The Hidden World

Chapter 6

Farther down the road there were houses. 

Maeve could see the light from their windows shedding a yellow glare on its asphalt surface. She was standing in a cemetery; to her left a church raised its dark spire against the sky. Slowly Maeve walked out into the road and headed towards the houses. Light was everywhere, blazing from the windows of homes and shops; in one picture window a couple sat watching TV, the whole room bathed in its cold, blue, underwater light. A group of teenagers stood outside a corner store drinking pop from cans under a fluorescent sign: Dougherty's Variety & Video.

"Are you okay?" one of the teenagers called.

Maeve realized that she had been standing rooted in the middle of the street, looking dazedly about her. "I... I'm trying to find Bayshore Road," she managed to say. And she gave them her aunt and uncle's address.

There was a little pause, during which they must have been wondering how on earth anyone could possibly get lost in Mary's Bay. Then one of the girls spoke.

"Bayshore? You're standin' on it, girl. Just follow it back east," she said, pointing with her pop can. "It goes round the north side of the bay. So you're new here, are you?"

"I'm visiting," Maeve called over her shoulder as she fled back down the street.

She found her aunt and uncle's home without any difficulty—the white saltbox house was ablaze with lights—and as she ran around the lean-to at the back, she saw her aunt and uncle in the front hall. Talking together—about her, no doubt. Had they contacted her parents, called the police? Maeve put on a desperate spurt of speed, flinging open the back door and tearing into the house.

"Oh, there you are," said Uncle Roy as she ran into the passage. "We were just about to send out the bloodhounds." He smiled at her, then turned back to Aunt Ellen. "So I said, 'What about tomorrow for the meeting, since I'll be in town...'"

Maeve froze in place, her chest still heaving with exertion. His tone had been light, casual, his expression as affable as ever.

"How long have I been out?" she asked slowly.

Uncle Roy turned to her again. "Oh, not much more than an hour. It was getting dark, though, and we thought you might lose your way. Rob would never forgive me if I mislaid one of his kids—"

"Are you all right, Maeve?" asked her aunt, turning a keener glance in the girl's direction. "You look a little pale."

An hour, Maeve thought. I've been gone only an hour. Then none of it happened.

"Maeve?" her aunt persisted. "Are you feeling okay?"

Maeve took a deep breath. "I'm fine, it's just... I went to this place in the woods, and I lay down by a stream and kind of dozed off." She must have done, though the transition between awareness and sleep had been strangely seamless. "And I dreamed . . ." Dreamed.  Was that really the right word? Her memories of sunlit fields, Thomas's family, the apple blossoms arose in her mind. When did I ever dream about taste and smell before? she wondered. And there was nothing vague or blurry about these memories, unlike the dim recollections of a dream. "I feel funny—as if I've been gone longer than I really was," she said.

"A nap will do that to you sometimes," Aunt Ellen said. "Leave you feeling a bit thrown off. And you may still be a bit jet-lagged. If you're that tired, perhaps you should make an early night of it."

Jet-lagged. She grasped the explanation eagerly, clutching at straws. That was it: she was overtired and a little disoriented still. Such things happened. She could put Connemara and Annwn and all that strangeness behind her now. It hadn't been real; of course it hadn't. For even in Grandma's novel, time had flowed at the same pace in Annwn as it had in our world. Emma Butler had come home to find she'd been given up for dead by her family. But Maeve's own "visit" to Annwn had seemingly taken only minutes (for an hour at least must have passed as she'd lain in the clearing looking up at the darkening sky). She breathed more easily as she mounted the stairs. Delusion, that was the word. None of it had actually happened.