I understood I was dreaming the book, and somehow, like before, it found me without me touching it, just being near it.
“Your very being is threaded in magic. You can never hide from me.”
“What does it mean? Tell me!”
“That is not the question you seek.”
Without any other warning, I felt myself being sucked through the book, even without it physically being there.
Then I was suddenly in a room I knew so thoroughly. My childhood bedroom in the lower levels of HDF, the apartment with my father. A fire crackled in my bedroom hearth, giving off the only light. I heard the sound of a little girl crying. My father, dressed in his uniform, sat on my bed, brushing his fingers softly through the little girl’s hair, wiping her tears away.
I sucked in, the memory of this moment barely a haze in my mind. I had no actual memories of it now, but my father told me I had incessant nightmares until I turned about four. I’d wake up screaming in pain, muttering things about lightning and my mother. They were never clear, a swirl of colors and impressions.
“Shhh, Kicsim.”His voice was soft and low.“It was just a bad dream.”
“I’m so sorry, Daddy.” My muffled voice could barely be heard as my younger self tucked her head into the pillow.
“Whatever for,lelkem?”My soul.
“I killed Mommy...”A gut-wrenching sob hiccupped from her.
“No, no... it’s not your fault. Mommy wanted to save you for me, Kicsim.She knew I could not live without you.” He tried to soothe my sobs, a low hum coming from his throat, murmuring a folk song my mother used to sing while pregnant with me. He calmed me so many nights, singing me to sleep.
“I’d like to cross the Tisza by boat
By boat, only by boat.
My dove lives there, lives there,
My dove lives there.
She lives in the town,
Red roses, blue forget-me-nots, violets
Are growing in her window.”
In a blink, I was ripped from the room and dropped into another. The secret cottage my parents stayed in. My body stilled as I saw my father hunched over the table, penning in the journal. Gray hair hinting at his temples told me it was years later, though the same song hummed in his throat.
My skin tingled as I stepped up to him, my gaze going over his shoulder to what he was writing. Nonsensical letters scrolled over the page as he frantically wrote, his head occasionally darting up to the window with a look of paranoia as if he expected someone to be there.
To find him.
My breath hitched as he muttered the words of the song, copying from a keycode next to him. He started to sketch out the last symbol in that peculiar line in the journal. The dove, rose, forget-me-nots, violets, and a boat.
My heart thumped in my chest. All the things he was drawing were from the song. The song he told me my mother sang to me.
The book shifted something in my sight, and suddenly I could read the line. It wasn’t words, but numbers.
Coordinates.
47°46’25. 18°59’06.
He scribbled out a few more coded lines before his head darted up, tipping to the side as if he heard a noise. His body went rigid, icing my skin. He hissed under his breath, slamming the journal closed. Dashing over to the fireplace, he tossed the keycode into the flames. He wiggled the stone from the side of the hearth before shoving it in the exact place I had found it.
I sensed his fear, his anxiety, as he pulled on his coat, grabbing for his gun. I had an urge to follow to see what was out there...whowas out there? Why he was so scared? But the book grabbed me.“No! Please!”I tried to push through, overpower its hold on me. The book easily flicked me out, tumbling me back into oblivion, not letting me see what was coming for my father.
It had given me what I went in there for—no more, no less.
