Down the Rabbit Hole

by J. D. Robb

  Almost anything. Sex could still win.

  But that was not enough. Not for her. She’d held on as long as she could. She’d made the point to him as many times as she was able without humiliating herself. And she’d come to the unhappy conclusion that she just wasn’t enough for Jeremy Abbott.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The apps appeared to be his, so Jeremy checked his email, text messages, Twitter and Facebook. He hadn’t missed much in the cyber world. A normal amount of time had passed, which he knew because the clock on the screens seemed to be accurate, so he found himself finally able to take a few normal, deep breaths. If he were really in hell, would he be able to check his email?

  Despite himself, and knowing he had far more important considerations that should be occupying the front burner, he scanned his inbox again for anything from Macy. Also despite himself, considering he could be dead and in hell, he was disappointed to find nothing. No apology for dumping him out of the blue, no follow-up explanation, nothing to offer hope that they might be able to talk this thing out. It seemed to be . . . over.

  A twisting began in his chest. Could he be having a heart attack—in hell?

  He had to stop thinking about Macy. He had enough problems right now without dwelling on heartbreak, and just thinking about Macy made his insides turn into something cramped and painful, so he turned his mind to the safe haven of work. He managed to answer several client emails, making sure he’d still have a job if and when he ever returned, and included one to his administrative assistant asking for a reply on some inconsequential issue. If she wrote back he’d know something more bizarre than dying had taken place.

  Then he sent one to his boss—just in case—telling him he had to be out for a few days. A family emergency.

  He closed out his email and looked around the cubicle. There seemed to be screens for every app—or rather each app was an illuminated area in his cubicle—all in the same order as on his phone. Except . . . he leaned closer to a small one on the lower right. It was a bright yellow sun, with a red heart inside. As he looked close, the app opened into a larger screen in front of him. Find a Girl, Contact a Girl, See the Girls Looking at You.

  Great, he thought, closing the app immediately. Just what he needed right now, a dating site. He hoped it wasn’t a sign that things with Macy were well and truly finished.

  He turned the chair away from the screens and looked out at the empty hall. “His” cubicle was on the edge of the farm, so his view out was a white wall. It might have been the cubicle where he’d started his career, except that the wall was not dinged up by people racing office chairs down the hallway for late-night stress relief.

  In fact, the whole place seemed recently built and sterile as an operating room. He listened again, straining his ears against the silence. Not even the tapping of keyboards could be heard. It was a weird sort of solitary confinement, being among hundreds but completely alone and seemingly invisible. Rising from his chair, he lifted his chin, then stood on tiptoe, to try to see across the sea of cubicles. He was about to dip back down onto his feet when another head popped up ten or fifteen yards to his right.

  His toes went numb and he dropped to his soles, heart pounding rapidly. He immediately went up on tiptoe again and didn’t see the first guy, but a few yards to the left, another head appeared. It was like a life-sized game of Whack-A-Mole.

  “Yo!” the second guy said, waving a hand. “Can you see me?”

  Jeremy’s heart leapt. He raised a hand in return. “Hey. Can you see me?”

  “Yeah! Yeah, I can! And you can hear me, right? And see me?” He continued to wave his hand. He had a thick, dark thatch of hair and a broad forehead.

  “Loud and clear, and I’m looking right at you.”

  “Finally!” It was hard to tell the guy’s expression, since only the top of his head and his eyes were visible, but he seemed to be smiling.

  “Where are we?” Jeremy called.

  The guy’s eyebrows fell. “You don’t know?”

  Jeremy shook his head. “You don’t either?”

  The guy disappeared, and Jeremy heard a small, discouraged “No.”

  “How about you?” Jeremy called. “The other guy—there was another guy over there. Hey!”

  Nobody answered. Had the other guy left, or been a figment of his imagination?

  “Hey, did you see that other guy? Are you still there?”

  “What?”

  Jeremy took the moment to drop back to his feet, then exited the cubicle. “Hang on!” he called. “I’m coming to find you.”

  He turned right and headed down the long hallway. He passed multiple cubbyholes just like his, all occupied by people staring at their screens, until finally he reached the corner. He turned and started down another interminable row.

  He should have reached the one who’d spoken to him by now, but nobody seemed the least bit aware of their surroundings, let alone to be looking for him, so he stopped, hands on his hips, and called, “Are you still there?”

  No answer.

  Disappointment threatened to swamp him. He was crazy. Someone had put him in an institution and he was imagining the cube farm, the silent preoccupied people, the colorful screens. The only real things were the four white walls and he was actually in a straitjacket. Or he was wandering around some giant man-made rat maze, perhaps observed, perhaps failing this test, failing all the tests.

  “Hello!” he yelled, fear giving his voice volume. He began to jog down the aisle, arms out to either side slapping the wall, the cubicles, the wall, the cubicles. “Answer me!”

  The industrial carpet, the fabric-lined cubicles all conspired to suck his voice into an abyss. The room was huge, and there was no echo, just the dead thumping of his feet on the rug. He ran until his breath ripped audibly from his throat and his chest burned.

  “Dude!”

  The voice from behind him made Jeremy damn near jump out of his skin. He spun around to see a short, dark-haired, square-headed guy in a shirt and tie and wrinkled khakis. He was built like a wrestler and stood with his arms out from his sides as if about to draw in a gunfight. It might have been aggressive except he looked he like might cry.

  He panted as he took the guy in. “Are you the one I was just talking to?”

  “I was gonna ask you the same thing! Where the fuck are we, man?”

  Jeremy started to laugh—hysteria, doubtless—when the guy launched himself forward and he found himself being hugged tight around the waist.

  Just as abruptly the guy let go. “Sorry, man. I’m just so glad to see someone. I mean, Jesus, this place, it’s huge, and I haven’t talked to anyone since I got here.”

  “So all these other people can’t see you either, huh? How long have you been here?”

  “I don’t know, man, days. One minute I was sitting in a meeting, checking my emails, and the next minute I’m like here, you know? It was okay at first, but now, I mean, what the hell, right? At least we got our stuff.” He gestured back into his cube and Jeremy saw an array of screens similar to those that he had. “I’d really be batshit otherwise.”

  Jeremy’s breath was slowly getting back to normal, but “days” threatened to make him hyperventilate.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “Brian. Yours?” He held out a hand.

  “Jeremy.” They shook. “So how’d you get here, Brian?”

  Brian’s face clouded. “Oh, man, it was awful.” He went on to describe sensations that were eerily similar to the ones Jeremy’d experienced.

  “And you said you were . . . what, checking your email? On your phone?”

  “That’s right. I just got this new Samsung, thing is fucking awesome. If I had it here I’d blow your mind with it. I’m talking hashtag-phone-gasm, right? I mean, I don’t even know what all it can do yet and I’m on it all the time. You kno
w?”

  Jeremy nodded slowly. “Did anybody say anything to you before you, uh, before you ended up here?”

  “What do you mean? I was in a meeting.”

  “I mean did anybody tell you to get off your phone, or ask you to listen up or anything like that?”

  Brian shrugged. “Hell, I don’t know. I was watching this video my buddy Ev sent, with this sweet chick in it wearing nothing but—”

  Something from inside his cubicle dinged and Brian’s head whipped around for all the world like the dog in Up when it saw a squirrel. Brian turned without finishing his sentence and bent toward the screen.

  “Brian,” Jeremy said, “did you see that other guy who popped up? Reddish hair? Looked annoyed?”

  “Pay attention, boys and girls! Are you paying attention?” a female voice boomed over the cubicles. You could hear the smile in her voice but at the same time she sounded far from benevolent. “That’s why you’re here, boys and girls, to Pay. Attention. Get what I’m saying?”

  The voice was getting closer. Jeremy glanced at Brian, who turned from his screens and looked at Jeremy with wide-eyed terror.

  “What?” Jeremy asked. “Who is that?”

  “Oh man,” Brian said, dropping into his seat. “Oh man. It’s her. Mrs. Hartz. Quick! Pay attention!” And with that, he turned back to his screens, hunching like all the rest of them, eyes riveted.

  “Why? Who is it? What’s she going to do? Brian?”

  But the guy was trembling in his seat, ignoring him.

  Jeremy turned toward the voice. What the hell? What on earth could anybody do to them now? They were already in hell.

  He watched the hall to see if she would come this way, and he didn’t have to wait long. She swung around the corner like the Stay Puft Marshmallow Man in Ghostbusters—about eight feet tall with a spherical body clothed completely in red, from her dress to her hose to her sensible shoes. Incongruously perched atop her fire-engine red hair was a tiara that did its best to sparkle despite being outgunned by the sheer massive proportions of the wearer. With her smallish head, thin legs, and colossal torso, she looked like a gigantic walking aneurysm.

  “What is this?” she boomed, spying Jeremy. As she approached, her yellow eyes became eerily clear and narrowed with displeasure. “You’re not in your office! You’re not paying attention!”

  It was hard to miss the malevolent gleam in her eye, as if his noncompliance might give her permission to do something awful.

  “I’m paying attention to you,” he said. He found himself sweating, despite his confidence that there was little she could do to hurt him.

  “I’m not the point,” she said.

  “There’s a point?” The question sounded sarcastic but he meant it. In fact the idea that there was a point gave him hope.

  “That question proves you’re not paying attention!” Her voice was piercing, especially at close range, but it was the waves of hostility and impatience that were most unnerving. “Look at all the other boys and girls; are you doing what they’re doing?” She bent from the waist to peer in at Brian. Though his back was to her, Jeremy could tell his trembling had increased from the force of her attention.

  She laughed—a gruesome sound—and her eyes shifted to Jeremy, conspiratorial. “I don’t think he’s truly paying attention, do you?”

  “Actually, yeah. I do.”

  “Well, that shows what you know. Get back to your office now and pay close attention—all the answers you seek are there. Go on. Now.” She made shooing motions with her hands, moving toward him. “Go on!”

  As if pushed by an invisible force field, he backed away from her.

  “Wait,” he said, before she propelled him any faster. “Who are you?”

  She stopped, her yellow eyes going wide and her red-lipped mouth gaping into a smile. As she bent toward him, her hands on her hips, his nervous glance fell on her tiara, upon which a large rhinestone heart anchored the center position, flanked by dozens of smaller heart-shaped glittery things, some of them on springs and bouncing with tiny ineffectual glee.

  “Who am I?” She reared up, her hands on her hips, and boomed a laugh. Next to them, a mousy-haired girl in a cubicle looked over her shoulder. Spotting Jeremy, she turned in her seat, eyes alive with interest.

  “Hi,” she said, her lipsticked mouth broadening into a smile.

  “Not him, you idiot,” Mrs. Hartz snarled. “He’s not real. Get back to work.”

  The girl flushed and snapped back to her computer.

  Mrs. Hartz crossed her arms over her chest and regarded him. “I am Queenie Hartz—that’s Mrs. Hartz to you—and I run this place. You’d do best to listen to me or else . . .”

  Her eyes—brows raised, impish smile—demanded that he ask.

  “Or else what?” he complied.

  “Or else . . . off with your head!” she crowed. With another flick of her hands he was tumbled backward down the hall until he reached the corner, bumped off the adjacent wall, and then rolled another dozen feet or more and found himself sprawled in front of his own cubicle.

  “Pay attention, boys and girls!” her voice said, much farther off now. “You know what happens if you don’t pay attention!”

  Angry, he picked himself up and brushed himself off. “No!” he called back. “What happens?”

  There was an unnerving moment of silence before a peal of maniacal laughter shivered through the air-conditioned room. “Nothing!”

  * * *

  “It was just . . .” Macy swept her hair back behind her ear and concentrated on her menu, hoping her inner turmoil did not show on her face. “Disappointing. That’s all. I thought there was more to him.”

  “You were with him for seven months, Macy,” her sister-in-law, Carolyn, said. “That’s longer than, like, anyone in your history of dating. Are you trying to tell me you were looking for something more all that time and couldn’t find it?”

  “No.” Macy looked up, wondering how to make herself clear without revealing the humiliating truth that she’d lost a guy to a phone. “There was a lot there, I’ll admit it. But when it came down to it he just wasn’t everything I wanted him to be. And it was just under seven months. Enough time to spot the flaws.”

  Carolyn slapped her menu down on the table. Macy noted a flush creep into her pale cheeks and felt terrible. She understood Carolyn’s disbelief. He had seemed perfect for her. She had thought so too.

  “I’m sorry,” Carolyn said. “I just don’t understand you. Surely you know that everybody has flaws.”

  “Of course. But they have to match up, you know? They have to be flaws you can live with.”

  “Sure, but . . .” Carolyn made a frustrated sound. “We liked him! Even your obnoxiously overprotective brother liked him. And believe me, when Lute likes someone you’re dating, things are a lot easier at our house, I can tell you.”

  Macy lay the menu in her lap and smiled at her. “Then I’m sorry. I truly didn’t intend to disrupt your home life.”

  Carolyn sighed. “It’s not that, and you know it. Something must have happened, because the last time I saw you, you were head over heels.”

  Macy snorted, then took a sip of her water, eyes skittering away from her sister-in-law’s too-perceptive gaze.

  “Hey, it was subtle but I spotted it.” Carolyn jabbed a finger into the table. “I’ve known you since you were ten, okay? And now you tell me you’ve dumped him. I have to say I’m shocked. And a little skeptical that he just wasn’t everything you wanted him to be.” This last she said in a voice intended to imitate Macy’s, but it smacked dangerously of Minnie Mouse.

  “See?” Macy sat forward. “This is why I don’t like dinner parties. If I hadn’t brought him to your little shindig you’d have never known him, never liked him, and peace would reign again in the world. Instead, this little ripple in my pond h
as your boat rocking. But okay, we went. Did you not notice how absent he was half the time?”

  “It wasn’t just our little shindig. It was Thanksgiving too.” Carolyn’s brows drew together. “What do you mean, absent? Oh, well, he did take that phone call.”

  “And he spent the whole evening checking his email. He did that on Thanksgiving too, remember?”

  “But he was expecting something, right? A contract or something?”

  Macy waved a hand. “Whatever. What about the time Lute caught him checking Facebook?”

  “He did?” Carolyn was starting to look doubtful. Then her face cleared. “Wasn’t he trying to get in touch with his niece? Or sister? Or someone like that?”

  “His cousin.” She sighed heavily, giving Carolyn a helpless look. “But there was always something like that. Something he had to pick that damn thing up for—maybe something valid, maybe not—but either way, he’d look and then he’d get sucked into it and poof! He’d be gone.”

  “What do you mean, he’d be gone? He leaves?”

  “Mentally!” Macy picked up her water glass. The agitation was beginning again. She took a few quick swallows. “You know, I spent months feeling like it must be me. That I must be boring. So I upped the chatter, tried to engage him, felt bad about myself and why he couldn’t seem to focus on me for more than five minutes at a time. And you know what I finally realized?”

  Carolyn looked at her, probably surprised by the heat in her voice. “What?”

  “That I was bored. Me! Not him. For the longest time I was sure that I was the problem, that if I were smarter, prettier, more interesting, he’d put the damn phone down. But no. The problem wasn’t me, it was him. Sitting at a table watching someone look at their phone is boring. So one day I’d just had enough. See ya!” She flipped a hand and shrugged, letting her gaze slip past Carolyn so she couldn’t read the hurt in it.

  Carolyn nodded. “Yeah, okay. I can see that.”