She looked at him and blinked, and he tried as hard as he could to meet her gaze. Their heads moved closer together and he closed his eyes as their lips met. For that moment, his concern for their situation and the trauma of what they’d witnessed pushed into the back of his mind. He held Emma and kissed her until they both fell asleep.
Chapter Six
Jim made his way home safely, but not before detouring to his office. He knew he shouldn’t push himself any further, and he knew Liz would be on her way to greet him, but his curiosity was tugging at him. He opened the main door to the real estate office and felt his stomach lurch. The layout inside was different. The front office, though accessed by the same door as always, was smaller. Instead of three doorways off of it, there were simply two. He opened one and found his own office looking more or less the way he always kept it. Behind the other door was a conference room, though it was designed differently than the one he knew.
Feeling dizzy, he closed the office door behind him and took a few deep breaths of the outside air before getting back in the car. He stayed centered after that with no threat of fainting, but the whole ride he agonized over the muddled facts that he had at hand. Clyde was gone. He’d been gone since the previous night and for a short time that seemed a big enough problem all on its own. Now things had gotten infinitely scarier and more complicated. How was it possible that Liz didn’t know who Clyde was? How was any of this possible? He wondered if he’d wake up and realize it had all been some kind of terrible dream.
He somehow got home before Liz and went directly to their bed. He tossed off the blankets, knocking all the decorative pillows over to Liz’s side. He undid his belt and allowed his pants to drop around his ankles. He stepped out of them and flopped into bed, pulling the covers up over him like a scared little boy. Wasn’t that what he had become? No adulthood life lessons or education could prepare anyone for something this fucking impossible!
Jim closed his eyes. He was half asleep when he heard Liz enter the room. She sat down on the edge of the bed and put a hand on his head. “I’m home, baby.”
He opened his eyes and looked up at her. She looked concerned. You and I both, he thought.
“Okay,” Liz said. “Let’s talk about what happened.”
“I don’t really know what to say,” he replied. That was as close to the truth as anything.
“Who is this Clyde you kept going on about?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know, babe. I don’t think you’d believe me if I told you.”
“Try me.”
He took a deep breath and began. “This guy came into the office to show us a bunch of properties…
To his surprise, Liz listened carefully through his entire tale without interrupting. When he finished, he looked at her uncomfortably. Tears had started to well up as he’d described what happened to Clyde, and he struggled not to lose his composure completely. “Do you believe me?” he asked in a quiet voice.
“I believe that you believe everything you told me. I’m scared for you, Jimmy. What you’re saying… it can’t possibly be true.”
“I know it seems that way. But I’ve seen it.”
“This store. That only appears on the full moon and only on video.”
“I don’t know. Maybe it’s a reflection thing or something, but I don’t…wait!”
He sat up suddenly and grabbed his pants off the floor. He fished in the front right pocket and pulled out his cellphone. How had he not thought of this earlier? He pulled up the photos app and loaded the most recent images. “Look! Look at this!”
“I see the inside of an empty store. That’s the place you talked about?” She took the phone from him and studied it with intense scrutiny.
“Yes! Scroll back a few images. There’s a selfie.”
“Okay, I see it. This guy with you…he’s—”
“Clyde. The guy I’ve been telling you about. You’ve known him for years.”
“Jimmy, I’ve never seen that guy before. Ever.”
He sighed. “Yeah. I’m getting that. But that’s him. Just like I told you. And that building behind us, that’s the place.”
He reached for the phone and she handed it to him. He opened Google Maps and typed in Galaxi’s Collectibles. He handed the phone back to Liz.
“Okay, I loaded Street View. It’s a little hard to see in the selfie, but if you switch back and forth between that and Google Maps, you can see that the building right behind us is not there in the other image.”
She flipped between the two apps over and over. “Jesus Christ. How can that be?”
“God, thank you so much for even hearing me out, baby.”
“I honestly thought it was a practical joke… it’s not a practical joke, is it?” She eyed him suspiciously.
“No! God no, I swear!”
She frowned. “I didn’t think so. Wow.”
“I’m sorry to drop all this on you, with the baby coming and all.”
“Don’t worry about me, hon,” Liz said. “I don’t understand any of it but you need to stay away from that place. I need you to stay safe.”
“I have to help Clyde! I have to do something about all of this!”
“Then let’s go to the police. Let them look into it. This is ten thousand times too dangerous for you to be involved in. Leave it to professionals.”
“Do you really think there are any professionals for something like this? I mean, who am I gonna call?”
There was a pause, and they both burst out laughing. That was really good, he thought. He needed some levity because he had a feeling the whole situation was far from over.
The next morning, Liz begged and pleaded for Jim to take her with him to the police station. It escalated into something resembling an argument, but with no actual animosity behind the raised voices. In the end, she gave in to his rationale that she would have to take enough days off soon, and didn’t need to take one to help with something like this.
“I just don’t want you to be alone when everybody gives you a hard time,” she said as she sat down at the kitchen table. “They’re going to laugh at you. You know that.”
“I do. It doesn’t matter. I need to get to the bottom of this thing. Something very wrong went on in that store, and I need the police to figure out exactly what that was and what we can do to get Clyde back.”
“I get it,” she said. She shook her head. “It’s just that for the life of me I don’t know what they can do.”
He kissed her goodbye and left the house. According to the Internet, there were still a couple days that the full moon would be visible. He hoped that would mean there was still some time to access the store without having to wait a whole month. He didn’t know for sure if it would make any difference if that much time were to pass, but in his heart he felt the urgency. Clyde, his best friend, was lost somewhere out there in some weird way that Jim couldn’t explain. It was on him to see this through and solve the mystery, and it had to happen right away.
Jim pulled into the police station next to the township library. Most of the visitor spots were empty, and he picked the one closest to the building. He pulled a briefcase containing the marketing materials from Barkley and Barslitt out of the front passenger seat and tucked them under his arm. He had been astonished to find he still possessed the papers about the Butler Avenue property. Whatever force had edited Clyde out of existence had done it with a strange, savage precision. He felt sweat on his palms as he walked up to the double doors at the entrance.
He approached the desk positioned directly across from the doors. A woman wearing glasses with unusually large frames sat behind the desk. She greeted him with a smile. “Can I help you?”
“Yes, um… I’d like to talk to one of the detectives.”
The woman looked curious. “What is this in reference to?”
“Well… I need to report a disappearance.”
“Is it a minor or an adult?” the woman asked.
“An adult. My fr
iend and business partner.”
“I see. Okay. Have a seat over there and I’ll see who’s available.”
Jim walked over to an arrangement of chairs in the corner. So far so good. He sat down, trying to let his brain unwind. The TV across the way was showing an episode of some HGTV show, and Jim allowed himself to focus on it and not on the monumentally confusing situation he had stumbled into.
“How’s it going today?” a man asked.
Jim looked up. A heavyset man in his fifties was standing a few feet away. “I’m okay, how are you?”
“Fine, fine.” The man stuck out a hand and Jim shook it. “Detective Magen.”
“Jim Hamilton.”
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Hamilton. Why don’t you follow me down the hall and we can have a little chat.”
Jim got up. Magen led him down the hall, talking as he went. “I’ve been told you’ve got a missing friend. That true?”
“Yes. My friend Clyde Dawson.”
“Mmhmm.”
Magen opened a door along the hallway and beckoned for Jim to enter. Inside he saw a long metal table and three chairs.
“Take your pick,” Magen said. “Sorry for the sparse accommodations. We don’t usually get many visitors who are here of their own volition, if you catch my drift.”
“I understand.” Jim took one of the two seats on the far side of the table. Magen sat across from him.
“So tell me the situation with your missing friend,” Magen said.
“I don’t really know where to begin,” Jim said. He reached into the briefcase and pulled out the marketing pamphlet. “My partner and I, we’re in commercial real estate. A man came in and showed us this strip of properties.”
He continued on for quite some time. Detective Magen never interrupted, but “mmhmm’d” and “aah’d” and “I see’d” at all the appropriate times. Jim wondered what kind of crazy cooked-up stories the detective had heard in his time on the force to be so cavalier about everything he was being told.
When Jim finished, he sat back in the uncomfortable chair, awaiting some kind of verdict. Magen remained silent for what seemed to Jim like nearly a minute. Long enough to almost convince him to produce something more to say just to break the uncomfortable silence.
“That is some story,” Magen said at last.
“I understand it’s pretty out there,” Jim said. “I wish it made more sense.”
Magen held up a hand. “I’m not in the business of discounting outright anything that anyone says. There’s usually some truth hidden in even the most jumbled story. Having said that, I’m at a bit of a loss as to what you’d like me to help you with. If you had come to me saying your friend had gone missing, I’d be ten steps ahead of you tracking down his whereabouts. And that’s even with the…unusual specifics, shall we say, of how he went missing. But this stuff you’ve told me about how nobody remembers he existed? I don’t know where to go with that. Technically speaking, a missing person who never existed isn’t a missing person.”
“So you can’t help me?” Jim asked.
“I want to help you, Jim. I just don’t know where to begin. Please don’t take this the wrong way, but have you considered the possibility you might need psychiatric help? Things like this can happen when under stress. As you said, you’ve got so much going on at work and with the new baby…”
Jim was prepared to protest, but as he opened his mouth to speak he wondered if maybe Magen had a point. In the world as it was there was no Clyde, or so it seemed. And if he had talked to the kid at Galaxi’s, maybe that story about the missing store had put something into his brain.
“I don’t know,” he said in a weak voice. “I don’t really know what’s going on.”
“Well, listen,” Magen said. “Here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to come with you out to the place you’ve told me about. And you can show me what you can show me. And let’s go from there, okay?”
“Okay,” Jim said. “That would be really great. Thank you.”
Jim took his own car to the property on Butler. The whole ride over he pondered what Magen had suggested. He wondered what he would do if he couldn’t produce the magic store for the detective. Worse still, what if he somehow could see the store but the other man couldn’t?
He was able to find parking right along the corner next to Helen’s. He got out of the car and saw Detective Magen working his way down the sidewalk. Jim felt anxiety dig into his brain from all angles.
“Here we are,” Magen said. “So how do we do this?” He peered into the alley between the stores and studied the empty expanse. His forehead scrunched in thought so that his eyes were hardly visible.
“The store only appears on video or something like that,” Jim said. “I don’t know why but it doesn’t seem like the human eye can pick up on it.”
“Okay, show me.”
Jim took out his phone and opened the camera app. He stood next to the detective and panned around. Please work, he thought. Please!
The screen displayed Galaxi’s, and then the unusual, blank facade of the store in between, marked only by the door in the center.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Magen muttered. “There it is.”
He turned to Jim. “I hope I don’t have to warn you not to be using some Photoshop kinda thing to play a prank on me, right?”
“You can touch it. Go ahead.”
Magen put out one tentative hand and inched it slowly forward. Suddenly, he pulled it back. “Christ!” Then he reached it out again and caressed the invisible surface in front of him. Jim, watching on the phone, saw Magen slide his hand up and down the brick wall.
“You weren’t making this up.”
“No, sir, I wasn’t,” Jim said.
“Can we go inside?” Magen asked.
“I think so, but I don’t know if it’s safe. Nothing bad happened to me in there yet but something in there caused what happened to Clyde. I don’t know what he did differently than me.”
Magen considered this. “We don’t know what he did but we know what you did. Make sure we follow whatever you’ve done previously. What can you tell me about it? Did you touch any walls?”
“Yeah, I mean, once I was looking for Clyde I pretty much touched anything and everything. The one thing I can say is I didn’t close the door.”
“You mean when you were inside the store.”
“That’s right. I just had a sense about it. Like it was a bad idea. Maybe it would lock somehow and I wouldn’t be able to get out. That kind of thing.”
“Smart thinking. Okay. No closing the door. Now how do we get in?”
Jim explained how to use the footage on the camera to access the inside of the store. They opened the door and entered the pharmacy.
Jim turned on the light and the fluorescents bathed the room in their unnatural white glow.
“Fascinating,” Magen said. He took his own phone from his pocket and began snapping pictures in every direction.
Is he doing detective work or is he a tourist? Jim wondered. He thought the answer at that moment was a little of both. For his part, Jim reexamined the counter and the space behind it where he had found the one snippet of evidence that Clyde had been there. There was nothing new that he could see.
“Find anything?” Magen called.
“No, nothing,” Jim said. “What do you think?”
“No obvious evidence of foul play,” Magen said. “No evidence of anything, really. So I’m inclined to buy into your theory that something happened when your friend shut the door.” He shook his head. “I can’t believe I’m even entertaining these thoughts.”
Jim nodded. “Yeah. It’s so unreal, yet the room is so ordinary that you forget that all of this makes no sense. What can we do?”
“We don’t do anything. Go home and be with your wife. I will pull every record I can on this place. I’ll interview people around the area. See what they know. And I’ll be in touch if I come up with anything.”
“H
ow long will that take?” Jim asked.
“I don’t know,” Magen said. “This type of investigation usually takes some time, and that’s not factoring in the bizarreness of this whole thing…which means I will have to do a lot of this off the books unless I want to get myself thrown in the nuthouse.”
“I don’t think we have that much time!” Jim said. “This place only appears during the full moon.”
“So there will be another full moon,” Magen replied.
“We don’t know that it will definitely work then,” Jim said. “And I can’t help but feel like if there’s any chance to get Clyde back, that will be gone as soon as this place goes into hibernation again, or whatever the hell it is that it does when nobody can see it.”
Magen sighed. “Maybe you have a point. Hell if I know. Look, Jim, you want to come with me and do some interviews, that’s fine. I can’t bring anybody else along at this point anyway. But if we get into the slightest bit of a dangerous situation, you are staying out of it. And I mean any danger. If I ask a question and somebody sneezes in a suspicious manner, that’s where you step away. Got it?”
“Got it,” Jim agreed.
Chapter Seven
Dylan woke up at what his phone told him was just after three in the morning. He heard the distant clicking of footsteps, but as soon as he raised his head to place the source of the sound, it was gone.
Dylan turned back to his phone. The device had put itself into a reduced power setting to conserve battery. Since he had placed it in airplane mode, the phone had experienced a very slow drain, but he knew that it wouldn’t last forever. There were outlets along the walls of the store, but he had no way of knowing if they would produce power, and no charger to use, at any rate.
He wondered how the lights in the room were able to function. From what source did the store draw its power? Was it the version of the electrical company that existed in the 1980’s or the one in the present? Was it even connected to PECO at all or was there some otherworldly explanation?
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