Molly walked confidently through a green valley filled with magnificent trees and luscious, juicy, glossy leaves. Streams trickled below the shiny undergrowth. The clean air tasted delicious. She was strong and healthy. She belonged there.
She didn’t exactly wake up from her dream. It was more that she became increasingly aware of being somewhere different. Of being something different.
Until she was.
She rolled her splitting head on the pillow of folded coats and squinted at her pillbox on its shelf. Within reach, but oh so far away in terms of effort.
She wasn’t sure how many of her standard painkillers she’d taken in the past twenty-four hours. She always erred on the side of caution, wary of an accidental overdose in the short term and kidney damage in the long term. But she was prepared to believe she might have taken more than usual, and with only snack food in her stomach.
It was time to switch up to the big hitters.
The muscle and nerve pains twisting her body were intense, and there was that familiar poisonous indigestion sensation sliding slowly and continuously down inside her chest as if she’d swallowed a pint of toxic tar.
But hard experience said those symptoms might be nothing compared with what could come later.
Her classic punishment-relapse pattern after a bout of physical activity beyond the norm, was sharply increasing pain and sickness that grew and grew until it reached its peak forty-eight hours after the event.
It stayed at that peak for as long as it wanted to. Sometimes days. Sometimes weeks. Sometimes months. She’d read that if a relapse was severe enough, a bad peak of pain could become the new norm indefinitely.
In her experience, the next twenty-four hours were likely to be hellish. After that, there was no knowing. It was all so random. There was just never any bloody knowing.
Reaching for the pillbox made her arm scream, but the big hitters were in there and she needed them right away.
She rolled over and managed to get two of them on her dry tongue, managed to lift the bottle and gulp enough water to swallow them without spilling any on her pillow, and managed to replace the pillbox safely on its shelf and ease back down without vomiting from the slamming pain inside the back of her head.
That was a win.
Now all she could do was wait for the chemicals to do their thing.
They would bring on a dull, dry headache in an hour or two, and her body would only get drier and duller the more of them she took at regular intervals. But constipation and a cotton-wool brain would be fair payment for helping her get through the day. Maybe the next few days.
She woke again two hours later, feeling not as bad as she’d anticipated. That was good.
It was also the second time in twelve hours that she’d decided to get Tamass the Fearless from the big room next door and then woke up later to find she’d sort-of-dreamed doing it without having even stood up.
Now she had to stand up. It was a good job the staff toilets weren’t far away because her bladder was bursting.
The ME bullied her with its classic lack of reliable after-sleep balance, but she bounced off the corridor walls and made it to the toilet in time.
She washed up while she was in there, and rescued a clean but empty water bottle from the waste bin. Refilled with tap water, it would add something to her defence of Sted’s book.
Her day wasn’t going too bad, so far, but she couldn’t guess how it would be in even an hour. Best to get the book while she was on her feet.
A Sunday morning in the unoccupied main fiction room was a magical time and place. Even torrential rain hammering against the tall windows beneath the domed ceiling wasn’t as mundane as it would have been in opening hours. And it was her best protection.
She headed straight for the Tamass shelf, but that took her past the newspaper table and Saturday’s front pages caught her eye. They all carried a headline about the same story.
The Times was closest to hand.
FAMOUS AUTHOR MISSING
Novelist Missing After House Fire
Four people including reclusive author Paul Best (40) have been missing since Friday evening, when during a lightning storm on Cornwall’s south coast a fire burned his gothic mansion to the ground.
Also missing are the mansion’s caretakers, Robert and Mary Thorne, and Dr Karen Stanley (32), a local marine biologist and family friend.
The article mentioned the death of Paul’s wife seven years earlier and its damaging effect on his career, noted that his agent was unavailable for comment, and said the police were keeping an open mind.
So the story appearing word by word in Paul’s handwriting on the pages of Sted’s book was real, and it was happening now, day by day, as she was reading it. She hadn’t needed any confirmation, but here it was anyway.
She lifted Tamass the Fearless (Second Edition) down from the shelf, arranged the other books in the series to make the missing volume less obvious, and took it back to the lost property room. Time to see if she could walk between the worlds just by deciding to.
What to take with her?
She didn’t know how long she’d be there. She didn’t even know for certain that she could get back. So painkillers and her full water bottle were her top priority. She dropped them into her haversack with the novel.
She stuffed her hair into a beanie hat from the shelf. Its black wool looked and smelled clean, which was more than she could say for her hair.
Sted’s book could stay behind. It was more trouble than it was worth.
She went to hide it, until she noticed its new title on the front cover.
THE ORPHAN AGE in inked block capitals, and a new chapter inside in Paul’s handwriting.
She read his account of Karen’s encounter with the merrow, and then hid the book inside a plastic bag along with the bottle of water she’d rescued earlier and put the bag under a nasty old coat at the back of a shelf.
On seeing the real Ys from a distance this morning, Paul had been pleased that all his previous descriptions of the city were accurate.
Molly knew the picture well. She had imagined entering Ys a thousand times or more. She didn’t need to find one of Paul’s descriptions in his novel. She simply closed her eyes and visualised the riverbank beside the high city wall.
And she was there.
Very close to throwing up again.
Very glad she’d stayed on her feet this time before she made the jump.
She lurched a single step sideways to stay upright, and kept her eyes closed until the violent swirling inside her head stopped.
The sunlight made her wince and hurt the front of her brain like scalpels slicing deep.
She opening her eyes more cautiously the second time, and stepped into the slender shadow beside the wall.
It towered above her like a cliff. Trying to see the top of it threatened to bring the dizziness back. Instead, she leaned against it and got her bearings.
The broad river flowed fast and smooth. Its near edge was about fifty feet from her. People walked in both directions along a wide path of hard, dry, beaten earth above its bank.
No one paid her any attention. No one seemed to have seen her materialise.
A quarter mile away in the other direction, standing proud of the high wall like the pillared front façade of a grand house, was the main city gate.
Paul and his friends were walking through it.