Chapter 1: The Raccoon by the Road

The house was a cacophony, razor-sharp against her eardrums.

Sound stabbed through the walls. It cut through the drywall, ricocheted off the baseboards, and clawed at Allison’s skin. No room comforted her the way she was used to. Not the upstairs hallway with its trembling vent. Not the office, where the next-door neighbor’s furniture shrieked against the floor like nails on a chalkboard. Behind the house, industrial mowers rumbled through the graveyard, their vibration sinking into every bone in her body. The bass from the neighbor’s car thudded beneath her feet, reverberating through the walls like an unwanted heartbeat.

It felt like a high-security prison where sound was used as torture to extract classified information. Her anxiety spiked. The tension in her chest tightened until escape was no longer a wish, but a necessity. The noise was everywhere. Around her. Inside her. There was no way out.

Then the neighbor on the other side lit their barbecue... again.

Smoke curled in lazy, suffocating tendrils, completely filling the backyard and dragging the choking scent of too much lighter fluid, burning wood, and charred meat into the house. On another day, she might have enjoyed the smoky richness and hoped they would share, as they often did. Today was not that day. Today, it was one more thing piled on top of everything else, so she shut the door, turned on a fan, and breathed through her mouth, willing the sensory overload to stop.

The noise, which seemed to grow louder no matter what she did to ease her discomfort, had already scraped her nerves raw. When the overly strong, noxious, dead-skunk smell of poor-quality weed seeped through her non-sealing windows and hit, it tripped the last breaker in her overstimulated body, sending her into shutdown. Fast. And she needed it to stop. Her body decided before her brain could catch up. The urge to escape surged from simmering discomfort into a feverish physical command: OUT.

She ran upstairs. Spud, her ancient Lhasa Apso, trotted after her, his nails clicking anxiously against the hardwood. He sensed the frazzled energy radiating from her like heat from a stovetop. Allison hurried to close the spare room and office doors, hoping the sealed air pockets would muffle the outside world.

And it helped. For a little while.

She caught herself holding her breath again. When she let it out, the sigh was so loud and so large it nearly startled her. Finally, she calmed down enough to think. She walked to her bedroom and turned on the bedside lamp.

She climbed into bed, her safe place, a cozy, people-sized bird’s nest of blankets and pillows. Spud scrambled up his little bedside stairs and curled into the crook of her legs before she even settled, pressing as much of his body against hers as he could, as if sheer contact could anchor his mom to the world.

Allison leaned back against her wedge pillow and pulled the green velvet throw over her legs. Its soft, plush nap soothed her skin. She reached for the book on her nightstand, Go Tell the Bees That I Am Gone by Diana Gabaldon, and the soft gray book pillow beside it. With the book propped open on her lap, she tried to let the words pull her out of her body and into Jamie and Claire’s world instead.

She made it three pages before the neighbors’ shared wall erupted again.

Doors slammed. Walls shook. Muffled voices rose above the calming white noise of her fan, punctuated by sharp peaks of yelling that vibrated in her chest. Minutes later, the oldest teenager’s room began thumping with bass so heavy it made her teeth feel loose in her skull. The stomping was worse, a full-body percussion section that made the lampshade tremble.

“How can they be so loud all the time?” she asked aloud, looking at Spud as if he might answer. “Why are they always making noise?”

Spud only nudged her left hand, asking for pets. Allison pressed her entire right hand to her head, as if she could physically hold her brain inside her skull.

She tried to tune it out and keep reading, making a mental note to order some noise-canceling headphones, but for now, the clamor was too jarring, too invasive. She snapped the book shut, slapped it onto the nightstand, and shoved the book pillow off her lap and onto the floor as she stood. Her feet hit the ground hard. A deep growl slipped out of her. She could barely hear her own thoughts above the din.

Outside, the child next door, instead of the normal playful yells children make, screamed the kind of screech a child is normally told not to make unless they were in danger. The mother yelled back, swearing in her smoker’s gravelly voice. Something heavy slammed against the shared wall again, and Allison started, flinching so hard that her vision blurred as she tried to ward off a trauma flashback dissociation.

That was it. She could not spend another moment inside these walls. Frustration sharpened into desperation. Every direction brought another barrage, another assault on ears that had already given everything they had to the tiny scrap of patience she had left. Every second brought her closer to a meltdown she couldn’t walk back from. She gripped the last fragile thread of control. Her final resort, the one thing that always worked when nothing else did, was escape: her bicycle, the hills, and the trees of the nearby Civil War battlefield.

She crouched beside Spud on the bed and wrapped her arms around his warm, scruffy body. He leaned into her, solid and reassuring against her chest. She pressed her nose into the soft fur behind his ear, breathed him in, and whispered, “I’ll be back in a little while, potato. Promise. I have to get out of here before I go mad.”

Spud watched her go from the top of the stairs, his head cocked to one side. When she reached the bottom, he gave a short, indignant bark.

She could practically hear the accusation. 

You’re going to ride without me, aren’t you?

“Sorry, old man,” she called back. “This one’s a solo mission.”

At the bottom of the stairs, she paused. Her periwinkle e-bike waited behind the mustard-yellow sofa. Allison favored colorful things. They anchored her in a gray world. She grabbed her backpack by the front door. She’d already half-packed it from her last hurried escape: notebook, pens, granola bar, water, earplugs, phone. She shoved her glasses up her nose, slung the bag over her shoulder, and strode to the door like it was the most important mission of her life. Because in that moment, it was.

She nudged Spud back from the doorway, wheeled the bike onto the driveway, and set the kickstand down. Then she looked one last time at her dog’s hopeful, fuzzy face in the doorframe.

“Be good. I’ll bring you something. I’m stopping for dinner on the way back. Chicken, maybe? Love you. Watch the house.”

She locked the door, swung a leg over the seat, powered on the control panel, and rode away.

Relief came almost instantly. As soon as she pedaled from the house, the frantic edge of her nerves began to soften. A tentative calm replaced it, growing with every passing yard.

Wind sliced past her ears, crisp and open. It swept the echoes from her skull. She inhaled the scent of freshly cut grass, sun-baked asphalt, and the honeyed fragrance of roadside blooms. With each pedal stroke, her shoulders loosened. Her jaw unclenched. Her grip slackened on the handlebars as she shifted gears and the scenery changed. On her bike seat, anything felt possible. It always did.

The world opened when she moved through it, rather than being trapped inside it.

She rode through her small town’s curves with practiced rhythm, the hum of the tires steadying her pulse. The houses thinned into hills, and the crush of small-town life faded into birdsong and the soft rustle of trees. At last, she could breathe. At last, her body was hers again. There was only one place she wanted to go.

Culp’s Hill.

A little creek meandered beneath a small bridge there, and beside it, a spot was tucked into a cluster of trees. From there, she could see minnows flashing in the shallows below a mighty gnarled oak, in a mossy hollow where the world knew how to be quiet. That was where she liked to sit and write. It was her place, the one place in Gettysburg where she could put her thoughts on paper without distraction.

By the time she reached the trailhead, her heartbeat had settled. The old cattle fields were on her left as she entered the roadway. They eventually gave way to tulip poplars, dogwoods, pines, oaks, hickories, ashes, and redbuds, which surrounded her, their canopies filtering the late-afternoon sun. The air smelled of damp earth and early blooms. It was late May, and the first tulip-poplar buds had begun to open high in the branches, greenish-yellow and orange, as large as oversized coffee mugs.

Her favorite tree waited just down a small, steep bank below the bridge, its granite-brick sides rooted in the soft earth like an old friend she could always count on. She parked her bike as far to the side as she could, tugged her pack free from the elastic net, and slipped beneath the branches with the ease of someone coming home.

The creek greeted her in its own language, water babbling over smooth stones in a voice that said, without words,

Welcome back.

Allison settled into a nook between prominent roots. Cool, damp earth seeped through her jeans, grounding, not uncomfortable. She knew she would stand up with a wet backside, but she did not care one little bit.

She opened her pack, pulled out her battered composition book and favorite purple glitter gel pen, uncapped it, set the tip to paper, and began to write. Scribbles at first. Fragments. Half-formed thoughts that had banged around her skull all day. The clamor. The haze. The exhaustion of processing a world at a volume no one else seemed to register. She wrote without structure or purpose, letting the words spill through her hand, messy, unedited, and free. It was not art. It was not for a client. It was only for her. It was a much-needed release.

Time blurred. The pen scratched steadily against the page while the creek murmured its accompaniment. The world narrowed to ink, paper, moss, detritus, mushrooms, and water. Her breathing slowed. The last of the tension drained from her shoulders, pooled beneath her, and sank into the earth, then into the little creek at her feet.

Then something rustled in the brittle leaves.

Allison snapped her head up, and her eyes searched the underbrush until they landed on a nearby pile of leaves and the glossy sheen of a black nose poking through. Slowly, a gray muzzle emerged. Allison’s mouth went slack as she watched the nose twitch, whiskers testing the air for danger. 

The leaves shifted again, and gray fur, nimble paws, and the unmistakable mask of the cutest raccoon she had ever seen emerged. She held her breath as it surfaced from the pile and shook debris from its fur. It sat at the edge of the tree line, maybe fifteen feet away, watching her intently. Allison had seen raccoons from afar, but never this close. This one seemed different. Too still. Too aware. More self-possessed than any wild creature had a right to be.

“It can’t be rabid, right? It would have tried to attach me by now,” she whispered to herself. “It seems chill.”

Allison blinked.

The creature blinked back.

It didn’t move like a raccoon usually does. No twitchy scurrying. No nervous darting. It approached cautiously, curious rather than aggressive. Each step was deliberate and unhurried, as if it had nowhere else to be but here, in front of her. Its eyes gleamed in the dappled light with a curiously wise glint as it looked at her like someone who had long been waiting to meet her. Then, the raccoon bounded across the creek, its paws barely disturbing the water, and sat on the opposite bank. It was close enough now for a conversation, if raccoons could talk.

Allison’s heart thudded against her ribs. Afraid to scare it away, she whispered, “Hi?”

The raccoon tilted its head and blinked.

Allison stared back, her face softening, her gaze averted just enough to avoid seeming threatening. She was caught between the impulse to laugh and the impulse to bolt. Something about the moment felt strangely comfortable, though she could not place why. The feeling had words somewhere, but they stayed just out of reach.

Then the air around the raccoon shimmered like heat rising off blacktop.

For the briefest moment, Allison saw something else fade into the same space where the raccoon sat, like an old double-exposed photograph. In the transparent image stood a tall, robot-like figure. It seemed partly metal, partly rubber, and maybe glass, though she could not be sure. It appeared and vanished in a couple of heartbeats.

Allison’s jaw dropped. As she watched, her pen slipped from her fingers and rolled into the moss. The vision faded. Only the raccoon remained. It hadn’t moved or flinched. It only watched her with those knowing, steady eyes.

Then it stepped closer, opened its mouth, and spoke aloud in a soft yet cautious tone, the register higher than her own: “Don’t be afraid.”

This time, Allison let out an audible gasp.

Her entire body went rigid with trepidation; The creek kept babbling. A bird sang somewhere overhead. The world continued as if nothing unusual had happened, which made it worse, because something unusual had absolutely just happened.

“You’re talking,” she said.

Her voice came out flat and mechanical, the way it did when her brain was processing something too large to fit into proper sentences.

“Raccoons don’t talk. They can’t talk.”

The raccoon sat again and folded her paws together with almost prim delicacy.

“True,” she said. “But I am not just a raccoon. I look like one to you, but that is not all I am.”

Allison stared. “What are you, then?”

The creature smiled, eyes slightly narrowed, head tilted. “Well, first, you can call me Thimble.”

Allison squinted. “Okay. Nice to meet you, Thimble. Good to put a name to a face, but you didn’t answer my question.”

“No,” Thimble agreed pleasantly. “It’s an invitation.”

“To what?”

“To understand.”

Allison looked down at her notebook, still open to the half-written page, ink drying in the afternoon air. Then she looked back at Thimble. Her logical brain screamed that this couldn’t be happening. She was dehydrated. Hungry. Finally, truly losing it. Her mind began to quiet. As it did, a voice in her head spoke, soft and unmistakably Thimble’s.

Just listen.

“Okay,” Allison said cautiously, looking at Thimble with one eyebrow raised. She pulled her knees to her chest and held them tightly. “I’m listening.”

Thimble stepped lightly to the creek’s edge and dipped one small paw in.

It did not ripple.

The surface held perfectly still, as if the creek itself were paying attention.

“I am to be your guide,” Thimble said.

Allison frowned. “To where?”

“To Dreamspace.”

Allison turned the word over in her mind.

Dreamspace.

It meant nothing except the make-believe place inside her head, the place where her imagination wandered, and her flow state lived. At least that’s what she always thought.

“Hold the phone a second,” Allison said, her voice rising. “How do you know about Dreamspace? It’s not even a real place. It’s imaginary. It’s in my head. I’ve never told anybody about it. Not a single soul.”

The shimmer returned, confirming Thimble’s words. This time, Allison felt it before it faded in again. In her bones, she sensed a threshold between everything she could see and some other plane waiting just beyond it.

“And who or what was that?” she whispered, barely audible above the creek. “The thing I saw. The figure.”

Thimble looked at her, coyly. “That is Sol. An android. A resident of Dreamspace, like me. They exist on the other side.”

“In Dreamspace.”

“Yes.”

“So you’re… both?”

“Of Dreamspace?” Thimble said. “Yes.”

Allison rubbed her eyes hard enough to see stars, then dropped her hands into her lap, resigned, for now, to going along with it.

“But how is it a really real place when it’s all supposed to be secret and private in my brain-case?”

Thimble smiled, and something in her grin suggested she had answered this question before, for other people in other times.

“That,” she said, her voice quiet, strange, and utterly sincere, “is a very good question.”

The creek babbled on. A firefly blinked once in the underbrush, impossibly early for the season, then went dark. The trees swayed overhead, their canopies nodding like they knew something Allison did not.

She sat there for a long time, notebook forgotten, pen lost in the moss, staring at the raccoon at the edge of a creek, trying to decide whether she had lost her mind or had found something she didn’t know she had been missing.