D. MacHale - The Pilgrims of Rayne

She walked past the ladies’ and girls’ departments and headed straight to menswear. There, as a perplexed salesman wearing a neat suit with a white carnation in the lapel watched in wonder, Courtney bought two pairs of men’s woolen pants and a few white, cotton shirts. She also bought socks, a pair of brown leather shoes that were much more comfortable than the ones from the flume, and a pair of green striped suspenders to hold the pants up. She found a gray woolen cap with a short, soft brim that was big enough to tuck all of her long brown hair under. Courtney put her hands in her pockets and admired herself in the mirror.

The salesman scowled. “Halloween was two days ago, young lady.”

Courtney smiled. “I think I look pretty good.”

She did. Courtney may have been wearing men’s clothes, but there was no hiding the fact that she was a girl. The final piece was an oversize, dark green turtleneck sweater that she knew she’d need once the weather got cold. Satisfied, she paid the salesman and headed out.

“What do I do with this?” the salesman called to her. He was holding up the flowered dress that Courtney had worn into the store.

“I don’t need it anymore,” she said brightly. “Halloween was two days ago.”

The salesman gave her a disapproving frown and Courtney went on her way. She had one more chore before beginning her search for Mark in earnest. She traveled a route she had taken many times before, in another era. From Thirty-fourth Street in Manhattan she took a subway train to Grand Central Terminal. The ride cost a nickel. From there, she got on a New Haven Line train, headed for her hometown of Stony Brook, Connecticut. The hour-long trip was familiar yet alien. The train wasn’t anywhere near as comfortable as the sleek, shock-absorbed cars of Second Earth. She felt herself bouncing around as if she were on a freight train. There was an incessant squeak and rattle that didn’t seem to bother anybody else but her. The constant bouncing was especially annoying because she was trying to read the newspaper.

If she had been tracking Mark on Second Earth, her first stop would have been the Internet. On First Earth all she had were newspapers and the occasional radio news broadcast. At Grand Central Station she bought five different daily papers: the New York Advocate, the Manhattan Gazette, the New York Daily Mirror, the New York Post and the New York Times. She quickly searched through every paper, desperate to find a mention of Mark Dimond, Andy Mitchell, the Dimond Alpha Digital Organization, or KEM Limited. Her thinking was that if Mark’s presentation of the Forge technology was so important, it would have to hit the news, even if it was a small blurb.

She found nothing. The big news item of the day was the mysterious subway derailment in the Bronx. Courtney read that the engineer swore he saw a man jump in front of the speeding train, but no body was recovered. It would forever remain a mystery.

Finding no news of Mark was frustrating and reassuring at the same time. With nothing in the papers, Courtney hoped the news about Mark’s Forge technology hadn’t been released yet. She brightened. Maybe there was still hope of pulling it back before the damage was done.

The train pulled into Stony Brook Station. Courtney stepped onto a wooden platform that had been torn down three decades before she was born. She was tempted to take a tour around Stony Brook to see what her hometown looked like so many years before, but decided she didn’t have the time. She was there for a very specific purpose. The quicker she got back to New York, the better. It was a short walk from the train station to the main street of Stony Brook, which years later would come to be known as “the Ave” to all the kids. Courtney actually recognized some of the older buildings that no longer looked that old. There was an ice-cream soda fountain that on Second Earth would become a bicycle shop; a barbershop that in her day would become an art gallery; and a vegetable market that one day would be the Apple store where Courtney’s parents would buy her an iPod. It was a fascinating and odd trip through the past.

Her destination was the National Bank of Stony Brook. It was the bank where Bobby set up a safe-deposit box to keep the journals he wrote on First Earth. Sixty-some years later on Second Earth, Mark and Courtney would open up that vault to find them. It became the place where Mark kept all Bobby’s journals. Now they were entrusted to her, and she wasn’t going to do any less of a job than Mark. She had the key on a chain around her neck and she had memorized the account and box number. With absolute confidence she presented the information to the stuffy bank manager, who led her into the vault and left her alone. Inside the safe-deposit box were Bobby’s journals from his earlier adventure on First Earth, waiting for her and Mark to discover them on Second Earth.

She had been carrying around a large cloth purse since she left the hotel. In it was Bobby’s Journal #28. Courtney added it to the earlier ones and locked the box back up. For a moment she wondered if she and Mark would find this new journal when they opened up the box for the first time on Second Earth. Was that possible? She decided that worrying about how monkeying with history might change the future made her head hurt. She needed to get out of there and back to New York to find Mark.

A few hours later she was back in Manhattan, walking up Park Avenue toward the Manhattan Tower Hotel. It was midafternoon, but the November shadows were already growing long. It would be dark soon. Courtney’s plan was to go back to the hotel, eat something at the restaurant, then hide under the covers in Gunny’s bed and try to come up with a brilliant plan to find Mark. She got as far as the entrance to the garden in front of the Manhattan Tower, when she felt an odd sensation. She didn’t know what it was at first, so she stopped short. Her every sense was on alert. A second later she realized what it was.

Her ring was activating.

She looked around quickly to make sure nobody was watching. Dumb thought. She was in midtown Manhattan. Everybody was watching. The dark stone in the ring was already melting into crystal. She slapped her other hand over the ring to hide it and ran onto the hotel grounds. Frantically she looked about for a place that would give her some cover. She found it among the perfectly manicured trees and bushes. She leaped off the sidewalk into the dense foliage. The ring was growing. She came upon a small clearing that had a marble bench in front of a pond full of gold fish. Nobody was there, which was good, because whether she liked it or not, the ring was about to open up.

She put it on the ground and watched as the silver circle grew to Frisbee size, revealing a tunnel to the territories. Shafts of sparkling light shot from the dark hole, as did the sweet music. Courtney didn’t watch. She kept glancing around to make sure nobody else was witnessing this impossible, magic event. It was over in a matter of seconds and Courtney was finally able to breath. Her fear turned to curiosity as she jumped at the ring, ready to grab Bobby’s first journal from Ibara. She knelt down to see…

It wasn’t a journal. It was a gray envelope. Courtney curiously turned it over in her hands. It looked like a regular, old, everyday letter. Why would Bobby send her a letter? She quickly put the ring back on her finger and anxiously ripped open the mysterious envelope. Inside was a single piece of paper with printing. Courtney read it once. Twice. A third time more slowly, making sure she understood every word.

It wasn’t from Bobby. It was from Patrick. It was from Third Earth. It was trouble.

Bobby and Courtney,

I am sending this letter to First Earth in hopes that you are there, and that the flume sent you back to a time where you can still affect what happened. After you left Third Earth,