by Jim Johnson
I kept my eyes on the glowing light and shook my head. “You don’t have to come with me, but I gotta check that out.” I forced myself to glance at him. “In for a penny, right?”
“I don’t get it.” He shook his head. “Look, I can hang with you a few more minutes, but then I gotta jet. Wandering through hallways chasing after some freaky woman with white hair and an invisible bass line ain’t my idea of a good time.” He gestured toward the stairwell door with the weirdly glorious light pouring out of it. “Not to mention freaking doors with disco lights.”
“I just want to know what this is all about.”
We stared at each other, then he nodded and let me lead the way. I didn’t think it was possible, but it got even colder as we approached the open doorway. So much so that by the time we reached the edge of it, my teeth were chattering and our breath hung in the air in thin puffs.
Malcolm paused near the doorway and glanced at me. The light from the doorway was enough to see by; better than the dim lighting in the hallway, anyway. “What’d you say your name was?”
I shook my head. “I didn’t, but it’s Rachel.”
He nodded. “Rachel. All right. We go in, we poke around, and then we get the heck out of here. Deal?”
I met his brown eyes with my own, tried to get a sense of him behind the bravado, but failed to see anything other than what he was presenting. When I’m not busy trying to make ends meet, sometimes I think I’m a decent judge of character, but Malcolm had me confused—the pieces weren’t quite adding up.
Finally, I nodded. “We look around, satisfy our curiosity, then we get out of here. I want to talk to my grandpa before going to work, anyway.”
He glanced at the doorway. “Want me to go first?”
I snorted. “Nah, I’ll do it.” I moved around him, took a deep breath, then took two purposeful strides toward the open doorway and walked through it and into the pale blue light.
What I saw through the doorway stopped me mid-stride. A curtain of shimmering blue light, haloed in gold, stretched across the inside of the doorway, from ceiling to floor and wall to wall. I could see nothing through or behind the wall of light. It was just a shimmer of energy, like sunlight rippling off opaque water.
“What is it, Rachel?”
Dumbfounded, all I could do was gape at the rippling curtain of light. Somehow I sensed Malcolm step into the doorway next to me, one arm of his thick purple parka brushing up against my hoodie sleeve.
“God damn,” he murmured. I shook my head, unable to voice what I was feeling and thinking.
I managed another couple of steps toward the curtain of light, but each one felt harder to make, as if I was pushing through invisible deep snow to get to the curtain.
After a few steps, I just could not push forward any more. “Damn, I can’t get any closer to this thing.”
He made kind of a strangled laugh. “Why would you even want to?”
I shook my head. “It’s glowing, but I don’t feel any heat coming off it. It’s just light.”
I reached my hand out toward the curtain, but it was like I was trying to push a mountain ahead of me. Whatever the curtain was, it had some sort of repulsor ray built into it, like something right out of Star Trek.
I pushed my hand forward as hard as I could, but it wouldn’t budge. I stared at my hand in a mix of wonder and horror, peripherally seeing the glowing curtain behind it.
“What is this thing?”
Malcolm reached out as far as he could as well, but as hard as he strained, he couldn’t get his hands much closer to the shimmering curtain than mine.
I even reached over with my free hand and pushed against his back as hard as I could, leaning all my weight into it. He didn’t budge much more than an inch or two, and I liked to think my legs were pretty strong.
I felt his body under his coat straining forward, pushing hard to get closer to the curtain of light, but whatever force was pushing out toward us was just too strong for us to overcome.
My legs quivered from the exertion. I was sweating hard in spite of the chill in the air. Just as I was about to ease back and give up, the shimmering curtain slowed and then stilled, turning the surface smooth and clear.
I stared through the curtain into a tube of light, the tube leading forward before dropping out of view in a crazy spiral of electric blue swirls. The curtain’s walls, all the surfaces, were glittering streamers of blue light with veins of gold flickering through them, arcing back and forth all along the surfaces.
“It’s so beautiful,” I said.
As we stared, transfixed, at the strange glowing tube on the other side of the still curtain, the arcs of energy started rippling and arcing across each other. Every time one of them bounced across the gap, there was a flash of electric blue light and the lightest tickle of heat on my skin, like a static charge buzzing you when you’ve shuffled your stocking feet on certain kinds of carpet.
Malcolm glanced at me. “That’s an awful lot of power. I think we should get back.”
I couldn’t disagree and made to back away from the curtain of light. But my feet betrayed me.
I shot a glance toward Malcolm. “I can’t move!”
He tried to turn away from the curtain, but he too was held fast in place. “Now what do we do?”
I managed a shrug and stared toward the arcing bursts of light, which were now coalescing in the center of the tube, weaving together to create a dense ball of crackling energy. “Is that a weapon?”
The ball of light got larger and larger, and the crackling energy racing across its surface rippled faster. The sphere of energy started to morph. All I could do was watch in sick fascination. It was like a good movie special effect; a piece of CGI changing before my eyes. No trip to Branchwood had ever been this messed up.
Actually, no trip anywhere had ever been this messed up.
“What’s that? Do you see that?” I cried out.
A strange, warm wind picked up from out of nothingness and washed around us. Malcolm managed to push his arm around my shoulder and held me close. “I see it, I see it!”
As we both stared into the strange electric maelstrom, that bass humming started up again, and I managed to clap both hands to my ears. It was deafening, like the tunnel was a subwoofer and we were standing too close to the speaker at a heavy metal concert.
The bass hum reverberated through the tube and the doorway we were standing in, and shook the floor under our feet. I could feel my heart and my lungs heaving in time to the rhythmic pulse of the strange bass line. The headache I’d been nursing all morning returned with a vengeance, threatening to split my skull apart from the inside.
Some little part of my brain whispered “heart beat” but I couldn’t make much sense of it. The bass line was hammering into my mind, into my body, shaking me to the core.
The core of energy continued to morph, and I was transfixed on the thing, helpless to turn away. I braced myself as best I could, certain that the thing was going to blow up in my face.
What happened, though, threw me for even more of a loop. The ball of energy transformed into a face, a man’s long face with a cleft chin and a regal, hooked nose. His wide-set eyes were full of the gold-flecked blue electricity, and his head was nearly three feet tall. His features were like those of some sort of god—almost too perfectly perfect.
The face formed in full and stared at us with large, glowing golden eyes. The bass line hammered over and over, and then within a breath, suddenly stopped. There was a long moment of silence, and then the mouth in the face cracked open. It uttered one word.
“Away.”
And then everything did explode in my face.
Chapter 4
COUNTLESS TINY PRICKLES OF ANGRY BLUE energy arced out of the massive face and stretched out toward me and Malcolm, like an endless stream of little lightning bolts.
Stuck in the repulsor field, I couldn’t move, couldn’t dodge, couldn’t even think. The lightning swarm slammed into m
e and Malcolm and we were rocked back off our feet and blown straight through the doorway and toward the wall on the opposite side of the hallway.
At the moment of impact, the world around me seemed to slow down. The headache I’d been nursing all day flared up, and then I felt a subconscious ‘pop’. For just a moment, one tiny fraction of a second, my vision was filled with brilliant electric blue light. I stared into an endless pool of bright, shining energy.
For that incredibly tiny moment in time, it felt like I saw everything the universe had to offer, as if I was looking out through God’s own eyes, and then it all closed in on itself. Time sped back up to normal and I saw nothing but a blur as I crashed into the wall.
My breath was knocked out of me. The force of the energy blast stuck me and Malcolm to the wall for several long moments, as the little pinpricks of heat poked into me over and over, like someone taking a million hot toothpicks to my skin. It wasn’t exactly agonizing, but it was no massage either.
As the energy dissipated, we both slumped to the ground together, sliding down the wall and ending up on the floor in a pool of fear and confusion.
The bass line in the air faded away, and the blue glow in the doorway also faded as the strange face dissipated into arcs of energy that then started to fade as the curtain closed down around itself. In a matter of moments, the curtain disappeared with a hollow ‘pop’.
Malcolm and I just laid on the floor for a dozen or more moments, the sound of our heaving breaths the only sound in the area.
My eyes were full of stars and flashes, but gradually, they started to even out and then I could see clearly. The lights in the hallway were starting to come back up to full power, but it was like someone was using a dimmer switch to gradually bring them up to full intensity.
Malcolm shifted on the floor next to me and I turned to press my other cheek against the floor. He pushed himself up to a sitting position and rested his back against the wall. His face was haggard and sweat poured off his bald head. He lifted a shaking hand and pointed at me. “Your hair...Rachel...it’s...”
”Yeah, I know.” I raised a shaky hand to my head. Somewhere along the way the hood of my jacket had been blown back off my head. I ran my hand along my hair and felt it standing on end—from the static electricity, no doubt.
I pushed myself up to a sitting position next to Malcolm and tucked my legs underneath me and faced him cross-legged. I used both hands to try and force my wild hair into some semblance of order, and fished a hair band out of my satchel with a shaky hand.
As I bound my frizzy hair out of the way, I asked, “Any idea what that thing was?”
He shook his head. “I have no freaking idea. But I do know I’m getting the hell out of here.” He pushed himself to his feet and then reached down to help me up.
When I locked hands with his, a thunderclap sounded and a bright burst of electric blue shattered the world all around me. I was spun away from Malcolm and directly into a tunnel of darkness I was helpless to escape from. I spun down and down some more, the darkness enveloping me until I knew nothing more.
Chapter 5
STRANGE IMAGES FLOATED THROUGH MY LINE of sight, even though my eyes were closed. Glowing forms, sort of like how floaters move in your field of vision when your eyes are shut. They had no coherent shape other than as blobs that glowed with a bluish electric light.
I groaned as I sat up. I cracked my eyes open, not sure what I expected to see. I was in the same hallway I’d been in before, resting against the grubby gray wall opposite the open doorway Malcolm and I had been blasted away from.
Malcolm was sitting on the floor next to me, rubbing his neck with one hand while he fumbled with a cell phone in his other. He glanced at me as I sat up. “What just happened?’
I stared at him and spread my hands out in the traditional ‘hell if I know’ gesture. “Your guess is as good as mine.” I frowned, realizing my headache had gone away, as if all the pressure that had been building up inside had burst somewhere along the way.
Maybe when I had crashed into the wall along with Malcolm, or before…when I had seen that deep pool of cosmic blue light.
“Do you have a cell phone?”
I rubbed the stars out of my eyes and tried to make sense of his question. “What?” was the best response I could manage.
He nodded toward the smartphone in his hand. “Cell phone. You got one? I’m gonna give you my number. I gotta go help my sister out with some stuff but I wanna talk to you later about…” He waved the phone toward the open doorway. “About all this.”
I stared at him, the synapses in my brain finally starting to reassemble into some semblance of order. “Oh, right. Yeah.” I fumbled for my satchel and fished out my phone, and read off my number to him.
He nodded as he programmed it into his phone, and then shot me a quick ‘hello’ text. “All right, got it.” He stood up and tucked his phone into his back pocket. He reached a hand down to me.
I stared up at him and then tentatively took his hand, expecting another explosion of blue light. Nothing happened. I breathed a sigh of relief. He helped me up to my feet.
He grinned sidelong, looking more relieved than anything else. “Next time I think we should think twice before we open up some strange door that some woman’s face disappears into.”
I managed a shaky smile. “I don’t think I can argue with that.”
He gestured toward the other end of the hallway, where we had first entered. “I gotta get going, but I’ll talk to you soon, all right?”
I managed a weak wave, content to sag against the wall since I didn’t trust my leaden legs to hold me up on their own. “See you around, Malcolm.”
He nodded and then headed down the hall and out of sight. I stared in through the open doorway.
With the opaque curtain of light now gone, it was clear that the doorway led to a stairwell. A set of stairs angled down to the left to what I assume was the basement, and another set of stairs curved up and around out of sight to the second level of the home. My grandpa used to live in a room on the second level, but within the last couple of years, as he got older and less able to move around, they eventually moved him down to a room on the ground level.
A small sign set on the wall next to the stairway had a down arrow and signage that read “Storage.” The up arrow was labeled “Rooms 201-240’, which was the same wing where my grandpa had lived. Room 229.
My hands had picked up some dirt and grime from the floor, so I wiped them off on my jeans. The hallway was warmer compared to the chill I’d felt earlier, and now that I was regaining my senses I caught the rumble of the heaters working at full blast. The nearby air vent set into the ceiling was pushing out a stream of warmer air.
There were no windows in this hallway, so I checked my phone for the time. Just after five. Crap. If I didn’t haul ass and get to the bus stop soon, I’d be late for work.
I hurried down the hallway, poking my thumbs at my phone screen. My brother had left me a brief text message: R—done w/grandpa but didn’t C U round. Had to get back to work. Catch U l8r.
I shook my head in frustration as I tossed a quick ‘OK—but need to meet you sooner’ response at him. I was supposed to have chatted with him and Grandpa and then gotten my monthly stipend from him. That I missed the chat meant that I probably wouldn’t see my brother or my money for another week and that meant I was stuck with whatever cash was in my pockets or stashed at home—and those two together added up to not a lot.
I closed down my phone and slipped it into my pocket as I reached my grandpa’s door. I tapped on it a couple times, then tried the door handle. It was unlocked and the door swung open easily.
The room was dimly lit, and feeble sunset filtered in from the shuttered windows set in the far wall. My grandpa was in his hospital bed, with the two side arms up and a warm afghan my grandma had knitted draped over his body. He was snoring quietly, so I closed the door carefully behind me after taking a couple ragged brea
ths. I hadn’t fully recovered from my encounter with that strange face in the curtain. I wasn’t quite sure I’d ever really recover.
I moved over to the side of the bed and took a seat on a wheeled stool. It was the stool my brother tended to sit in when we visited, and also the stool the doctors tended to use when they came by to check in on him.
I settled onto the stool, thinking about that face and the one word it had said to me and Malcolm—‘Away’. Didn’t make much sense, though it had worked for the strange face. We’d been blown away, that’s for sure.
I stared down at Grandpa’s snoozing form, knowing I was cutting it close to the bus time I needed to catch, but I really wanted—needed—to say hi. He was the last sane piece of my life next to my girlfriend Abbie and my bestie Bonita, and I sure didn’t want to lose my connection to him any time soon.
I wheeled the stool over to the side of the bed and rested a hand on the closest bed arm. I leaned over, taking a deep inhale of Old Spice, that smell that always seemed to linger around him. It reminded me of better days, younger days hanging out at his house in Old Town. We used to listen to the endless streams of summer tourists walking by outside on the old brick sidewalks and to Grannie’s knitting needles click and clack back and forth, and Grandpa telling his stories in his deep voice.
I wiped a sudden tear from my face, knowing those days were long gone. I smiled down at him, and just watched him breath. After a long silent moment or two, he cleared his throat and cracked open one eye. He stared at me through the gloaming of the sunset spilling in through the window nearby.
“Glad you made it by, Rachel dear. I think you missed your brother.” His voice sounded tired, gravelly.
I nodded. “I got...distracted.” God, I didn’t know what had happened and had no idea how I’d mention it to anyone, much less if I even wanted to mention it to anyone.
I managed a half-hearted smile. “How are you?”
Grandpa shrugged underneath the multicolor afghan. “I’ve had better days, but I’ve had worse ones too. The nurses have me on another pill for my blood pressure. So far it’s agreeing with me.”