by Brian Harmon
Eric eyed the bed nervously. A tightly rolled blanket lay in the corner, a makeshift pillow. Aiden wasn’t merely spending time here…he seemed to be living here. And had been for a while. It must have taken at least a few weeks to make this much of a mess, perhaps months.
But how could he have been here this long without attracting attention? The whole county knew about Aiden Chadwick. His disappearance was the stuff of urban legends.
Now he was beginning to look a little more Hannibal Lecter-y.
Turning his back to the bedroom, Eric glanced back the way he’d come, half-convinced that someone was sneaking up behind him. But the apartment remained empty and silent.
He had a bad feeling about this place. More and more, he was sure that what he found here was going to ruin his day.
He walked to the end of the hallway and stepped into the combination living and dining room. Here, the walls were decorated with maps and photos of Creek Bend and the surrounding areas. In the middle of the room stood the cheap folding table that Eric had seen from the doorway. A large map of the city was taped to it. Several locations were circled in black Sharpie marker, each with a straight line drawn from it to the edge of the map, seemingly at random. In the center of one of the circles, a screw had been driven into the table. Two lengths of bright green string ran from this screw to two more screws driven into the walls on two sides of the room, where strange, spiraling arrangements of numbers had been drawn onto the faded wallpaper. Strewn across the table on top of the map were a wooden ruler, a compass, several markers and an old Polaroid camera.
There were more maps lying in an untidy pile on the floor under the table.
What the hell was this?
That bad feeling grew even stronger. Carefully, he placed the daisies on top of the map between the camera and the compass and reached for his cell phone.
“Are you seeing this?” he asked as he pulled it from his pocket.
The phone rang obediently in his hand. He answered it and lifted it to his ear without glancing at the screen.
“I am.”
“It’s weird, right? I mean it’s not just me?”
“Definitely not just you.”
“Like I should be concerned about how weird this is.”
“I agree. You should be careful.”
Eric looked around the room again. “You think I’m in danger?” The only other door leading in and out of this apartment was in this room. With the apartment empty, Aiden must have gone through there. By now he was probably long gone.
“Never hurts to assume so.”
Eric nodded and said, “Especially when things are freakishly weird.”
“Especially then. I’m doing great, by the way. Thanks for asking.”
Eric was looking nervously around the room, appreciating just how weird this all was, but as soon as she said this, he felt his shoulders slump. “Aw crap… I’m sorry.”
Isabelle giggled. “I’m totally just joking. It’s fine.”
“No it’s not.” Now that he was thinking about it, it’d been over a week since he last spoke to her. Karen had been keeping him so busy preparing for the shower… He felt like a jerk.
“I’m fine, Eric. I’m not a kid. Well… I am a kid… You know what I mean. I can entertain myself.”
“Still, that was rude of me.”
“Seriously. Forget it. You should be focusing on those…what are those? Maps?”
Isabelle couldn’t actually see what was in front of Eric. More accurately, she could perceive what he was looking at by what he was feeling and thinking. They shared a connection. It was…complicated.
Eric turned in a circle, scanning the walls around him. “Yeah. The whole city. He’s circled a bunch of locations for some reason.”
“He’s put some serious work into all this,” observed Isabelle. “But what’s he up to?”
Eric turned and leaned over the map on the table. This part of Main Street was enclosed in the circle with the screw driven into it. A line jutted out from the circle, pointing roughly westward. It crossed three other lines, each of which originated from another circle elsewhere on the map, but did not appear to lead anywhere. Each line ran to the end of the map. And none of the drawn lines matched the lines created by the two lengths of string. “Is he planning some kind of…massive burglary?”
But Isabelle didn’t know.
There was another circle drawn over the hospital and another just south of the water tower, centered over Milwaukee Street. The others didn’t seem to have any outstanding landmarks to help locate them.
Only one of the circles did not have a black line running out from it. Instead, it had been circled again in bright red marker and then crossed out with an X. This particular location wasn’t far from his home. He wondered why it was marked out. It was the only one like it. Was it a mistake?
“I get a seriously weird feeling about that place,” warned Isabelle.
“Weird how?”
“I don’t know. I can’t quite put my finger on it. But I really think you should be careful.”
Eric glanced around the room again. There were two windows. One appeared to have been broken. It was boarded over with a roughly cut piece of plywood. Eric’s eyes were drawn to a hole in the center of the wood. Bright sunlight was pouring through.
As he ducked under one of the strings and moved toward this window, he saw that there were actually two boards, one behind the other, with about an inch of empty space between them. The second board had a hole in it, too, but it was offset from the first so that he could only look through them at a sharp angle. Peering through these holes, he could see the roof of one of the buildings across the street and the tall peak of a distinct structure reaching up behind it. Pressing his eye to the hole for a better look, he thought at first that it was the steeple of the Catholic church on Deer Street, but it was squared off, not pointed, less a steeple than a tower. And as he thought about it, he realized that Deer Street was in the opposite direction. This looked more like a clock tower, minus the clock. But he couldn’t quite place the building, even though he’d lived in Creek Bend most of his life.
A noise startled him. It sounded like a door clicking closed.
Suddenly his heart was racing.
“Be careful!” hissed Isabelle.
Eric nodded but didn’t dare speak aloud. Was that Aiden? He pressed his back to the wall and glanced around the room. The big, pink bouquet was still lying on the table, visible from the door all the way down the hall. If anyone had entered the apartment, they would know instantly that someone was here.
That was really stupid.
But no one called out to ask who was trespassing. The building remained deathly quiet. The only sound was the occasional rumble of passing traffic on the street outside and the thudding of Eric’s pulse in his ears.
Silently, he stepped away from the wall and ducked under the string again, careful not to make any noise. Seconds passed as he crept toward the hallway, his body tense, ready to defend himself, but no one came to investigate the bouquet. The apartment remained quiet. And when he peered around the corner, he found no one there.
He’d left the door open behind him. Now it was closed. Perhaps a breeze had pulled it shut. It wasn’t all that unlikely. The door at the bottom of the steps didn’t have a latch, so the wind could easily have created a draft.
He checked the bedroom and bathroom, just to be sure, but both remained empty. There was nowhere to hide. There weren’t even any closets.
He peered out the door and down the steps, but no one was there, either.
Returning to the living/dining room, he opened the second door and looked out. Another dark stairwell led down to the first floor of the building.
Eric turned around and scanned the mysterious apartment again. If these were the only two exits, then Aiden could only have gone this way.
Isabelle’s voice drifted up from his hand and he lifted the phone to his ear. “What was that?”
/> “I said, what’s the deal with this guy, anyway? You knew him?”
“Not very well. Aiden was one of my students about seven years ago. The next year, he disappeared without a trace. It was big news in this town for a long time.”
“A missing person, huh?”
“Yeah.”
“I can relate to that.”
Eric smiled. “That’s right.” He found Isabelle almost a year ago. She looked and sounded thirteen, but she’d been missing for thirty-six years, trapped inside a living mansion that existed between two worlds. She saved his life, and in return he gave her the courage to escape her strange prison. But she still wasn’t exactly free. Although she’d left the terrifying Altrusk House behind, she could only travel between buildings with similar properties. She still couldn’t venture outside.
“Maybe you can save Aiden, too, just like you did me.”
“Maybe.” But Aiden didn’t seem to want to be found. He was gone as quickly and mysteriously as he’d appeared. “But for now, I’m going to hang up until I’m out of here.”
“I’ll be watching.”
“Thanks.”
Stuffing the phone back into his front pants pocket, he retrieved the daisies from the table and then left the apartment down the spiral staircase. At the bottom was a heavy, steel door. Like the others, it was unlocked.
He stepped through the door and immediately found himself standing in a shadowy room that smelled of leather, stale beer and faint cigarette smoke. A round, oak table stood before him with a single, unlit candle resting in the middle. Four high-back chairs of matching oak stood around it. Similar tables were set all over the room. The walls were painted black, the floors were hardwood. The décor appeared to be a passionate marriage of Harley Davidson and United States naval history. Leather jackets, gloves and biker helmets mingled with American flags, framed photographs of aircraft carriers and battleships, paintings of sailors, framed medals and other various war memorabilia.
This was a bar.
He was still on Main Street, just a few doors down from the florist. He thought for a moment and finally realized where he was. This was Big Brooke Tavern.
Fantastic. He was now trespassing in a biker bar before business hours.
This was definitely not somewhere he wanted to be.
Quickly, he turned to retreat back up the steps, intending to instead leave the way he came. But the heavy, metal door to the spiral staircase was no longer there. He was staring at an empty wall adorned with a painting of a bald eagle.
Baffled, he croaked a stifled, “What—?” and twirled around, scanning the room.
Where the hell had the door gone? He just came out of it. It was right here.
Wasn’t it?
He pressed his hand against the wall and felt it. It made no sense. Doors didn’t just disappear. Yet this one had done just that. It was utterly gone.
He turned and looked out into the bar again. He had to get out of here.
Stepping around the table, he saw that there was a door to his right, but it was clearly marked “FIRE EXIT” and warned him that an alarm would sound if he attempted to open it.
That wasn’t desirable.
The only way out seemed to be the front door.
A loud bang came from the rear of the building, followed immediately by a deep, angry voice that he couldn’t clearly hear but was certain had uttered a profanity of some sort.
He wasn’t alone here.
Again, he wondered what would happen if he was caught. Would the owners call the police and have him arrested? Or would they simply beat the crap out of him and toss him out with the garbage?
Still clinging to the stupid daisies, Eric made for the front door, weaving around tables as he went.
He glanced back. From here he could see the polished bar with all its bottles of liquor neatly organized behind it and its cozy stools sitting empty and waiting for the day’s first patrons. He could also see the door to the right of all those bottles, leading back into the store room. There was a light on back there, shining through the window in the door. If someone were to glance out from behind that window, he would be right out in the open and impossible to miss.
He reached the front doors without drawing anyone’s attention, only to find them locked tight. The handles clanked noisily down, but refused to budge.
Panic exploded in his chest. No! This wasn’t fair. What was he supposed to do now?
“Hey!” boomed a frightful voice from the rear of the building.
Eric spun around. Standing behind the bar, having just emerged from the store room, was a large man in a leather vest with big, tattooed arms and an even bigger gut. His hair was cut so short it was little more than a shadow covering his scalp, but he had more than enough beard to make up for it. Black as coal, it cascaded down his chest and came to rest on top of the huge bulge of his belly. “What are you doing in here? We’re closed.”
Frozen and wide-eyed, significantly outweighed and cradling the big, pink bouquet of daisies in his arms, Eric never had a chance of intimidating this monstrous man. Not even a little. He might as well burst into tears and wet himself on top of it all. “I’m sorry,” he stammered. “I think I’m lost.”
Eying the bouquet, the man said, “You think?”
From somewhere in the back room, he heard another voice, this one the deep, throaty voice of a woman: “What are you going on about?”
“I’m not talking to you,” the hairy barkeeper bellowed back.
“What?”
The man lifted his head, exasperated, and filled his mighty lungs. “Nothing!”
“I’m really sorry,” Eric said again. “I don’t know what happened.” He reached behind him and tried the door again, but it still wouldn’t open.
Stepping out from behind the bar and strolling toward him, looking even bigger now that the bar wasn’t obscuring any of his impressive girth, the man said, “I don’t either. Those doors’re supposed to be locked.”
“Yeah…” Eric glanced back at the doors and was struck by fleeting inspiration. “They seem to be. Now. I was…” He had to force himself to relax. He hadn’t done anything wrong. Well, he was trespassing…but he hadn’t done anything seriously wrong. “I wasn’t paying attention. I came into the wrong building. When I realized my mistake, I couldn’t get back out.”
“Are you talking to somebody?” bellowed the woman from the back.
The barkeeper stopped and turned his back to Eric. “Just some guy at the door!” he shouted back at her.
“We’re not open yet!”
The barkeeper threw his hands out to his sides as if to say, “No kidding!” and shouted, “I know! He’s just lost or something!” He turned back to Eric, shaking his head and muttering something that sounded like, “Crazy trucking woman…”
Eric was fairly sure the woman in back wasn’t a trucker.
“I really didn’t mean to cause any trouble.”
But the barkeeper waved a dismissive hand at him as he walked up and shoved at the door. They were locked tight. “That’s strange. Why would it let you in but not out?”
Eric feigned bewilderment and shrugged. “No clue.”
The man looked at him, eying him up and down, and fished a huge set of keys out of his pants pocket to unlock the door. At that moment, the store room door swung open and a frightfully immense woman sauntered through. She was even taller than the man, at least six and a half feet tall, with broad shoulders and broader hips, a huge mane of badly dyed red hair and a vast amount of cleavage spilling out from a too-tight corset top. She was wearing a lot more makeup than was strictly necessary and gave off a far more impressive presence than the bearded barkeeper. “Why’d you let him in?” she asked, her voice booming over the silent bar. Eric thought she was probably used to the atmosphere being much noisier in here.
“I didn’t let him in. He got in on his own.”
“Didn’t you remember to lock the door?”
“Of course I
remembered to lock the damn door. Don’t I always remember to lock the damn door?”
“Then how’d he get in?”
“Hell if I know! Something funny going on with the lock, I guess.”
“Well you’d better fix it. We can’t have people just walking in whenever they want. We have business hours.”
“I know I’ve got to fix it. I ain’t stupid, woman.”
“Again,” said Eric. “I’m sorry. I’m really embarrassed about this.”
The barkeeper shook his head and thumbed through his many keys.
The woman now eyed Eric with a distressingly keen interest. “Those for me, sweetie?”
“What?” Eric looked down at the daisies, startled. He felt an instant blush wash across his face. “Oh… No. I mean… They’re for my wife. I mean, my wife sent me out for them. They’re for a baby shower. My sister-in-law, actually.”
A curious smile touched the woman’s lips. For some reason, he felt like a slab of meat dangling in front of a hungry tiger.
“I was supposed to go to the flower shop and the bakery, but I was daydreaming and I guess I got turned around.”
“I’ll say you got turned around,” the woman told him. “The bakery’s right next to the florist. Two doors back the way you came.”
“Really? Two doors… I’m… Wow. I’m sorry.”
“You would’ve had to walk past it to get here.”
Eric didn’t know what to say to this. Now he was embarrassed about losing the door back up to the apartment and about being too stupid to find the bakery.
The woman laughed. It was a hearty laugh, loud in the silence of the closed bar.
“Well shit, it ain’t no wonder,” said the barkeeper. “Look at the size of that bouquet. Poor guy probably couldn’t see where he was going.”
“Real men buy pretty flowers for their women.”
“I buy you flowers,” the man returned quickly, managing to sound hurt.
“Not pretty ones like those.”
“I buy you roses.”
“Red roses. I know. Every time.”
“I thought you liked red roses. They symbolize love. Passion.”