by R. L. King
“Yeah, join the club,” I muttered. “I’m gonna order T-shirts soon.”
“How’d you meet that Stone guy, anyway?” he asked. “Seems like he’s behind all this strange stuff in your life.”
I glanced at Al’s cartoon head; he was watching me with interest, as if waiting to see how I’d reply.
Amber and I hadn’t talked much about Al—I wasn’t sure why, but I think part of it was because, aside from being one-quarter bear shifter, she was one of the more down-to-earth, straightforward people I knew. One of the reasons I had fallen in love with her so fast was that she was uncomplicated. What you saw was what you got with Amber. She was sharp and quick-witted and had a wicked sense of humor, but she didn’t play games.
With Al, on the other hand, I always felt like he had secrets buried within secrets, to the point where I was sure I’d never get to the bottom of them. I doubt even Verity had, and she was closer to him than anybody I knew. I think, somewhere deep down, I felt like if Amber’s and Al’s worlds intersected too closely, some of his would rub off on her, and I didn’t want that. I felt a little guilty about it, but there you go. “Long story,” I told him.
“Give me the short version. It’ll take my mind off unscrewing heads.” He was moving more slowly than I was, and had only made it halfway down his row of tables when I was almost done with mine.
I shrugged. “He helped me track down Verity a few years back, when she was in some trouble. Magical trouble, it turned out, though I didn’t know that at the time. He was hunting the same people from a different angle, and we ran into each other in the middle of it. He saved my life.”
“And then you just decided to stay up there in the Bay Area?”
“It made sense. V wanted to apprentice with him, and she was only seventeen at the time. I couldn’t exactly leave her there alone with a guy I barely knew. I didn’t have much going on down in Ventura anyway, so I figured I’d hang out and keep an eye on her.”
Connor removed another head and put it on its plate. “And now they’re together? That doesn’t bother you at all?”
I tensed.
He must have sensed it, because he held up his hands. “Sorry, man. Personal question. I’ll back off.”
“No, it’s okay.” I thought about it. Was I truly okay with it? The two of them had been together for more than a year now, but Verity was also in tight with Kyla, the head of the Harpies up in San Francisco.
“I guess I am,” I said at last. “Al’s my best friend. He might be an odd dude, but he’d move mountains for me, and he’d die before he’d let anything happen to V. And besides, mages live a long time, so the age difference isn’t as big a deal with them.” I unscrewed a young Asian man’s head and lowered the dome over it. “Anyway, it’s none of my business. Right now I’m focused on Amber. Which is why I want to figure this fucking puzzle out and get back to the real world.”
He chuckled. “You think she’ll be doing anything like this?”
“What, screwing heads onto dummies and watching tentacle-monster porn?” I shot him a withering look. “I’m gonna doubt it.”
“Why do you figure this happened?” he asked, sounding more thoughtful than usual. “Why would somebody do this? You got any magical enemies?”
“Not that I know of. Al has plenty, but I don’t think most of them are into stuff like this. And besides, why would they come after me? I’m pretty much a big nobody in the magical world.” I reached the end of my row and started up his from the other end. “I dunno, man. I thought I did, but I’m starting to doubt it. Come on. I still don’t have a clue what we’re supposed to do here, and we’re running out of time.”
I kept returning the extra heads to their spots and Connor did too, until we met up at the middle of his row with the last unknown, a pale guy with a blotchy face and chubby features. “You do the honors,” Connor said, pointing at it.
Anticipation growing, I twisted the head off, trying not to look at the goofy expression on the guy’s face. I put it on the plate and covered it.
Instantly, as soon as the cover hit the plate, all thirteen of the headless dummies disappeared, leaving only the nineteen corresponding to my friends. The ones facing me all grinned.
“Yes!” I pumped my fist. On a whim, I picked up the dome in front of the nearest empty chair. As I suspected, the head underneath was gone too. “Try the door!”
Connor hurried to the end of the car and tried both the exit door and the one to the galley. “Still locked.”
“Damn.” Okay, so we hadn’t solved the whole puzzle yet. But we were obviously on the right track. “But what the hell are we supposed to do now?”
As Connor moved back up the aisle, a female voice spoke from behind him. “I hope you’ve had a chance to look at our selections.”
I spun to see the same female version of the bartender standing near the galley door. She was still naked, except for a tiny white apron tied around her waist and five-inch stiletto heels. She held a menu with Chez Nostalgia across the front in fancy, looping letters.
I forced myself to look her in the eyes, but it wasn’t easy. Even standing still it seemed like she was writhing sensually. “Distracting” didn’t begin to cover it.
“What the hell are we supposed to do?” I repeated. “We did the thing with the heads.”
She laughed. “Yes, I see you’ve made some space at the tables. It’s a good start, but you’re not done yet. Better hurry. Believe me, you don’t have much time left and you don’t want to run out.”
Her shudder rippled through her entire body, and I quickly directed my attention elsewhere. When I looked back at her, she was seated at one of the empty chairs at the table closest to the galley, one leg crossed over the other, the menu on the table in front of her.
“Hey, can I look at that?” I asked, pointing. “Maybe it’ll help us figure out our…selections.”
She smiled, showing even white teeth beneath her blood-red lipstick. “Be my guest, handsome.”
I snatched up the menu, but when I opened it, the inside was blank. “What the hell?” I demanded. “There’s nothing here!”
“Oh, honey, here at Chez Nostalgia, you write your own menu.” She plucked it from my hand, and as she did, the restaurant’s name on the front lit up in bright pink. “Everyone here has a different story. If you want the optimal dining experience with us, you have to make this one your own.”
She faded from view again, taking the menu with her.
I growled in frustration and slammed my fist down on the nearest table. The plates and silverware jumped, and the cartoon heads blinked in surprise. “Damn it, I don’t get what we’re supposed to do!” My brain felt stuck between gears, and the harder I tried to think, the more static seemed to build up.
Connor didn’t answer. He looked as confused and frustrated as I did.
Think, Jason. In the background, the clickety-clack of the train’s wheels on the track seemed to get louder—and was it getting faster, too? Wherever we were headed, were we picking up speed? My heart thundered along in rhythm with the wheels.
I took a few deep breaths and focused on my friends’ words again: in an escape room, everything could be a clue. In my mind’s eye, the swirling pink words on the front of the menu appeared again: Chez Nostalgia.
“Nostalgia,” I muttered. “So…memories. Thinking about things that happened in the past.” That made sense, since the nineteen cartoon dummies at the tables represented friends from several stages of my life. But what did it mean?
Across from me, Connor had picked up one of the bottles of wine, contemplating it like he was trying to decide whether to open it and pour himself a glass. “Hey!” I called as a sudden idea struck me.
“What?”
“Does it say anything on the wine bottle?”
“Like what? It’s wine.”
I snatched it from his hand and stared at the label. I didn’t recognize the brand, but that didn’t surprise me. I was more of a beer guy than
a wine fancier. The wine itself was red, and the date on the bottle was from twelve years ago. Nothing particularly out of the ordinary, unless I was supposed to deduce something from the brand name.
“Give me a second,” I told Connor, and began moving up and down the tables, picking up the other wine bottles and reading their labels.
They were all different. The brand names were different, some of them were red and some white, and even the shapes of the bottles were different. Each one had a different year on it, ranging from one to fifteen years old. There wasn’t one for each year, though—some of them had duplicate years. Each table had two bottles, for a total of sixteen.
“This has got to be important,” I told Connor, holding one of them up.
“What—like maybe we’re supposed to figure out which ones go on which tables?”
It was a good idea—better than anything I’d come up with so far. I looked at the nineteen dummies spread out around the eight tables. As usual, the ones facing me were watching me. They couldn’t lean forward in anticipation, but they managed to make it look like they were. Al in particular, seated next to Dave my high school buddy, seemed to be very interested in my next move.
I held up another bottle, one in each hand, and compared them. One was red and the other white, with dates marking them as two and ten years old. But what did it mean? Should the white wine go together? One red and one white on each table? Maybe arrange the dates in chronological order?
That last one seemed like my best idea so far. “Come on—help me arrange them by date order!” With a kind of frantic energy, I began moving back and forth, gathering up the bottles and sorting them with the oldest first and the newest last. Connor, who didn’t look like he was buying my reasoning, nonetheless helped me spread them out on the eight tables, two at a time, starting with the one-year-old bottle and ending with two of the fifteen-year-olds.
“There!” I yelled to nobody in particular. “How’s that? Are you happy now?”
Nothing happened.
The cartoon heads continued to watch me. Did Al look disappointed? It was hard to tell, since the faces didn’t convey the same depth of emotion as a real person.
“I don’t think that’s it,” Connor said.
“What was your first clue?” I snapped. Then I shook my head. “Sorry, man. Just getting a little stressed.”
“No sweat. I get it. I am too.”
He didn’t look stressed, though—at least not as much as I did. I chalked that up to his more mellow nature and picked up one of the bottles at random. I had to be missing something.
Nostalgia…
Everybody has their own story…You have to make this one your own.
“Connor…”
“Yeah?” He’d gone back to the galley door again, maybe in hopes it might open this time.
“I just had a crazy idea.”
“Yeah?” He ambled back over.
“That waitress said I should make this my own story.”
“She did?” He chuckled. “I wasn’t listening. I was too busy looking at—well, you know. I guess it’s a good thing you were, though, or I’d have to punch you out.”
“Better wait till after we get out of here. Anyway—look around us.” I waved my arm to emphasize my words, taking in the whole room. “This is my story. Now that we got rid of those other guys I didn’t recognize, the only ones left are my friends. The people I know.”
“Okay, that makes sense, I guess. But what’s that got to do with the wine bottles?”
“Maybe nothing. But…” My brain was spinning now, clicking along with the train’s wheels and my thumping heart. “…the bottles all have dates on them, and they’re all chronological. Sixteen bottles, two per table. And look—some of them cluster around certain dates. Here are five that range from fifteen to twelve years ago. Then three around ten or eleven years, and then a break and more around five years and newer.”
“I’m not following.”
I looked at the dummies, a half-formed idea bouncing around my head like a fly at a bright light. My gaze settled on Dave. “I met Dave there when I was fifteen. We were still in high school. If I’m thirty now, that means it was fifteen years ago.” I pointed in turn at three other guys: Shane, Chris, and Kurt. “I met Chris and Kurt that same year. And look—there are two bottles with a date fifteen years ago.”
“Okay…but they’re spread out all over the room, and like you said, there are two bottles from fifteen years ago. How are you gonna handle that?”
I looked at Dave’s face, then at Chris’s across the room. They were both smiling. “I think I’ve got it! You’ll have to help me, though.” I grabbed Al’s dummy under its arms and hefted it from the seat next to Dave. I thought it would be light, considering how easily Connor had lifted another one earlier, but it felt heavy and unwieldy, like one of those dummies firefighters use to practice dragging people out of buildings. “Ugh. This is gonna be fun.”
Connor narrowed his eyes. “What are you doing with him?”
“Moving him. We gotta move Chris and Kurt to this table, and get Al and Ty away for now until we figure out where they belong.”
“Uh…those things are heavy. Why don’t you just move the heads around?”
I felt like Homer Simpson. D’oh! “Uh…Yeah. Good idea. Go grab the guy over there at that table, and I’ll move these.”
A few minutes later, we had Chris’s and Kurt’s heads screwed onto dummies at the first table to join Dave, and Al’s and Ty’s sitting on another table across the room. Even in their disembodied state they were still watching us. Apparently we were the most entertaining thing in the room. I put the two bottles with fifteen-year-old dates on the table in front of them and waited.
Nothing happened, but that was okay. We weren’t done yet.
“What next?” Connor asked.
“Give me a minute to think.”
“I think I just saw something out the window.”
I whirled around. “What?”
“I don’t know. It flashed by too fast to see. I think we’re moving fast, Jason. Like, really fast. You don’t think this thing’s gonna derail, do you?”
As if to emphasize his words, the train made a little lurch, jerking me sideways into the table where I’d put Al’s and Ty’s head. Al’s rolled off and landed on the thick carpet with a soft thunk.
I scrambled to pick him up. He looked indignant. “Sorry, man. I’m working as fast as I can.”
There was nothing to write on or with in here, so I struggled to keep my life’s timeline straight in my head. Fortunately, the dates on the wine bottles helped. I directed Connor, and between the two of us we managed to move the heads around and pair them with wine bottles until everybody was where they were meant to be based on the year I’d met them. Three high school friends from later in my term were at the next one, followed by a couple tables of Academy guys, two old friends from Ventura, and then Al at his own table with two bottles of five-year-old wine. The second to last table included Leo Blum, Ty, and one other guy I’d met through my PI work.
“That just leaves you, man,” I said, holding up Connor’s bearded cartoon head. “Looks like you’re all alone here.”
“Sweet. More wine for me.”
More aware than ever of how fast the train was going and wishing I knew exactly how much time we had left, I positioned Connor’s head above the last dummy’s screw and twisted it on, then stepped back and waited.
Nothing happened.
“Oh, come on!” I yelled to the room in general. “That’s got to be the right idea!”
Connor hurried over and tried both doors again, but shook his head. “Still locked.”
I almost wished the tentacle things would come back, but the TVs had disappeared from the dining car. I guess monster porn and basketball highlights didn’t go with high-class dining.
“Having trouble, boys?” came a voice from behind us. “Dinner service is over soon, so if you don’t make your selections so
on, we’ll have to seat you another night.”
Once again, the nude waitress was back, lounging against the wall, stretching her arms above her head.
I swallowed hard. Down, boy. “Come on,” I protested. “We did it right. I know we did. So how come it isn’t working?”
She laughed, and once again I couldn’t help thinking I’d seen her somewhere before.
That’s crazy. You’d remember a woman who looked like her. “What’s so funny?”
“Oh, nothing. It’s going to be fun having you here with us forever. Don’t worry, though—we have great food, and fantastic entertainment. You won’t be bored, I promise.”
“I am not staying here forever!”
“Well, if you don’t want to, you’d better figure out what you did wrong. Because right now, your hospitality leaves a lot to be desired.”
“What’s that mean?” I yelled.
She laughed again and faded away.
This was crazy. This was absurd. I’d been playing along so far, but it occurred to me that they could string me along forever if I let them. I only had my assumption that we were even on the same train, and that the next car—assuming we figured out this fucking puzzle and made it that far—was the last one. The waiter, the male one, had said so before, but who knew if he was telling the truth? Who knew if anybody around here was telling the truth?
The cartoon heads were looking at me with sympathy, but they still didn’t offer any suggestions.
“What does that even mean?” I snapped at Connor. “My hospitality leaves a lot to be desired? What hospitality?”
“I dunno, man. But I’m starting to get nervous. Something smells wrong, and it’s stronger. You better hurry up and figure it out.”
I spun away from him, frustrated, wishing once again that Al was here. Usually I was good at this kind of thing.
Hospitality. How could I show hospitality to a bunch of cartoon dummies? I had them at the right tables! I’d matched them up with the right dates. What else did I need to—
For the second time, I got a mental picture of Homer slapping himself on the forehead. “I am an idiot!”
