I rifle through our Book of Shadows as soon as I’m home, but just as I expected, I don’t see anything about imaginary friends. My gut is telling me I’ve missed a bit, but this book is thick, so whatever useful info might be in here could be anywhere. In theory, my parents could have hidden it on some obscure page or written it in a code only they know, but that’s me being paranoid. We don’t keep secrets like this, and definitely not to this extent.
But Mom hesitated when I asked to take it with me, and that won’t leave my head.
I set the book aside for now and try something more active. I turn off the lights in my little altar room, light a candle on both sides of my person-sized scrying mirror, and remove the sheet that covers it whenever I’m not using it. Then, I spread my meditation cloth in front of it, sit cross-legged on the cloth, and let my gaze go soft.
It only takes a few seconds before all I see is my blurring reflection in the mirror, the black quickly overtaking everything else.
I’ve used this method so often to communicate with various spirits that it’s become my preferred method. Still, I feel a little silly when I say, “Mister Smiley Demon, come to me.”
I feel the familiar lightness and the beautiful sense that I’m floating, but other than that, nothing happens. I didn’t expect an immediate answer, but… I don’t know. Maybe I did. I hoped that, since he asked for help and I’m trying to do just that, I’d call and he’d be there. A hurt and deeply buried part of me feels abandoned all over again. I called to him after he left, too, and he didn’t respond then, either. I remember the loneliness that came with it. I shake it off. Mister Smiley Demon needs help for a reason. He probably can’t answer as easily as that.
I say his name again and picture his face as well as I can remember it. I think I catch a glimpse of him, but I don’t hear anything.
A few more glimpses, but they all fade like he can’t maintain our connection. It feels like when you’re calling someone just as you enter a tunnel: the phone line starts fine, then crackles, and finally disappears.
I try meditating instead, but I get the same frustrating lack of results. All I’ve done is confirm that he really does seem to be stuck somewhere. Why would he need my help to get free, though? He must have made plenty of contacts since I was a child. Clearly, imaginary friends don’t disappear just because their human no longer needs them, or Mister Smiley Demon would have vanished a long time ago. It’s true that I wasn’t ready to say goodbye at the time—not that I ever got a clear goodbye—but I’ve moved on. Sure, I thought about him here and there, but I sometimes think about other old friends and acquaintances, too. That doesn’t mean I actively miss all of them or that I’m not over our friendships ending.
And still…
Something’s compelling me to try again, to try harder.
I picture his face and try to remember his voice but only remember a giggle. I silently call out to him again. Something takes shape before me, but I reach out and it vanishes. I’m getting closer—it felt like Mister Smiley Demon in a way I can’t explain. I become lighter still, float ever upward toward a red landscape I don’t recognise—
And I panic.
My eyes fly open. My heart hammers as I grip the cloth under me.
That’s the second time now I’ve involuntarily begun to astral project. What even was that place? Is that where Mister Smiley Demon is? I hope not, because if I need to astral travel to get there…
I picture his face again, and my heart clenches. Isn’t he worth the effort? Even if we’ll never be friends again, even if it weren’t for our history, someone is trapped and needs my help. How could I just leave anyone there when they’ve asked me specifically? But there must be people more qualified for this. Who knows? Maybe that place I saw is a prison. Maybe Mister Smiley Demon deserves to be there—kid-me did call him a demon.
I sigh, blow out the candles, and turn on the lights. I cover the mirror under its sheet again. Does it matter what Mister Smiley Demon is? For a short while, he made me feel less alone. Demons aren’t evil by default.
I open the Book of Shadows again, stopping on every page about specific demons just on the off-chance that I’m on to something. None of them resemble my demon. My heart skips a beat at that, and my face flushes. He isn’t my anything.
There’s a longer general entry on demons. I skim it, though mostly because I don’t know what else to do. I should try scrying again, but what if I astral travel this time, too? What if it takes me to that red place, and I get stuck there? Maybe this whole thing is a trap, not Mister Smiley Demon at all, but a malevolent entity wanting to trap me on some other plane for some reason.
I nearly message my parents to ask them if they’ve ever seen a red plane that somehow made me think of a prison, but I change my mind halfway through the text. The astral plane and the universe are incomprehensibly huge. There’s no way my parents and I have accidentally stumbled across the same place.
I close the book and admit defeat for today. Tomorrow, I’ll come up with a new strategy.
***
I dream I’m in my parents’ garden and I’m five. The roses everywhere are an instant giveaway that this isn’t real: my parents never had that many roses, and no flower has fluctuating colours like rainbow northern lights.
“Hello, Lori.”
I whip around and come face to face with Mister Smiley Demon. Just like me, he’s five again—or maybe imaginary friends always look like children? His smile looks relieved, like he’s as glad to see me as I am to see him, but underneath, he seems sad. His eyes almost have a desperate edge to them.
I’ll make this count before I wake up.
“Where are you?” I ask.
I want to throw myself into his arms and make up for twenty-eight years of being without him, but an invisible force keeps us separate. It wakes something in me, though I don’t know what it is. That he’s right there and I can’t even hug him seems cruel and puts me on edge, like…
Like I won’t be complete without him. I don’t know where that thought came from.
I take a deep breath and remind myself that this is just a dream. Any emotion could mean any number of things; I’ll analyse it later, but right now, I have answers to get.
Mister Smiley Demon slowly shakes his head, and my enthusiasm wanes.
“I don’t know for sure. I just know I can’t leave, at least not on my own.”
“Why do you need my help? I thought you—” I swallow my unfair accusation. This isn’t the time to make him feel bad for leaving without a word.
He shrugs, but his smile is still there, like he can’t believe it’s really me. I can’t quite believe it’s really him, either, but then I feel a lightness at the back of my head, and I know I’m waking up. Whatever he needs to tell me, he needs to do it now.
“You’re the only one I can reach,” he says. “I don’t know why. I’ve tried my—”
“Can you tell me anything at all about where you are? Please, I don’t know how to—”
I startle awake when Sassy, my cat, jumps onto my chest and paws at my face.
“Damn it!”
Who am I kidding? Mister Smiley Demon doesn’t know anything. And besides, there’s no guarantee that was really him. It was likely just a representation of him that my mind invented to help me organize what little I do know: I last saw him when I was five, in my parents’ garden; he appears to be trapped somewhere and needs my help; that’s it.
So, really, I know nothing at all.
Dad’s words come back to haunt me. I do have better chances of finding him via astral travel, but…what good is my help if I get stuck right alongside him? What if I get severed from my body and can never return, my soul forever trapped somewhere in the void while my physical body slowly decays? My cat would probably start to eat me at some point. Good. She shouldn’t starve just because I was stupid.
But if I don’t risk it, I may never find him, and there is one thing I learned during the dream: whatever the reason, I need to find him. I don’t simply feel compelled to; I feel— It’s hard to put into words. Like not finding him isn’t an option. Like my soul requires me to find him and… and what? I doubt he’ll move in with me, and we’ll finally be the best friends we could have been when I was a kid. He’ll probably just go home, wherever that is. Child-me never asked where he lived. It doesn’t matter—Mister Smiley Demon should go home. What if he’s been trapped in this red landscape ever since I last saw him? I don’t know how imaginary friends age or perceive time or whatever other tricks they might have up their sleeves, but I doubt the years went quickly for him.
So, really, there’s only one way forward.
I reach out and scratch Sassy’s ear. She leans into the cuddles and starts to purr with a vengeance.
“I’m scared,” I whisper to her. “Watch over me, okay? Don’t let me get lost.”
She does a cute little purr-meow and loafs on my chest. I try to convince myself that if my soul does somehow get severed, my cat will totally catch it in her tiny paws and guide it right back into my body.
Because I’m so used to meditating, it doesn’t take me any time at all to feel like I’m floating. It also helps that I was asleep a moment ago and that I’m still tired. Slowly, the darkness behind my closed eyes turns purple. I lose all sense of my physical body. Sassy purring right over my heart actually seems to help ease me into the vibrational stage.
My phone rings, and for a moment, I begin to slip out, but I catch myself. It’s 2am. No one calls me at this time, and the likelihood of there being a genuine emergency just as I try to astral travel is slim, so it’s a test. My mind is making sure I’m ready.
“Come home,” I hear Mom call from downstairs. “We need you here, Lorren!”
I ignore her. She isn’t really in my house.
I know what you are, Guardian of the Threshold , I think at the invisible watcher. You won’t fool me. Take me to Mister Smiley Demon.
The purple light behind my eyes becomes impossibly bright, and then I fall up , out of my body, and right out of my house and away from this planet. I don’t know that me demanding to be taken to Mister Smiley Demon will actually take me to him, but it’s certainly taking me somewhere. Light, stars, and darkness flash past me like I’m zooming through a tunnel. One second I’m in there, the next…
I’m on a beach of black water and red sand. The sky is a violet-and-light-blue nebula. I’m alone, not even buildings anywhere. Is this the right place, or did my mind just remember the red and find the nearest match?
“Hello?”
No response. My heart begins to race, but I make myself take deep breaths to calm down. Panicking over being alone on some alien world will only make me snap back into my body faster, and then all this was for nothing.
And if I’m being completely honest with myself, this is pretty cool. I’m on another planet. I did it. I’ve never seen water, sand, or skies so vibrant, so stunning.
“Lori?”
Mister Smiley Demon has grown-up, too, but I’d recognise his eyes anywhere. He walks down a rise toward me, genuine disbelief on his face. I take a few unsure steps toward him, and then I run. He wraps his arms around me the second I reach him.
“You found me,” he whispers with a slight giggle. “You’re really here.”
“Well, my soul is,” I say. “I astral travelled.”
He cocks his head in confusion. “You didn’t convince your parents to send you here?”
My turn to be confused. “How would they know where you are?” I look around the foreign landscape. “Where are we, exactly?”
“I don’t know the name, but Lori, this isn’t a planet. It’s a plane—a prison plane created to keep me here.” His earlier smile falls when he sees the very real confusion on my face. “You really don’t know? Then… how did you find me?”
“I told you, I astral travelled. I— What plane? Who created this?” An uncomfortable truth begins to settle in my heart. I did think my parents were hiding something, and Mom hesitated to let me take our Book of Shadows. So, there’s something useful hidden in its pages, after all. She must have thought I was going far enough down the wrong path that I wouldn’t find their secret.
Betrayal replaces my confusion. My parents have been lying to me since I was five.
“We probably don’t have much time then,” Mister Smiley Demon says.
I really need to get his name before I fall back into my physical body. It’ll help me find him again. “Let me tell you all I know. Your parents were scared of me. That was mostly my fault—I based my appearance off the two demons who raised me, though I don’t think they’d have found my real looks any more comforting.”
“What is your own appearance?” I ask. Knowing what he really looks like might help, too. “I wasn’t sure if… Since you’re an imaginary friend…”
He hesitates, and I worry I’ve offended him. “If my appearance was based on what you found comforting?”
I nod.
“That’s a long story we don’t have time for right now, but once we have more time, I’m happy to tell you whatever you want to know.”
I nod again. “Just the basics for now, then.”
“All you need to know right now is that I didn’t leave you; I was banished. I have my suspicions about who did it, but I have no way to be sure.”
I wonder if we have the same suspicions, but I can’t be sure either, and frankly, I hope that I’m wrong. The idea that my parents banished my imaginary friend, who did nothing but cheer me up when I needed a friend, is ridiculous. I don’t know what I’ll do if it’s true. I suppose I’ll need to have another chat with my parents to get the truth. Although, given that they’ve lied to me so far—possibly—I’m not filled with confidence that they’ll come clean now.
“As I said, I don’t think this plane has a name because it was created, but you’ve found me once, Lori. You’ll find me again. I wish I could give you more, but…I’ve been here a long time. I don’t know anymore what I’ve made up and what’s a genuine memory.”
“What’s the last thing that happened before you got sent here?”
He pauses for a moment. “I was playing with you in your parents’ garden. They were afraid of me because of my appearance, so they were watching me more than you. I never gave them any cause for concern, though, at least not that I remember.”
“What happened then?”
“You went to bed, same as every night. I went home, too, but before I could make it back, something forced me away. I don’t know what it was exactly, only that it was powerful magic.”
Powerful magic… Like what my parents are capable of.
“I’m sorry, Lori. That’s all I know. Next thing I knew, I found myself here, and I’ve been stuck here ever since.”
That explains why he didn’t say goodbye. I was angry at him for so long when he didn’t do anything wrong. I feel like an ass now.
“I’m sorry someone did this to you,” I say. “I thought… I thought you’d left me. I’m sorry for that, too.”
Pain flashes across his eyes. For a moment, I think he wants to take my hands, maybe hug me, but he stays where he is.
“You have nothing to apologize for, Lori. I knew it wasn’t you. You were too young to wield spells like that, even by accident, and I hoped I hadn’t scared you enough to try.”
I smile, remembering how much better I felt whenever he was there. “No. Definitely not.” Since it doesn’t seem like he knows anything else that might help, I change the topic in what little time we might have left. “You said you were raised by demons, but…” I sigh. “I don’t know how any of this works. Where, erm…” I clear my throat. “Where do imaginary friends come from? And don’t give me the talk about what happens when a mommy imaginary friend and a daddy imaginary friend love each other.”
Mister Smiley Demon laughs. “I’m sorry to disappoint, but—”
I don’t hear the rest. A gasp escapes me as I fall up, presumably through the same tunnel of darkness and lights that got me here. It takes me a second to comprehend that it’s not just more lights in front of me when I come to in my body, but my cat’s demanding stare.
It’s feeding time.