He moved through the woods near the Starlight Cinema amid a howling swirling wind.
Chaos rising. The entire landscape different, broken, primordial. In flashes it felt as though he were in the Tempest Bay of roads and cottages and the housing development, but then in other moments it was a rough pirate village of a few shacks and a series of jetties visible down by the shoreline. In still other blinks of his exhausted eyes it was nothing but a wild, desolate coast. A mysterious sphere rising above the northern hills like a distant planet.
But in every version, regardless, the ruined tower stood on the western clifftop. Squat, brooding, strange. A lighthouse on eternity. Human time against Old One time.
Something moving through the trees. A light, a form. A moment’s chatter.
He followed. He wouldn’t lose her. He had been so unaware in the Maze of Amaze. He had missed everything. Well not this time. He had been stupid. A confused young boy. Well not now. He was a grown man. He was ready for this.
Echoes everywhere in each step. This is where Dolly Salk lost her virginity. This is where Kerry March and Angus Sheaney lit a bonfire together. This is where old Sapper used to come, lonely, to cry after his shift at the loaders.
It’s all one thing. The land and sky and ocean. All one story, birthing aeons. And then now, here comes the information. Like a buzzing creature crystallising out of somewhere else.
Talking talking talking to cast the words like lamplight ahead of him—
I’m sorry, my love. I don’t understand you, but I know that you are the guiding soul on my journey through this hell. You’re a lost girl who sees the world differently. But you’re also much, much more.
And there she was. Summoned, maybe, by the ramblings coming out of his head. Flitting behind a tree on the edge of the wood. A roving Dramolite, perhaps. The ghost of weathers past.
He followed, his brain bleeding and the high-pressure atmosphere of an impossible town choking him. Followed the girl. But he couldn’t do it.
He was lost. More lost than ever. There were monsters and echoes forever roaming the Maze of Amaze and he couldn’t do anything about it. A pain in his throat that reached so deep he felt he’d die.
His heart started to give. He would die here.
But then he saw something gleaming in the dark. A book, nailed to a tree. And another beyond it.
A whisper in his ear from a familiar voice, twelve years old going on two hundred:
How dare you. How DARE you. I need you. Stop chasing ghosts.