still here,” the girl said.
“I am,” Delbit responded. “I feel like an intruder, but I can’t get out any more than you can. The doctor said that you probably wouldn’t be aware that I was here, but obviously that’s not so.”
“What doctor?” the girl asked.
The great cube they were standing on rumbled and rolled over, pitching them onto the slippery blue surface below. There was a grinding sound, and a great maw opened beneath them.
“They’ve found us!” the girl screamed. “The Nimber!”
Blackness surrounded them as they fell into the void.
* * * * * * *
“Transcribe it as accurately as you can,” Dr. Faineworth said, tapping the desk with his forefingernail. “Every nuance, every gesture, every word may be important.”
“Yes, sir,” Delbit said. The doctor had provided him with a small desk, like a schoolboy’s, in a corner of his office, a supply of lined paper, and a pen and ink. For three days now, early every morning Delbit had been electrically attached to the mysterious girl’s sleeping mind, and had gone along as an uninvited guest into her dreams. It was the strangest experience of his young life: part of him lying on a hard leather couch, staring at the white ceiling, the greater part of him within the strange worlds of the girl’s unconscious mind. Then he had been disconnected from the apparatus and given breakfast. Then he had spent the rest of the morning and afternoon hand-printing out (because Dr. Faineworth couldn’t read his handwriting) every detail of the girl’s dreams.
The job was not to his liking. What could be more personal than a dream? Being in the girl’s dreams was bad enough physically—or mentally—or whatever the right word was. It certainly seemed physically real while he was there. And the dreams all ended in sheer terror, a terror that washed over him while it engulfed the girl.
But if it would help the girl get her memory back, it was worthwhile. And Delbit believed that Dr. Faineworth did want the girl to get her memory back. It was what the doctor planned to do after that that worried Delbit.
* * * * * * *
Down in the oppressive depths below the ruby palace of the Calla Host, in an ancient torture chamber whose walls were lined with instruments the use of which could only be dimly remembered but whose very appearance provoked terror, the Princess Whose Name Might Not Be Spoken awaited her fate.
Slender silver chains encircled her body, binding her to the central pillar, and silver wristlets held her arms above her head. Helpless and proud she waited.
Far away in one of the many ancient hewn-stone corridors that passed the chamber, she could hear the footsteps of the Archpriest of Loth, coming to wrest from her the dreadful secret of the Golden Orb. The sound, as steady as the dripping of water, relentlessly neared; now louder than the squeaking of the rats, now louder than the beating of her heart.
“I don’t think I like this one,” said the boy (the boy?), the boy who—who—who was tied beside her. The serving boy who had been her companion on many a better-fated adventure, and now must share her doom.
“Quiet, Vondar,” the princess whispered, “the Archpriest is blind. Do not aid him in finding us.”
“Delbit,” the boy said. “My name is Delbit. Let’s play another game; this one is scary.”
“Game?” the princess whispered. “I do not understand.”
“You know,” Delbit said, “you have an awful lot of nightmares. I’m surprised that you’re still willing to go to sleep.”
“Nightmares?”
“I’m going to try something, Exxa. I don’t know if it will work, but the doctor is going to start some kind of experimenting on you today, and I’ve got to do something.”
“What are you speaking of?” The stone walls of the ancient chamber receded in the distance. “And who is Exxa?”
“Let me take a chance,” the boy said. “We’re going somewhere else for a while.”
The room shifted again, and blackness closed in about them, until only the boy’s face remained in front of her. Then, slowly, the universe expanded outward once again and everything had changed.
They were walking down a country path, with a waist-high stone wall on one side and a fenced-in meadow on the other. The sun was high, and the air was still, and somewhere a frog was croaking.
“Where are we?” the girl demanded. “The Calla—”
”There are no Calla anything here,” Delbit told her. “And no Nimber, and nary a Golden Orb. This is where I grew up, before my father died, and nobody can hurt us here.”
“It’s very pretty,” the girl said, looking at the pastoral scene about her.
“Tell me about yourself,” Delbit said. “What you remember.”
“I am the princess of—”
”No, no,” Delbit said. “Your waking self. The girl without a name, that Dr. Faineworth is calling Exxa. You can do that without waking up. We will stay here, in this dream, in this pretty place, while you tell me about yourself.”
“Dream?” the girl considered.
“Tell me about yourself,” Delbit repeated.
The girl looked off into the meadow, and several cows stared back at her. “Yes,” she said, “of course. You’re the boy at that—hospital—where the doctor—Faineworth—wants to explore my dreams.”
“That’s right,” Delbit told her. “Tell me about that. What do you remember?”
The girl stared straight ahead. “I don’t remember much,” she said.
“Tell me what you can.”
“I was for a long time in a—I guess it was a hospital—another hospital—a big building in the middle of a great city—before I came here,” the girl said. “That’s the earliest thing I remember.”
“A long time?”
“Two years. A little more.”
“In a big city? New York?”
“Where is that?”
“Where you are now. But we’re pretty far uptown. Downtown, where you, ah, were found when you came back, that’s where the big buildings are.”
“Oh, yes. Big stone buildings. No, that’s not it. The city I was in was much larger. Buildings so tall they were lost in the mist. With more metal and glass. Very shiny.”
Delbit shook his head. “I don’t know any place like that.”
“Well, that’s where I was.”
“And before that?”
“I have no memory of any time before that.”
“Do you know your name?”
“At that hospital they called me Jane. Here they call me Exxa. Neither is my name. What it truly is, I cannot tell you.”
“Where is it that you go when you disappear?”
The girl shrugged. “I don’t know. A forest.”
“How do you do it?”
“I truly wish that I knew. I—twist something. Like turning sideways, but inside my head. And there I am.”
“And you come back the same way?”
“That is so.”
“Well, I should tell you that the doctor has it figured out, he thinks, and he’s going to start experimenting on you sometime soon.”
“He has what figured out?” the girl asked.