Vacancy

by Fredric Shernoff

  “Men’s detention facility,” Murphy said. “That’s your new home, kid.” He nudged Dylan in the back with the end of his gun. Dylan grimaced and thought of killing Murphy with that same gun.

  That was what the store had done to him. It had seemed to be nothing but positive in the long run, bringing him and Emma together. But they had overdone it in their attempts to be helpful, and now the store had exacted exactly the kind of terrible cost he’d expected. It had killed his best friend, and trapped them in what seemed more and more like the actual embodiment of Hell.

  Then he thought about Murphy again. It was that man’s fault, not the store’s. Stevens shared fault too for allowing all of this to happen. It would all have to be made right eventually. Somehow.

  He started on the path toward the detention building, but turned back to Emma. “It’s going to be okay,” he said. “We’re going to get out of this.”

  She nodded. “We will.”

  “I love you,” he said. “Don’t forget that.”

  She started to reply but Murphy gave her a harsh shove in the opposite direction. Dylan felt the rage boil up again but coached himself through it. He swallowed hard and turned away from Emma. Agent Stevens walked next to him. There was no prodding with a firearm from Stevens, who didn’t seem to relish any of this, even as he was complicit in all of it.

  “How long are you going to keep us here?” Dylan asked once they were far enough away from Murphy and Emma to speak privately.

  “It depends on what our organization decides to do with you. It could be a long time. I did warn you, Dylan.”

  “Fuck you and fuck your warnings,” Dylan spat. He knew in some ways he was taking anger that he held for Murphy and was directing it at the easier target, but he didn’t care.

  “Knock it off, kid. Just walk.”

  “You’re a bunch of pussies. Bullying kids. Killing kids! To protect a store. Fuck you.”

  Stevens moved so quickly Dylan couldn’t react. The man backhanded him across the face hard enough to draw blood from his lip.

  “Kid, you need to shut up. You got yourselves into this mess, not me. I’m trying my best to let you off easy. Consider that a warning, not that you’re so good at heeding those. Next time I could break your nose or hit you with my gun instead of my hand.”

  Dylan remained silent and rubbed at his swelling lip. Stevens just sealed his fate, he thought. He knew that his anger could consume him if he wasn’t careful, but he also knew it would be necessary to sustain him through whatever was coming.

  Two guards were on duty, one on either side of the giant door. Stevens spoke to one of them and the man typed something into a console in the wall. An alarm sounded one blast and the gate swung open.

  “Get inside,” Stevens said, firmly but without any threat in his tone.

  Dylan walked through the open gate. The inside of the building looked decidedly unsupernatural, though it looked old. Certainly older than 2018, and almost definitely older than 1989. “What is this place?” Dylan asked.

  “It’s the detention center for males,” Stevens said. “Men and women are kept separate here.”

  “No, I’m not asking what you use it for. What is the building? And this world around it. Where the hell are we?”

  “Murphy wasn’t wrong that there’s a lot about this stuff you have no clue about, kid. And I’m not able to tell you most of it. You’re just gonna have to live with that.”

  The walls inside the building were a rough stone, with wires secured along the length of every hallway providing power to lights and computer systems. “You’ve got wiring retrofit all over this place,” Dylan said. “Whoever you people are, you didn’t build this place, did you?”

  “Kid, you ask too many questions,” Stevens said. “But no, we didn’t build this place. We didn’t build much of this. We use it. To keep people safe, like I’ve told you all along.”

  “So I’m a threat now? Emma’s a threat? We must be if you need to lock us away to keep other people safe.”

  “I’ve answered more than enough, Dylan,” Stevens said. “You just have to accept things are as they are. I’m not in charge. Murphy isn’t either. If I stepped out of line and didn’t follow the same rules you didn’t follow, I’d be on my way to this place too.”

  Dylan didn’t respond. They went down two more hallways, each one requiring additional computerized access. Finally, they came to a long hall of cells. Solid, rough iron bars held prisoners, all of whom seemed much older than Dylan. The prisoners sat in silence or rocked or moaned.

  “What’s wrong with these people?” Dylan asked. “What did you do to them?”

  “We didn’t do anything to them,” Stevens said defensively. “This place is what damaged them. They’re kept here because they’re no longer fit to be out in the real world. They aren’t being held captive.”

  “Then why are you trying to put me in here?” Dylan asked.

  “Because these people can’t string together a coherent thought let alone pose any risk to you. You don’t want to be with the actual prisoners, believe me.”

  The gates to each cell looked newer than the rest of the bars, and next to each was a panel screwed into the wall. Stevens led the way to an empty cell and put his palm on the panel. The computer beeped and Stevens opened the cell.

  Inside was a cot, like Dylan had seen in the occupied cells, though many of the occupants were not using the furniture. A toilet was in the corner, and a small desk was on the wall opposite the cot.

  “There are no windows,” Dylan said.

  “You know what’s outside this place. You’re better off not staring at it. And be glad for these walls and the privacy they provide.”

  With that, Stevens gave Dylan a small push and backed out of the cell, closing the door.

  “You’re leaving?” Dylan asked. “What happens now?”

  “Now you wait here until we get word about what to do with you. I don’t think you’ll be here long, but that depends on how you respond to a cycle of the moon.”

  “And Emma?”

  “She’s going to be kept with women in a place similar to this one in a different part of the Forge. She’ll be fine.”

  “What about Matt?”

  Stevens frowned. “Your friend was an unfortunate situation. I’m sure he will be erased. Nobody will know he ever existed so nobody will mourn him.”

  Dylan felt tears forming. “You can’t do that. You can’t just erase people and lose them in time.”

  “Time isn’t what we’re dealing with here, Dylan. And yes, we can erase people if we need to.”

  Stevens turned as he said this, then he walked away, leaving Dylan sniffling back sobs and clenching his fists in frustration and fear.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  With Dr. Mike gone, the man fell into a hazy dream state. He saw a life he didn’t recognize as his own. A real estate office. A pregnant wife. The name James Hamilton.

  He woke up. Was he Martin, as the pharmacist had suggested? That seemed right, but on an emotional level he didn’t connect to that name as completely as he had the one that had appeared in his dream.

  He heard the lock turn in the door. The door opened and Dr. Mike walked in.

  “Martin!” the pharmacist said. “You’re looking much better.”

  “How long was I out?”

  “A half hour, give or take. How do you feel?”

  He scratched his head. “Better. Still confused. There’s a name. James…or Jim, maybe. It’s like my brain wants to remember that’s who I am.”

  “Look, Martin, I told you there are special properties to this store. But I saw your identification in your wallet. Whatever you’re thinking, it’s just a mix-up brought about by the heat and maybe a little of the influence of this place. Can you stand up?”

  “I can, I think.”

  Dr. Mike came over and assisted him to his feet. “There you go. Good. Now who can we call for you? I assume work is wondering where you got off to.�
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  He watched Dr. Mike walk toward the phone on his desk. Suddenly, the man seemed to jump back three or four feet. Dr. Mike walked toward the phone a second time without missing a beat.

  “What the hell was that?” the man called Martin asked.

  “What was what?” Dr. Mike replied. “I just asked if you know who I can call to pick you up.”

  “You jumped backwards across the room. It was like a glitch.”

  “A glitch? No, I don’t think anything strange happened, and I’m attuned to plenty of strange things here.”

  “The man in the comic book store. Roland. He kept repeating himself. Like a record skipping.”

  “Hmm.” Dr. Mike walked over and studied him intently. “It’s like you’re slipping out of sync with this reality.”

  “This reality?”

  “Oh, yes. I believe there are many realities. Many different universes. I don’t tell many people this for fear of them thinking I’ve lost my mind, but I believe this store sits on top of a thin spot between dimensions. It’s where all that energy comes from that I’ve been able to harness in my experiments. I think your brain is picking up on that somehow, though beyond that admittedly vague explanation, I really don’t know what’s happening to you.”

  As the pharmacist talked, his voice drifted in and out. The man called Martin felt panic creep into the edges of his mind. He stumbled toward the door. “I have to get out of here.”

  “Hey, hey, calm down. It’s okay. Let me help you there.” Dr. Mike steadied him and escorted him out the door.

  On the other side of the door was a pharmacy filled with medications, and a work bench covered in what looked to be half-completed projects. Dr. Mike pushed him forward toward the store, which was occupied by at least a half-dozen customers. They stopped their browsing and chatter when the man called Martin entered the room.

  “Hi everybody,” Dr. Mike said in a friendly address to the customers. “If you’ll just make some room so my friend here can get outside, that would be great. Nothing to worry about. Thanks.”

  As he spoke, he guided the man called Martin across the store to the front door. There was something so familiar about the store. Something so crucially important about the door, though somehow that particular door felt wrong to him.

  They stepped out into the sunlight. “Listen, my friend, if there is anyone you want me to call—”

  “I’m fine. Really.” He didn’t feel fine at all, but at that moment he just needed silence and privacy.

  “Okay then, let me know if you change your mind. Best to you.” Dr. Mike forced a smile while he studied the man called Martin with a look that said he expected his “patient” to be in need of more help in no time at all.

  The man called Martin turned to watch Dr. Mike return to the store, and felt shock almost knock him off his feet. The pharmacist seemed to vanish as he crossed the threshold and entered the store. When he was gone, there was an empty store visible through the doorway that didn’t match what could be seen through the windows.

  The man called Martin knew that doorway. He didn’t know how, but everything in him said the answers were through that passageway. He ran toward it and heard noise from the customers. He heard Dr. Mike. “Hey, Martin, slow down! What’s going on?”

  Suddenly he was inside a room that looked just like the store he’d just left, but it was cold and empty. The shelves were pushed to the sides. He tripped over something on the floor and went sprawling to the middle of the room. He looked back and saw a dead teen boy in a horrifying pool of blood. His mind began to lurch and spin again, and he heard Dr. Mike yelling from the outside world, “What’s going on? Can you hear me?”

  He passed out, holding himself in a shivering ball on the floor of the vacant store. When he awoke, the sky had turned a dark shade of twilight. He put his head back down on the floor and closed his eyes. He drifted in and out of sleep until the sound of an explosion made him shoot upright.

  He felt a fog lifting from his mind as he looked out the door. The name Dr. Mike had called him seemed less and less a reality, and the dream name, Jim, emerged from the darkness, bringing with it a smattering of images and sounds, memories of his true life. He looked out the door and saw a blackness that was slowly pulling back, revealing a sunny morning. The boy on the floor was turning transparent, dissolving along with the black emptiness outside the door and a bike and a duffle bag not far away.

  Jim stared in awe as the boy and all his blood, the bike, and the bag vanished completely, just as the scene outside came to life. He saw cars go down the street and heard the sounds of people talking somewhere nearby. He stood up and walked closer to the doorway. His memories were coming in torrents and he smiled. Somehow he had held on, and he had found a way back to himself and back to the store that had eluded him for so long.

  He wondered about the things he’d seen. That poor boy…and so much blood. Were they hallucinations? He thought maybe they were. His brain had been through so much. Now he needed to find Clyde and get home.

  He started to walk out the door and froze. The thought of risking his very identity by stepping out into that awful, forgotten world paralyzed him.

  Jim turned back around. The store was as he remembered it, now that the heinous scene on the floor had vanished. He looked in the direction of the back room where he had just spent time. In his past visits to the store there hadn’t been anything there, but now there was a solid metal slab blocking a doorway.

  Jim walked toward it, leaving the door open to the street behind him. Whatever was going on out there was the normal routine of the day. Nobody would remember his experiences there, and he didn’t want to risk that world capturing him as it had before.

  Was it another world? Dr. Mike had been convinced that there were other realities and that the store had the ability to access them. But if what appeared to be 1989 was really another of Dr. Mike’s realities, how did the pharmacist himself live there performing his experiments in an endless cycle?.

  Too much of it was too hard for Jim to understand. Whatever power governed the world outside the vacant store had held sway over him for a long time, and even after all that, he had many more questions than answers.

  He reached the back wall of the store and ran his hand over the dark surface in the doorway. It was pockmarked in places, but it appeared to have been designed as one smooth surface. At first it looked like metal, but on close observation he thought it might be some sort of high-tech ceramic.

  He pushed against it but it didn’t budge beyond its position already an inch inlaid from the surrounding cinder blocks. In frustration he pounded a fist on the surface. It released a hard, dead sound, but nothing changed.

  “There’s something here!” Jim said out loud. “There’s a fucking way into this thing!”

  There was a time not so much earlier, assuming time held any meaning at all, when Jim would have seen a man ranting to himself and thought drug addict or mental case or simply what a weirdo. He didn’t think of those things now as his focus was all that mattered.

  He scanned the perimeter of the doorway. He and poor Detective Magen had done a detailed analysis of the whole place, and he didn’t expect to find anything, but then he saw it. A small, yellow LED bulb pulsing on and off from inside one of the cinder blocks.

  Jim spread his fingers around the bulb, which was no bigger than an individual bulb in a chain of Christmas lights. He felt a strange warmth and he pressed against it. The block pushed inward and slid up. The light, Jim could see, was mounted in a metal panel with a touch-sensitive glass surface embedded in it. On the glass screen was an image of a tube in a circle.

  Jim studied the image. The tube was marked at one end as “Store” and at the other as “Forge.” He reached out with two fingers, touched them to the screen and rotated his hand. The image rotated accordingly. Two seconds after the image began to move, Jim heard a grinding, and saw the smooth surface in the doorway rotating away in pace with the visualization. Whe
n it was gone, Jim saw a deep, dark endlessness. He returned his focus to the image beneath his fingers. He continued to rotate and guided the image to the opposite of its initial position, passing by three additional marked points.

  He lined the tube back to the “Store” and “Forge” marks in the opposite direction, and removed his hand from the screen. The grinding structure behind the doorway continued to turn, clacking as it passed the other acceptable stopping points. Suddenly, he saw a hallway come into view.

  Jim looked through the opening. The tube was a decorated tunnel, almost a sort of elevator. He could see on the far end the other side of the slab that had blocked his view. Jim stepped into the hallway. His footsteps echoed hauntingly as he made his way down. Halfway across the wall was a command panel and he used that to flip the hallway back as he’d found it.

  It occurred to him that he was heading into something very uncertain and almost definitely dangerous, with no weapons or protection of any kind. Then he thought of Liz and his baby, and he thought of Clyde, and he pressed on.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The minutes stretched into hours as Dylan sat in his cell. As Stevens had said, the walls along the sides of his prison quarters prevented him from seeing or interacting with the others being kept there.

  He wondered about those other people. Stevens claimed they weren’t prisoners in the sense of having done something wrong, but rather something wrong had happened to them. Clyde had mentioned others, beyond himself and his friend Jim. Was one of the people he’d seen in the row of cells someone Clyde had known or seen?

  Dylan worried about Emma. She was supposed to be in similar circumstances to his, but that was based on what Stevens had told him. Emma had been led away by Murphy, and Stevens didn’t seem to have any idea what Murphy would do.