Signalz

by F. Paul Wilson

  “Do you have any idea about what this is going to look like when you’re through?” I asked her when it had reached halfway up the wall.

  “I don’t have just ‘any’ idea, Mother, I have an exact idea about what it’s going to look like—what it must look like when I’m through.”

  I didn’t see how that was possible, considering the random way she seemed to be throwing all the trash together. Well, it looked random, but as it grew, and as I saw how precise she was with the placement of her pieces of junk, I began to think she might have a plan. When she had me hold a piece in place while she affixed it to the whole, I had to hold it just so. Many times she’d use a protractor to get an angle exactly right.

  Gradually, as we worked through the night—sleep was not an option—it began to take shape. Exactly what sort of shape I’m not sure, but a shape of some sort. In the base was an arched opening, maybe two feet high and two-and-a-half feet wide, but only a foot deep where it dead-ended at the outer wall of her room. If Ellie was constructing this to be a “shelter”—whatever that was supposed to mean—I could see no way she’d fit in there.

  At sunrise she was still at it, though running out of trash. Only a few random pieces left. I was drained and sleep deprived and prayed she wouldn’t want to make another foraging trip.

  Maybe she sensed my exhaustion.

  “Almost finished, Mother. Just these last pieces to fix in place and I’ll be done. But they’ve got to go in exactly the right spot at exactly the right angle, so bear with me.”

  …in exactly the right spot at exactly the right angle…

  She had to be joking. The shelter, the construction, the thing was a totally random, asymmetrical, eight-foot pile of junk stretching from floor to ceiling. Further proof that this was no longer my Ellie. My Ellie wouldn’t make something like this. My Ellie liked order, not chaos. This was pure chaos.

  I slumped on the bed and watched her standing on a chair while she worked with her protractor on those last pieces.

  Almost finished…then what?

  I decided to ask: “So Ellie, what are you going to do with this when you finish it?”

  Her response came out garbled because she had her protractor clamped between her teeth while she held something in place, but it sounded like she was going to take shelter.

  “Shelter from what?”

  Garbled again, but I thought she said so she could be by herself.

  I looked askance at the little arched space at floor level and said, “But how are you going to be—?”

  And just then Bess rang from the downstairs vestibule and I buzzed her in. When she arrived she froze in the doorway to Ellie’s room. She hovered there and stared for what seemed like a long time, then stepped inside, still staring.

  She made that Gaudi remark, then said, “No, not Gaudi, more like objet trouvé.”

  “Could you speak English?” I said, more sharply that I intended. I was so tired.

  Bess seemed not to notice. She kept staring. “It means ‘found object’—it’s an art form. Yo, Sis. Where’d you ever learn to do something like this?”

  “In my coma,” Ellie said, still standing on the chair. “I learned that the angles have to be just right. I learned a lot in my coma. Like how to heal my burns and how to build a shelter, and all about what’s coming.”

  “Heal your burns?” I said. “What does that mean?”

  Instead of answering, Ellie hopped off her chair and pulled it aside, then stepped back to appraise her work, cocking her head this way and that.

  “Uh-huh,” she said, nodding with satisfaction. “I think I’ve got it right.”

  Bess gave a soft laugh. “How on Earth would you know if you got it wrong?”

  Bess had a point. Ellie’s objet trouvé had no symmetry, no rhyme or reason. It crumbled over the arched base, then undulated up the wall, widening here, narrowing there, shooting branches left toward the window, then right toward the room’s corner, back and forth until it stopped at the ceiling.

  “We’ll know in a few minutes,” Ellie said.

  As I tried to fathom what she meant, I noticed a tube of glue on the bed. I didn’t want it to leak on the spread, so I bent to pick it up…and as I did—

  One of the branches disappeared.

  I gave a little gasp and straightened, and suddenly the branch was there again.

  “You okay, Mom?” Bess said.

  I didn’t reply. Instead, keeping my eye on the branch, I bent again and…slowly it faded from view.

  “Oh, dear God! Something’s wrong with that thing!”

  Bess stepped to my side.

  “What do you—holy shit!” Obviously she’d seen it too. She stepped back. “Ohmigod, the whole top just disappeared. Ellie, do you see this?”

  “Uh, huh. It’s all a matter of getting the geometry just right.”

  Bess moved again. “Now the top’s back but the whole left side is gone! Ellie, what the fuck!”

  “Bess!” I said, but I knew how she felt. What the fuck indeed.

  “Nothing’s actually gone,” Ellie said, keeping her eyes fixed on the lower part of the construction. “It simply angles into another place.”

  “‘Another place’?” Bess’s eyes were wide. “What does that even mean? Another plane of existence, another dimension, the other side of the wall, what?”

  Ellie shrugged. “Yeah, I guess so. Sort of.”

  “‘Sort of’? Wh-wh-wh-wh—” Bess sounded like a stuck record.

  And then I felt a warm breeze against my shins. It flowed from under the bed. No, it came from the pile, from the arch at its base, and flowed under the bed.

  And the arch…the opening was dark now. Where I used to be able to see the floor molding and some of the bedroom wall…only blackness now.

  “Oh, excellent!” Ellie said. “I did get it right.”

  Get what right? I wanted to say, but couldn’t take my eyes off that dark space.

  Ellie dropped to her hands and knees. “Okay, I’m going in.”

  “Going in where?” Bess said with a laugh. “There’s no place to go.”

  “Sure there is. See you later.”

  With that she crawled through the arch and disappeared inside.

  “Ellie!” I cried. “Ellie, don’t.”

  Her voice, strangely distorted, echoed back about being by herself.

  Bess wasn’t laughing anymore. “That’s impossible! Mom, she can’t—don’t let her go!” She dropped to her knees beside the arch and reached inside to grab Ellie’s foot or leg but came away with nothing. “Mom, she’s gone! But she can’t be gone! It’s not possible!”

  My brain was numb but I knew what she meant.

  Ellie’s construction lay against an outside wall. A hole in the wall could lead only to empty outside air. Yet Ellie had crawled all the way through and beyond. I rushed to the window and looked out. The outer wall was unmarred. Nothing extended beyond it.

  I dropped beside Bess and stuck my head inside. Warm, odorless air flowed against my face.

  “Ellie? Ellie! You come back here! You come back here this instant!”

  Faintly, as if from a great distance, I heard, “…fine…little while…myself.”

  Bess fumbled with her key chain and came up with a pen light. Aimed through the arch, its bright beam lit up a long, narrow passage with rippled-ribbed walls of gleaming black. Bright as it was, the beam didn’t reach the end.

  “Oh, God,” I said, and it came out a moan. “This isn’t right, it isn’t possible.”

  I so wanted it to be an optical illusion, but I could feel the air flow, so I knew I wasn’t just seeing things.

  “Mom,” Bess said, “we can’t both be in the same nightmare, can we? I mean, this stuff doesn’t happen in real—”

  “I’m going in,” I said, but Bess pulled me back as I started to crawl forward.

  “Are you crazy? With your back?”

  “I can’t leave her in there!”

  “She wa
nts to be in there.”

  “She says she wants to be by herself but I’ve got to know if she’s all right.”

  “What if your back goes out?”

  “It won’t go out.”

  “But you know what happens when it does. You’ll be stuck.”

  I knew she was right, but…

  “That’s Ellie in there, Bess. Your little sister. My little girl. I can’t just let her disappear into God knows where!”

  She did her patented eye roll. “All right, I’ll go in, okay?”

  I could tell she was afraid—who wouldn’t be?—but she’d never admit it. She might aspire to a bohemian life but she’d grown up with that Midwestern hold-my-beer approach to challenges.

  With her penlight pointed ahead of her, Bess crawled through the arch on her elbows and knees and disappeared into the tunnel. I crouched at the opening and watched her slowly dwindling silhouette. I estimated she was about fifty feet away when she stopped.

  Faintly I heard Ellie’s voice say, “Hello, Bess,” followed by Bess’s scream. And then Bess was frantically crawling backward on her hands and knees, making terrified, high-pitched mewling noises as her shoes scrabbled toward me.

  I ducked to the side as she emerged, feet and butt first, almost knocking me over. But she didn’t stop. She kept up the panicked backward crawl, kept making those terrified noises as she reverse-scuttled across the room until she ran out of floor. It might have been comical were it not for the look of abject horror twisting her face. With her back pressed against the wall, she slid upright, slipped and fell, then regained her feet and stumbled-ran from the bedroom.

  I hurried after her and found her at the apartment’s front door, her back pressed against it, blinking, cringing, shuddering as she reached for me with a trembling hand.

  “M-m-mom!” she panted in a breathless voice. “You’ve got to get out of here!”

  “What’s wrong? What happened?”

  “You can’t stay here! You can crash in my dorm! Lena won’t mind!”

  “That’s crazy talk. I’m not going anywhere while Ellie—”

  “That’s not Ellie in there!”

  Bess had just voiced my greatest suspicion, my worst fear. I felt my knees soften, ready to give way, but I forced them straight and locked them. I wouldn’t, couldn’t acknowledge it.

  “Don’t be silly. I—”

  “I am not being silly! You can’t stay here!”

  “I can and I will and I don’t want to hear any more of this. Now come into the kitchen and I’ll make you—”

  She grabbed the door handle. “No. No way. I can’t force you to leave, but me, I’m outa here. You know where my dorm is. You can come any time.”

  “Bess, please. Get hold of yourself.”

  She opened the door and slipped through, then turned and looked at me through the narrowing opening.

  “You don’t get it, Mom. You said she went in there to be by herself. You got it wrong.” A sob escaped her. “She went in there to be herself.”

  And then she slammed the door.

  I stood there, gaping in shock. Bess…Too-Cool-for-School Bess, the unflappable Boho who took everything in stride…I’d never seen her like this, never imagined she could be like this. So terrified…

  What had she seen?

  My mind reeling, I wandered back to Ellie’s bedroom where I stared at the darkness within that low arch. I knew I’d have to go in there.

  FRANKIE

  P. Frank Winslow leaned back from his laptop and rubbed his eyes. This self-publishing shit was a lot more involved than he’d thought.

  But then, he hadn’t really been thinking when he’d threatened to publish Dark Apocalypse on his own. He’d been pissed and wanted to shove their lawsuit threats back in their faces. Like he was going to let some glorified Elk’s club dictate what he could write about. Were they kidding?

  Last night, a corner of his mind had seen himself uploading the Word doc, clicking a PUBLISH button, and voila!—Dark Apocalypse would go on sale under his Phillip F. Winter pseudonym. He hadn’t considered the small matter of a cover.

  So he’d spent much of the morning searching for an appropriate piece of art and then working it through a cover creator. Those wasted hours were wreaking havoc with his Daily Duty.

  He stared at the result on his screen and hated it. He couldn’t imagine buying a book with a cover like that, so why should he think anyone else would? Was he actually going to have to pay someone good money to create a cover for him? Frankie hated that even more.

  Take a break. That was it: Get up, stroll around a bit, then come back with fresh ideas.

  Trouble was, his fourth-floor one-bedroom walkup didn’t afford much strolling space. The front room doubled as living room and office, furnished with his laptop on the desk, a couch, and a TV. And bookshelves, of course, mostly stocked with copies of his titles.

  He made a circuit of the room, then stepped into his little eat-in kitchen and put some water on to boil. A cup of tea would be good about now. From the kitchen he wandered to the sparsely furnished bedroom but stopped inside the door as a breeze wafted against his face.

  Where was that coming from? He kept his windows closed pretty much all year round. He checked them now—yep, both locked up tight. But still that faint breeze. It seemed to be coming from the rear corner, behind the nightstand.

  Years ago, when his mother had downsized, he’d moved his old bedroom furniture from Harrisburg to NYC. The bed was a twin and plenty big enough for him, but the furniture was heavy maple. He’d damn near given himself a hernia moving it all in here, and now he risked one again as he grunted and groaned to angle the nightstand out from the wall for a look.

  “Well, I’ll be damned.”

  A section of the floor, maybe three feet in length, appeared to have separated from the side wall. Just a few inches, but if he angled his head right, he could see into the apartment below.

  This wasn’t good. In fact, this could be very bad. The building dated from the late 1940s, which made it like three-quarters of a century old. It just might be coming apart. He didn’t want to be here if it decided to come crashing down.

  He understood how he’d missed the gap, hidden away as it was on the floor behind the nightstand. But it opened into the ceiling of the apartment below. How had anyone missed that?

  He decided to go check.

  He didn’t know his neighbors much beyond a non-committal nod in the hallways. Didn’t really want to. Not because he didn’t like them or anything, but he wasn’t looking for friends here. He had a few writer friends around the city and they’d get together now and again for drinks and dinner and to bitch about the industry. But truth was he’d actively avoided making friends in the building. He had to bang out a minimum of 2K words every day—what he called his Daily Duty—to keep the royalties flowing and pay the rent.

  Frankie took the graffiti-bedizened stairway down to the third floor. Apartment 3F was directly below his own 4F. He knocked and waited while he assumed he was being checked out through the peep hole. Then he knocked again.

  Finally, a tentative “Who’s there?” from the other side.

  “Hey, there. I live above you. I think we share some structural damage. Mind if I come in and take a look?”

  The door opened and a familiar wrinkled black face peeked out. He recognized her but her name was a blank space in his mind. He’d helped her carry her groceries up the stairs more than a few times.

  “I know you,” she said in her Jamaican accent. “You that writer mon.”

  He bowed. “One and the same, ma’am. Look, I won’t be a minute but I’d just like to check out your ceiling.”

  She hesitated, then swung the door open. “I guess I can trust you.”

  “Seriously”—what the hell was her name?—“I’ll be just a sec.”

  The rooms of her apartment were laid out exactly like his but hers were richly redolent of cooking spices. Jerk chicken, maybe? His mouth watered
as he hurried through the front room to the bedroom where—

  He stared in shock. The ceiling was perfect.

  “Whassa mattah?” she said, coming up behind him.

  He stepped closer for a better look. A few minor cracks in the plaster, sure, but no three-inch gap. No gap at all.

  How could this be? Was he in the wrong apartment?

  He took a mental picture of the bottles and hairbands and such on the dresser right under the spot where the gap should be, then mumbled a lame excuse and hurried upstairs.

  Back in his apartment he made a beeline for his bedroom and dragged the nightstand a little farther from the wall—just enough for him to squeeze in behind it for a better look below. Good thing he was skinny. He knelt and craned his neck, but as he leaned on the edge he felt it soften—not crumble but soften and—

  “Oh, Christ!”

  —he tumbled through.

  He managed to swing his legs under him and land partially on his feet in a crouch, then plopped onto his butt, damaging nothing beyond his pride. As he straightened he looked around and saw a king-size bed and a dresser against the wall, but its top was bare and made of a different wood from the old Jamaican woman’s. He’d landed in someone else’s apartment.

  Whose then? Not some trigger-happy drug dealer with an AK-47, he hoped. Best to announce himself to avoid surprises. That gap in the corner of the ceiling showed where he’d come through. He could explain everything.

  “Hello?” he called, moving toward the door. “Hello?”

  No reply, so he peeked out into the short hall leading to the front room. Empty. And the front room looked empty too.

  Yes!

  One more try: “Hello?”

  Again, no answer. He had the place to himself. Okay. Not a good idea to exit by the door—someone might see him and think he was up to no good. Best to go back the way he’d arrived.

  In the bedroom he dragged the dresser—luckily it didn’t weigh much—under the opening, then placed a chair atop it. Now all he had to do was stretch and haul himself back into his own place. As soon as he was home, he’d get on the line to the property manager.