Chapter 7: Walking in a Daydream

Allison awoke the next morning with the smell of the seashore she had been dreaming about still lingering in her nose. She lay still for a moment, eyes closed, letting it wash over her. The scent remained—faint but persistent—threading through the ordinary morning smells of her house.

She sat up slowly. The Spark Quill was on the nightstand beside the notebook, right where she'd left it when sleep finally pulled her under. Even from the bed, she could feel tiny tendrils of warmth radiating from it. She reached over and touched it with one finger. Warm and humming, faintly.

"Okay," she said to no one. "So that's still happening," stifling a yawn.

Spud stretched, yawned widely, and fixed his eyes on her with the look of a dog who had been patient long enough and now wanted to demand his breakfast and a morning potty trip.

"Yeah, yeah, potato. Time to get up. I know. Let’s go."

Allison moved through the morning routine on autopilot, her brain otherwise occupied. Spud went out, coffee pod went in; the croissant went from the counter box to her hand; Spud came back in; dog food went into the bowl; and Spud attacked it like a creature that had never been fed before.

Throughout the entire morning routine, the scent followed her—relentless yet patiently waiting for her attention. It lingered even when the smell of wet dog food briefly overpowered everything else in the kitchen, reasserting itself the moment Spud’s meal faded, as if to say, "I'm not going anywhere. Get used to it."

She splashed her usual French vanilla creamer into her coffee, picked up the mug with one hand, shoved the croissant in her mouth with the other, grabbed the notebook and her new and improved pen from the seat of her bike with the other, where she'd placed them as she came downstairs, and settled onto her sofa with careful, practiced choreography. 

The TV stayed off. Anything but the morning's silence, she knew, would be much too loud. She wanted only the room noise, food, coffee, and morning dog snuggles.

She opened the journal on her lap and flipped to what she had written—or rather, what the pen had written—the night before she fell asleep. Her eyes flicked back and forth as she read every word.

In the memory, the flip-flops slapped against the boardwalk planks with every step, their foamy rubber soles already embedded with gritty sand that was never fully coming out. The gulls cried overhead—sharp and demanding. One dove so close she felt the wind from its wings kiss her cheek. She clutched the paper cup of boardwalk fries tighter, the grease already soaking through, the smell of Old Bay and malt vinegar rising in a cloud so thick she could taste it before she brought one to her mouth.

In the memory, the fries were perfect. Golden. Crispy on the outside, soft and almost creamy inside. Coated in the unmistakable orange-red Old Bay seasoning blend that stung your fingers and lips and dashed with just enough vinegar to make your eyes water if you leaned in too close. She ate them one at a time, savoring each, because the cup would be empty soon, the walk would end, and both the day and summer would be over, and...

Allison was mid-bite, mid-sentence, when the television turned on by itself. She froze, the croissant halfway bitten. She hadn't touched the remote; it sat on the sofa arm where she'd left it last time, undisturbed. But the screen was on, playing a video she’d almost forgotten.

The footage was grainy, washed out, and slightly overexposed, in a way that made you know it belonged to that era of home movies filmed in the bluish glow of early evening light of the ’80s, filmed by the unsteady hands of someone who cared enough about that moment to put it on a video cassette. The audio was muffled and distant, like listening through the glass of a full aquarium.

A beach. A boardwalk. A family walking together—two adults, two children—in the bright, hazy afternoon.

Allison's breath stopped. She recognized it all: the boardwalk, the shops—the saltwater taffy place with the machine in the window, the T-shirt store with airbrushed designs featuring various names, the arcade with its front windows and doors open to let in the breeze while patrons basked in the neon glow of the games. She recognized the light, the sun's angle, the particular blue of the ocean beyond the railing.

And she recognized the man. He was tall and broad-shouldered in the way that had always made her feel safe, like standing behind a wall nothing could get through. He wore a faded T-shirt—navy blue, she thought, or maybe dark green; it was hard to tell—cargo shorts, and flip-flops that slapped his heels with every step. His hair was dark and thick, cut short, and when he turned his head to look down at the child beside him, his face cracked into a grin so gentle and warm it could have powered the carousel at the end of the pier.

Her dad. Seventeen years had passed since he died, and here he was, walking the Rehoboth boardwalk in 1988. She remembered being 8 years old, and he was holding the hand of his little girl—her, in a yellow sundress, who was trying to take boardwalk fries out of the greasy paper cup he held down for her, walking at the same time, getting a nice dusting of Old Bay on everything.

A loud gasp came out of Allison's throat, and the ache in her chest grew as she tried to hold back tears with an audible gulp. She missed him so badly and for so long that the grief had become architecture, load-bearing, woven into the walls of who she had grown up to be without him. She hadn't heard his laugh in so many years; she’d almost forgotten what it sounded like. The video had no clear audio, but she could see his mouth moving and his shoulders shaking, and she knew that laugh the moment it came through the speakers, as familiar as her own heartbeat. It lived in her bones. And it would stay there, even when she could no longer remember the sound.

The tears came almost without warning. She bunched the fabric of the PJs she wore in her hands, brought it to her face, and pressed it to her mouth and nose to stifle the loudest sob. The grief broke open like a fault line, and every ounce she'd been holding on to since he died poured through the gap.

On the screen, she and her father reached a section of the boardwalk railing. He knelt beside her and pointed at something in the distance—the Ferris wheel on the far end of the boardwalk, maybe, or a dolphin in the surf by the pier; she couldn't see it clearly. The little girl leaned into him, her small body fitting against his side like a puzzle piece locking into place.

Then, for a moment, the camera panned to the railing. Mounted on the weathered wood, in a style that didn't match anything else on the boardwalk, was a small brass sign. It read:

Please be patient while the boardwalk is rendering.

Allison stared at it through her tears. Dreamspace was building this—right now, in real time—from the memories to the words she had written in the journal the night before with the ordinary pen that wasn't so ordinary anymore. The Dreamspace was building itself; Her memories, thoughts, ideas, and writings were the raw material. She looked down at the page once again; The purple ink shimmered, steady and patient. Allison let her eyes focus and read back what had been written—the flip-flops, the gulls, the fries, the boardwalk—and matched it, line for line, with what she'd just seen on the television screen. A perfect parallel. Word for word.

With just the smallest shuddered breath as she looked back up to the TV, she whispered, "What. Is. Happening? This cannot be real."

The pen rose above the journal on its own and tapped down on the open pages; its ornamental end glinted in the morning sunlight through her living room window, catching her attention most noticeably. On the page, without her moving the pen, a new line of handwriting formed—first gold, gleaming and glowing, then mellowing into the shimmery purple of the rest of the book's text.

You'll eventually stop asking if Dreamspace is real and start asking why it found you.

She chuckled, wiped her face with her sleeve, and looked back at the TV. The footage was fading now, the colors bleeding out, the boardwalk dissolving back into a blank screen. The last image was of her father's hand, large and sure, wrapped around her small one. It lingered a breath longer than the rest, then, too, it was gone. She inhaled with a shuddering, post-crying gasp as she tried to pull herself back together one breath at a time and get on with her day.

She gulped down the last dregs of her coffee at the kitchen sink before putting it on the counter, almost knocking it off, then ran upstairs to get dressed and pack her bag, fully focused on the task at hand—Notebook, pen, Sparkkeeper card—with no rhyme or reason, just tossed into the bag in haste, though the only appointment she had to meet was her sanity. She slung the backpack over her shoulder, bent down to kiss Spud's sleepy head, and told him she'd be back in a few hours.

The weather outside was beautiful—bright, warm, the kind of late-spring morning that practically begged you to be anywhere but indoors. Allison felt energized. She needed to move her body, desperately, because the walls of the house were too close, the air inside was too stuffy, her muscles felt like a spring that needed to be released, and if she spent one more minute inside with old ghosts and new, weird magic pens, she was going to lose it.

"Guard the house, potato; Don't let any magical raccoons in while I'm gone."

Spud yawned, stretched, and nestled his head further into his curled-up body, not even opening his eyes.

She wheeled her bike outside, locked the door, and took off down the driveway.

She turned left instead of right—not her usual route to the creek, not the familiar path to the grocery store. She felt the intense urge to do something completely different today. She headed up Seminary Ridge, where the roads were wider, traffic lighter, and the straightaways long enough to really open up and let her push. She needed speed. She needed the wind in her face and the burn in her legs.

The morning was warm and bright, and the battlefield stretched out around her in rolling green waves—fields and fences and monuments and the quiet, heavy stillness that always hung over this land. Allison had always felt it—the energy of the weight borne by such hallowed ground. Most people who lived in Gettysburg did, whether they admitted it or not. The landscape held things here. It held history, memory, and some energy vortex she'd never been able to name but had always felt.

Today, it felt louder.

She pedaled hard, legs pumping, breath steady. The wind pulled at her hair and dried the last of the tears. The smells surrounded her—the ones she knew, the ones that belonged here: moist earth, rich, dark, and alive. The deep, loamy scent of mushrooms and decaying leaves—the quiet rot that feeds new growth. Overall, threading through the canopy of oaks, cedars, birches, dogwoods, and redbuds, the green that smelled like every leaf, flower, and branch had opened and exhaled at once. She breathed it in. Deep. Filling her lungs with nature, with the real world, with the ground beneath her wheels.

But underneath it—tenacious and impossible to outrun—the scent of Rehoboth Beach followed her through every mile. It wove through the hills and forest, smelling like a melody played in a different key. Two worlds, two scent-scapes, layered over each other, and no matter how hard she pedaled or how deeply she breathed the battlefield air, she couldn't shake the beachy memory.

She turned onto the steep path that wound through Big Round Top, the trees thickening around her, the canopy closing overhead like a cathedral ceiling. The light shifted to dappled gold, falling in beams through the leaves and spotting another, less-traveled trail ahead in patches of warm brightness. The air cooled as the shade deepened, and the forest smell intensified—that intoxicating, almost overwhelming perfume of living and dying things, of new growth and old decay, of water and stone that existed in this part of the battlefield.

She could feel it, as she always had. As she rode down the other side, heading toward Little Round Top, somewhere just ahead through the trees, the energy pulsed with an intensity she'd never been able to explain to anyone who hadn't felt it. It was like standing in a room where someone had just been speaking—the words were gone, but the vibration lingered. Every time she rode through here, the hair on her arms stood up, and something in her chest tightened, as if her body was receiving a signal her brain couldn't decode.

Today, she decided to stop at the overlook, park her bike at the rack, walk to the top of the path, and look over the Valley of Death. The energy was screaming.

Her skin prickled. The scent of ozone sharpened. Her intuition, that quiet voice she'd spent a lifetime learning to ignore, was no longer quiet. It grew louder with every step, shouting something she couldn't make out. Something was calling her from the other side of a wall.

Once she got her fill of tourists, she went back to her bike, gripped the handlebars, hopped on, pulled it off the rack, turned onto the main road, and cycled on.

Meanwhile, deep in the backpack strapped to her shoulders, the Sparkkeeper card was waking up. It jostled with each bump her tires found on the trail. The gilded edges caught no light inside the dark bag, but they didn't need to. The card had its own.

Inside her bag, a soft, pulsing light began to shine. At first, it was barely there; then it grew more intense, like a visible heartbeat, rhythmic and patiently waiting for Allison to slow down and hear it.

Then something moved.

From the inked edge of the card's border came a flicker—a single spark, gold and shimmering, a tiny firefly, its lantern glowing so brightly as if someone had taken a piece of starlight and taught it to crawl. It emerged from the illustration—slowly, unsure, pulling itself free of the two-dimensional surface and into the three-dimensional dark of the bag. Its antennae swept the interior of the once-rough canvas, softened by use, the metal zipper pull, the notebook's spine, the warm brass of Allison's pen. It oriented itself and began to climb.

Drawn toward the thinnest sliver of daylight from a wrinkle in the bag's cinching, the firefly crawled up the satchel's inside wall. It squeezed through the gap and emerged into the blinding morning sun, perching on the edge of the flap, holding on for dear life against the wind.

The firefly turned to look at the back of Allison's head, her blonde hair whipping in the wind, strands of gold glinting in the sunlight, and the determined, slightly frantic rhythm of her pedaling. Then it turned to the scenery: trees rushing past, dappled light, the ancient battlefield rolling out in every direction. For a moment, it seemed to take it all in. To appreciate it.

And then it launched with a burst of golden light; it zipped into the open air, using the bike's momentum to quickly pick up speed, and began to orbit Allison as she pedaled—spiraling, dancing, leaving faint trails of shimmer in its wake like the ghost of a sparkler on the Fourth of July.

"Shoo," she muttered, batting at it without looking. So many gnats this morning.  She thought to herself. Late-spring Gettysburg was full of ‘em. The firefly dodged her hand with effortless grace, looped once around her head, and settled back into its orbit.

A chill bloomed at the base of her spine and spread upward, blossoming into a full-body shiver. She wasn’t at all cold. She felt watched. She was used to that. The battlefield and graveyard behind her house were full of ghosts. The feeling was nothing new, nor was the shiver. She glanced over her shoulder, checking for cars, other bikes, or walkers, and shrugged—just the dappled, quiet, empty trail behind her.

“Yep. Nothing. Just as I thought. Probably another mischievous Spirit. 

"Well, hello there. I'm just passing through. It's a beautiful day. Coming along for the ride?" She addressed whichever ghosts were listening, chuckling and shaking her head. "Come on then. Keep up."

But far behind her, just beyond her view, the atmosphere rippled, the leaves shimmied, and somewhere beyond a thinning veil between realms, a voice existed between thought and sound, between the waking world and the one just outside it. 

Allison thought she heard a voice say, in a sweet but excited voice that was becoming all too familiar: "She did it! The carnival! It's open!"