When the portal closed by itself after less than five minutes, and Sashtun hadn’t returned, Kashpur tried to open it again right away, with no success. Undoubtedly the cabinet needed to recharge. Letting it do so from the ambient magic might take too long, perhaps a month or more, so he cast a spell to funnel additional magic to it, allowing it to recharge much faster, and went about other business, going to bed not long after.

The following morning before breakfast, he tried to open the portal. It didn’t work. It did work when he tried again during a free moment in the afternoon, but it didn’t stay open long, and he didn’t see anyone in the room on the other side of the portal.

He didn’t dare go through it himself. He’d seen how Devi grew into a ten-year-old boy and Sashtun aged into a woman into her forties; if he went through, he could be well over a hundred, too feeble to walk back through under his — or her — own power, and prone to dying of old age at any moment.

He kept casting the spell for recharging talismans faster, and opening the portal once a day at different times, for two more days before he finally saw someone on the other side — the boy that Devi had grown into. The boy looked at the portal in astonishment, then shouted something brief in that language that he and Sashtun had spoken after passing through before, and ran out of view of the portal to the right. Kashpur kept the portal open and waited. A few minutes later, when he began to think he couldn’t keep it open much longer, a girl a little older than Devi — Devi’s new age, or rather his original age when he was at home — came in view of the portal and gawked at him, then waved her hand a little and said something, just a couple of syllables. Then Devi returned with a man and woman in their late thirties or early forties. The man said something in a flat tone, the woman said something softer, barely audible, and Devi spoke up excitedly. The man shouted a single syllable and grasped Devi’s wrist — and the portal closed.

Where was Sashtun?

After Davey finished the placement tests, he found that there were a couple of police officers who wanted to talk to him. He told them the same thing Mom had told the school administration lady — that he couldn’t remember anything from the night he’d disappeared until the night he returned. He was tired of grown-ups not believing him, and he was afraid if he told them even part of the truth, they’d want to question Sashtun, and they might arrest her for kidnapping (and probably being an illegal immigrant, because even if they didn’t believe she was from another world, she didn’t have any ID to prove she was a citizen of the U.S.). They kept asking the same questions in different ways, and Davey kept giving the same answer. After they were done, Mom took him home.

“I got a call from Sashtun this morning,” Dad said when they gathered for supper that night. “And another one a few hours later. She said she’d sold some of her gold, bought a cell phone, and paid for a hotel room. She’s staying at the Quality Inn on Thornton Road, and said I should call her back after I see the portal open.”

“I’ll holler as soon as I see it open,” Davey said. “But I don’t think she can get here fast enough to go home before it closes. How far is the Quality Inn?”

“Not too far, I guess. Four or five miles, maybe?” Dad said. “But calling for a county bus or taxi and waiting for it to show up... yeah. I don’t know.”

“If she’s really from another world that doesn’t have cell phones,” Mom said, “how did she figure it out so fast?”

“She said she got the guy who sold her the phone to show her how to use it,” Dad said. “But she sounded pretty frustrated.”

“We’ll see,” Mom said, and she told Dad, Carson and Amy about Davey’s doctor appointment and placement tests at school. “They say he’d better repeat the last few months of fourth grade, and start fifth grade in the fall. But he can go ahead and take fifth grade math classes.” Davey hung his head, ashamed of his performance, although he knew logically that it didn’t make sense. He’d missed months of school; of course he wouldn’t be ready to jump in with the other fifth graders now.

Davey spent as much time in his bedroom as he could, sitting and drawing, reading, or playing a handheld game so that he could see the portal out of the corner of his eye, but he was necessarily asleep, at school, eating or in the bathroom for much of the day. He asked Mom and Dad if he could take his meals in his bedroom, but they said no. Amy sat and watched the portal with him a lot for the first couple of days, asking him more questions about his time in the other world, but then seemed to get bored.

School was frustrating. The lessons he was repeating weren’t all that long ago for him, and he didn’t know any of the kids, who were about a year younger than him. Having enrolled in the middle of February, it was hard to make friends. Of course, it probably would have been just as hard if he were in fifth grade, it being a new school for him. He hadn’t told anybody at school that he’d been missing for six months, much less where he’d been during that time, but somehow the rumor had spread from one of the office staff or teachers, and all the kids seemed to know about it. Kids kept coming up to him and asking him where he’d been, whether he’d been kidnapped, if his kidnappers had made him do various horrible things... He always claimed he couldn’t remember, though he was tempted at times to tell them the truth.

Amanda paused in her work at her desk. One of the books Sashtun had loaned them was spread out before her, and a legal pad with a makeshift spreadsheet ruled on it next to that. She’d already done some basic sniff tests like checking that there were a few common words that appeared many times, and verifying that there were more short words than long ones. Now she was calculating the frequency of each glyph, both in general and in specific positions — at the beginning, middle, or end of a word. Fortunately, the language was printed with spaces between what she assumed were intended to be thought of as words by the hoaxers. She’d identified only eighteen distinct glyphs that occurred at least once in the page and a half she’d gotten through, and based on what she’d seen so far, she was guessing at least one of them was a punctuation mark. Probably at least a couple of others were punctuation, too, which would make this a language with a smaller than average phoneme inventory, like Hawaiian... she would intuitively have expected a hoaxer to go the other way, as most of the conlangs she’d seen had much larger phoneme inventories, but maybe they’d just gotten tired of designing glyphs that were going to be meaningless anyway. On the other hand, if it was a real language... it pretty much had to be an alphabet or abjad, not a syllabary or logographic system.

She didn’t have exact numbers yet, just groups of little tick marks in each cell of the spreadsheet that she hadn’t counted and replaced with Arabic numerals yet, but she could already see at a glance that it had roughly naturalistic letter frequencies. One letter occurred more often than any other, and it was the most common in the middle or end of words, but didn’t occur at all at the beginnings of words, suggesting either a vowel in a language where syllables couldn’t begin with a vowel, or a consonant that wasn’t permitted at the beginning of a syllable, like “ng” in English, in an abjad where vowels were unwritten, like Hebrew. Various other glyphs had staggered frequencies, though even the scarcest occurred several times in the page and a half of glyphs she’d counted — not surprising in a language with so few glyphs.

She took a sip of coffee and thought about it. Did she need to count another half-page or more of glyphs before doing the math? She already had what she needed to know that this wasn’t a weak point in Sashtun’s story, something to point at and prove to Davey that she knew he was lying and would he please tell her what had really happened. If it was randomly generated, somebody with good knowledge of natural language statistics had put a lot of thought into the program that generated the text to be printed — not to mention the graphic design and what seemed to her like a decent replication of nineteenth-century printing techniques, though she wasn’t sure she wanted to share the book with someone who could verify that. How would she explain where it came from? They’d been telling everyone except Dr. Menendez that Davey couldn’t remember where he’d been all those months.

So there wasn’t any point in analyzing the text further for now. If it was a real language, or even a meaningful conlang, there was no chance of ever figuring out what it meant without a bilingual text or any illustrations except those cryptic geometric diagrams. She’d have to admit defeat for now... and wonder what the point of such an elaborate hoax was, and whether it might not be...

Saturday afternoon, Davey and Dad went to see Grandma Platt. Usually, Grandma came to see them, because there was more room for everybody at their house — even their old, smaller house — than in Grandma’s apartment. But Carson had basketball practice, and Mom had promised Amy a mother-daughter outing back before Davey reappeared. So it was just Davey and Dad. Grandma hugged him every bit as hard as Mom or Dad had when he’d shown up again. As Dad had instructed him, he didn’t tell Grandma where he’d been all those months, just that he couldn’t remember.

Sunday morning, they went to a church he didn’t remember going to before. Back in the summer, just after they’d moved, they’d gone to a different church every Sunday, trying to find a place that suited them like their old church that was just around the corner from their old house. By now, of course, they’d picked one and everybody there knew Mom and Dad and Carson and Amy, and nobody knew Davey, but they’d heard about how he’d tragically went missing for months... It was a real hassle to tell them over and over that he couldn’t remember what happened to him. He didn’t like to tell lies at church, but Mom had said not to tell anybody outside the family, except the doctors, what had really happened.

And then, late Sunday afternoon, while Carson was away visiting a friend from school, but everyone else was home, Davey was sitting in bed reading when the portal opened. He jumped up and yelled “Mom! Dad! Come look!”, waved excitedly at Kashpur, and ran out of the room. He found Mom and Dad in the living room watching TV; it was loud enough they probably hadn’t heard him.

“It’s open! The portal, I mean! I could see Kashpur standing there working the spell to keep it open... Come on, come on!”

First Dad and then Mom got up and followed him up the stairs. Davey took the stairs two at a time, and from the clatter behind him, he thought Dad might be doing the same. Amy was in his room looking into the portal, but not touching it — good idea, wouldn’t want her missing the last few months of sixth grade. Or even just a few days of school.

“You were right, Davey,” Dad said. Mom mumbled something Davey couldn’t quite understand.

“Yeah! You believe me now! But we have to tell Kashpur where Sashtun is, and he can’t understand us talking in English, so I’ll just step over there where I can speak Stasari and —”

“No!” Dad yelled, and grabbed Davey’s wrist. “If —” And then the portal closed, and the mural was intact again, showing the horse and buggy off in the distance beyond the gate of the villa.

Mom sat down on Davey’s bed and put her head in her hands. Dad sat down beside her and put his arms around her. “I’ll call Sashtun,” he said. “And give her a ride over here, I guess... don’t you think that makes sense, Amanda?”

“I’m sorry I didn’t believe you, Davey,” Mom said. “Yes, of course Sashtun can stay here while she waits for that thing to open again.”

Davey impulsively hugged her, and she hugged back, hard.

Dad got out his cellphone and called Sashtun, but it rang and rang and finally went to voicemail. “Hi, uh, Sashtun,” he said, “this is Carson Platt. The portal opened again — I’m sorry we doubted you and Davey, but... anyway, it closed again after just a few minutes, but if you want to come over and stay here until it opens again, you can. Give me a call back,” and he reminded her of his phone number.

“Are you sure she knows how to check voicemail?” Amy asked.

“No... I’m surprised, now, that she was able to figure out how to use a phone at all. I’ll try again in a little while. And then drive over to the Quality Inn.”

“Maybe her cellphone battery is dead or something?” Davey suggested. “She probably doesn’t know that much yet about how to use cellphones, so she might have forgotten to charge it.”

“Yeah, or it might have rung and she didn’t know what part of the screen to touch to answer it.” Dad looked up the main number for the Quality Inn, called, and asked for room 249. Again, it rang for a while with no answer.

“She might be out,” he said. “Eating supper or something. She told me when she called me before that she’d picked that hotel because it had several restaurants in walking distance. I’ll wait an hour, then call again, and go over there if I can’t get her.”

“Can I come with you?” Davey asked.

“Sure.”

“Can I come?” Amy asked.

“Why not?”