They stepped out of a storage closet and into a classroom.

Rows of desks faced a chalkboard, and a small, cramped table piled high with paper was tucked into a corner. A jiggly, matronly woman sat perched on a stool by the table, her flabbiness spilling over the top of the stool like muffins too big for the pan.

“Oooh!” she exclaimed upon seeing five strangers appear in her classroom. “Oooh! Have you come for me? I’ve always known someone would come for me.”

“No, ma’am,” said Zack, who was very practiced at being nice to teachers. “We haven’t come for you.”

“One of the children, then?” asked the woman with a quiver that took an extra second to travel all the way around her body. “I can well understand. A few of them are nice and plump.”

Zack had no idea what she was talking about but was saved the bother of responding by his grandfather. “Just passing through,” spat the old man, leading the children down the aisle to the door.

“Oooh,” said the woman, a hint of disappointment in her voice. “Well, if you change your mind…” She patted her tummy and returned to her paperwork as they left the room.

Rows of full-sized lockers covered the hallway while pale industrial lighting gloomed down upon a far-too-shiny linoleum floor. Marcus carefully closed the classroom door before turning to his grandchildren and shaking his head.

“She gives me the willies,” he said, more to himself than to any of them.

“What was that thing in the water?” asked Zack, ignoring his grandfather’s musings and getting right to the point.

“And why’d—achoo!—why’d you throw pepper at it?” added Sydney.

“I said don’t breathe.” Marcus looked up and down the corridor and led them forward. “It’s a mucus creature. Lots of nasal passages. Pepper irritates it.”

“Where did it come from?” asked Janice, trying to keep up. “That’s not real. Nobody ‘remembered’ it.”

“No. It…evolved.”

“In the MemorySphere?” asked Sydney with a sniffle, her eyes puffy and red.

“In a specific memory,” he answered, frowning. “One of the first…” His voice trailed off. Zack saw a weariness in his grandfather he hadn’t noticed before. He wondered what sort of life the man must have been leading trapped inside the MemorySphere all these years.

“However,” snapped Marcus, suddenly back to his usual self, “I’ve never encountered it elsewhere.”

“How’d it find us?” asked Janice.

“The memory man brought it,” stated Alexa.

The others turned to look at the diminutive girl who, tired of all the walking, had flumped down onto the floor. As one, they waited for her to elaborate. She didn’t.

Finally, Zack cleared his throat. “What memory man, Alexa?”

“The one that put the Nasty, Slithery Something in the lake. Duh.”

Everyone just stared. “Huh,” said Zack.

“Did you see the memory man?” asked Marcus.

“Sure,” answered Alexa. “He waved to me. Then he put something in the lake. Then it swam over and attacked me. It was nasty.”

“You mean someone brought that thing to the lake?” asked Janice with rising alarm.

“Not someone,” corrected Marcus, growing red with concern. “The memory of someone! Walloping wallabies! I was right!”

“You know who it was?” asked Zack.

“Yes! Dimitri!” declared Marcus.

“No, Dimitri’s innocent,” said Janice. “Remember? He was tied to a chair.”

“The real Dimitri, yes. But not his memory! Pliable penguins! The implications!”

Marcus at once set off on another back-and-forth pacing binge, mumbling and muttering to himself as his mind worked.

“I don’t understand,” confessed Janice.

“I think I understand,” said Sydney. “I’m just not sure I believe it.”

Zack tried to put it together in his mind. Was it possible? Could a memory of the quirky foreigner have been acting on its own? How?

“Why would Dimitri want to hurt us?” asked Alexa.

“Not Dimitri,” reminded Sydney. “A memory of him.”

“But he’d still be Dimitri, wouldn’t he?” she asked.

“Not necessarily,” said Marcus, returning from his mini jaunt. “He’d be of this world. The MemorySphere. And dangerous. If I’m right, he’d be very, very dangerous.”

Zack was not thrilled with his grandfather’s tone. “Why?” he asked.

“Because I think I know where he came from,” answered a very guilty Marcus Tulving. “The same place that creature came from.”

He swept a hollow gaze across his grandchildren, filling them all with dread.

“My wife’s memory.”

“Your grandmother was a wonderful woman,” remarked Marcus. He sat on one side of a table in the school cafeteria, with Zack and his sisters on the other. “Beautiful. Warm. Generous. Loving.”

“Mom said you abandoned her,” said Sydney, rubbing her eyes dry.

“Did she? Yes, I suppose she would. She didn’t understand. Refused to understand.”

“What happened?” asked Zack, trying to keep his grandfather on track.

“Agatha grew ill. Pneumonia. Nothing could be done. I lost her.”

The children teared up over the loss of the grandmother they had never known.

“I was devastated. She was my life. But I had been so focused on my work….” He sighed and wiped a tear from his eye. “It was Charlotte’s idea, to use her mother’s door. She hooked it up without telling me. While I was grieving. She visited…so many times.” He stopped and put on his best “studious professor” face. “You understand what happens? When you enter and exit a memory over and over again?”

“We do,” answered Zack with a shiver. The others nodded.

Marcus fidgeted in his seat and rubbed his hand across the back of his neck. “Dimitri told me what she was doing. I went down there to stop her, but she was already inside. We followed. Dimitri and Gladys and I. It was a nightmare.”

He stood and turned away, as if not looking at them would make the story easier to tell. “Agatha was…a monster. Those things were everywhere. And worse. She was worse. She was…” He turned back to face them. “I loved your grandmother. Have I said that?”

“Yes,” answered Zack.

“It’s true. I loved her. More than anything. But this…this was not Agatha. This was an abomination. Charlotte didn’t see. She was blinded by love. But we saw. And we acted. Dragged Charlotte out of there. Shoved her through the door.”

He stopped his narration, a puzzled look on his face.

“Twice.”

The children perked up at this odd remark.

“Twice?” asked Alexa. “That’s silly.”

Marcus nodded. “I can’t explain it. But we shoved her out the door. And then shoved her out the door again. Then I left. And then I left again. As soon as Dimitri was through, I slammed the door shut. We barely escaped with our sanity. Charlotte was furious. Ran off later that night. Never came back.” He shuffled absently away, lost in his own thoughts.

Something about the story seemed off to Zack, but he couldn’t quite put his finger on it.

Sydney, however, figured it out. “Dimitri only came out once,” she said.

Marcus lowered himself onto a cafeteria bench, which for some reason had the consistency of Jell-O, bits of it squirting out from under his bottom. “I never really thought about it. But you’re right. He only came out once.”

“One Dimitri escaped,” said Zack. “But the other…”

“Oh, dear Lord,” murmured Janice in horror. “Trapped inside that nightmare.”

“With nowhere to go,” added Marcus quietly, a subtly comic squishy sound coming from his uncomfortable shifting about on the Jell-O bench. “I dropped my research for years. Opened no new doors. Added no new memories to the MemorySphere.”

“And all that time…,” breathed Sydney.

“All that time,” confirmed Marcus, “he would have been trapped among the few initial memories, the entire MemorySphere—his whole world—souring into a nightmarish prison.”

A stunned silence echoed throughout the dumbfounded cafeteria. The children, who had experienced only fleeting moments of terror within the MemorySphere, went cold at the thought of spending years in a nightmare.

“He must hate you,” observed Zack.

“Undoubtedly,” agreed Marcus.

“But he’s just a memory, isn’t he?” asked Janice, determined to make some sense of it all.

“He’s much more than that,” assured their grandfather. “A sentient being? Born in here? Who knows what his limitations may be? Or if he even has any?”

“That’s why he was able to switch out Mom’s and Aunt Gladys’s memories at the same time?” asked Sydney.

Marcus slowly nodded, putting it all together himself. “He can go anywhere. Once you have a memory of your own hooked into the MemorySphere, you’re at his mercy.”

“We’ll never get Mom or Aunt Gladys back,” realized Zack. “Anything we do, he can undo.”

“What? No!” cried Sydney. “We have to get them back. We can’t just abandon them!”

“We have to save Mommy!” urged Alexa. “And Aunt Gladys! They’re our family!”

“There has to be a way to fix them,” said Janice. “Maybe we can talk to this Memory Dimitri.”

“And say what?” asked Zack. “ ‘Sorry you were driven insane by our family years ago, but would you mind making everything all better for us?’ ”

Janice bit her lip and didn’t answer. Because there is no good answer, thought Zack. This Memory Dimitri obviously has it in for us. Which left one alternative.

“We need to stop him,” he said.

“How do we do that?” asked Sydney.

“We go to the source. Stop him from ever being created.”

Marcus shot up in panic. “No! Very bad idea! You can’t go into that memory!”

“We have to,” insisted Zack.

“It’s too dangerous! Those things! And Agatha! No. Out of the question.”

“Is there any other way?” pressed Zack.

Marcus rose to his full height, suddenly seeming far larger and more intimidating than he had before. “That memory is not for you. It is evil. I went back in there when I first locked myself in here. I barely survived. Do you understand? I barely survived! And I’m an adult! What are you? Ten?”

“Eleven,” mumbled Zack.

“I’m seven!” said Alexa proudly.

“Out of the question!” roared their grandfather. “The MemorySphere is…! You shouldn’t even be here! Any of you! Give me your doorknob—you’re going home!”

He extended his hand expectantly.

“We can’t go back—” began Sydney.

“You don’t have a knob?” His eyes and nostrils flared with fury.

“I got it! I got it!” Alexa quickly pulled the knob out of her pocket and offered it to Marcus, shaking in fear the entire time.

He snatched it from her hands and marched to the door leading back into the school hallway. “You’re all leaving!” he announced. “This instant!”

“They’ll send us all away,” complained Janice. “Split us up.”

“I don’t wanna move to Uruguay,” complained Alexa.

Marcus reached the door and smacked the knob hard against the wood. The children all heard and felt that odd clicking sensation as the knob settled into place. “I’m…sorry,” he said hesitantly. “But…there’s no other way.”

“We’ll never see each other again,” pleaded Janice.

“At least you’ll be alive. And sane,” finished Marcus, who then yanked the door open, showering the cafeteria with bright white light.

Zack shielded his eyes from the intense glare. “You’re our grandfather,” he said. “Our only hope.”

But Marcus simply shook his head. “There’s no hope for you in here.”

Zack turned to survey his sisters. Janice was a wilted mess, Alexa was on the verge of tears, and Sydney was working herself up into a serious RAGE. A RAGE that would serve no purpose but to permanently scar their family. He knew what he had to do.

“Come on, guys.”

He took Alexa’s hand and gently led her to the beckoning whiteness.

“Zack, we can’t just quit!” said Sydney, her face growing even redder than it already was.

“It’s over, Sydney,” he said. “Grampa’s right. We’re just kids. This isn’t a playground.”

He turned his back on everyone and, with Alexa’s fingers curled tightly around his, walked out of the MemorySphere.