Bleedover

by Curtis Hox

  There it was. The portal.

  Hattie had been willing to be stranded there, if that was what it took to know the truth, even for the rest of her life. She had not known, for sure, if she could find her way back.

  I need to find Margery.

  * * *

  Alice, Masumi, and Dr. Brandeis all took turns trying to move the handle.

  They couldn’t understand why Dr. Sterling would pretend not to hear their calls, which they continued, for several minutes.

  They banged, they pleaded, they demanded.

  Masumi feared that Dr. Brandeis might hurt himself.

  “I can’t believe this,” he said, after banging his little fists on the door for nearly a half hour. “I can’t believe Hattie wants me to think the other door actually leads somewhere other than an admin building.” Even more banging, now with the palms of his hands. “Hattie!”

  He stopped to catch his breath. “I made the calculations. I walked the perimeter of the library along the alley in the back. I counted the paces. This office is flush with the southeastern corner of the building. A narrow three-foot alley separates the library from its neighbor. This magical doorway and corridor extend at least ten feet, as far as I can tell; maybe more. I even went into the subbasement of the other building. They only have one. Hattie’s office is in the bottom subbasement. It’s lower. I asked what was under the other building. Solid granite bedrock.” He put his ear to the door, then faced it and screamed, “Come out!”

  Alice and Masumi gave him space, neither willing to intervene.

  When the door handle moved, Alice shouted, “Look!”

  He yanked on it and pulled. Dr. Sterling stood in the doorway.

  “What was that, Hattie?” he asked. “Why did you lock the door?”

  She wavered, as if she might fall backward.

  Dr. Brandeis grabbed her arm, then led her out of the corridor and around her desk. She walked like a zombie, bumped the corner, but said nothing.

  “Are you all right?” he asked

  “Give me a few seconds,” she said. “How long have I been gone?”

  Hattie felt the room continue to spin as if she’d just gotten off a merry-go-round. She had waited for a minute or so in the corridor, both hands against the walls, until she heard his banging. The noise had almost ruined her enjoyment. Her return had been as wonderful as the initial crossover. She was still awash in the flush.

  She had stumbled forward and opened the door, realizing they had never left. She had looked at her clothing. She no longer wore the finely pleated pants she’d bought in a Park Avenue boutique with Margery during an afternoon of shopping. Her blouse was different as well. She had on the same outfit she wore when she first arrived in Manhattan. She checked her tote. Everything was still there, as if she’d never left.

  “How long?” she demanded.

  Masumi looked at her watch. “Just over twenty minutes. You didn’t tell us to time you.”

  “Why?” Eliot demanded. “Why go in there and lock the door and keep us waiting like that?”

  “I was gone, Eliot.” No one responded. “For almost three months.”

  More silence, the sickening kind that follows the words of the mad.

  “It worked,” she said, grabbing her desk to steady herself. “Alice, Masumi, can you get the case back in place? Get my books in order? Tomorrow morning, Masumi, meet me in my apartment and we’ll discuss your crossover.”

  Alice and Eliot both glared.

  “Alice,” Hattie said. “I promised Masumi she goes next, so stop pouting. And Eliot, accept the fact of what has happened so that you can help me explain it. Masumi, I want you to choose any book: your favorite, something you won’t mind reading, and reading again. Nothing too adventurous, please.” A wave hit her, threatening to buckle her legs. “Help me to my apartment.”

  They led her out of the office.

  Hattie tossed her bag on her kitchenette table, then slowly sat in one of the chairs. She placed her head in her hands, enjoying the lingering effects of the transition.

  “I need to sleep. I feel like I’ve been up all night—”

  “Are you telling me you went somewhere?” Eliot asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  She reached inside her bag and withdrew the stack of loose-leaf papers that comprised her novel. She set them on the table and fingered the corners.

  “Your novel?” he asked. “You went into your novel?”

  “Well, no,” Hattie said, disliking how he put it. “I went into the narrative of the novel.”

  He crossed his arms and tried to puff up his meager chest. “Prove it.”

  She expected the demand. She had prepared.

  She and Margery had spent most of their time together walking through the city, talking, Hattie playing her role as a second aunt to the young first-year Columbia student, Harriet Sterling (hoping it wouldn’t come up how much she looked like her).

  Young Hattie was away for the summer, having just completed spring exams. She had gone home to see her parents in Macon, Georgia, both of whom had asked her to return because her father had lost his job at the factory. They were unable to send summer funds. She helped her mother run their small grocery store while her father looked for more work.

  Margery stayed in Manhattan, enjoying her freedom. She wasn’t yet a possession of Hattie’s; they were only acquaintances at that point; no phone numbers had been exchanged. Their relationship would blossom the next year with a first kiss in, of all places, a library.

  As Aunt Betty, Hattie doted on Margery with dinners, dancing, and shopping. They spent a few days a week together that summer. Margery gave Aunt Betty a violet tulip as a gift. Hattie took back a single petal to her hotel and placed in her manuscript.

  Proof.

  When Hattie opened her manuscript to show Eliot, she couldn’t find the petal. She batted down a sickening anxiety, refusing to believe it hadn’t crossed over with her.

  “Just stand there and wait, Eliot, and don’t look at me like that.”

  She began searching page by page, licking her thumb, choosing a page, placing it aside. A quarter of the way through she spotted the interpolation.

  Right in the middle of a page, a few lines of dingbats, then, not the flower, no, a few words repeated over and over, a phrase Margery had used: for lovers everywhere, a violet tulip. Right there, an interpolation in Hattie’s own document. Of course.

  Hattie pointed to the text.

  “That’s your proof?” Eliot asked.

  “Well, no,” she said, realizing what it seemed. “Margery spoke those words and gave me a flower—”

  “Are you kidding me?”

  “I have the interpolation.”

  “So what?”

  Hattie stared at him, mouth open, unsure what to say, then realized what she needed to do.

  * * *

  They argued for an hour before Eliot turned on his heel and left. He had never done that before, never once, not even when a fumbling pass had been deflected, not even that time Hattie told him she couldn’t love him like he wanted (she blamed it on menopause, but she guessed he knew the truth).

  Hattie kept insisting that she’d gone somewhere (not back in time, no, she tried to explain, more like to a parallel universe). He laughed at her attempts to rationalize, even while she struggled to focus.

  They have no idea. He has no idea.

  But Eliot returned, then helped her to bed. He sat on its edge and tucked her in. She curled up, one thing on her mind:

  “Eliot, my lack of proof is a small setback. I just have to master one final skill. I’ve thought about this problem since Towns’s successes, mulling over the facts, drawing from this wide tapestry a simple insight: the incantation process can be learned. Towns merely filled the beats, albeit with his own distasteful but authentic sounds. I studied those full-throated growls in the .wav printouts. They’re primarily uniform in dynamic level, while their pitch varies. This is sim
ply Towns’s interpretation of how to fill the beats. A locater like him should have no guaranteed skill in incanting. Or rather, if you have any ability to sense the N.P.B., incanting shouldn’t be a problem, if you can vocalize. Reading, writing, stitching, these are the rare talents.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I just have to sing.”

  “I’m going to stay with you tonight.”

  She rested for a few hours, then woke up and moved to her kitchenette table. He chose another chair in a corner, where he could watch her.

  Hattie sat at the table with her notebook and novel and stitched the interpolation with the consonants, with two beats, plus enactment and conclusion ephemera.

  “I spent hours with Masumi,” she told him, “when we first wrote the sequencing program for the Red Delicious apple interpolation. Masumi sat at the board; I was at the mic. We spent months digitizing a library of aural consonants. At first, we spent way too much time manipulating these elements. I now believe you can even hum them yourself, as long as the beats are filled properly. The empty beats; yes, the beats. You have to own them. When incanted in a full stitch: success.”

  She memorized the incantation in a few hours without any audio help.

  How to fill the empty beats?

  “You need to rest,” he said.

  “You can stay, but don’t interfere.” Hattie took a deep breath, letting the air leave her lungs slowly. “I bet the beats can be filled with any sound rendered in full-voice.” She’d once spent a summer in Arizona learning Native American dance, and even how to drum and chant. “I know what to do.”

  “What’re you planning now?”

  “To prove it to you, Eliot.”

  She stood.

  Hattie placed her palms on her diaphragm and opened her ribcage while keeping her back straight. She hummed solfège notes to warm her voice.

  Then, she began the incantation with low consonant sounds punctuated by high-pitched, ululating wails that echoed off the walls. She did this a number of times, reciting from memory, hypnotizing herself. She finally felt confident, even though Eliot sat rigid in his chair, eyes wide like saucers.

  “Here we go.”

  Hattie performed the entire incantation with the enactment and conclusion elements. Now in silence, she waited for something to happen.

  A fresh violet tulip petal, still glistening as if plucked from the field, lay on the edge of the table close to her manuscript.

  “There!”

  Eliot leaned out of his chair to see behind the manuscript. He said nothing as he shifted his glasses.

  Hattie shuffled her feet in a quick dance.

  She floated over to the petal, bent, then sniffed the aroma of a fresh flowerbed on a spring morning. The enormity of her actions—the reading, the crossover, the incanting—meant she understood the N.P.B. She could now speak with authority. Her conviction was now more than a personal perspective.

  “I’ve been to the other side and have brought back proof. If only a tulip petal this time, what about the next, and the next? The possibilities are endless. So much to think about. My Society of Spinners can begin its practical as well as its theoretical mission.” Trembling, she placed the petal on her manuscript. “This must be protected.”

  Eliot moved to her side and gently grabbed her arm. “The flower, or the portal?”

  “Imagine someone uses my method for political ends—or something worse. If the barriers between the worlds of narrative and reality are permeable, all sorts of imagined things could be brought back. I now see the true danger in Corbin Lyell’s vision and Dreya’s application. If narrative has that much power to enter reality …”

  Hattie shivered and drew her robe tighter; she wondered if it might be wise to pretend it was harmless.

  No, the scholar in her would not. Learning required more investigation. Caution, then, she thought, and went rummaging for a pad and pen.

  She spent the rest of the night in her office detailing her experience, while Eliot sat in his chair and stared at her, not saying a word.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The next morning, Masumi drove her trusty Honda Civic an hour northwest to Hexcom.

  She saw a sprawling complex of buildings peppered liberally between lawns sprouting copses of Douglas fir. The place looked like a campus rather than a private business park.

  Security directed her along a winding road toward headquarters, a long, squat glass building fronted by shrubbery and a disturbing fountain. Inside, a large, squid-like creature appeared to be crawling out of the water, its tentacles entwined in steel letters spelling Hexcom United.

  Towns waited by the fountain. “Neato, huh?”

  “I’ve only got a few hours,” Masumi replied, unnerved by the creature. “Show me what’s so important.”

  She walked past him, triggering the electric door to open inward.

  He caught up. “It’s amazing here.”

  They moved through an air-conditioned lobby that looked like a doctor’s waiting room. Two glass doors to the side of an empty receptionist area opened.

  A jolly father-and-son duo entered the room, the son skipping, both high-fiving as if they’d just met their favorite sports star. Their shoes tapped on polished faux tiles the size of cafeteria trays as they headed for the exit.

  Iconic signage and promotional materials from horror and sci-fi pulp fiction and film adorned the walls. Big, saucer-like spaceships, a giant spider walking down the street. She recognized the bride of Frankenstein. A few panels dedicated to modern comic book art featured a barely clothed, buxom female alien with devil horns, sporting a flaming sword. Then, a few icons of modern sci-fi and horror: E.T., the Giger alien, even the Cloverfield monster.

  “Charming,” Masumi said. A few mothers and sons sat patiently, waiting to be called. “What is this place?”

  “They have an archive of anything and everything from speculative pop culture,” Towns said. “It’s massive. They showed me.” And then, “Want to see?”

  “Is that why I’m here?”

  Towns frowned. “No.”

  Masumi wondered why anyone would come here to see an “archive” when you could order this stuff easily through the Internet, unless they archived bleedover material …

  “What did you want to show me?”

  Towns withdrew a small plastic security card from his pocket and led her to a nondescript side door, annoyed she hadn’t said yes. That would have meant more time together. He could have taken her to a workstation and told her to choose anything of interest. Then, they could have waited together in the private room while an army of employees tracked down the material.

  Obscure Japanese film about giants destroying Tokyo? For sure.

  They probably already had digitized selections available on the network. If not, they’d offer you refreshment and a suggestion of other material while they tracked down a copy.

  Pretty cool, according to Towns, but only the most die-hard fanboys used this service. It looked like a sure money loser. The real money was made by selling authenticated bleedover examples. Still, he wanted to get her alone in one of the rooms. Maybe she would take pity on him.

  Maybe a kiss. Maybe even …

  Towns led her to another security checkpoint guarded by an asshole named Jacob.

  Jacob sat at a desk and watched whatever he wanted all day long—pretty much the coolest job you could get. Towns spent an unfortunate hour with him yesterday, waiting for an escort. Jacob was short, skinny, and wiry and looked like he should be fixing your car. He wore Hexcom’s standard dark brown slacks and short sleeve button down, and he was proud of his knowledge of the most bizarre material.

  Towns was glad he flicked off his monitor before Masumi saw the soft-porn/slasher flick.

  Towns introduced her. “Can you call Max?”

  Jacob grabbed a phone hanging on the wall, punched numbers, and waited, unable to take his eyes off her.

  She ignored him. “Towns, what is this plac
e, exactly?”

  Jacob said a few words, then hung up. “He’ll be here in a minute. I’m Jacob, by the way.” He cast Towns a dirty look. “They have me on door duty. You want to know what they do here?”

  Towns was happy she refused to acknowledge him beyond a slight nod.

  “I have an hour or two before I need to be back, Towns.”

  He cast Jacob a fuck-you-thank-you look.

  “To Dr. Sterling?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Figures.”

  “You have no idea what they do here, do you?” Jacob asked.

  “Not at all,” Masumi said.

  “Siegen’s coming to get you,” Jacob said, triumphant, “so that’s a good thing.”

  “How far down you been, Jacob?” Towns asked.

  He stammered enough to reveal he had no idea what lay behind the door.

  Towns smiled. “I thought so.”

  He watched Jacob annoy Masumi with more questions about her favorite films, until the door opened and Max Siegen appeared.

  “Max!” Towns said. “Hey!”

  Max wore his typical summer gear: a pair of baggy shorts and, today, a loose-fitting floral shirt that screamed out-of-place. He had a natural tan, and the sunglasses bunching up his hair suggested he might hop on a flight to Hawaii. Max was a guy with hairy forearms and meaty hands that looked like they’d spent time handling heavy tools. His slight paunch and flushed face meant he probably had a blood-pressure issue, but he didn’t care.

  As he’d explained it, he didn’t need to see a doctor if nothin’ was broke. Towns thought he was cool.

  After brief introductions, Max led Towns and Masumi into an elevator that descended a floor.

  He handed Masumi to a security guard in an office whose job it was to process visitors. The guard took her picture, created an ID, and returned her with a brand new Hexcom visitor’s sticker on her shirt.

  “Follow me.”