Vacancy

by Fredric Shernoff

  Those questions pointed to one of the more curious things about the store. The interior seemed to be whatever existed in the present. It certainly wasn’t the version he saw through the windows from the street outside. Dylan thought the room he found himself in was not necessarily from 2018, either. Who could say? Maybe the pharmacist, Dr. Mike. Or maybe not. Whatever the man was up to, it predated the store going supernatural, didn’t it?

  Dylan’s growling stomach interrupted his thoughts. He sat up and linked his hands behind his back, stretching his sore muscles. For the first time he realized his bladder was in dire need of emptying. He imagined that was what had woken him in the first place. He looked to his side and saw Emma fast asleep.

  Might as well let her sleep, he thought. Dylan got up and opened the door. He was experiencing a very strange form of jet lag, spending so much time in a timeless environment, and his eyes and his brain both rebelled at the sight of so much sun coming in through the opening. He walked outside, making sure to leave the door wide open. That didn’t cause him much worry, since it seemed nobody from the past world could see or access his version of the room.

  He walked along the far side of the street. The same cars as always drove by. He didn’t see the car that had hit the man from the street corner, but he knew that one wouldn’t be along until several hours later in the day.

  He turned the corner and jogged behind the row of stores across from the pharmacy. In a hidden back corridor, he relieved himself against the wall. Once that task was accomplished, he zipped his pants and ran back around to Butler Avenue.

  The little bit of exercise felt good after sleeping in such an uncomfortable position for so long. That made him think of Emma again. What had happened between the two of them hours earlier wasn’t surprising under the circumstances. He had heard about people’s feelings for each other blossoming because of shared ordeals.

  Did that mean what he felt for her wasn’t real? He doubted that. He’d liked her from the first moment he’d seen her. He wondered about her feelings for him. She was scared and he was there to comfort her. He hoped there was more to it than that but he didn’t know. Understanding girls had never been his specialty.

  He decided to repeat their previous theft from the café. He ordered chocolate croissants for each of them and bolted as soon as the woman placed them on the counter. He had wanted to get drinks as well, but didn’t know how he could carry them. Besides, escaping without harm was the top priority. He didn’t think anything could get in to hurt them once they were inside the store, but he suspected that out on the street, the fact that he came from the future didn’t mean he was invincible.

  He got back to the pharmacy, sweaty and out of breath. Emma was sitting on the counter watching him. “I was worried about you,” she said. “I kept debating whether I should leave and look for you. But then I thought you’d come back when I was out and it would be one of those things.”

  “Yeah, that almost definitely would have happened.” He held up a semi-squished bag of croissants. “Breakfast? I hope you aren’t allergic to chocolate or anything.”

  “Nah, not allergic. Addicted, maybe.” She hopped off the counter and kissed him on the cheek. “You’re the best.”

  “So… now that we’re a little bit rested, any thoughts about what the hell we do?”

  “We can explore again, maybe.”

  “I don’t know,” Dylan said. “This place doesn’t have any answers. There’s no Internet we can access. I don’t even know where to begin.”

  “We can try to talk to Dr. Mike again,” Emma said. “He’s up to something and it ties into all of this. I know it does.”

  “All right. I’m willing to try anything at this point.”

  They left the store and turned to face the windows. A large woman leaned on the windowsill inside the building. She wore a bright green workout outfit like the kind Dylan had seen in an old clip on YouTube.

  “Where did she come from?” Emma asked.

  “I don’t think we’ve ever watched the store at this time of day. It’s just a little after the boy would have been in there. The one who usually sees us.”

  They watched the store for a few minutes. The woman in the green leotard left the window and disappeared from view. Shortly afterward, she appeared out of nowhere, materializing in the middle of the open door to their version of the store.

  “Excuse me,” Dylan said. “Could you ask Dr. Mike to come outside please?”

  The woman gave him a disparaging look. “Go in and talk to him yourself.”

  She turned and wandered down the street, a plastic bag filled with her purchases bouncing off her hip on one side and her purse bouncing off the other side.

  “Well that went terribly,” Emma said.

  “Thanks. Want to reset things and try again? Maybe you’d have more luck sweet-talking her.”

  “You’re saying I’m lovable?” She batted her eyes at him.

  Dylan smiled. “I’m saying you’re more manipulative.”

  “You’re amusing when you’re scared, you know that?”

  “Only way to be. Otherwise I’d be running screaming down the street.”

  “Hey what about the boy?”

  “The boy? What about him?”

  “Yeah, the boy who is always there when we reset,” she said. “What if we can get him to bring Dr. Mike out?”

  “Maybe. Let’s try it.”

  They started to walk back to the store.

  “Hey kids!” called the familiar voice of the man from the street corner. “Kids!”

  Dylan and Emma looked at each other. “Do you want to talk to him?” he asked.

  She shook her head. “I can’t. Not after what we saw. What we heard. I can’t be responsible for that again. I know you don’t think we’re to blame for any of this, but still. It was fucking awful.”

  “It was. Okay. Sorry dude, catch you next reset.”

  They walked back inside and shut the door.

  Back on the street in the reset timeline, Emma and Dylan watched the boy in the store.

  “I feel more than a little creepy spying on him,” Emma said.

  “I understand, but we don’t have the luxury of worrying about things like that. We need to get out of here and get home. Our families have to be worried sick about us by now.”

  “You’re right. It can’t be that much longer until he leaves, right?”

  “Probably won’t need to wait that long. Any minute now he should turn toward the window. When he does, he’s going to see us. Wait… there. Now!”

  The boy turned as Dylan had seen him do before. The boy saw the two teenagers watching him and stared at them curiously. Dylan waved and then gestured for the boy to come out. The boy watched with slight confusion, then understood and shook his head no.

  “Fuck. Come on kid,” Dylan said under his breath. He smiled as cheerfully as possible. He pointed to Emma. “She wants to talk to you!”

  The boy considered the request again. Slowly he stepped away from the window. Dylan felt his heart race in the endless moment before he saw the kid’s bright sneakers emerge from the doorway.

  “Hey buddy,” Emma said. “Could you do us a huge favor and ask Dr. Mike to come outside? You know, the man who works in this store?”

  “Okay,” the boy said. He turned around and disappeared behind the magic doorway. He was gone for what Dylan thought was an unusually long time. Finally, the boy emerged again and with him an angry woman.

  “I don’t know what you want Dr. Mike for, but go into the store yourselves and leave my son out of it!” she yelled. She dragged the boy by one arm toward their car.

  “Damn it!” Dylan cried. He pounded his fist on the wall of the cursed store. “What the hell are we going to do?”

  “Let’s just go back inside,” Emma said.

  Dylan cursed himself for being so vulnerable when Emma was depending on him. He sat on the counter and fumed while Emma paced back and forth, thinking out loud.
<
br />   “There has to be a way to get Dr. Mike to come out. But even then, I don’t know what he can tell us that will get us out of here. All of this has to do with whatever goes on in his version of the store to turn it into our version of the store. That seems obvious, right? But how do we even know what happened? It hasn’t happened yet!”

  “Why don’t you come sit for a minute?” Dylan asked. “You’re making me dizzy.”

  “Sorry. I know you’re down. Didn’t mean to make it worse.”

  “No. I’m sorry. You’re trying to figure things out. I’m the one stuck in my own head. I don’t know how anyone could take this for very long and not completely lose their fucking minds.”

  She sat next to him. He watched her slide onto the counter and felt his desire for her rise up again, and with it the lurking doubt that her feelings for him, whatever they were, came from anything other than being held prisoner by time.

  “You know how I told you I move around a lot?” she said.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I remember.”

  “Okay. Well, I move because of my dad’s job. He’s involved in some kind of consulting work that I never totally understand. He jumps from company to company every couple years, and every time he gets a new job my mom and I have to get uprooted and come along with him. He told me once that he wished we could just settle down somewhere, but that he has to go where the money is for the sake of the family.”

  “Well… that makes sense, doesn’t it?”

  “It makes sense if you think money is the only thing that matters. He never really sees what all that moving around does to me. And my mom, too. She can never truly make friends or get established anywhere before we’re off somewhere else. And it doesn’t bother my dad because he’s traveling a lot and just so busy with work that he doesn’t have the time for any kind of social life.”

  “But still,” Dylan said, “he’s gotta make a living.”

  “He’s a smart man. He could make a living doing something that didn’t fucking disrupt his family over and over.” She paused. “Can I tell you something?”

  “Sure. Anybody I could tell would just forget it happened.”

  She took a second to process this and burst out laughing. “Okay, that was pretty good. I just meant, like, you won’t judge me or anything if I’m honest with you?”

  “No judgment. Promise.”

  “Okay. The day I met you? In that drug store?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I had just had a huge fight with my dad. I told him I hated him for moving us again, and that I didn’t ever want to speak to him again. I told him he ruined my life.” She looked down at the floor. “I was thinking of running away when I met you.”

  “But you didn’t,” Dylan said.

  “No, I didn’t. I met you, and found out we would be going to the same school in the fall, and I thought maybe things wouldn’t be so bad after all.”

  Dylan smiled. “That’s pretty nice to hear. So… did you talk to your dad after that?”

  She shook her head. “No. I kept avoiding him. Barely acknowledged his presence. He kept telling me he wanted to talk. Wanted to explain. I just felt I’d heard the explanations so many times that what more was there to say? Now I’d give anything to see him again. And my mom too. I’d sit and listen to anything they wanted to say to me.”

  “I get it,” Dylan said. “I really do.” He put his hand on her leg. “You are a good person, Emma. You didn’t ask for the life you have, and you didn’t ask to be stuck here. I’m sorry for what you went through with your dad, but when we get out of here you can make it right.”

  “If we make it out of here,” she said. “That’s still a puzzle we haven’t solved.” She looked at him. “You’re sweet to say the things you do,” she said. “That shows me the type of person you are. But you don’t really know me well enough to assume I’m as good as you think. I think maybe… maybe you just like me because we’re trapped in this place and I’m all you’ve got.”

  He put his arms around her. “You know, I’ve been thinking the same thing about you. That you only tolerate me because of this situation.”

  She laughed. “Tolerate you? I came to you with all of this, didn’t I?”

  “Well, like you said, you didn’t really have anybody else.”

  “I’m way beyond tolerating you, Dylan,” she said, and kissed him. She pulled back and looked at him curiously.

  “What? What is it?”

  “I was just wondering… never mind.”

  “What? Tell me!”

  “Are you…you know… a virgin?”

  He blushed. “Yes, about as much as one can be. Never had an opportunity to get anywhere close to losing that status.”

  “I’m surprised,” she said.

  “Oh yeah, I’m such an obvious ladies’ man. I can understand the confusion. You?”

  “Me? Total virgin here too.” She put out her hand and he took it in his. She gave it several exaggerated pumps. “Welcome to the club, sport.”

  Chapter Eight

  Hugo Callahan was surprisingly warm and friendly for such an imposing figure of a man, though Jim felt the personality fit well for the owner of a shop like Galaxi’s. He had welcomed Jim and Detective Magen into the back room of his shop, and sat across from them on a folding chair just like the ones he offered for them to sit on.

  “I’m always happy to help law enforcement,” Hugo said, “though I have to say this is a first. Nobody has ever come to interview me at the store and I have zero clue what I could possibly do to assist you. You’ve got me curious, that’s for sure.”

  “You’ve been living in Ambler your whole life?” Magen asked. He had a small notepad and pencil, and Jim saw the man had written the date and the name of the store at the top of the page along with “Hugo Callahan.”

  “Not Ambler currently,” Hugo said. “I’m down in Waldorf. I did live here as a kid, though. Right down the street from this store, to be exact.”

  “And you have a family?” Magen asked. Jim was confident the detective had done his research beforehand and was simply confirming facts while building a rapport. Despite the drama surrounding this investigation and what he assumed was a concerning time limit, he was a bit fascinated to watch a real police detective at work, and an old-school one at that.

  “Yes, sir, I do. There’s three of us. My wife, Kara, and my daughter, Galaxi.” He smiled. “I know what you’re going to ask next.”

  Magen smiled back. “Did you name the store for your daughter or your daughter for the store?”

  Hugo laughed. “Precisely! And the answer is, I named the store for her. Took over this place just after she was born. She’s seven now. Which is absolutely terrifying to me.”

  “Oh it does go all too fast,” Magen agreed. “Your tattoo…is that—”

  “The flag of the Island,” Hugo said. “Yeah, all three of us, Kara, Galaxi and I, we went through the Event. But Kara was adamant that we not get involved with all those reporters and authors and whatever else trying to document everybody’s memories of the visions. ‘Vultures’ is what she called them. She said it was for Galaxi’s sake that we never talked about it. So there’s no record of our version of the story, and there’s nothing left of it in my head, or my wife’s head either.”

  “And your daughter?” Magen asked.

  “She was so little. I don’t think she understood anything of what she saw in the visions. All gone now, as far as I know. I hope so, anyway.”

  “So if I may ask, why the tattoo?”

  “Eh, I don’t really know. We went to the first gathering of survivors or whatever down in Atlantic City a few years back. It just wasn’t our scene. But I guess on some level I believed that whatever those people talked about was true.”

  Jim had read the accounts of the people who had experienced the shared visions called “The Event.” There was great debate over their origin and if the visions were truly of a life those people had lived, or another version of themselv
es in another world, or just totally planted craziness from some Russian hackers or something. Jim had certainly always been in the lattermost camp, but now he wasn’t so sure. He’d seen plenty of weird shit in the past couple days.

  “Well, I’m glad you’re an open-minded man,” Magen said, “because we’ve got an unusual situation happening and I could really use your assistance.”

  Hugo nodded. “Anything I can do. Really.”

  “Okay,” Magen said, scribbling on his notepad, “Tell me what you know about the store next door.”

  “Helen’s?” Hugo asked.

  “No, the store in between. The one that existed in what’s now an empty alley.”

  Hugo grimaced. “Ooh. That one. You know, it’s crazy, actually.”

  “What is?” Jim asked. He was so interested to hear where the discussion would go that he had interjected his question without meaning to interrupt. “Sorry, I’m just here as an onlooker.” He turned to Magen. “Go ahead.”

  “No problem,” Magen said. “So what did you mean by ‘it’s crazy,’ Mr. Callahan?”

  “Please, I told you, call me Hugo!”

  “Hugo. Okay, go ahead.”

  “What I meant was, I’ve owned this store a long time. I started working here much further back than that, though that was before I had a ‘grownup job’ and left for a good many years. But even so, I’ve been coming here in one way or another since I was a kid. And yet nobody has ever asked what happened to the store next door. Not even once, as far as I can remember.”

  Magen wrote something on the pad. “Interesting. But you do remember the store that existed years ago?”

  “Sure,” Hugo said. “Like I told you, I grew up down the street and I’ve been coming here for as long as I’ve been into comic books. Pretty long time.”

  “When was the store here?”

  “Well, it was long gone by the time I started working here… so I’d say it was back probably in 1988 or 1989 that it went away. No…wait…definitely ’89.”