Liminal Spaces and Missing Persons, part five

"Look, mister Davis..." Antoinette said gently, "You've been through a lot, so let me start with the obvious: there's more to our world than you knew. Magic works, if you know how to access it and how to control it. There are people who aren't, strictly speaking, human. And there are things outside our world, too: places like this --" She gestured around them, and then pointed back at the blank face of the granite boulder behind them. "--and monsters like that."

The rescued man swallowed. "Okay, I-- Okay. I mean, no, it's not okay, all right?" He looked around at them. "I need. I need to say some things. And I need you to tell me that they really happened." 

Antoinette nodded. "If that will help."

Adam nodded back. "I was out jogging. I tried to take a shortcut back home."

He waited, and Antoinette nodded. 

"The tunnel... just kept going. And then it was blocked, and there were stairs."

Antoinette nodded again. "We followed you. We found them, too."

"Something, some horrible bone snake, chased me down the last of the stairs and into that... place."

"It's dead now," Antoinette told him. "Destroyed."

"Thank God," Adam said, and then paused for a long moment with his eyes squeezed closed. "I closed the door behind me, tried to block it. Then I turned around, and I was in a place made of bones." 

"Covered in bones," Antoinette corrected gently, "but yes: it happened."

Sherri had come up beside Chris and started to lay a hand on his forearm; he leapt away, graceless in his surprise. "Relax," she said. "I only want to check your injuries."

"You were in some kind of force field, and that guy kind of spider-manned across the ceiling, and the other one over there... he was definitely a werewolf."

"Yes," Antoinette said simply.

"That's not possible," Adam Davis said, and abruptly sat down in the grass. "It's not possible. People would know. Something would get caught on video. It's the same reason we know that Bigfoot doesn't exist: everybody has a camera now. Somebody would have caught him."

Chris stepped back as Sherri stepped forward. "I'm fine," he said.

For a moment he thought she was going to try to force it. Then she settled back, looking frustrated. "Fine. Stay injured, then. Tell me if you change your mind." She turned away, and Chris turned his attention back to the man they'd just rescued. 

"You're not wrong," Antoinette said simply. "But you still saw everything that you think you saw."

"I-- Okay." Adam swallowed again, looked up at her as she knelt down beside him. "So how is it that everybody doesn't know about this? How do you keep a secret like that? Why do you keep a secret like that?"

Antoinette sighed. "The world as you know it -- Earth, the Mundus -- was created as a shelter for humanity. It's walled off from the Grey, and the things that dwell there -- and, as a result, from magic itself. Mostly. There are still a few passages that connect the Mundus to the Grey, and people like us -- Magi -- use those connections to... charge ourselves with magic, which we can then use inside the Mundus."

"Like filling up a battery?" Adam sounded dubious.

Antoinette nodded. "And people like them--" She gestured towards Chris and Thorin. "--find it extremely hard to use their abilities in the Mundus. They still have a sort of shadow of their natural abilities, but nothing like what they can do out here. So part of the reason that there aren't YouTube videos of people turning into wolves and things like that is that the world itself prevents that from being possible."

"Out here," Adam said quietly. "So we're... in the Grey? We're basically out in Fairyland?" He started laughing. "Oh God, I've died and gone to Fairyland." Gasp. "I always knew--" snort "--it would come--" guffaw "--to this." 

Antoinette patted his knee. "Don't worry. We'll get you back to the Mundus, back to your husband."

Adam Davis fell silent, studying her, suddenly suspicious. "But what about your secrets? I'm not supposed to know about any of this, am I?'

Chris dropped onto his haunches, listening. He wanted to see how Antoinette would handle this; it was something that mattered. 

But Antoinette didn't disappoint him. "You have a couple of choices," she said. "The Ministry can remove your memories of all this. You'd wake up remembering that you'd tripped and hit your head, and the police would report that they found you lying in a ditch or something. You'd probably have a day or two in a hospital to make sure you were okay, and then you'd be back with your husband, safe and sound and probably a lot less traumatized. Or... we could let you keep your memories, but lay a geas, a binding, on you so that you could never speak of them to anybody outside the Ministry. In that case the story is probably that you got abducted or assaulted, and the Ministry would offer therapy sessions to help you get past it."

Adam blinked several times in rapid succession. "Ah. Is... is there an option where I join this Ministry and learn to destroy things like... that?" 

Antoinette exchanged a glance with Sherri, then said. "It's a risk. If I test you, out here in the Grey, and you do have the ability... it'll make it harder if you decide to give up your memories and go back to your life. If you have the ability and decide to join us, then you won't be able to talk to your husband about why you're suddenly changing jobs, or what you're doing, or... a lot of things." She hesitated, the said: "I wouldn't know about that. I was born a mage, raised a mage, my whole family are magi. But this is what... this is what we're taught to explain to civilians who get caught up magical issues."

Adam Davis rose to his feet, walked in a circle around Antoinette, and then came over to look at Chris. 

"You're not going to eat me, right?" he asked. "Because even just standing there being completely human, you kind of look like you're going to eat me."

"Sorry," Chris answered automatically, and turned away. "No, I'm not going to eat you."

"Wait." Adam sounded suddenly hesitant. "You're not a, a mage, right? You're a werewolf who works for them. With them. Right?"

Chris nodded. He was uncomfortably aware of Thorin staring at the pair of them, drinking all this in. 

"Is that something I could do?" He heard Adam swallow. "Could you bite me and make me a werewolf too? If she tests me and I can't do magic, could I become a werewolf instead?"

"That isn't how it works," Chris said reluctantly. He liked the way Adam thought, though: the man was looking for a way to protect himself from the kind of thing that had nearly killed him. He was someone who wanted to fight back, and he was looking for the tools to do it. "I can't make you a wolf."

Adam glanced at Thorin, who immediately shook his head. 

"Damn it," he said, but without any real heat. He took a deep breath, then released it. He considered, and everyone else waited in silence. 

"Test me," he said, and turned back to Antoinette. "I can't... I can't just go back to my life, knowing this could happen again. And I can't stand the idea of going back not knowing."