It started when I was seven. I saw a giant brown-and-gold cobra one night. It rose and fanned its hood, then stared calmly at me from the foot of my bed. I sat up and looked at it for several minutes before running out to tell my mom.
She gave me a hug, told me it was a nightmare and that I should go back to sleep.
I insisted it was not a nightmare. I wasn’t scared, I told her, and that snake was real. She smiled and explained that we lived in upstate New York and there were no cobras there.
When I went back to bed, the snake was gone. I stayed up for a while, wondering if my mother was right and I had imagined everything. But I knew I’d been wide awake.
I looked for the cobra again, night after night, but it never reappeared. Then one night, during those same hours after I went to bed, but before I fell asleep, I closed my eyes and felt myself drifting. It was like going through a misty rain—reminded me of being in the cave behind the falling water at Niagara Falls.
In the darkness, I saw a golden, wispy thread and grabbed hold of it. When I opened my eyes, I was in a whole different place, and it was daytime.
I panicked, but there was a woman there. Pasea. She was kind and warm and soothing. She told me she’d found my body in the desert and something had called her to me. She said she was from Zanum, a land from the distant past—far, far away from where I lived, but it was okay, I would get home fine. She said everything would be all right and she would be there to help me.
“People like you have existed since the beginning of time,” she explained, as she found a wrap for me to change into. “It is nothing to be afraid of. I am real, not imagined, and you are real. All of your experiences here will be very, very real.”
Then she looked me dead in the eyes. “Never, never, let anyone convince you otherwise. You are descended from here, little one. Your power is greater than you can even imagine. There are people who will know this, and they will be afraid.
“But be unmoved, child,” she continued, “the Wise Dark is the eternal womb—the life force. It is the darkness from which all events, people, and time itself emerge. Those who have the gift to navigate the Dark create the events of our collective destiny.”
Each time I visited, I was farther along in their future. How quickly I jumped forward, or where I landed, depended on how I manipulated the Dark.
I trusted Pasea immediately. And I met Dhan, her grandson.
Dhan’s mother died in childbirth and Pasea had raised him. He was very curious about the strange bahari, the “permanent visitor,” among his people, but accepted my sudden appearances in his grandmother’s home. He was easy about it all, perhaps because he was used to people having gifts, even if he and his family were not among the gifted.
In the early years, Dhan bombarded me with questions. “What is the name of your home? Do you like Zanum better? Is your home more beautiful? Is there more water? Do you have the same lizards?”
Slowly, my tongue and my ears grew accustomed to the thick, ancient language. A few minutes of my time could be hours in Zanum, and hours could be days, sometimes even weeks.
At first I had no control over how long I was gone, or how much time had passed since my last visit, but I looked forward to going every night.
When I first told my mother about the visits, she dismissed it all as a dream. When it didn’t stop and I began to speak to my dolls in Zanum, using the same words each time for various objects, she scheduled the first available appointment with a child psychologist in a hospital where she used to work.
Dr. Mace.
I remember telling him, “Pasea says it is important for me to hold on to my memories of Zanum. She said people might try to take them away.”
His gaze had sharpened. “Yes,” he nodded. “Go on.”
But the look on his face had stopped me cold. It was the way a prisoner might look at the key to his jail cell. My throat closed up and I said nothing more.
There were other things that happened in Dr. Mace’s office that I couldn’t explain. Chunks of my memory went missing. I’d be talking to my mother about someone from school or something, then—nothing. It was like falling off a cliff. Complete erasure.
“It’s normal,” he would tell my mother. “These things happen when the mind is struggling with a painful reality.”
I complained daily about missing Dhan and Pasea, but my mother would only scrunch up her face, take deep breaths to fight the tears I could already see, and say that I needed to keep up with my appointments because I was “doing very well.” Then she would pull me close. “I lost my mother and grandmother to these fits of delusions… I won’t lose you, too.”
After a while, through weekly sessions with Dr. Mace, Zanum began to slip from my grasp. I dreamed of calling into the darkness and hearing only my echoes in response. I clung to Zanum night after night, but it was like grabbing a handful of fog.
I stopped participating in school and was developing “behavioral issues,” according to the guidance counselors. I was in danger of being kicked out of the private school my mother had worked so hard to get me into.
Soon, she got other family friends involved and called my grandparents in England for money. She took an extended break from work and monitored my every movement. She made sure I made it to every single one of my appointments with Dr. Mace and checked on me every night to make sure I wasn’t having one of my “fits.” And she kept Dr. Mace informed of everything.
It worked. I began to forget. The last visit I remember was when I was eleven. Dhan was eight then. Zanum was gone, no matter how desperately I searched for those beautiful, magical strands I’d found before.
Pasea said that time worked like a spiral staircase. Time slowed down or sped up depending on how you remembered it in your brain, how fast you moved through it to get to different points, and the decisions you made in the Dark.
When it was taken away from me, I felt empty, incomplete.
My mother was happy. Dr. Mace was happy. The counselors at school were happy. For three years I was normal. I was functioning well. I’d made “great progress.”
Then, when I turned fourteen, I found a strand. And everything I’d been made to forget avalanched into my memory again.
When I saw that thread—so faint and wispy I wasn’t sure it was real—I knew that I would never let Zanum slip from my grasp again.