Dean looked over smirking, scrunching his brow. “Are you high?” he said. Tarantulas, hawks, Gila monsters—was a horde of natural wonders enough to satisfy him? I turned to the window and rubbed my red eyes. “I just think the world must have been a whole lot more magical in ancient times.”
In Medieval Europe, common people suffered the black plague, Inquisition and poor sanitation. But they also believed in elves, luminous fairies and nymphs. I’d explored caves, soaked in springs, slipped inside the dank cavities of hollow trees, and I had never seen any of these creatures.
I imagined forest hovels, warlocks tending wood fires, concocting potions, casting spells. Roots, herbs, and berries. A broth filled with charms. Bats flapped overhead on the night of the full moon while knotted hands stirred iron caldrons.
Round about the cauldron go;
In the poison’d entrails throw.
I thought of the witches of Macbeth:
Double, double toil and trouble.
Fire burn, and caldron bubble.
I unrolled the window and hung my hand outside. Chilly wind battered my palm, sweeping the sweat aside. At seventy miles per hour, momentum resembled time speeding forward, hurtling us toward the smothering repetition of home. My dry eyes searched the sky for the moon but couldn’t find it.
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg, and owlet’s wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.
I set my head on the window sill and let the wind ruffle my hair. It seemed the world’s magic lessened with each year we aged. Childhood had been filled with it.
When I was nine, I woke up every Saturday morning to watch the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon. Based loosely on the role-playing game—which, at the time, had a harmful, occult reputation among parents—the cartoon series aired on a local TV station from 1983 to 1985. The premise was fascinating. During a casual day at the fair, a group of young friends got pulled from their rollercoaster ride into an alternate dimension: the “Realm of Dungeons and Dragons.” Without reason or warning, the rollercoaster broke free from its track, disintegrated, and hurled the kids into an alien land where a longhaired elfin man named the Dungeon Master assigned them each weapons suited to their talents and temperament. One was a Ranger who shot magic arrows; one a teen wizard who pulled items from a hat; the eight-year old barbarian had a club that produced shockwaves when it hit the ground. Like most kids, all they wanted to do was return home. As they searched for a way back, they stumbled from adventure to adventure, rescuing the unfortunate and battling the dimension’s many evil forces: swine-faced soldiers named Orcs, skeleton warriors, and a demon named Vengar. The show had true bottom-of-the-barrel geek appeal, and I ate it up, because beneath the mundane setting of these ordinary kids’ lives lurked an exciting ulterior world, a world where they had superpowers, a purpose, a chance to be heroes and no clue about any of it until a portal spirited them away.
In Episode 11, “The Box,” the mythological Greek character Pandora appeared in the altered form of Zandora. In Greek mythology, Pandora’s box—originally a jar—wasn’t a force of liberation, it was the source of the world’s troubles. Zeus gave Pandora the jar and instructed her to keep it shut. Since she had also been given the gift of curiosity, she inevitably opened it, and out rushed ills the world had not previously known: various evils, disease, burdensome labor. The story goes that Pandora hadn’t acted out of malice, only curiosity, and when she saw what she’d unleashed, she quickly closed it. Hope, apparently, also laid at the bottom of the jar. I felt the same way at age twenty while out in the woods. And watching Episode 11 as a kid, I knew that, had I found a box in a canyon, I would have opened it, too.
“Let’s not go back,” I told Dean. We could ditch everything, live in the van, get crappy jobs, sleep in National Forests, travel city to city, park to park, and be free.
“I agree,” he said. “I could do this forever.”
He steered the van between the straight yellow lines. I looked at my watch. We were well past the witching hour.
By the time we reached the town of Everett, the dark eastern sky was turning light blue. We wanted to see Possession Sound, that narrow stretch of water between the mainland and Whidbey Island. Instead, we watched the sun rise behind the Cascades from a window seat at McDonald’s.
Pink. Lilac. Shades of ghostly lupine.
Four sausage and egg breakfast sandwiches.
As enchanting a sight as sunrise was, I wanted nothing more than to find a place to curl up in the passenger seat. Dean assured me we would sleep soon, and drove us to a nearby convenience store. We looked disheveled. Mud splattered Dean’s hiking boots and socks, and the hole in the bottom of my black Converse All-Stars kept letting in tiny pebbles. Blearily, we pulled caffeinated sodas from the store cooler as a frantic woman in her mid-twenties begged the clerk to use his phone. “Please,” she said. “I don’t have any money.” The clerk refused.
When we found the women by the gas pumps, pacing in the yellow dawn, Dean asked if she needed help. She said she was trying to get home, then tailed us to our van and climbed into the passenger seat. “Hurry,” she said, “they’re following me.”
Her long brown hair twirled as she scanned the perimeter. I didn’t see anybody. A single car sat in the lot. It was probably the clerk’s.
Dean took the seat behind her and unfolded his pocket knife, in case she tried something.
She directed me down the street. “Go left.” I steered the van down a two-lane road. Her long nails dug into the arm rest, and I wondered how we’d ended up entangled in a stranger’s drama.
“Turn there,” she said. We veered into a residential neighborhood. White, manicured houses lined the green, narrow streets.
I studied our passenger sidelong. Trim waist, small nose, pink lips—had Dean and I seen her in a bar, we would have both wanted to talk to her. But in this frenzied state, she could have just robbed a store, fled the scene of an accident or had a pistol in her shirt.
Eyes bulging, she said, “They’re right behind us!”
I glanced in the rearview. There weren’t any headlights. Was she hallucinating?
Dean’s aunt was schizophrenic. She refused assistance, quit taking her medication, and lived on the Phoenix streets in and out of homeless shelters.
My stomach knotted from adrenaline.
“Hurry,” the woman said. “They’re right down that street.”
I looked out. The street was empty. Just rows of unlit houses, rose bushes and parked cars.
I tried to think up ways to get rid of her. Yet another part of me feared she might really need our help. Her behavior, as strange as it was unsettling, mixed with the adrenaline and sleep-deprivation, awoke something in me that all the weed and shrooms could not.
Dean tried to extract information, but the woman only screamed, “They’re catching up.”
No one knew Dean’s aunt’s exact location day-to-day. Sometimes she called the family house to berate Dean’s mother, claiming she’d hired people to kill her. Other times she called to rant about demons who were pursuing her. Demons—that was a recurring obsession. As we sped through Everett, Dean’s aunt was somewhere lost in Phoenix.
I repeated Dean’s question. “Who’s following you?”
“Some people,” the woman said in a loud, labored voice. “They’re jealous. They always are.” She looked around but wouldn’t make eye-contact. “Keep going straight.”
Dean