52stories

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With a few strides, I reentered the store. The old man was standing in the middle of the store, leaning heavily on his staff, looking frail, the bathroom door closed behind him. As I entered, and opened my mouth, to say what I don’t know, he looked at me, and said “Silence.” He straightened and strode past me, to shut the door to the store. The scarred wooden door fit the doorframe inexpertly, as though the wood had shrank with age. This was fortunate, as the only source of light in the store, I noticed, was from the door, and with it closed, light only managed to sneak through a centimeter wide crack that ringed it. Outlined in front of me was the old man, who now stood straight, and equaled my six foot height.

His voice rasped through the dark, “Are you done running away like a child?”

My mouth, still hanging open from my entrance to the store, closed, then opened again as I said, reluctantly, “Yes.”

As my eyes adapted, the light around the door started picking out details in the old man’s outline. Strands of red hair danced around his head, though the air in the store was still. His hand gripping his staff held it in a steady, solid grip. “I need you to understand something. If I help you retrieve your little girl, I will be taking a great risk, both for my own life, and for this world. Do you understand this?”

“Yes,” I repeated. Suddenly, I blurted, “Who are you? What is this?”

“Time is fleeting. Time works differently beyond the door. Your daughter is getting further from your grasp, further beyond your seeking, leagues for every minute you dally. Do you still want an answer, or would you like me to prepare you and open the door again?”

“Yes!” I cried, “I would like an answer!”

“Very well,” he sighed. He raised a hand to his brow, and a flame sprang to life on top of his staff, creating a flickering light that danced over his leathery face. “You can call me Yehuda. In your world people know me as Old Yehuda, but through that door I am Yehuda the Banished, if my name is spoken now at all. This, as you say, is your daughter being kidnapped into the world of Cephas. Cephas the Terrible as I call him, but in the world through the door he is known simply as The Cephas, and to speak of him otherwise is to court death. Hurry, I will open the doorway, you will find her- you will bring her back here and begone, as I begged you from the start.” Yehuda made some swift adjustments to the head of his staff, turning inset rings in the dragon’s neck. I noticed that the flame atop the staff was not consuming the staff, but was hovering an inch above it.

“Hold on one moment! What exactly is this, you haven’t told me anything, really!”

Yehuda’s hand stopped its adjustments to the staff and struck out, grasping me by my collar and pulling me to him, my face inches from his. “There is no time. You do not understand. Time is much faster on the other side of the door. Your little girl- Cephas has a use for little girls, and no compassion. You must leave now!”

I paled, and my fists clenched. Yehuda put one arm around my shoulders and marched me towards the bathroom door. He opened it, again to that impossible field, and turned me to face him. “I cannot go with you. My life, and yours, would be forfeit if we were seen together. I have contacts there that I will go to, and alert to your quest. You should take this,” he said as he pressed a burlap wrapped mass into my hand, prying my fingers from their clenched position. “Take that, and go to the town of Vizzi. Find an inn there, the Blue Mare. Give it to the barkeep. He will relay further instructions from me. Now go!”

“Wait, why can’t I just find my daughter and come back?” I cried, as he started hustling me through the door.

“Because, you fool, she’s been through there alone for at least half a month now! Either Cephas has her, or she is… Cephas has her. Now go! You do not want her in his clutches for long!”

And with that, he thrust me through the door, and it slammed behind me. I turned to ask him one last question, and kept turning. All signs of the door were gone, and I was alone in a vast landscape, in front of me meadow stretching out to a dark forest on the horizon, and behind me, where the door should have been, more of the meadow, which seemed to end in a cliff that dropped away into what sounded like a large river or sea.

I ran back towards where the door should have been, but nothing was there. Grass, long enough to brush my knees, caught at my sneakers, and thoroughly soaked my legs in dew. The sun, which had been high overhead in the meadow ten minutes before, when Daphne had gone through the door, was rising behind the forest on the horizon. So the old man- Yehuda- wasn’t lying when he said time worked differently here. I continued running, but bent my path back and forth, trying to find the door, or some sign of the passage of my child, or a sign of Yehuda. Nothing. I stopped, and yelled, the effort of the yell tying my stomach in a knot, “Daphne! Daphne! Daphne!” I continued yelling, and fell to my knees, the knot in my stomach being pulled tighter and tighter, my voice getting stuck in my throat.

I grabbed the grass with both hands, dropping the burlap sack Yehuda had given me. With a wrench I pulled two handfuls free from the earth, each individual root snapping with a small twinge that flowed through my hands. Soil dropped from the hanks in small globules, scattering over the ground. I gathered my breath raggedly, finding it hard to fill my lungs through the constriction in my chest, and screamed a syllable-less sound, the primal scream of frustration, fear and anguish being swallowed in the vast emptiness that surrounded me.