The Perennial Flames

I lay on my bed the next morning, staring at my ceiling and willing myself to come up with an excuse not to go to school. Mom would want to know why I didn’t want to go. Of course, she would let me stay in bed if I told her how much more frequently my involuntary naps were happening… but then she would also tighten the reins and make me go in for more testing.

That was the last thing I was in the mood for.

I shut my eyes, squeezing tightly. When I opened them, I was back in my little cottage. The one that didn’t exist, or shouldn’t exist. I looked back at the picture of me and Kaz, and was instantly filled with the same desperate, immediate need to find him.

Athena, she had called him by name and said she knew where he was. How could she have possibly known about Kaz? I hardly knew about him. Was it another parlor trick like Baxter’s healing hand? Maybe her shtick was pretending to be able to read minds.

But no, of course that couldn’t be it… Since in order to get Kaz’s name out of me, she would have had to actually read my mind. Even if she was lying about knowing him, that ability would serve to back up her story, if only a little bit.

I had to get back. I needed to get home to my real life before Mom realized that I was gone. Images of testing rooms and doctors, another endless stream of doctors, plagued my mind. I squeezed my eyes shut and pulled a Dorothy.

There’s no place like home?

When I opened my eyes, I was back in my own bed.

“It worked!” I couldn’t believe it. Had I really just willed myself back into my own body? Could I do it again?

“Sydney!” It was my mother. I heard her footsteps nearing my room and shuddered. I had been so close to getting caught asleep.

“Yeah, Mom?” I called back. Her footsteps instantly halted and turned the other way. She was forever checking on me. I was pretty sure that she expected to find me drowning in an inch of water I had fallen asleep in, or about to burn the house down with smuggled-in candles.

I wasn’t allowed to have candles, you see. Too much risk of accidentally leaving them unattended.

I walked slowly down to the kitchen, mentally preparing what I was going to say to my mother to convince her that school was not the best place for me today. I didn’t come up with anything better than, “Hey, Mom? I’m really not feeling up to school today. I think I might be coming down with something.” So that’s what I said to her.

She pouted and instantly crossed over to me, feeling my forehead and my throat. “Well, your glands are a little swollen, sweetheart. Why don’t you go lay down, and I’ll bring you up some honey tea?”

I nodded meekly, hoping that I wasn’t overdoing things. I felt bad lying to her, but I really needed to figure out what was going on with me… and with Baxter. And if there was any chance that Kaz was in the other place, the place I visited when I fell asleep... Well, crazy as it sounds, there was a part of me that would not rest until I had done everything in my power to get to him.

A face flashed in my mind; rather, several faces did. They were undoubtedly the same person, but they were that person with different hairstyles and different ages ranging from a tiny baby to very, very wizened and old. Kaz. I knew that all of these faces belonged to him, and each one of them was precious to me.

I felt very strange. Was it better or worse, to have a face slapped on this delusion I was having? Kaz couldn’t be real. I knew that, and even as I berated myself for my foolishness, for my desperate need to find him now, right now, I couldn’t stop. It was too much.

My mother walked into the room then, carrying a tray with a whole tea service and some biscuits and scones. She fancied herself a Brit at heart, and enjoyed encouraging me to feel the same way. I smiled wanly at her and hoped that she couldn’t see the excitement in my eyes. Kaz’s image still haunted me. I didn’t think it would leave until I had seen him again.

Or… not again. It couldn’t be again, since I had no memory of ever seeing him before. But…

But he felt so, so familiar.

A feeling of desperation was growing in me. I wouldn’t be able to keep it out of my expression for very long, I knew. I needed to get her out of here, fast, so that I could do something, anything. “Thanks for this, Mom,” I said. I cleared off a space on my bedside table, which had too many books on it, as always. She set down the tray and looked at me sadly.

“I just feel so bad going into work if you aren’t feeling your best. Do you want me to stay home with you? We could have a marathon. I’ll make popcorn and snicker doodles.”

And that was tempting. I hadn’t had a nice day in with her in too long. She worked hard to keep us afloat, and I knew that she had been taking a lot of extra shifts lately in anticipation of me going away to college. She would want to help me as much as she possibly could.

I frowned. “You know, I’m actually really tired. I think I might try to get some sleep.”

Wrong thing to say. I knew that as soon as the words left my mouth. Her expression instantly became sterner. “Sydney, you know you have to stick to a regular sleep schedule. Do try to stay awake. I don’t want your episodes to start getting worse.”

I grimaced. “Yeah, of course. Sorry. I’ll stay up. Maybe I’ll use this time to catch up on some reading. I’m a little behind in my English class right now. We’re supposed to be finished reading ‘Heart of Darkness’ and I’m only halfway through.”

This pleased her. “Yes, alright. You catch up on your schoolwork. I’ll try to get off early today, and then we can hang out. Sound good?”

“Yeah,” I said, smiling. “That sounds great.”

A little while later, I watched as my mother pulled out of the driveway and drove down the street. Then I pulled out my phone and, before I could think too much about what I was doing, I dialed Baxter’s number.

Then I hung up. I couldn’t talk to him right now. What if he told me more impossible things that I wasn’t prepared to confront? The worst thing about everything that he had told me yesterday was that I couldn’t really make myself disbelieve him. I wanted too badly for what he was saying to be true.

No, I could do this without him, I assured myself. I had been letting Baxter clean up my messes for way too long. It was time that I learned how to do things for myself, whether he was crazy or not.

I lay down on my bed and shut my eyes. If I could will myself back from my hallucinatory place, maybe I could also will myself there. It was worth a shot, at any rate. I concentrated on the little cottage, trying to visualize it as closely as possible.

I opened my eyes and found myself staring at my bedroom ceiling.

Eyes shut again. This time I focused on the picture, that lovely picture of an older me with the man I now knew to call Kaz. I was filled again with the same longing. I needed to see him. It wasn’t right, this separation. I couldn’t say why, but there was something terribly unnatural about finding myself apart from him for so very long.

Long? I opened my eyes, startled. How long could it have been? Then I looked around, wide-eyed. I was somewhere entirely new. It was a house, dark and vacant and just as small and perfect as the one that I usually found myself in. The architecture in these vision I had was always far superior to what I saw in real life.

“Hello?” I called, even though I was fairly certain that I was alone.

A shifting sounded above me. “Who is it?” a man’s voice called gruffly. More creaking. A face appeared near the ceiling and I realized that there was a hammock up there. It was cast in shadow. I could barely make out any features of the man, but there was enough light to see that his eyes widened dramatically once they locked on me. I felt my heart turn over.

“Kaz!” I sounded like the breath had been squeezed out of me. I felt that way, too- like I hadn’t properly breathed in days. “Kaz, is it you?” How odd, to be in a situation where that question was meant genuinely.

The man leapt down, his eyes never leaving my face. He was younger than I had expected- perhaps a year or two older than me. “You’re here,” he said, his voice choked with disbelief. He reached out to hug me. I saw rather than felt his arm passing through me. I felt the missed contact like it had hit me physically. “Violet?” he asked, his voice a mere thread. “What’s happened to you? Where have you been?”

I frowned. “I don’t know. I don’t even know where I am right now.” Or who I am right now, I added silently. Violet. He had called me Violet, and everything in me had warmed to hear the name in his welcome voice.

“What do you mean? You’re ghosting. How can you be ghosting here?”

“Ghosting? Like… like I’m dead?”

Kaz’s face paled with horror. “Dead? No. You can’t die. We can’t die… or, I never thought we could.” He looked afraid. I longed to reach out and comfort him. Even if that were possible, I wouldn’t have known where to begin.

And what did he mean, can’t die? What, like he and I were some kind of immortals? No. That was impossible.

My mind snapped back to Baxter’s knife trick. That was impossible, too.

This was too much. I felt a sharp stab of panic, and the room faded in front of my eyes. I sat up on the bed, feeling more wretched than I ever had felt before in my life.

Dead?

I groped my neck, feeling for a pulse. It was there, thrumming quickly. I didn’t let go of it until long after the beating had slowed and the guilt caught up to me for leaving like that.

I had to get back to Kaz. But… but I wasn’t ready to do that right now. I needed to have some kind of normalcy. I rummaged through the stack of books that I had relegated to the floor earlier in favor of Mom’s tea tray, until I found my copy of ‘Heart of Darkness.’ I would read for a little bit. Then, I assured myself, I would confront Kaz again. I just needed a little time to calm down, that was all.