Did a person need a clearance card to get out of here? The elevator had no keypad or card slot, just a button. She pressed it, then wondered what she’d do if someone else rode the elevator down and they ran into each other.
The steel doors began to open!
The stairway door, behind her! She ducked through it and crouched against the wall. She heard two voices in the hall.
“Where’s Kessler?” said one.
“We’ve paged her. But the subject took the stairs and then security lost her.”
“She’s probably long gone by now.”
“Wouldn’t that be better?”
The elevator dinged. She looked through the door window in time to see two doctors—at least they were wearing white coats—get into the elevator.
Before the big steel doors swung shut she caught a glimpse of a dark hallway bathed in hellish red light.
Well, this was quite enough for one day. She hurried up the stairs, one flight, two flights, three, four. She reached a landing with a door and went through.
Oh, wow, main floor, back in the hallways. A sign on the wall directed her toward the lobby, and she went back the way she came. A left turn at the next intersection should take her past the gift shop, then to the lobby and out of there. She reached the intersection, turned left—
And almost collided with a lady doctor, her sandals squeaking on the floor as she braked and almost toppled.
Try to bluff? “Oh, sorry, excuse me.” Smile, try to pass by—
But her eyes went to the doctor’s face as if the face had pulled them there, and just in time to see the doctor do a double take and turn pale, her professional demeanor melting away. “Oh, my God!” She backed toward the wall, putting a hand behind her to touch the wall and steady herself.
Mandy felt her own reaction, an ache of foreboding. “You—you’re Dr. Kessler! From the ER!” It still astounded her that she knew.
Dr. Kessler’s other hand went over her heart as she stared Mandy up and down, wagging her head in what looked like disbelief, maybe horror. Her jaw was trembling. She fell against the wall as if all her strength had gone out of her.
Mandy was stupefied. She was supposed to be running from trouble, but all she could do was stand there. A doctor afraid of her? “Are you all right?”
And then the disbelief in the doctor’s face gave way to a profound look of pity, the most tragic face Mandy had ever seen.
“What’s wrong? Do you need a … doctor?”
Kessler covered her face a moment, then shook her head in an unexplainable fit of remorse. She looked at Mandy as if trying to find words, but finally just waved her along. “Go on,” she whispered, “go on!”
“Are you sure—”
“Get out of here!”
Mandy hurried, looked back—the doctor was still resting against the wall, head down, a hand to her forehead.
She made it to the lobby and slowed to a brisk but normal-looking walk, making a beeline for the front doors. She came by the reception desk, smiled at Nancy—
A hand grabbed her right arm. “Hold up there, girl!”
“What—”
It was Bill the male nurse and …
Tyler the security guy, grabbing her other arm. “Take it easy now.”
Her first reaction was natural, to squirm and try to break away, but their hands were clamped on her, digging into her, and she couldn’t move. It hurt. From somewhere she found the self-control and civility to ask, “Please let go of me.”
“Not till we’ve cleared up a few things,” said Tyler.
So here she was again, held against her will and painfully so by two insensitive brutes—like Johnny the cop and Dr. Angela’s apes Bruce and Dave and the sneaky Samaritans Clarence and Lemuel—and once again, she was being held and manhandled in a hospital.
“Let go of me,” she said, and it was a warning.
Of course they didn’t. They started forcing her along and she knew they would take her down another long hallway to another door that would lock behind her.
Any thought of doing the right thing, any consideration of being reasonable and compliant, flickered out like a candle in a gale, and in their place flashed a burning, visceral rage. She growled, clenched her fists and eyes, reached from the depths of her rage into unseen places and times, and drew back to herself any and all parts of her that were free and could fight.
It happened fast. It was noisy and alarming. Nancy screamed and cowered behind the reception desk. Everyone else in the lobby froze, and some ducked. Mandy remembered making some kind of shrieking animal sound, and before she drew another breath she was coming at Tyler and Bill from every direction, fighting mad, ready to show them how it felt to be grabbed, dragged, manhandled, and hurt. Both came off the floor and sailed several yards before landing, Bill on the floor, Tyler slung over a couch in a sitting area. A lamp next to the couch shook, then slid, then sailed in Tyler’s direction.
It stopped, in midair.
Mandy was looking at herself looking back. The Mandy she was had just come in the front door, neatly dressed, wide-eyed and curious, looking at every little thing until she saw herself.
The lamp crashed and rolled on the floor before it ever reached Tyler.
Mandy was crouching like a cat, panting, disheveled. She’d just decked two men twice her size and was ready to do worse and she would have … which scared her. She stared at who she was then, shocked at who she was now. How in the world did she get from there to here? Sense and civility returned—whipped and ragged, but they were there, along with a healthy dose of shame and embarrassment. “Oh, boy, are you in for a ride!”
She made sure Tyler and Bill got the message—they were obviously in pain as they looked up at her, not moving—then walked up to her earlier self. The words didn’t come from memory; they burst from her as if foreordained. “Don’t let ’em do this to you, you hear me?”
She could hear hurried footsteps from the hall, see Bill and Tyler stirring. She brushed past herself and headed for the door.
“Let her go!” came Kessler’s voice. She looked back to see Bill and Tyler get to their feet. “Let her go,” Kessler repeated, and they remained in place. Kessler met her eyes, but only to watch her leave.
Kessler did not want to talk to Ernie Myers. She dreaded what she would learn, loathed what she would have to do with it. But the others were waiting.
She leaned over Ernie. “You look like you’ve seen someone, Ernie.”
He was ready to confess. “Yeah, yeah, I did. But it wasn’t a hallucination! I saw her. She was standing right there. She tried to zap me again!”
“Who?”
“The ghost, the Tinkerbell girl.” He spilled it. “Yeah, I saw her on the job. She was this ghost kind of thing, all dressed in pink and sparkles and she just came out of nowhere and when I touched her she, she zapped me, she did all this to me! And I’m not crazy, I swear to God!”
“It’s okay, Ernie, it’s all right. Did she have a name?”
“Uh, yeah. Mandy. She said her name was Mandy.”
Of course.
Ernie brought out a section of Sunday’s newspaper. “And I found her, can you believe that? I’m not crazy, I really found her. She was asking about the Orpheus Hotel, so I checked the paper. Take a look!” He folded the newspaper to the page and handed it to her, pointing at an ad featuring a sprite young magician opening at the Orpheus. “That’s her! Mandy Whitacre! That’s the gal I saw! Man, she must be really good. I’d just like to know why she zapped me and broke my collarbone.”
Kessler straightened. No surprises here, just confirmation. “I’m sure she could have explained it all to you.”
“Yeah, well, she’ll explain it all right, she’ll explain it to my lawyer!”
Her heart sank. No surprise there either.
chapter
* * *
38
Well, she hadn’t had any visitors yet.
Mandy sat in her dressing room trying not
to botch her mascara again, hoping she would never hear an authoritative knock at the door. There was a cop right there to handcuff her for that afternoon’s Dumpster escape, but he didn’t say or do anything that wasn’t part of the act.
Her hand still shook a little.
Girl, you have got to remember the rules: don’t be a danger to yourself or others. If Kessler hadn’t stepped in and stopped those guys …
She whooshed a sigh. Oh, the things she was about to do to Bill and Tyler and that lobby. It was God’s grace that she didn’t.
But she really could have, and that was why she was shaking. Call it an answer to prayer—hoo boy, what an answer!—but ever since that visit to Clark County Medical Center, a realization had come together piece by piece, growing from a hmmm? to an aha! to a big-time life changer over the course of the afternoon: all the weird “delusions” she’d been having weren’t delusions. They were weird and otherworldly, scary at times, mysterious, and hard to control, but one thing they were not and delusions were, was false. The Clark County Medical Center wasn’t a bunch of nightmarish flashbacks but a real place she had visited, if not in body, in fact, countless times. She’d seen real things, been real places, met real people, learned real names. She’d talked to Ernie Myers from a supposed delusion and she’d talked to him in the real world, and in the real world he was mad at her for doing something to him from her delusion, which told her the delusion was as real as the real. She was never making any of this stuff up, she was really going there and seeing it.
Just like her visions of the ranch, the white paddock fence, the driveway, the three aspens, the house, the barn, all of it. She’d seen those things because they were really there and somehow, some way, she’d been there to see them before really being there. The Mandy she saw coming out of the hospital was the same Mandy she saw coming in—now, how that worked she hadn’t a clue, but both Mandys were she, and both were real.
She beckoned to Maybelle, who sat with her friends on their perch in the corner. Maybelle fluttered, alighted on a lipstick, and brought it to her. The dove got a treat and returned to the perch.
Anyway, this changed everything. Seeing things that weren’t real was crazy. Seeing things that turned out to be real wasn’t. Thinking she could move things from somewhere else was crazy, but really moving them from somewhere else wasn’t. Just ask Clarence, Lemuel, Preston Gabriel, Bill, and Tyler, and most every audience she’d ever had—to name a few. Until today she’d gone with it and figured it was just part of her crazy world, something she would never understand, much less discuss. Now she still didn’t know what it was—a gift, maybe?—but she knew it wasn’t crazy.
As for thinking—knowing—she was Mandy Whitacre, if all the other stuff was real, then maybe her being twenty years old in 2010 when she was born in 1951 was real, too. Sure it was. She just hadn’t figured that part out yet.
Anyway, all the trouble aside, today’s Dumpster escape went off without a hitch because slipping between dimensions, “interdimming,” to pull off a vanish, escape, levitation, whatever she needed, wasn’t so scary or difficult anymore. She was getting a handle on it—pretty much. Now, if the trouble would just stay away …
Well—she touched up her rouge—maybe you’re not crazy, so try not being dangerous. Behave yourself and be glad you aren’t in jail!
The nine-o’clock show had a great crowd, a nearly full house.
Les and Eileen, along with their friend Clive, all from Westport, Connecticut, were as entertaining as Sarah, Clive’s wife, the one Mandy levitated. Mandy allowed them to walk all around and under Sarah and even wave their hands over the top of her to feel for wires, and they were having such an amazed, flabbergasted, and hilarious time of it the routine was scoring big points and gold stars with the audience. What made the illusion even more fun was the fact that Sarah, unlike most pretty girls who get levitated, was not in a hypnotic trance but fully awake and as giddily mystified as her husband and friends were.
Nearly excellent, thought Dane, sitting near the back. Incredible timing, inventive effects and gags, great pacing, perfect misdirection and hand placement, lots of Vegas-style pizzazz, but where was the wonder? He couldn’t see it in her eyes or hear it in her voice, not like before. Maybe the town was getting to her. Or …
He could see Seamus Downey standing in the back, watching—or patrolling. Downey seemed pleased enough, but with a strange lord-of-all look in his eyes that Dane had seen before and never liked. So this was the man in her life now? That could explain a lot.
What a feeling—or feelings: pride in the great progress she’d made, gladness at her success mixed with regret at the loss of her unique sparkle, sorrow at the chasm now between them, and a longing to be with her, at least to be friends again, to steer her a bit, maybe bring back what she’d lost since … The memory of that day would forever haunt him.
He’d come in the hope of speaking with her, but now that was looking like no small task, especially with Mr. Downey the Great and Powerful lurking about. He’d thought of finding someone in management and using his name to get through to her, but seeing her on that stage made her seem so unreachable and him so much a stranger, what could he say?
He could try congratulations, kudos, small talk, and then—oh, this should be easy—the question of who she really was, and how would he segue into that? He might comment on the stage name she’d chosen and how she’d come by that name, and whether that tied in with all the other facts about her that lined up perfectly with the girl he met some forty years ago.
And where from there? Oh, this should be a cakewalk.
The show went great considering what a day she’d had, but as soon as she closed the dressing room door, uncapped a bottle of water, and dabbed the sweat from her face, the highs of the performance ebbed away and the trouble loomed in her mind. Maybe, maybe, Ernie Myers would forget about her, maybe he wouldn’t see her picture in the paper even though she told him she was looking for the Orpheus Hotel; maybe the hospital wouldn’t be that interested in her even though she decked two of its employees.
There was a knock on the door. It didn’t sound like a police bust. The voice was quiet and courteous. “Miss Whitacre?”
“Julio?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
She opened the door to Julio the bellman, all by himself. He’d brought a small envelope. “Thanks, Julio.” She offered him a treat-size Hershey’s bar from a dish on her vanity. He snatched it up, gave her a wink, and let her be.
The envelope contained a note. She unfolded it and read, “Saw you near the elevators the day of my accident, would like to speak to you regarding what you saw.” It was signed by Doris Branson, the hotel manager. Branson included her phone number.
Mandy rested against the wall and let her lungs empty. Accident? What a day. First Ernie, and now her.
The good news could be, if Doris Branson saw her near the elevators while she was interdimming there, that was one more confirmation that something real was going on, a second witness. The bad news could be, if Doris Branson had an accident right after she saw Mandy, the same as happened to Ernie, that could mean that Mandy and all her interdimming had something to do with it, and what if it did? Double trouble.
Well …
She’d just have to call Doris and face the music, whatever it was. It probably would be painful, but what else was new? She might learn something more about her very strange world, so the pain might be worth it. To put a smile on it, maybe Doris would end up on her side and talk to Ernie, then maybe they’d all talk, then maybe … she didn’t know.
Dane waited through the show, suffering and enjoying, and stood to applaud when Mandy struck her final pose. When the curtain came down and the lights came up, he searched through the heads and shoulders to find an usher, anyone—other than Downey—he might ask about having an audience with—
Someone tapped him on the shoulder. An unintended brush, of course; the place was swarming. There was an usher at the main door
. He could ask him—
The tap came again. Probably Downey. Dane steeled himself and turned.
“Pardon me,” said a middle-aged man in wire-rimmed glasses. “Am I addressing Dane Collins?”
Dane was looking at a miracle and made no effort to hide his awe. “You most certainly are.”
“I’m pleased to meet you, sir, and glad I caught you.” The man extended his hand. “I would use an alias, but you already have my name: Jerome Parmenter. Before you have your talk with Miss Whitacre, may we have a word?”
chapter
* * *
39
Parmenter couldn’t talk with Dane anywhere at the Orpheus, not in a hotel room, not in the casino, not in the lounge or in the restaurant. They had to find someplace safe, neutral, secure. Dane suggested the house where he was staying.
“No,” said Parmenter, “everyone knows you’re living there.”
“What do you mean, ‘everyone’? Who’s ‘everyone’?”
“We’ll talk about that.”
“So how much do you know about me?”
“Not here.”
Dane thought of going to Christian Faith Center. By now it was after ten, but the church might still be open. Parmenter thought that would work. Dane called Pastor Chuck, who met him at the front door and gave him a key to lock up. Parmenter remained in the car until Dane could make sure no one would see him, and then went inside.
They settled for the Preschool Department, a large room painted in bright, primary colors with biblical murals on the walls, Scripture posters, pictures of Jesus, Moses, the disciples, the lost sheep, the boatful of fish, and finger paints of Jesus, sheep, fishing boats, and an empty tomb. They sat down on child-size chairs at a child-height table in a corner filled with plastic toys. It looked awkward, even a little silly, but Parmenter felt safe here. He visibly relaxed.
“Good. Good enough.” He faced Dane, hands on his knees, his knees elevated because of the tiny chair he sat on. “Thank you for giving me this time, and most of all, thank you for choosing to talk with me before talking to Miss Whitacre. I’m sure you’ll see it was the right choice.”
08 Illusion Page 34