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Printed from https://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1989235-The-Magic-Place
by beetle
Rated: 13+ · Short Story · Fantasy · #1989235
"Who did this?"
Week 4, April 27th-April 3rd Prompt #2: “Who did this?”
Word count: 1,000


Logan Dennings turned his face away from the Door of Light and leaned against the damp stone of the tunnel wall, sliding down it.

“Who did this?” he muttered to himself, his voice breaking as he wiped stray tears from his chilled and clammy cheeks. More immediately took their place and Logan cursed them. Cursed the dark tunnel he’d been lead to. Cursed the circumstances that’d brought him back to the brink of madness after so many years of forgetfulness. “Shit!”

He knew he had to go in . . . go through the Door of Light and back into The Magic Place . . . something he hadn’t done in twenty-five years. Back when he was a small child, at home with wonder, and had thought that The Magic Place was where he belonged. His magic world where nothing could ever harm him or anyone he loved.

On his eighth birthday he’d learned quite the opposite. On the eve of that fateful day he’d lost his Mumma and Appa, the only family he’d had, to The Magic Place, and had himself been stranded on the barren shores of real life for what he’d assumed would be forever.

And so he’d taught himself to forget, and proved himself an adept teacher and student both, in that endeavor.

The Magic Place had begun to seem like nothing but the demented dream concocted by a strange, lonely, traumatized boy whose only family had fetched up tragically missing—likely dead—with the boy himself found injured and raving in a gibberish language by the side of the road.

No one, not even Logan—after a few years in the real world had gone by with no word from Mumma or Appa—had believed The Magic Place was real. Logan’s mother and grandfather—surely as fabricated and fantastical as the place from which they’d supposedly come—had never been found.

Now, at thirty-three, Logan had thought to have buried his past. Buried his memories of his beloved Mumma and Appa, of the wondrous place they’d all come from, and the amazing things they’d been able to do. Indeed, his earliest memories had been buried under years of hard-won practicality and pragmatism.

Buried, until. . . .

Digging his wallet—the expensive leather one Jordan had gotten him two birthdays ago and the only one Logan ever used anymore—out of his back pocket, Logan flipped slowly, anxiously through the many photos of himself and Jordan, lingering at the ones that featured just Jordan. He especially lingered over the final photo, in the back. In it, Jordan was laughing, his head tipped back into a ray of bright sunlight, his dark eyes squinting half-shut with mirth.

Brushing his finger across that wide, gorgeous smile, Logan sighed before kissing the cool plastic protecting it.

I love you,” he whispered, then reluctantly closed the wallet and put it back in his pocket.

Wiping his eyes, angrily this time, he reminded himself again of why he’d come to this tunnel, and it certainly wasn’t to reminisce over good times had with Jordan, but to rescue him. To save him before The Magic Place swallowed him whole, like it had Mumma and Appa.

“Fuck,” Logan sighed, looking once more at the Door of Light—which seemed to pulse seductively, repulsively—at him in waves of swollen, gold-white radiance. He got carefully to his feet, grit and stones crunching unpleasantly under his running shoes as he turned to face the Door full-on.

He did not want to go.

But Jordan was in there. Taken by the same bastards who’d made Logan’s Mumma and Appa disappear all those years ago. And who knew what was being done to Jordan while Logan dithered and hesitated here? Who knew if he was being hurt, or . . . worse. . . .

“But why?” Logan asked himself aloud. His voice echoed hollowly in the drafty tunnel, one end of which opened on a rainy night in MacNeelly Park, the other of which—for now—opened on an entirely different world. “Why kidnap a short-order cook without a cent to his name and who’d never harmed anyone? Why? Why?”

And why, a quiet voice in his head prodded, take a woman and her father, yet leave her child wandering by the side of the road in a different world? Why do these things? What do my mother, my grandfather, and Jordan have in common?

Logan looked up at the stone ceiling of the tunnel as if for answers from a god he knew nothing about and didn’t believe in. He of course received none. At least not from above. No, Logan’s answer came from the sludgy depths of his own frightened, shell-shocked, but never dull mind:

Me!” he gasped in with sudden understanding, an almost literal light-bulb going on above his close-shorn head. That same breath came instantly gusting out of him, as if he’d been punched in the gut. “They have me in common. I’m the catalyst. And they’re . . . bait, aren’t they? Bait for a trap that’s been set to . . . catch me.” Shaking his head he stared hard into the Door of Light until his eyes began to water from its ever-waxing glow. “But why?”

Logan couldn’t even begin to imagine. Couldn’t fathom what they’d want with him now. What they’d ever wanted with him as a child, that they would take the people he loved from him once . . . then go to the trouble of doing so again twenty-five years later.

But Logan intended to find out.

For there was only one way to get his answers—one way to save Jordan . . . the way he hadn’t been able to save his poor, forgotten Mumma and Appa. Trap or not, Logan meant to follow where Jordan had been taken, and once there . . . oh, yes, once there, there would be a reckoning for all that had been stolen from him.

Grimly wiping his wet eyes once more, Logan Dennings walked through the Door of Light . . . and into The Magic Place.

End
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Printed from https://www.writing.com/main/view_item/item_id/1989235-The-Magic-Place