Dropping the bundle of script pages onto the coffee table, I head to the kitchen. The sole resident of the cupboard above the sink is last night’s bottle of Johnny Walker. It’s already half gone, but it’ll do.
Three fingers poured, drained, and re-poured brings me halfway back to normalcy. I fall onto the couch and regard my script. The small stack of pages stares back at me. Barry’s right. It’s only a thinly veiled ripoff. Gomorrah’s Winter is a masterpiece, a brutal examination of the Algerian War told through the eyes of a housewife, an Algerian call girl, and a American soldier struggling to escape an Algerian POW camp. I saw it eight times in the theater and wept through every showing.
I sit in front of my typewriter and stare at the stack of pages. How the hell did I get this assignment, anyway? Too many glasses of wine and my own loud mouth, that’s how. I had pitched Barry a bold new take on Gomorrah’s Winter. I decided to follow the POW character after his daring escape and turn him into a spy. But all I’ve written so far is an overly long, rambling mess—180 pages of a pathetic, aimless protagonist who, having received his new orders, is now smoking and drinking his way across the various cafes of Algerian-occupied Paris.
And here I’ve gone and promised a rewrite in only a week. I could do it if the words were flowing, but to say they aren’t would be the understatement of the year. My creative well is dry. I stare at my script, held neatly together by two small, brass brads.
I can fix it.
There's no way I can write an entirely new story in a week, and no way I want to write my own goddam story. But I can fix the one I have. I have to. It's my only choice.
I stand, pacing the room. My bare feet slapping the cold linoleum of my living room floor. Gomorrah’s Winter. Same but different. Same but different. Vance’s face floats into my consciousness. There was something different about him. Something haunted.
I remember my former therapist with his thick glasses, patchy beard, and horrible eczema. Your lost month is not lost, he had said. It's buried in there, somewhere. But the only one who can remember it is you.
After years of therapy, years of searching for the key to unlocking the door of my memory, I finally had to turn my back on it. I can’t be sucked into that desperate hope again. I can’t. Forget Vance and forget Aleisha and forget their conspiracy theories. I don't need their insanity to break me out of this.
Make no mistake, Bob Carr always gets his man.
I snatch up the bottle of Johnny Walker. I'm a writer. And writer’s don’t need self-exploration to explore our stories. We write, goddamnit!
I pace the room. Six steps in one direction, then four, then six. I will work this out the old-fashioned way. Three more fingers of whiskey, into the glass and down the hatch. I snatch up the script, staring at it as I abandon my glass and drink straight from the bottle. What the hell is this story even about? Maybe I need to make it more exotic. I could set it in Istanbul. No, Rio de Janeiro. And the main character could be a woman. Or why not a kid while I’m at it? Hell, a dog would make a better protagonist then what I’ve got so far. I spin, walking faster, kicking a chair out of my path.
Vance’s face floats to my mind again.
Goddamnit!
I push the vision aside, walking even faster.
Make no mistake, make no mistake, make no—
I spin back around and curse, taking another drink, and—
Crack! My shin hits the edge of the coffee table, upending the entire thing. I reach down toward the pain and drop the bottle and half the script.
Shit, shit, shit! The pages aren’t even numbered.
I bend, trying to collect the pages as the bottle empties its contents on the floor.
I hop forward, snatching it up.
And slip on the wood floor.
Twisting. Flailing. Trying to right myself.
This would be the point of the film when the camera spins and the music crescendos, with a hard cut on the hapless protagonist landing in an embarrassing mess.
But I dare anyone to have half my grace after slipping on a bottle of spilled whiskey.
I land on my ass, hard. The impact ringing through my bones.
And that’s when I see the rest of my pages. I had tossed them into the air during my fall. And now, for a moment that seems to stretch on and on, the pages stand, suspended in the bungalow’s small living room. The afternoon light hits them, reflecting off the white pages, seeming to hold them in the air. My breath catches. Words floating in the air. A single, perfect moment. A story in the sky.
And times catches up to me. The pages descend, almost slowly, toward the floor, and land in the puddle of whiskey.
The amber liquid soaks into the pages.
I lean back on the couch and stare at my ruined script. The only copy, of course.
Shit.
The grounds of Camton University look more like a hippy commune than a place of higher education. The campus is located right up on the edge of Malibu’s cliffs and the smell of salt drenches the air. Well manicured gardens line small, Spanish-style buildings. The students I see are all relaxed, wearing shorts and flip-flops, some of them even carrying surf boards out of their dorms. A professor is talking next to a group of girls seated on the grass, flirting with one of them.
So, nothing’s changed.
I slow as I near the main entrance to the old Psychology building.
“Ellis!”
Vance is standing next to an open, unmarked door near the far end of the building. He glances around and waves me over.
“No one followed you?” he asks as I near him.
Had Vance gotten himself into something I don’t want to be a part of? Shit, I better not tell him about the Lincoln that chased me around Beverly Hills earlier this afternoon.
“All clear,” I say.
Vance nods, still gazing past me. His skin is pale and there are large circles under his eyes. Did he look like this last night? It was probably too dark in the bar to tell. Even stranger, his long brown hair is damp, and his tee-shirt is splattered with drops like he had been standing outside in the rain. But there’s not a cloud in the sky.
“You’re wet,” I say.
Vance looks down at himself, surprised. “Oh, right,” he says, then steps back against the door, making room for me to pass.
I don’t enter.
“You’re not going to say anything?” I ask.
“About what,” Vance says, growing irritated.
“About how you think you’re feeling followed, why you obviously haven’t slept in ages, or that you’re soaked in water in the middle of the day when it hasn't been raining?”
“Not right here, I’m not,” he says.
I fold my arms across my chest, rooting my feet in place. Vance glances past me, looking irritated.
“What’s going on,” I demand.
“Just wait a little longer and she’ll explain everything,” he says with an odd smile.
“Who? This girl you mentioned the other night? What’s so special about her?”
He smiles and leans forward. “Everything.”
“This way,” Vance says, as the door clangs shut behind us. Vance walks quickly down the hallway. A door opens and a professor steps out, jumping back quickly to get out of our way. I give the professor, an older woman clutching a stack of books to her chest, an apologetic smile as we slide past and she scowls back at me. I rush past her to catch up with Vance.
“Where are we going?” I hiss.
Vance stops in front of a door. He pulls it open, revealing a narrow staircase leading down into darkness.
“The basement.”
I descend the staircase. At the bottom, Vance pushes open the door. It gives a loud groan.
“People don’t come down here much, do they?” I ask.
“It’s mostly storage,” Vance replies.
We step into a hallway lit in the sickly, green glow of old fluorescent bulbs.
A tall, lean man steps out of the shadows. He’
s black, with buzzed hair and wears a long trench coat over corduroys and a Pink Floyd t-shirt. He starts when he sees us, stepping forward with a nervous energy before visibly relaxing.
“Vance, it’s you.” He looks me up and down. “Is this your friend?”
Vance nods. “This is him. Is she expecting us?”
The man nods.
I hold out a hand, stopping Vance. “Hold on, who is this guy, Vance? And what the hell are we doing down here?”
“This is Quincy,” Vance says. “And like I said, we’re going to meet the girl.”
I gesture around the empty hallway. “Where?”
“This way,” Quincy says. He jerks his head toward a door behind him marked ‘Storage’. He pulls out a set of keys and unlocks the door.
I step forward to follow, but Vance grabs my wrist, stopping me. “Ellis,” he says. “I’m trusting you by bringing you down here. You have to promise me that whatever happens, you will never tell anyone about anything you see or hear in this room.”
I stare at him. “Vance, what the hell is going on.”
“Promise me, Ellis.”
His grip grows tighter on my arm. The knuckles on his hand turning white. I wrench myself out of his grasp. “Yes, I promise.”
I step through the doorway after Vance and Quincy into a large room filled with stuff. A single, bare bulb hanging from the low ceiling illuminates the room. But the space is so crammed full of large filing cabinets and stacks of boxes leaning at dangerous angles that the pale light doesn’t illuminate more than a few feet of the cluttered space.
There are cabinets stuffed to overflowing with boxes of equipment. Half constructed devices clutter the tables. A massive steel object that looks like something from a submarine sits in the corner.
The room smells musty and damp, like an attic with a leaking roof, and there is a sharp, almost electric taste in the air. The space has the feel of a mad scientist’s laboratory.
“What is this place?” I ask.
Vance looks around with a smile. “Storage for the old Parapsychology Lab. All this stuff used to be on the third floor until we got shut down. We moved it all down here when we discovered the, uh… Well, you’ll see.”
“Para-what?”
But I’m cut off by another voice.
“Are you going to introduce me?”
A young woman sitting at a table in the far side of the room. There are small cans of paint in front of her, brushes, and stacks of paper and what looks like a flier. Is this the girl? She turns and I immediately recognize her.
“Ellis, you remember Aleisha."
“Good to see you again,” I say.
“Ahem,” Quincy says, walking past us to the table. He picks up one of the fliers, holding it up for Vance to see.
“What do you think of these?”
Vance takes it from him. “Hey, this looks great. What do you think, Ellis?”
There’s a painting of a brain with lines flowing out of it and a cloud of words and short phrases surrounding the lines. I lean over to read them:
Past Lives? Lost Time? Have You Seen the Future?
“Oh no,” I say, stepping back. “No, no, no. I don’t want anything to do with this.”
Vance holds up the flier. “What, this? Don’t worry about it, Ellis. This is for recruitment purposes only.”
“That’s my problem with it,” I say. “With something like this, all you’re going to get are the crazies.”
Quincy frowns at me, folding his arms in a defensive posture. “I thought you said he was cool, Vance. Is he cool?”
Vance holds up a hand. “Yeah, he’s cool. Listen, Ellis, we’re very selective. We bring in people and take them through an extensive interviewing process to validate their claims.”
“How do you do that?” I ask.
The three of them share a glance. Aleisha pushes her glasses up her nose. “There are certain techniques that, well, open up a person to the truth. We can help you remember things you don’t even realize you’ve forgotten.”
I think of my month of lost time. There is a noise from the back of the room.
“We can talk about that later,” Vance says, checking his watch. “It’s about time for you to meet Jane.”
“Who’s Jane?” I ask.
Quincy turns to the back of the room and points. “You’ll be seeing her any second now.”
I turn, seeing only a large cabinet, the doors pulled shut. But the noise is coming from inside the cabinet. It sounds like a lock being unlatched.
“There’s no one back there,” I say.
And then the cabinet door swings open and a figure steps out.
The cabinet is barely five feet tall, so the figure is stooped over at first. When the figure straightens, I see that it’s a woman.
She is young. No older than twenty. But, somehow, the word “girl” doesn’t feel quite right. There’s a certain weariness to her that suggests maturity beyond her apparent years.
The young woman has dark, curly hair pulled back into a ponytail. Like Quincy, she is wearing a long coat, pulled tight around her shoulders. I realize with a start that her hair and shoulders are wet. Though it wasn’t raining outside when I got here.
I look back at the others. “Was—was she just hanging out inside a cabinet?”
“Sort of,” says Vance.
The young woman steps in front of me. She stares at me with a strange intensity as if sizing me up. She has bright, almond shaped blue eyes that are angled slightly. Her skin is an olive color splashed with dark freckles.
“So, this is the new guy?” she says.
“Yeah, this is Ellis,” Vance replies.
“What’s your name?” I ask, but she ignores me.
“You think he’s traveled before?” she asks, stepping around me and looking me up and down.
“That’s what it sounded like,” Vance says.
“What do you mean, traveled?” I ask.
She continues to ignore me as she makes her survey of my entire body.
“And you think he knows about another tunnel?” she asks.
I look sharply at Vance, who simply nods.
I step away from the woman. “What tunnel?” I say. “And why won’t you tell me anything, and—and—seriously, but what the hell is going on here, anyway?”
The young woman sticks out her hand. “Call me Jane,” she says.
I stare at her hand for a moment before realizing that she wants me to shake it. Taking her hand, I feel a strong grip.
“I don’t like this,” Quincy says, his voice flat. “He’ll crack the moment he goes through.”
“That's what you said about you,” Vance responds.
“And you did crack,” Aleisha says.
Quincy folds his arms in a defensive posture. “Did not!”
Aleisha turns on him. “You didn’t sleep for a week!”
“Hey!” Vance shouts. “Traveling messed all of us up. So we’re not going to discuss that, okay? And the fact is that we need everyone we can get.”
“It’s Jane’s decision, anyway.” Quincy says, crossing his arms and glaring at Aleisha.
Vance nods at Quincy. “That’s right. It is Jane’s decision. So Jane, what do you think?”
Jane steps in front of me again. She takes in a breath, staring into my eyes. I hold her gaze despite an increasingly strong sensation she is, at this moment, deciding my fate. “Let’s show him.”
Quincy throws up his hands, walking back into the recesses of the cluttered room. “Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you after he comes back a blubbering mess.”
“How does this work?” I say with a grin. “You expect me to walk in that cabinet or something?”
Jane nods. “That’s exactly what you’re going to do.”
My grin fades.
“Follow me,” she says, and turns, walking back toward the cabinet at the far end of the room.
I turn to the others. “Is she for real?”
Aleisha walks a
round the table. “Completely,” she says.
Vance grabs a jacket off a nearby shelf and tosses it at me. “You’re going to want this,” he says. He takes another one for himself and pulls it on.
I follow them through the twisting, cluttered space. The tall shelves seem to close in on me the further in we walk, suffocating me in their closeness and threatening to topple over and crush me under their weight. We reach the back of the room, stopping in front of the large metal cabinet
The others fan out, forming a loose circle around the cabinet. Jane swings open the door.
I peer into the cabinet seeing… nothing. The inside of the cabinet is gutted, the shelves gone. I step a little closer, examining the interior of the cabinet.
I turn back to Vance. “There’s nothing back here.”
Quincy shakes his head, eyeing me up and down. “He’s lying. He made up that whole story.”
I feel myself growing hot. “I don’t care if you trust me, but if you expect me to believe there is something in that cabinet—”
“We’re not asking you to believe,” Jane says. “All we’re asking is that you take one little step.”
With that, she ducks down stepping into the cabinet. I let out a small laugh and then stop. Because the darkness in the closet seems to be closing in around her. Like a reverse corona effect, shimmering waves of darkness flow over her body, engulfing her.
“What the hell?” I mutter.
And then she’s gone.
I turn to the others. They grin back at me.
“Well?” Vance asks.
“She disappeared,” I say.
Quincy backs out a laugh. “He’s quick.”
“You want to do it too?” Vance asks.
“Do what?” I ask.
“Disappear,” Aleisha says.
“How do I—?” I begin to ask, but Aleisha is shoving me toward the cabinet, and the back wall of the cabinet rushing toward me, and I put out my hands to stop myself, but it hardly matters because the tips of my fingers are disappearing into the back wall, a wall which isn’t a wall, but is more of a shadow with moving, shifting layers that seem to recess both into the wall and into reality itself, and with a stifled cry I fall into nothing.
Dispersion: Book Two of the Recursion Event Saga Page 3