Imaginings

Place and time unknown

Loche Newirth remembers the first time he saw Julia Iris. It was at the Floating Hope restaurant while he waited for Basil to join him. He was seated at the counter. She was serving. It was just days ago.

Of course, the experience was imagined.

It is strange to think of the traits that attract one person to another, especially now while peering into a colorless mist of impenetrable fog atop what he assumes is another pyramid far from Menkaure. He looks to his right and sees Julia crouched down beside him. Edwin is dozing, leaning against her. She meets his gaze. He remembers again the moment she turned and said her first word to him, “Coffee?” Certainly, her beauty arrested his breath. Her smile shot a volt of electricity through his senses. The rawest form of attraction. But there was something more. A familiarity. A trust. As if he’d known her for his entire life. Perhaps somehow, he did.

Of course, the experience was imagined.

She moved with confidence. Thinking back, Loche pictures her gliding from table to table—professional attire with a hint of sensual grace, elegant poise and a way of bringing comfort to everyone in the room. It made sense when she revealed that she owned the boat. The memory is a delight.

Of course, the experience was imagined.

Julia represents a number of firsts for Loche Newirth. She was the first to make the world around him disappear. Even now, her nearness can eclipse the horrors encircling their every move. He thought he had felt love for his wife, Helen, but upon meeting Julia, love had been totally redefined. Quite likely, he thinks. The first time he’d felt it. Never before had he experienced anyone or anything to cause him to question his marriage. Julia was the first.

Of course, the experience was imagined.

But how could the taste of her skin linger? The joy in her voice still lilt in his ears? The depth and breadth of her past life be as real as his own? He introduced her on paper in a few short sentences—that was all. There was no mention of her upbringing, or how her own choices through the years forged the woman she had become. Julia had her own memories. Her own light. A thousand untold stories she’ll never tell a soul.

Loche may have imagined her—wished her to life, but that was all. Julia’s life was hers.

“Julia?” Loche says. “Are you there?”

She is staring at him. “Of course,” she answers. “I’m right here.”

He kisses her.

“Can you imagine,” he asks, “when this is all over, what it will be like for you and me to wake up together in, say… a bed? Maybe it will be midmorning and raining outside.”

“I would love that,” she says. “Maybe it will be foggy.”

Loche searches the nebulous white around them for some landmark. “Let’s start down and find a place to rest.”

Somewhere out there in the fog, they are being hunted.

As soon as he secures Edwin in his arms, the little boy falls asleep. They descend slowly. The pyramid steps are steep and smaller than the Egyptian blocks.

This experience is not imagined.

Julia is beside him. He knows her. Not everything, but he knows her. They move together. Down and down. Step by step.

“Do you feel it?” Julia says. “It feels like—

“Like home?”

“Weird,” she says.

A slight breeze unveils the tops of evergreens.

A section of flat stones juts out and away from the slant of the pyramid and they walk along the smooth path for another few meters. The air is cool. More spikes of cedar and bull pine appear. After a few more strides, a drop off to a blurry haze stops them at an edge. They look for another route when, like lace blown from a window, the veil peels back revealing a crystal blue lake. Slanted light angles and sits on the shoulders of southwestern hills. Loche follows the line of surrounding mountains and ridges. He scans the shape of the shoreline. He inhales the sweet decay of maple leaves, and the moisture rising from sun on moss in the cracks of rock at his feet.

His heart nearly bursts. Another kind of love. This is—it must be—home.

He looks to Julia. She is searching the sky and the shores.

“I’m not seeing things, am I?” Julia questions. “This is the upper lake, right?”

Upper Priest Lake.

Imagined or not, Loche knows this place. Julia knows this place. Imagined or not, they feel for the first time they have an advantage over their pursuers.

But before Loche can puzzle out an answer to her question, he surveys their exact position. Directly across the lake is a nook he’s stared at for years. He traces a line back to his feet and stares down for a moment—the sheer cliff face—a drop of some fifty or more feet.

“This is where I fell,” he says almost inaudibly. He shudders. “This is the cliff I fell from, but something is—something is different.” His joy at being home darkens as he turns and looks back.

A massive, perfectly symmetrical pyramid rises from out of the hillside. The stones are a frosted white—a kind of quartz. They are standing on a kind of foot bridge from the pyramid center.

“Where are we?” Julia gasps, taking in the anomalous structure rooted beside an Idaho lake.

Loche feels his head crook to one side.

“Not where are we?” he says, “Maybe we should be asking, when are we?”