The Child: Chapter 23
Where does Albreda want to go?
“Do you want to tell me what in the hell is going on?” I asked Albreda when she returned to the car.
She passed me one of the two coffees from the 7–11. I took a sip, letting the hot liquid burn my lips and tongue, sharpening my senses, hoping that a little pain would help me separate the real from the unreal. Over the past several hours, my life has felt like an illusion, as if I were magicians’ prey.
The coffee jostled my brain. “Wait!” I blurted. “How did you open the car door with a coffee cup in each hand?”
Albreda sat for a minute, completely silent. The coffee’s rising steam first circled the space between the cup and face like a floating whirlpool, then entered her nose. She leaned as far back as my Prius’ seat would let her, and exhaled a long note of contentment. She ran her finger along the cup’s circumference. “Sometimes I think I could live on coffee alone. Mmm.” She took a drink. “Even bad convenience store coffee is good. When you’re on the road for hours and days, your next coffee stop is all you look forward to, and all you need to sustain you. You get into that zone of driving and caffeinating, pulling over only to refuel your car and yourself. It’s the perfect synergy of human and machine.”
I wedged my cup into the holder between our seats, removed the key from the ignition, and made a show of burying it deep in my pocket. The seat squeaked as I turned toward her.
“We’re not going anywhere until you start answering my questions.” I had to concentrate not to ball my hands into fists. The front of my head throbbed, the back of my head hurt, and my eyes stung. “What is Galinder? What happened to my friend, Harlan? Did you do something to him? What is he? Who for that matter is the boy and who are you?” I paused a beat. “And those are just some of my questions.”
Albreda’s eyes slowly traveled from my hair down my face, neck, chest, legs and then back up, as if she were recording a video. When she had finished looking me over, she rubbed her chin, interlaced her fingers, and locked her eyes on me.
“At least tell me I’m not seeing things. Would you at least say that?”
Albreda reached behind my head, leaned forward and kissed me, pressing our lips tight together. I can’t say if the tingling I felt inside was because I was surprised or because her lips felt simultaneously sensual and calming, as if she was intending to both seduce and soothe me. Her hand stayed behind my head, and I was at a loss as to where to put mine.
When Albreda stopped kissing me, I sputtered, “What was that about?”
“So now you have a brand new question?” Her lips curled into a wry smile. “Your lips felt good, too. Shall we kiss again?”
“So you’re a mind reader in addition to” — my shoulders raised into an involuntary shrug — “whatever else you are?”
“I don’t think it takes a mind reader to know you enjoyed our first kiss and you think I’m pretty. But I’ll answer your last question first.” She narrowed her eyes. “My mind reading abilities are limited, unlike some of the others, but I can intuit thoughts, like a child who looks in the sky and sees the underlying shapes of clouds.”
“You kissed me to see my thoughts?”
She smiled more broadly this time. I detected a wink. Her luminous green eyes looked like the light from paper lanterns floating on a misty lake.
She reached for my hand, and this time interlaced her fingers with mine. I tingled again. I wanted to pull her tight and have our clothes melt away. Does this mind reading thing work two ways? Is this what she’s also thinking? Or is what I’m feeling a byproduct of having thoughts scooped out of my head?
“When I kissed you, I learned you didn’t find the child by accident. You were supposed to find him,” Albreda said.
“I don’t understand.” I shook my head. “I wasn’t thinking that.”
“But you knew anyway.”
“I’m lost,” I said.
“There’s a lot to explain and it’s not easy to explain, either. You have to see and experience the other world in order to understand.”
“Okay.”
“It’s not necessarily okay, Mark.” She leaned across me and opened the driver side door. “It will be dangerous.” She waved her hand toward the door. “If I were you, I’d leave.”
“It’s my car.”
“I need your car, Mark.”
“Is that what the kiss was about? A bribe to get my car?”
“I told you. That’s how I get inside somebody’s head.”
“Do you need to read more of what’s in my head?”
She chuckled. “Maybe. But you need to decide: Keep your car, travel with me, and maybe lose your life or go home and live in blissful ignorance of perilous realms.”
TO BE CONTINUED
The Child is an interactive puzzle fiction story. If you’ve stumbled onto this episode without reading the beginning, you can start at Episode One here.