The Wyrms of &alon

It was like yesterday was playing out backwards right before my eyes.

Andalon sat in the front passenger seat, still wearing nothing but a nightgown. Her pale little toes dangled over the plate and silverware leftover from my breakfast that occasionally jostled around on the carpeting on the floor in front of her seat.

Our eyes met.

“Are… are you okay, Mr. Genneth?”

“No,” I said, answering her question without hesitation. I wasn’t in the mood for her to cry again, nor did I have the heart to endure it.

My grip on the steering wheel tightened. “I’m not okay.”

I tapped my lips together. My throat was bone dry all over again.

“My nervous system—which is telling me that I’m a corpse—is lagging behind itself, there are dead parrots on Seacrest Avenue, there’s something in my eyes, I fudged up what was supposed to be a big family night with my son’s school play, and… and now… ” Pausing, I tried to calm myself. “I think I just moved a car with my mind.” I exhaled, curling my fingertips around the wheel. “I don’t think I’ve ever been as palpably and inimitably not okay as I feel right now.”

“Well…” Andalon began, “I haves something to make you feel better,” she said. In an apparent show of sensitivity, she lowered her head and folded her hands in her lap.

I smiled sardonically. “Really?” I felt like I was about to cry. My smile immediately shriveled up and died.

Andalon nodded. “Andalon got you a thank-you!” Her arms shot up in excitement.

The corners of my lips, however, did not.

Mellowing, Andalon lowered her head

“I wanna say thank you,” she said. “Thank you for saving me from the scary place, and thank you for trying to protect me from the bad man, and… for telling me about Cat. So, yeah…” Looking me in the eyes, she smiled gently. “Thank you.”

Well, isn’t that great?

I sighed. Tightness screwed my shoulders close as I lowered my head and scowled at the road. My list of troubles might have been growing at a mile a minute, but now at least, I could cross “earn my hallucination’s forgiveness” off the list.

Tears pooled in the corners of my eyes. I probably should have pulled over and let myself weep. But then, I’d be late. So, instead, I grit my teeth, sniffled, inhaled, straightened my posture and asked Andalon the one question that burned inside me stronger than any of the others.

“I think I’ve earned myself a thorough explanation from you. Why have you appeared to me?” I asked. “And why do you keep doing it? Why do you suddenly disappear? Why was I being haunted by a psychic projection of Aicken Wognivitch?” My head shook. “Why is any of this happening to me?”

Andalon nodded determinedly. “When I went all fiery and woo,” she said, gesticulating around her head, “I remembered something.”

“…What?”

Bringing her hands up to her face, Andalon spread them out—fingers and all—and pushed them forward, pantomiming her light show from the night before.

“Woo,” she said, adding the sound-effect for emphasis.

Okay…

“So?” I asked.

“I ‘membered somethin,” she said it expressionlessly, as if the words were self-explanatory.

I wasn’t going to lie: I was genuinely curious to see what she had remembered.

It’s not like it will make anything worse, I thought.

I nearly chastised myself right then and there. My life as of late had begun to resemble a science-fiction action-thriller, and I was too genre-savvy (i.e. too much of a geek) to make the time-honored error of tempting fate by speaking the dreaded words “it can’t get any worse”. At least, I thought I was.

Andalon had stopped talking. It was like she was an android that had gone idle. I guess this meant I needed to prompt her. Or, perhaps, she was waiting for me to wrap up my internal monologue and stop ranting at myself.

“Well…?” I took another deep breath with my rotten bubble-gum lungs. “What did you remember?”

She looked off into the distance. “I…” She stared at the morning sun high above the bay. “For a long time,” she said, lowering her head, “for so long, so, so, so long, I’ve been all on my own, and it was so scary. But then, the more I thinked, the worse it get. Andalon dunno who Andalon is. Who is Andalon? Why is Andalon?” She shook her head. “Where am I s’posed to be?” She looked at me with quivering eyes. “It’s awful. Awful, awful, awful! I… I feel empty, and I don’t know how to fix it.” If it was even possible, her pale face somehow grew even paler still. “But… there was more. Something else. When you saved me from the scary place, it was there.

“What was there?”

She whimpered softly. “Something bad. Something… very, very bad.” Her blue eyes widened. “The darkness. That’s what it is. And it’s already here…”

She trembled.

At that moment, the rational and irrational parts of my brain clasped hands and kissed in the rain.

“The dark…—the darkness?” I stuttered. “Do you mean this disease? NFP-20? Or is it what’s happening to me?”

“I… I dunno.” She shrugged. “Maybe…?”

“Wonderful…” I huffed, oozing sarcasm.

I leaned back into my seat’s leather upholstery and rapped my fingers along the curve of the steering wheel.

“I know I used to know,” Andalon said, “but I forgot… and I forgot why I forgot.”

“That would be amnesia, then,” I said.

“Amwhatsia?”

“Amnesia,” I explained, “is a partial or total loss of memory. It can be caused by alcohol consumption, traumatic stress, a head injury, or being a character on a poorly written soap operas.”

Completely unrelated to anything else: Jerald Pressman’s The Soap Opera was one of the most uproariously funny comic operettas I’d ever had the pleasure of seeing. The tagline—You’ll laugh your pores clean!—was exactly on point.

Trivia like that made for an excellent distraction, something I sorely needed, even if I was driving.

As frustrated as I might have been with Andalon, and, whether or not she was even truly real, it was clear to me that, whatever she was, her trauma seemed real enough. Working off the supposition that the injuries I’d seen on her in my dream were real (whatever “real” meant in that context), it seemed safe to assume that the darkness Andalon spoke of was responsible for it. And that made me nervous.

Stories were like sonatas—the form, not the genre. That was part of what made sonata form such a powerful a structure for art music. Expositions in stories introduced the main characters, the setting, and the inciting incidents that set the plot in motion. Expositions in sonata form presented the main melodies of a piece—usually two, but sometimes more. Both stories and sonatas followed up their expositions with the development section. In music, this was a free fantasia: a creative elaboration on the main themes. In the story, this was the meat of the hero’s journey. In both, this was followed by a recapitulation. In stories, that was the point where the nature of ultimate conflict made itself clear to the audience. In music, this was a return to opening themes. In both, the subjects would be changed as a result of their journey. Then came the coda; the dénouement; the end.

The events of the past two days had shaken some of my foundational assumptions about reality, and, as such, I would be a fool if I dismissed her fears as beyond my concern. I had a sinking feeling that a great drama was set to unfold before me. And it looked like I wasn’t going to have a choice in the matter. That being the case, it seemed prudent for me to get on Andalon’s good side.

“You sure know a lot Mr. Genneth,” she said.

I nodded. “I’m a neuropsychiatrist—a mind doctor, that is. It’s my specialty.”

“What’s a mind doctor do?”

“Hmm…” I spent a moment thinking of how to answer the question in a way that she might understand, and eventually found one that satisfied me. “Thoughts and feelings are very complicated. They’re both part of our bodies, and yet also different from them. Sometimes, our bodies cause our thoughts or feelings to misbehave. We can’t feel happy; we don’t think straight; we start doing things that make no sense. I work to help fix those problems, and if I can’t make them go away, I try to make them less troublesome. And, as much as possible, I try to make people happy.

“Then… maybe you can help me?” Andalon asked. “I wanna be happy, and I wanna remember. Could you help me with that?”

I exhaled. “I guess I can try.”

“And,” she added, “can you help me with my quest, too?”

That piqued an eyebrow out of me. “Your quest?”

Jumping jackalopes, this is really happening.

Andalon’s eyes bugged out again. Her jaw went slack. She turned to me, excited yet afraid. “I just remembered,” she said, softly, “I remembered why I’m here.”

“Yes?”

She nodded. “The darkness… that’s why I’m here.” She pursed her lips. “I have a power. I can keep people from being destroyed. That’s why you saw that bad man last night. He was gonna get eated by the darkness, but… I saved him.”

“You saved him?”

She pointed at me. “I put him in you.”

A wonderfully unhelpful explanation, if there ever was one.

Lowering her gaze yet again—she had a real self-confidence deficit—Andalon swept her blue bangs across her forehead. “I’m sorry he was so mean,” she added, apologetically.

I nodded. “He was definitely ‘mean’.”

This really is going to be one heck of a day, isn’t it?

“But, if he was so mean,” I asked, “then why did you save him?

Andalon lifted her legs up onto the seat, pulled them close and tightly wrapped her arms around them. “If everyone goes away, I’ll never figure out why I am, or how to make the hole I feel inside me go away,” she said. “If everyone dies—”

—She shivered and twitched. Her expressions flew into a panic that she tried to stifle by covering her ears with her hands and shaking her head.

“No! That’s awful. Awful, awful, awful!” She shook it again and again, with more emphasis each time.

Her breathing got heavy as she slowly managed to calm herself back down again. Whatever it was had passed.

Then she looked me dead in the eyes. “I save people. I won’t let them be lost.”

Regardless of whether or not it was true, there was no doubting that she absolutely believed it was the truth. She spoke with that white-hot conviction that only a child can know.

“So, Mr. Genneth… will you help me?”

“I…”

My voice trailed off.

I took a moment to gather my thoughts, closing my eyes as my car zoomed through an Expressway offramp’s banking curve. I opened my eyes a split second before the wheels re-deployed as my car transitioned to wheeled travel on the city streets. But when I looked over to where Andalon sat, the seat was empty, and I was alone once again.