

  “Ith-rassil, ptet sirihis ra roross. Hroussil htemtep ra grassil, ith-ihadentet ra,” she started typing. Time to see what that language was she had apparently become fluent in.

  Internet had never failed Kate before. Online research was one of her favorite parts of her old job; she could spend days in a row, learning everything she could about the key players of a company her firm was interested in investing in. So when her search for “Ith-rassil, ptet sirihis ra roross. Hroussil htemtep ra grassil, ith-ihadentet ra,” yielded no results whatsoever, Kate refused to give up. She tried typing every word on its own. She used every possible different variation of it (in case she was remembering it wrong). She even installed an AI translation software and took a photo of the note with it, for it to identify the characters and match it to a non-Latin alphabet. Nothing. Absolutely nothing. That language did not exist anywhere in the web… which probably meant that it didn’t exist anywhere in the world, either. At this point, she felt like she was just spinning her wheels. And she didn’t quite like the sound they were making.

  In an effort to maintain her sanity, Kate realized she had to take a step back from the language thing and consider the bigger picture, starting with all the different variables.

  First off: a Mystery Man who had been watching her for days, always conveniently disappearing after being noticed. A claim he had answers, presumably related to her abduction and memory loss. (Because there simply had to be a connection between his appearance and her eight-month gap. Kate never really believed in coincidences, even less so lately.) A note with sixteen numbers, written in characters that technically did not belong to any known alphabet. A suggestion that she should visit the place these numbers supposedly pointed to, if she wanted answers. While she was on that particular trail of thought, Kate realized the absurdity of even considering following the instructions of a potential stalker — especially after having been kidnapped once. And yet she couldn’t ignore that uncanny kinship she felt with him either. Why wasn’t she feeling more threatened by that encounter? Why wasn’t she more afraid? Why did the word “Ith-rassil” in particul
ar, the first word Mystery Man said to her, make her strangely sad although she couldn’t quite pinpoint what it meant? Her frustration rising by the second, Kate decided to turn her focus back to the thing she was most good at: numbers. Sixteen of them to be exact, grouped in a repeating sequence of two and six.

  This time, the internet did not fail her. After a few attempts at writing the numbers down on a piece of paper to see if they were some kind of code for a meeting time and place (she even tried to substitute them with letters), she realized the answer was probably much simpler for this once. The numbers were simply geolocation coordinates; latitude and longitude.

  A quick map search later, revealed them to be in Yardley, Pennsylvania, a mere 91.5 miles from her parents’ home at Great Neck Gardens. To think, just an hour and forty minute drive on the I-95 and she could finally have some answers… Wait, how come there wasn’t any meeting time specified on the note though? Perhaps Mystery Man, in true spy novel fashion, would leave her another note stating the time soon? Or, perhaps, the meeting time didn’t matter because this was a trap: this was his place, his lair even, the place where she was being held all that time. And she was debating whether she should walk right back into it. Kate didn’t really believe that Mystery Man had abducted her, not in her heart of hearts… But she couldn’t afford not to consider all possibilities. She definitely didn’t have another eight months of her life to waste.

  When the sun came out that morning Kate realized she had, at some point, fallen asleep on her desk right next to the keyboard. In the hand that was not currently serving as a pillow for her head, the note was still clutched tight. It was a bit crinkled and a lot less sturdy — and it had cooled off completely by now. Also the markings were way less visible today (thankfully Kate had them written down and the geolocation was marked and saved on her browser). There was no mistaking it: the note seemed frailer and smaller, like it had shrunk and withered overnight. With a groan, Kate cast it aside. She got up and headed toward the bathroom, to take a long shower and clear her head. After all, there was still such a thing as the real world out there; the supermarket would be opening soon. Mystery Man and withering notes and general craziness aside, Kate had a job she had to go to and she wouldn’t be late.