~5.17~

She was freaking herself out again, Laurie realized.

“This is stupid,” she said to herself… though very quietly, as she was mindful of the open door.

She was just stuck in a really poorly laid out subdivision, probably one that came about as a result of some haphazard rebuilding or something. Hadn’t she read all about the varied architectural heritage that made up Jericho? Hadn’t that been part of what caught her attention in the first place?

Except the point of that article had been that you could find things in Jericho that you’d expect to see in other cities spread across the globe. What cities had a bunch of backyards that shifted around and trapped you?

No, not trapped, she corrected herself. Not stuck. Not lost. Not trapped. Just temporarily misdirected. Because courtyards didn’t rearrange themselves, passages didn’t redirect themselves.

And little girls in striped socks didn’t just disappear?

That was the rub. She knew that one impossible thing had happened already, one thing that had no mundane explanation that she could see. If one impossible thing could happen, didn’t that mean it was possible that others could, too?

“This is stupid,” she whispered again. All she had to do was stop scaring herself, raise her voice, and ask for help. The worst that would happen is that the stupid tourist girl would get herself laughed at. That was all.

Unless she really was trapped in a shifting maze. Because who would she find living in a house that backed onto such a place? What kind of… person… would leave a door so invitingly open and a light on, providing such an obvious way out for someone stuck in a place that offered no other escape?

The really helpful kind, she thought, but she couldn’t make herself believe it, any more than she could make herself believe that she’d just gotten turned around or mistaken a passage.

She decided to just take one more look around for the way to the street.