And we did. We went on an adventure.
I can’t properly describe it to you even now, Nell. Agloe defies explanation. It’s impossible to convey just how remarkable it was, because anything I say will make it sound like just a town. And it was just a town—but it was a town that didn’t exist. Or rather, it didn’t exist anywhere but within the map. How could that be possible? And yet, it was.
That day, we spent a few hours in Agloe, tentatively peeking into a few buildings, trying to understand how it was all possible.
It was an eerie place. Full, but empty. There were houses and buildings, but no furniture, no occupants. Gardens and parks, but no pedestrians strolling through. A gas station with a functioning pump, but no cars, other than our own. In the diner, there wasn’t any food or sign the grill had ever been used, but somehow, the utilities and appliances worked. The stove had gas, the lights had electricity. Water ran from the sinks. It was like the whole place had been set up, ready for something, but then lost, or forgotten.
There’s so much we could tell you about that town. And we will—but that isn’t the point. The point is what it did to all of us.
We didn’t realize how long we’d been there until the sun started to set. That spooked us—it had seemed safe so far, but can you imagine being inside a huge, fully built, completely deserted town like that at night? We sped back down the dirt road that led out of Agloe and to County Road 206 as fast as we could. As I drove, wheel to wheel with Wally, for a moment I worried that somehow we wouldn’t be able to leave. That the road would end without meeting back up with the real world, and we’d be trapped inside forever. We all did—everyone’s eyes were as desperately locked onto that little scrap of old paper as mine.
But the map showed us the way out, just as it had shown us the way in. I don’t think Tam folded it back up until we were all the way to the house, on familiar ground again.
We stumbled up the porch as quickly as we could, eager to get out of the dark.
“I’m starving,” Bear said, as we all realized we hadn’t eaten since breakfast. “Let’s get dinner going.”
“Let’s get drinks going,” Francis replied. “I’m going to need a lot more than dinner after that.”
But when we made it inside, conversation stilled.
“I totally forgot,” I said.
“The Dreamer’s Atlas,” Romi added. “We got it all set up.”
We all looked across the kitchen, to the assembled workspace in the living room. To where our project, once an all-consuming passion, sat utterly forgotten.
Slowly, I went over and picked up the first map I’d started working on before Tam and the others had come back to get us. It was the Franklin, loaned to Romi by the Madison Geography Society for our project, one of the most valuable in our fledgling collection.
Except now, it seemed so . . . insignificant.
The entire Dreamer’s Atlas did.
How could it be important, after what we’d just discovered? How could we simply go back to working on mundane, ordinary maps, when we now knew about the secret this one held? How could we marvel at the invented places on the literary maps, nothing more than figments of imagination, when we knew there was a place like Agloe?
“Someone get the wine,” Tam said then. When I turned to her, I was surprised to see not the same confusion that was on everyone else’s face, but instead a fierce clarity—the same expression she always got when she was on the verge of a breakthrough back in Wisconsin.
“What are you thinking?” Wally asked, hesitant.
“You’ll see.” She grinned. “But we’re going to need to get really drunk first.”
I’m sure you can imagine what Tam had realized.