Well, Schroeder is having a rough day.

I thought I was going to have a heart attack when I first woke up after hitting the water and discovered him bobbing face-down beside me, surrounded by floating debris. He was completely limp when Simon and I dragged him onto the sofa. We pounded some water out of his chest until he came around enough to puke up the rest of it himself.

He passed out again shortly after that. We thought he was out of danger. But just now Simon waved me over and said, “I think he stopped breathing!” So we beat on him all over again.

We’ve laid Schroeder out on the other side of the couch for now. He’s still out cold, but alive. I can’t say I’m all that surprised. This is the same guy who once air-drop assassinated a Ford Focus by jumping off a second-story apartment balcony and ramming a street sign into its hood. Say what you will about the idiot, he’s stupid tough.

Okay. Simon and I have gone into a huddle. We’re trying to figure out what the hell is going on. We’re adrift in the middle of the ocean, surrounded by battered paintings and scraps of smashed furniture. Everywhere I look I see nothing but blue sky, blue water, and fluffy white clouds.

Simon is having a bit of a meltdown. His freak-outs are very calm, at least. Like right now he’s hugging his knees and mumbling, ‘oh my god, she tried to kill me.’ His voice is still hoarse after nearly being strangled. Even from here I can see the livid ring of bruises that his mother’s hands left on his throat. Poor guy.

I have no idea where the hell we are. Are we even still in Hinterland at this point?

Ugh, speaking of hands, mine are cold. It’s hard to write. Gimme a moment.

—

Okay, back.

Still soaking wet. But I’ve noticed that the air here is warm. It almost feels tropical. The water is cold though. I’m sitting with my knees pulled up to my chest and my feet pressed together, aching and shivering. Got this notebook braced against my knees as I write in it. It’s damp too.

Brrr. My fingers aren’t so stiff now. Let me explain what is going on.

First off, this was Simon’s idea. Not mine.

He’s reading over my shoulder as I write this and made a face at me just now.

But really, Simon. We’re stranded at sea with no clue how to get back home. Schroeder is unconscious and we’re all sporting bruises after the fight with your mother. Is this really the best time for me to write out a journal?

Huh?

He said I need to do it right away, before I – oh. In case we die out here. He wants to leave a record of what happened to us.

I wish I could just write this straight onto my cell. But my phone was in my backpack when we all fell from the portal into the ocean, so it’s not working very well at the moment. I tried to send Noelle a text with it earlier and it just typed a row of weepy emojis at me.

So here I am, hand-writing this in one of the spiral notebooks I bought for school like a chump. I had to lay it down in the sun for a while to let the paper dry out. Even this pen didn’t work at first. I was like, hey, look Simon, I can’t do your journal assignment because everything got dunked in the ocean, oh man, that’s too bad. Then he took my pen and gave it one of his sad Simon faces and said, ‘could you please help us, pen? Gondor requires your aid,’ and just like that the pen worked again. I might have paraphrased the Gondor thing.

I guess it’s up to me to explain what happened. How I survived the fateful two-story fall off a farmhouse roof that plunged me into the shadowy world of Hinterland. What happened when we confronted Simon’s mother in the cellar of her horrible mansion. And how the three of us ended up stranded on a sofa in the middle of an ocean that may not even exist?

Well, I’ve never written a journal before, so you’re going to have to bear with me. I’ll try to get everything down as best I can. Because wow. What a shitshow.

I guess I’ll get right to the moment when things got completely screwed up.

It went down a little like this…

—

The woman’s black coat swayed about her ankles as she bore down on me. I felt my bravado dwindle as I stared up into her expression of smiling malice. Oh my god. This couldn’t be happening. I was going to be kidnapped by my best friend’s mother. I was going to be kidnapped and spirited away to some horrible house where I would be enslaved as her servant. Also possibly murdered.

I backed into the wall. The woman reached for me with a gloved hand. Her sunglasses flashed, and for an instant I thought I saw the heavy-lidded eyes behind the pitch black lenses-

She paused. She sniffed.

“What the hell is that smell?” she said.

I sniffed too. We exchanged puzzled glances. Then I heard a soft ‘whomp’ noise and the side of her face lit up in red. Startled, we both looked over at the living room.

The floor was on fire. Tendrils of flame were already creeping up the drapes. With another quiet ‘whomp’ a houseplant was engulfed. Black smoke billowed into the hall.

I clapped a hand over my mouth in horror. Her cigarette!

“Oh, for god’s sake,” said the woman.

Then she roared and whirled around. Simon, from his headlock, had just chomped down on her wrist.

She drew back her fist, but by then I was already flying. I slammed into her waist and she staggered into the wall. All of the paintings rattled wildly and a mirror jumped its nail and crashed to the floor.

Simon grabbed me by the back of my shirt.

“Run!” he shouted.

Together we thundered down the hall. Smoke burst into streamers when we ran through a wall of it and stumbled gasping into the kitchen. A thick haze already filled the room. Over the refrigerator a smoke alarm wailed, barely audible over the din of snapping wood and drywall.

Simon tottered over to the sink. I collapsed against the fridge and threw my arms around it. It felt blissfully cool.

“So,” I panted, “that was your mother.”

“Yeah, that’s her,” said Simon.

“You neglected to mention that she’s a complete psychopath!”

“I honestly didn’t think it would ever come up.”

Flames crept across the ceiling, dripping sparks. I shoved off the fridge.

“We’ve gotta get out of here!” I said.

Simon stumbled past the table. “This way! The back door!”

“What about your mom?”

There was a crash from the living room. A blast of hot air exploded into the kitchen, blackening the walls with soot.

I yanked the front of my shirt over my nose. “You know what? Fuck your mom! Let’s get out of here!”

We ran into the back hall, which was still dark. Rain streaked across the window, glittering silver against the glass. Boy, did the rain look good all of a sudden.

I leapt for the door and wrenched it open. Something huge with shining eyes reared up from the night.

Its fist caught me slam-bang on the cheek. I swear I tasted blood as I flew backwards into the hall. Rubber boots went flying when I hit the floor.

The woman outside pointed down at me savagely. “Got you this time, you little b-”

Simon darted forward and slammed the door into her face. From the other side came a thud and a muffled howl.

I lurched upright, clutching my face.

“God, your mom hits hard,” I groaned.

Simon crouched beside me. “Are you all right?”

I shook off his hand and gingerly probed my nose. It felt like it had been smacked all the way to the other side of my face. I sniffed.

“Yeah,” I said. “How did she get to the back door so fast?!”

“She has her ways. Come on, we’ve got to hurry!”

“But-”

The door rattled. Simon seized my arm and yelled, “Go, go, go!”

Burning cinders fell from the kitchen ceiling when we stumbled back inside. The hallway was an arch of fire that framed the raging conflagration on the other side. The heat hit me like a fist, making me reel.

“Simon!” I screamed. “Are you insane?! We can’t go this way!”

The back door crashed open. Simon threw a fearful look back over his shoulder, then grabbed me and heaved me straight into the inferno.

The world turned orange. Brilliant sparks blazed across my path like comets, tossed upon waves of flame. It roared in my ears, a storm of fire that blasted over the sound of crackling debris. Against my skin the air felt like a blistering liquid that poured through my clothes and sucked at my lungs, burning everything it touched-

And then I fell out the fire and into red, sooty air. I staggered, my eyes streaming tears. I felt a hand shove me in a different direction. My shins hit something and I pitched forward.

“Up the stairs!” howled Simon. “Up the stairs!”

On all fours I pounded up the staircase. Hot ash burned under my hands but the worst of the heat fell behind me. The air was thick with smoke.

At the top of the landing I fell against the railing and sobbed for breath. My arms and chest were black with soot. Something down in the living room collapsed with a splintering crash, sending more smoke blasting up the stairs. I coughed and peered down them through wet eyes.

Simon’s mother was strolling up the staircase.

No joke. She walked casually up the stairs, as dark as a bat, as if there wasn’t a cherry-red inferno behind her. Holes like golden rings smouldered in her coat, the hem of which was on fire. Reflected flames danced across her sunglasses, while smoke twined around her ankles like ghostly eels.

I gripped the railing in both hands.

“Are you kidding me?!” I screamed at her.

Simon grabbed my collar and dragged me back. We bolted, banged into one another, and ran blindly into the first bedroom we saw.

Which was his. I slammed the door shut, threw my back against it, and yelled, “What is the deal with your crazy mom?!”

Simon leapt across the room.

“Grab the other end of this desk!” he said. “This will stop her! For maybe two minutes.”

“In two minutes we’re gonna burn to death!”

“Just do it!”

Already smoke was beginning to seep beneath the door. So I scrambled through the mess and grabbed the other side of the desk. It didn’t want to budge from the grooves it had worn into the carpet, but between the two of us we managed to jam it in front of the door.

Simon dashed to a window and thrust it open. His shirt billowed as the wind drove a smattering of rain inside.

“Follow me!” he said.

“You want to go out on the roof?”

“It’s okay! There should be a TV antenna on the side of the house we can climb down!”

It was unnerving. This show of resoluteness was so unlike Simon’s usual timid demeanour that it made me wonder just how many times he had escaped from deadly peril in the past. I snapped my mouth shut and followed him out the window.

Rain beat against my face. It felt good after the intense heat. The roof pitched steeply downwards, the shingles slick with dead leaves. I clambered out onto it shakily while the wind shrieked in my ears.

Simon stood further up the roof, already drenched. He waved. “This way!”

I clenched my teeth and climbed after him on my hands and knees. I could barely see a thing in the stormy darkness. Smoke poured out of a broken window below, lit up in red from the fire. It made me cough when the wind blew it over me.

I clawed over the peak of the roof and straddled it. Simon’s face hovered against the chimney below. So I swung both legs over and scooted down after him on my butt, my teeth grit tight.

Simon didn’t even look around when I skidded into his legs. He just stared rather stupidly at a satellite dish fixed to the side of the chimney.

“What now, genius?” I yelled.

“There’s no antenna. The tower is gone. The tower is gone!”

“I can see that! I’m asking what the hell we do now!”

Simon clutched his head and looked around wildly. A rumbling bang rocked us both as a pillar of smoke blasted out another window. Tongues of flame shot up the edge of the roof, as if the damn fire was trying to sniff us out.

The unreality of the scene seemed to have broken Simon’s brain.

“It’s a two-story drop to the driveway,” he said in a daze. “We’d be lucky just to break our legs if we jumped.”

I climbed to my feet and hugged the chimney. Over the wind I hollered, “What about the trees? Isn’t there a big one on this side of the house?”

“It’s too far away! If we missed it we’d get seriously hurt in the fall. The fall…”

He trailed off. I jumped when he whirled around to face me.

“I never thought it would come to this!” he said. “But better it be me than her, I guess. I’m so sorry!”

“What are you talking about?”

Looking sorrowful, Simon grasped both of my shoulders. I was so taken aback by this I stared at him.

“Uh, Simon?” I said.

He blinked back rain. It had plastered his hair to his scalp and now it ran down his face and throat like big weepy tears.

“Morgan,” he said. “I’m sorry, but this is very important! I need you to trust me, and to believe me when I say that I would never do anything to hurt you. I need you to believe me when I say that I know what I’m doing and that everything will work out in the end! Can you do that?”

“Holy shit, Simon, what is coming out of your mouth?”

“Please!” He shook me hard. “You have to take this seriously! Do you trust me?”

Flames burst over the eaves. I cringed as sparks and ash roared around us, borne upon scorching updrafts as the fire tore through the roof. I grabbed Simon by the collar of his shirt.

“Fine!” I screamed. “Yes, fine, I believe you! Get us out of here!”

Simon sagged in relief.

“Thank god,” he said. “Because now I need you to go limp.”

And the little monster pushed me backwards off the roof.

—

Whoa. Time out. Hand cramp.

—

Okay, back. Wow. Look at all this stuff I wrote! I don’t think I’ve ever written so much in my life. Man, my hand is sore.

Simon is asleep. All curled up on the other side of the sofa, hugging an end cushion. He looks wiped. No surprise there. He had a tough reunion with his mother. I mean, it was really bad. I wouldn’t wish that kind of thing on my own worst enemy. Which is probably his mother, come to think of it.

I think I’m in shock. I don’t feel upset or horrified. Just angry. At Mrs Miller, at this whole place. At everything. But I feel angry a lot these days, so even though we’re adrift at sea with no sign of land or rescue I don’t really feel very traumatized.

Meanwhile, Schroeder is still out of it. Hmm. Hang on a tick.

Ha! I just crawled over and drew a fabulous porn moustache on him. He didn’t so much as twitch. Stay classy, Schroeder!

Okay, serious moment here. I have to admit that I don’t get it. Why did being exposed to that red… thing in Miller’s cellar mess up Schroeder this badly? He’s been unconscious since her weird portal dumped us here. Doesn’t make much sense. I feel fine. Simon seems to be okay now as well. Mysterious.

Uh oh.

I have to pee. How is this gonna work.

Be back later.