Interesting Times (Interesting Times #1)

by Matthew Storm

  Oliver’s vision focused on Chantal again but the room was still moving. Chantal looked down at him curiously. “What is it?” she asked.

  And then everything stopped moving, instantly snapping back into place. The sound of rushing water was gone. The room was still there, just as it had been a few moments ago. Chantal was smiling down at him, hand still pressed over his mouth.

  Oliver felt one more jolt of pain, and then he caught fire.

  Chantal screamed in terror and scuttled backwards, falling off the end of the bed to the floor. Oliver sat up and looked at his arms. He was covered in flames. But while he could feel heat, the flames weren’t burning him. His clothes and the bed he had been lying on were unscathed.

  Oliver climbed to his knees. The razor blades in his stomach were gone. There was only fire now. Cleansing fire. Of course, he realized. That was the purpose of the fire. It made perfect sense to him now. The fire was there to burn the vampire blood out of him.

  That made sense, didn’t it?

  Oliver leaned forward and vomited. He saw bits of Chinese food and the blood he had just consumed leave his body and splatter on the mattress. Incredibly, the blood itself appeared to be boiling. Rather than being absorbed into the sheets and mattress, he saw the blood sizzle and evaporate like water landing on a hot frying pan.

  Chantal was on her feet, backing away from him towards the door. Her eyes were wide. “What are you?” she screamed at him.

  Then the bedroom door burst open, tearing itself off its hinges and crashing to the floor. Maria stood in the doorway, still wearing her immaculate business suit. Oliver could see John Blackwell a step behind her, along with two other people Oliver could only assume were more vampires.

  Blackwell stared at Oliver. “What on earth?” he asked in wonder. Maria looked over her shoulder at him questioningly. She wouldn’t make a move without instructions, Oliver knew, but she’d do whatever her master commanded.

  It was time to get out of here, Oliver thought. He couldn’t trust any of them. How long would it be before another one of them tried to make a meal out of him, or use him for their own purposes? He wasn’t safe here.

  Even with his body on fire he wasn’t sure he could get past the vampires. What should he do?

  He needed a door, but the room’s only exit was blocked. But if there had been another door, he could use it. He needed another door. A door that led somewhere else. Somewhere far from here.

  Why did the bedroom have just one door? He needed it to have another one.

  He heard rushing water and the world shifted yet again. When it snapped back into place Oliver suddenly saw the room’s other door. In his panic he had somehow not noticed it before, but there was a door just behind him. He stepped toward it hesitantly. How had he not noticed it when he had woken up earlier? He had been so sure there had been only one door.

  “Where the hell did that come from?” asked one of the vampires, staring at the new door in shock.

  “Master?” Maria asked, looking at Blackwell. She was nervous, Oliver thought. Why was she nervous? Oliver took another step toward the new door.

  “No!” Blackwell cried, throwing a hand forward. “Mr. Jones, please wait!”

  “He’s a sorcerer!” said one of the other vampires.

  “No,” Oliver said, but his voice sounded very strange to him. It was deep and echoed strangely, as if he were shouting up at them from the bottom of a well. “I’m not.”

  He turned to the door. It hadn’t been there before, had it? No. But that hardly mattered now. It was here, and it would take him away. He turned the handle and opened it. He could see nothing on the other side, but the door frame itself was filled top to bottom with what looked like shimmering blue water. The door wasn’t a door from one side of a wall to another, he realized. It was a door from one place to another place. Of course, he thought. That made perfect sense. Didn’t it?

  But where did this door go? It hardly mattered, Oliver thought, as long as it led to someplace safe. Somewhere far from this house of vampires.

  Oliver raised a hand and touched the shimmering blue water. It yielded to his hand, and he saw his fingers disappear into it. He pulled his hand back and his fingers came with it. He wiggled them curiously.

  “Stop him,” commanded Blackwell. Oliver saw Maria shift her body weight but he could see things now he hadn’t been conscious of before. He could see the path she would take to get to him. She was never going to have the chance, he thought. Oliver shut his eyes and stepped forward through the new doorway. He was going somewhere safe.

  Oliver opened his eyes but all he could see was blue light, so bright he had to close his eyes again. Strong winds buffeted his body this way and that, as if he had stepped directly into the path of a hurricane. Then as suddenly as it had come, the wind was gone. Everything was calm again.

  Oliver opened his eyes. He was outdoors now, standing on dirt path surrounded by pine trees. A short distance away he could see a small pond with benches and picnic tables nearby. A park, then?

  Oliver looked behind him. There was no door there, and nothing to suggest he hadn’t simply walked here from somewhere else.

  He held up one hand. He was no longer on fire. That was a relief.

  The sun was beginning to come up on the horizon. Oliver stared at it in wonder. It had been dark out when he had woken up in Blackwell’s house, and it would have stayed that way for hours yet. But it was morning here. How much time had passed? Was it even the same day?

  For a moment he wondered if he really had been turned into a vampire. Would the sunlight kill him? But the sun’s rays felt good, warm on his skin. If sunlight killed vampires, he could be fairly certain he was not one.

  With nothing better to do, Oliver began walking up the path. Before long it forked. A broken old wooden sign stood there to give directions. He read it and at first wasn’t sure what to make of it. According to the sign, to the left was the butterfly kingdom, and to the right were the chimpanzees and the lions.

  Oliver suddenly knew exactly where he was. No time had passed at all, he realized. The sun was coming up because he was on the other side of the country. He was in Maine.

  He wondered if people ever fainted in real life, or if that was something that only happened in the movies. Because this would have been a great time for it.

  Chapter 14

  Oliver had to stop for a moment and shake off another bout of dizziness. Of all the insane things that had happened to him in the last twenty-four hours, he almost found this one the hardest to believe. Five minutes ago he had been in a bedroom in California, surrounded by vampires. Then he’d walked through a door that hadn’t been there only a moment before, and now he was at Binkle’s Roadside Zoo and Amusements. In Maine. If he remembered correctly, it was about an hour’s drive from Portland, not far from the coast. And the Atlantic Ocean, not the Pacific he saw nearly every day.

  Oliver had been here once before, many years ago, when he was still a small child. His parents had taken him to the Maine coast for a vacation. They’d stopped in countless small towns for “antiquing,” which his mother had developed an instant passion for. Oliver remembered that he had eaten lobster for the first time on that trip. He’d been reluctant, believing that their large red bodies looked suspiciously like giant cockroaches, but his father had insisted, telling him that they were a delicacy, and one he had just spent a great deal of money on at that.

  And on one of their drives through the country his father had brought them to Binkle’s, which boasted one of the tallest Ferris wheels in the state and a small but diverse menagerie, which included lions. “Straight from the African jungle!” Oliver’s father had told him. He’d read it on a billboard he’d spotted on the freeway.

  The zoo did have two lions, but they had been rescued from a private collection in Milwaukee and had never seen the jungle. They regarded the passing throng of tourists with a certain degree of boredom, having learned some time ago that they couldn’t scale
the walls of their enclosure in order to snatch a quick snack. Oliver had been terrified of them nonetheless, certain that the lions would find a way to escape and eat him. His father had picked him up and held him close, telling him in a soft voice that this was a safe place. There was no danger here.

  Oliver laughed now. It made sense, in a perverse kind of way. He had felt safe here, all those years ago, and safety had been the only thing on his mind back when he’d wanted to escape from the vampires. He’d wanted to be safe somewhere far away. Now he was clear on the other side of the country. Next time he’d have to try to wish he could be safe somewhere closer to home.

  That answered the why, then, but not the how part of what he was doing here. How had he done it? Maybe Jeffrey had been right. Was he a sorcerer? For that matter, was a sorcerer something that a person could be? Maybe there was a book or something he could look at.

  Binkle’s had been closed for years, Oliver knew. He’d seen a blurb on the news some time ago. It had fallen on hard times and the animals had all been shipped off to other zoos. He wasn’t sure what had happened to the lions. Would they be able to speak to him now, if he wished for it hard enough? That would make as much sense as anything else that was happening in his life.

  He should probably get out of here, he thought. He doubted there were any security guards on the grounds, but an abandoned roadside zoo could not possibly be the best place in the world for him.

  Oliver started walking along the path, looking around for an exit sign. After a moment he spotted one and headed in that direction. As he had suspected would be the case, no security guards came running to intercept him. He found the dilapidated condition of the place more than a little depressing. This had been a good memory. He hoped somebody would buy the place and fix it up. He wasn’t a fan of roadside zoos, but it wouldn’t take much to turn it into a passable amusement park. You could put in a few rides for the kids, sell popcorn and candy. It would be nice.

  Oliver stopped suddenly and looked around. He was almost surprised that none of the things he had just envisioned had magically appeared before his eyes. Lately it seemed that anything he thought about wound up happening somehow.

  Was there any chance of that actually working? Oliver looked around to double-check that nobody was nearby, and then he said aloud, “I want popcorn.”

  No popcorn appeared. Maybe he was doing it wrong? “I wish for popcorn,” Oliver said. Nothing. “Abracadabra. Hocus Pocus.” He wiggled his fingers in the air as if he were casting a magic spell.

  Still nothing happened. Oliver sighed. He felt foolish, but he was actually a little relieved. There was nothing wrong with him. There must be another explanation for all of this, however bizarre it would turn out to be.

  Maybe he needed a physics textbook. Something very advanced, and probably theoretical.

  After a few minutes he came to the main gate and stepped through a rusty old turnstile, exiting the park. The parking lot was devoid of cars, its pavement cracked and strewn with litter.

  Should he call a cab? Oliver spotted a bank of three pay phones near the park’s ticket booth. This place really had been closed a long time, he thought. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen a pay phone. He’d have to remember to buy a prepaid cell phone the next time he was at a 7-11. He felt naked without one.

  Oliver checked the pay phones but was not surprised to find that two of them had been vandalized to the point of destruction, and the other had no dial tone. There would be no cab for now, then. He’d have to walk.

  Oliver walked to the edge of the highway and looked to the left and the right. No cars were coming from either direction. But it was still early, and who knew how much traffic this road got, anyway? Oliver searched his memories. He was sure that Portland was the nearest large city; he could recall eating dinner with his parents on board an old ship that had been converted into a restaurant the night before they’d been to the zoo. But which way was it? Was anything else nearby, ideally much closer? As much as he tried, he couldn’t come up with anything. He’d spent much of the driving portions of that trip absorbed in a book about elves and dragons. If he were lucky, he would not run into either of those things during his walk.

  Oliver looked back at the zoo. For a moment he entertained the thought of staying there. He could go inside there and hide for days, maybe. It seemed like the last place anybody would be looking for him. What were the odds that scheming vampires and evil lizard people were going to track him down out here?

  But food and water would become a serious issue, he realized. He’d never eaten his lunch and hadn’t kept his dinner down, and his stomach was already rumbling. It was time to get going.

  Which way to go, though? It hardly seemed to matter. He thought about flipping a coin but realized he didn’t have one, so after a moment’s hesitation he turned to his left and began walking down the highway. The road seemed to angle downward in that direction, which would make the walking easier. And Portland was at sea level, he remembered. That couldn’t possibly be the closest he was to some kind of civilization, but if it was, he could at least hope he was going in the right direction.

  Oliver walked. The sun was rising through the trees and he was beginning to feel warm. That was something to be thankful for. He didn’t have a jacket. Maybe he could pick one up when he found a cell phone. And if he was lucky, maybe he could buy a gun. He had no idea what firearms laws were like in Maine but if he could get a pistol, at least he’d feel a little safer.

  As the sun continued to rise Oliver began to hear birds chirping in the trees. It was a good sound, he thought. At least that was a little bit of normalcy. Lately there hadn’t been much of that to go around.

  Still, he did have to think he’d handled recent events fairly well. He had managed to get through all of it without crying or wetting his pants. He could take some small pride in that. Certainly some people would have ended up in the nuthouse if they’d had a day like his.

  Not for the first time, Oliver paused long enough to wonder if that had already taken place. What if he was strapped to a hospital bed somewhere and this had all been a delusion? In a lot of ways that made more sense than what was happening now.

  He was wondering if there was a way to test that theory when he heard a vehicle approaching from behind him. He turned and saw a pickup truck heading in his direction, slowing down as it came closer. Not sure of the protocol, Oliver put his fist out and stuck his thumb in the air. That was how people hitchhiked, wasn’t it? He’d only seen it before on television. Nobody hitchhiked in San Francisco. You’d have to be suicidal to try it there.

  The truck stopped and a jovial man shouted to him from the driver’s seat, “Where you headed?”

  “Portland,” Oliver said.

  “Portland? Well, it’s gonna take a while. You’re going the wrong way.”

  Oliver sighed. Of course he was. “Well, what’s this way?” he asked.

  “New Hampshire,” the man said. He looked at Oliver suspiciously. “You been drinking there?”

  “I’m thinking about it,” Oliver said truthfully.

  “You want a lift?”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Boston. I don’t mind the company, if you got some gas money. I can drop you off somewhere along the way, if you want.”

  Oliver felt for his wallet. It was still tucked away in his back pocket. At least that was one thing he wouldn’t have to replace. “Sure. Why not?”

  The man leaned over to unlock the passenger door and Oliver climbed in. He had never hitchhiked in his life and would never have considered doing so before now, but what was the worst that could happen? The man could turn out to be a murderer or some kind of sex pervert, but those things seemed fairly mundane now, compared to what he’d been dealing with lately. He might even find them boring, he realized.

  “Name’s Smith,” the man said, extending a hand.

  Oliver shook it. “I’m Sam,” he lied. On any other day he would have fel
t awkward about the lie, but now he found it no longer bothered him. He might even be doing the guy a favor, if anyone questioned him about it later.

  “Good to know you, Sam. All right, let’s go.” Smith put the car in gear and they started off down the road. Oliver was grateful for the ride. Once they got to a city he’d be back in his element. He’d be back in the world of taxis and hotels. And airports. Airports were good. He could buy a ticket to somewhere far away from here. Magic doors were overrated.

  Smith had been listening to an oldies station on the radio. He turned it down. “So where you from, Sam?”

  “Washington state,” Oliver said. That was true. “Little town near Spokane you never heard of.”

  “You miss it?”

  Oliver sighed. “Today I really do.”

  After a while the two-lane highway they’d been driving on widened and became a four-lane freeway. Smith looked askance at Oliver. “You look like a man with a lot on his mind,” he said.

  “It’s been a crazy couple of days,” Oliver admitted.

  “Woman trouble?”

  Oliver laughed. “You could say that. A woman bit me right here,” he said, pointing to his neck where Chantal had drawn his blood.

  Smith peered at it. “Looks okay to me.”

  Oliver flipped the passenger visor down and looked in the mirror that was mounted there. His neck was untouched. There wasn’t even so much as a bruise. “Huh,” he said. Even his shirt was clean; there was no trace of blood anywhere. For a moment he was baffled, then he realized it must have burned off and left his clothes untouched. That was a neat trick.

  “You sure you ain’t been drinking?”

  “No, I’m fine,” Oliver said. “You ever have one of those days where…I don’t know…it’s like you shut your eyes and when you open them again, the world is different?”

  “How’s that?”

  “I mean, it’s like the whole world has fundamentally changed when you weren’t looking,” Oliver said. “I’m not sure how to explain it.”