Down the rabbit hole

There was no breeze, no wind, no moon. Nothing on the top of this hill moved. The Americans hadn't staked a flag in it, the English hadn't planted a non-native tree on it. It was bare grass and stones — nothing should flap even in a hurricane. And yet that shadow moved across the stones on the east side of the hill.

I rolled behind the sitting stone, like a punk Bruce Willis dodging bullets. I got a mouthful of sod, but I didn't break anything. I stared that motherfucking stone down. I glared at it, going full Clint Eastwood, until my vision blurred and the bluestone actually flashed blue. Blue light, like a TV screen glimpsed through a window from across the street.

“Fuck this,” I said, backing out of the circle. I called it a fairy circle like everybody else, but I never believed the spot was anything more than a bunch of stones some ancient guys had piled up and danced around, same as the village church was nothing more than a building full of people talking to imaginary bearded old men. Those stories were in my gray matter all the same, though, and everything from naked witch raves to human sacrifices grooved through my imagination. Thanks, but no thanks.

Just as I was about to step outside the circle and dash down the hill to the safety of my monastic cell, my mobile vibrated.

I stopped dead, blue lights and shadows forgotten. Tal.

Tal: Got a surprise for you, flyer.
Me: Thought you were offline or something.
Tal: Never. Wired in, 24/7. You want your surprise? 'Cause it's going going gone.
Me: You know it.

I waited for whatever it was — an image, a file, a link. After a few moments, the link popped up on my screen and I followed it.

I frowned, squinting at the tiny screen. What came up was a Google Earth image, zoomed in tight.

Tal: Know what this is?
Me: Looks like a Google Earth map or something.
Tal: It's you, rockstar. See those white dots?
Me: Yeah.
Tal: Look like stones to you?

They were only a few pixels, floating out of the dark screen like fireflies. But they were in a rough circle, the oblong bench stone dotting the center.

Tal: Sit down. On the bench.

Slowly, I moved back to the center of the circle. You play around on these things, looking up your address, your house, your ex-boyfriend's house, that house where the kid drew a big penis on his roof. You play, and you think you should be seeing things as they are right now, your neighbor's car parked crooked, your wheelie bin overturned. But you look closer, and you see differences. That shed you painted last summer is still dingy and old-looking. There's a car there, but it's the one that got wrecked in the “tree incident” two months ago.

But this time, I do see something. The blob in the middle of the pixel stone circle flickers as a shadow crawls across it, and I realize that shadow is me. I'm not going to stand out in the nighttime scene, what with all the black clothing – I'm more like a black hole, visible because of the light I hide.

“Holy shit!” I say to the screen, and then I type it.

Tal: Mad crazy, ain't it?
Me: This isn't Google Earth. It's real time. What'd you do, hack some MI6 sat?
Tal: MI6 doesn't have the funding for something this rad. Are you ready for the true mind-fuck?
Me: There's more?
Tal: This is just a map, kid. Maps just tell you where you're going – they're nothing without a destination.

Underneath the message, a red dot appeared over one of the standing stones. I oriented myself until I was facing the massive chunk. On my mobile screen, it was outlined in red. In real life, the light was fading up on the stone, that blue light that I'd seen flashing over the stones a few moments earlier. Now it was steady, like a TV that had settled on a channel, finally warming up.

The mobile dinged, and I glanced at it.

Tal: Doors are meant to be opened.

I didn't type anything. I didn't trust my fingers to find the tiny letters. The blue was coalescing on the stone, neon embedded in the ancient surface, glowing brighter in the spots where prehistoric delinquents — and more than a few modern ones — had etched drawings and shapes onto the surface. I'd stepped right in the middle of a Doctor Who episode.

I stood there, staring at the stone, the stone staring back at me. This hadn't happened through spells or incantations. This was tech — freaky, scream-your-silly-head-off tech, but tech all the same. Tal couldn't be in Antartica or Rio or Sydney. He had to be a local, maybe even somebody I'd met once or twice, passed in the Lidl. Otherwise he couldn't have known exactly where my hill was, couldn't have set this up. I'd be able to meet him, in all the gruesome flesh, maybe even tonight. I pictured what he'd look like — tall and dark, his hair too long, his T-shirt too big, his skin pale. My heart hammered with both the anticipation, and the fear. Bodies are real, and once you come into contact with them, your perception of the being within changes forever. I wasn't sure I wanted Tal's body.

I reached out to touch the screen. It had to be a screen, embedded in some kind of stage stone made from styrofoam, a pretender that would be obvious in the light of day. I waited for the slick warmth of plastic to slide through my fingertips, for icons to appear, for a virtual desktop to tell me what to do.

But the screen was rough, the grit scraping into my nails. Breathing short little gasps through my mouth, I shoved my mobile in my pocket and pressed both palms to the surface. It was cold, damp, and when I leaned into it I could smell the moss and dirt that had lived on it for longer than my grandparents' village had existed. Nothing save the blue light spilling over my hands belied the presentation of a giant stone.

It shifted, and I yelped. I jammed a fist to my mouth, embarrassed at my own girlish noise. A rectangle had opened in the stone, the azure outline of a door.

Doors are meant to be opened.

“Fuck me with a magic wand,” I whispered. I thought of the missionaries who came into the pub every summer, who told me it was okay that I didn't believe in God (lying, clearly), because he believed in me. Apparently the same went for magic, too.

I backed away from the doorway. Behind the stone, down the hill and under the mist, slept my grandparents, the pub, the village where my mom grew up. The village where she grew up and then ran away from as soon as she could legally buy the tickets to get the hell out. The village she'd told me about, that hangdog look in her eyes, all throughout my own childhood, until the accident. Until I'd been forced to move there myself, with the parents she'd missed but hadn't been willing to stay with.

If I stepped through that blue doorway, would I return? Would I disappear, like my mother had thirty years earlier, only to feel the sadness creep into me every time I thought of home? Or was I even now walking through a dream that would leave me broken and depressed on awakening and discovering I was right about magic after all?

I squeezed the mobile phone in my pocket. Tal had offered nothing more. He would not cajole me, would not beg me, would not turn into some educational TV movie about peer pressure. But he'd offered the door.

Doors aren't only meant to be opened. They're meant to provide passage. So I passed.

I passed through the doorway, into the blue stairwell spiraling down, so deep and so far it seemed to stretch beneath the world. And then it moved.

The steps spun downward, just slow enough not to send me flying down to break my neck. No way would this escalator ever pass any safety inspections in the UK. I thought I was going to hurl, crouching and gripping the riser beneath my feet like a surfer riding a drill to the core of the planet (talk about a shitty film — Michael Bay would probably take it on). The step was cold and rough on my fingers, though it made no sound as it scraped around the inside of the tunnel, which just seemed to be an extension of the standing stone above.

And then, as the escalator to hell slowed, I did hear something. I half-expected to hear the chink-chink of pickaxes on rock, and seven tiny voices whistling as they worked. Instead, I stumbled out of the stairwell to a rocking rush of steel on steel, forced air in a narrow space, and a posh electronic female reminding me to “mind the gap.”

A metro station. An underground rail, all the way here on Anglesey, where only the train to Holyhead passed overland, where public transportation consisted of the three buses that went back and forth from Holyhead, Beaumaris, and the RAF base to the mainland. A subway under a sheep pasture next to a village whose name had never been translated from Welsh to English.

Fuck me, indeed.

The doors on the train slid shut as I approached, and it slipped out of the station without me or anyone else. Emptiness filled the chamber, and I wandered through it, like a lone dancer in the middle of a strobing dance floor.

I'd never seen a station like this — if it really existed, it wouldn't last long. It did not resemble the stations I'd used in big cities around the world, which were often just ballooned openings along the arteries of the metro lines. Rather, it was a maze of screens, flickering and loading, flashing their advertisements, scrolling through texts, reeling through vids and clips. Walking through it, I found occasional cul-de-sacs that led to the tracks, openings just wide enough to permit the train doors to open and allow people on and off.

I reached out to a screen, and at my touch it blanked out. Text appeared under my fingers.

Come find me, flyer.

“Tal?” I whispered.

Another line merged into the first.

Come find you.

“Where are you? Are you here?”

A train slammed through the station, never slowing down, washing me with hot gusts of stale tunnel air. The confines of the screens only allowed me to see a moving picture of the train through the nearest access space, and I stared through the empty vehicle to the other side of the station, its seats empty, its cars containing nothing more than potential.

I stepped away, my eyes dropping to the screen, where Tal's words were fading. One last line had scrolled up as I watched the train, and I frowned.

Come find us.

And there he was, in the last car. Not empty, the car's potential fulfilled to the number of one. He flashed past, and I ran to the edge of the cramped platform. He receded into the tunnel, drawn away to a far off capillary I might never know the location of. But he saw me, caught my eye before the distance grew too great.

My mobile vibrated, and I jumped. I'd forgotten it there in my hand, and as it came to life it felt as though something were trying to eat through my flesh, straight to the bone. I glanced at the screen.

A new icon had appeared on my home screen, resembling the old road markers that still sat at crossroads around Wales. The tombstone shapes were generally carved with nothing but names and numbers, telling you what the next village was and how many miles away. The icon was tiny, the font even smaller, but I could just make out the place name: Færwhile. Distance: 0. I tapped it.

A map opened. Not the satellite map Tal had shown me, but a spartan map instantly recognizable to anyone who had ever ridden metropolitan rails. The only difference was the scarcity of stations: in this system, it seemed, the trains blasted round and round through tunnel after tunnel, with no stations to let anyone on or off, save this one and a terminus, where all lines converged.

Another train pulled into the station, this one drawing to a sighing stop.

When the next train stopped, I gave no thought to my grandparents as they slept in their bed above the ground and in the world. I crossed the gap and let the unseen conductor carry me further into the dark, following Tal. Following him to where I sit now, posting to a blog whose server is, for all I know, in another universe by now.

Come find us.