By: Ursula Whitcher
Hi, I’m Emmelyne Schroeder, it’s January 4, 2023, and I’m seventeen or sixteen years old, depending on how you count. I’m in the living room for my plant-sitting gig in Toronto City, Wisconsin, talking to an empty Zoom. I know it’s cringe. Sorry about the transcript, future self! But my English teacher says if you’re extra hyper stuck on an essay (she says it just like that, “extra hyper stuck”), sometimes you gotta talk it out first. And the University of Wisconsin application is due next week.
I’m supposed to write about an experience that made me who I am. Something that ties back to why I want to go to college and be an engineer. And I had an experience exactly like that. Problem is, the whole thing was impossible. So I’m going to tell the truth for once, just me and the succulents. Maybe once I’m done I’ll understand how to lie.
It all started here, in Aitken House. Aitken House is a big old mansion built in the 1800s, back when people thought the Iron County mines would amount to something. These days, it belongs to the hospital. It’s split into bedrooms for the doctors, the young ones who live in Green Bay and crash here between shifts. You can sleep in the original dining room with the built-in china cupboard. Even the old front parlor is cut in two. But there’s stained glass with red and silver parallelograms over the entryway. In the living room, between the fireplace that doesn’t work and the staircase, there’s a fake bookcase. Maybe you can see it on the screen behind me. The fake titles are highlighted in gold: Ivanhoe, The Princess and Curdie, one book just called Poems, and then a lot of thistles.
One of the doctors has a ton of plants. There are ferns and spider plants as well as the aloe. The room feels damp even in the wintertime. My mom’s a nurse and, starting freshman year in high school, she volunteered me to help water things when Dr. Wei isn’t around. I liked it. I didn’t have to judge which twin deserved the good purple gel pen, or try to explain to Timothy Christensen why him playing Call of Duty was different from us playing Minecraft, or justify why I’d had the same haircut since sixth grade. It was just me and the plants and the puzzle on the big coffee table.
Freshman spring, corona hit. Not directly. Not in Toronto City. We heard things were bad in Michigan. Maybe in Chicago too. The ground was still covered in snow when school went remote. I learned to use Mom’s old sewing machine and made some masks and taught the twins how to cook waffles.
In the fall, school was back to normal but Mom was working all the time. She hugged us a lot and kept her mouth shut, so I hugged the twins a lot and kept my mouth shut. I was getting better at sewing.
Mom was on shift basically all of Thanksgiving weekend. I could have gone to their dad’s house with the twins, or the Christensens said I was invited to Tim’s grandparents’ place in Marenisco. But the twins’ stepmom would’ve asked whether I was dating that nice boy who liked Legos yet, and Grandma Christensen would have said how clear my skin looked these days, and the probability was around 99% I would have said something rude. So I told Mom I’d make green bean casserole for her break on Saturday, and she told me she’d buy chocolate ice cream. When it snowed Thanksgiving morning, I shoveled at our house, and then because I was stir-crazy and it was a holiday, I came over to Aitken House and cleared the snow here, too.
The shape of Aitken House was bothering me. I had never entirely understood how all the rooms fit together, but now that I had shoveled all the driveways, it bothered me more. I knew where the fireplace was in the living room, and I knew where the chimney was on the back of the house. They didn’t match. A couple of feet were missing somewhere.
I had nothing better to do, so I found a measuring tape and lined up the compass on my phone and checked. The fireplace was twenty-eight inches further north than it should have been, compared to the outside of the house.
I thought something had to be going on with the fake bookcase. I pressed every single title, looking for a button or a secret door, but they were only paint. I tapped on the center of each carved leaf on the mantelpiece itself, but nothing happened. Finally I rapped on the wall to the left of the mantelpiece, just to be thorough. Two raps, and then an inch further left, and then two raps again.
On about the twelfth rap, a section of the wall slid into the mantel. I saw a staircase leading down and to the right. It was dark and it smelled like dead moss. Based on my measurements of the outside of the house, it shouldn’t have been there at all.
I downloaded a flashlight app on my phone and shone light down the staircase. The stairs just kept going. I didn’t see any hatches connecting to the regular basement, and I couldn’t find a light switch, or even a bulb with a string. If I wanted to know where the stairs went, I would have to take the light and look for myself.
I set a cast-iron pan in the living room, with its handle at the edge of the doorway, just in case the secret door tried to slide shut again. I left a note inside it for Dr. Wei: “Please don’t move! Back soon! Emy.” It seemed like it might be cold down there, so I grabbed my gloves, boots and my coat. Then I started climbing down.
I went slowly at first, trailing my left hand along the stone wall, but the steps were even and unworn, so after a while I sped up. When I finally reached a flat spot, a few stories below the regular basement, I lost my balance. There was a hallway leading off at right angles. I nearly fell into the wall. It was still made of evenly cut stone.
I was maybe four yards down the corridor when there was a muffled thud, like a branch falling into snow. I spun around and saw another sliding door had shut behind me.
I shouted, though I knew I was too far underground for anyone to hear, even if one of the doctors had come home. Obviously I had no signal. I rapped in every pattern I could think of and searched for cracks I could use to pry the door open. I made myself wait for seventy minutes with the light off, pulling my sweatshirt sleeves over my hands and listening to music from my phone echoing off the walls, in case the door was on a timer. Nothing worked.
But someone had built this place. It existed for a reason. I just had to figure out where the hallway was supposed to go. I ripped the tag out of my sweatshirt and left it near the door, in case someone tried to track me later, then started walking again. After a while, the walls changed from carefully cut stone to rougher rock. I saw flecks of pink and greenish streaks here and there. Once I thought I had found a dried vine, with brittle twigs and tendrils, and then realized it was shiny copper.
I saw more and more gleams of pink and green. The wall was starting to glow. I shut my light off, relieved. If there were lights, even weird ones, there had to be people somewhere, and I was getting worried about my phone’s battery.
The greenish streaks grew larger, branching and rejoining, like the veins inside of trees, pulling water out of the ground; like grasses reaching toward the sky, their seedheads casting filaments into the wind. As I looked up, there appeared to be a white eagle in the air, not a bald eagle but a pure white one. Its wings were spread, the shafts of its feathers branching out, barbs fanning smoothly from each hollow shaft. The eagle then drew its wings together and struck upward, toward the sky I now saw as a mirror, reflecting the grasses and their golden-gray seedheads. The eagle was going to crash into the glass.
I realized I was sitting on the ground hugging my knees. I was cold and there was a pebble under my butt. My arm hurt where my nails were digging in. I wasn’t flying.
I wasn’t fainting, either. I didn’t feel woozy. At least, I hoped I didn’t, because that would mean the air was bad, and this tunnel only led in one direction. But I shouldn’t stay in this spot; it wasn’t a safe place to start dreaming.
I started walking again. The tunnel branched, finally, twice. I made arrows out of pebbles to point which way I was going: right, and right again. I saw a TikTok once about how if you always went right you would escape a maze eventually, as long as there weren’t any loops. If there were loops, at least I would see my pebbles again. I thought this tunnel might be tending up.
After a while, I noticed that the nails on the hand I was trailing along the wall were a good quarter-inch longer than the nails on my left. That was weird – I had trimmed them and coated them with gloss, just the other day.
After a much, much, longer while, I realized that I had to try to sleep. My legs hurt and my feet hurt. I must have walked for miles. If I stumbled over a rock and hit my head in the tunnels, nobody would ever know. I put my coat on and tried to use my gloves as a pillow. This was a terrible idea, but somehow I still fell asleep.
I didn’t dream at all. I just woke up with two huge, round eyes peering into mine. There was a person crouching on my chest.
I screamed. I opened my mouth and inflated my lungs, and as the person hopped off my chest, I went on screaming. She was saying something, her big hands spread out, showing translucent webs between each finger. I realized in horror that I wasn’t wearing a mask.
I rummaged for the spare mask in my coat pocket. This had to be a cave person. She was barefoot and her eyes were pale like an underground fish. She might not have immunity to the common cold, let alone covid. And I was screaming at her, pushing everything in my lungs out into the cold, damp air.
I hooked elastic over my ears, finally, apologizing as fast as I could. Her answer was something in the back of her throat that I didn’t understand at all. I switched to apologizing for not getting it.
“I said, you’re no witch,” she said, with a jerk of her pointed chin.
“No? I’m not?” I almost felt guilty. I hadn’t ever even been a witch for Halloween.
“Well, I set out this morning to find help, and you are the first creature I found, so you will have to do.”
“Help do what?”
“To break the spell, of course.”
I stuck my gloves back in my pockets. “I’ll do my best.” Maybe the “spell” would be something simple, like a missing lightbulb or an old-timey radio. “But afterwards, will you show me the way out?”
“Where is out?”
I waved a hand back and up, the way I had come. “Outside.”
She tilted her head hard to one side. The edges of her ears had bat-wing scallops. “I do not think that up is a place you want to go.”
“That’s where I’m from!”
“Mayhap my sister will show you, then. If we can bring her to speak.”
I followed the cave person through the tunnels. She walked quickly on her wide, bare feet.
The tunnel walls had different textures, sometimes sandy and sometimes shiny, but always flecked with pink and greenish light. The pattern reminded me of the calico backing on the twins’ baby quilt. I daydreamed about petals arranged in circles and spirals, in between trying to memorize turns.
When she paused, hissing her breath past her teeth, I nearly ran into her. “Are you OK?”
“I am Forveleth, the youngest daughter of my mother’s dwelling.” She was staring at me, or rather at my chin. “Can you see the reflection in the wall?”
The wall here was glossy, like the piece of obsidian my eighth-grade science teacher brought out on igneous rock day. There were blobs of orange-pink light near the ceiling. But there were also streaks of gold shining on the wall itself. They slid about as I moved my head.
“Is your mask enchanted?” Forveleth asked.
I shook my head fast. The golden streaks wobbled. “It’s quilting remnants. The Gs are for the Packers. I mean, the Green Bay Packers.”
“You printed these sigils of power?”
“Huh? I guess they’re lucky? No, all the fabric’s from a factory. I just cut the mask pieces and sewed them.”
“The seams you made are shining,” Forveleth told me.
I touched the side of my mask gingerly. It was cool. On the wall, a golden streak turned to shadow.
I’m not going to lie, it got a lot easier to focus once we were out of that hallway.
The center of the cave people’s home wasn’t that much further. The room was like their Main Street, if Main Street was a bubble made of rock: a huge, round chamber, almost a sphere, but fatter near the bottom, the way bubbles are. There were curved shapes scattered around the floor, like moss-green cushions or inflated river pebbles. I touched one. It was as velvety as a mushroom cap. I hoped it wasn’t poisonous.
Six or seven cave people were chatting, near the edge of the cavern. They looked at me, and their eyes got even wider, but nobody came over to introduce themselves. I thought maybe I should be grateful they were staying more than six feet away.
Forveleth led me toward a bigger heap of the mushroomy shapes. A tiny cave person was curved up at its base, all puffball cheeks and chubby elbows. Her ears were huge, and she had flopped them down to block out the light while she napped.
Forveleth said, “Sister?”
She trundled upright all at once, like one of those wobble toys with a weight in its base.
I curled my hands around my backpack straps to stop myself from hugging her. “Hi, I’m Emy! I met your big sister in the tunnels, and she’s going to help me find my way home!”
The tiny person shoved her ears out of her eyes, the way I would adjust a headband. “Forveleth. You have not told her?”
“Did I not say there was a spell? The regret is mine, for the confusion.” Forveleth bit her lip with pointy teeth. “This is my elder sister.”
I started a kind of fake partial laugh, but they both looked at me like they were sorry nobody had done the reading before class. I swallowed my laughter. I wanted to cough it back up, get the awfulness out of my throat, but I couldn’t stack rude on top of rude. All that adorable squeezeable roundness was some kind of symptom. Cancer? Nutritional deficiency? Why didn’t they teach us anything useful in bio?
I apologized. Forveleth bent toward her sister with a slight shake of her ears. They argued, speaking so fast that all I caught was “of a surety, not a witch.” At last, Forveleth declared, “She is of my finding!”
“Come, then. It may be it is time you learned.”
We set off again, through a door at the far side of the cavern and up a set of long, shallow stairs. I was ready to stop walking. Maybe even eat something, though I didn’t feel hungry exactly, just floaty. Things were worse for Forveleth’s sister, though. The stairs weren’t shallow for her. She had to tilt her body back and stomp up every time.
About halfway up, she paused to catch her breath and stretch. I paused, pretending to tie my shoe, but Forveleth leaned toward me, closer than was comfortable. “We go to the chamber of true dreaming.”
“Is there anything I should know, to be respectful? Do I need to take my shoes off?” This dreaming chamber sounded like religion.
Forveleth shrugged. “The needed thing is silence, and listening. The dream comes up from the rock.” After a long breath, she added, “For my sister, time is like a colony of fungus.”
Every possible response I had was wrong, so I just said, “OK.”
“Time for my people should be like frogs,” Forveleth said seriously. “There is the egg, then the pollywog wiggling in the puddle, then the grown frog. One change flows from the next, in the proper order. But all the possibility of a fungus is threaded through the rock. The whole shape of a mushroom can appear at any moment.”
“Your sister can’t grow up, the way a tadpole grows up?”
“Time has lost its whole direction, for my sister.”
I thought about that as we climbed the stairs.
Walking inside the dreaming chamber felt like entering the bottom of a bottle. There was a hollow at the center of the room, and a pool filled with dark water. Every so often a droplet of water fell from above into the pool, and ripples spread toward us.
We sat in a rough triangle around the pool. The sandy floor was cold. I wanted to pull out my emergency blanket, but it would be almost as loud as a bag of potato chips. I half expected Forveleth to whisper a ghost story. Instead there was darkness and the echo of splashing. I wondered why Forveleth had told me about tadpoles, and not about the streams they swam in. Time should be like a current, pulling you forward. Maybe they didn’t have rivers down here.
The embarrassment of laughing at Forveleth’s sister washed over me again. I scrunched up my eyes and wrapped my elbows around my knees, trying to block it out.
I was in a room made of trees, huge ones that reached toward the sky. Their limbs clasped in arched cathedral windows. The white eagle was perched beside the glass. Light cut through in rainbow shimmers, washing over her. She stretched her wings, balanced, possessing the air, and as she stretched she turned into a girl. She looked older than I was, maybe old enough to be a college freshman. Her short hair was cut in layers like the eagle’s feathers and her eyes were winter sky reflected in snow. Her soft sweater fell across her hand as she relaxed. She picked up a picnic hamper and brought it to me, lounging on the carpet like she was an advertisement for Beloit or Grinnell.
The carpet was made out of white-gold leaves, shining softly, interlaced together. It was easier to look at than the girl’s face.
I didn’t know why I was letting awkwardness drag my eyes down. High school is supposed to be the best years of your life. Here was a real friend, a forever friend. She was offering me a sandwich wrapped in golden paper. Peanut butter and jelly, but with real strawberry jam. It oozed from the edge, sweet and thick, a drop of summer.
I touched my face and didn’t feel a mask. I backed up as fast as I could. The girl rose, too, leaning over me, shifting back to her bird form. Ready to strike.
I was fine, I was fine. I had backed into the cave wall. I was wearing a mask. It was brighter than ever. More than fluorescent. I could see the bars of light across my hand, as I raised it to make sure.
“Emmelyne?” Forveleth asked, tentative. “Were you granted a dreaming of the rock?”
A dream, right. A hallucination. My hands weren’t sticky with red jam. Maybe there was a drug of some sort, to create the ritual. That would be all right, if it was sacred. And if it was all over. “I saw an eagle who turned into a girl with white hair.”
“You did not! You cannot say it!”
I had dreamed wrong. I didn’t want to mess things up, but somehow I still had.
“Forveleth. Forveleth.” Her sister scooched close enough to grab her hand, without standing. “We will trace this dreaming.”
“It is not from stone. It should not be here.”
“I’m sorry. I know I shouldn’t be here, at all.”
Forveleth’s sister looked me straight in the eyes. I saw the echo of the person she ought to be, stern and sure. The tilt of her ears signaled interest. There should have been traces of kindness as wrinkles around her eyes, but instead her face was soft and smooth. “We are still rooted in what is, here, not what we wish would be. Tell us of your dreaming, Emmelyne.”
I told the story: the trees like a church, the transformation, the impossible sandwich.
“Would you wish to stay in that room of trees?” Her voice was high and gentle.
“It’s a dream.” Even if I thought I could still smell the fruit.
“This is a chamber of true dreaming.” I recognized the way she placed her words. She was struggling to be fair.
Forveleth simmered like a pot of salted water. “You cannot send her to the land of summer!”
“But it’s November?”
“Emmelyne, the place above us is not the place you came from. We are underneath, between, and sideways.” Forveleth’s sister slid closer to the center of the room and cupped her hands in the water, drawing it up. I thought she was going to drink it. Instead, she pulled her hands apart and the water followed, resting between her fingers in a wobbling lens. Light from my mask shivered inside the dark water.
Water didn’t work like that. I knew it didn’t. Maybe she had some kind of special algae or gel. Maybe this was a trick. Maybe I was hallucinating everything.
But this didn’t feel like a normal dream. I hadn’t forgotten a test, the twins hadn’t suddenly disappeared, and my toes were cold. This felt as real as my life ever had. So all I could do was what I always did: work through things slowly, and listen to what people said. Forveleth and her sister were weird, but they didn’t seem like liars. “Why don’t you live up above, yourselves? If it’s as beautiful as what I saw?”
“It is not home to us,” Forveleth said, shrugging. “And it is not a place that one can visit.”
“So it isn’t real?”
“It might be more real than here. So real that summer is unending.”
“The folk there are a bit like me,” said Forveleth’s sister. “They lose the trick of finding when to leave, or growing old.”
I thought of the endless pattern of the grasses, the feel of falling toward the sky. I thought of never having to wear a mask again. Of having a friend who never changed and never left.
I can’t say I didn’t want it. But it didn’t feel like it was for me. It felt like when I was at summer camp, and all the other girls in my cabin were talking about whether falling in love was the same rush as connecting to God, and all I could think about was whether the twins were home alone making a grape explosion in the microwave.
I was right about the grapes in the microwave, by the way. I was good at collecting data. And right now, I had a piece of data that Forveleth and her sister maybe didn’t. “I’ve had visions of this summer place before, at other spots in the tunnels. This is the third time.”
“What is it that you saw?” asked Forveleth’s sister.
“I saw the eagle striking upward, to a sky like glass. The second time was more of a daydream. I was thinking about spiraling petals. But that’s when Forveleth saw my mask was glowing, and it’s glowing again now.” Reflected streaks still shook inside the water mirror.
Forveleth made a sound like a teakettle. “What is this thread that shines so brightly?”
“Polyester? Uh, that’s synthetic, so from oil originally. Dinosaur swamps?”
“It is a rare material, and finely crafted?”
“No, my coat is basically the same stuff. But I did craft it. At least, I sewed the mask by hand.”
Forveleth’s sister set her lens in the pool. It slowly settled into normal water. “Tell us of the purpose of this mask you wear.”
“It’s to protect you. Or anybody I meet, in case I’m sick. Because lots of people are sick, where I’m from.” And I was extra careful, ‘cause of Mom.
Forveleth clapped her hands. The webbing between her fingers made the echo even louder. “You have sewn a protection spell! The oil seeps out from the earth, and is spun up to warn us!”
I took a deep breath and caught my startled laugh. “I guess that might work, here. You’re saying it’s some kind of alert? Like, summer air settles in certain places and that makes the thread glow?”
“Forveleth, did Emmelyne’s mask shine this brightly when first you saw its power?” Her ears perked forward like a sad kitten’s.
“I don’t think it could have been. I saw the reflections.” I was being careful and logical, but I saw Forveleth wilting, while her sister sat very still and very calm. “You think it’s here. The surface timelessness. Collecting in this cave.”
“Where I come alone, to look for dreams.” She looked like a perfect Christmas cherub, only with those ears instead of wings.
They would have to wall this cavern off. Kick everyone out of the holy place. Stay away. Forever? Until time got its teeth into Forveleth’s sister again, and she started growing forwards? Till they learned to make their own masks? It wasn’t fair. It wasn’t fair, and I was so tired of not being able to see the danger, or do anything, or help anyone.
Except this time, I had a sort of detector: the glowing thread. I stood up. “Is my mask brighter now? Or about the same?”
“Mmmm, it’s flickering... Dimmer, I think.”
I crouched like I was part of a football huddle. “What about now?”
“In between? Maybe? Emmelyne, are you going to dance all over this room?”
“No, we’re going to make a map!”
In the end, we made four maps. Four different circles, for different layers of the room, the heights I could reach without a chair. I drew rotating Es on a piece of paper, like the eye tests they give to first-graders, and held them next to my mask. Forveleth marked regions of the circle based on which size of E she could see by the mask’s glow.
“Emmelyne, this is the most wearisome spell I have ever known.”
“I’m sorry. Science is like that.”
“Yours is a great science of cartography.” Forveleth’s sister’s fingers were too clumsy to manipulate my pen, so she got to supervise.
We worked out, slowly, that whatever caused the brightness came from two puddles at the edge of the room. I couldn’t see a crack, just tarnished green threads, as if lichen had turned to metal. I reached out to touch one and found myself wondering if they were roots attached to trees, and the pool here mirrored the sky far above. Then Forveleth said, “It is so bright!” and I shook myself and went back to mapping.
We worked out a plan to stop the leaks. Fabric stitched in a pattern like a winding river and stretched taut against the wall with hammered spikes, then layers of a rust-red substance painted over it, to harden like cement.
But before the final layer could harden, I had to go home. That meant more walking through more tunnels. Forveleth carried her sister piggy-back so she could guide us. The final exit was up a freezing metal ladder. I shoved aside the cover and found myself behind Aitken house, near the crumbling building that used to be a woodshed. I was glad the snow wasn’t heavy yet, and even gladder I didn’t have to hike home.
I haven’t gone back into the main tunnels. Because when I got inside and washed my hands and took off my mask, my face was covered in zits. Not one or two, the way it always happens if you wear a mask for too long, but bright red streaks, like freshman year all over again. I got one of the twins to stand on a chair and check my height against the doorframe, and I was a quarter of an inch shorter than I had been on my birthday. Mom said it was probably different socks, but I knew I was barefoot both times. I had lost a whole year in just a day.
Every so often I go out back of Aitken House, and push aside the cover that isn’t really for a well, and let down a basket full of human things. Polyester thread, and mask patterns. Drawings of me and the twins. Riley is a pretty good artist. Sometimes, when I pull the basket back up, there are rock carvings. Turns out Forveleth is a pretty good artist, too.
Meanwhile, I did my homework. Kyley has a whole collection of books about kids who go to other worlds. I sat down one evening and read all the endings. There are basically three kinds. There are kids who stay in the world and become queens or princes or some kind of magic cop, which, no way was I doing that. There’s Narnia, where you learn a lesson about religion. And then there’s books like The Phantom Tollbooth, where the kid is inspired to draw or paint or make some kind of art about the magicalness of our world.
I thought at first, it shouldn’t have been me, then. It should have been Riley. But then I realized, the way I helped Forveleth and her sister, it wasn’t making a beautiful picture. It was collecting a bunch of data, knowing about masks, and building something with that knowledge.
And so I decided to go to college and learn more about measuring and building things. I thought at first that might be for architecture, maybe even fashion design, for the masks. But it turns out it’s engineering. There are people whose entire job is knowing about air flow. Some of them even design hospitals.
So that’s what I’m going to do: be an engineer. I’m going to learn as much as I can about filters and air currents. When I know all of it—and when I’m old enough I can risk losing a couple years, without speed-running puberty again—I’m going to come back to Toronto City. I still remember where to rap the walls in Aitken House.
© Copyright 2024 Ursula Whitcher
About the Author
Ursula Whitcher is a writer, poet, and mathematician who may be found on
Bluesky (@yarntheory.bsky.social) or at http://yarntheory.net/ . A
collection of linked short stories, North Continent Ribbon, is an August
2024 publication from Neon Hemlock Press.