Where Memory Meets Water

THE FOOTSTEPS SOUNDED THE WAY they do in movies—thudding and ominous—and drawing nearer.

Thump, thump.

“The Inspectors should stay at the conveyor belt! They shouldn’t be in this area!” Spuddle whispered. “I swear, I’m going to fill out Official Complaint, Form 246A!”

“You guys seem to put a lot of faith in paperwork,” Stella said.

Anyway and Spuddle stared at her in shock. “Doesn’t everyone?” Spuddle asked. He hiccupped nervously.

“Look, we can discuss this later,” Anyway said as he climbed out of Stella’s pocket and leaped onto a suit of armor. “But first—hide.” Stella hurried to the edge of the room and pressed herself against the cold stone wall. It gave her the oddest sensation—it was as if the room had once held magic, but it had all leaked away, leaving everything deader than if it never had any in the first place.

The clunk, clunk, clunk of boots stopped right outside. The door rattled on its hinges. Anyway peered at Stella from the shoulder of the armor. “They won’t get in,” he said.

“How do you know?” Stella asked.

“I don’t; I’m just saying that.” Then he scurried into the visor of the armor and disappeared.

Thunk. Thunk.

She had to hide. She scanned the room for a likely place and spotted a beautifully carved chest. She didn’t like the idea of being shut up inside so instead hid behind it, covering herself with a wall tapestry as the door banged on and on.

It is a horrible feeling to simply sit and wait to be found, and Stella shivered as she shrank back against the wall.

There were a few things hidden near the chest: a silver brush, a hand mirror, and a small, oval pendant. The pendant had a symbol on the front. It was a letter A, drawn to look like a star. Stella picked up the necklace, and the moment she touched it, a feeling like a wave of electricity traveled through her.

Thunk.

She didn’t know what an Inspector looked like, but if the turnstile operators were gargoyles, any horror she could imagine was possible.

She couldn’t get caught.

She couldn’t get kicked out of the Dreamway.

She had to find Cole. The Chimerath, or whatever it was, was sucking up his light like pasta. And it was happening fast. Stella knew it—could feel it in the real world.

She slipped the necklace into her pocket as one last, loud crash finally shattered the door. The deliberate boot steps crossed the threshold, and Stella shrank away from the sound. As she did, something small and sharp poked her in the back.

After that, everything happened at once. The tapestry she was hiding behind moved slightly; at the very same moment she realized that the thing in her back was a key—a key in a small door—and she turned it, swinging the door open. Twisting backward, she crawled into the darkness, kicking the door closed behind her. She moved forward, feeling along the wall until her fingers uncovered a hole. It seemed large enough for her. Stella squeezed her body into the hole and realized it was a pipe. She shimmied along the metal tube, forcing herself not to wonder what usually ran through it or whether or not it might start flowing at any moment. She crawled and crawled, the metal rough against her hands until—finally—a gray disk of dim light showed in the distance. A few moments longer, and she came to the end of the pipe. Her body spilled out into the semidarkness of a large industrial area. She lowered herself on to the concrete and looked around the dark, grimy tunnel. It was a no-man’s-land of steel cylinders and beams.

“Where am I now?” Stella asked out loud, and her voice echoed in the empty space.

“You’re at the edge of the Memory Line,” a voice replied. “Where Memory meets Water.”

When Stella looked, she saw a silvery figure. She rippled like light through waves. She was a strange sort of person—small, but Stella could not tell if she was very old or very young. She had the strangest feeling that she might be both.

“You’re not . . . an Inspector, are you?”

She let out a silvery laugh that almost seemed to sparkle, like light over water. “No.”

“Can you help me? Do you know how can I get out of here?” Stella asked. “Is there—where can I find a door?”

The old young woman laughed again. “You don’t find the doors,” she said reasonably. “The doors find you.”

“I—I need to get back to my friend,” Stella went on. She felt the need to add, “He’s a mouse.”

“Is he a Door Mouse?”

“Yes.”

“Then he will find you along with the door,” the old young woman said. Dust motes floated and danced around the woman, shimmering like snow.

“Are you—are you a ghost? Or a memory?”

“Are those things different?”

Stella thought about this for a moment and decided that she wasn’t sure.

“Do I frighten you?” The ghost began to fade, slowly, from the edges.

“No.”

“Then does it matter?” She was still fading.

“I guess not. But—wait! Please don’t go.”

“I suggest you take a train to another station,” the ghost said. “You won’t find what you’re looking for here.”

The moment the ghost disappeared, the entire station went black. It was as if the room had dissolved and Stella was back at the beginning of time, before she—or anything—existed.