Broken Dreams (The Chronicles of Mara Lantern, Book 5) (6 page)

He raised a finger. “Ah, but we have not established that, in fact, you are someone other than the Mara I know. You might have bumped your head and become disoriented.” His gaze scanned her hairline.

Mara smiled at him. “I will not spend any more energy convincing you. You’ll see. When the time is right, you’ll see.”

“When I meet myself.”

“Exactly.”

When they stepped onto the large back porch, they were met by a mider, squatting at the top of the stairs. Mara didn’t see it until she almost stepped on it. Startled, she stumbled, but Ping caught her arm.

“Sheesh, those things give me the creeps. Isn’t there some way to put them on hold? I’m not in the mood to check messages at the moment. Besides, I’m not sure I would know who they’re from or how to answer them,” she said.

Ping pulled out his receiver, the brass pad he’d demonstrated earlier. “Fortunately I believe this is a message for me. I’ve got a friend tracking the chasms, and I am expecting a report from him.” The mider’s shell opened, and its tiny smokestack released its puff of digisteam. Ping’s pad inhaled the tiny cloud, and he stared down its screen.

Mara eyed the spider gizmo as it skittered away.
There must be thousands of those things crawling around
. A shiver ran up her spine.

“Just as I expected,” Ping said.

“What?” Mara asked.

He lowered the pad. “As soon as you returned, the chasms dissipated. There have been no reports for over two hours.”

“You mentioned the chasms before. You said the dirigible ran into one. What are they?” Mara asked.

“They look like big black holes in Reality. That’s the only way I can describe them,” Ping said. “Whatever comes in contact with them dissolves. Thus, the dirigible became damaged and crashed after it encountered one.”

“Black holes. Ping—my Ping—said he thought this Reality was collapsing or something like that. What do you think caused them?”

“I think your absence caused them,” Ping said.

“How so?”

“When you were connected to the receptacle network, this Reality came into being. It’s only logical to think that you being disconnected from it could have the opposite effect.”

“You’re saying this realm exists only as long as …”

“Only as long as the progenitor is connected to it. That appears to be the case.”

“Well, that sucks,” Mara said. “I was looking forward to leaving here as soon as possible.”

Considering the size of the mansion, the small kitchen surprised Mara. It looked to be about the same dimensions as the one in her mother’s house—before the dragon burned it down. Given that the Progenitor’s Manor, as Ping referred to it, was five or six times the size of her house from childhood and beyond, the room struck her as disproportionate.

Ping had just placed a plate of sandwiches and a bowl of salad on the table when chimes rang out from somewhere else in the house. He jogged to the counter, grabbed a towel and wiped off his hands.

“Is that a doorbell?” Mara asked.

“It’s the front door. I’ll be right back,” he said, exiting through an arched entryway.

Mara could hear his footsteps echoing for what seemed a long time before the muffled sounds of a door latch being turned, indicating he had arrived at the front of the house. She ate part of her sandwich as she heard a conversation that seemed a little heated, a rapid back-and-forth of one person convincing another of something, but she couldn’t make out the words. Then the door closed. The footsteps echoed again, but, on the return trip, they were out of step somehow.

When Ping returned through the kitchen’s entryway, he stepped aside and leaned a hip against the counter. He held out his hand and said, “This young man wants to see you.”

Sam stepped into the room. “I told you. I’m her brother.” He walked over to the table and said, “Hey, sis. It’s about time you showed up.”

He didn’t quite look like himself. He wore brown corduroy slacks, suspenders over a loose linen button-up shirt and a herringbone newsboy cap. For a moment she doubted he was
her
Sam.

“Young man, I told you the progenitor does not have a brother,” Ping said.

Sam pointed at Mara and said, “This one does. Ain’t that right, sis?”

“You sound like my brother, but you sure don’t look like him. How did you find me?” she asked.

He sat down before the plate on the table, grabbed a sandwich and stuffed it into his mouth. He said something incomprehensible through the bread and cold cuts he chewed.

Mara reached across the table, took the hat off his head and hung it on the back of his chair. “When wearing a hat, take it off when you come inside, and also stop talking with your mouth full.”

“Speaking of manners, who invited you to lunch?” Ping asked.

“What? You don’t have enough to share?” Sam asked after swallowing. “You seem a lot more uptight than our Ping. Have a seat and grab a bite.”

Ping glanced at Mara, and she nodded. Turning back to her brother, she said, “How did you know I was here?”

Sam rolled his eyes. “Duh. The place is called the Progenitor’s Manor. Once I heard that, I thought the odds were good you would be around here somewhere. Well, either you or your counterpart from this realm. Either way, we thought it would be good to get in touch.”

“How can you tell I’m not the Mara from this realm?”

He’d already taken another bite of his sandwich and pointed at Mara’s leg instead of responding.

Mara looked down, then back at him and said, “What?”

Ping interjected, “I believe he means your clothing. You’re not dressed like someone from this realm. People here don’t wear … I believe they are called blue jeans. I would have mentioned it earlier, but, to be frank, I wasn’t sure how mentally stable you were, so I let it go for the time being.”

Sam tapped his nose with a finger and continued chewing.

Mara wasn’t sure if Sam agreed with the part about the blue jeans or her mental stability but didn’t care enough to ask. She nibbled at the edges of her sandwich, waiting for Sam to swallow. When he did, he reached for another sandwich, and she grabbed his arm.

“Why don’t you take a breath and tell me where Ping is before you shovel another load into your mouth?” she said.

He slumped back into his chair and sighed. “He’s back at the hotel, keeping an eye on Abby.”

“Abby? You guys found Abby? Ping told me when we spoke through the holographic interface that you hadn’t seen her,” Mara said.

“That was last week. A couple days ago, some of the employees at the hotel said they heard a rumor of a strangely dressed, delusional girl running around the streets in the northeast. We thought it might be you, so we spent a whole day tracking down the rumors until we spotted her on a bench in Woodlawn Park.”

“Time must run differently here,” she said. “And what about the Aphotis?”

Sam shook his head. “Ping doesn’t think she’s possessed any longer. She’s disoriented and confused, like she’s had some kind of mental breakdown, but there’s no sign of the Aphotis, no metaphysical hinky stuff, no strange voices or anything like that.”

“Pardon me,” Ping said, “What is an Aphotis?”

“A disembodied metaphysical demon that possessed Mara’s buddy and tried to take over the world—well, the robot world where you people came from before you gave up your bodies and started living in this dream realm,” Sam said.

Ping went pale.

Mara rolled her eyes. “I hate when you spew out things in the worse possible light.”

“Can I have another sandwich now?” he asked.

“Please, put something in your mouth.”

Ping cleared his throat. “Something aphotic thrives in darkness. Does that have something to do with this demon that possessed your friend?”

“I believe that’s where the name comes from,” Mara said. She wadded up her napkin and tossed it onto her plate which still held half of her sandwich.

“I’m more interested in the nature of this creature and where it is at the moment than I am in its etymology,” he said.

“The nature of the Aphotis is this. It’s a dead man’s soul that possessed my friend Abby and believes it has a metaphysical calling to battle me in some twisted effort to define the nature of Reality. As far as what happened to it, I can’t tell you that. It sounds like we should talk to Ping—
our
Ping—and see if he has any thoughts about why Abby showed up in this realm without it.”

“Is there a chance that this thing is loose in our realm?”

“I don’t know. I just got here. Remember?”

He turned to Sam, who shrugged while continuing to chew.

“It concerns me that something noncorporeal might be loose in this realm—which is, in essence, a noncorporeal Reality. The dangerous threat to the minds of the people who live here could be significant,” he said.

“I don’t see the point in getting worked up before we confirm we have a problem,” Mara said. “For all we know, the Aphotis is still stuck in Abby’s body in the receptacle.”

“Clearly you were concerned enough about this creature to cross over to this Reality,” Ping said.

“After I communicated with Ping—our Ping—I thought the black holes, or chasms as you call them, were caused by the Aphotis. The people’s fear affected their physical bodies back in the receptacles, and the repository doctors were getting concerned. So that’s why I crossed over. I had no idea that my counterpart’s absence had occurred or that it had caused the problem.”

“So now that you’re here, the black holes have stopped?” Sam asked.

“It would appear so,” Ping answered for her.

“I guess one progenitor is just as good as another,” Sam said.

Ping turned to Mara. “We refer to the Mara from this realm as the progenitor because it is from her mind that this Reality came into being. Since you are not from here, I find it odd you seem familiar with the term. Are you known as the progenitor in your realm?”

“Yes, she is,” Sam said.

Mara raised a hand and wiped the air as if erasing his words. “No, I am not known as a progenitor throughout my realm. Not like the Mara in this place.”

“But you are familiar with the word—progenitor?”

“Yes, but we define it differently than you do. I am not responsible for creating the realm in which I live.”

“But she can shape Reality with her mind,” Sam said.

A tall sandy-haired man in his mid-forties stepped into the kitchen from the hall. “Really? I bet that’s quite something to see.” He grinned as he entered the room. His features turned more serious as he approached the table, his gaze locked on Sam.

Mara, whose back was to the kitchen’s entryway, recognized the voice and gasped. Twisting in her chair, she grabbed its back and held on tight.

“Dad?”

Her father—or rather, her counterpart’s father—patted Mara’s shoulder but didn’t look at her or say anything when he walked to the table. His face had gone ashen as he stared at Sam, who stared back, mute, with a glint of hope in his eyes. Though she knew the details were likely different in this realm, she was sure she understood the tension in the room. While Ping had said a few minutes ago that her counterpart did not have a brother, that didn’t mean she had never had one. After all, the Sam from her realm had died as an infant, and she didn’t find out this until discussing it with her mother—after Sam’s arrival during the crash of Flight 559 when he had crossed over from his realm. Obviously this version of her father recognized Sam but was astonished to see him.

With doubt and joy battling to shape the contours of his face, Christopher Lantern blinked twice. In almost a whisper, he asked, “What is your name, young man?”

Sam cleared his throat and swallowed, then stammered his response. “I am Sam. I mean, my name is Sam.”

The man’s face went a lighter shade of pale, and Mara worried he might faint or something. She stood and took his elbow. “Here, take my seat,” she said.

Continuing to stare across the table, he grabbed the back of the chair and lowered himself as if he wasn’t sure his knees would hold up. Mara took the seat across from Ping—now positioned between her father and brother. She waited for one of them to say something, but they stared—her father needed time to absorb what he was seeing, and her brother was at a loss for words.

Ping broke the silence. “Am I correct in believing that you recognize this young man, Dr. Lantern?”

He’s a doctor, like my dad.

Without taking his gaze off Sam, Dr. Lantern turned his head in Ping’s direction and said, “He looks remarkably like my son—whose name was also Sam—but who died when he was three years old after falling down a flight of stairs at home.”

“When he arrived here a short while ago, he claimed to be Mara’s brother,” Ping said. “And Mara claims that she is not the Mara we know but a doppelgänger from an alternate Reality. She appears to accept him as her brother.”

Dr. Lantern turned to her, eyed her clothing for a brief second and said, “Explain.”

“It’s true. I’m Mara, but a different version of her from a different realm,” she said. Indicating her brother, she added, “And this is Sam, a version of your son, albeit from a realm in which he did not die as a young child.”

The right corner of her father’s lips pressed together and turned downward—a tic he had when he doubted something. Seeing it didn’t surprise her since she had inherited his skeptical nature, something her mother enjoyed pointing out. Oddly he didn’t challenge her—something her own version of him would have done.

His gaze turned back to Sam, who looked back, wide-eyed. “Does he talk?”

“Usually I can’t get him to shut up,” Mara said. “To be fair though, you caught him by surprise.”

“
I
caught
him
by surprise?”

“Sam’s never met his father before,” Mara said. “We—Mom and I—have been discussing a way to introduce him to my father—my realm’s version of you—but it’s a little tough to explain to a man that his dead son wants to get to know him.”

“Tell me about it,” her father said. “Wait a minute. Your father is not his father? I’m confused.”