OtherWorld

by Sarah Dreher

  “Maybe,” George said. “But they’ve never mentioned it, and I think they’d tell us. Kids could find those things and get lost in them. You think that might have happened with your friend?”

  “Just considering all the possibilities,” Stoner said. How in the world was she going to bring up the matter of Spaceship Earth without admitting she’d committed an illegal act by going where she wasn’t supposed to go?

  She glanced up at Gwen and signaled “help me” with her eyes.

  “What’s under the Ball?” Gwen asked abruptly.

  “Nothing but air,” George said. “It doesn’t connect with the ground.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Positive.” George looked from Gwen to Stoner and back. “Why? Do you suspect something?”

  Gwen put on an innocent face. “Just curious.”

  “I’m not buying that,” George said. “What are you thinking about?”

  “Better tell her,” Gwen said to Stoner.

  She took a deep breath. “Okay. We were on the ride, and it stopped, and I saw an exit sign and went through the door and down some stairs and...”

  “Found yourself outside, right?”

  “No, I was in some kind of basement or something. It was dark. I couldn’t see…”

  George shook her head. “I’ve been up and down those stairs a dozen times. They go outside.”

  Stoner felt sick. Okay, let it go. You fell asleep again, right? Made a mistake, right? Were boldly going where no one has gone before, right? Had another of those “Stoner McTavish, for your eyes only” experiences, right?

  George was looking at her closely. “Stoner, what did you see?”

  “Nothing,” she said quickly. “I must have been confused, imagination, you know.”

  “There was something. Come on.”

  “I went down the stairs,” she said hesitantly, “and I know I passed the door to the outside, but the stairs went on, and so did I, and at the bottom there was a… well, a door...”

  “And?”

  “And I opened it, but there didn’t seem to be… anything… on the other side.”

  Stape was staring at her, open mouthed.

  “Did you go in?” George asked.

  “No. It was...dark.” She folded her hands on the table top. She was damned if she was going to tell them about the fog and the bottomless hole. “That’s all.”

  “There you are,” Stape said, a little smugly.

  “No, Stape, this is not there you are. This is not necessarily the same thing at all.”

  Stoner glanced from one to the other. “What same thing?”

  “A friend of Stape’s was working on some wiring in there…”

  “He isn’t a friend,” Stape said.

  “A colleague of Stape’s. And he claimed he went down underground, just the way you did. Except what he saw...”

  “What?”

  George shook her head. “It’s nutso stuff.”

  “What was it?” Stoner said insistently.

  George looked at Stape and rolled her eyes in a the-world-is-full-of- loonies-and-I’m-the-only-sane-one-in-it way. “He claims he saw a hole— said the whole area beyond the door was a hole, actually—and that there were clouds or something coming out of the hole.”

  Stoner noticed her hands were shaking, and hid them in her lap. “Anything else?”

  “He says he dropped an electrician’s wrench down the hole, and it...”

  “Never hit bottom,” Stoner finished for her.

  George stared at her. “Did that happen to you?”

  “Not exactly. It was a penny.”

  Stape signaled to Rita for a refill all around. George shook her head in warning but didn’t object aloud.

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “Nope,” Stape said. “We went and looked for the place, naturally. But there wasn’t anything. No stairs past the outside exit. No door. No clouds. Nothing. Not even the big nothing he said was there.”

  Stoner started to get up. “I have to talk to this guy.”

  George stopped her. “No good. He’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Left the state. Said life was hard enough with the recession, he didn’t need Voodoo complicating his life.”

  “Is that what he thought?” Gwen asked. “Voodoo?”

  “Something like that.”

  Gwen grinned. “If it’s Voodoo we’re dealing with, no problem. Aunt Hermione can handle that.”

  “Or one of her friends from Cassadaga,” Stoner agreed.

  Stape and George exchanged glances.

  Oh, boy, Stoner thought. The end of what could have been a beautiful friendship.

  “You Yankees are all a little strange, aren’t you?” George asked.

  Stoner nodded eagerly. “Sort of.”

  George patted Gwen’s hand sympathetically. “Must be a strain sometimes.”

  “I’m used to it,” Gwen said demurely.

  “Listen,” Stoner objected, “she’s just as strange as I am.”

  “Well,” Gwen admitted, “almost.”

  “I mean, I may have weird stuff happen to me, but at least I don’t believe in it. You believe in it.”

  “Which, Stoner, my sweet, is why is doesn’t happen to me.”

  The evening’s entertainment was setting up in the background. There were clattering and grunts as amplifiers were heaved onto the stage. The ripping of duct tape. Someone blew into the mike, apparently liked the sound, and spent a few minutes “huffing” and “hoo-aaaaaing” and “puff-puff-puffing”.

  Stoner glanced up.

  A blonde woman of indeterminate age was tuning an acoustic guitar. But not just any acoustic guitar. This guitar was pure white, and shiny as a mirror. And it had “Patzi” written on it in silver sequins that caught the light and threw it like confetti into every corner of the room.

  “Nice guitar,” Stoner said.

  “That’s Patzi,” Stape said. “She is cool.”

  “But strange,” said George. “Being a Yankee.”

  The woman was pumping up, tapping the toe of her pure white cowboy boot on the floor, then the heel, making her own drums. She did a little dance, accompanying herself on the guitar, the fringes on her blouse and skirt gyrating wildly.

  She was cool, all right. And somehow familiar.

  Patzi ran through a few chords, then threw back her head and sang. A couple of bars of Loretta Lynn, strung together with a snatch of Brenda Lee, a little Tammy Wynette, and washed it all down with some early Dolly Parton.

  Her voice was familiar, too.

  “Great, isn’t she?” Stape said, obviously smitten. “Not real up-to-date in her choices, but some kind of voice.”

  Stoner had to admit it was, indeed, some kind of voice. Deep, lusty, well-travelled, intimate, and definitely bedroom.

  And definitely one she’d heard before.

  She turned in her seat to get a better look.

  Patzi let out a whoop. “Stoner McTavish! I’ll be damned, it’s Old Home Week.”

  Stoner couldn’t believe it. “Ione?”

  The woman put her guitar down and sashayed over to the table. “Call me Patzi, honey. That other woman’s long gone.” She threw her arms around Stoner and gave her a breath-choking hug. “Damn, it’s good to see you. Hey, Gwen!”

  Stape and George were looking totally bewildered.

  “We go way back,” Patzi explained. “We were in the same mental hospital.”

  “That’s nice,” George said with infinite politeness.

  Patzi flapped her hand at her. “Not that way. Stoner was under cover, looking for a missing nurse, and I was just there because my no-good husband put me there.”

  Gwen reached back and pulled over a chair for Patzi. “How in the world did you end up here? Like this?”

  “Always wanted to be a country-western singer, remember, Stoner?”

  Stoner nodded.

  “So when old Shady Acres went down the t
ubes, I just decided, Hell’s bells, it’s a damn short life. You might as well give it a try.”

  “That’s really great, Ione...uh, Patzi.” She wondered how to phrase her next question. “Do you play a lot of… well, women’s bars?”

  “You mean am I ‘in the life’?” Ione/Patzi fluffed her hair a little. “Honey, I am in it. These Baby Dykes love older woman. My dance card’s always full.”

  “I can’t believe it,” Gwen said wonderingly. “When I met you before you were so, I don’t know, so…”

  “Mousey,” the singer finished for her. “I sure was. It’s amazing what divorce will do for you.” She sang a few notes of “D.I.V.O.R.C.E.”

  Stape was still staring at them in slack-jawed awe. “All I can say is, that must be one heck of a mental hospital.”

  “Sure was, Sweetheart. It was haunted.”

  “You saw it, too?” Stoner asked.

  “I saw it tear itself apart around our ears. And I saw it put back together the next day. You think it was the medication?”

  “I don’t know,” Stoner said. “Did you ever remember all the lyrics to all the songs Doris Day ever recorded?”

  “Looked them up. Probably should have just let it go, since my life was coming back together anyway. But by then it was something I knew I’d always wonder about. Listen,” Patzi said, giving Stoner a little punch in the ribs with an elbow, “you’ll never believe who I ran into. The other night? I was doing a short gig over at the World? The Hoop-de-Doo Review? So there I am relating to the audience, I mean we were rockin’ and rollin’, honey, and I look up and sitting near the back is none other than Millicent Tunes.”

  Stoner felt her blood run cold.

  “Isn’t she in jail?” Gwen asked. She turned to George and Stape. “Millicent Tunes ran the hospital Ione and Stoner were in. She was using it to smuggle gangsters out of the country. Stoner blew her cover.”

  “She may have been,” Patzi said, “but she’s out now. Big as life and twice as ugly.”

  Suddenly a lot of things made sense, and Stoner didn’t like the sense they made.

  “Hey,” Patzi said, “I got to rehearse some before my fans get here. Let’s get together later, okay?”

  “Sure,” Stoner said. Millicent Tunes. Damn.

  Patzi pranced back to the stage and started giving hell to her guitar.

  “Well, well,” Gwen said. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

  Stoner nodded slowly. “Now we know what happened to Marylou. And we know why.”

  “But she knows Marylou, and from the note it looked like she thought it was me she’d kidnapped.”

  “Yeah.” She could feel the cold fear spreading from her blood to the surface of her skin. If she didn’t move soon, she wouldn’t be able to. “She had someone else do the kidnapping. But when she realizes...” She stood up. “We have to find her, Gwen. Before Millicent gets to her.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Marylou knew herself pretty well, and one of the things she had always known about herself was when she was getting near the edge of her sanity. That edge, she could tell, was coming up any minute now. What she didn’t know for sure was what would happen when she went over it.

  This seemed like a really bad time not to know.

  She was perfectly capable of doing something that would get her killed, simply to break the monotony. She couldn’t stand being bored. It ranked right up there with dark places, terrible food, no sleep, no intelligent conversation, and a score of other horrors indigenous to the present situation.

  One of the things she needed to do, and was finding increasingly difficult, was to keep herself under control until someone came to rescue her.

  If anyone came to rescue her.

  She shook herself. No, you mustn’t think that. Stoner will come. She will definitely come.

  You see how easy it is to get into negative thinking?

  Marylou crumpled a food wrapper in her hand, just to hear sound. But what if she didn’t come?

  Now that she had thought it, the idea took root in her mind and refused to leave.

  What if Stoner didn’t come?

  What if nobody came?

  What if nobody really gave a damn about her?

  Maybe she’d been too outrageous her entire life—too self-centered, too insensitive, too zany, too ridiculous, too downright Marylou. Maybe she’d made it impossible for anyone to be a friend, to really love her.

  Marylou felt tears come to her eyes. She was sorry. Sorry for every smart-ass remark she’d ever made, every teasing comment. Sorry for every complaint. Sorry about the secret cache of pistachio nuts she kept hidden in her desk drawer so she wouldn’t have to share them with Stoner.

  For Heaven’s sake, Stoner doesn’t even like pistachio nuts. Never has.

  She really was becoming quite disturbed.

  DISTURBANCE was written all over her.

  She had to put her mind on something constructive. Like getting out of here. Or staying alive and sane.

  Well, not completely sane. No one could go through what she was going through and stay completely sane. Could they?

  Maybe she should play with David a little more. She could manipulate him. Easy. He might be a hot-shot kidnapper, but men were her area of expertise.

  If there was one thing Marylou Kesselbaum knew how to do, it was to get a man to think he wanted to do something he didn’t really want to do.

  Marylou sighed. She’d almost welcome a trip on an airplane to break the monotony.

  The airplane. That’s what had done it. She’d made too much of a fuss and alienated everyone, and now no one was ever going to come and get her. Stoner would hire some fancy, sleazy attorney, have her declared dead, and take her half of the business and all her insurance money. Then she’d split it with Gwen and Aunt Hermione and Edith and they’d all sail around the world, carousing and whooping and congratulating themselves on getting rid of her at last.

  The No More Marylou Celebration Cruise.

  Even now, they were probably celebrating. Glad to be without her. Going on the rides. Having a better time.

  Well, if people didn’t like who she was, they could just...

  It was her own fault if people weren’t close to her. She’d never been able to tell people how she really felt. If people don’t know how you feel, they don’t know who you are. If they don’t know who you are, they can’t care about you. Plain and straightforward. No share, no care. Nobody’s fault but her own.

  She didn’t know why she was like that.

  She couldn’t change it. She was over thirty. You can’t change your basic psychology after thirty, it’s a scientific fact.

  Even her own mother probably didn’t like her very much. How could she? How could you like somebody you didn’t know?

  Damn it, she’d tried to change. All her life she’d tried to change. She didn’t want to be a neurotic spoil-sport. But she just couldn’t do it. Couldn’t make the transition. Couldn’t get it together. Couldn’t do whatever it was she was supposed to do.

  And probably never would be able to. She’d probably never have any real friends.

  She knew darn well Stoner was only nice to her because they were in business together. Not to be manipulative, Stoner’d never do that. But just to keep things pleasant. Keep the work environment pleasant.

  That’s what she was, a Work Environment.

  She choked on a little sob.

  Well, this was totally ridiculous. Stoner’d better find her before she became completely unhinged. Stoner’d better get that slow-moving, methodical, obsessively thorough Capricorn mind of hers in gear and GET ME OUT OF HERE.

  Trouble was, Stoner didn’t know boredom would make her crazy.

  Stoner probably thought she had all the time in the world to putter around being cautious.

  Stoner wouldn’t go crazy in this situation.

  Stoner would just sit down and think the whole damn thing through, nut by bolt by hair. Then decide on the best course
of action. Sleep on it. Look at it again the next day. Run it through in her mind once more to check for snags...

  Marylou swore, if she ever got out of here alive, she would kill Stoner McTavish. Do the world a favor. Get rid of the damnable, compulsive, slow moving, irritating...

  Fear and loneliness overwhelmed her.

  She began to cry.

  * * *

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Gwen asked as she pulled off US 192 onto World Drive.

  “Probably,” Stoner said. She scanned the lawn and bushes they passed. It was getting dark, too dark to see, really—but just in case... “It’s the worst possible scenario.”

  “She wants revenge.” Gwen studied the bushes and lawn on her side of the car.

  What was that? Stoner peered into the dying twilight. “Worse than that. Marylou was in on the arrest. So she has plenty of reason to want her dead, and no reason to keep her alive.” No Marylou, just a topiary Figment.

  “And as soon as she finds out it’s Marylou she has...” The car started to slip over the center line. Gwen pulled it back into the right hand lane.

  Stoner thanked God there wasn’t much traffic on the Drive at this time. It was too late for the afternoon crowd to leave, and too early for those who were staying for dinner and Illuminations. “She’ll toss her away like a used Kleenex.”

  “Probably wouldn’t even be interested in a trade.”

  Stoner looked over at her. “A trade?”

  “Me for her.”

  She couldn’t believe it. One by one, all the people she cared about were either disappearing or going insane. She wondered what they’d find when the got back to the Contemporary. Aunt Hermione wandering the halls naked and tearing out her hair, no doubt. Edith Kesselbaum trying to conjure up ghosts by reciting Erickson’s Stages of Development, with subcategories. “I can’t see one positive thing about that idea,” she said.

  “Well, there’s one thing. I know how I’d be handling it if it were me. God knows what Marylou’s doing.”

  Stoner didn’t even want to think about that. “What would you be doing?”