Chapter Twenty-One: The Church

We stood in an empty parking garage, the writer holding a notebook in one hand and a can of kerosene in another, Tulip in a white wedding dress, and me, holding a bouquet of flowers and trying not to sneak desperate glances at her, ashamed of the feelings that were stirring within me.

Would the ORACLE want this? Did she arrange it? She had been the most beautiful thing I had seen before this, but now...

My head hurt and I didn't know what was going on. The writer consulted his notebook again and then started pouring the kerosene in a circle around us.

"A burning ring of fire?" Tulip said. "That's the shortcut?"

"Almost," he said. "Give me the flowers." I did and he dipped them in kerosene as well. "Hold onto these," he said and gave them to Tulip. The bouquet included some of her namesake as well, until the writer lit a match and set them aflame.

"Whoa," Tulip said and nearly dropped them.

"Hold steady," the writer said and dropped the lit match on the ground where the kerosene circle was and a wall of flame erupted.

The wall of flame grew until it reached our faces and then shrunk downward and suddenly we were no longer in a parking garage. Instead, we were inside a church, huge and tall, but covered in ash and soot. The pews were burned out husks and the whole thing looked like it might collapse at any second.

"Where are we?" Tulip asked and I turned to look at her and gasped. The wedding dress she was wearing, pure white a second ago, was now as gray as the walls of the church, covered in the same soot and ash.

"Our Lady of the Immaculate Conflagration," the writer said. "And you are the substitute bride. The real bride isn't here at the moment, but she'll be back soon. We don't want her to catch us here, so don't let go of the burning bouquet, that's our way out."

Together, we walked down the aisle until we were a foot from the podium and the writer made another circle in kerosene. The flowers were almost burned to their tips now and Tulip was having a hard time holding them.

The writer allowed us to step into the circle and Tulip finally let go of the flowers as the fire burned them away and the circle of flames grew around us again and then died down and we were outside in a field of wheat.

"Where are we?" I asked.

"Near the center," he said. "Close to the turning point. Let's go."

We followed him, as we had followed him through fire, to unknown lands.

Chapter Twenty: Ceremony

I don't know how he got the wedding dress, but he did. We picked up the matches at a hardware store, as well as a can of kerosene. We went back to our hotel room, where we found the writer and a pristine white wedding dress, complete with veil.

"Put it on," he said to Tulip.

She raised an eyebrow.

"Please?" he said.

"Fine," she said and took the dress into the bathroom. The writer took out his notebook and started scribbling in it again.

"Do we really need to do this for a shortcut?" I asked.

"No," he said. "I can just write us there. But there needs to be a journey, steps taken. Otherwise it won't mean anything. Just words on a page. Besides, this is a place nobody's seen yet."

"What do you mean?"

"Never mind," he said and scribbled more. "I think she's ready."

She was. She stepped out of the bathroom in the white wedding dress and smiled and suddenly she was more beautiful than I realized. "Not the way I wanted to first wear one of these," she said. "But considering my life path before this, it's probably the last chance I'll have anyway. So, what's next?"

The writer stood up and said, "Parking garage."

We walked to the parking garage and I tried not to stare at her. I'm afraid I failed miserably.

Chapter Nineteen: Shortcut

"We're not moving fast enough," the writer said.

"How do you know?" I asked.

"I just do," he said. He looked tense and he had grown a full beard since he wasn't shaving. He squinted up at the evening sky. "We need to take a shortcut."

"There's a shortcut to the Wall?" I asked.

"There are shortcuts to everywhere," he said. "But I need some supplies. There's a ritual, a ceremony."

"What do you need?" I asked.

"Flowers," he said. "And a wedding dress, including a veil. And matches."

"Sounds like some crazy fun times I've had," Tulip said. "What do you need them for?"

"I told you," the writer said. "We're taking a shortcut."

Chapter Eighteen: Closer

"We're getting closer," the writer said. I didn't ask him how he knew.

Instead, I asked Tulip why she was traveling with us. "You don't even know where we're going," I said.

"Doesn't matter," she said. "I didn't know where I was going either. I was just...going." She refused to talk about what happened to her, only offering up information about "nobody," as she called it, and the other things that she has heard about. "It's better traveling in a group. I've heard of people targeted by something called the Cold Boy – he takes those that are alone, isolated."

This was the first I had heard of it and I had been isolated almost my entire life. I asked her about that and she said, "I don't know how it works. Maybe they are just picky about who they target. It doesn't really matter. From what I've heard, they all get you in the end."

"How many are there?"

"Lots," she said. "I came across someone who couldn't look in a mirror. Said a snake lady was just waiting in his reflection. And then there was the one who said his dead brother was after him. And another said they were being followed by a giant hound, black as pitch."

I sat back and thought about this. The ORACLE and the Ivory Woman were not the only otherworldly creatures out there. But they were different somehow from these things she was telling me – the stories she told me involved these creatures targeting a specific individual, driving them mad or simply killing them. While some ran, others decided to serve the creatures, saving their own lives by taking others.

The ORACLE was different, I knew. She didn't want me to serve her interests by killing. She had me find the writer so we could find the Wall.

But what was behind the Wall?

I put the question in the back of my mind and tried to listen again to Tulip's stories, tried to figure out some sort of logic, some reason in a unreasonable world.

Chapter Seventeen: Almost Dead

I almost died today. We were crossing a bridge when a car careened out of control. It swerved until it was pointed straight at me and I was frozen. I saw it coming and I couldn't move. I knew I should move, yet I was stock still, like a statue.

It was the writer who pulled me away, who pulled me down, scraping my hands on the hard bridge. And the car went off the side and down onto the road below us, making a horrific noise as it did, a crunching, crashing, breaking noise, a noise that still rings in my ears.

The Ivory Woman is not stopping. She wants me dead. She wants to stop us from reaching the Wall.

We ran from the scene – the writer and Tulip and I. We didn't want to talk to the police – we needed to create no ripples, as they say. No ripples in the pond.

I asked Tulip if she had heard of the Ivory Woman. "Sorry," she said. "I've heard of some weird shit, but nothing like that."

I wonder if anyone has?

Chapter Sixteen: Tulip

Her name was Tulip. We met her on the road to nowhere. At least, that's what the writer said it was and she didn't disagree. She said that it would have to have been the road to nowhere, since she was being chased by nobody.

I asked if that meant she wasn't being chased, but she said no. "I'm being chased by...myself. But it's not me. I mean, it looks like me and acts like me and everyone I knew thought it was me, even my own mother and father, but..." She stopped, as if she had said something that she hadn't wanted to, something that just slipped out. Her hair was a dark auburn, wavy at the ends, and her eyes were brown and she looked lovely. "When I had had enough, I finally confronted it. I asked what it was. It said it was nobody, like me. And I told it that I wasn't nobody." She turned away from me. "And it said, 'We'll see.'"

She didn't say much after that. The writer was busy scribbling things down in his notebook, which he had kept secret from me since the night at the motel.

Suddenly, he looked up. "Do you have a car?" he asked Tulip. "I think we're going to need a car."

And just like that, we were three.

Chapter Fifteen: The Third

"The third what?" I asked.

"The third man," he said. "Or probably woman, in this case, since we're both men. That's how it usually goes: two men and a woman. Or two women and a man. Or three women. I've never actually seen a story with three men - usually, in those cases, it's five people, three men and two women."

I stopped and finally said, "I have no idea what you are talking about."

"We're going to meet someone else," he said. "You didn't think it would just be you and me, did you? On a road trip to end the world? No, there's going to be a third. She'll show up soon and probably be in trouble. Or save us from trouble. One or the other."

"Why?" I asked.

"Three is a magic number," he said. "Lots of things come in threes. Three Wise Men, Three Billy Goats Gruff, Three Blind Mice. And it's lucky. Did you know that in Chinese, 'three' sounds like the word for 'alive,' whereas 'four' sounds like 'death'? So a story like this has to have a third."

"This isn't a story," I said.

"Of course it is," he said. "It's all a story. It's never going to stop being a story. And if you think you're outside the story, that just means there's a larger story around you, like a Russian nesting doll. That's why it won't work."

"What won't?" I asked.

"Breaking the Wall," he said. "She thinks breaking the Wall will bring her into the real world. But the 'real world' is also a story, so it won't work. She can't escape by using stories. It's just...impossible."

"So why are you doing this?" I asked.

He shrugged and said, "The show must go on."