She paused here, waiting for me to ask the implied question so she could have the satisfaction of answering it. If I wasn’t enraptured by the odd effect of her voice, I might have found it off-putting, but as it was, I just gave her the response she desired. “Others?”

She smiled with the practiced graciousness of someone used to getting what she wanted. “Other worlds. So many other worlds.”

Even in my partial stupor, I had enough sense to wonder why she would tell me all of this. I was beyond questioning the reality of incredible things at this point, but I was troubled by her willingness to share such things with a stranger. Unless… “You don’t plan on letting me leave, do you?”

Her smiled widened, reminding me of an old gray wolf that used to prowl around my parents’ farm when I was a boy. My father would hunt it, but always without success, and I remember one time it stood watching us from the edge of the woods, regarding us with a breed of indifferent contempt as my father fruitlessly rushed inside for his rifle. Thinking back on it now, I think that wolf was smiling, perhaps even laughing at us. It understood a terrible truth that we were still learning.

You will never beat me. I will come when you don’t expect it and will always know your tricks better than you know yourself. You should give up. You should give up. You should…

”Well, I plan on making it so you don’t want to leave, though I suppose that’s a thin distinction to you at this point. I want you to stay and make this place your home. I want your help exploring all the many places I have found and will find. The workers I have here…they lack the spark I need. But you…I think you could be something very special.”

****

The journal entry ended there except for a short postscript that simply said, “When you see her, go with her.” I wasn’t sure who “her” was, but the idea that it might be Angelica Lemark filled my stomach with a queasy, fluttering fear.

And while I didn’t recall those last passages I had read from my own past memory, I did feel I was sharing some of the brain fog he had described. I have heard that some animals, when heading toward their own death and destruction, enter into an almost euphoric state of calm. The lemming tumbling toward the rocks, the mantis feeling the pressure of its deadly lover’s embrace—did they feel fear? Or a sense of rightness? A conviction that they weren’t being obliterated by bad luck or the ill will of others, but were instead playing their part in the grand design of some larger plan?