“Are they at Villa Anna Sofia on Amorgos Island?” I asked.
“That’s right. Would you like to leave a message for Mr. and Mrs. Mason?”
Jim called his family’s compound in Greece the Milk Shake for the way it oozed down the cliff overlooking the ocean. Much to my parents’ irritation, I’d spent five days there with Jim the summer before junior year. Although the time had passed in a sunburnt blur of bleached-white beaches and outdoor feasts, sunset boat rides and Greek folk music, Jim working relentlessly on his musical, that island and the Masons’ vertigo-inducing compound remained one of the most surreally beautiful places I’d ever seen.
“We could try Skyping them,” suggested Kipling. “?‘Hi, we’re Jim’s old friends phoning from purgatory. We command you to tell us everything about your son’s death.’?”
“I guess that’s that,” said Whitley gloomily.
“Not exactly,” said Martha.
I turned to her with a shiver of dread.
“It’s time you guys learned the truth.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Whitley.
Martha cleared her throat.
“The Neverworld is more complex than you think. I mean, none of you have noticed anything strange?”
“Oh, no, this is all perfectly routine,” said Kipling, smiling.
“Strange things like what?” I asked.
“Unusual disruptions. Magnetism. Instability.”
Instantly I thought of the mold, the peeling wallpaper, the tumbling trees, the collapsing shelves, the exploding snow globes, that black ink soaking through all the case files.
Martha appeared to know what it was, what it meant. She was fumbling in her heavy black bag, pulling out a small black notebook.
I recognized it. It was the one I’d spotted her carrying in the early days of the Neverworld, when she stopped to hastily scribble in the pages before moving on.
“?‘Sighting, six thirty-nine p.m.,’?” she read. “?‘One mysterious purple-feathered owl perched atop a maple tree, unknown species.’?” She turned the page. “?‘Overheard. Variety of eighties songs by the Cure in every passing car and every surrounding house.’?”
Martha closed the notebook, surveying us.
“Remember what the Keeper said. ‘Imagine if each of your minds was placed inside a blender, and that blender turned on high. The resulting smoothie is this moment.’?”
“Okay,” said Whitley, nervous.
“He was talking about the physics of the Neverworld. I’m very excited to tell you that it’s based in part on J. C. Gossamer Madwick’s groundbreaking masterpiece. And it’s my fault.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Cannon.
“I wrote a two-hundred-page thesis on the novel. I tracked down every rare book about it. Every obscure blog. I interviewed professors, experts, and scientists. I even went to visit Madwick’s daughter on Bello Costa Island in the Florida Keys, rowing out to this tiny, falling-down beach house in a remote cove swarming with alligators. She let me inspect Madwick’s notebooks, which have never been seen by anyone outside the family, not even the people at Harvard who’ve been bullying her to donate them to their archives. I read all eleven notebooks, translating them from Lurroscript, the language Madwick made up.”
She stopped her mad outpouring of words to take a deep breath.
I realized she was talking about The Bend, the fantasy novel she’d been obsessed with, the one no one had ever heard of except her and a bunch of geeky fanboys on the Internet.
“My preoccupation with the book made it our reality. I lived it. Breathed it. Now it’s in the Neverworld.”
“But what does that mean, child?” Kipling asked, faint shrillness in his voice. “We’re all about to float out into outer space? Become androids?”
Martha tilted her head and grinned, the lenses in her glasses flashing in the light.
My heart plunged. Whatever she was about to tell us, I knew I couldn’t trust it.
I also knew that in this world stuck on repeat, everything we knew was about to change.
“Well, for one thing,” Martha said excitedly, “it means rather than waking up at Wincroft, we can wake up anywhere in the past, present, or future.”
“And how do we do that?” asked Cannon.
“We climb out the unlatched window.”
We could only stare, baffled.
She sighed. “Right. Okay. I got way ahead of myself.”
She took another impatient breath.
“Lesson One. J. C. Gossamer Madwick was a science fiction writer. He wrote just one book, called The Dark House at Elsewhere Bend. The Bend for short. It’s this amazing adventure story and alternative world, different from anything you’ve ever read. It was never published. Just photocopied over and over again, bound using a hole-puncher and garbage bag zip ties, passed hand to hand by anonymous travelers, student backpackers, and disaffected youths in hostels. The thing you have to do once you finish The Bend? You sign the dedication page and leave it for the next lucky person on a park bench, bunk bed, airplane seat, or train compartment. For the longest time the only copies to be found were in ancient bookshops and on eBay, some with hundreds of thousands of signatures. The ones with famous names of the readers, like Marilyn Monroe and Leonard Bernstein and Frank Sinatra? They went for as much as four, five grand. Now it’s an official cult classic, steadily in print, and even random people like E.S.S. Burt have copies.”
To my surprise, Martha raced over to the shelves and pulled out a hulking silver hardback book. Returning to the couches, she handed it to me. The cover featured a collage of birdcages, steam trains, men and women wearing top hats, masquerade masks straight out of Victorian England.
The Dark House of Elsewhere Bend by J. C. Gossamer Madwick.
The legendary cult saga of future pasts. Present mysteries. An undying love at the end of the world.
I flipped to the back flap and stared down at the author photo.
It was grainy and black-and-white. In a rumpled suit, Madwick was a man few would look twice at: hound-dog face, extravagant ears, an apologetic slouch suggesting he was more comfortable ducking out of a room than entering one.
Jeremiah Chester Gossamer Madwick (December 2, 1891–March 18, 1944) was an American novelist from Key West, Florida. His only work, the posthumously published The Dark House of Elsewhere Bend, won the Gilmer-Hecht Prize for Fantasy in 1968. For 37 years he worked as a bus driver for the Key West transit office, driving passengers to and from Stock Island by day, and writing his 1,397-page masterpiece by hand on hotel notepads by night. At age 53, he was found dead in the doorway of Hasty Retreat Saloon, a harmonica, a tin of tobacco, and the final paragraph of his novel in his pocket.
“Madwick died penniless and unknown,” Martha said. “Now he’s considered one of the greatest fantasy writers who ever lived. Harvard has an entire class about him: Hobos, Strangers, and Vagabonds: The Literature of Madwick. He even has a cult following in the real-life physics community due to his theory of time.”
She paused to hastily draw something in her notebook. It was a sketch of a train.
“Which brings me to Lesson Two,” she said. “Time travel. Madwick viewed time not as linear, or an arrow, or even a fabric, like Einstein. He saw it as a locomotive. To time travel in Elsewhere Bend, you climb out the window of your speeding train compartment and scale onto the roof, like a bandit in an old western. Then you carefully move toward the front of the train, the future, or the back of the train, the past. It’s vital not to move too quickly in either direction because that will cause instability. Like, the train can jump the tracks, or crash, or separate compartments, or veer suddenly onto a wrong track heading clear in the opposite direction.”