Wisteria Wrinkle

by Angela Pepper

“Help,” Liza said between gasps. “Help me. It’s got Xavier.”

  Chapter 23

  All concerns about the exploding glowfish and Karl’s black blood were pushed aside by Liza’s appearance and declaration.

  Karl demanded, “What happened to Xavier?”

  Liza clung to the door handle, her honey-brown eyes darting left and right. “It... took him,” she said, still breathing heavily. “There was... nothing I could do.”

  Karl moved quickly, putting himself between Liza and Zinnia.

  “I’m glad you came to me,” he said gruffly. Liza had actually come to Zinnia’s office, but it was just like Karl to assume she’d been looking for him.

  “This is bad,” Liza said. “So bad.” She kept clinging to the door handle. A rivulet of sweat streaked down the side of her temple.

  “I’ll handle this situation at once,” Karl blustered. “Nobody takes one of my employees without my permission.” He buttoned up his collar and straightened his tie. “Who was it?”

  “Not a who,” Liza wheezed. Her eyes glistened, and then tears streamed down both cheeks. She choked back a sob. “Not a who,” she repeated softly.

  Karl didn’t bat an eyelash. “Take me to where it happened.”

  Zinnia cut in, “Did something happen to you on the third floor?” She noted that Liza was still in possession of the key, worn around her neck.

  Liza looked at Zinnia as the color drained from her cheeks. She whispered hoarsely, “You know about the third floor?”

  “We can talk about all of this later,” Zinnia said. “After we locate Xavier.”

  Liza nodded mutely.

  “We’re going to the third floor,” Zinnia said to Karl.

  “You’d better believe we are,” he said, as though it had been his idea all along.

  Zinnia hoisted her purse onto her shoulder and shooed the other two out of her office.

  As they entered the main area, their coworkers Carrot, Dawna, and Gavin stared at them with interest. Someone in the room was snoring. Margaret. Zinnia grabbed Margaret by the arm and forcibly removed her from her chair. Margaret gave Zinnia a dirty look but was immediately alert. She grabbed her own purse and nodded, as if to say she was ready for anything.

  As the four of them proceeded toward the hallway, Gavin called out from his desk, “What’s going on?”

  Karl barked at him, “Nothing that concerns you, Mr. Gorman. You focus on those reports.”

  Gavin, who’d started to rise from his chair, sat down immediately. He gave Zinnia a creepy, knowing grin. Again, Zinnia got the feeling she was forgetting something important. But it probably didn’t matter, compared to whatever had made Liza so frightened.

  On the walk to the elevator, Zinnia held back to cast a narrow sound bubble and say to Margaret, “Karl has black blood. I saw it just now.”

  “I knew it! Is he a troll?”

  “He was going to tell me about his powers, but he wanted me to go first, and I wouldn’t.”

  “That sounds like you,” Margaret agreed. “You can be so stubborn.”

  Talk about the pot calling the kettle black. Again. “Also, the surge detector went supernova,” Zinnia said. “It turned orange, then red, then bright white, and it exploded in my office.”

  “Surge detected!” Margaret adjusted her purse strap. “Where are we going?”

  “Third floor.”

  “All four of us? I shouldn’t have rested my eyes. What time is it?”

  “It’s just past two o’clock. I fell asleep, too. I didn’t notice Liza was late getting back from her lunch break. She finally showed up just a few minutes ago, looking like a mess. According to her, something has taken Xavier. Something on the third floor.”

  Margaret said, with a pout, “I miss all the good stuff.”

  “You haven’t missed it yet. Open your eyes. It’s all happening right now.”

  “Oh!” Margaret cheered up.

  Zinnia popped the sound bubble just as Karl turned around to stare at them with suspicion.

  Liza pressed the call button for the elevator. The doors opened immediately. The three of them followed Liza in.

  “Was it the mayor?” Karl asked. “Is that who detained Xavier? That woman is so bossy. She’s always putting her pointy nose in everything.”

  Liza’s mouth moved silently before she spat out, “The mayor didn’t take Xavier.”

  He demanded, “Then who did?”

  Liza said, “I told you. It wasn’t a who.” She unfastened the clasp of her necklace, gripped the magical key, and slid the blade into the elevator’s control panel.

  Karl demanded, “Who gave you that key?”

  “My grandmother,” Liza said. “Except she didn’t give it to me. I found it when I was packing up some things to take to her at the hospital.”

  The elevator suddenly plunged.

  Karl gripped the handrail and looked around wildly. “What are you doing to the elevator?”

  Before Liza answered, the elevator stopped plunging and the doors opened.

  Beyond the elevator was the same abandoned, incomplete floor Zinnia and Margaret had visited the previous day.

  Karl ducked his head out, looked left and right, then pulled his head back into the elevator.

  “I can’t believe it,” he said, his tone wondrous. “It’s an accordion floor.” He turned to the witches with an excited, boy-like expression. “An accordion floor! Right here in City Hall!”

  Zinnia said, “Can you explain to the rest of us what an accordion floor is, boss?” Karl liked being called boss.

  Karl waved his hands with a childlike glee Zinnia hadn’t witnessed since their time playing on the swing set at the park.

  “It’s a wrinkle in space,” Karl said. “A floor that exists between floors, in a space that expands from within yet doesn’t displace. City Hall has five floors, but it also has six.” He peered out at the floor again. “Unless it has more than six.” He frowned and scratched his head. “If there’s one accordion floor, there could be a thousand.”

  “But why?” Zinnia asked.

  Margaret cut in, “It’s used for time travel. We know about that.”

  Karl chortled. “Time travel?” He chortled right at Margaret. “There’s no such thing as time travel. It’s just a wrinkle in space, not a wrinkle in time.”

  Zinnia raised an eyebrow. “Don’t be so sure about that, boss.”

  Liza whimpered. The other three stopped talking about wrinkles and turned to look at her.

  “Listen,” Liza said. “Do you hear that? It’s coming back.”

  In unison, the other three asked, “What’s coming back?”

  Liza opened her mouth but no sound came out. There was, however, a rumbling noise, and the shatter of glass breaking.

  Suddenly, the giant head of a creature burst through one of the floor’s milky windows and shot directly toward the elevator. The head extended on what appeared to be a neck, a very long neck. Except the neck never turned into shoulders. A head with a neck and no shoulders was something else.

  “Sandworm,” Zinnia managed to say.

  Its mouth—if you could call it a mouth—split open along three seams as it came rushing toward the elevator.

  Everyone screamed, even Karl.

  A long, pink tendril shot from the sandworm’s maw and grabbed hold of Liza, who’d been standing closest to the door. The tongue lashed around her like a whip, and then reeled her into the darkness of its terrible mouth.

  Zinnia wasn’t quite ready, but the defensive magic was already pooling in her hands. She widened her stance, braced herself, and shot her blue plasma fireballs at the creature. Margaret stood at Zinnia’s side and followed suit with her equally powerful green-colored plasma fireballs.

  The blue and green electricity crackled over the creature.

  The sandworm’s mouth closed around Liza, muting her screams.

  Karl shook his fist at the creature. “Let her go! That’s my employee. Put her down at once,
whoever you are!”

  Margaret leaned into Zinnia and gasped, “It’s not working. That thing is too big!”

  Karl continued to berate the sandworm, and the witches kept zapping it. Neither approach was having any effect.

  Zinnia felt her strength draining rapidly. Even so, she gave all she had, holding nothing in reserve.

  Chapter 24

  The two witches’ plasma was failing, sputtering out, when the elevator made a ding sound. With a metallic clang and whir, suddenly the elevator doors were closing. The view of the menacing sandworm was closed off by metal doors.

  Both witches dropped their arms to their sides to avoid ricochet plasma within the elevator cage. They turned to Karl, who had his finger on the Close Doors button.

  Margaret demanded, “Why did you do that?”

  Karl puffed up his chest. “Sometimes the department supervisor has to make difficult decisions. I’ve already lost two employees to that thing, and I wasn’t about to lose another one. I did it to protect the two of you.”

  The elevator was already moving upward rapidly.

  Zinnia said, “We can’t leave Liza behind.”

  “Of course we won’t,” Karl blustered. “I wasn’t planning on leaving her there. But we need, uh, backup.”

  Zinnia spotted something on the floor. Liza’s key. Shattered to pieces. She groaned as she crouched down and picked up the remnants. It had been crushed to smithereens.

  “We have a problem,” Zinnia said.

  Margaret dropped to her knees beside Zinnia and wailed, “How are we ever going to get back to 1955?”

  Karl and Zinnia looked at Margaret.

  She quickly said, “I mean, how are we going to rescue Liza now? And the other one?”

  “His name is Xavier,” Zinnia said.

  Margaret straightened up and huffed, “Why are you both looking at me like that? I’m not the one who smashed the key to smithereens.”

  Both witches looked at Karl.

  He made a harumph sound then said, “I didn’t smash the key. It must have been you two witches and your magic lightning zaps.”

  “But you did hit the button to close the elevator doors,” Zinnia said.

  He gave her an incredulous look. “Did you see the size of that thing? It would have taken all of us! Not just the new girl.”

  The new girl. Zinnia noted that the way Karl called Liza “the new girl” made it sound like Liza was expendable, like a crew member who wore red in a classic Star Trek episode. If a sandworm had attacked the Star Trek crew, it would have gobbled a Red Shirt first.

  The elevator stopped moving. With another ding, the doors slid open.

  All three turned to the doorway, bracing themselves for another round with the sandworm.

  Instead, they were back on the ground floor again. They immediately saw who had pressed the call button. There were two people standing in the hallway: Dawna and Gavin.

  “Great,” Karl said. “Now the whole office is here. Is there any work getting done today at all?”

  “Carrot’s not here,” Dawna said.

  Margaret muttered, “And neither are the two of us who got eaten by sandworms.”

  Karl asked, “Where’s Carrot? Is she in trouble?”

  Dawna gave Karl a squinty look. “Not that I know of. She was sitting at her desk when we came out to...” She shook her head. “You two are both witches, aren’t you?”

  Zinnia and Margaret looked up from the shattered bits of key they were trying to piece together. In unison, they said, “No.”

  Dawna shook her head. “Deny it all you want, but now that I can see it, I see it all.” She looked directly at Karl. “Boss, are these two witches?”

  Karl said nothing.

  Dawna took that as an answer in the affirmative. “Busted,” she said, grinning.

  “The game’s up, ladies,” Gavin said. He crossed his arms and looked smug, giving Zinnia his creepy grin again. “Your cover is blown, and you have only yourselves to blame.”

  Zinnia gave the gnome a dirty look. He already knew about the two of them being witches. He’d known for months. But they had an understanding about mutual secrecy. Why had he told Dawna? Why now?

  Dawna, meanwhile, was unfolding a piece of paper. She showed the handwritten note to the witches.

  “I found this crazy note on Gavin’s desk this morning,” Dawna explained. “At first, I thought it was a practical joke. All this talk about you two having a magic key and going to some other world.”

  Zinnia suddenly remembered the thing she’d been forgetting. The note they’d left on Gavin’s desk the night before. They hadn’t gotten back in time to remove it.

  Dawna continued, “But then I thought maybe it wasn’t a joke. When I looked at it that way, all sorts of things started to make sense. The way you two always talk so quiet inside the break room. Then I thought about all that stuff Annette wrote in her book, about the two teen witches...” She slowly turned her head to the side. “Did you hear that?”

  The ground rumbled and the elevator shook. The witches and Karl exchanged panicked looks. The sandworm? Had it followed them through?

  Dawna and Gavin, who were still outside the elevator in the hallway, turned to look at something. In unison, both of their jaws dropped open.

  Zinnia, Margaret, and Karl leaned out of the elevator and followed their gaze.

  Zinnia had expected—no, feared—she would see the sandworm rushing toward them through the hallway. But there was no sandworm. There was, however, a teeming mass of crawling creatures. They were moving on multiple legs, like spiders, but the size of crabs.

  Margaret cried out, “Bone-crawlers!” She clutched Zinnia’s arm and dug in her fingernails.

  Dawna managed to tear her gaze off the wave of bone-crawlers and turn toward the witches, her eyes huge. “Did you two do this? Did you mix up one of your witch potions and make those things?”

  “We did no such thing,” Zinnia said. “Those are bone-crawlers, and—” She cut off her explanation, grabbed Gavin and Dawna by their arms, and yanked them into the elevator. As she did so, she caught a glance of two men in body armor coming toward them, chasing the bone-crawlers.

  The larger of the two men yelled at her, “Take cover!”

  She did so, ducking back into the elevator.

  Karl was already pushing the button to close the doors.

  The doors closed, and they started moving up. All five of them spaced themselves out evenly.

  They looked at each other in stunned silence. Everyone looked horrified, except for one person, who looked happier than a kid at her own surprise birthday party.

  Dawna Jones bobbed her head from side to side, grinning. In a sing-song voice, she sang, “You two are witches. You two are witches. I know your secret. I read your no-ote.” The word note didn’t have two syllables, but she stretched it out for the rhythm.

  As she paused to take a breath, there was a skittering, scratching sound that filled the elevator. Everyone looked around and then down.

  Dawna screamed.

  One of the bone-crawlers had made it into the elevator. There was more skittering. It was actually three bone-crawlers. It was always difficult to count bone-crawlers, on account of how they were asymmetrical and sometimes clung together, looking like bits of burned meat on stiletto legs.

  Karl loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar again. “Everyone stay calm,” he barked.

  Zinnia tried to pool blue defensive plasma in her palms, but she was still spent from her efforts on the third floor. And by the look of Margaret’s hands, the other witch was in the same position.

  “I said stay calm,” Karl barked. “Don’t you dare electrocute me, you two witches.”

  Dawna screamed again. Or maybe she’d never stopped screaming.

  Karl tilted his head left and right, cracking his neck. The skittering paused, and all was quiet. Dawna inhaled for another scream. Zinnia’s ears were ringing.

  And then Karl Kormac, man
ager of the Wisteria Permits Department, opened his mouth wider than it should have been possible for any human to open their mouth. Karl’s tongue shot out. And out. And out. His tongue was as long and flexible as the tongue of the sandworm.

  In less than ten seconds, Karl had snapped up not just one, but all three bone-crawlers and... eaten them.

  Chapter 25

  The other four people in the elevator stared at Karl Kormac, the cheap-suit-wearing, coffee-machine-cursing, fart-bombing supervisor of the Wisteria Permits Department. Unless they were all sharing a group hallucination, Karl had just eaten three bone-crawlers.

  Karl cracked his neck again and let out a burp. “Tasty,” he said. The seven-foot-long tongue had retracted and his mouth looked perfectly normal.

  Margaret waved a shaky finger at Karl. “You just ate three of those horrible creatures.” She turned to the others. “You all saw that, right?”

  The others nodded.

  Zinnia said, “Is that your big secret, boss? You can eat anything?”

  “That’s part of my secret,” Karl said. “It all falls under the major headline.”

  Dawna covered her mouth with both hands and made a hiccup-burp sound. “I’m gonna be sick,” she said. “Is Karl a witch, too? Or a warlock or something?” More hiccups.

  Zinnia patted Dawna on the shoulder. “Just keep breathing.”

  Margaret asked Karl, “And what exactly is the major headline? What are you?”

  Karl wiped the corner of his mouth. “Haven’t you guessed already?”

  The two witches exchanged a look. Zinnia had an idea, but it felt rude to say the word out loud.

  “Troll,” Margaret said. “Karl, you’re a troll.”

  Karl winced and clutched his hands to his heart. “Ouch. Margaret! How can you say that? And after I saved everyone from a trio of ferocious bone-crawlers?”

  Margaret gave him a confused look. “You’re not a troll?”

  Karl bobbed his head from one side to the other, as if to say she was neither right nor wrong. “We prefer the term sprites,” he said. “Whenever legends are translated to different languages, there’s a tendency for translators to call any creature whose name they don’t have a word for yet, trolls. Several family lines are unfairly labeled as trolls. It’s a term that’s both offensive and vague.”