by Tom Upton
I walked out into the hallway, which stretched gray and deserted in both directions. Everything was filled with a dim light, although none of the lights were on. Strangely, it did not seem like the middle of the night here, but nor did it seem like day.
I called out Mary Jo’s name, loudly, but there was nothing. My voice did not even echo, but sounded flat and confined, as though it didn’t carry more than a couple feet.
I walked down the hallway. The rubber soles of my shoes did not make their usual short squeaky sounds.
I searched the school for a while, the empty classrooms, the deserted gym, the abandoned main office…. It didn’t take long before I started to kick myself mentally. Some plan, right? Just jump into the thing that looked like a big mouth, get spit into another reality, and then what? Search for weeks, months, or years to find a single lost girl? Brilliant, utterly brilliant!
I walked through an exit door and discovered that everything outside was just as gray and forsaken as inside the school. The parking lot was empty, and no cars moved down the street. The grass was a medium shade of gray. The leaves on the trees were a slightly lighter shade of gray. The sky was milky white and there didn’t appear to be a sun. There didn’t seem to be birds or squirrels, and the world was as silent as the inside of a locked closet. Man, I didn’t know exactly where this place was, but they must not have got jack in the way of tourism.
I sat on one of the benches and tried to think things out. Mary Jo had been here for three days. So exactly where would a tree-hugger go in a place like this? Maybe she would try going home. That was what I would do—go home and try to find somebody. But what if she couldn’t find anybody at home, or anyplace else? Where would she go, then? Really, she could be anywhere in the city by now, wandering around, looking for help that wasn’t there.
Suddenly there was a low rumbling noise. At first I thought it was thunder, but then I felt the bench vibrating. The tremor grew stronger and stronger, until it nearly tossed me off the bench. Then it stopped just as abruptly as it had begun.
An earthquake? In Chicago? That would be rare, but then again this wasn’t my Chicago.
I went back into the school with a sense of urgency. I needed to find out Mary Jo’s home address, so I went to the main office. I sat at one of the desks, and tried to get into the computer system. But, maddeningly, I couldn’t get the computer to power up. Everything was plugged in—there just wasn’t any electric. On a hunch I checked all the desk drawers. They were empty—no forms, no staplers, no paper clips, nothing. Everything was a fake, as though it was never meant to be used.
I wandered out of the office, not sure what to do next. When I saw the drinking fountain in the hallway, I realized how thirsty I was. But the fountain probably didn’t work. Nothing here seemed to work. Still I tried the fountain, and was surprised when an arc of water rose from the faucet. It sampled the water; it was cold and tasted normal, and I drank some more. When I finished, I was struck with a thought. Basic needs. Water is a basic need. Mary Jo would need water. She would need shelter, too, but here that would be no problem; this city, this entire world, seemed uninhibited, but there were thousands, maybe millions, of buildings. That left only food. The lunchroom, I thought, and started running down the hallway.
The large room was silent and sad. Row after row of tables at which nobody would ever sit to eat. Absent was the low hum of gossip, punctuated by the occasional catcall. There was no lunch line of kids jostling each other to see what was in the glass cases. There were no white-uniformed lunch ladies wearing hair-nets and doling out dubious dishes from the steam trays. But there was something, I noticed; the lingering aroma of food. Was it just my imagination? After I sniffed the air some more, I determined that it wasn’t my imagination at all. I could smell—what?—buffalo wings, pasta sauce, maybe enchiladas. The smell of food was real, the realest thing I discovered so far in this place.
As I approached the lunch counter, I heard the clang of a folk or spoon hitting the floor. I stopped in my tracks, startled because I couldn’t see anybody. But then Mary Jo popped up behind the steam tables.
She didn’t notice me, but went about her business, which seemed to be searching through the shelves under the counter. She had that all-American look that lot of people like, but that tended to make me want to vomit. The bright blue eyes. High cheekbones. Toothy smiles. Pert nose. A light dusting of freckles across her face. Now as she stood there, looking down at the low shelves, she frowned—in an adorable sort of way, of course – and I wondered why did I want to rescue her again? This was a person who in a million years would never be my friend. She had as much reason to like me as I had to like her. Yet I could never leave her here, like this, all alone in a gray world.
I stepped up to the counter.
“Mary Jo?” I said.
She looked up at me. “Oh,” she said, but wasn’t startled; she seemed to take my sudden presence in stride. “You don’t happen to know where they keep those little wet towel thingies, do you?”
“Uh, no,” I said.
She shrugged in a perky way. “Oh, well, I guess they ran out.”
She had a plate, which she started to pile up with food from the steam trays. There were chicken wings that looked charred black, and gray enchiladas covered with a light gray sauce. There was a tray that was filled with some kind of soup that looked like a mud puddle.
“I thought you were supposed to be a vegan or something,” I said.
“I am,” she said pleasantly. “But this doesn’t count. How could it?” She looked up from her plate at me. It was as though she saw me for the first time. “Hey, I know you. You’re that spooky girl, right?”
“I suppose,” I said. I was wondering whether she had hit her head even harder than me when she slipped into this reality.
“Strange that you’re here.”
“I think so,” I said. “But, really, we need to get out of here.”
“But why?” she asked. “It seems that I’ve been running around all day, looking for people, and now I’m starved,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Well, you know how it is. What are you anyway?—a starver or a barfer?”
“What?”
“Anorexia or bulimia. Or maybe both. Let me check out your teeth.”
“My teeth?”
“Look, nothing counts here, right? So why don’t you grab a plate and pig out? Might as well.”
She took her plate and walked out from behind the counter. I followed her to one of the tables, where she sat and started to eat.
“We don’t have time for this,” I said, looking down at her.
“Sure we do,” she said. She took a chicken wing and shoved it up toward my face. She tried to put it in my mouth, but I blocked her hand and grabbed it from her.
I wondered what was wrong with her. I was pretty sure this wasn’t the way she normally acted. I remembered what Jerry had said about no telling what kind of damage might be caused to a person who stayed too long in an alternate reality.
Then the floor started to shake, as it had done when I was outside. A couple dishes fell somewhere and shattered. I decided to sit across from her before I was knocked off my feet. Through it all, Mary Jo kept eating, completely untroubled. When the earthquake stopped, she smiled at me, and said in a playful way, “Rumble, rumble.”
“Let me ask you something,” I said.
“You going to eat that chicken wing?”
“No.”
“Then you can’t ask.”
“I don’t eat meat,” I said.
“Admirable. But I told you: it doesn’t count here. It tastes like real food, but it isn’t.”
I looked at the chicken wing in my hand. I decided what the heck, and took a bit. Although it was black, it tasted like a regular hot wing. Not only that, I didn’t get any flashes of the chicken as its head had been cut off, or any other grisly images that usually flashed through my mind whenever I ate meat.
I stared at Mary Jo, and, still chewing her f
ood, she smiled.
“Good, isn’t it?” she asked, and a fleck of meat flew from her mouth.
I reached over and grabbed her arm, much tighter than I intended. She yelped a complaint, but I held on. I wasn’t getting anything from her, not a single thought or errant feeling. It freaked me out. I always got something from people, but now Mary Jo seemed as empty as a zombie.
“Something wrong?” she asked.
I shook my head, eyeing her warily.
“Then you think I could have my arm back?”
I let go and she resumed eating.
“Mary Jo,” I said. “What do you think is happening?”
“Right now?—I’m eating.”
“I mean, where do you think you are?”
“That’s obvious,” she chortled.
“Tell me.”
She shrugged her shoulder. “In a dream, of course.”
“This isn’t a dream.”
“Of course, it is,” she said, looking at me as though I were an imbecile. “Look around. Everything is in black-and-white. I dream in black-and-white. Most people do, you know. Dreaming in color is pretty rare—or so I’ve heard.”
“And why would I be in your dream?” I asked.
She wagged a half-eaten chicken wing at me. “You know, I’ve been wondering that. I don’t even know you, right? You’d think that my friends would be in a dream. But aside from you I haven’t seen anybody—not a soul. It’s sort of strange.”
“Because it’s not a dream.”
“Then what is it? You tell me,” she said, starting to lose patience.
“I don’t know—not a dream, though.” I wasn’t about to tell her that we had ended up in an alternate reality. She’d never believe that.
“It has to be a dream. If it wasn’t a dream, I’d be running around in a panic tearing my hair out.”
“Why?” I asked cautiously.
“When I first found myself here, I went looking for somebody. Who wouldn’t, right? A dream is a lonely place. But I looked and looked, but couldn’t find anybody. What a dumb dream, right?
“So I walked home. It’s not far—six, seven blocks. I found the house unlocked. My mom, who is almost always home, wasn’t there. My grandpa, who has a small apartment in the basement, wasn’t there, either. That was really strange; he’s confined to a wheelchair, and never goes anywhere.
“So I decided to grab my bike and ride around. I could cover a lot more ground that way, right? I didn’t see anybody anywhere. The whole city is, like, a ghost town. Then a tremor hit. It knocked me right off the bike. Well, I knew this is a dream. So I figured I was lying in bed sleeping at home and maybe my kid brother decided to jump on my bed. He does things like that—the little nuisance. Anyway, I didn’t think much about the earthquake until I reached the lake. Boy, that was weird! The lake wasn’t there. No kidding. Nothing was there. There was the beach, and then a drop-off to nothingness. Then when another tremor hit, I saw what was happening; the beach crumbled away and fell into the nothingness.”
“Was that the first day you were here?” I asked, starting to feel a bit panicky myself.
“The first day?” she asked, frowning. “What are you talking about? I’ve only been here for, maybe, seven, eight hours.”
So, on top of everything else, time didn’t work the same here as I did in the real world. That plus the fact that this reality seemed to be collapsing into oblivion gave me a greater sense of urgency. I jumped up from my seat.
“We really need to go—now,” I said.
Mary Jo seemed amused.
“Go? Go where?”
“Look, this ‘dream’ is vanishing.”
“Yeah, I know, but so what? I figure when it’s gone, that’s when I’ll wake up. Until then, I plan to finish lunch.”
I grabbed her by her arm, and started pulling her out of her chair. She whined and shrieked, but finally allowed herself to be dragged away from the table. I started towing her toward the exit.
“I don’t get it,” she said, still chewing on food. “This is the weirdest damned dream I have ever had.”
I kept pulling her, and didn’t stop until we were back where she’d started, in the girls’ bathroom.
“What are we doing here?” she demanded. “Ohmigod, this isn’t getting creepy now, is it?”
“Just shut up, and do what I tell you.”
“I knew it, I knew it,” she moaned, in dread. “Don’t touch me. I’m warning you—do not touch me.”
I pushed in the door to the middle stall, and sure enough, the inside was half-filled with the black gelatinous substance.
Mary Jo stared into the stall. She no longer feared for her virtue, or whatever she had thought she was about to lose.
“What is that?” she asked, wrinkling her nose.
“It’s hard to explain.”
“It wasn’t there before.”
“It is now,” I said, “and you need to jump into it.”
“Jump in it?” she screeched.
“It’s a dream. Who cares, right?”
“No way am I jumping in that. Not even in a dream.”
Then the floor and walls started quaking, this time with greater intensity than before. It lasted longer, too, and didn’t cease until the large mirror over the sinks shattered.
“We don’t have time for this,” I said. I grabbed her by the shoulder, spun her so that she faced the stall, and, as hard as I could, booted her in the butt.
She flew forward, and ended up sticking half in, half out of the black goo. She looked back at me, and cried, “This is so gross!” And then she was suddenly sucked in all the way, presumably heading back where she belonged.
I lingered there alone, in a world that wouldn’t exist much longer. Except that it was vanishing, it might not have been a bad place for me; there were no ghosts to trouble me, no people with strange thoughts going through their heads, no future to see, no gory visions whenever I ate meat. It was a world where I could have been normal, only there was nobody with whom to share it. I suspected that maybe I had always been wrong; everybody needs people, even me.
When I looked back into the stall, I saw that there was about eight feet of rope coming out of the wall of black stuff. The roped wiggled impatiently on the floor, like some crazy snake.
“Pathetic,” I murmured, shaking my head. “Truly pathetic.”
Still I bent down and seized the end of the rope. I wrapped it around my waist and a moment later, a sharp jerk pulled me into the soft black wall and I was heading home.
13
“What took you so long?” Jack demanded, standing over me.
I was lying on the floor again, holding my achy head, but at least this floor, and the wall that had just hit headfirst, was in my world.
“Just habitually tardy, I guess,” I said, and got to my feet. My skull felt like an enormous throbbing balloon. I had matching lumps on the crown of my head. If I didn’t watch it, I’d have to change my nickname from Freaky Jules to Knotty Cranium.
I saw that Mary Jo was laid out across the sinks on the counter. She looked dead.
“What did she do? Get knocked out?”
“She came through unconscious,” Jack informed me. “She flew out of the aperture like a rag doll. She’s breathing and everything—just totally out of it.”
I stood there studying Mary Jo. “She’s much less annoying when she’s unconscious.”
“So what happened?”
I shrugged. “I found her.” I gave him a bare-bones account of what had happened, what it had been like. I saw no reason to give him every last detail; he was altogether too obsessed with weird stuff.
In return Jack informed me that it was now Saturday night, that, although it seemed to me only about an hour passed, I had been missing for nearly a full day. “It took more than an hour between the time Mary Jo returned and the time you popped back in,” he said.
I grunted. “So time didn’t work the same there.”
“Appare
ntly not,” he said.
I studied him from head to foot. He looked like a wreck. He looked like how I felt.
“And you waited here?”
“What was I supposed to do? I couldn’t leave you,” he said. “I spent most of this morning ducking Creepy Carl. I guess Saturday is when he buffs the hallway floors,” he added wryly.
“I can’t believe you waited.”
“You would have done the same for me,” he said.
“You sure about that?” I really didn’t think I would have, but it was nice to know he thought better of me.
We both stood there and looked at Mary Jo. She seemed so peaceful. Probably now she was actually dreaming.
“So what do we do?” Jack asked.
“We go home.”
“We leave her here—like this.”
“Sure. As soon as we open an exit door, the alarm will go off. So we prop the door open with something. The cops will check out the building, and, poof, they find her. A miracle, right?”
“But what if she tells the cops what happened?”
“Well, for one thing,” I said patiently, “you don’t have a thing to worry about. She never saw you, right? And what is she going to tell them about me? That I came to her in a dream and rescued her?”
He shook his head. “They’ll send her to a shrink.”
“Better her than me,” I said.
Jack gathered up his rope, and stuffed it into his gym bag with his other things.
Before we left, we checked the bathroom again. The black matter in the toilet stall was gone, and everything looked normal, except for the sleeping girl lying on the sink counter and the remnants of a huge slimy booger splashed across the floor.
14
“You’re going to love this!” Melody roared.
This was the first thing she said when I answered my cell phone. It was Sunday night, and I was still lying in my bed. I had slept on and off since I returned home in the small hours of the morning. My head ached. My knees hurt. My lower back was killing me. And I had had another nasty nosebleed that didn’t quite want to stop. So I was in no mood for Melody’s perkiness.
“Mel, can’t it wait until tomorrow?” I asked.
“No, no, you have to hear this.”
