Foreverland Is Dead

that. He wanted to share it with others, for the good of mankind. So he conducted these… experiments . I was part of them.”
    “Sid, too?”
    He nodded. “But something happened, I don’t know what. Everything was as normal as possible. Sid and I reached a critical juncture in the process when the world collapsed. Just one second it was there, and the next…”
    Snap.
    “We were disembodied, lost in a soupy dream, the gray place the boys called the Nowhere. We were ghosts.” Mr. Williams looks at her. “It’s the place in your dream.”
    “I don’t dream, not like them.”
    “I see.”
    She curls the teacup against her chest. “What does any of this have to do with us?”
    “Patricia is Sid’s mother.”
    “The old woman?”
    “Yes. She ran a sister program, an experiment like Harold’s Foreverland.”
    “What kind of experiment? What were you trying to discover?”
    “It’s hard to explain.” He avoids looking at her. “Let’s say we were exploring expanded consciousness, living life outside the physical body. My wife, Barbara, volunteered to participate in Patricia’s experiment, which only allowed females.” He chuckles. “I was on a tropical island, and she was in this place.”
    “So you’re saying this place, right here and now, is like Foreverland?”
    “In a way. You see, the girls in Patricia’s program—”
    “The Fountain of Youth.”
    “Um, yes,” he stammers. “I believe that’s what they called it. How did you know?”
    “I saw it somewhere.” She sips her tea. “Go on.”
    “Okay. Whatever happened to Foreverland also affected Patricia, only she didn’t crash. She rebooted. Your experiment started over.”
    “Then where’s your wife?”
    “I don’t know.” He pauses with a grimace, although it looks forced. Fake . “Maybe they got out before it crashed.”
    “But why didn’t we get out?”
    “Look, Miranda, I don’t know everything, just where we are. I do know this, we don’t want to stay here.”
    She pulls her legs onto the chair, throws a blanket over her lap and sinks into the cushions. Mr. Williams sits back quietly.
    The music soothes the moment.
    “It’s not fair.” She holds the teacup with both hands below her chin. “Foreverland was nice.”
    “It was utopia, Miranda. Patricia’s world is an exact replication of reality. This place is exactly where my Barbara lived, all the way down to the pictures. I don’t know how Patricia did it. It’s almost like she absorbed the details of reality around her and created this alternate reality in her mind. Patricia made this world exactly like the physical one. There’s almost no difference.”
    She hides half her face behind the blanket. “I want to wake up.”
    “There’s no waking up.” His eyebrows shade his eyes. “She didn’t create this world to last, there’s only so much food, only so much time. The only way out is to escape.”
    “And then what? If we die, we wake up?”
    “In Patricia’s world, you start over, you wake up without memories.”
    “How do you know?”
    He sighs. “This isn’t the first time you’ve been through this.”
    The corners of his mouth turn down grimly.
    “We have to escape.”
    “A gate.” Miranda pulls the blanket down. “You told Cyn in the barn there was a gate.”
    “It’s like a doorway between reality and this world, the epicenter of Patricia’s mind.”
    “What does it look like?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe it’s another sundial. We’ll know when we get near it, feel reality begin to quiver. There are several square miles to search and the weather is getting worse. It should be in the middle, but I don’t even know where that is.”
    He rubs his face, yawning. His eyes are red. His cheeks hang like dead skin.
    “I’m old and tired, Miranda. Old and tired. I can’t take much more of this.”
    “We’ve got plenty of food, Mr. Williams. There are elk in the countryside, I’ve seen them. It’s not as bad—”
    “No!” He launches to his feet. Miranda sinks into the chair. “We can’t wait, this won’t last. And I won’t go into the Nowhere again, do you understand? I can’t do it, Miranda.”
    He points at her, his finger knobby and hooked.
    “We have to find the gate. And when we do, I have to be the first one out.”
    She pulls the blanket up higher.
    He downs the remaining tea, puts the cup on the table. He rubs his face, again. “I need some rest. Would you mind if I take one of the beds?”
    She nods,