This Is Not Really Happening

“Rhiannon? Is that my sweet?” the woman croaked.

I stumbled back and tore out of the room into the hallway. My vision started getting shaky again. Madeline raced into the hallway to catch me followed by Heather.

I shot around. “That isn’t her, Madeline. That woman? It’s not possible! It’s not her!”

“It is her, Mom, I swear. It’s Barbara,”

“It’s true, Rhiannon,” Heather buttressed. “That’s Barbara Wessinger.”

“Right,” I scoffed. “She’s Barbara. She’s my mother. Heather, that woman looks younger than me!”

“I think she is younger than both of us. She’s the age she was when she left, but it is her.”

“How is that possible? Where was she this whole time? How did you even find her? What in the hell’s going on here, Heather?”

Heather spread her hands. “I understand how bewildering this all is.

“Oh, you think?” I snapped and immediately stopped myself. I held up my hands apologetically giving Heather space. She took a second to collect her thoughts.

“Look, after Barbara disappeared that night and your grandparents assumed her assets, they sold the house.”

I nodded. “That’s right.”

“What you may not know was that my parents were the buyers. They were planning to fix it up and sell it, but after Hurricane Katrina they decided to hold onto it as is and use it for rental income. After they died, I inherited it.”

“Wait. You own Barbara’s house?”

Heather chuckled. “I know, right? But I was honored to become its caretaker. That house holds within it so much woo. I continued to rent it out to families. A year ago, I got a call from the tenants. They said there had been an intruder in the house. They called the police and arrested the intruder. But by his tone, I knew something was up. I asked if anybody was injured and he said no and hesitated before adding that the nanny cam set in the hallway caught something. He forwarded it to me and what I saw…One moment there was no door at the end of the hallway; the video feed glitched and the next instant the door was there as if it always had been. And then it opened and out came your mom who then walked into the main bedroom, and well…kerfuffle, cops called, and your mom was arrested for home intrusion.

“As soon as I saw the video, I headed over to the police station to bail her out. She was incoherent, babbling manically. They only knew her identity because of the fingerprints on file from prior arrests.”

I smirked. Barbara had been arrested a few times for bounced checks and shoplifting. “Didn’t the cops wonder about her age?”

She shrugged “They just figured she had one hell of a facelift, I suppose.”

And then Heather then looked down. “After that night and when my parents sent me to boarding school, when I lost you, I felt like I lost my soul. For years afterwards it was like going through the motions, that I was living someone else’s life. When The Glitch hit, I wanted it to mean that all of this to include myself was a fiction, that my vague self-awareness was just an illusion. Like Madeline, I wanted to stop the stupid game and just embrace what little semblance of joy I could find in my meaningless existence.

“But when I saw the video I remembered the wonder of that night thirty years ago, at least parts of it. There was something we experienced, Rhiannon, something that we touched that night! Maybe we could find it again.”

Heather’s eyes burned with an intensity, reminding me of the animated discussions we had as kids.

“Barbara was proof of what we experienced. I took her to the commune and presented the evidence that there is something beyond and there is a way out, a passage.”

“So, you took Barbara to the commune and rebranded it,” I surmised.

“It’s not like everybody was easily convinced. Your mom was between states of lucidity, madness and being catatonic, and even when she was lucid she couldn’t provide any answers. But with Madeline we had the DNA evidence that she was her grandmother, that along with the fingerprints, not to mention the video. I took Barbara back to her house in the hopes she could bring me through the door, but when I got there, the door disappeared. I thought that was the end of it, but your daughter came up with an idea.”

Heather turned to Madeline and nudged her to speak. Madeline cleared her throat.

“Yeah, I told Heather that maybe we could find a way to prompt the door to reemerge if we had some kind of professional help, scientists, experts on the fabric of the simeality. I got in contact with a friend who was dating this girl whose cousin is one of Doctor Malik’s assistants.”

“Doctor Malik was naturally skeptical,” Heather admitted, “but he heard us out. He flew down and reviewed the DNA evidence, the video, all of it. Once he was convinced, he put together a team, some of whom you’ve met, and we started working together. After paying off the family to leave the house, Malik’s team started conducting studies of the house and Barbara, trying to see how they coax the door to reappear. That’s what Dr. Malik was working on when…”

And she stopped, because we all knew what happened. An Ecstatic murdered him. It was followed up by the other murders like the researcher from the Fermilab, and then there was the attack on The Passage itself. I put it together.

“The scientist from Fermilab Dr. Sanchez, and the ones attacked at The Passage, they were part of his team, weren’t they?”

Heather nodded. “Doctor Malik insisted on keeping things hush hush. I thought he was just being paranoid. But he knew better. They started with him, then Dr. Sanchez who was compiling the research…”

“And then they came for us,” Madeline said.

I rubbed my forehead, trying to massage everything I just learned to make sense. “Okay. We can fix this. We go to the police and we tell them everything…”

“No!” Heather exclaimed. “The Ecstatics got people everywhere, especially the cops. We can’t go to the authorities.”

“So, the cops don’t know where you are?”

Heather shook her head. “When we were attacked, Madeline and I got Barbara and bolted with Malik’s surviving team. Dr. Malik had previously made an arrangement with the reverend and that’s how we wound up here.”

“With the militant Unitarians.”

“Two words that wouldn’t go together before The Glitch.”

“So, what’s the plan then? Move in with the gun-toting humanists?”

“We’re not finished with the project, Rhiannon. I think we can find the door.”

“You just told me you spent a year trying to do that with no success and you’re now essentially on the run. What am I missing?”

Heather smiled. “It’s us who has been missing it. One thing. You.”