We Made the Past Our Playground

I last saw my girlfriend around seventeen years ago. Although for me, it was last week.

I know that doesn’t make much sense. I’m not even sure why I’m writing this. It’s not like anybody will believe it. And even if they did, the truth would only make things worse. I just need to tell someone, anyone, even if that “someone” is the anonymous hive-mind of the internet. Maybe then I’ll be able to sleep again. Perhaps even start to move on with my life. I doubt it, though. I don’t think I can ever “move on” from the way I feel right now.

So, where to start? Well, you can call me Joe. Obviously, that isn’t my real name. But for the sake of this story, it’ll do. I’m seventeen years old, in high school. And as for my girlfriend’s name… let’s go with Dahlia. Yeah. She had an old-fashioned flower name.

Dahlia and I met around three months ago, when she transferred into my school. Her short, messy hair was dyed a bright blue. Sections were starting to fade to a peroxide greenish-blonde, and her dark roots were coming through. She wore very little makeup, and was always dressed in a black hoodie with the logo of some obscure band on it. Nobody else in our entire school – heck, our entire town – looked like her. I thought she was the coolest girl I had ever seen.

I never had the courage to talk to her. Just being around her spawned butterflies in my stomach, and if I thought about starting a conversation with her, they fluttered up into my throat. I’m not the most outgoing guy. I don’t have any close friends, and I’m not remotely popular at school. I’m the one hiding in the corner with my earbuds in, listening to emo music that came out before I was born and thinking “wow, these guys really get me”.

Dahlia was the one who made the first move. It was early September, a couple of weeks into the semester. I was sitting in the cafeteria, earbuds in, when she sat down opposite me. I saw the flash of her blue hair, and my face immediately flushed bright red. And I only burned brighter when I realised she was looking directly at me. Even worse, she was saying something.

I took my earbuds out, my nervous fingers dropping one into my lunch tray, and used every ounce of my courage to look up and meet her gaze. Her eyes were a pale grey, with black pinprick pupils. The eyes of a wolf. The eye contact felt like it was causing me physical damage, but I didn’t dare look away.

“Hey,” she said, smiling. She had a small gap between her front teeth. “Mind if I sit here?”

“No,” I blurted out, a little too loudly. “I mean, I don’t mind. It’s cool.”

“Cool,” she said, her smile widening. “We can be the unpopular kids table.”

It’s true that she was unpopular. Not in the same way that I was; I was just ignored. She was actively disliked, mostly by the girls. They said she was a psycho, that she’d been expelled from her last school because she’d smashed up all the windows with a baseball bat and then kneecapped one of the teachers. Her parents had divorced over it, and that’s why she and her dad had moved to this dead-end town. I didn’t know if any of that was true. I suspected the girls were just jealous because Dahlia was cooler than they were.

“So what were you listening to?” my crush asked, deftly filling the silence when I didn’t say anything. I flushed red again. She was into obscure stuff. She’d think my music taste was basic.

“Uh, MCR,” I stammered. “I mean, My Chemical Romance.”

“I know what MCR stands for, bro,” she said, with a smirk. “Black Parade?”

“Oh, uh, Bullets. Their first album.”

“Hmm.” Her eyebrows arched, and she squinted at me slightly, like she was trying to read a block of tiny text printed on my face. My heart pounded so loudly I was convinced she could hear it. After several long seconds of studying me, she leaned back in her seat.

“You’re Joe, right?” she asked. My eyes widened. Oh god.

“Yeah, that’s me,” I somehow managed. “And you’re, uh, Dahlia.”

“Like the flower,” she confirmed. “Old fashioned name, huh?”

I just nodded. I had no idea how to continue this exchange. At school, I only spoke when a teacher called on me. Even at home, I spent most of my time playing video games by myself in my room. This was already the longest conversation I’d had in days.

Dahlia was still staring at me. I kept staring back, but it felt like every second our eyes remained locked was building up a pressure and heat that would eventually cause my head to explode.

“You’re pretty nervous, huh,” she finally said, grinning. “Is it because I’m a psycho?”

That did it. I broke eye contact and stared down at the table. “No, of course not,” I replied quietly. “I don’t believe any of those rumours, anyway.”

“Well, maybe you should.” Under the table, I felt a soft impact against my shin. She’d kicked me. Only lightly, not enough to hurt. “Half of those rumours are true, you know.”

“Oh?” I swallowed loudly. “Which… which ones?”

She playfully kicked me again. “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

“Yeah,” I replied, and then, before I could catch myself, added, “I would like to know more about you, actually.”

“Hmm?” There was a question in the sound. Or perhaps confusion.

I froze, head bowed, like I was waiting for an executioner to lop it clean off my shoulders. And then, she seemed to make up her mind about something, and asked, “Well, what are you doing after school today?”

And that was how it started.

I won’t relay every moment of how our relationship went from cafeteria outcasts to romantic partners. It’s personal, and it would take too long, and honestly, it’s too painful for me to think about right now anyway. The short version is: I did meet her after school. We went for a long walk around town, and she told me about herself. She really had been expelled for breaking a bunch of windows, although she hadn’t broken a teacher’s leg. Her parents had divorced, but that had happened a long time before. She had moved here with her dad, but they weren’t very close, and mostly stayed out of each other’s way.

Within a couple of hours, my nervousness around her had all but vanished. She was easy to talk to, and she had this way of listening. She’d ask me a question and then grin, her eyebrows raised, as I replied. At first I thought she was going to make fun of me, and I internally flinched every time I answered one of her questions. But I soon realised that she was just genuinely eager to know more about me. She was hanging on my every word.

Why me? Who knows. I asked her that exact question several times over the next couple of months. She’d always just smile conspiratorially. “I have my reasons,” she’d say. When I’d start to point out that I was average and boring and skinny and nerdy she’d punch me lightly in the shoulder, and tell me not to put myself down. Maybe she saw something in me that nobody else does, myself included.

I guess I’ll never know.

So yeah, we started hanging out. We’d sit together at lunch, much to the amusement of the other students. I got bullied a little more because of my association with her, but that stopped when Dahlia noticed. “Anyone says a bad word to this boy, and I smash their fucking teeth in,” she announced pleasantly to the entire class, teacher included. She tanked the detention without a single complaint, and nobody bothered me again after that.

We’d spend time together in the evenings and on weekends. She didn’t want me to meet her dad, so she’d come over to my place. My mom hated her. Like everyone else, she’d heard about the window smashing rumours, and was convinced Dahlia was a bad influence on me. Dahlia’s dad was a thug too, she said. An alcoholic with a criminal record. Everyone in town knew about it. Like father, like daughter, she said.

I didn’t care. Dahlia quickly became my entire world. I had never given much thought to romance, and had certainly never had a girlfriend before. I’d never even tried. But she made everything so easy. She grabbed me by the wrist, and pulled me down avenues of experience I had never even imagined. And I willingly went with her, every step of the way.

We’d listen to music for hours. Talk about our lives. Our deepest thoughts and feelings. Things too personal to repeat here. My dad had died when I was a kid, and I’d never really spoken about it to anyone until she asked me about it, not even my mom. After a couple of weeks, she knew me more intimately than anyone else in the world.

She told me all about her trauma. Her… attempts. I didn’t care that much about her past. She had me now. She’d be okay.

As quickly as our emotional relationship deepened, so too did our physical relationship. Our first kiss was on the way back from seeing a movie, under the sepia glow of a streetlight. Honestly, it wasn’t very good. Our teeth clacked together loudly. But the second kiss, seconds later, was incredible. And so was every kiss that ever followed.

It was when my mom caught us in my bed one time, our clothes in a pile on the floor, that Dahlia was banned from my house. “I won’t have that happening under my roof,” Mom insisted, almost on the verge of tears. She’s a very dramatic person. “If you’re hell-bent on letting this good-for-nothing girl ruin your life, you can do it somewhere else.”

Somewhere else, she said.

And that’s how Dahlia and I ended up at the abandoned house on Somerville Street.

It was a nondescript two-story house with white wood cladding, right on the edge of town. It kinda looked like the house from the American Football album cover, with the second floor window in the middle of the gable that covered the porch, except the window on this house was diamond-shaped for some reason.

I knew that something bad had happened there a long time ago. I’d heard about it as a kid. A murder, or something. It had mostly been empty since then, since nobody wanted to buy it. Signs around the house implied that it was to be demolished at some point, but that never seemed to go anywhere. Ever since I could remember, it had just sat there, unused.

With both of our bedrooms being off-limits, Dahlia and I wanted to find somewhere we could be intimate. She suggested a lot of outlandish ideas: the school gym, the football field, the dairy aisle of the local supermarket. But when we rode our bikes out to the house on Somerville Street, her eyes lit up.

“This is our place,” she whispered. “I can just feel it.”

Despite being empty for a decade or two, the house wasn’t in bad condition. A little run down, with some graffiti tags spray-painted onto the walls, but still entirely intact. It didn’t stay that way for long.

Dahlia sauntered up to the house like she owned it, and started looking for a way in. Obviously, the doors were all locked. The windows, too. I was just about to give up and suggest we try somewhere else, when she suddenly had a rock clutched in her fist. Before I could stop her, she’d hurled it through one of the windows. The sound of breaking glass was deafening in the quiet neighbourhood. I froze in place, waiting for alarms to start blaring, hidden security cameras to swivel in our direction, concerned neighbours to come sprinting around the corner. I listened for distant police sirens, growing louder and closer.

But nobody came.

By the time I unfroze myself, my girlfriend was already halfway through the window, head-first. I could just see the soles of her Doc Martens as she wiggled through. I murmured something about broken glass and being careful.

On the other side, she turned to face me, her eyes lit up like a slot machine.

“Dude. Get in here.”

I’d never trespassed in my life, but there was no turning back now. Careful not to cut myself, I squeezed through the broken window. The second my feet touched the floor, Dahlia’s arms were wrapped around me.

“You’re insane,” I started, but then she kissed me, and whatever half-hearted admonishment I’d been about to give her was forgotten.

I was dimly aware of the interior of the house: amazingly, it was still furnished, although everything was covered in a thick layer of dust. Most of my attention was fixed on Dahlia, though. Her blue hair glowed in the low light of the house. As if she knew where she was going, she led me up the creaking stairs, to the bedroom. The bed was still there, beneath the diamond-shaped window.

An hour later, we lay in each other’s arms, wondering if we’d get sick from all the dust in the bed. We didn’t care if we did. Everything was different, now. We’d crossed over into a new world, together.

The fading light through the window shone a diamond spotlight on us. I remember feeling like we were the main characters of a teen love story, and this was our happy ending.

I wish, more than anything, that my story ended here. Before everything that came next.

Dahlia got dressed first and dug around in her pockets for her vape. She crossed over to the window. I had assumed it wouldn’t open, given its unusual shape, but she fumbled with it and it swung aside. A warm, late-summer breeze began to drift into the dusty room.

“Hey,” Dahlia said. The breeze toyed with her blue hair, and in the evening light she seemed to shine. The sight of her took my breath away. And so did her next words. “I think I love you, bro.”

I opened and closed my mouth a few times, trying to formulate a response, but she’d already turned away, and to my shock, she was climbing out of the window. The triangular gable was right beneath it and didn’t have an especially steep incline, so she probably wouldn’t fall, but it was still a steep drop if she did. And besides, what if someone saw us trespassing?

I jumped out of the bed and scrambled to put my own clothes on. By the time I looked back up, she had gone. I couldn’t see her through the open window. Did that mean she’d fallen? Was she hurt? Everything about today had been so perfect… surely it couldn’t end like this?

I rushed to the window and stuck my head through the frame to look for her, and that’s when I felt the strangest sensation. Like a wave of vertigo mixed with plunging my head into warm water. I gripped the frame to steady myself and blinked several times, unsure of what had happened. When I looked around, my eyes landed on Dahlia, crouched on the gently sloping tiles.

I breathed a sigh of relief, and then noticed the expression she was wearing. She looked confused, her face stuck somewhere between a smile and a question. “What’s wrong?” I asked her, but before she could answer, I saw it for myself.

It was broad daylight outside. Just seconds ago it had been sunset. Now the sun was high overhead, and so bright that Dahlia barely cast a shadow. We exchanged a stunned glance, and then I retracted my head back into the bedroom to get my bearings. There was that sensation of submersion again, and when I looked around, the room was bathed once more in dim orange light.

I could no longer see Dahlia through the window, even though she should have been right there. All I could see was the sunset sky. And then, to my amazement, one of her boots materialised from thin air, followed by the rest of her. She quite literally appeared out of nowhere as she climbed back through the window. I caught her in an embrace, and we stood there together for a long moment, breathing heavily.

“Joe,” she said, her voice muffled by my chest. “Is it just me, or is that window some kind of, like… portal?”

I’d been thinking the same thing. “It’s not… it’s not unlike a portal,” I carefully agreed.

She looked up at me, and I watched a wide grin slowly overwrite any apprehension on her face.

“Shall we check it out?” she suggested, but I knew it wasn’t a suggestion.

We stood beside each other at the open window. On the other side, we could see the town through the amber lens of evening. Cars crawled slowly up and down the streets, and people were taking their dogs on a final walk before it got dark. I checked the time on my phone. It was just after 7 pm.

“3… 2… 1!” Dahlia counted down, and we both stuck our heads through the window. That watery sensation once again, and then we were looking out at a town brightly lit by the midday sun. Somehow, it really was daytime on this side of the window.

“What the hell is this,” Dahlia whispered, but she didn’t sound scared. She was giddy with glee.

I swallowed. I couldn’t disagree that it was exciting, but it was terrifying, too. This wasn’t an illusion, it was real. Some kind of scientific phenomenon that we had no understanding of. Or maybe it was just magic.

I scanned my eyes up and down the streets, and noticed something else strange: all the cars had stopped. They were just parked in the middle of the road, as if abandoned. And I couldn’t see any of the pedestrians that I’d seen just a moment before either. In fact, I couldn’t see any activity at all. There wasn’t a single sign of life.

Dahlia had already climbed out onto the roof, and before I could stop her, she’d dropped down to the ground. The smart part of my brain was telling me to stop and think before I followed her, but as was often the case when she was around, I ignored it.

I landed awkwardly, sprawling onto my back in the grass beside the porch. A moment later, Dahlia dived on me. We lay together for a long moment, and then she planted a lingering kiss on my cheek and got to her feet. I did the same.

It was quiet. Very quiet, in fact. The only sound we could hear was the slight rustle of tree branches in the breeze. There were no distant voices or sounds of traffic being carried by the wind, no buzz of backyard lawnmowers or power tools. We couldn’t even hear the chirping of birds. This was a quiet part of an already quiet town, but it still felt unnaturally silent.

“Where is everybody?” I whispered. I didn’t even know why I was whispering. My voice just came out that way.

“I dunno,” Dahlia whispered back. “Let’s head downtown. See what’s going on.”

Our bikes had vanished. I wasn’t especially surprised by that. The window that Dahlia had smashed to enter the house was completely unbroken too. And maybe it’s just because I was looking at it in daylight, but it seemed like the house was cleaner. Less run down. Less graffiti. And hadn’t the grass been longer before? More overgrown?

As we walked towards the centre of town, hand-in-hand, my unease only grew.

We didn’t see a single other person, hear a single sound of an animal or even an insect. The sun was high overhead, but it wasn’t especially warm. There was a chill in the air that hadn’t been there before. We passed several cars just parked in the middle of the road: doors closed, engines off, nobody inside them.

We didn’t talk much. I think we were both on guard, in case something happened. In case we saw someone, heard something. I’m not sure what I was expecting. A distant scream. The silhouette of someone watching us from a window. But there was nothing. It was just silent, and still. It felt like walking through a film set, the houses on either side of us facades with nothing inside them, the cool sun above us a stagelight that made everything a little too bright, that stopped the shadows from even forming at our feet. A set that had been cleared of all personnel so the action could begin. But what kind of scene were we blindly walking into?

It wasn’t until we reached downtown that we realised the full extent of it.

It was one thing for residential streets to be empty. But seeing every shop, every cafe, every park and public place utterly empty gave me a feeling of awful foreboding. It’s like everybody else knew something that we didn’t. My mind cycled through the possibilities. A tornado warning. A devastating new virus. A government-mandated purge. Nuclear war. Alien abduction. The Rapture.

“Dude.” Dahlia let go of my hand. “What the fuck.”

I snapped out of my doom-spiral daydreams and followed her gaze. She was looking into the window of a store. It was full of red balloons, in the shape of cartoon hearts. A gaudy banner above them read “MAKE VALENTINE’S DAY 2007 THE START OF SOMETHING THAT LASTS FOREVER.”

We looked at each other. “2007,” I repeated. “That’s the year I was born.”

“Yeah.” Dahlia shrugged, and started to head inside the store. It was open. Or at least, the door was unlocked. Unable to think of anything else to do, I followed her. I told myself that the banner was a simple misprint, that they’d just typed the wrong year, but…

It was still September. Why would a shop even be advertising Valentine’s Day stuff?

There was nobody inside, of course. None of the lights were on, either. Dahlia grabbed a box of chocolate from the shelf and tore it open without a second’s hesitation. I started to protest, but before I could form any words, a chocolate heart was being pushed between my lips. Despite the ambient anxiety I’d felt ever since we went through the diamond-shaped window, I smiled and bit into it.

The bitter taste of ash filled my mouth. Dahlia’s eyes widened as I spat it onto the floor.

“Hey!” she protested. “That’s no way to treat my first-ever Valentine’s gift to you.”

“Try one for yourself,” I suggested, and immediately regretted it. What if it was poisoned? Contaminated somehow? Maybe by the same thing responsible for the entire town’s disappearance? But before I could voice any of these concerns, Dahlia popped one into her mouth. She chewed it thoughtfully for a few seconds, and then spat it into her hand.

“Yeah, no,” she said, her face all screwed up. “Whatever that is, it ain’t chocolate.”

We wandered back out onto the street. Now that I was looking around, I realised that most of the stores were different from the ones I knew. A cafe that I visited often had a different name and layout. There was a Blockbuster Video, which I’d only seen in old pictures online. I think they went bankrupt about a decade ago. I pulled out my phone to Google it, but it had no signal. Neither did Dahlia’s.

It was looking more and more like we’d gone back in time. But where was everybody? Why was the entire town empty? Had there been some kind of emergency back in 2007? I’d never heard of anything like that.

We wandered into a restaurant. The lights were all out, but there was cooked food laid out on the tables, some of it half-eaten. I nervously nibbled a slice of pizza, but it had the same chalky, ash-like texture as the chocolate. We tried turning the lights on, but the power seemed to be out.

Returning to the street, I was at a loss as to what to do next. But Dahlia had her own ideas.

For the second time that day, the sound of breaking glass startled me out of my daydreams. I looked over at her, horrified. She’d tossed a trash bin through the window of a jewellery store. Smashing the back window of an empty house was bad enough, but this was criminal vandalism in broad daylight.

“My mom was right,” I told her. “You are a thug.”

I was smiling, but she’d started to scare me a little.

“And a thief,” she happily agreed. She snatched an expensive-looking pendant from the window display and put it around her neck. It had a blue gem that matched her hair. A sapphire, I assumed. It looked great on her. But my growing anxiety about being in this lifeless place made it hard to appreciate.

“I think we should go back,” I said. “I don’t want to get stuck here or whatever.”

“Aw,” Dahlia protested. “An entire town with nobody except me and you in it sounds like heaven to me.” She wrapped her arms around me, and we kissed, long and deep. I broke it when I had the sudden mental image of someone watching us from the alleyway across the street.

“Come on, let’s go,” I insisted, and seeing how restless I was getting, she didn’t resist. We walked back to Somerville Street, down empty roads dotted with empty cars, past buildings with all the substance of cereal boxes, beneath a sun that never seemed to move. My mind kept playing tricks on me, creating dark figures watching us from behind trees and buildings, but when I looked closer, there was never anybody there.

My biggest fear was that we wouldn’t be able to return to our own time. That we were stuck here, alone in a world without people, or power, or edible food. But when we climbed back up the porch and through the diamond-shaped window, that wobbly feeling washed over us again, and then everything went dark. I fumbled for my phone and managed to turn the flashlight app on, and we saw that we were back in the bedroom, just as we’d left it. My phone was working again, and now claimed the time was 9 pm. Outside the open window, we could see the moon, see the lights of cars moving on the main roads, hear the low hum of traffic and the chirping of nighttime insects.

I carefully closed the window, and we quietly made our way back to the ground floor. The window we’d entered through was still broken, and we squeezed through it to find our bikes where we’d left them.

“Let’s keep this to ourselves,” Dahlia suggested, as we picked our bikes up. “There’s, like, a whole other world through that window. Nobody else has to know about it, right?”

“Yeah,” I agreed. I had the mental image of a vague yet menacing government agency sweeping in to claim it for themselves, teams of scientists taking soil samples from the past, stuff like that. If this was an actual portal through time, then it could be dangerous if the wrong people got their hands on it. The worst that Dahlia would do was break a few windows and steal a necklace or two.

“Hey,” I said, suddenly realising something. “Did you take that necklace off?”

“Huh?” Dahlia’s hands went to her throat, and she felt around for the sapphire pendant she’d taken from the jewellery store’s window display. It wasn’t there any more. “Weird,” she whispered. “Maybe it came loose while we were climbing up the porch? But I’m sure I fastened it properly…”

“We’ll look for it next time,” I promised, and the words ‘next time’ sent a shiver of nervous excitement through me. Now that I knew we could safely come back, the prospect of exploring this mysterious new world suddenly seemed a lot more fun.

I gazed at my girlfriend. “Today was incredible,” I told her. “I mean, even before the whole time portal thing. You’re incredible. And so is every moment we spend together.” My voice faltered nervously. “And… I love you too.”

“Fuck yeah, bro,” Dahlia sang, grinning wide and wrapping her arms around me.

We headed home after that, and after enduring my mom’s interrogation about where I’d been, I booted up my computer and did some research on the Somerville Street house. An ice-cold tendril coiled itself around my spine as I read the article. I immediately messaged Dahlia.

There really had been a murder in that house. On February 10th, 2007. In the very bedroom where I’d lost my virginity just a few hours ago. The owner of the house, one Hector Strenz, had strangled his wife Madeline after suspecting her of infidelity. He’d fled the scene, and taken his own life before the police could take him in.

We texted back and forth about it all night, wondering what it meant. Had Madeline’s demise in that room somehow created another version of the outside world, frozen on the day of her death? It was a ridiculous concept, something out of an old X-Files episode. But there could be no explanation for this that made any logical sense.

We had more fun talking about what we could do there. We’d been looking for a place to be together without fear of interruption. Now we’d found an entire town with nobody in it. And it didn’t seem to be dangerous. We hadn’t been attacked, or stopped from leaving. Neither of us felt sick from trying the chalky food we’d found. It had been creepy there, sure, but that’s just because it was so empty and silent. It reminded me of the liminal spaces I’d seen online, empty offices and public places that felt like all the life had been siphoned out of them. But in those stories, you couldn’t leave, and there was always some monster stalking you.

Dahlia was especially excited about the things we could bring back with us. Money. Clothes. Jewellery. They were all just laying there, unclaimed. The thought of stealing made me uneasy, but was it actually stealing if it wasn’t owned by anybody? Would taking them from the past make them disappear in the present? There was no way of knowing without trying it out.

We even came up with a name for the place: Uncanny Valley. It was technically inaccurate; the uncanny valley is the feeling you get from seeing something that is almost human-like but not quite right, like a detailed video game character whose animations are slightly wrong. The term doesn’t apply to places. But we liked the name, so it quickly stuck.

The following afternoon, after school, we made our second visit to the house on Somerville Street. We came prepared this time, with food and drinks in backpacks, and a collapsible step-ladder that Dahlia had “borrowed” from a neighbour’s garage.

We learned a lot that day. We learned that time doesn’t pass in Uncanny Valley. We stayed there for hours this time, and the sun didn’t move an inch. It was always suspended directly above us. But time continued to pass in the present; when we went back through the window, it was the middle of the night. After my phone connected to the network again, I got a dozen furious texts from my mom asking why I hadn’t come home.

Phones didn’t work in the Valley. Nothing did. There was no signal. We tried taking photos, but they all came out as indecipherable smears. There was no electricity, either. The cars were all dead, not that either of us could drive. All food and drink found there tasted vile and seemed to have no substance to it. Even tapwater tasted bitter and alien. The picnic we brought with us was fine, though, so we ate that in the park. With the folding knife that she always carried, Dahlia carved our initials into a nearby tree.

D + J 4EVA. Inside a rough-hewn heart.

We also learned that nothing we did there was permanent. The jewellery store window that Dahlia had smashed last time was completely intact, and the pendant she’d stolen was back in its display. She took it again, shattering the window with a blissful smile on her face. A shard of flying glass sketched a rough red line on her cheek.

That feeling of foreboding returned, at least to me. Dahlia never seemed scared, and I never admitted my fears to her. It just always felt like someone was watching us, like if I turned my head just a little faster I’d see them. Inside buildings, floorboards creaked as if someone were quietly creeping along the corridors. I told myself that it was just the emptiness and silence. I remembered staying in a hotel at an airport once, when I was a kid. You could only get to it via a bus from the terminal, so the only people there were those who were going to fly early the next morning. It was almost entirely empty, and the complete silence of the place, disproportionate to its staggering size, had terrified me.

Uncanny Valley gave me the same vibes. But ultimately, that hotel hadn’t been dangerous. And this place didn’t seem to be, either. There were no noodle-armed anomalies here. No swarms of little Pac-Man monsters appearing over the horizon to devour us. Nothing.

I swallowed down that unsettling feeling, and after a while, I actually began to enjoy myself.

Side-by-side, Dahlia and I explored the empty town with no real agenda in mind. We opened dozens of books in a bookstore, finding all of the pages blank. We visited cafes where cold cups of half-finished coffee still sat on the tables, like the customers had just abandoned them and left. Moving back towards the residential area, we entered people’s homes, finding them frozen in time, meals half-cooked in their kitchens.

“How far do you think this goes?” I asked my girlfriend, as we wandered the streets.

“What do you mean?” She was checking that the sapphire pendant was still in her pocket. It was, and she smiled. “How far what goes?”

“I mean, it seems like the entire town exists here,” I mused. “Or like, a facsimile of it does. But does the entire world exist? If we just kept walking, would we get to other towns? Other states?” My mind was reeling with the possibilities. “Is there an empty copy of Times Square just sitting there in total silence? A lifeless record store in some Hong Kong alleyway? Is there a deathly quiet copy of, like, the Amazon rainforest out there somewhere? What do you think?”

I looked at her, and she grinned at me. “I think you’re cute,” she chirped.

“My cuteness has nothing to do with this,” I replied, trying not to smile. “I’m asking a very serious question about the underlying mechanics of this supernatural world we’ve discovered.”

“Well, I don’t know about any of that stuff,” Dahlia responded. “But I do know you’re cute. So I’m qualified to make that claim.”

I put my arm around her shoulders and squeezed. “It’s interesting though, right?” I went on. “Thinking about the mechanics of it? How it works? And where it came from?”

“I guess.” Dahlia didn’t sound too convinced. “I just think it’s cool, you know? It’s so empty. No parents, no teachers. You could disappear in here, and nobody would ever find you.”

I was about to say something when she stopped walking. “We’re here,” she announced. She pointed at a nearby house. “This is my place.”

I raised my eyebrows in surprise. I thought we had just been wandering the town at random, but apparently she’d had a destination in mind. The house she pointed out was unremarkable; the same as all the others around it. I followed her to the front door, and we found that it was unlocked.

“Oh, weird,” she remarked as we looked around the living room. “It’s all different.”

“This would be how the house looked seventeen years ago,” I realised. Would Dahlia have even been born in February 2007? I realised then that I had no idea when her birthday was. We still had a lot to learn about each other.

“Well, it’s still my house,” Dahlia declared. Her eyes glinted mischievously as she looked at me. “So let me show you my room.”

Our second time together was a lot less dusty than the first. I felt bad for whoever’s bed we’d done it in, but then realised they didn’t really exist any more. Whoever had lived in this room was now seventeen years older, and somewhere else in the world. The real world, or the present, or whatever you wanted to call it. Thinking about it made my head hurt, but in a satisfying sort of way.

I looked down at Dahlia. She was snuggled into my chest, her shoulders shaking. I couldn’t see her face.

“Hey,” I whispered, ruffling her messy blue hair with my hand. “You good?”

“Yeah,” she whispered back. She looked up at me and blinked several times. A couple tears rolled down her cheeks, but no more followed. Slowly, very slowly, she smiled again. “I love you,” she said. Her wolf-like eyes were gazing deeply into mine, and I knew without doubt that she meant it.

“I love you too,” I murmured, and I meant it too.

She stretched and yawned in my arms. The sterile light from the static sun shone through the bedroom window, and all was silent. Nothing moved in the entire world.

Tired from a full day of adventure, we headed back to Somerville Street after that, but instead of using the step-ladder to climb up onto the porch, we broke in via a window on the ground floor, like we had in the present. The house was much the same inside, a little more lived-in and a little less dusty.

But the bedroom floor was covered in blood.

“Oh, fuck, fuck,” Dahlia gasped, as we both stared down at the roughly human-shaped pool, glistening in the bright light admitted by the open diamond window. It looked fresh and wet. “Nope, no,” Dahlia continued, wheeling on her heel and charging back down the stairs. “Not doing this.” I was only a second behind her, swallowing my heart back into my chest.

Outside, we quickly climbed the step-ladder to the house’s gable. The window was open. As I was about to dive through it like a darting salmon, Dahlia reached into her pocket and took the sapphire pendant out. I gaped at her. We’d just seen something right out of a horror movie, and she was worried about dropping her stolen necklace again?

Despite the terror I felt, I insisted on sending her through the window first. And that’s when we found out what had happened to the pendant last time. As the hand holding it approached the window, it began to tremble. Alarmed, Dahlia uncurled her fingers. In her palm, the necklace was vibrating violently.

“What the-” she started to say, and then it vanished entirely, right before our eyes.

“We don’t have time,” I urged her, and ushered her through the window. I followed, my head swimming as we passed through the threshold, and then we were in darkness. We had returned to the present.

It took us a while to return to the Valley after that. The memory of the blood on the bedroom floor kept us away. But after a week or so, unwilling to remain in mundane reality (and desperate to spend some time alone), we cautiously returned. The town had reset itself once again. The jewellery store window was stubbornly unsmashed and the sapphire pendant was back on display. Dahlia didn’t bother stealing it a third time.

The initials she’d carved into the tree in the park had disappeared too.

“So much for forever,” she remarked, running her fingertips over the unbroken bark.

I put an arm around her. “Forever sounds pretty good to me.”

When you say that you’ll love somebody forever, you’re really saying it because it feels good in the present. You embrace each other on a day that feels like it’s going to last an eternity, and you can easily imagine a lifetime of those days. Millions of shared moments. But ultimately, we have no way of knowing what the future will look like, or who will be in it. You can easily return to the past, apparently, but no-one is there any more. Perhaps there’s no-one in the future either. Maybe all that really exists is the moment you’re in right now.

We made love right there in the park. There was nobody to see us, or stop us.

“I wanna break something,” Dahlia announced, as we lay together on the grass. She dressed, stole a baseball bat from a sporting goods store, and began to smash every single window she could see. The harsh scream of breaking glass echoed through the silent streets. I watched from a distance, smiling, wanting to stop her. When she was finally satisfied, she sprinted over to me, her wolf eyes alert and alive. She had shallow cuts all over her hands and face.

“Feels so fucking good,” she hissed. “God, I love it here.”

We started visiting the Valley more and more after that. We never went back to the bedroom with the blood on the floor. But it felt like we explored every other inch of the town. We poked around dozens of houses, snooped around every store. We made love in countless places, growing bolder and bolder over time. The middle of streets. The main exhibit of the art museum. The school gym, the football field, the dairy aisle of the local supermarket.

Dahlia’s appetite for destruction continued to grow. She left broken windows in her wake like a trail of glass breadcrumbs. She smashed entire houses to pieces. She would often cry. I wasn’t brave enough to broach the subject with her. I’ll never stop regretting that.

We tried to bring more things back with us, but it never worked. They would all just vanish. Even stolen clothes that we were wearing would disappear right off our bodies. Only the things that we took with us could come back through the window. After a while, we stopped trying.

One time, we took our bikes with us. Squeezing them through the window and getting them down to the ground was more trouble than it was worth. We rode for miles out of town, but there was nothing there. Just more empty world. It was like loading up a multiplayer video game by yourself. Wandering these huge spaces that should have been full of sound and action, but were just inert backdrops without the actors to create those scenes.

I visited my own house once, but it was awful. There was nobody there, of course, but it was clear from the layout that my dad had been alive at that point in time. My room had a baby’s crib in it. Being in there felt like someone was standing right over my shoulder. I had a powerful mental image of me as a baby, looking up out of my crib and seeing me as a seventeen-year old, staring down at myself. It was so vivid that I wondered if it was a memory just now resurfacing. An infinite cycle of terrified eye contact. I ran out of the house and never went back.

In the present, things were bad with my mom. It was hard to keep track of time in the Valley, so I often ended up returning home in the early hours of the morning. None of her texts or phone calls ever went through, and she assumed I was turning off my phone to deliberately avoid her. And when she demanded to know where I’d been, I couldn’t tell her. What was I supposed to say?

My grades at school slipped. I didn’t really care. I just wanted to be with the girl I loved.

One day, Dahlia didn’t show up at school. The teachers hadn’t heard from her, and my texts didn’t go through to her phone. There was only one place she could have gone. But she’d never been there without me, at least not to my knowledge. And I’d certainly never been there without her. The thought of walking those silent streets alone gave me shivers.

Of course, I did it anyway.

After the endless school day finally ended, I rode my bike to Somerville Street, hid it behind the house, entered through the back door we had left unlocked, and climbed the stairs to the second floor. I couldn’t stop thinking about that pool of blood. It had looked so thick and warm, like spilled soup, steam rising from it as it cooled in the cold winter air.

I climbed through the diamond-shaped window. It felt like my head slowly rotated a hundred and eighty degrees. And then I emerged, blinking, into the flat light of a February afternoon. I slid down the ladder and set off for the center of town. If Dahlia was in the Valley as I suspected, I hoped to find some hint of her whereabouts there.

The utter silence and stillness of the past town were deeply unsettling without her chatting away beside me. The entire world seemed to be holding its breath. Any second now, there would be a scream. A thousand unmoving figures watched me as I walked, empty eyes staring from every window, from around every corner. I could feel the physical weight of their gaze on me. I could almost hear their running feet, see their reaching hands in the corners of my eyes. It had never been safe here. They’d just been waiting for me to be alone, all this time.

I pushed these paranoid thoughts out of my mind and kept moving. I had to find her.

It wasn’t hard, once I reached town. I just followed the broken windows. Hundreds of them.

And I followed the blood.

I walked faster and faster. I started to run.

“HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY”, screamed every store that I passed. Pink balloons twisted noisily in the stale breeze. The blind black eyes of teddy bears watched me rush by, shoes crunching on shards of shattered glass.

I found her on the floor of a record store. The windows were all broken, and the albums had been swept from the shelves and strewn about the floor. All of the covers were blurred smears. Whatever force had created this place couldn’t reproduce fine print or detailed images. I didn’t know why. It didn’t matter.

There was blood everywhere.

“Dahlia,” I said quietly, crouching beside her, touching her cheek. Her eyes slowly fell open, first one and then the other. She looked like a broken doll.

“Oh,” she said, smiling, blinking, as if she’d just woken up from a pleasant Sunday afternoon nap. “Hey, beautiful boy.”

“You’re bleeding.” Her forearms were covered in fresh cuts. I’d seen the dense ladder of scar tissue on her arms and thighs many times before, of course. There wasn’t anywhere on her body that I wasn’t familiar with. But I’d never seen fresh ones. I’d hoped that she wouldn’t need to do that any more, now that she had me.

Thinking back, I suppose I only knew her for a few months.

“Yeah,” she said, sheepishly. “I was hoping you wouldn’t find me like this.”

“Come on,” I urged. I didn’t care what she’d done. I just wanted to make sure she was okay. “We need to get back to the house, call an ambulance.”

“No.” She shook her head, slowly. She seemed dazed, still half-asleep. “I’m actually going to stay. I can’t go home any more.” She tried to smile; failed miserably. The black pinpricks of her eyes had lost their sharp edge. “I’m going to stay here forever.”

“We can’t stay, sweetie.” I was fighting to keep the rising panic out of my voice. There was blood everywhere. Where was it all coming from? What had she done to herself? “We don’t have anything over here. There’s no medical supplies or food or, like… social media. We need to get back, don’t we?”

I didn’t know what I was saying any more.

“Nah,” she said simply. “I love you, Joe, but fuck off.”

She closed her eyes again, and immediately dozed off. I called her name, shook her shoulders, even slapped her cheek, but she didn’t stir. I crouched down, slid my arms under her shoulders and knees, and picked her up.

Carrying a girl is a lot harder than movies and TV make it look. Maybe it’s because the guys carrying girls out of burning buildings in those movies are jacked, and I’m just a skinny teenager. But within seconds, my arms were burning with the strain.

It took a long time to get back to Somerville Street. I had to stop frequently, put her down, rest my arms. I tried to wake her every time. I couldn’t. Her face was very pale. There was so much blood. Her blue hair was fading again, brown roots coming through. She’d need to dye it again soon.

There was so much blood.

I don’t know how I hauled her up the ladder onto the house’s gable. It’s all a blur when I think back on it. They say mothers get the strength to lift cars if their baby is trapped underneath. It was probably something like that.

As I dragged her towards the diamond-shaped window, she started to shake. I let out a breath I’d been holding in for as long as I could remember. She was moving again. She was waking up. We were going to go through the window, and I’d lay her on the bed where she’d taken my virginity, and I’d call an ambulance, and it would arrive quickly because we were in a quiet part of town, and everything would be okay, everything would be okay, everything would be just like it was before, and we’d start making plans to move, to another town, far away from my mom and her dad, and we’d get jobs in fast food or something, make enough money to live on, and she’d dye her hair again, and we’d have good days and bad days.

We’d have years and years of days like that, and everything would be okay because we’d be together.

The closer we got to the window, the more her body trembled. I could barely hold on to her. I dragged her another step. Then another. We were so close now. We were almost there.

Her body vibrated violently.

“Hold on-” I started to say, and then she vanished, right out of my arms. Her empty, blood-spattered clothes fell onto the tiles like a pile of laundry.

If I’m being honest with myself, here and now, as I write this all down, I had noticed she was dead several minutes earlier, as we’d been turning the corner onto Somerville. I just hadn’t allowed myself to acknowledge it at the time. All I’d been thinking about was getting back to the present, to the real world, to a hospital where I’d spend a sleepless night in a waiting room until they told me that she was going to be okay, and that the cuts to her wrists I’d been refusing to look at hadn’t been as deep as they looked.

With calm and precise movements I climbed back through the diamond window and into the pitch-black present, like it was a dance I’d rehearsed. I waited for my phone to reconnect to the network and dialed 911. When the operator picked up, I hung up without saying anything.

I turned back to the window and started to climb through. I needed to go and look for her. The sapphire necklace had respawned back at the shop after it had disappeared. Maybe Dahlia had too. Maybe she was at her house, or at the little park. Unbroken, just like all the windows. She’d be carving our initials into a tree, pulling items out of a picnic basket, smiling at me with that little gap in her front teeth, picking out some outlandish place for us to make love. Maybe lying on the grass, next to the mausoleum. Like in the song. She really liked that kind of thing.

I couldn’t wait to see her again.

On the other side of the pitch black window, it was a pitch black night.

I panicked, lost my balance, and fell head-first into the front garden.

That’s where the police found me. They took me to the hospital, where I was treated for a broken shoulder. They had a lot of questions. They wanted to know where Dahlia was. I don’t remember what I told them at the time. I was in a lot of pain, and my shoulder hurt too.

I saw her dad for the first and last time. He was standing outside my hospital room while the police spoke to me. He looked terrified. He left town a few days later. I don’t know where he went.

“I love you, Joe,” she’d said, “but fuck off.”

I don’t know if she intended those to be her last words, but they fit her well. If I imagine a gravestone for her, I imagine those words carved into it. I imagine visiting it often, leaving flowers before it, watching those final words grow faint as the years go by.

But of course, there is no grave. Officially, she’s considered a runaway. A ridiculous idea, I know. They found me literally covered in her blood. At first, it was obvious they thought I’d killed her. I told them that she’d killed herself, that I’d found her body, that she should be in the house on Somerville Street. They didn’t find her, of course. They didn’t find anything. And when I went back there myself, as soon as I was able to, the diamond-shaped window was no longer a portal into the past. It was just an oddly-shaped window.

They’re finally tearing the house down now, after all this. That’s what I heard, anyway.

The cops didn’t have enough evidence to charge me with her murder, and there was no body anyway. Based on her dad skipping town days later and her own violent history, they assumed there had been a domestic dispute that had led to her hurting herself and then running away. They put out a half-hearted missing persons report. And that was that.

“I’m so sorry, honey,” my mom said when I got home from the hospital, holding me tightly. Her voice was choked with emotion, but I could see the corners of her mouth turned up in a slight smile. When I went back to school a few days later, a missing-persons poster had been taped to my desk. A blurry photo of my dead girlfriend, taken before she’d started dying her hair, stared out of it. The other students seemed disappointed in my lack of reaction to it.

She’d have hated that photo.

And that’s it. It’s been a week, and I don’t really know what to do with myself. Mostly, I hate myself. I spend a lot of time doing that. Entire days and nights. Especially the nights. Sleep cannot reach me through the thick fog of guilt that has enveloped my mind.

I should have paid more attention to the things Dahlia was saying to me. I should have understood her pain, engaged with it. Maybe it wouldn’t have changed anything. There’s no way of knowing now. But I wish I had tried.

I said I loved her, but what I loved were the good times we were having together.

Whoever is still reading this, please, pay attention to the people you claim to love. Listen to what they are telling you. Really listen. Don’t push it back, because tonight is pizza and movies and sex and smiles, and tomorrow would be a much better time to broach such a difficult subject. There might never be a tomorrow.

And if, somehow, you find a window that goes into the past, a past with nobody in it, leave it alone. It was left behind for a good reason. The past is an empty shell. It is not a place to linger. It is not a place to escape to. And the past is not your playground.