“Ugh. Yeah. I understand, but that’s not what I meant. So we come out the door, right? A door that’s kind of on top of the door that belongs in this time.”
“Yeah… that seems right.”
“We’ve seen people leave the store both when we’re on the street and when we’re hanging in here the couple times we’ve left the door open.”
“Yes. So weird.” She sat up as she became more curious where his thought was leading.
“Three different times we’ve seen customers leave the pharmacy. Their bodies appeared to materialize out of nowhere in the doorway, right? Now, we’ve never seen anybody enter the pharmacy while we’re in here, but it would stand to reason the view for us would be equally weird, right?”
“It would.”
“So here’s my question…or more of an observation, really: nobody has seen us leaving our version of the store because if they had—”
“If they had, it would look weird as hell to them, and they’d probably come out to see what was going on!” She jumped to her feet. “So it must be just coincidence that nobody was looking at the door when we left the store. We can fix that.”
She opened the door and exited the room. Dylan was impressed by how quickly she had snapped into action, and flattered that she was so enthusiastic about his idea. He just hoped it would work.
“Just wait a second,” Emma called to him. She disappeared from view. He heard a knocking. It was a strange, distorted sound, because the window she was tapping on from the outside of the building didn’t exist in the interior building.
“Wait for it…” she said. “Wait… now! Come out now!”
He walked out to the street. Just for effect, he danced in and out of the door several times. He met Emma on the street and waited. There was nobody in the window. Suddenly, a man emerged from empty space in front of the open doorway. It was Dr. Mike.
The pharmacist’s eyes were wide and confused. “What’s going on here?” he asked. He looked at Dylan. “How did you do that?”
“Sir,” Emma said, “we’ve been trying so hard to get you to come talk to us.”
Dylan saw Dr. Mike’s face wrinkle in confusion. “You have?”
Emma continued. “It’s just extremely important that we talk to you. We’re in some serious trouble and we need help. We think you’re the only one who can do that.”
Dylan wondered if he would have taken such a direct approach with the perplexed pharmacist. The man eyed them up and down. Was he looking for weapons? Some sign of a threat?
“Tell me how he did what he did. Some sort of optical illusion?”
“Sir,” Dylan said, “we can try to explain everything to you.”
The man sighed. “Okay. Come inside.”
“We can’t,” Dylan said.
“You can’t? Why can’t you?”
“For the same reason you saw me appear out of nowhere. If either of us tries to go in your store we will go somewhere else.”
“Somewhere else? What does that mean?”
“Please, could you just sit with us at the café down the street?” Emma asked. “We will explain everything.”
Dylan had been worried about Dr. Mike’s nervous reaction to them, but he held on to a theory that the pharmacist was just the kind of man whose scientific curiosity would get the better of him.
“Okay,” Dr. Mike said. “Give me a second to close up the shop. I’ll give you fifteen minutes.”
They walked down to the restaurant. It was a funny feeling being in a place they had stolen from twice, but then, none of that had happened. They took seats near the door and Dr. Mike saw them as soon as he came in.
“Hi kids,” he said as he sat down. “I admit, I had second thoughts about coming down here, but I want to know what this is all about.”
“You’re Dr. Mike,” Emma said. “Right?”
He laughed. “That’s what people call me. You’ve heard of me, I take it. Curious. I don’t think I recall ever seeing you in my store.”
Emma looked at Dylan. “How do you want to handle this?”
“Handle what?” Dr. Mike asked.
“What we have to tell you,” Dylan said, “it’s a lot to process.”
“Just let me have it, kid,” Dr. Mike said. “I’m losing money every minute the shop’s closed.”
“Fine. We’re from the year 2018. In that time your store is gone and nobody knows why. But it’s not really gone. It’s sort of invisible. We found it and it brought us back here. We can come in and out of our version of the store but not yours. And I guess, vice versa. We’re trapped here and we can’t get out.”
Dr. Mike didn’t reply. He just looked Dylan in the eyes and blinked several times, as if clearing his eyes could help him make sense of the story he’d just heard.
“We need you to help us,” Emma said.
“On the one hand,” Dr. Mike said, “I’m inclined to think you’re making this entire thing up. But then I did see what I saw in the doorway. So there’s something going on, whether I want to believe it or not. What I don’t understand is why you think I can help you in some way.”
“We don’t really know, sir,” Dylan said. “But we know that something must happen in your store at some point to turn it from the one you know into the hidden one that we found. Have you ever found anything odd about the building?”
Dr. Mike did his silent staring thing again. Then he laughed. There was something just the tiniest bit off-kilter about that laughter. “Son, there is a great deal that’s odd about that building.”
They walked back to the store with Dr. Mike. The pharmacist talked the whole way up the street. “I came to this store quite a few years ago, but it’s been a pharmacy for much longer. Hard for a little operation like mine to operate these days with the big players in town, but for a time Maverick was the place to go for medicine or various necessities. There’s a rumor that it had one of those old timey soda fountains back in the 1930’s, which would have been when much of this block started to emerge.
“At any rate, I started working as an employee pharmacist but eventually the opportunity arose to buy the whole place. I didn’t have any family and the store and my customers became my life. It wasn’t until I was already the owner that I started to notice little things.”
“What kind of things?” Dylan asked.
“Nothing totally crazy,” Dr. Mike said. “Plants in the windowsill would grow faster than expected, and didn’t seem to require very much care at all. Lights would occasionally come on by themselves. Especially once I installed the long fluorescent bulbs. They’d flicker or develop a dim glow. Barely noticeable if it’s not totally black out. That kind of thing. That was my first inclination that there was something odd going on.”
They arrived at the pharmacy. “You say you can’t come through the door… can I see that for myself?”
Dylan and Emma agreed. She walked into the open door back to their version of the store.
“What do you see?” Dylan asked.
Dr. Mike’s jaw was open. “She disappeared. How is that possible? Do you see her?”
“I do. She’s standing in a version of the store, but one that’s been vacant for years and has nothing left but some empty, dusty shelves and counters, and no windows or other rooms.”
“No other rooms?” Dr. Mike asked.
“That’s right,” Emma said as she emerged, startling the pharmacist. “There’s a faint line indicating a doorway or something. Like someone walled it up.”
“The real store has a back area,” Dr. Mike said. “It’s the actual pharmacy, plus my little private office space and a bathroom. Mostly for me and my two employees, but we’ll let customers use it if necessary.”
“I wish we could see inside your version of the store,” Emma said.
“Well,” Dr. Mike considered, “do you think you could get in through the window?”
“Works for us,” Dylan said. “But I’m not sure breaking the window is necessary.”
Dr. Mike entered the store. He reappeared behind the window to their right and fiddled with the casing. The glass came loose and Dr. Mike set it aside. “Been needing to get this thing fixed before the winter comes. Never thought it might come in handy, having it this loose. Watch your step.”
Dylan boosted Emma up through the opening, then pulled himself through. Though he had peered into the older version of the store many times, those peeks hadn’t prepared him for the reality of standing inside.
The dimensions of the store were an exact match for the one he had become so accustomed to, but this store was filled with the color and life of a business that, while definitely not what he would call thriving, was certainly sustaining.
The shelves that in his store were dusty, empty, and pushed to the side of the room were filled with grooming products, small toys and coloring books, and various other needs. He saw one shelf with an array of batteries and one with light bulbs.
“This is awesome,” he whispered to Emma.
“Yes, but don’t lose sight of why we’re here. We need to find a way out.”
“I know, I know. I’m on it. Don’t worry.”
Dr. Mike walked behind the counter and straightened a rack of baseball cards. “You all take your time and look around. I don’t know what I can do to help you with your predicament, but maybe there’s something in this place that will trigger some idea.”
“We appreciate that,” Emma said. “Can we see the back room?”
“Normally, I’d never let anybody back there who didn’t work here, other than to use the bathroom,” Dr. Mike said. “I keep all the files on the pharmacy customers written down back there plus it’s always a risk of someone stealing the pills. But I have just seen you turn invisible, so I feel like we may be in uncharted territory. Come on back around the counter.”
They did as he suggested. Dylan felt strangely comfortable inside the store. The counter in particular felt hauntingly familiar. He and Emma had sat on that very surface. They had held each other as they kissed on the floor both behind it and in front of it. All of that seemed normal, but the opening in the wall behind the counter was not. They followed Dr. Mike through that passageway.
The back room didn’t look very different than the front. Same tiles, same paint, same lighting. Rows and rows of medicines surrounded them. In the middle of the far wall, next to a door with a glowing exit sign above it, was a long white worktable. A light was suspended from a chain directly over the workspace. There was a great deal of what Dylan thought was chemistry equipment on the table.
“You use all of this stuff here to make up people’s pills?” he asked.
“Well…” Dr. Mike hesitated. “There’s some of that.”
“What does that mean?” Emma asked.
“Remember what I said about the strange properties I’ve observed here? In my spare time I like to experiment with them a little. I told you— I don’t have any family. This place is everything to me, and in this weird sense it provides my hobby as well as my job.”
Dylan nodded. “I see that. Makes sense. What kind of experiments have you been doing?”
Dr. Mike held up his hands pleadingly. “I promise I’m not hurting anyone! I’m not doing anything illegal, despite all the rumors out there to the contrary. As I said, there’s some kind of unusual energy source, and I’m finding different ways to harness it, focus it, and sometimes amplify it.”
At that, Dylan and Emma exchanged glances. “You understand how that sounds from our vantage point, don’t you?” she said.
“You think I had something to do with whatever you’ve experienced?” Dr. Mike asked. “I didn’t do anything that would bring you here.”
“It’s not about bringing us here, exactly,” Dylan said. “Somehow, I think that energy you’re talking about took over the whole store and made it disappear. And that messed-up version of the store is what brought us here. And I understand nothing you did caused it. Obviously, because we’re standing in the store right now. It’s something you’re going to do that we’re worried about.”
“You think if you can get me to avoid doing whatever the hell it is you think I did, then nothing will happen to the store.”
“The thought has crossed my mind,” Dylan said.
“Look, kids,” Dr. Mike said, “you’re going through something crazy. I’ll give you that. And of course I don’t want anything bad to happen. I don’t want anything to happen to you, and I don’t want anything to happen to my store. And let’s not forget I don’t know what happens to me in this circumstance you’ve described. So I’m on your side here. But I’m just doing little experiments. Games, really. If something happens to this place because of the phenomenon here, it’s not my doing. I assure you.”
They looked around at the bathroom and the pharmacist’s makeshift office, before returning to the front of the store.
“I’m very sorry I can’t be more help to you,” Dr. Mike said. “I hope you can figure all of this out. Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” Emma said.
“What happens to you now?”
“We’ll go back to our version of the store. Once we close the door, we get sent back in time to the start of this day and nothing we are doing right now will have ever happened. You won’t know you’ve met us because—”
“Because technically I never would have,” Dr. Mike finished. “Simply fascinating. Well, I do wish you all the best. I’m truly sorry.”
“What do you think?” Dylan asked as he and Emma exited the store.
“I think he’s full of shit on so many levels.”
“I agree. He got all shifty-eyed when defending his little experiments. I don’t know if he’s a bad guy, but he’s up to something that he’s smart enough to know might be the thing that caused all this. And what infuriates me is that this fucker is going to do it anyway! Knowing and believing what’s happened to us… what might happen to him!”
“He’s obsessed,” Emma said. “I saw it in him the more he talked about his work. It’s his whole life and it consumes him.”
“Well, it’s really going to consume him if he continues on this path. But I don’t know how we can stop him.”
Back in their version of the pharmacy a few minutes later, Dylan and Emma inspected the back wall. Dylan traced the barely perceptible edges with the side of his finger.
“There’s something about this,” he said. “Do you really believe that whatever happened to the store walled up the back room and the windows?”
“No,” she said. “Someone did this on purpose. But why?”
“I don’t have any idea, but I think there’s something in that back room that will solve all of this.”
“Well, it would be nice to have a bathroom,” she said.
Dylan felt laughter bubble out of him. Emma joined him and they both laughed until tears poured down their faces.
“So…” Emma said as she wiped her eyes with the back of her hand, “what do you want to do? Break it down with a sledgehammer?”
“That’s pretty much exactly what I want to do,” Dylan said. “But where do we find one and steal it and get it all the way back here?”
“We’ll have to ask around. There’s no hardware store on this street in the present, but that doesn’t mean much. I could really use some Google Maps.”
“How’s your phone doing, by the way?”
She held up her iPhone. Its screen was black. “Dead. It sucks. I really would have loved to see the looks of people around us if we sat and charged our phones in the café.”
“Mine’s almost gone too. This situation is getting worse, and it needs to end.”
They walked outside. Most of the repetition was, in a weird way, almost calming, but Dylan found he always turned instinctively to his right so that he wouldn’t be looking when Roland came out of his store. There was something disconcerting about repeating an interaction w
hen the other party thought it was all happening for the first time. He thought that for someone with a different personality, that kind of advanced knowledge might be a real power trip.
“Hey, kids!”
“What the fuck?” Dylan said. He turned to Emma. “I think that’s the bum.”
“Kids! Come around here!”
She gulped. “I can’t look. Not after what happened.”
Dylan turned in the direction of the voice. The bum was leaning around the corner of the building beckoning them.
“He looks fine. I mean, he looks the same as he did before the car situation. But this isn’t right.”
“What?”
“He shouldn’t be contacting us so early in the day.”
She shrugged. “We’re standing off to his side of the block without crossing the street. We’ve never done that before.”
“Okay, good point. Should we ignore him?”
“I don’t know which is more likely to make him throw himself into the street.”
“Kids! Please!” the man called. His voice was strained and frantic.
“Goddamn it,” Dylan said. “Let’s just go tell him we don’t have any change and be done with it.”
They walked toward the corner. Dylan didn’t want to say anything to Emma, but he completely agreed that dealing with the bum after what they’d witnessed was unpleasant. He was grateful that he’d had the good sense to turn away, but the honking horns and those other, worse sounds…
The man was seated against the side of the building. He held his head in his hands and swayed side to side as if he was overwhelmed by all the wrongs of the world.
“You wanted to talk to us?” Dylan asked.
The bum froze and then turned his head to them. His eyes were wide, and there was a foamy saliva in his beard that reminded Dylan of a rabid dog. “Do you see?” the man said.
Dylan was shocked that he hadn’t been asked for any money. “See what?”
“It’s all hopeless,” the bum replied. “Hopeless. No change.”
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