by Gabi Moore
“So are you going back home?” she asked. “To your aunt and uncle’s house?”
“No. I need to find out more about my uncle and his background. I can’t do that here, so I’ll have to find a travel agency which can take me where I want to go.”
“You mean like that place we were in yesterday?”
“No, I need to find a travel agency which can take me to a place of my own choosing. I need to find one that can take me outside this time circle. However,” he said while unrolling the map, “I have a way to find one.”
He traced his finger on the map and Lilly noticed a red dot appear in the map. She looked at it and saw the dot was located in a section of the mall right outside Jupiter Hitch’s hobby shop. The dot indicated where the bearer of the map was at any given time.
“It appears there is a travel agency which can take me where I want to go just down the concourse in a back hall under the stairway. It’s here on the map.”
Lilly looked at where he pointed and the map showed a location called Purple Zone Travel. It was shaded in such a way to indicate that it wasn’t open to normal mall patrons. Since they’d wondered into the last place which took them outside the mall by accident, Lilly could only speculate what this one was like on the inside.
“So who is this travel agency meant for?” she asked him.
“Travelers. But not always human ones. The place we were at yesterday was specifically for human travelers. The place we are going is for any creature that needs to travel from one point in the multiverse to the next. They have stations everywhere and can generally get you where you need to go.”
Dion took both of her hands in his after he rolled the map up and placed it under his arm. “I want you to understand you can wait for me outside or just leave. You’ve been through a lot already and it will only get worse. I can take Emily and Sean home this evening on my own; all I have to do is phone my uncle. I can give you the keys to my van and you’ll be able to leave this place.”
“I don’t want to go,” she said as she let go of his hands and wrapped her arms around him. “I’ve gone this far, I’ll see it through.”
“I’m glad to hear that,” Dion said as he leaned over Lilly and lightly kissed her on the lips. “We need to get moving if we’re going to reach this place. Let me check one more thing.”
Dion rolled the mall map open again and checked the path it showed him to the travel agency. “Good, it recommends a direct route. I guess this means Karanzen knows his men were unable to stop me again. I’m sure we’ll deal with him later, but not right now.”
They continued down the concourse, waving at a few friends from the high school. As this was spring break, there were quite a few kids from the school out today. All the stores were decorated with their special savings signs and the full weight of consumer culture was on display. Every other person was weighed down with a shopping bag or carried some box. All the major department stores in the area were represented by whatever they had in their hands. It was a grand parade today of endless packaging. Dion and Lilly didn’t stop to reflect on the contradiction between the mall culture and what it was built over, but continued on their way. The travel agency would be hard enough to find without the mobs of people blocking the entrances to the stores.
Purple Zone Travel didn’t even have a sign outside to tell the potential customer what it was. There was a blank storefront window where the travel agency was supposed to be located. Dion walked up to the storefront and looked at it. Most people would have assumed it was closed or not yet opened. The mall tended to put facades over closed stores or ones, which hadn’t been opened. It looked bad on them when there was a blank space, so they did everything they could to hide it.
Dion looked at the glass door, which lead to the inside, and saw a small notice on the door right above the handle. He bent down and read it.
“PZ Travel,” the small sign, no bigger than six inches read. “We are open by appointment only. Please call this number to arrange an appointment.”
There was a phone number listed after the notice, which would probably go directly to an answering machine so the owners of the travel agency could screen the callers.
Dion placed one hand on the door handle and tried it. It was loose, but he felt a tingle in his hand as if the door had examined him. The door was tuned to let only those inside who needed the services of the company and to keep out the idle visitor. Dion turned and looked back at Lilly.
“It’s open, we can go inside,” he called to her.
They pushed the door open and went in. As they heard the automatic door closer swoosh behind them, they examined the room they’d just entered.
It was painted black. Everywhere. Even the ceiling was black and Dion wondered how they’d managed to paint it without spilling the paint everywhere. The floor was a shiny black color and reflected their images as they looked at it. Lilly thought about how difficult it must be to keep the floor clean and free of scratches.
Artifacts and paintings lined the walls. For a minute Dion thought, he’d made a mistake and walked into an art gallery, although it would be odd to see one in a shopping mall. There was faint light, which was provided by a series of candles, which were strategically placed over the inside of the room. It created a sense of unreality. It was hard to believe they were still in the mall.
Before them, a man sat behind a huge desk. This was an antique desk which was carved from wood and made by carpenters who distained the use of nails. Lilly knew a few things about furniture and estimated the desk to be over a hundred years old. It would not have looked out of place in an antique auction where people in eveningwear bided with sums higher than most made in an entire year.
The desk was neat and orderly with stacks of paper over it. Behind it, in a wooden chair, sat a bearded man. He wore glasses and was very thin, not more than a hundred and twenty pounds. His grey hair was long and cascaded down his back; although it was obvious, he was bald on top. He was in the process of stamping out a clove cigarette in an ashtray made of a single piece of polished stone when they opened the door.
“I know,” he said as the cigarette smoke vanished into the air, “no smoking in the mall. Please tell me you’re not with the building inspector. I don’t think the door would’ve opened if you were, but put my mind to ease.”
“No, we’re not,” Dion said. “We’re here to plan a trip.”
“Glad to hear. Please come over here and sit down.” The man pointed to a seat by the desk where two chairs were positioned. “I need to fill out some forms. You are over eighteen, right?”
They both nodded.
“Good, that way I don’t need parental permission forms.” He detached a sheet of paper from the clipboard he held and placed in a drawer.
Lilly and Dion seated themselves by the desk and waited to see what would happen next.
“You’re in luck today. It’s been slow in here so I have the time to fill out the forms for you. I just need some basic information.”
He proceeded to ask them their names, addresses, birth dates and other contact information, which he wrote down with a silver pen. His eyes glanced over his glasses when Dion told him about his current living arrangement, but the man asked no further questions beyond occupation, which both told him was “student”.
“Anything to declare?” he asked them again. “I don’t think you do since neither of you have any luggage, but I have to ask anyway.”
The shook their heads.
“Okay, on to the reason for you coming inside. Where do you need to go?”
“My uncle is the man behind the mall,” Dion told him. “I need to learn his background. He told me a little bit about it last night, but I know very little of my family’s history. I need you to send us back to the beginning so I can view it all and know what I’m up against. I need it done in observation only.”
The man behind the desk let out a whistle and leaned back.
“Tall order, kid. You want me to give you
information you can use against my landlord? Now I have no love for Mr. Seth either, but I don’t need to get into hot water with the old coot. If he finds out, and I know he will, that I helped you, I could lose my lease. Then I’d have to get another one. Do you have any idea what it takes to run this franchise? You have no idea what standards I have to meet. I might end up moving my office halfway across the planet to keep my franchiser happy.”
“In other words,” Dion said, “this is going to cost me a lot.”
“Precisely. I hope you have enough money to cover it all.” The man took out a slip of paper and wrote a sum on it, and then he handed it to Dion.
Dion looked at the paper and nodded. “You are right, it’s not cheap. But I can afford it.” He took the paper from the man and wrote down an address. “Bill my aunt and uncle; you know they are good for it.”
The older man looked at the address on the page and then to Dion. “I won’t do this for anyone else, keep it in mind.”
“Your help will be rewarded, don’t worry. Now what else do you need from me?”
“Fill out the destinations you need on the form and how long you want to be there and I will see you are on your way.”
Dion spent thirty minutes filling out the form and adding the destinations he needed on the back. When he was done, he handed it to the man across from him. The travel agent looked at the locations and placed the form into a folder, which was then put in a file cabinet behind him.
“So, how do we travel?” Lilly asked them. “Is there some door we need to pass through to get there?”
“You’re thinking of the other place,” the man told her. “We do it differently at PZ Travel.”
Lilly blinked and the room disappeared.
Chapter 13
The background changed instantly to the desert setting she had visited before. This time she still wore the same clothes, but the chair remained as well. Both Dion and she were still seated in with the man at the desk in front of them. They were in a desert and the sun blazed overhead, but the working part of the office had gone with them.
“You know,” the man behind the desk started to say, “We were never introduced. I see your names on the form, but you don’t know mine. It’s Lou.” He extended a hand over the desk, which both Dion and Lilly shook. He sat back down in his chair. “Is this the setting you wanted?” he asked Dion.
Dion glanced around and his eyes focused on a series of rocks piled up near them. “Yes, you took me this time to the very place I wanted. And we will have the time I listed on the form?”
“No problem,” Lou the travel agent told them. “Everything is squared away on my end. Now if you will do me the honor, please rise.”
Dion and Lilly followed his instructions and stood up.
“Thank you,” Lou said. “Enjoy your trip.”
The chairs, desk and travel agent vanished. They were alone in the desert.
The heat was worse were they stood. Lilly couldn’t understand why it felt so much hotter in this part of the desert as opposed to the one she had been in several times before with Dion. She felt the heat drift across the sands and turned to look at the source of the intense heat, which raked across her face. It bubbled not three hundred yards from her.
It was a volcano crater. Lava glowed red and flowed out of the opening while poisonous fumes blew from it too. She stood there in wonder as it breathed fire across the plains of the desert. Wasn’t she supposed to be in ancient Egypt or somewhere like it? Lilly couldn’t recall there being active volcanoes in the Egypt of history. Something to do with the continental plates where Africa met with the rest of the landmasses.
Dion starred at them too. There were three of the craters and the fissures on the side glowed as lava poured out of them.
“Aren’t we too close?” she asked him. “I thought you needed fire suits to be this close to an active volcano.”
“You should see them at night. It’s when they really look beautiful. Don’t worry about the heat. We’re beyond these things.”
“Beyond getting burned alive?” Lilly snapped at him. What was he talking about?
“We aren’t really here,” he explained. “We’re sitting in that office in the mall until our trip ends. Our elements have moved outside the time circles where we are sitting. Think of it as an elaborate movie you can watch inside at the theater. We’re here while at the same time we’re not. Does that make sense to you?”
“Not in the least bit.”
“Don’t worry, just follow me and do what I do. You won’t be able to interact with what you are about to see, although you will feel some of the effects of it. Just bear with me for the next hour or two.”
Lilly shrugged and turned to look at the rest of the desert.
It was beautiful in its essence. The sun had baked dry everything as far as they could see. Any flash rainstorm would be dried by the intense heat, which followed them. It was the primordial part of life. Where the first civilization began before recorded history. In the distance, humanity had risen and made itself master of everything it saw. But the sun ruled all in the horizon.
“Quiet!” Dion said to her as Lilly started to ask a question. “Look over there.”
Lilly became silent and turned her gaze to one of the massive broken rocks before them. She could see a lone figure reclining on the rock. From the distance, it was hard to see what the person was up to and she returned her eyes to Dion with a look of confusion.
“Let’s move closer,” he said. “She can’t hear or see us unless we make a real loud noise. Even then, she’ll probably think it was a jackal or hyena, so I wouldn’t worry too much.”
They walked across the sand and through the field of stone toward the figure who continued to recline on the rocks. As they came closer, they saw she was sleeping. The shadow of the sun hadn’t reached the cleft where she slept in the heat of the day. The moment Dion stopped, the first rays of sun drifted over her face and she opened her eyes.
The women wore a long Egyptian style wrap-around dress with bracelets on her wrist. She was dark in complexion and appeared to come from the Ethiopian or Sudanese part of Africa. As they watched, she sat up and starred at the rising sun. Lilly noticed the crown on her head resembled two horns with a large disk between them. Although her crown appeared heavy, it gave her no problem as she sat up and stood on the rock. She held something in one hand and Lilly noticed it was an ankh, the Egyptian symbol of life. She swerved and held the ankh up to the rising sun three times before placing it in the belt around her waist. She jumped off the rock and headed away, as if she had an important meeting scheduled.
“That was my grandmother,” Dion whispered.
The woman walked along the desert sand and they followed her. After a few minutes, Lilly noticed she had a staff in one hand, which she used to work her way through the sand, which soon turned to hard rock. Lilly held Dion’s hand as they followed her.
“And she can’t hear or see us?”
“Not as long as we remain quiet.”
The woman turned the corner around a large hill and starred out to the plains before her. It was in that moment Lilly noticed a man standing in the distance. He was dressed in the robes of a court official from the fifth dynasty and wore the single crown of the king of Lower Egypt. Both hands were crossed over his chest. In one hand he held a flail and in the other a crook. She was once told that the scepters the pharaohs carried were to represent the different forms of agriculture.
“My grandfather,” Dion told her.
The man and women were facing each other. She saluted him with her staff and they walked off in the direction of the rising sun.
To Lilly, it seemed their bodies faded into the rays of the solar orb as it flooded the landscape with heat. “What did I just see?” she asked. “Are you trying to tell me your real grandparents are Egyptian gods?”
“Oh no,” he laughed. “It was their wedding. I wanted to see it again. The first elemental workers were from Egypt and
they were preparing for their wedding feast. I’d look again at the actual ceremony, but I don’t think it has any bearing on what I’m up against.”
The Egyptian sky faded and turned black. Lilly found herself in a wooded scene at night. The air was much cooler this time and she felt relieved to be out of the hot sun. They faced some kind of stone niched carved or formed naturally in a rock facing and looked inside it. The moon was full in the sky and the light of it illuminated the inside of the niche.
Lilly looked inside to see if anything was contained in the niche. It was the form of a woman. She was very pale, so pale Lilly didn’t think she was alive. The woman wore a black robe and had her arms folded across her.
Just as Lilly was about to ask Dion who she was, the woman opened her eyes and stared up at the ceiling in the small niche. She rose up slightly, tossed her legs over the stone where she lay and stood up. She faced the moon in the sky and smiled.
They followed her until she met up with a man and woman who were dressed in the fashion of medieval peasants. She left with them and walked in the direction of the moon, although the three of them were silent every bit of the way.
“Now who was that?” Lilly asked Dion as they walked back in the direction they came.
“Her name is Lilith. Your namesake. I think that was your parents with her. But I can’t be sure.”
Lilly watched them as the faded into the trees. Her mother and father were quiet about family too and she never visited more than a few cousins or aunts. And those were only from her mother’s side of the family. Her dad never talked about his and she’s never met anyone from it.
Once upon a time, she asked her parents why she was named Lilly. Was it for a flower? She was told it was in the honor of a close friend of the family who was no longer around. It seemed a good answer and she never pushed them for an explanation.
