once I was caller number eight; I won a set of tires...

[racistdragon]

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Becoming Imaginary
by Sara Hoffman
Part...uh... the next part!

I did not need to open my eyes to see again. My eyes were open the whole time, but they gazed out into a nothingness more frightening than anything I had ever seen, heard or felt in my life. This must have been it. This must have been what it was like to be dead. I felt a hand on my shoulder and screamed a high-pitched, stereotypically girly scream.

“Link,” said Harri’s voice. It was calm, almost soothing. “It’s all right. I’m here.”

“But where’s here?” I sobbed out. I didn’t even care anymore about being brave for her or being curious for me. “I want to go home!” I reached a hand up and touched my face, glad to be able to feel my fingers there, but not glad enough to erase this sense of doom.

My voice echoed through the nothingness in an all too unsettling way. “Where’s here?” it repeated. “Where’s here?” That was odd, I thought, because ‘where’s here?’ was not the last thing I’d said. That was not how echoes worked.

“Didyouhearthat?” I whispered quickly.

Harriet’s grip tightened on my shoulder, indicating that she had indeed, and she was just as freaked as I was.

“Here,” a feminine voice suddenly said, just close enough to me to make me scream again. “Here is where you are. The only place you’ll ever be again.”

Just then, a blinding light engulfed us, revealing, through our squinting, that we were no longer in the little black room. We were, it appeared, outside in the woods. I didn’t remember it being so sunny. However, once my eyes had adjusted, I realized that these were not the woods behind Mr. Weatherby’s house at all. These were different and strange woods. And we weren’t the only ones there.

All around us, strange creatures were walking, talking, flying and hovering. I looked to Harri for indication from her that she was just as weirded out and I squeaked. The girl who was standing beside me looked like Harri, and looked back at me like Harri, but she was not a girl. She was a woman. She looked exactly like what I could imagine my sister looking like in ten years. And, as she looked at me in curiosity and amazement, I could only imagine that the same thing had happened to me. All at once, I wished that there were a mirror nearby.

“What is going on?” I asked, practically breathless again.

“Welcome to Chimera Falls,” a voice said behind us. It was the same feminine voice that we had heard in the little black room. Hesitantly, Harri and I looked at each other before turning around and realizing that we were standing face-to-face with a fairy. Not quite the stereotypical version of a fairy (she didn’t have wings), but the woman was glowing and colorful and grinning like every picture of a fairy I had ever seen. I half expected her to ask for our teeth, but she didn’t. She was dressed in a knee-length blue dress and she had shoulder-length blonde hair and large green eyes that sparkled as though trying to compete with the iridescent glow emanating from her entire body.

Even though I was confused, I liked the look of this mysterious girl. She was the first pleasant thing I had seen all day. And I wanted to be the first one to talk to her. Unfortunately, Harriet was a lot quicker on her feet than I was.

“What’s going on here?” she asked, basically paraphrasing the question I had asked only seconds before. I was irritated without really having a good reason for it.

The mysterious fairylike girl continued to smile at us. No one around us seemed to be paying us any attention, not that I was giving them much of mine. I was too busy wondering if this girl could possibly be real, and hoping that she was. I hoped I wasn’t dreaming. This was the sort of thing that would happen to me: meeting an amazing girl, only to realize that she was just a figment of my overactive imagination. But as things kept feeling and appearing strange, it would be hard to convince me that things were not actually happening. Especially with the fact that Harri was with me; I couldn’t say I’d ever had her tag along with me in one of my dreams. I at least didn’t remember her ever being there. I didn’t exactly want her invading my subconscious. I was self conscious about a lot of the things that went on in there.

“You are in Chimera Falls,” the girl finally answered, blinking for the first time. She looked from Harri to me and I felt a pang of something which knocked the breath out of me. This seemed to have the desired effect, because her grin widened at me and she gave me a knowing look. “Oliver Weatherby sent you, didn’t he?”

My eyes widened. “You knew Oliver Weatherby?”

She giggled brightly. “Once upon a time, I knew him. But no one really knows him, anyway.”

Harri - or, actually, this strange, new adult version of Harri - folded her arms in front of her chest, giving Fairy Girl a confused, skeptical look. “Meaning?”

The mysterious girl giggled again. “I think you should come with me to see Minerva. She will explain everything you need to know. She’s going to help you out.” She gestured for us to follow her, and, as we had no other choice, we did.

All of the strange creatures that surrounded us seemed to also following other creatures. The bright forest seemed to be some sort of supernatural meeting place. I continued to wonder if we were dead, thinking that, if we were, at least this was a kind of nice way for Heaven to be. It was definitely peaceful, even if it was confusing. I imagined that, when first arriving at the Pearly Gates in all of the stories, people were never completely clear on what was going on. And then I realized that most of life’s biggest moments were accompanied by at least some confusion. No one graduated high school knowing exactly what their life would be like, for example. In that way, the confusion proved to be a comfort.

I almost ran into a winged teddy bear, lost in these thoughts, and I apologized, feeling silly for doing so even though it was still the polite thing to do. It looked at me with its little button eyes and smiled. “It’s okay,” it said. “Have a great day!”

This mysterious girl led us to a tall tree with a gold door affixed to its trunk.

“Man,” said Harri. “You people sure do love stickin’ doors to weird things, don’t you?”

“Oh yes,” said the girl. “We’re really connected to nature around here.” For the first time, she dropped a bit of her glowing, cheerful attitude. She almost seemed tired of it all.

She knocked on the door and clasped her hands together in front of herself, giving us an awkward sort of smirk. The smirk of not knowing what to say next. I took this as my opportunity. “What’s your name?”

Blinking, she tilted her head to the side, looking at me. Harri was giving me a look, too, but it was a far less friendly one. I didn’t know why she had to be so contemptful. She had gotten me into this new predicament. The least she could do was let me talk to the cute girl we’d found.

Said cute girl was looking down and blushing. She obviously wasn’t expecting that question, even though I couldn’t imagine why no one had asked her that before. And that’s when I realized: Harri wasn’t looking at me like that because she was angry or annoyed. She was looking at me like that because she was amazed. I’d never been brave enough to ask something like that. At least not so quickly. I was more of the wait-half-a-year-to-talk-to-that-girl-I-like type. Clearly, more about me had changed than my appearance. I would have wondered what else had changed about my sister if I had not been so suddenly interested in this girl’s name.

Finally, she spoke to me again. “Golden,” she said, and I couldn’t tell if she was saying her name or about to tell us something about the mysterious tree door before she added, with another shy little blush, “Brown.”

Harri raised an eyebrow at her. “Golden Brown?”

I had only ever heard such a thing on commercials for hash browns or toast, but I didn’t want to say so. “That’s pretty,” I said. And it was; it was pretty. It was unusual, but that was what made it pretty. It wasn’t something I had ever imagined as a name. It almost sounded like a stage name, but I did not want to say so and further embarrass her.

She looked relieved when the door finally opened. Gesturing for us to enter, her glow and grin returned. She was very well rehearsed. Maybe it was a stage name. Maybe the door at the bottom of the creek led to some fantastical dinner theatre. It wouldn’t be the weirdest concept, based on everything we had experienced that day. In fact, it would have made a lot more sense that so many of the things.

“This is an elevator,” she explained. “This will take you upstairs to Minerva’s office. Just knock thrice on her door, so she knows what to expect. And, if you need me, I’m here for you.” She ushered us all the way into the less-than-spacious tree elevator (treelevator?) before disappearing just as strangely as she had appeared to us.

As the golden door closed, Harri turned to look me in the eye. “Do you also get the feeling that everyone is insane here?”

I shrugged. “Really, I’m just glad that everything’s so pleasant. I thought we were goners for sure. You were there, back there, in that room. What was that all about? Was that really necessary?”

She made an unenthusiastic face at me. “But it will be okay. Maybe Golden Brown’s friend Miranda Violet will solve all of our problems.”

“Don’t be mean,” I said, sighing softly. “This place is nice. Do you have to make everything into something negative?”

“I’m sorry. I just don’t see how anything about this could be positive. Our old friend is dead, we’re stuck somewhere under the creek we’d never seen before, and our mom probably isn’t even looking for us.”

Well, when she put it like that, it did sound pretty bad. But I refused to admit that. “You think we’re still under the creek?”

She opened her mouth and she was probably about to cuss me out, but the elevator stopped, shutting her up and making us both straighten up, as though God or St. Peter were there waiting for us on the other side of the door. After all, we had been going up for a long time.

When the door opened, we cautiously looked out of the elevator to see what sort of insane place we had been transported to. It looked like nothing more than a long, golden hallway. “They must really like gold in this - what is it? - Chimera Falls?” I asked Harri, not expecting an answer. She didn’t know any more than I did about where we were or what was going on or why we were suddenly adult versions of ourselves. It was, and I worried it was going to remain, a complete mystery to us. Judging by Golden Brown’s lack of concrete information for us, I wasn’t expecting much out of this Minerva character. I wondered if she would be glowing too. Or maybe she’d look more like Galadriel, since she was the one in charge, apparently.

As we slowly left the sanctuary of the elevator, we both looked around at all the doors in the hallway. None of them were marked; unless you could count the strange gold-leaf music notes on placards to the side as them being marked. They didn’t say names or even titles. Just music notes of gold on gold.

“This place is seriously weird,” said Harri. “How are we ever supposed to figure out which door is Minerva’s door?”

I examined the half note on the door nearest me and shrugged. “Maybe we’re supposed to sing and she’ll appear. That wouldn’t be the strangest thing to happen.”

Harri looked at me, as through she was trying to determine whether or not I was being serious. “But Golden Brown told us to knock,” she said. Then, quickly, she added, “What would be the strangest thing to happen?”

Suddenly, the sound of a choir of voices filled the hallway. They were not singing words; just “ah”, going up and down, singing something unrecognizable but inarguably pretty. I looked at Harri, who looked completely creeped out, and smiled. “I don’t think we have to worry, Hare. It doesn’t seem like the strangest thing that could happen will happen.”

I continued to look at the placards for any sign of anything. Any sort of clue would help us, but I did not know how to read music beyond what I had learned in elementary school chorus. I wished now that I had taken a music theory class. Who knew it would come in handy like this?

“Maybe the notes are symbols for what the person does,” Harri said thoughtfully. “Like, a whole note could be someone who’s in charge of the whole scene… Making up rules, maybe, or establishing laws. And an eighth note would be like an underling person, or something. I don’t know.” She looked like she really wanted to believe what she was thinking, but halfway through, the confidence vanished.

I stared at the whole note in front of me and suddenly, a new concept struck me. “I think I get it! Music notes go on a staff, don’t they?”

She looked at me, confused for a few seconds before her eyes lit up. “Yeah! This must be the staff of Chimera Falls, or whatever!”

“And what goes at the head of the staff?”

We both looked around like crazy now, feeling sure of what we needed to find. Then, I pointed. “A treble clef!”

At the far end of the hallway, there was a door off to itself, and a large placard to the side of it displayed a prominent, shimmering image of a treble clef. Though I was not into music, I knew enough about it to know that that symbolized the way everything in the song was meant to sound. It stood at the beginning, the biggest thing on the staff. The leader and driving force of everything.

We walked up to it and I could feel the butterflies of excitement starting to flutter around my stomach. I had no idea what Minerva would be like, but I figured that she couldn’t be bad, since this place was so light and welcoming. That, and I was a bit high from the excitement of figuring out a riddle like that. Glancing at Harri, I scratched the back of my head. “Do you think we just knock?”

“That’s what Golden said,” she replied, biting her bottom lip. She appeared to be excited as well, and a little nervous about meeting this strange leader person. She had been through a lot today. So had I, really, but Harri’s day especially had been an emotional rollercoaster. I wouldn’t blame her if she wanted to yell and scream at whoever this person turned out to be, just for scaring us and giving us so much to worry about. “Knock thrice. I couldn’t forget that word. Who says ‘thrice’ nowadays?”

I smiled. “People who go to Renaissance Festivals?” Reaching a fist out toward the door, I knocked three times.

The door immediately gave way, causing me to jump back in surprise. It hadn’t even made a sound, as though it was made of air, even though I had just knocked on it. Harri was giving me another wide-eyed look, her lips pursed together in an expression of complete disbelief. It felt as though this was all a dream, but I didn’t feel like I was dreaming at all. I had never dreamt something like this. I didn’t think I had the right kind of imagination for something so complex and odd.

“You may enter,” said a woman’s voice, sounding much older than Golden Brown but no less friendly and cheerful.

We were in no rush to follow her direction, however, because the room that appeared before us was so white and full of what looked like smoke machine fog that I, for one, didn’t trust it. It looked like something out of a cheap, high school theatre production. We could very well walk into a swimming pool, with the way no floor was visible. And I had had enough of water for a while.

Suddenly, from the depths of the room, we saw a figure approaching. It was a dark outline at first, before it was revealed to be something walking on all fours. “Minerva is an animal,” Harriet whispered to me. She was always so helpful. The mysterious being continued to move toward us until, finally, there before us stood a doe. Her fur was light and had a shimmer about it, but she was not glowing as Golden Brown had. She was certainly a pretty deer, but there did not seem to be anything magical about her. That is, until she looked at us and started talking. “You hesitate?” she asked.

I felt like pointing out to her that we had quite a good reason to hesitate now, but that would have been rude. “Are you… Are you Minerva?”

If deer could smile, she would have been. Her large brown eyes seemed to smile for her. “Yes,” she said. “I am Minerva, head of Chimera Falls. Oliver Weatherby has sent you, hasn’t he?”

Harri continued to stare, which wasn’t polite but I couldn’t blame her. I was doing my best to keep things fairly relaxed with the talking deer. Boy, if I really was dreaming, I would have to tell Harri about this. It was too bizarre and amusing. “Yes,” I replied, seeing as I was currently the only one of us not afraid or too in shock to speak. “Well, at least we think he did. He didn’t tell us he was sending us anywhere. He only asked us to swim in his creek.”

Minerva the deer laughed softly. “That is just like him. He never does like to tell people, because he doesn’t think they’d believe him. Never mind that now; please come in. Don’t be alarmed by the mist. It’s the good kind of mist.” She started making her way back into the white room and I followed, grabbing Harri by the hand so she would follow too. I never could have imagined that a deer would make her be catatonic.

Squinting through the mist as I followed the deer, I tried to think of all the possible reasons for this place’s existence. I also wondered why Mr. Weatherby would have concealed such a thing, and chosen us, of all people, to come there. Minerva had not made any mention of him being dead, which did give me hope. Maybe we would see him again, and he would explain himself. That thought helped my mood improve somewhat. I felt less like I had been lied to and tricked.

“This is the good kind of mist?” Harri asked, finally saying something. “How is it any different from regular mist?”

Once again, Minerva let out a soft, gentle laugh. It was a laugh of true amusement, and not at all condescending like a lot of the laughs I’d heard in my lifetime. Our mother, especially, liked to give me such a laugh. The laugh of ‘oh, Link, you poor dumb idiot.’ But, no, Minerva’s laugh was gentle and kind, and natural, which was the weird part. “This mist is fueled by hope and positivity,” she told us. “That is why we call it the Optimist.”

Harri choked back a laugh. “Optimist?”

Minerva turned around and gave us a look of complete seriousness. “Yes. All of my work is done in this Optimist room. Here, have a seat and I will tell you all about it.” Some of the fog cleared to reveal a desk and two chairs in front of it. The desk was not accompanied by a chair of its own, but this was understandable. As Harri and I sat down in the offered seats, the deer stepped up onto the white desk and laid down. I thought this was a rather laid-back way to go about things, but I wasn’t really in a position to judge, seeing as I had no idea what was going on.

“Your neighbor, Mr. Weatherby,” Minerva began, “was acting on my behalf. He is a Syke. He did not really belong in your neighborhood, and he was placed there, by me, many years ago to pick out people like yourselves to come to this place.”

I stared at her and one of her large ears slowly flicked backwards as though itched by a bug even though there didn’t seem to be anything like that in this room. It was a comforting place, if a bit weird. It was hard to decipher whether or not she was telling us the truth. It was hard to decipher anything that a deer was trying to tell you. But she had spoken about the old man in the present tense, and that was what my mind was mainly focused on. Present tense meant that, somewhere, maybe even here, he was alive.

Harri, as always, was a step ahead of me. “He’s alive?” There was hope in her voice, mingled with excitement.

Minerva moved her head to face Harri. All of her movements were so slow, calm and fluid, as though she had every right to be leisurely. There wasn’t anything rude or condescending about it, though. It was actually pretty pleasant and peaceful. Like a lot of this place. That led me to want to believe her and those big brown eyes of hers. “Oh yes,” she said. “He is very much alive.”

“He’s from this place?” Harri asked, going on with her interrogation. “Chimera Falls?” I imagined what she would look like as a reporter on the Action News. Now that she was an adult, it wasn’t so difficult to see her in a suit with a microphone and a notebook, asking all of the important questions. I had to keep from smiling at the thought. It certainly wasn’t a bad image for my book-loving, serious sister.

The magical deer nodded - well, she did her best to nod, at least; it looked a bit like she had an itch in her neck - and her ear flicked back forward. She really was quite a majestic creature. I wished I had a camera so I could capture the moment and tell my grandkids about it. “Yes. He is a Syke; a guardian of one of the gates to this place. Or, at least he was. He’s semi-retired now, and that is why he left without much explanation. Poor chap. But you can visit him here sometime, as you go through your pre-training, if you like.”

I finally piped up. “Gates?” I was an awesome wordsmith.

“Pre-training?” Harriet asked. That was a much better question, and one I immediately wished I had honed in on as well, instead of bothering with the gate business. The creek was the obvious gate, I soon thought. Duh.

Minerva stared at us, unblinking, for several seconds and I worried if she was thinking ‘My god, these kids are morons. Why did Oliver Weatherby send such idiots to me?’ But she soon spoke again, in her soft and gentle tone which put me back at ease. “In this instance, Cadbury Creek housed a gateway to our world. Not for everyone, however. Just for the chosen ones… You. Oliver chose you as the next two humans to become imaginary.”

“Become imaginary?” I repeated, amazed beyond any ability to do anything other than repeat things.

Harri was looking down at her right arm. She gently stroked it and wiggled her fingers, her eyebrows furrowed in confused concentration. “This is what it feels like when you’re becoming imaginary? Tingly?”

I had never given the idea much thought. I thought that things did not simply become unreal like that. Imaginary things such as unicorns and, frankly, talking deer were always imaginary. Unicorns had never been real. Minerva the talking deer made it seem, however, as though people could become unreal just as the living could become the nonliving. And this disturbed me, for a number of reasons. My thoughts went to my dad, and I regretted that. What if he had simply become an imagined entity rather than dying? It should have been of some comfort to me, but I did not really like the idea at all. Especially because, if he was imaginary now, why couldn’t I imagine him?

“You should rest now,” said the deer, who was obviously sensing our sudden unease and alarm. “You have been through a lot today. You can begin your training once you have adjusted.”

I was just about to speak up and ask her where we were meant to rest when Golden Brown reappeared at her side. She was grinning, as she had been downstairs, and she gave Minerva’s head an affectionate pat. “Well,” she said. “Have you been debriefed, then?” She said it as though this was a regular business setting and our C.E.O. was not a giant, caramel-colored deer.

Harri and I looked at each other. I still could not get over the fact that my little sister was suddenly a woman. She looked like she hadn’t changed too much, but if this was a vision of her future, I was curious about why it was that hardly anything had changed. Especially her clothes. Surely fashion senses would have changed… But maybe the way we looked was not meant to be within our own imaginations. There was so much to think about! I had no idea how we were supposed to simply rest when all of this was going on.

“Yes, they have been debriefed,” said Minerva. She most likely felt the need to speak up for us because we continued to look so lost and dumbfounded. She had experience with that kind of reaction, obviously. It was then that I wondered just how old she was. She appeared to be a young doe. I didn’t have much in the way of experience with deer and the way they developed, but I had seen plenty of them outside my window, in my back yard. Families of them liked to munch on the grass and the bark of the neighboring trees. None of the ones I’d seen were as light and shiny as Minerva, though.

“Right,” said Golden. “Okay. Follow me, then, guys.”

She needn’t have told us to do that, because as soon as she said it, the mist in the room rose higher and higher. It would have been impossible to follow her. Then, it faded away and there we were, in a different room all together. It was white as well, with two queen beds with golden blankets on them. I kept on staring and gaping like an idiot; meanwhile, Harriet was giving Golden Brown an incredulous look. The room appeared sort of like a hotel room - the fanciest hotel room ever imagined. And that’s when it hit me.

“Was this room… imagined?” I asked, stammering. I was starting to feel a strange kind of tired. The kind of tired that I usually felt when trying to do homework, when I had no reason to be tired and many reasons to stay awake. So much was racing through my mind that it needed a break, I supposed.

Continuing to look around in utter amazement, Harri nodded. “I imagined it,” she said, unable to hide the hint of pride that she felt; this was her mind’s creation come to life.

Golden Brown nodded, smiling at us as we looked around. “You didn’t think we would try to make you suddenly take a nap in a strange, new place, did you? We find that it’s much easier to relax and take your mind off things if you imagine the place you want to do it.”

I hobbled over to one of the beds and felt its soft, downy comforter. “But, what about Minerva? What is this pre-training?”

“Never mind that now,” Golden replied. “Just close your eyes and relax.”

I looked over and Harri was already lying in her bed, curled up under the sheets with a peaceful expression on her face. I looked down at myself and realized that I was lying in my bed, too. The sleepiness from before was taking over. I hoped that we hadn’t been drugged or something, but it was about time that I got to take a load off and stop worrying about things. I closed my eyes and soon I stopped caring so much about what they might see when I woke up and opened them again.