Wind pushes against my window. The scent of pizza wafts up the stairs and into my bedroom. Dad has heated up the leftovers I brought home from the Ember Oven and is eating them for dinner. I sit at my desk, my Chromebook glowing in the dark as I scour the internet for answers, like someone out there might actually know how to break into an alternate dimension and rescue a classmate who may or may not be dead.
Amidst a slew of fictional results, most of them about theAvengersand the Multiverse, there are real, scientific hits involving things like quantum mechanics, cosmic inflation, string theory, and trans-dimensionality. The kind of stuff that’s right up Twig’s alley. My brain, however, ties into a knot.
“A separate plane of existence with its own physical laws,” I read aloud, peering at the screen.
Like the ability to combust into ash and still, somehow, survive?
Ever since Halloween night, I’ve been distracting myself from the memory of Lainey and Ivy dragged through the rift. Healthy coping mechanism or not, I’ve been doing my best to actively repress the images. Call me crazy, but I don’t want to relive what I assumed was the sudden and tragic death of my classmates. Now it seems I didn’t witness their death at all, but something else entirely. So, I let myself do what I’ve not allowed myself to do all week.
I revisit the night.
Seraphina, summoning that terrifying squid. It’s tentacle lashing through the rift. Grabbing Ivy and pulling her through. Her eyes locking with mine. Her body distorting. Her scream warbling. A violent convulsion and then, her entire body erupting in fire, bursting into ash. Lainey was the same. An explosion of ghostly flame, and then… nothing but that powdery residue. Fine particles floating in the air.
Rafe, on the other hand, disappeared bit by bit, the same way my mother did in my 8-year-old dream. I close my eyes and replay the details in chronological order. Seraphina, destroyed.The curse, broken. The night air against my face. A sky full of stars. Thenormalsky. And then—only then—did Rafe fade away. But did he really fade at all, or did I simply stop seeing him because he stayed behind in that alternate dimension?
Frustrated, I return to the internet. This time, I get more specific, searching for phrases likealternate dimensions in Foggy Hollow,alternate dimensions in Randolph county,Foggy Hollow squid,spontaneous human combustion,cryptids with lavender fur, andglowing seeds that produce visions.
I learn about Blue Dogs, which are linked to the chupacabra, and firefly petunias, which are genetically engineered plants, and spiritual seeds that are completely metaphorical. Ultimately, Google gets me nowhere. So I grab a pen and a notebook and start listing everything I know about this other world.
1. There are doorways called rifts
2. Jude and I can see them. Twig cannot. Neither can Lainey, Mr. Calloway, Mayor Ridley, or Denis Tulane.
3. It’s a physical place that I can step into.
4. It responds to emotions.
That’s howRafe opened the doorway—using a ballroom full of volatile emotions and Seraphina’s ruby amulet.
5. It mirrors our world with the same general layout, like the estate and the cemetery, but it’s dark and frightening with scary creatures.
And slightly cute ones, too, like a lavender, furry gremlin.
I tap my pen against the notebook and stare at the seed on my desk. Did it give me that vision of my mother, or did I simply have a vision when I touched it?
I pick it up and squeeze the seed in my palm.
When nothing happens, I exhale wearily and peer down at my notes.
Then I add one more.
6. My mother went inside this dimension thirty years ago with Simon Vandenberg.
I open the bottom drawer of my desk, move aside the shoebox and a tattered copy ofWhere the Wild Things Are, and pull out Simon’s journal. I turn to the entry marked March twelfth—the first time he and my mom saw a rift. They were in the hedge maze when the air tore open and they stepped through. They saw his sister, Lily. But she didn’t see them. I flip the pages, more travails into the strange. Simon talks of shadows and monsters and finally, in his very last entry, he mentions something following them. The next day, Simon’s love for my mother would trigger a centuries-old curse and he and his family would disappear. Vanish off the face of the planet.
I tap the pen some more—thinking, thinking, thinking. If Lainey and Ivy didn’t die, where did they go? What are the physical laws of this dimension? How did Lainey get out, and if she really was with Rafe, where is he?
The questions circle like birds of prey.
Until finally, one of them lands.
Season two, second episode.
The trapped teens!
I snatch my phone and text Twig.
The trapped teens in 1998. Almost certainly regular teens, right? What are the chances they both had angelic bloodlines?
