To celebrate the milestone, here's a sneak peek into the first chapter

In which I find myself on a fictional island where Mom is informed she doesn’t know her own name.

Chapter 1

Mom and I arrive at Glenhaeven as the sun is setting over the mainland, the boat-ride over having been mercifully calm. As we shed the bright yellow Gorton Fisherman’s slickers you have to wear to avoid getting soaked in the small motorboat, I look back at the coastline we’d left behind.

Wow. It’s been completely transformed by fog and the failing light into a dark shadow of itself. The sun’s backlighting has further dissolved its depth, turning it into a flat, two-dimensional cardboard cut-out, no more real than a set dressing far in the distance. Great. As if Glenhaeven needed any additional help feeling completely unreal.

Mom stops on the short dock next to me and stares up at at the mansion looming above us. To get to it, we’ll have to traverse a long, winding—and only slightly harrowing—path that leads up from the beach we’re on, then criss-crosses along the cliff faces that surround us. At its height, it meets the bluff at the top, where it turns and follows the ridgeline until it hits the mansion. At the point where it turns, however, the path is joined by the Gray Sisters, tall, eerie statues studded along the path’s length, their long distorted shadows lying heavily across the beach.

This isn’t the first time we’ve been here—but each time I see it, I am blown away by how impossibly real it all looks. I mean, yes, I do know that by most definitions it is real; it’s here, and we’re going to spend the next twelve weeks in it.

But, at the same time, it’s also entirely fictional, as it literally is the fictional estate from my father’s first novel, A View from Midnight. So technically, it shouldn’t even be here. What’s more, despite knowing it’s all only about four years old; my eyes and gut insist that this massive building with its accompanying statues have been here since… well, forever.

It just belongs here… way more than I do, that’s for sure.

Though to be totally honest, I am not sure where I belong these days.

Until last year, my life had just been me and my Mom, living in one crappy apartment after another. And I honestly never really thought that much about my Dad, or lack thereof. My life just was what it was, and he wasn’t in it.

What was in it was my perennially exhausted, single Mom, always working two jobs so we could have incredible luxuries like food and shelter while the rats we cohabited with tried to devour both of them.

And then we moved to New Haven, Connecticut and got to live in this adorable little apartment owned by Yale, where Mom is now a registered student. Even better, it is both clean and totally rat free, some­thing my brain can’t fully accept. Yeah, I’m still waking up pan­icked that I forgot to lock my file cabinet/book safe and all my precious books have been turned into towering piles of steaming rat turds.

Seriously, my little corner of New Haven, around the Yale campus, couldn’t possibly have been better named. For me, it’s heaven, with just enough hell to make me accept it truly could be my life. The hell, of course, is that while I’m living there, my boyfriend (Aaaah! Still not used to that word...) Peter isn’t.

“What are you thinking about?” Mom asks.

I startle at the question, pulled abruptly out of my head, the shock of reentry sending me stumb­ling. Fortunately, Mom grabs my arm, saving me from pitching backwards off the small dock. She doesn’t otherwise react to the near catastrophe however, which may seem harsh, but is truly for the best. See, if she did react every time I flinched away from some non-existent danger, only to throw myself squarely in front of a real one, her nerves would be utterly shot. Not to mention, one or the other of us would almost certainly be locked in a small room with bubble wrap glued to the walls for safety.

I realize she’s still watching me, waiting for an answer.

“Um, you know,” I tell her, eloquent as always. “Just listening to my contrapuntal voices doing their interweaving voice parts thing.”

She gives me a long look. “You do know that’s not…?”

I nod.

“Just checking.”

If you're as confused as I hope—no sorry, imagine—you are, then Yes! My job here is done.

Just kidding, I'm not quite that evil, though I do still have ambitions.

But back to the contrapuntal voices and all. See, as you may have gathered, I have this habit of wandering off in my head and getting lost in there. At some point Mom started calling it my fugue state, a term I’d never heard before, though there was no way I'd let her know that.

When I looked it up in Merriam Webster’s, it kindly defined a fugue as “a musical composition in which one or two themes are repeated or imitated by successively entering voices, and contra­puntally developed in a continuous interweaving of the voice parts.” Which of course clarified it completely… well, at least the successive voice parts as I do end up arguing with myself all the time.

Of course, I later learned this definition has absolutely nothing to do with the type of fugue she’d been talking about, which is something else entirely

“Gwen­dolyn!” a lilting, Irish voice calls out, turning my rather pedestrian Gwen into something mythic and exciting. We’re still on the dock, waiting for the guy who’d piloted the boat to finish tying it up, and I barely have a moment to turn before Ginger comes barreling into me. The world dissolves into a blur of vibrant red as her long, loose hair envelops me. She’s one of the first people I met when I originally came to the island looking for my dad, and she’s a true force of nature. Though only an inch or two taller than me, she picks me up in a bear hug that would do an anaconda proud, mixed metaphor and all.

“We are going to have so much fun,” she whispers conspiratorially, then puts me down before I can respond. Or pass out from lack of oxygen, for that matter.

She turns to Mom. “Yvette, it’s so great to see you again.”

Mom smiles, and grins sheepishly. “It’s good to see you too, Ginger. But it’s actually Karen.”

“Not while you’re here it’s not.”

Mom begins to protest, but Ginger puts a warning finger up. “We took a vote,” she says, grinning. “When you’re here, you’re Yvette.”

“Wait, who got to vote?” I ask.

“It was going to be just Romance, because, well Romance. But that didn’t go over so well, particularly with Mysteries. Then YA got upset, so Mr. Ink just opened it up to everyone.”

Mom looks kind of confused, much as I imagine you do.

“Remember, Mom, everyone here’s on a writing fellowship.” I remind her. “So people get kind of grouped together by the genre they write. And Mr. Ink is the one running the show.”

“Sorry,” Ginger says. “You get so used to it, you forget that to people coming in, you often sound like a lunatic.”

“That’s okay,” Mom replies, glancing at me meaningfully. “People sounding like lunatics is something I’m fairly used to.”

“Hey!”

“Anyway,” Ginger says, linking her arms with ours and leading us up towards Glenhaeven on its perch high above us. “It didn’t really matter in the end, as the final tally was Yvette 63 to 2.”

“Really?” Mom asks, and for a moment, I think she might actually be reddening in embarrass­ment, though it’s probably just the setting sun.

“You’ve got to admit,” Ginger says. “It makes a lot of sense. That’s how Bax knew you, so that’s who you are here.”

By the way, if you didn’t get it from context, Bax was my father, a nickname based on his last name… you know, the one I didn’t get to have.

“Wait,” Mom says, stopping in her tracks. “So everyone here knows…?”

Ginger nods. “It was all Mr. Ink’s fault, just so you know.”

Wow. Mom’s definitely blushing, something I don’t think I’ve ever seen her do.

“But don’t worry,” Ginger tells her, starting us up the path again. “You’re a complete celebrity.”

“Oh, that makes me feel so much better…”

“Honestly, everyone’s on your side.” Ginger says, squeezing Mom’s arm supportively. “It’s such a great story that Mr. Ink had half the room crying by the end. The man can barely write a simple declarative sentence, but get a whiskey in him and give him a story, and you can forget about going anywhere else anytime soon.

“And while I didn’t get to know Bax for all that long…” Ginger continues.

“I am so jealous you got to know him at all,” I say in the faintest of whispers. Still, apparently Ginger hears me, as she gives my arm its own squeeze as she continues.

“But the biggest lesson I learned from him, was to embrace whatever life throws at you, and somehow make it your own. That’s what he did as he was dying, and that’s what you’re going to do this summer. Right, Yvette?”

Mom doesn’t respond for a moment, then slowly nods. “Okay fine. Though I’m not doing the accent.”

“Oh, Maman, but you must,” I tell her in my own best, terrible French accent, “just a leetle…”

Mom looks at me and snorts, “In your dreams, kiddo.

I’m a bit winded when we finally reach the Gray Walkway, the statue-lined, crushed gravel path that follows the ridgeline to Glenhaeven’s grand entranceway. From here you can see the entirety of the building with nothing but sky behind it. And, I’ve got to tell you, it’s pretty much the definition of awe-inspiring.

Every time I see it, though, it always gives the strongest feeling of déjà vu, because it looks exactly like I expect it to. And yes, I do know that’s pretty much the definition of déjà vu, but this is different. See, we learned in French class that déjà vu translates as already seen, but this is really more like déjà lu (“already read”), because my familiarity isn’t merely a feeling, but is because Dad wrote his descriptions so vividly I feel like I could find my way around it blindfolded.

Also, whoever did the actual design and con­struc­tion of it all was an absolute, freaking genius, recreating it so faithfully that it feels like this place had to have inspired the book, instead of the other way around. And by the way, when I say genius, we’re talking real, E=mc² level genius. You know, the kind who dreamt up chocolate mousse, safety pins, and other utterly life changing invention

“I can’t wait to show you where you’re staying,” Ginger tells us as we stroll towards the main building, excitement evident in her voice.

“We’re not in the village this time?” Mom asks.

That’s where we stayed the last time we were here. It was just for a long weekend, but they put us up in one of the communal long-houses they have there, and it was really fun.

“Nope. You’re in the big house this time. In the Royal Suite.”

“When did Glenhaeven become a monarchy?” I ask, confused.

A deeper voice answers my question. “Still hasn’t. It’s more of a benevolent dictatorship.”

I look up and Mr. Ink is there in the open doorway, his wheelchair barely filling half the space the massive oaken double doors take up when closed.

“Uncle David!” I cry out, and hurry over to hug him. Although he’s not technically related to me, he really is the closest thing to an uncle I’ve ever had.

“I’m truly beginning to regret I’d ever said that,” he says, as I reach him. He’s in one of those low sports wheelchairs with the wheels angled out, so it’s a bit awkward bending down to hug him. And once I’m in the hug, I realized I probably should have crouched more first, as now I am completely off balance and cannot actually end the damned thing. Crap.

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Mom shake her head, and for a second I think she is commenting on my brilliant hug debacle.

“So says the Judas behind the whole Yvette thing.”

Oh, she’s still going on about Yvette.

He grins guiltily at her as I release the hug and put my right hand on the frame of the wheelchair to push myself up. His wheelchair, however, has other ideas. Instead of me pushing myself up, it rolls away, causing me to lose my balance even worse from the sudden lack of resistance, and I fall towards him, resulting now in hug #2, where even more of my weight is on him. Can I just die now? Please, anyone?

“Hi, again” he says, amused. Well, at least someone is. Well, him and the universe at large, of course, which always seems to get great amusement out of messing with me.

“I guess I should have set the brakes,” he says, even though we both know it was completely my fault. In any case, he rolls forwards to give me the leverage and resistance to get up, and I actually manage to do it this time. Will wonders never cease?

“I just mentioned the Yvette story once in passing,” he says to Mom, though behind him Ginger is shaking her head, contradicting him.

“Your definition of ‘in passing,’” she says, “and mine, do not share much in common.”

“Nonsense. I just told a quick, five minute version.”

“Try forty-five, at the very least.”

“Ten minutes, tops.”

“Remember how Tina kept pressing you for details? And Romantasy Greg kept insisting he wasn’t crying?”

“Lovely,” Mom says dryly.

“Well, in any case, the next thing I know,” Mr. Ink says. “I’m contending with a mob that’s looking like a cross between the women’s suffrage movement and the American Revolution, all demanding we vote on what your name should be while you’re here.”

Mom looks down at him and sighs. “So much for your benevolent dictatorship.”

“Shhhh!” Ginger says in an exaggerated whisper. “Don’t say that. It’s so cute when he thinks he’s still in charge.”

Mr. Ink raises one eyebrow.

Well, I’ll give him that. His “are you serious” single eyebrow raise is dead on.

“So, what is this royal suite, then?” Mom asks. “It sounds like a lot more than we probably need.”

“Don’t listen to her,” I tell Mr. Ink sincerely. “I am all for being treated royally. And ‘need’ is such a nebulous concept anyway.”

“Gwen,” Mom says, more seriously than I’d like. “They are already stretching the rules to let you and Peter stay here; we really don’t need any additional special treatment.”

At the reminder that my boyfriend Peter is coming, with the attendant knowledge that he’s going to stay for four whole weeks, the butterflies in my stomach decide its their day to shine and start doing aerial ballet in there. Yeah, thanks a lot, Mom.

“Oh, that ‘special treatment’ ship has sailed, Yvette,” Ginger tells Mom. “Once everyone heard who you were, there was no way we were going to let you guys stay anywhere except the Royal Suite. So, you might as well lean into it and enjoy it.”

“Benevolent dictatorship, is it?” Mom asks Mr. Ink again.

“Well, yes. Following the signing of the Magna Carta, I suppose.”

“Could have been worse,” Ginger adds cheerfully, which elicits a doubtful look from Mr. Ink. “Could have been following the French Revolution. But enough talk, let’s go show you your rooms.”

“Right you are,” Mr. Ink says, then turns his wheelchair and leads us off down a hallway that I don’t think I’ve gone down before, though of course it feels so natural and familiar, it’s hard to be sure. We follow him for another couple of minutes, then come around a corner only to see this fanciful looking spiral staircase apparently ripped straight out of a steampunk graphic novel. It’s got a bronze metal frame with that overly ornate Victorian-techno steampunk vibe, huge gears in its side-walls that spiral up alongside the steps. I really want to go up it, but I know we won’t as it’s kind of the definition of non-wheelchair friendly.

Or so I thought.

Mr. Ink has just passed it when he suddenly reverses direction and backs up to the first step. There is a loud ca-chunk, and I see something grab the wheelchair, then the gears are all in motion and he’s ascending smoothly before our eyes. Mom and I have stopped in awe, watching as the stairs flatten themselves out to become a ramp just before the wheelchair wheels would hit them, then flip back to stairs after he passes.

It sounds like a giant flip clock, you know those retro ones from the 1960’s or 70’s where the numbers are on little plastic cards and flip down as the time changes. But multiply that by about a hundred and ten or so, and you’ll get the picture.

“Well, come on,” he says, now at head height and still rising. It’s kind of daunting with the stairs flipping up and down just above our heads, but despite the constant whirring motion Ginger starts up the spiral stairs after him, and after a moment’s hesitation, we follow. It’s loud and disquieting, and is about the coolest thing ever.

We’re about two-thirds of the way up when Mr. Ink reaches the top and rolls off the other end, the staircase settling back to inactivity as quickly as it had come to life. For the remainder of our short trek, it lies quiet and complacent, pretending to be a normal spiral staircase, though I now know it’s merely lying in wait, ready to spring back into mechanical life at a moment’s notice.

I look at Mr. Ink, a huge smile on my face. “That was absolutely amazing!”

“I had a feeling you’d like that.” Mr. Ink says. “Bax sure did love his toys.”

“He wasn’t in a wheelchair, too, was he?” Mom asks. I suddenly realized I’d never even considered the possibility.

“Nope. He was fully wheel-free, though I’ll have you know, I never held it against him. Actually, he put that in just for me. Said he didn’t want to give me any excuse not to come up to the Aerie for a game of chess or to just shoot the breeze. I shudder to think what it cost him when he could have just added a small elevator, but I’ve got to admit, after I got over the sheer terror of the thing, it’s a lot more fun.”

“What’s the Aerie?”

“This is,” he says, sweeping his arm around.

The spiral staircase has led us up into the middle of a large, circular room, inlaid wood flaring out from the spiral staircase in its own spiral pattern, each whorl of the spiral ending in a large floor-to-ceiling window on one side, or a closed door on the other.

Now that I look more closely, the staircase isn’t quite centered, the side with the doors closer in than the one with the windows so the room appears to be more of an oval than a true circle.

I wasn’t sure how high up we’d come until I look out the windows and get a glimpse of the ocean, far, far, below us. All I can say is wow. It’s almost beyond stunning, and the windows must be on an overhang or something because all you can see is the beach and sky, as if you’re floating in mid-air without anything holding you up.

It’s incredibly cool, and only slightly terrifying. As I stare out at the waves crashing far below, I actually start to get a bit of vertigo. I step back from the view to give myself some space when my legs hit something and I start falling backwards.

Sigh. It would actually be really nice to go more than ten or fifteen minutes without colliding with, landing on, falling into, or tripping over something. You’d think this wouldn’t be too much to ask, but the universe always seems to have other plans.

Uncharacteristically for me, however, I’ve collided with probably the most convenient thing I possibly could have, and I fall directly onto the seat of one of the many chairs scattered about by the windows. It also turns out to be astonishingly comfortable.

“It kind of gets to you, doesn’t it?” Ginger asks, and for a second I think she’s talking about the chair. “It’s so beautiful, but there’s something about it that’s really overwhelming.”

Oh. She meant the view. Okay, that makes a LOT more sense.

“Yeah,” I agree. “Though it’s much more manageable sitting down.”

“Ah, so you intended to do that?” Mom asks innocently.

“Absolutely.”

She nods, clearly not believing me. Not that I expect her to, but hey, you’ve got to keep up appearances. Or at least the appearance of appearances if you get my meaning.

“If you find that it gets to be too much,” Mr. Ink tells us. “You can actually dim the windows. They have some kind of polar­izing thing I don’t truly understand, but there’s a remote around here somewhere that let’s you do it.” He looks around, then spots something that looked like an iPad with an angled base built into it. “Ah, here it is.”

He rolls over to it and picks it up, then touches the screen and the windows dim, the light in the room automatically brightening to compensate.

“Wow. That’s pretty cool.”

He smiles. “Bax and his toys.”

“And his mysteries,” Ginger adds.

“Right.” Mr. Ink says. “I had better move this along. We have a big welcome dinner in about an hour and a half that you both have to attend, and I still need to show you how to use your rooms, and introduce you to their mysteries.”

Mom and I look at each other.

How to use our rooms? Mom silently mouths at me.

Their mysteries? I silently reply in kind.

“So, who stays up here normally?” Mom asks as Mr. Ink leads us to the closest of the three doors.

“No one, not since Bax passed that is.”

“What a minute,” I say. “These were Bax’s rooms?”

Mr. Ink nods, and, out of the corner of my eye, I notice Mom doesn’t seem all that happy about the news. She’s trying to keep a smile on her face, but I know her well enough to see it’s become forced, so I reach over and give her hand a squeeze.

“It’s gonna be great, Mom. You’ll see,” I whisper to her.

She gives me an unconvinced smile as Mr. Ink rolls up to the first door. It’s beautifully carved with detailed flowering vines climbing upwards towards a huge crescent moon that looks like it’s gilded in real silver. Bracketing the door are a pair of matched, dramatically ornate Grandfather clocks, ticking away with quiet intensity. The one on the right has completely the wrong time, though, and I’m about to point it out when I notice that the entire clock face is backwards. Actually it’s not just the face, it’s the entire design, carvings and all.

It takes me a moment to do the mental gymnastics to read the mirrored clock, but I guess it’s right. If you happen to live in a mirrored dimension.

“This was Bax’s study,” Mr. Inks tells us. “Where he did the bulk of his writing. And if you’d care to do the honors, Gwen…” He waves towards the door.

“Okay,” I say somewhat doubtfully, sure that the mirrored clock means something I’m not quite catching. Still, I gamely walk up to the door, which has one of those lever handles with the lever extending to the right. As I press it down to open the door, I’m startled by a loud whirring coming from all around me. I jump back, and of course one of my feet lands on the left foot rest of Mr. Ink’s wheelchair, tilting him forwards, which in turn throws me backwards and sends me crashing into his lap.

He grabs me, and we somehow manage to stay upright just as the two grand­father clocks start chiming together. They’re now both showing twelve mid­night, the two clocks together creating a different harmonized tone for each of the twelve chimes. Mr. Ink grins at me as we wait for them to finish.

“Comfy?” he asks, as the chimes die away. I jerk upright, suddenly realizing I’ve been sitting on his lap the whole time. I can feel the sudden heat in my cheeks as I scramble off him, astonishingly without nearly capsizing the wheelchair.

Ginger looks over at us. “Are you both okay?”

I nod, my cheeks burning, and Mr. Ink gives her a thumbs up.

The clocks hold their twelve position for a long moment, then their hands start whirling madly around their respective faces—producing the same sound that had so startled me—before finally settling back into the current time. Or what passes for it on their respective faces.

“Good lord,” Mom says. “Is it going to do that every time we open the door?”

“Yes, and no,” Mr. Ink says. “Now, normally, I’d make you figure out the trick to it on your own. However, as Gwen is going to be sleeping in there, I’d rather not drive you both mad so, this one time, I’m willing to make an exception. Unless you don’t want me to, of course.”

“No, please tell us,” Mom says.

“I don’t know, Mom, it might be kinda fun to figure it out.”

She gives me The Look and I cave. If you don’t know what Look I’m talking about, then you’re living in a very different world than I am, and I’m frankly baffled how your parental units skipped the requisite training.

“I guess we want to be told,” I tell him.

“Are you sure?”

“Unequivocally,” Mom says, her tone as unequivocal as the word itself.

“Fair enough,” Mr. Ink says. “Any guesses?”

I look at Mom, but she shrugs, and I shake my head.

“Alright, then. If you press the lever down, you’re effectively turning it the right, as you just did, then you get midnight with all the whirring and all. However, if you lift the lever up, you’re instead turning it counter-clockwise, or as our Ginger would say…”

He looks at her and she blinks for a moment, then belatedly picks up on his cue.

“Oh, right. Anti-Clockwise…”

I suddenly get it. “Then no clocks!” I offer enthusiastically.

“Precisely.”

“Get it Mom? Clockwise and anti-clockwise?”

She nods indulgently. “But why?” she asks Mr. Ink.

“Mostly for the fun of it, I imagine. And as an homage to his first novel, A View from Mid­night, of course, as it was the genesis for all this. It will also make at least a little more sense once you go inside.”

Well, that sure clarified everything.

I tentatively push the now unlatched door open the rest of the way, and am met with a slight breeze wafting out, a hint of salt water carried along with it, neither of which do I typically associate with bedrooms or studies. Or any kind of room for that matter.

It’s pretty dim inside the room and I feel for a light switch without success. Aside from the dimness and the breeze—or probably because of them!—the room gives the feeling that I’ve stepped outside, though I know I haven’t.

I look back at Mr. Ink. “Um, I can’t find the light switch.”

“Give it a moment for your eyes to acclimatize.”

I shrug and turn back as Mom joins me in the doorway.

After a moment, the dimness acquires more details and I look up and see… stars.

And not just some stars; we’re talking the full monty of stars in all their glory, like you can only see out in the wilderness, or a mountain top, with no light pollution for miles.

Mr. Ink wheels up between us and whispers to me. “Say Glenhaeven, lights please.”

“And you must say the please,” he adds in a normal volume.

I turn back to the room and does as he’d directed. “Glenhaeven, lights please.”

Mom and I gasp at almost exactly the same moment, and Ginger laughs at our reaction.

“That never gets old,” she says, grinning.

You’re probably wondering what the heck is going on, as turning on lights by voice is hardly astonishing these days. Yeah, but these aren’t just any lights… they’re the Northern Lights, sheets of red, green and blue silently waving as they dance across the sky.

“I’m really going to stay in here… uh, out here? I don’t even know what to call this.”

“It’s the Midnight Room. And yes, if that’s okay with you.”

“Are you kidding me?! This is the absolute coolest room ever!”

Mom is staring speechless at the whole thing, shaking her head as if she’s not sure if Dad wasn’t a bit insane. Personally, I’m getting fairly convinced that he was, but in an absolutely amazing way.

“The story Bax always told,” Mr. Ink says. “Is that there’s a writing retreat up in Banff, Canada that he went to when he was writing A View from Midnight. Something about the place really spoke to him, so he stayed after the official retreat was done and rented a little cabin. And though it’s not that close to the Arctic Circle, in winter the nights are still about sixteen hours long, and he just fell in love with being out in nature and writing with the stars overhead. In fact, that’s what inspired the book’s title.”

“So he brought it back with him. Of course, he did,” Mom says in awed disbelief.

“Glenhaeven, fireflies, if you would.” Mr. Ink says.

“I thought you had to say please,” I say as half a dozen jars of what look like fireflies light up in a friendly yellow glow, revealing the rest of the room.

“Well, you really just have to be polite. It’s not very smart…”

“That’s putting it mildly,” Ginger adds, sounding somewhat peeved. “It has the dickens of a time understanding me, and I articulate far better than most of you Yanks.”

Mr. Ink smiles at her indulgently as he continues. “Well, assuming it understands your accent, then most common phrases of appreciation work.”

“Except ta, that is,” Ginger adds.

“I’m sorry, my dear, but no one says that on this side of the pond.”

“What’s it mean?” I ask.

“You don’t know ta?”

“I know ta-ta.”

Mom gives me a sharp look.

“No, not like that. Like ta-ta, see you later.”

She doesn’t seem entirely convinced, but lets it go.

“Ta is the same as your thanks, which we also say,” Ginger tells me. “Or cheers.”

“Cheers for thanks? I like that.”

“Ó diabhal” Ginger says, looking at her watch. “I didn’t realize how late it was, and I still need to prep for the welcome party.”

“You mentioned that before,” Mom says. “Please tell me you aren’t throwing a party just for us….”

While the others probably don’t pick up on it, I can hear the discomfort in her voice, and even in the thin, golden firefly light, I can see how her smile has become forced again.

“No, of course not,” Ginger tells her. “We have a bunch of new writing fellows that arrived this week and it’s for everyone.”

“Oh, that’s good.” Mom says, the tension in her smile loosening.

“You’re just the guest of honor.” Ginger adds.

And it’s back.

“Well, I’m off. I’ll see you in a couple of hours.”

She gives us a jaunty wave and vanishes down the spiral staircase. I watch it intently, waiting for it to burst into mechanical life and whisk her away, but it remains still and utterly staircase-like. Yeah, only here could a spiral staircase acting completely normal seem abnormal.

“Well, let’s get back to your bedroom while you’re here,” Mr. Ink tells me, and we turn back to the starlit room. “Voice recognition controls the fireflies, lights, and ambient sounds. Just start with Glenhaeven, say whatever it is that you wish to control, like lights or Northern Lights, followed by brighter or dimmer, higher or lower, on or off and then end it with please or thank you or if you would. For example, ‘Glenhaeven, Northern Lights off, please.’

At his words, the northern lights fade away. With their distraction gone, my eyes seem to acclimatize more and I notice there’s a large built-in desk on one side of the room located just under a small, um… flock of fireflies. The desk has a computer monitor, keyboard and mouse on it, and a very high-tech looking computer chair facing them. On the other side of the room is a love seat that’s been pulled-out into a fold-out bed, neatly made with a bunch of pillows on it and jars of fireflies where you’d normally have reading lamps. It all actually looks really cozy, and the pull-out look surprisingly comfy, though after having slept on my old futon-from-hell for so many years, most anything looks comfy to me in comparison.

I also notice the faint chirp of crickets, which I’m fairly sure weren’t there before. Real ones can be pretty awful if they get into your bedroom, as they’re almost impossible to find and they chirp at such irregular intervals you can never really tune them out. Still, I’m pretty sure these aren’t real, and they’re at a low enough volume to just add to the ambiance.

“Oh, you can also give it nearly any location in the world and it will display the correct sky at midnight for that location on today’s date. Or at least so Bax claimed. I never did bring in an astronomer to verify it, even though I threatened I would.”

“That’s just nuts,” Mom says.

“Yeah, right?” Mr. Ink says agreeably. “But pretty extraordinary, too, wouldn’t you say?”

Mom shakes her head, still in disbelief. “Frankly, I don’t know what to say.”

“What do you mean, nearly?” I ask. “Does it not have the poles or something?”

“No, they’re there. And the Southern Cross is pretty stunning, too. You should definitely check it out. No, so far, the only location we’ve found that doesn’t work is Las Vegas.”

“Maybe it’s your accent,” I say, joking.

“No, it’s not that it doesn’t understand. It wants some kind of password.”

“That’s really weird,” I say. “Why Las Vegas…?”

Out of the corner of my eye, I see Mom stiffen when I repeat Las Vegas.

“I have a theory,” he says, getting a strange expression on his face, “But we didn’t discover the block until after he passed, so it’s only an educated guess.”

“Is that’s this room’s mystery?” I ask, still trying to decipher both Mom’s reaction and his expression, though when I look back at Mr. Ink, his expression seems normal, so maybe I imagined it. Mom’s still looking uncomfortably stiff though, so something’s up.

“What? Is one mystery insufficient?” Mr. Ink asks.

“No, no… I just want to make sure when I solve it, I’ve solved the right one.”

Mr. Ink laughs. “I like your cockiness, and I look forward to learning your solution. Oh, by the way, Gwen. Feel free to use the computer if you want. Password is ‘Midnight,’ much to your surprise, I’m sure. Oh, but with the digit 1 instead of the i’s. There’s also an app on it called room control that lets you do the same controls as the voice, in case it has problems understanding you, though I think you’ll be fine.”

“Aye, I think I will, Laddie,” I say in what was intended to be an Irish accent but which came out at best half Scottish, half Serbo-Croation, and half Klingon, for all I know.

“Don’t do that around Ginger,” Mr. Ink warns. “Or she’ll put on her…” he draws a set of dramatic air quotes with his hands, “American accent in retaliation, and that’s something you really do not need to hear.”

“I don’t know, I think I might.”

“Okay, let me rephrase that. It’s something you really do not need to hear twice.”

Mom wanders over to the computer chair and rubs her hand along its back, her face unreadable.

“And he really wrote here?” she asks. “In the darkness, with the Northern Lights and all?”

Mr. Ink nods. “Right up until the end.”

“Hmmm. Whatever happened to what he was working on?” she asks.

“Well… we don’t know, actually,” Mr. Ink replies, looking slightly embarrassed.

“What?!” I ask, well, demand really, though I didn’t mean it to come out that stridently.

But I’m aghast; my father’s writings are all that I have left of him. They’re the only way he can still talk to me, and now they’ve gone and lost the very last thing he wrote?! I take a deep breath, then let it out and try again, more calmly… Or at least I hope it comes off that way. “Sorry. How can you not know?”

“Well, as executor of his estate, after he passed, I went into his computer to find it, and there was only a single file in his documents folder. I opened it and it had just four words in it, and—”

“Did you try looking for backups?” I interrupt, my attempt at calm failing spectacularly. “Or look in the cloud, or his trash or—”

“Gwen,” Mom says, in that special tone she uses to warn me I’m getting too intense. “I’m sure Mr. Ink knows what he’s doing.”

“But it’s the last writing Dad ever did! We can’t just give up on it. It can’t be gone just like he… I mean, it’s got to be somewhere, right?”

“Don’t worry, Gwen,” Mr. Ink says kindly before Mom can respond. “I feel exactly the same way. And we don’t think it actually is gone, we think it’s just hidden.”

“What do you mean hidden?”

“Well, that’s this room’s other mystery, now that I think of it. As you may have gathered by now, Bax loved games,” Mr. Ink says. “And I’m quite confident he didn’t accidentally delete the text he was working on, for two key reasons. First, the file was named…. well, I have to show you.”

He takes a small leather, pocket notebook from inside his suit jacket. The note­book has an elastic band holding it shut, with a leather pen pocket on the band’s front. We watch confused, as Mr. Ink extracts the pen then opens the notebook and flips to the first blank page. He starts to carefully draw something on it as Mom and I look at each other, the unspoken question of why he couldn’t just tell us the name, hanging in the air between us.

He silently hands me the notebook and Mom and I look down at it confused, as this is what he’d drawn:

Ꞁ̲(ツ)̲ʃ.docx

“That shrugging guy is a file name?” Mom asks.

“Strange, but true. It uses several odd fonts, and I don’t exactly know how he typed it, but yes, it’s all just letters and symbols, and is apparently a perfectly valid file name. Point Two, as I said earlier, the file with this name contained just four words. And they were carefully centered in the middle of the page in a very large, italicized font. All of which seems entirely deliberate and intentional.”

“But what were they?” I ask impatiently.

He smiles, looking back and forth between us, amusing himself by drawing out the anticipation. I’ve never quite worked out why teasing someone is so much fun when you’re the one doing it, and yet much less so when you’re on the receiving end.

He finally relents, intoning the four words gravely. “Use the fork, Luke.”

Really?

“What the fork?!”

Mom gives me a sharp glance.

“I said, fork, Mom.”

“Yeah, I heard what you said.” She turns to Mr. Ink. “So, what does it mean?”

“Haven’t the foggiest. But I know Bax. Knew Bax. From him, I know it means something.

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