Steve sat back his in chair and looked at the new whiteboard he'd bought the other day. He'd never wanted to be one of those writers, with a wall full of crazy, but it really was one of the better ways to layout and organize information so he could wrap his head around it. It was his effort to try and make sense of what had been happening to him over the last week and a half. The sneaking fear that he was going crazy was slowly fading away, replaced by a the niggling feeling of a mystery unsolved.
He'd gone out and bought the whiteboard a couple of days after his late night - for him anyway - run in with the Danish man. Although Jørn was the only one he'd had a solid conversation with yet, he'd seen numerous other faces, and a line of rough sketches and digital images was placed along the top of the board. Another rough sketch, this one of the dream, complete with the man and two women, sat in the bottom corner. A world map with little red markers over Sydney and Skagen was in the opposite corner of the board. Blue markers denoted other likely locations based on other incidents - a snatch of understood conversation that turned out to be Hebrew, a strong flash of deja-vu when watching a crime drama set in New York, and a couple of others.
Pride of place in the center, at least for the moment, sat a full color A4 picture of the same cold windy beach he'd stood on with Jørn, pulled off Google Images. A simple circle had been drawn around it and the words "Not Crazy" scribbled underneath. He'd never been there before that night, so there was no way he could have possibly known what it would look like. It didn't rule anything out conclusively of course, but the sheer sense of relief he'd felt when he found it was what had prompted him to start digging into the mystery rather than hoping it would simply pass with time. His own writing had fallen by the wayside the last couple of days, and he knew he was going to have to do a heavy burn over the weekend to catch up, but he didn't particularly mind - this was giving him inspiration for more than a dozen stories.
Suddenly there was some indefinable change in the apartment - not so much a change in air pressure or temperature, but an instinctual level knowledge that he was no longer along with his thoughts. He took a moment to compose himself, trying to feel out something about the presence - it felt friendly, or at least not actively hostile. "What do you think?" he asked, motioning at the board before turning around to face his visitor.