The Travelers

The Travelers

By N.N. Shepherd

   The travelers approached and Ingrid waved them near. 

   “Welcome to the gate, just a short moment before passing on,” she said with her best smile. “Where are you planning to go?” 

   They handed her their identification cards, smiling back at her in a friendly way, if a little nervously. It was rare when someone wasn’t a little nervous. 

   “Wanted to see forests,” the man said quietly. “It’s been so long since I’ve been out in the trees.” 

   Ingrid glanced up from their ID cards and smiled again, looking to the woman. It wasn’t important if their stories didn’t line up, but she always thought it was neat when they were on the same page. 

   “The smell of pines,” the woman said, equally as softly as the man. “I don’t know where you’re from,” she went on, her first sentence trailing off, “but there’s a kind of tree called a hampling fir back home that had thick needles on each bough, and each needle held their scent for days, or so it seemed.” 

   “Sounds lovely,” Ingrid agreed, handing the cards back. She pointed to the gate behind her and gestured off to the right. “Everything looks in order, enjoy your stay.”

   The travelers seemed relieved, everyone had that look even though Ingrid knew there had been little trouble with people trying to go where they weren’t supposed to, and just before they walked past, the woman tilted her head with a question. 

   “You look familiar,” she said curiously. “I don’t know you from somewhere, do I?” 

   Ingrid shook her head, not breaking her own smile. “I would be surprised,” she answered. “No, I get that a lot, must just have one of those faces.” 

   “Ok, thanks for your help,” the woman said. 

   Then, the travelers walked past with beaming whites and soon the silence returned, leaving Ingrid to wait for whomever would journey next. 

   They came in ones and twos and threes, sometimes families together, sometimes large groups of schoolchildren. Men, women, boys, girls, some of them human, but most of them not, traveling from all places and all worlds. Communication was the same, there was no language barrier. Some glamor of the gate, Ingrid assumed. 

   It wasn’t a bad job, meeting someone new a thousand times over, making small talk and checking to make sure everything was in order for where they wanted to go. Some were traveling for the mountains, some for forests, some wanted to see the great sand dunes and others wished to visit the oceans. There were numerous places to go from the gate, and numerous people to go there. Ingrid directed them all. Strangely, many of them found something familiar in her face, asking if they had met or if she was this person or that. She assumed it was another glamor of the gate, turning her face into a friendly familiar one for everyone to see. 

   “Can I go swimming?” a young boy asked as Ingrid looked over his cards. 

   He had webs between his fingers and pale skin that was nearly blue. There was a glaze over his eyes that was nearly like a set of milky screens. 

   “Would you like to?” Ingrid asked. She knelt down on one knee and handed the boy his papers back. 

   “Very much so,” he answered. “I always hoped I would come here, thinking that maybe I could finally swim. I was sick at home a lot, you see.” 

   She nodded very gravely and pointed behind her to the gate. “Enjoy your stay.” 

   A man came next with horns about his head and a long beard on a long chin. Only three fingers on each hand held his papers out to her. 

   “I’m sure you hear this quite often,” he began, his voice a deep bass that nearly ruffled the cards as Ingrid took them, “but you quite remind me of someone.” 

   “I do hear that quite often,” Ingrid agreed. “Must have one of those faces.” 

   “I think the uniform helps too,” he said. 

   “Perhaps,” she admitted. “Says here you’re looking for plains, wide open and quiet?” 

   The horned man nodded. “I would like to see a full day from sunrise to sunset, all across the land. It’s very dark where I’m from, lots of mountains and rocks and caves. There was a war, too, if I remember correctly. Seems a long way off now,” he smiled. 

   “I’m sure, I’m sure,” Ingrid said. “If you go that way past the gate, you should find what you need.” She gave him the papers back and waited on the next traveler. 

   They came on and on and Ingrid lost count. It was a good job, she had no issues with it. There were worse jobs at the gate, she was sure of that, and hers was quite stress free. Looking over the identification papers of each traveler in turn was mostly a formality, a way for Ingrid to direct them in the right way. No one was ever out of order, no one ever was going where they weren’t supposed to go. 

   There was another gate, somewhere else, that always seemed to have more trouble with travelers falsifying information. Or, at least trying to hide where they were going. People went through that gate to their destinations, but it seemed that people didn’t ever stay there long, and Ingrid imagined that everyone eventually ended up at hers. 

   Other workers came and talked with her on occasion, between travelers, all wearing the same uniform. It was important that the gate workers could match, Ingrid supposed; it gave the place a sense of regality. 

   Her days off were nice, there were so many places to visit, so many places she hadn’t seen before but had wished to go. It was nice to see some of the faces she had let into the gate as well, in some of the places she visited. She never stayed as long as they did, of course, her duties always pulling her away. 

   Among all of the travelers, among everyone who thought she was familiar, a man and a woman came who Ingrid finally thought she might recognize. 

   “Welcome to the gate, may I see your information?” she asked, trying not to stare at them too strongly. 

   The woman handed them over, watching Ingrid back seemingly as much as she was staring herself. “Forgive me,” she said, “but you look greatly like someone I once knew, someone very dear to me.” 

   “To us,” the man corrected. 

   Something in his eyes couldn’t be discounted and Ingrid found it hard to focus on their papers. She kept looking from the man to the woman, searching for a memory. It was so strange;, in all of the countless travelers she had met at the gate, none had stolen her speech and her calm the way they hadsuch as they. 

   She read their names on the pages, forcing the letters to stay together as words, read their place of origin and their travel destination, and though each piece seemed hauntingly familiar, she couldn’t put the pieces together. 

   “Seems in order,” she mumbled, handing the cards back. Pages hung out and she saw that she hand bent some of the corners. Very unprofessional. 

   The travelers didn’t seem to mind and smiled at her, though they didn’t seem too eager to pass. 

  “Ingrid,” the woman said with a sudden gasp. “Yes of course, I knew it was you. I could tell it the moment we arrived. Oh I’ve been hoping to see you for so long!” 

   Ingrid stepped back and instantly her hand raised to the nametag on her uniform. “I feel as though. . .” she began, but the cull of the gate swept the man and woman past her and toward their destination. 

   She watched them go, watched them enter the gate and walk along toward their destination. She burned their names into her mind, repeating them over and over, repeating their destination alongside them. 

   Ingrid smiled at and was pleasant tothrough every other traveler that came to the gate on her shift, not surprised at the centaurs or lichens or fierens or even the humans. 

   Ulmo took her place eventually and Ingrid marched to the offices of the gate, past every destination and the joys within, past the waiting and changing rooms of the other workers and finally to the window room. 

   It was as it sounded, and just as the first time Ingrid had entered and each time since, she paused for a moment to see the myriad of scenes opened before her, each of them different and new, each of them the destinations that were offered at the gate. 

   A man and a woman walked around the perimeter of the window room, notepads out, hands writing quickly and elegantly, taking notes of what they saw. Soft music was playing, piano or harp, Ingrid couldn’t tell. 

   “I think I know someone,” she said loudly, not sure which worker she should speak to. “Two travelers came during my latest shift, and they seemed to know me.”

   “Most people think they know us,” the woman said, not looking at Ingrid from her eyes on the windows. “Part of the glamor.” 

   “No, I mean yes,” Ingrid corrected. “I mean that I haven’t felt like I know anyone, not until now.” 

   “Now?” the man asked with a little smile. 

   Ingrid huffed and crossed her arms. “During my last shift.” 

   “It would seem that you would meet someone you knew before working here,” the man said. “I can’t rule it out, improbable though it is.” 

   “And yet, if you work here for long enough. . .” the woman said carefully.

   “Indeed,” the man agreed. 

   “Can I find them?” 

   Both stopped walking and lifted their heads from pad and pen. They did look similar, but not enough like Ingrid herself to make it conspicuous. The look on their faces, though, was something else. 

   “Why would you want to find them? You do realize how many people travel through the gate, don’t you?” 

   Ingrid nodded at the man’s question, licking her lips and trying to organize her thoughts. Though her life up to this point had been nothing but work at the gate, shift after shift, traveler after traveler, she had never thought it mundane or monotonous. Yet, it seemed so far away now, a past thing that had been a terrible waste of time. 

   “I think I knew them,” she said. “I wonder if there are others I know as well.” 

   The man and woman looked at each other briefly then back to Ingrid. The man spoke. “We try not to interact with the travelers too greatly, any more than within the scope of our duties. For some that means tour guide, some that means greeting at the gate, and some that means-” he spread his arms wide, waving pen and pad to the edges of the window room, “-it means watching all and ensuring the best stay for each traveler.” 

   The woman cut in at the slightest pause from the man. “If they were people you knew before this job, you forgot them at some point, didn’t you? Then it would stand to reason you might forget them again, and not have to worry about missing them.” 

   “I don’t want to forget them again,” Ingrid said. “At least, I don’t think I do.” 

   “Your off shifts are yours to visit where you will,” the man said. “But we are not at liberty to divulge personal histories and current movements of our travelers, no matter their familiarity to certain workers.” 

   He wasn’t unkind as he spoke, neither of them were, but there was a certain loftiness, as though they were patient teachers dealing with a petulant student. Ingrid didn’t want to feel like a student, so she left the window room and decided she would try to find them herself. 

   As much as she thought the destination was burned into her thoughts, she found it hard to put on the map and travel to. It was easy being a traveler;, you had a destination and you entered the gate and there it was, ready for you. For the workers, there was every destination and every one open and waiting. 

   The chimes sounded and Ingrid was forced to delay her searching and return to her post at the gate. She had checked a great number of destinations, but there was no sign of the travelers who called her name. 

   So she worked, taking papers and cards and sorting out the destinations of the drakes and elves and americans (all equally as odd), and smiling as she always had, smiling though her thoughts were elsewhere. 

   When her off shift came again, she found the names of those two travelers had blended with every other name she had read and now they were gone, two droplets lost in a river of blending names. 

   Yet, she was determined to look on. 

   There was a new something in her life now, a cycle of working and searching, the later prevalent in her mind even after she forgot what she was looking for. There were travelers in each location who moved about in pairs and she approached each because that was one thing she could remember, the knowledge that she wanted a pair, two of a kind, a left and a right. 

   “Do I know you?” she would ask. 

   “No,” came the smiling answers, “but you seem quite familiar.” 

   The gate, the destinations, the cycle without knowing purpose, on and on and on. 

   Then, there was a place she liked more than others she had been to. 

   Mist came in off the sea, the clouds were low and the sun was just hiding in the space between them, far far away, yet so close you wondered if you might touch it, if your arm was only a little longer. Trees lined the bank far behind the sand, and the very sand you stood on next to the waves rose in dunes that carefully grew littered and darkened with needles and boughs and sticks, and even rocks poking here and there, back to that line of trees. You could watch that floating sun forever, neither rising nor setting, and it was almost impossible to know which side of the world you were on. 

   Ingrid stood on the beach and breathed in the ocean air and felt the mist leave kisses on her skin, smelled the sweet perfume in the air and heard the talkative banter of the waves and the wind. 

   If memory and peace were the same thing, Ingrid remembered everything. 

   They walked along the shoreline toward her, hands together in a v that ended at their shoulders, hair blowing long from her and unruly short from him, kindness an aura joining them both even more strongly than the clasped hands. They stood in silence with the sun shining far off between the gray pages of sky and sea, the three of them searching familiarity. They were fortune tellers of the past, discerning what was based on lines of the face and veins in the forehead and shadows beneath eyes. 

   “We know you,” the woman said. 

   “Yes,” Ingrid answered. 

   “You came here before us, and we missed you so,” the man said. 

   Ingrid looked to him and saw the sunken depth of his words, an ocean of his own breaking on the shores of his cheeks. 

   “I did? I didn’t mean to.” 

   “No, of course not,” the woman said. 

   “We can’t go back, I suppose?” Ingrid asked. 

   They shook their heads and though they smiled–it was nearly impossible to keep from doing so–there was profound sadness in their eyes. 

   “No, dear,” the woman said. “And I don’t think we want to, do we? Not any of us?” 

   “I wish I could remember,” Ingrid said. “I feel as though some of the glamor has worn off, but I don’t desire my duties at the gate as much as I once did.” 

   “Must you continue to work there?” the man asked. “Could you not remain with us?” 

   Ingrid shook her head. “Remain? For how long would you remain here? There are so many other destinations.” 

   It was their turn to shake their heads. “We don’t see it that way. For us, we can only stay here.” 

   “I can go where I please,” Ingrid said. She wanted them to understand that they could travel about, continue to travel about just as she did. 

   “You’ve been here much longer,” the man said. 

   Ingrid nodded. “Yes, I suppose I have. Though, I’ve spent many off shifts looking for you, that must account for something.” 

   The chimes rang. 

   Ingrid shook her head and stepped back, feeling the wet sand beneath her and hearing once again the breaking of the waves. The sun had not changed in the corner of the world and the wind had neither stoked nor decreased. 

   “You have to go?” the woman asked. 

   Ingrid nodded. 

   “We love you!” they called in one voice.

   Ingrid remembered, then, and though the culling of the gate pulled her back, she knew them and knew why she had searched for them. They followed her to the edge of the destination, back to the gate, and for a moment, Ingrid paused the cull and waited, staring at them. 

   “How did you come here?” she asked. 

   “We were very old,” the woman answered. 

   “We lived long without you, after you left,” the man added. 

   “How did I leave?” Ingrid asked, the chimes shaking her fingertips. 

   The man shook his head. “It was an accident, they promised me it was an accident, but I never quite-” 

   “It was an accident,” Ingrid said, and the chimes stopped fully, if only for a moment. She didn’t remember why, but she knew it was. “You came to peace with it, or you wouldn’t be here?” 

   “I guess not fully,” the man said, his eyes brimming once more.

   She reached out and touched her father, feeling his warm skin and the wetness of his tears. “Don’t waste your travels wishing for a different life before,” she said. “I love you too,” she added. 

   “Will we see you again?,” her mother asked. 

   Ingrid smiled but shrugged, taking her hand. “I don’t know. I think I’m bound to forget, it’s part of the glamor. Memory seems to keep me held to one place, and I need to know all places and be content with all people, new, all the time.” 

   “I missed you,” her father said quietly. “Missed you terribly.” 

   “I’m here now,” Ingrid said. “You can visit me any time,” she pointed to the gate, where Ulmo was waiting for the shift change. 

   “Can we?” her mother asked with joy abundant. 

   Ingrid laughed and shook her head. “I don’t know. Though, now I’ve found you, I think I’m alright with whichever way it goes.” 

   The chimes pulsed and culled her away. 

   Papers and ID cards came and went and the man and woman she had searched for spent their time in their destination, the place they wished the most to go forever. 

   Many travelers still asked Ingrid if they knew her, and for some reason she found the questions melodious, as if they reminded her of someone from long, long before. 

The End.