by R. L. King
“What? Are you okay?” Connor gripped my arm hard. “Talk to me, man!”
I didn’t know what to say next. “Just…drink it,” I muttered. “I can’t explain it.”
About the only thing that hadn’t changed was that the general shape and size of the car were still the same as before. Aside from that, all bets were off. I’d never done drugs before, aside from smoking a joint once in high school, but if a drug trip was anything like what I was seeing now, I could see why people might give it a try.
“What…the hell…” Connor said next to me.
Every wall and ceiling surface in the car was covered with faintly glowing, pulsing graffiti in all kinds of colors. The tables were gone, and so were Al and Stan. The bar was still there, but now it was made of a smooth black surface studded with sparkling stars. Behind it, the image was now animated, with the storm-tossed ship actually pitching and bobbing on the waves as the wind whipped its sails. The little model of the train car was still there, its windows pulsing with the same glow as the full-sized version. The windows were still there too, with the strange shapes flashing by, but now instead of trees they looked like writhing plants, tumbling and climbing over each other, stretching tendrils as thick as my arm out toward the train. Each time they contacted it, another knock sounded. I couldn’t tell if the knocks moved the train, but it felt like they might.
“Congratulations,” a voice said. “The first step is always the hardest.”
I jerked my head back toward the bar.
The bartender was back…only he was different now.
A lot different.
Where before he’d been a sensuous, snakelike young guy, now he was a red-headed woman, stark naked, with the kind of figure that made priests reconsider their vows. I didn’t know how I knew they were both the same person, but I did. Maybe it was that they had the same glittering green eyes and amused, confident stare.
I didn’t think it was possible to make the act of wiping down a glass into an erotic experience, but damned if she didn’t. Down, boy. You’re engaged. And she’s probably another one of those tentacle monsters anyway. “What are you talking about?”
She leaned forward, putting the glass down and gripping the bar with both hands. She had long fingernails painted blood red, and her gaze never left mine. “Time’s getting short, handsome. Your brain and your gut are your friends now. Go with the flow, do what you feel. Don’t be afraid—everything will be fine if you trust your instincts.” She looked like she might climb right over that bar.
“Uh…” I backed off as things started getting uncomfortably tight in my jeans area. Quickly I turned back to Connor, who was staring every bit as hard at the woman as I had been.
She laughed. “Maybe I’d better go. Things are getting a little…warm in here. Remember—trust your instincts!”
With a wink and a jiggle, she disappeared again.
Connor looked like he was having trouble processing what he was seeing. “Did you just see that?”
“You mean the hot naked redhead behind the bar?”
“Uh…yeah. Her too. But…this.” He spread his hands, indicating the whole room. “What…the hell…is going on? Did somebody put LSD in those glasses?”
“I don’t think this is drugs. I think it’s magic.”
He swiped at his face with his hands, pushing his hair back. “Magic.”
“You’ve never seen magic before?”
“Not like this.” He let out a loud breath. “This is what you deal with?”
“This is…weird even for me,” I admitted. I looked around again. “Al and Stan are gone. And the TV, too.”
“Can’t say I’ll miss that. Those tentacle things gave me the creeps.”
“You don’t look too sexy to us, either, Beardo,” came a grumpy voice. The scene from the TV lit up the car’s entire ceiling, This time, though, instead of Bob and Sally going at it alone, the glowing green sand was hosting an orgy. Everywhere I looked, tentacles and goo of all different colors writhed together, making happy grunting noises.
“I had to shoot off my mouth,” Connor grumbled.
I was barely listening, because I’d just spotted something I hadn’t seen before. I’d been examining the graffiti on the walls, noting that it seemed to be split about equally between obscene cartoons, words I couldn’t read, and drawings of actual objects from the train car traced in glowing blue, green, and red, as if somebody had taken a set of those black-light gel pens and drawn a train-car interior on the blank walls of a long, narrow room.
What I’d noticed was that the door that led to the next car had a padlock drawn on it—a big, cartoonish one in bright blue. As soon as I noticed it, a cartoon figure of a busty naked woman suddenly appeared pointing at it, her cheeky grin flashing on and off like a neon sign. Her nipples were flashing too, but I tried not to notice that.
“Hey, Connor—take a look at this.”
He came over from where he’d been checking out the bar. “It’s a lock. It’s a drawing of a lock.”
“Yeah. Look around—do you see a key anywhere? Or a drawing of a key?”
“How are we gonna use a drawing of a key?”
“I don’t know. Just…look around, will you?”
But a thorough search of the space didn’t reveal anything that looked like a key, either drawing or real. We reconvened near the door a few minutes later as Bob, Sally, and the rest of their oozy orgy plowed away above our heads and the knocking outside got both louder and more persistent. A few times, I was certain the train rocked back and forth on its wheels when something hit particularly hard. I tried not to think about how much time we had left to figure this out.
“I don’t see any keys, man,” Connor said.
“Yeah, me neither. But it’s gotta be here somewhere. Did you check all the walls?”
“Yeah. Nothing.” He pointed. “Unless that cartoon guy’s enormous pecker counts as a key…”
I didn’t think it did—and even if it did, there was no way in hell I was going to grab it.
“I’m gonna check the booze bottles—maybe it’s inside one of them.”
I didn’t think it was, though—any key inside one of the bottles would be far too small to fit the big lock anyway, but maybe that didn’t matter. Nothing else around here seemed to be making much sense. As I sat there at the bar, head in my hands as I stared down into its black starry depths and listened to the continued knocking all around us, I couldn’t stop thinking that if the lock was a drawing, the key had to be too.
“Trust your gut…” the redhead had said. “Do what you feel.” It was hard to feel much beyond the obvious when looking at a body like that, but if the original bartender had been correct and this puzzle wasn’t meant to be dangerous, maybe it had been a clue.
Knock.
Knock-knock.
Knock. Knock.
The sounds had a metallic quality, like somebody was pounding on the train’s outer skin with a crowbar. They hit hard, but didn’t appear to be getting anywhere. Almost as if whoever was out there wasn’t trying to beat their way in, but was expecting somebody to respond and let them in.
Then something clicked that hadn’t before: the knocks had a pattern.
“Hey, Jason—” Connor’s voice cut into my thoughts.
“Quiet,” I snapped, raising my hand. I closed my eyes and listened until I picked out the repeating pattern:
Knock.
Knock-knock.
Knock. Knock.
Knock-knock-knock.
Knock. Knock.
And then it started over again with a single knock.
“Sorry,” I said, focusing back on Connor. “I think I got something. What did you want?”
“Nothing—just to say I didn’t find any keys in the booze bottles. Or under them.”
“Didn’t expect you would. Listen.” I pointed up toward the ceiling. “There’s a pattern to the knocking.”
He closed his eyes and listened through two full repea
ts of the knocking pattern. “Damn, you’re right. But what’s it mean?”
“Maybe we’re supposed to reproduce it.” I walked to the wall, listened one more time to make sure I had it right, and then duplicated the knocking pattern.
Nothing changed. The knocks from the outside kept going.
“Wait,” Connor said. “They come from different parts. Like the roof and the sides. Always the same ones. Maybe we need to do it like they do.”
It was a good thought, but it didn’t work any better than the last try had. For one thing, with only two of us we couldn’t reproduce the pattern correctly—even with Connor’s height to reach the ceiling, it took too long for us to move from one part of the train to the other.
In frustration I returned to the middle of the car. “We’ve got to be missing something. I’m sure that pattern is important.”
“Maybe it’s a code,” Connor offered. “Look around the walls—maybe it matches one of the drawings.”
I didn’t think so. As I watched him moving along the opposite wall, examining the glowing graffiti, I became more and more convinced there was something I should be getting. Why did the knocks come from different places, especially if the two of us couldn’t duplicate them? Hell, the bartender had said he didn’t expect Connor to be here, which meant I was supposed to do this on my own. No way could I get from one side of the car to the other fast enough to—
Yes. Yes, I could.
As the solution came to me, I couldn’t help laughing.
Connor turned back to me at that moment. “What are you so happy about? If you’re thinking about that redhead again—”
“No. Not the redhead.” Still grinning, I hurried behind the bar and snatched up the little train-car model.
It took him a second to catch on, but then Connor’s grin matched mine. “Damn, man. Good thought.”
“Well, let’s see if it is.” I set the model down on the bar, listened to the pattern one more time, and then carefully knocked on the little thing with the same one, trying to hit exactly corresponding spots.
We both waited, holding our breath.
Outside the train, the knocks stopped.
I pumped my fist. “Yes!”
I expected the train-car model to pop open and reveal a key, but it didn’t. “Okay…we figured it out, but…”
“Look at the bar!” Connor yelled, pointing.
I pushed the model aside and gaped at the bar. The pinprick glows of the stars on the velvety-black surface were moving, flowing around as if the blackness were some kind of liquid. They swirled across the whole surface, forming a series of patterns, and then, as the two of us watched in amazement, they settled into the shape of a large, old-fashioned key.
In spite of my growing nervousness about the bartender’s time warning, I couldn’t help being impressed and intrigued. “This is a fucking escape room…” I muttered. “A magical escape room. On a train.”
“Huh?”
“I’ve never been to one, but a couple of my friends have. They lock you in a room with a bunch of puzzles you have to solve, and you can’t get out until you figure them out.”
He looked around. “That’s crazy.”
“Yeah. It is. Somebody’s messing with us.” I narrowed my eyes. “Dude…are you absolutely sure Al was out? That nobody else was on this train except the guys from the party?”
“Yeah!” He looked indignant. “Don’t insult my nose, man. Trust me—he was out, and there wasn’t anybody else here. Except the engineer and the bartender, anyway. And besides—come on. I’ve seen magic. There’s no way one guy could have done all this.”
“You don’t know Al,” I muttered, but he had a point. Even Al couldn’t be everywhere at once. I returned to my old theory, that somebody was messing with Al and I’d gotten stuck in the middle, because that had happened more than once. But either way, at least whoever it was seemed to be playing straight with us—so far, anyway.
I looked down at the starry key on the bar. “Okay, so we’ve got a key here, but no way to get it to the door. Any suggestions?”
He went back over to the lock, crouched, and examined it. “I don’t see anything here. The cartoon chick looks happier, though.”
She wasn’t the only one. Above us, Bob and Sally and Ted and Alice and twenty of their gooey friends were getting busy again, with all kinds of squelching noises to go along with their grunting. “If you guys drip any of your disgusting bodily fluids on my head, I’m gonna climb up there and rearrange your tentacles,” I snapped.
Somebody giggled, but at least nothing dropped on my head.
I looked at the lock again, then the key. On a whim, I reached down and tried to close my hand around it. My fingers hit the bar surface and stopped, just like I thought they would. The black stuff might look like liquid, but it was as solid as it had ever been. The glowing, pinpoint stars winked at me as if daring me to figure them out, like the world’s strangest dot-to-dot puzzle.
Trust your instincts…
Feeling like an idiot, I glanced over to make sure Connor was busy so he wouldn’t see what I was about to do if it ended up being wrong, and then touched the tip of my finger to one of the stars forming the key.
It glowed brighter.
Heart beating faster, I carefully moved my finger without lifting it from the surface, tracing each star in the key’s design one at a time. As I passed over each one, it lit up like the first one had. The ones I’d already touched stayed lit too. “Connor—is anything happening over there?”
“Not yet. Did you figure something out?”
“Maybe.” I continued tracing until I only had one more star left to cover. As I hit the last one, the whole thing flashed even brighter. Lines appeared to join all the dots, then the dots themselves disappeared, leaving the key outlined in pale blue. “Got it!”
Connor hurried over. “Nice. But…what do we do with it now? It’s here, and the lock’s over there.”
I tried to pick it up again but once more the bar’s surface stopped my fingers. Frustrated, I slapped my hand down. If I couldn’t pick the thing up, how was I supposed to use it? I was no further along than I was before.
But as my hand hit, I thought I noticed the key drawing move, just a bit. “Did you see that?”
“See what?”
I put my finger down in the center of the key and tried to push it. This time it moved easily, letting me shove it around on the bar’s surface without any protest.
Up above, the squishing noises of the tentacle creatures’ orgy stopped. When I glanced up, I saw all of them were watching me, still intertwined with each other. Some of them didn’t even have eyes, but it was as clear as anything that they were fascinated by what I was doing. So was the naked cartoon woman over by the lock.
Okay, ignore the weird. Focus on the problem.
The problem was that the lock was a drawing, the key was a different drawing, and the two of them were across the room from each other. I couldn’t lift the key, but somehow I had to get it over there.
Wait…it was a drawing. And I could move it. Who said I could only move it on the bar surface?
Holding my breath and feeling more than a little stupid again, I shoved the key to the edge of the bar and tried to push it over.
It slipped over the edge, disappeared for a second, and then reappeared next to the sink.
“Damn,” Connor said. “This is getting too weird for me.”
I didn’t answer. Now that I was on to something, I was fully focused. Moving carefully, I pushed the key over the edge of the sink. This time, it slid over and let me push it down the side to the carpet. A few minutes and a lot of careful pushing later, I’d maneuvered it along the wall and stopped it next to the cartoon woman. For a second I hesitated—should I ask her if I could push the key across her body?
She’s a cartoon character, you idiot.
Even so…she was obviously watching me, with her big toothy grin and flashing nipples. “You…uh…mind?”
She giggled, making her whole body shake in a really distracting way (hey, if you don’t think a cartoon character can be sexy, you’ve obviously never seen Jessica Rabbit) and patted her stomach.
From the ceiling, the tentacle orgy murmured and squelched.
Feeling entirely weird, I kept pushing the key until it crossed the woman’s stomach (she giggled more, like it tickled) until it rested on top of the glowing lock.
With a sound like a fanfare, the lock popped open.
The tentacle orgy cheered.
The naked woman clapped her hands and disappeared.
As her clapping faded out, the sound of someone else applauding faded in from behind me.
“Good job,” said a voice.
8
The bartender was back. He was in his male form again, dressed all in black, and he was still clapping. “Well done. I was afraid you wouldn’t get that one.” He looked at his wrist, where a watch should have been but wasn’t. “But it took you a lot of time. You’ve still got two more cars to get through. If you don’t hurry it up…” He made a clucking noise. “I can’t say what might happen.”
“What did you do with my friends?” I demanded. “Where are they?”
He made a languid shrug. “Safe. I promise you. All your friends are safe and sound—and if you get them out of this, they won’t remember a thing about what happened.” Nodding toward the door, he added, “But you’d better get on with it.”
There was something about him that made me want to paste him one across the face—but something strangely familiar, too. I couldn’t put my finger on it, though. He definitely wasn’t anybody I’d ever met before.
“Good luck!” he said brightly, and then disappeared again.
Connor was standing over by the door we’d just unlocked, but he hadn’t opened it yet. “Come on, man. I want to get out of here.”
I hesitated. What would happen if I just refused to play along? Part of me wanted to—as Verity and Al well knew and Amber was learning, I could be a stubborn bastard when I thought somebody was trying to jerk me around. And I was definitely being jerked around here, no doubt about it.
