Prologue:
A Midsummer Afternoon’s Dream
IT WAS HOT. And humid.
Glenn was silent. He gazed around in a daze. He was in his own clinic, in his usual chair in the exam room.
“Umm…” He turned his head, taking in whatever information he could grasp from his surroundings. His first observation was that it was hot. Most of all, it was humid. On the other hand, the core of his body felt cold. The pit of his stomach was so chilly and uncomfortable that he thought he might be ill.
“What—what happened again?” His memory was fuzzy. “I know I was in the clinic… Sapphee was talking about wedding plans, and then…”
Parts of what happened started to come back to him through the fog in his brain.
“Molly came…and then she… my chest…”
Right. He remembered clearly now. The Dullahan—the headless monster—had stabbed him in the chest. The woman had looked a lot like Molly, whom Glenn knew as the manager of the graveyard.
“Er.” Suddenly remembering, Glenn looked down at his chest. There was no wound or blood where he had supposedly been stabbed. There weren’t even any holes in his clothing. If he were thinking logically, he would have figured the stabbing was all a dream. But Glenn was sure it had happened.
I was definitely killed. There was no pain or agony, I just suddenly…lost consciousness!
As a doctor, he had the ability to keep calm, even in the face of his own death. It was an indisputable fact that the Dullahan had killed him.
“But I’m alive…right?”
His body was cold, as if reacting to the muggy air. Though he couldn’t say he felt just fine, Glenn did seem to be alive.
“Is no one…here?”
He didn’t sense anyone else in the clinic, which was usually bustling with patients. Even when there were no patients, there were fairies, and he saw no sign of them. It was strange. Even when the entirety of the town had succumbed to the slumber caused by the Barometz tree, the fairies had been unaffected. This world, with no fairies present in it, felt stagnant and silent as the grave.
✦ ✦ ✦
Glenn staggered out of the clinic, holding his head. It was hot outside, but despite the heat, his cold body did not sweat. It was extremely unsettling.
He recalled that Lindworm was in the middle of a heat wave, but this was a completely different kind of heat. Or at least, it felt that way to him.
“There’s no one…outside, either.” Lindworm was a lively urban metropolis. The clinic was on the main boulevard, and there was never a shortage of people coming and going on that road. Glenn looked up at the sky, thinking it might be the middle of the night—but the indigo sky of early evening was spread above him. There were no sun or moon or stars to be seen, and he couldn’t figure out what time it was.
There was no sign of anyone, anywhere. What was going on?
“Is this…really Lindworm?” He wondered aloud. This street was part of the town that Glenn knew, but absent all signs of life, it felt like a place he didn’t know at all.
He moved on, dragging his frozen body along.
Sapphee…
There was definitely something strange going on. Subtly but surely, something Glenn could never have imagined was happening. He wondered if his fiancées in the town—especially Sapphee—were all right. Where were they and what were they doing? That was his only concern.
He continued down the streets of Lindworm. At one point, he glanced down at the waterways. For some reason, the canals that the aquatic monsters used to move around looked deep and bottomless, like anyone who entered them would never come back up.
Something really was strange here. The town looked like Lindworm—but it was undoubtedly a different town than the one Glenn lived in. He knew that much, instinctively, but it didn’t help him understand what was happening to him. He had to do something quickly.
But with no idea where to go, all he felt was a growing sense of danger.
“Oh…hey!”
Glenn looked up. He’d heard a voice. Perhaps due to the thin fog, he didn’t know where it was coming from, though he was sure it was close. He looked around but couldn’t spot anyone.
“Here, over here! Hey!”
Glenn looked all around. The speaker clearly knew Glenn, but he had never heard that voice before. He searched for the speaker, wondering who in the world it could be.
“Down here. Look down!”
“Down?” Glenn looked down at his feet, noticing a small shadow.
“You finally noticed me! You inferior ignoramus! You are just the epitome of disrespect, ignoring my voice—oh, but we simply do not have time for that right now.”
“A…fairy?”
Before him stood a fairy in a hat. Glenn had seen him before. It was hard for him to tell the fairies apart, but there was one individual who stood out in particular—the one who seemed to command the other fairies in Glenn’s clinic.
“You are the clinic—”
“Indeed! I’ll have you know, I am Cottingley Bradford the Sixth, brave commander in charge of the Litbeit Clinic Squad!”
“You have a name?”
“Of course I do!”
While Glenn stood there, stunned, the fairy called Cottingley smacked his ankle.
It didn’t hurt, really.
“Wait, but…you’re talking?”
“We have had a cheerful and magnanimous language since the day we were born! It’s just the speaking part that is difficult for us, but compared to your inferior species, our thoughts are—well that is not the point right now!” The fairy named Cottingley floated gently up on his insect-like wings and sat on Glenn’s shoulder. “This is an emergency. You need to deal with this immediately, Dr. Glenn.”
“Yes, I know. I can’t find anyone anywhere and—it’s clear what is happening. I need to find Sapphee.”
“Oh, dear, it’s worse than I anticipated!” the fairy cried out, looking irritated. His wings buzzed and quivered, making a sound like a bee’s. “It’s the opposite of what you think, Dr. Glenn. Everyone is not gone. It’s you who is gone!”
“Wh…at?”
“It is you who is lost! Now Sapphee and the other ladies are desperately trying to save you! Do you not understand that this is why I came all the way to the netherworld?!”
“Uh, sorry. This situation is…” Puzzled as to why this fairy he barely knew was so angry with him, Glenn desperately tried to understand what Cottingley wanted.
“So you understand words but not what they mean! Ignorant humans, you would be lost without us. Fine, I’ll break this down so even you can understand!” Cottingley offered.
“Th-thank you…?” Glenn bowed his head to the self-important fairy, still puzzled.
“Listen, Dr. Glenn. You—died.”
“Wha…?” He felt a wave of coldness come over his already-frozen body. “W-wait a second, um.”
“I shall not wait. First, you need to accept your state.”
“It’s just that, I’m talking…and this is Lindworm.”
“Here? I see—so that is what you are seeing,” Cottingley scoffed. “This is not the dragon’s town. It is quite obviously the next world. The place you humans call the netherworld, the afterlife—allow me to remind you again, Dr. Glenn.” The fairy’s low voice reverberated through Glenn’s abdomen. “You died.”
Glenn was silent.
“This is the afterlife. It is not the Lindworm that you lived in. Do you not clearly remember the moment when you died?” Cottingley moved his face closer to Glenn’s.
He did remember the moment he was pierced by the Dullahan. “But…”
Glenn couldn’t find the words. All he knew was that the air around him was hot. His body was chilled to the bone, and he finally realized why he felt that way.
“You have arrived in the afterlife, Dr. Glenn.”
Living beings, as long as they are alive, emit heat. His frozen body had lost its warmth. That was when he realized his body’s metabolic processes were no longer running.
Suddenly, Glenn was terrified of the humid air in the town.