"Hallowed Ground"

There aren’t too many of us left who remember that war. Cemeteries filled with dead men from across an ocean litter the ancestral land of my people, and most of the youth don’t know enough to remember what they’re for, or why those cemeteries have been allowed to stand so long with infidels’ crosses over the graves, carved of white limestone and marble. Those kids see the symbology of Christ as just that, a symbol of the enemy to be demolished.

The Colonel kept order, at least. He didn’t really like those cemeteries either, though he’d had the education to know their significance, he preserved their sanctity out of either fear of the great powers that had erected those gravestones or out of archaic respect for the fallen dead of so many years past. It doesn’t matter anymore, of course. I was already well into my life when he was born, I was already old when “Colonel” became synonymous with “King”, and I have outlived him in the end. Those who would replace the Colonel are not like him - they are barely above kids themselves. I should have known things would come to the point where they could not bear the sight of those stone crosses any longer.

It was only a few weeks after word was spread of the Colonel’s death when it finally happened. I made my way slowly to the cemetery just outside of town, just as I had for more years than most men were lucky to live. Each time, it seemed, my steps were a little shakier. My dear wife used to come with me, but she’s been gone four years now, and our children have long since left this poor little town to make their lives in the big city not far from here, on the coast. There’s no-one to help me make the trip, but I have to make it. It’s not something most people understand, and since my dear wife went to meet God, I have walked the third of a mile up to the cemetery alone.

I saw that the gate was smashed in when I rounded the last bend, and though it left me gasping for breath I hurried the last few hundred paces, and nearly died of horror when I looked in on the ruins inside the walls. The graves were desecrated, and despite my age I wanted for that moment to take up a blade or a rifle and kill every one of the culprits. Stone crosses lay smashed, and tire tracks showed the culprit - a small truck, like those so famously used by the men who killed the Colonel, had been rammed into some of the stones, and used to pull others down. Some showed signs of being smashed with hammers, others bore the marks of pickaxes. Many sported the bright splotches I knew were caused by gunfire. Only one cross-shaped marker stood defiant, un-toppled.

It was near the front, just to the left of the gate, and the nameplate, despite looking to have absorbed a full clip from an assault rifle, still legibly read “JAMES H. WOLTON”. The stone cross was scored with dozens of impact marks, including long horizontal ones that bore a distinct resemblance to the front profile of a truck bumper. But despite all that, the marker still stood, battered but defiant, where all of its compatriots had fallen. I staggered to it, and knelt down amidst the shattered pieces of rock, my knees resting only feet above the bones of the greatest man I have ever had the honor to meet.

Private Jim Wolton was an American. I know we all hate the Americans now and shout “death to America” at all the right times to please those who know better, but there was a time when some of us and some of them shared a battlefield, not as enemies, but as allies.

“Jim, I am sorry.” I whispered, in the same broken English he’d taught me all those years ago. “They’ve broken all your crosses. They don’t remember. They didn’t - ”

“They didn’t know what they did.” Jim seemed to say. Many times, when I came to his grave, I could almost see him sitting there, in dusty, worn tan fatigues and with a steel bowl helmet, leaning on the grave marker. I remembered his voice - it twanged oddly, even in English, and more so when he had spoken Arabic. “You let them forget, Zudi.”

I swallowed against a lump in my old throat. “No, Jim. I told the stories. You must believe me. I told three generations of young children what we did here. What we lost, and what we gained in the end.”

My mind’s eye view of my old comrade in arms chuckled drily. “But they did not hear, Zudi. You didn’t make the hear.” The vision tilted its head up to the noontime sun, which reflected off his sunburned, smooth cheeks. It seemed not that he was pronouncing a judgement, only stating the facts, facts that no longer could harm him any more.

A tear rolled from my eye and lost itself in my tangled gray beard. “I’m sorry, Jim. Forgive me.”

The vision did not reply at first, but I sensed that Jim would have forgiven me. He was never the sort to hold a grudge - in the months we’d fought together, I’d never seen him angry outside of combat, and then he was always more scared than angry. We all were, I suppose.

“What will they do?” I eventually asked the gravestone, and the vision of Jim sitting against it, meaning the Americans. “Will they come here to seek revenge for this?”

Jim shook his head sadly in my mind, and closed his eyes. “Like the youth here, they have forgotten, my friend. They have let the words at the gate become a lie. Do you remember them, Zudi?”

I nodded shakily. “I do, Jim.” How could I forget? The men who had erected the crosses and the wall had carved the words twice - once in English, then again translated to Arabic.

“We can not dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow, this ground: the brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have hallowed it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; while it can never forget what they did here.” My vision of Jim quoted, in a tone almost like the one I’d heard him use reading from the bible the chaplain often lent him. “Zudi, did they ever tell you where those words came from?”

I nodded. They had, sort of. “A place called... Gettysburg. The bloodiest battle in American history.” I didn’t know where Gettysburg was or when a battle had been fought there, the men who’d carved those words into the plaque by the gate hadn’t said.

“It’s too bad, Zudi. About the gravestones. Without them, how will people remember what we did?”

“I’m sorry, Jim.” I repeated. “I think... Perhaps the world has already forgotten. There aren’t many of us left who were there. I am the last I know of, and when I go to meet God, there will be no more. It will be like our war never happened.”

He looked at me, and offered a thin smile. “Zudi, people may forget. But God remembers.” He stood, and beckoned me to stand as well. Despite knowing that he was not there, that Jim was just an image in my mind, I complied creakily, my old joints protesting. “We cannot be harmed in humanity’s forgetting. Those who would be harmed are the forgetters.” He gestured out over the ruined stones, and I looked in that direction. At first, all I saw was wind eddies stirring what few hardy plants had grown up around the graves and survived the destruction, but as I looked, I saw a ghostly phantom of a man standing before the stump of each stone. Each phantom had an equally pallid rifle slung over his back, the same kind of rifle that we’d used to shoot at the soldiers in charcoal back in nineteen fourty-two, and in the right hand of each, hilt clasped to his breast and point down, was a sword, not curved in the local fashion but three and a half feet of rigidly straight steel with a wide crosspiece. I could not help but gasp at the sight of the ghostly platoon, armed for war but with faces at peace. Though I knew the men interred in the cemetery to be Americans, Australians, British, and French in life, in the ghosts I could find no trace of nationality - I suppose death washed such distinctions away.

“Zudi, you must not lose heart.” Jim insisted. “There is still much to be done.”

I nodded. “Are the armies of heaven preparing for the last war?” I asked, gesturing shakily to the other spirits.

“Zudi, the last war will come when it comes. We are ready, be it tomorrow or twenty more centuries away.” Jim smiled. “There may be many wars and rumors of war before judgement comes. We fought evil in our time, my friend, but evil was not limited to our time. It is almost as eternal as God himself.”

I nodded. “I know evil, Jim. I see it here.” I gestured to the devastated cemetery.

“This was not done by evil people, only by people led astray by evil.” He gestured to the smashed-in gate behind me. “Soon they will be back, you know. They will be back to destroy what’s left, and to scour the words from beside the gate.”

I nodded. “What would you have me do, Jim? I have grown too old to fight.”

He smiled cherubically, an expression that didn’t seem to conflict with his being dressed for war. “You have a weapon more powerful than any sword, any rifle, any bomb, Zudi. You have the story of our war, its lessons.” My vision of Jim seemed to fade, and with him all the other spirits. “The hosts of heaven watch, Zudi. make them proud.”

I sank back to my knees, and waited. The sun wheeled overhead, the day grew hot, and then it grew cool. The shadows of the ruined stones grew long. All this seemed to happen in moments, though I knew that hours were passing I did not feel them slip by. I prayed that my vision of Jim was right, that what I had was enough to save the last gravestone in the graveyard of heroes.

Dusk was already setting in when I heard the crunch of tires on the path, the slamming of rusty pickup truck doors, and the tromp of feet. I stood creakily and turned to face the half-dozen young men entering the place, all armed with construction equipment and guns of various sizes. One had a shovel, and I wondered if he aimed to dig up the bones of the dead.

“Elder Zudi!” The leader exclaimed, surprised to see me. “What are you doing in this place?”

I smiled, gesturing back at the stone marked with my friend’s name. ”Visiting an old friend from an old war.”

The leader scoffed. “An infidel’s grave.” The others nodded. I was only slightly offended at how little respect they seemed to have for me, but I decided not to bring it up.

“Perhaps.” I shrugged stiffly. “Or perhaps he was more. Perhaps all these men were servants of God in their own way. Would you like to hear their story?”

I was surprised to find out that Jim was right. They laid down their demolition equipment and listened to my story, the story of all of us who fought and those of us who died all those decades ago to defeat evil in our time.

"Hide and Seek" (Part 4 of ?)

Part 3 to this story posted previously (here)

The events of the previous evening far from his mind,  Mark pulled into the apartment complex’s lot around five forty-five. It was raining again, a slow, misty drizzle that wasn’t falling so much as permeating the air. He dashed into the building and took the elevator up, and only when the doors closed did he really remember what the previous night’s little road trip had wrought. Five hours, he remembered the book saying. Well, five hours starting then, he realized, was wide open - why not see what it was that Carrie had for him next? Given the weather, he certainly didn’t have any particular desire to go out again.

His apartment looked as it had when he’d left that morning, with Carrie’s notebook laying closed on the countertop. Mark locked the door, and after heating up a can of soup in the microwave, he turned to page seven.

First, Mark, turn on a TV or a radio and find a station with nothing but static. There’s nothing special about the static, but you’ll need the white noise. It doesn’t need to be particularly loud, just audible. Let it run for a minute or so, then you can go on to the next page.

White noise? Mark read the paragraph, the only one on the page, again to be sure. Not really seeing the harm in white noise, Mark flipped on his countertop radio, tuned it to a dead band, and dialed it up to a reasonable volume. The hissing sounded no different from any other static, but why should it? Even Carrie’s book had said there’s nothing special about it. Mark counted to sixty, then read the next page, the hissing sound already part of the background, beyond notice.

Now  turn out all the lights in your place and close the blinds. If  you’re getting white noise from a radio, I suggest a flashlight - you’re going to need to read the next page with the lights off.

Mark, still trying to figure out what this was for, nevertheless finished his soup, then set about doing what she asked, using his cell phone’s screen as a flashlight after all the lights were out and the blinds were closed against the evening’s damp gray light. Besides the shifting triangles of light that seeped between the still-shifting blinds at the window, everything else was swallowed in the sudden gloom. Holding his cellular light source close to Caroline’s little book, Mark turned to the next page.

Before he could read a word of it, though, a tiny noise behind him made Mark whirl on the stool chair, peering into the darkness beyond which the apartment’s bathroom lay. He saw nothing there, though - only shadows. The musings of the previous night’s drive came to mind - what, Mark supposed, if he wasn’t alone in his apartment? What if some mysterious, ghostly being had been the purpose of the bizarre antics Carrie had proscribed, and that entity was now invisibly lurking in the darkness?

Expecting that unsettling cold feeling Mark had known on and off all his life to come back, Mark stepped out of the chair and toward the bathroom, cell phone held ahead of his face to light the way. By the time he got to the bathroom doorway, though, the feeling had not struck him - perhaps the sound was just the building settling, or came from the apartment below?
    
Shaking his head, Mark went back to the counter and to Carrie’s book.
   
Mark, imagine that that static isn’t the radio, it’s something else. Something you remember from years ago.
    
The two sentences were alone at the top of the page, and below that Carrie had drawn a little curved arrow. Mark took the arrow to be an instruction to turn the page again, and did so.
    
 Don’t think, just imagine, and read. It’s not static, it’s the hiss of a fountain. After that, another “next page” arrow.
    
Mark stopped. A fountain? What was Carrie doing? He sat back on the stool. What could be the purpose of these pages? He wondered what these “instructions” were intended to accomplish.
   
Unless, Mark realized, Carrie was trying to lead him to something, something he already knew. But what was the point in that when the same goal would be achieved by simply reminding him?
    
With a sigh, Mark bent over the book and read the page again.
     
Don’t think, just imagine, and read. It’s not static, it’s the hiss of a fountain.
    
Mark turned the page, trying to picture a fountain.
    
The whole family is there on the lawn, in white plastic chairs and nice clothes. The grass is almost too green to be real, but you aren’t paying attention to it.
    
Flip. Mark’s mind pictured green, tended grass, chairs. A wedding? No. Mark had never been to an outdoor wedding. The only outdoor ceremony he’d been to was -
    
They gave you a seat in the front row, right between Mom and me, and everyone can see you crying but you can’t help it. You don’t want to be crying, why are you crying? You have to be strong.
    
Flip. Mark’s eyes burned with remembered tears as the memory played just as Carrie described it. His mind had caught hold of the scene.
     
The casket behind the man at the podium is closed. Mom hadn’t wanted to have an open casket, you know. She’s in the same state you are, but it’s expected that she cries.
    
Dad’s funeral, Mark thought vaguely as he flipped to the next page. It was a memory he didn’t like to recall, why was Carrie dredging it up? Their father had died when Mark was a teenager.
    
He could see the fountain now. It was the kind where the water spills down evenly over an artificial cataract, not the kind with water jets spraying into the air. That kind was too lively for a cemetery - the one they had was quiet, soothing. Peaceful. It was background noise for the solemn goings-on that surrounded it. Mark had forgotten the fountain until now.
    
Jack Lynch, Dad’s old friend, is speaking. You remember him from years ago, when he was fit and lively, but he’s pale and thin now, wasting away, but you can’t see him through the tears and your mind puts the old “Uncle Jack” in his place.
    
Mark might have wondered how Carrie knew all this, but he was beyond that now, fully caught up in a memory both painful and compelling.
    
You wouldn’t look at me, you didn’t want me to see your grief. You wanted to be the strong older brother you thought I needed. So you kept your face turned to the podium and concentrated on Jack’s retelling of some of his best memories of his buddy.
    
 Mom had been squeezing Mark’s hand so hard that he wondered if he’d have broken fingers lately, but at the time he hadn’t minded. His father was dead, and he would have gladly sacrificed all of his almost-fourteen-year-old fingers to have his old man back.
    
He wondered how Carrie was holding up, in that abstracted part of his mind where he could think clearly despite his emotional state. He couldn’t hear her, but Carrie had always been one to cry silently, not to weep openly, so there were not as many eyes on her.
    
That part of Mark’s mind was acutely aware of the eyes on him. He was the man of the house now, right? Sure, the twins were technically older, but they lived in different states. How could they look after Mom and Carrie from that distance? He felt their eyes on him head the most heavily, from their seats on the other side of Mom. And what was he doing? He was crying like an infant in front of over a hundred people.
     
Jack finishes. It looked like he was going to say more, but he choked up and surrendered the stage, and another man came up. You vaguely recognized him, but that’s all - maybe a man Dad worked with.
    
 Mark clenched his free hand to try to get control of himself, to try to stop crying. Everyone else here had the luxury of mourning openly, so why was he the only one who couldn’t help but do so when he was the one who needed to be strong? Was he the only person there (besides his mother, that was) that felt the need to weep as the realization that George Farner was dead set in?
    
Mark wished hard to stop crying. He wished that his father wasn’t dead. He even tried wishing he wasn’t there, at the funeral.
     
You did something then, you’ve never done before. You put all your mind and all your heart into something impossible, and with all the willpower you could muster, you pushed against the world.
     
Mark latched onto the wish that he wasn’t at the funeral. He bent his head down and clenched the fist that wasn’t being crushed by Lauren Farner’s grief-stricken grip, and he squeezed his eyes shut, and he tried to will himself away, to somewhere he could grieve for his father alone. To anywhere else. Anywhere but there, in that hard plastic chair on the lawn of a cemetery in May. He put all his mind into it, and then more he didn’t know he had, all of it into the same thing, imagining himself farther from the place he was.
     
I saw you do it, Mark. You did it. You pushed hard enough, in that moment, and you got through just a little. Mom didn’t notice, she couldn’t. But someone besides me did.
    
Mark opened his eyes, and the grass between his well-dressed knees was still there. Nothing had changed, despite all his best efforts he was still weeping his eyes out in front of his extended family and pretty much every family friend his parents had in a cemetery, twenty feet from the casket containing his father’s lifeless body.
    
He looked up, and the vaguely-familiar man at the podium was stepping down. Beyond him, Mark saw a girl of about his age who he did not recognize standing beside the casket, her hand resting on the side of the wooden box. Mark was stunned - who was this girl who had wandered into a private funeral? His first instinct was to be angry. Why was no-one doing anything about her?
    
She was dressed in black, and her head was turned toward the casket, bent low as if in mourning. She had an unruly mess of straight but mussed and tangled red hair, and she was built like Carrie - thin, giving the impression of frailty that Mark knew was only an illusion in Carrie’s case.
    
As Mark sat wondering why none of the grown-ups about had moved to guide the girl away and debating if he should say something, she turned to look in his direction, and their gazes locked. From where Mark was sitting, her eyes looked green - not the standard eye-color green, but a color so bright and vibrantly green that in comparison to it the lawn, itself far too green, looked pale and brown. He knew immediately that there was something not right about those eyes.

At first she didn’t believe you saw her, just as you couldn’t believe someone would let their kid just wander up to a stranger’s funeral and get right up to the casket. She had had fleeting moments several times before where she thought you might have glimpsed her, but this time she knew it.
     
The girl bowed her head and dashed around behind the bier, and still no-one went after her. By the time the next speaker got up to the podium, she had not come back out. She was probably still hiding there, Mark realized - maybe he’d been the only one to see her, but how was that possible, that is, unless everyone had been staring at him rather than at the podium or the casket?
    
Carrie nudged her brother in the ribs then, and he turned to look at her. He almost jumped out of his seat when he turned and saw her eyes lit up with the same vibrant green as the mystery girl’s -

But that must have been a trick of the light. No, he realized, with a settling feeling, they were their normal grayish color.

Carrie gave a wincing, reassuring smile, and patted Mark’s arm, saying without words that they’d get through this. Together.
    
The phone’s screen had gone out, and Mark didn’t know how long it had been out. He became immediately conscious of the static playing in the radio - no longer gently cascading water, it was merely static again. Mark’s cheeks were tight from drying tears, a sensation he hadn’t felt in a decade. He’d gone that long without thinking of that day for a reason - it was the most painful day of his life to date. At George Farner’s death, Mark’s childhood had ended abruptly, and at his funeral, the rest of Mark’s life had begun on a very undignified note.
    
Mark tapped his phone’s “power” button so the screen came back on, and re-read the page it was open to. Who was “she”? Presumably, the young girl with the intense green eyes and the red hair.
    
He set the phone down, screen-up, and as he did the shadow of something darted back from the counter at his side as the light spread. Mark scrambled to pick it back up and point it in that direction, but the phone’s pale illumination revealed nothing there.
    
Mark sighed shakily and mentally chalked his jumpiness up to the fact that he was just prodded into remembering with near-perfect clarity  some of the worst minutes of his life. Underneath that last paragraph, presumably about the green-eyed girl, there was another turn-the-page arrow, this time near the bottom of the page rather than right below the text.

He hesitated, though, before turning the page, wondering if the rest of Carrie’s steps would be as... powerful. Mark had always had a good memory of events, but for reading a few words to bring up old memories like that was without precedent.

With a shrug, he flipped the page, at least wanting to see what came next. He’d by this point lost count of the pages he’d gone through, and decided that it didn’t matter - Caroline hadn’t numbered them. 

While what you did then is fresh in your mind, do it again. I can’t really say more than that. Do it in front of a mirror, if one’s handy, and you’ll begin to see where all this is leading. You’ll know when you’ve succeeded, and then come back and turn the page. 

Mark read the short paragraph carefully. What he’d done, that must mean the wishing - Carrie’s text had focused on it specifically. But he hadn’t gone anywhere - the wishing had been an abject failure of a childish hope then, and there was precious little chance of that being any different now. Mark, after all, was a grown man now, and was hardly going to expect that sort of childish wishing to change reality.
    \
But it was in the instruction book, and Mark was still curious, if now a bit annoyed with Caroline for making him remember Dad’s funeral like that.
    
With a resigned sigh, Mark flipped on the overhead light and went into the bathroom, leaning his palms against the sink. His reflection in the mirror was a sorry sight, but that wasn’t what he was here to see. Why wishing oneself away would have a visible effect in a mirror Mark could not even guess, but he discovered a curious thing: he no longer felt the desire to question Carrie’s little book. Deciding that he had used up all his energy for questioning suffering through the recollection of his father’s funeral, Mark closed his eyes, dropped his head, and devoted every shred of his mind and will to wishing that he was not in his apartment, that he was somewhere else. Anywhere else. He held that in his mind for a long moment, but didn’t feel any different.
    
Opening his eyes, Mart saw nothing had changed - it hadn’t worked, whatever it was supposed to do. Nothing was different - he was still leaning on his bathroom sink, looking haggard, in his work shirt.
    
Mark gripped the edge of the counter and lowered his head in frustration. Carrie had been wrong. Whatever it was she wanted him to do, he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t just close his eyes and leave his drab, lonely apartment at will.
    
All of a sudden, Mark realized how much he very much he’d wanted this whole thing to be going somewhere. A part of him had, upon asking himself if the whole thing was ridiculous, hoped beyond hope that there was more to it than a joke, or the product of a crazy sibling gone off the meds. Carrie had for years been simultaneously Mark’s closest companion and the greatest enigma he knew, and this from the beginning had implied to him that completing the book’s instructions might teach something about Carrie herself. Something to prove what Mark had believed since childhood - that Carrie was not insane, or incomprehensible.
    
If the book’s instructions were nothing but memory prompts, tricks, and meaningless dictates, Mark realized, he could no longer believe that Carrie was sane. He could no longer defend her to his mother. He couldn’t even defend his sister’s sanity in his own mind.
    
Mark wanted very much to be somewhere else, if only to prove that there was something coherent in the head of his younger sister, the person who’d been his childhood companion and closest friend. He wanted to find the secret that proved Carrie sane, to himself if to no-one else. For a second time, he wished, put all his mind and heart into wishing, that he was anywhere else, or barring that, that he could see the world like Carrie saw it.
    
Something in Mark’s mind clicked, like a tumbler siding into place, but Mark didn’t feel any different after. The feeling, though, was alien and unmistakable. His heart leaped - had he done it?
    
When he opened his eyes, Mark was still standing in his bathroom, looking down into the sink. Deciding that he had imagined the feeling of something happening, Mark raised his eyes to his own reflection with a resigned sigh, and jumped back in shock.
    
In his reflected face, Mark’s usually clear, dark-brown irises glowed a neon green, impossibly bright. As he watched, the glow flickered and faded, and his eyes returned to normal. Not that Mark felt anything - without the mirror, he wouldn’t have noticed anything different.
    
Remembering what the book had said, Mark dutifully went back to the counter and flipped to the next page.
    
What you more than likely just saw is not a transformation of you or anything else, but a translation - a movement along an axis you cannot perceive. It probably only lasted a second or two before stopping - think of it as analogous to a step. You have to learn to take steps effortlessly before I can teach you to run or dance, so right now just concentrate on practice.
    
I’ll explain what the translation does later, but for now, trigger as many as you can. Each will become successively harder, but it’s like doing pushups, Mark - you can do more with practice. When you can see the title on this book’s cover, turn to the next page.
    
Vague as always, Mark mentally remarked about his sister’s instructions. Maybe he’d get his wish after all, to see the world the way Caroline did. The alternative, that Caroline had managed to unmoor Mark from sanity, briefly crossed his mind as he returned to the mirror, but he discarded the possibility.
    
Marking his page and closing the book, Mark examined the cover. It was soft false leather, with no brand name, and no title - probably a journal Carrie had gotten at a bookstore. Mark didn’t see any depressions where there’d be letters or words, but Carrie said that he’d be able to see a title with enough of the green-eye-flash trick. Not thinking about it too hard (he was certain that there would be no benefit in doing so), Mark returned to the mirror and attempted Carrie’s little exercise again.

   
Ten “translations” in, Mark was able to make his reflection’s eyes green without an emotion-soaked force of all his will, but it still took a good deal of effort and required him to close his eyes for several seconds. It was only then that he wondered fleetingly how one “un-translated” - but given that none of the supposed “movements on axes” had seemed to do anything, Mark tossed the thought aside, expecting it to be answered in a subsequent step in the book once he needed it.
    
 At number thirteen, he encountered the resistance first. It was strange, like something dragging his thoughts back from that thing so near a wish that triggered Carrie’s “translation” effect. But he beat it. Fourteen was harder still, but Mark managed - barely - to complete the trick - with about the same amount of effort as his first few translations had taken. At fifteen, he gripped the counter with white-knuckled hands, gritting his teeth and forcing his thoughts and emotional energy to go where he wanted them, struggling against inexplicable forces. Eventually, he yielded to the resisting force, and nearly collapsed in shock at the sensation of settling, at the impression that the air around him wavered slightly. He knew without the book telling him that failing the trick had put him all the way back to square one, and knew with a bit of mild satisfaction that that meant he knew how to reverse the trick in a pinch - by taking it as far as he could go and letting it “snap back”.
    
Two hours of on-and-off practice later, Mark, with increasing ease and decreasing discomfort at the alien green glow, turned in for the night. It was steadily getting easier both to “translate” (Carrie’s term for the bizarre glowing-eyes trick, which Mark had adopted), but each push still took several seconds, and his best count all night was seventeen - the second to last set.
    
 As he got into bed, Mark wondered what the little trick, Carrie’s “translation”, was really for. In itself, it was something novel, but maybe, just maybe, Mark hoped, it was a bit of what made Carrie who she was. A dozen conversations or more between pre-teen Carrie and Mark’s own teenaged self would have made a lot more sense in light of this development, he realized - but he failed to determine the logical conclusion of this context before he drifted off to sleep.

Mark’s alarm went off the next morning, and he grudgingly rolled out of bed to deactivate it. The previous night’s discovery seemed far off to his morning-hazed mind, replaced by the concerns of work. As he went through his routine, he even wondered if the whole bit had been a dream, if he would slowly come to remember that as sleep became a more remote prospect in his mind

As he left the apartment, though, that had not yet happened, so he determined that he had indeed learned a new trick from Carrie’s book. Still not satisfied, Mark went into the office bathroom as soon as he got to work to perform the “translation” trick. He half-expected it not to work, but work it did - Mark looked up to see the green glow he remembered lighting his irises, and did not leave the bathroom until it had faded.

After that, Mark coasted through the day as much as he was able, the book that still sat on his apartment countertop being foremost in his mind. Mark had spent all his early life trying to see the world like his little sister did, and had years ago given up hoping that one day he might learn how she worked. The book could only be her way of beginning to show him - why now, Mark wondered? What had changed? And Why had Carrie not elected to do this in person?

Despite not having enough information, Mark tried out, and discarded, several theories over the course of his day. His work suffered - the only thing he managed to get done was the monthly network security report - but not so much, he suspected, that his boss would be able to tell that something was up. Mark felt an irrational desire to keep Carrie’s book and its contents secret - he thought it was irrational, anyway. He knew that Carrie hadn’t told him in the book to keep anything secret, but that didn’t stop him from feeling reflexively that it should be.

 After seemingly the longest work-day in months, Mark was relieved to return home and again tackle the mystery in the notebook, remembering only belatedly to stop on the way to get something to eat. When you can see the title on this book’s cover, turn to the next page. Mark read again, as he distractedly ate his Chinese take-out. How many translations would it take to do that? He remembered doing fourteen successfully, but he hadn’t checked to see if that was enough - but he doubted it would be.

As soon as he was done disposing of the empty styrofoam cartons that had contained his meal, Mark returned to the bathroom mirror, and started doing more translations.

Story continues in part 5 (here).