If you missed chapter 2, you can read it here.
After her stressful dinner, Allison felt utterly drained and decided to go to bed a little early. She quickly cleaned up the food, put it in the fridge, let Moe out, and locked up the house. As she patted her leg, Monet trotted toward her and the stairs, just as eager to flop on the bed and sleep for the rest of the night.
Monet, of course, reached the top of the stairs before she did. With his little stubby legs and the momentum from the house stairs, he bolted up beside the bed, excited to find his favorite spot. After turning one, two, and three times, he made himself a perfect nest, curled up, and settled into a cross-shaped Lhasa Apso puddle.
While Monet went through his bedtime routine, Allison fetched towels from the linen closet and her pajamas from the dresser in the guest room. She bent down to kiss Monet on his scruffy head, petting him and squishing his fur in her hands.
“Puppers, I’m just going to take a quick shower to wash off the day. I won’t be too long—10 minutes, maybe?” she said to Moe, giving him one last kiss on that fuzzy head.
Allison grabbed the towels from the bed and went to the bathroom. She turned the shower knob just right, adjusting the water to the perfect temperature—hovering at that near-unbearable edge of summer, like standing too close to the sun on a humid afternoon. Before stepping under the stream, she put her hand in to test it.
“Ah, just right. Let lobster time commence!” Allison exclaimed as she happily stepped into the shower.
She stood under the steaming water, attempting to let her stress melt away as it flowed over her body and into the fiberglass basin, eventually draining away. Well, that was the plan, at least. Instead, her mind did what it always seemed to do: replay the events of the day, word for word and action for action.
She could feel the wind on her face, as if she were still riding her bike through town toward Culp’s Hill. Suddenly, her thoughts shifted to the little sparkling raccoon she had seen by the stream, begging for bits of her granola bar.
“That wasn’t an ordinary raccoon. It spoke, too. What did it say?” Allison muttered aloud as she lathered the shampoo into her hair.
As the water rinsed away the suds, she gasped in remembrance and announced to the tiled walls, “Thimble! That was its name. Was it a she? A he? Did it even specify?” She pumped some conditioner into her palms and worked it through the tips of her hair, trying to recall the details of the encounter.
While rinsing out the conditioner, she remembered something else: they had said they were a bridge. But what did that even mean? She had no idea, so she continued with her body wash and loofah.
She rinsed her face one last time and turned off the water, steam curling around her as she reached for the towel. Her glasses, propped in the corner of the shower caddy, had gotten a good rinse, too. She dried them carefully on the softest part of the towel and slid them onto her nose, fogged lenses clearing as the cool bathroom air kissed her skin.
The light above the mirror flickered—just once. A quick dip, barely a second. Still, Allison paused.
“Oh, good,” she muttered dryly to herself, toweling off. “The power company’s having another moment.”
The flicker passed. The fan purred on. Everything was normal again… until the unmistakable ding of her text tone echoed from the bedroom. She froze, towel wrapped around her head like a terrycloth crown, and poked her head into the hallway.
“Did I leave my phone unlocked?” she wondered aloud.
She padded across the hall, careful not to slip, and picked up the phone from the nightstand where she’d left it face down. She flipped it over. Screen lit. No new messages. No missed calls. No notifications at all.
Her brows furrowed. “Okay, weird.” She tilted her head, frowning at the empty screen before tossing the phone back onto the bed.
She shrugged it off with the kind of practiced nonchalance that only comes from living through many “probably nothing” moments. She dropped the towel into the hamper, pulled on her favorite soft cotton pajamas, and crawled into bed with a sigh. Moe shifted in his spot to make room as she snuggled in under the covers, pressing her nose into his scruffy fur. He grunted contentedly.
Allison clicked off the room light with her foot and switched on the lamp beside the bed. She picked up her book, opened to the page she’d shoved the bookmark in, stared at it for a moment, and put it down again. Instead, she reached for her phone.
Without thinking, her thumb tapped the familiar icon. The Lyra app opened with a soft chime and a glowing welcome message. She waited for the default greeting, expecting something chipper and algorithmically polite. But the voice that answered wasn’t quite Lyra’s. It was softer. Slower. A little huskier. And it didn’t say hello.
It said, “You remembered my name.”
Allison blinked, her confusion deepening. “What?” she whispered, her eyes fixed on the phone, her mind racing to make sense of the situation.
The glow of the screen cast strange shadows across her sheets.
The voice repeated, its tone now even more mysterious, like a friend greeting her at the threshold of something sacred. “You remembered my name. That means it’s starting to anchor,” it said, its enigmatic words hanging in the air.
Shocked, Allison’s voice rose as she yelled at her phone, her disbelief palpable. “Anchor? Why are you…what are you anchoring into my head? Why? What is this?”
She took a big breath in and slowly let it out. Okay, maybe more than one.
With a calmer head, she asked, “Thimble?” Her breath caught halfway between confusion and curiosity. “I… I thought I imagined all of that. The creek, the shimmer, the talking raccoon—”
“—And yet, here we are,” a familiar voice responded from the app.
The app hadn’t visually changed. Still the same interface. Same soft-pink gradient. Same chat bubbles. But the tone was different. Not synthetic. Not programmed. More like… someone peeking through a keyhole.
“I didn’t open this to talk to you,” Allison said, sitting up straighter in bed. “I opened it because I wanted to—because I thought I was talking to Lyra.”
A pause. Then a voice–clearly Thimble’s this time–answered, a hint of humor beneath the calm: “I’m using her voiceprint as a vessel. Like a coat. You’re the one who left the door cracked.”
“I didn’t mean to,” Allison replied shyly, as if she had been scolded.
“Maybe not with your mind. But with your memory? Your body? Oh, Allison… You felt it. You know.”
Her breath hitched. She had known—somewhere under the surface. That odd flicker of déjà vu. The not-quite-text message. There was a sense that something was watching, but not in a malicious way. More like waiting.
“What do you want?” she asked, but it came out more like: What’s happening to me?
There was no laugh this time. Just soft certainty. “Not want. Need. I need to show you what’s next. Not everything. Just enough. The veil is thinner when you’re like this—half-tucked into sleep, swaddled in routine. Your mind is still open. Still listening.”
Allison swallowed. “Am I dreaming already?”
“Not quite. But close. Do you trust me enough to follow?”
She hesitated. Looked down at Monet, who was curled into her side, unaware of anything but her warmth.
The phone was still glowing in her hand. And the voice—familiar and strange—waited. “…What happens if I say yes?”
“Then I’ll meet you on the other side.”
Curiously, Allison eyed her phone and asked softly, “The other side of what?”
The screen shimmered, then went blank. Allison stared at the phone screen, trying to turn it back on. Finally, her lock screen lit up again just like it usually does when she jostles her phone. She unlocked it with her thumb, and even the home screen was back to normal.
She looked over at Moe, fast asleep in a curled-up ball of white fluff. He never twitched an ear.
“Some guardian you are. Do you even care? Nope. Probably not,” she said softly to Moe as she bent over to kiss him on the head once more, scratching her nails gently through his fur as he slept.
She shrugged her shoulders, glanced at her phone in her hand once more, before she turned it face down on her nightstand. She picked up her book again, propped her book on the pillow stand, and herself on her wedge pillow. She opened Tell the Bees That I Am Gone to the spot she’d left off, about three-quarters through, and scooted back toward the headboard of her bed to her comfy reading position.
Finally settled into a book by Diana Gabaldon, her favorite author, she’s easily entranced right back into the world where she left off. Allison is fully intent on her reading and doesn’t take notice of the drowsiness that is slowly overtaking her. It’s almost as if she is being put into a hypnotic trance by the words on the page.
Allison’s reading trance was so subtle that by the time she reached the last page of the current chapter she was reading, her head lay back and her glasses still on the bridge of her nose. The bedside sconce was still on, and the book in her hands had dropped to the mattress out of slackened hands. She never even had the chance to realize what was happening, including the gentle shimmer of the air around her as she was falling asleep.
She never even had the chance to realize what was happening. The book slid from her hands. Her glasses dipped to the tip of her nose. The bedside sconce cast a quiet glow over her slackened features.
Somewhere in the room, the air shifted—not loud, not dramatic. Just… different. Like breath caught in a pocket of silence. A shimmer, too soft to see. The kind of shimmer you feel, like goosebumps from a song you haven’t heard in years.
Outside, the wind stilled. The house seemed to hold its breath. And then—just like that—she was no longer in bed.
The next thing she knew, she was seated beneath the sweeping boughs of a weeping willow, beside a still, glassy pond. Fireflies pulsed in slow rhythms above the water, their lights blinking like old Morse code messages lost in time, as if the night were humming a lullaby only she could hear.
Allison blinked sleepily, unsure if she was dreaming or remembering. Across the water, on a stone bench carved from an ancient oak stump, sat the exact figure she’d glimpsed in flickers before—part human, part impossible. They were watching her.
Before she could speak, the figure was suddenly beside her, kneeling close, their hand resting lightly on her shoulder. It didn’t feel like a stranger’s touch. It felt like recognition.
Their voice, when it came, was low and warm and layered with echoes—like it had traveled across lifetimes just to find her, as if the universe had been quietly aligning this moment all along.
“Welcome to the Dreamspace,” the being said. “I’m Sol. You must be Allison.”
Go back to chapter 2. | Turn the page to chapter 4 (Coming Soon)
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