A Moment When the Past Came Back

A sleepy sound echoed through the huge laboratory, like unseen machinery that was pulsing through the walls. Aleeza took a step forward. She understood that she was getting hypnotized.

“Okay, Aleeza,” she whispered to herself. “You’re locked in an old lab. No big deal. Just find a way out. And definitely don’t think about ghosts. Or demons. Or—oh, great. Now I’m thinking about Maxwell.”

She forced herself to focus. She turned her attention to the objects scattered around. Glass bottles, some cracked and crusted with strange residues. A stack of notes written in a hurried scrawl.

She remembered the thing she had glimpsed earlier, just for a second, in the swirling green liquid during her distillation experiment. Maxwell’s demon, the creature from the theoretical paradox. She had seen it. Tiny and flickering. And now, the liquid was lifeless.

“Where did you go?” she murmured, scanning the shelves. “If I can distill you once, I can do it again. Right?”

She spotted a separatory funnel hanging from a stand and she grabbed it. If the demon was in a mixture of insoluble liquids, she could separate him. But the distilled liquid was homogeneous, there were no separate layers.

“No extraction then,” she muttered. “What about evaporation? No, I’d lose the liquid. Filtration? But I don’t have a solid to filter out. Decanting? Still need a solid… Ugh, think, Aleeza, think!”

She turned, her eyes catching the title of a thick book, whose name was Chromatography. What a solemn word. She knew it meant a separation method for small amounts of substances. She pulled the book down, leafing through the pages, trying to block out the whispering sounds that seemed to come from the dark corners of the room.

“Okay, chromatography… separates pigments… used in chemistry and biology…” she read aloud, forcing herself to focus. The idea of separation felt right, but how could she separate a creature from darkness, where it was hiding?

She sighed, closed the book, and began pacing the length of the laboratory. She needed a solution.

A feeling washed over her, heavy as stone. The laboratory melted away in her mind, and she found herself standing in the forest of dead apple trees. The air smelled of damp earth.

Seven years since the accident. Seven years since her parents were taken from her. And yet it was as if the years had never passed.

“I can’t think about this right now,” she murmured, but the forest remained, pressing in on her senses. She sat down on the cold laboratory floor and closed her eyes. The whispering voices of the laboratory faded. She took a deep breath and exhaled. She sat there for a long time, and she just let it go. She felt how the lifeless apple forest continued behind the wall, and she felt like she was a part of it.