by JM Guillen
“I’ll be here.” I held up the keys. “You’ll even have time to chew. Not that you ever do.”
“Yeah, right.” Baxter headed off in search of food.
I studied the keys, selected the one with the bright orange plastic housing and tried the door. It opened easily, so I slipped within.
The door swept closed behind me, and the pair of jingle bells hung from the inside handle tinkled. To the side, a bank of switches waited.
“Eight, eleven, nineteen seventy six.” I punched in Dad’s favorite security code—my birthday—then flipped all the switches, flooding the room with florescent light.
I turned to face my father’s shop and let my eyes roam over walls painted with larger than life comic book characters, wire-rack shelves of plastic figurines, and wooden displays of comics.
“Liz couldn’t believe how much her father’s shop had grown.” I stared, stunned at my surroundings, as I narrated. Has he rented more space? It had to be something like that.
The comics caught my eye again. My fingers itched to rifle through them and finally catch up on all my favorites.
I had actually taken a few steps and reached out to caress the colorful inks before I caught myself and withdrew my arm.
No.
I totally could, I knew. Dad owned the whole damned place, right down to the last d4. He’d let me rifle through anything I wanted without a second thought. I could dive into the hip-high wooden box of loose dice and burrow into it like the ball-pit in every childhood fast food restaurant, if I wanted to.
The thought made me stifle a giggle, though no one could have heard.
My eyes danced over comics and board games and dice and rule books and…
I let my eyes flutter shut as I drew in a deep breath. Old paper, dry and slightly sweet with an earthy hint of must, hit me first. Tobacco teased my nose next, only partially covered by vanilla incense and old, waxed wood.
Dad’s cigar. He only smoked during games. Helped him relax during tough sessions, he said.
I blew out my breath.
“No side quests.” I had already split the party, after all. I needed to keep on track.
I had to find him.
Letting my fingers caress the protective covering of the comics, I started my tour of my father’s shop.
My footsteps barely made any noise on the hardwood as I took casual note of the inventory. Mini figs in fearsome poses waited in plastic bubbles attached to cardboard backing. Some had been painted, others waited next to tiny pots of acrylic paint.
“No way,” I bent to examine one, a beast-headed monstrosity with tentacles spewing out of its stomach, and shook my head.
Tentacle monsters were not my style.
Taking a step back, I nearly bumped into a display case which housed an eighteen inch, fully posable figure clothed in wizard robes and a hawk-nosed plague doctor mask.
His plastic visage regarded my clumsiness haughtily.
Further on, a wealth of board games had been stacked atop each other on shelves nailed all the way to the ceiling. Titles I’d never heard of tempted me, but I moved on with barely a pause.
Saving throw made.
Slipping past two tables full of boxes—a brief rifle proved them to be full of back issues of popular comics—I rounded a set of bookshelves arranged back to back to form a maze of stubby walls.
Four glass cases held collectible cards and matching dice sets. They formed a hollow island in the middle of the room that guarded a couple of registers.
How had he expanded so much? The store was far larger than I’d dreamed it ever could be. The rent must be astronomical.
I glanced over the register-fortress and noted the ledger and notebooks on the shelf beneath.
“There? Maybe?” I walked over to the registers and poked into the books. It looked as if Dad had kept extensive inventory notes up here, but little else.
Then, I saw the mini-library of bookshelves that guarded a short hallway. It stretched behind me.
“The office has to be back there.” I nodded. “An office means papers and papers might mean answers.”
Four doors lined the passage, all shut. A bathroom, maybe, and an office and… what? A backroom? Storage? Broom closet?
I tried the first one and found it locked.
Shit. Good thing I had some keys.
After a few fumbles, I found the correct one and opened the door.
A riot of color greeted me.
“Oh wow. Dad.” Painting after painting of men, women, and mutants in candy colors warred across the walls of an all but empty room. A long wooden table, scarred and battered, took up most of the available space. Mismatched chairs, all their cushions stained and worn, surrounded it. Ghosts of food, cigar smoke, and comradery swirled around.
“A gaming room? You have a whole room just for people to game in now? How cool is that!” I exclaimed to my distant father. Hurriedly, I scrambled to open the other rooms.
“My mistake.” I shook my head as I opened the second door. “Two gaming rooms.”
The second proved to be much the same, though the characters on the walls gamboled and flitted across fairy-tale forests and castles. A particularly busty young woman with dragon wings, horns, and a thick but short tail stood on the edge of a cliff to observe the aerial antics of scantily clad angels as they floated across the ceiling.
While cool, still not an office.
“Oh well, third time’s the charm.” I brandished my set of keys and headed across the hallway.
The scent of bleach wafted out of door number three before I’d hit the light switch inside. The bathroom within had been well-cleaned and stocked with all manner of cleaning supplies.
“Dad never struck me as the obsessively clean type before,” I mused. “He must have a clean-freak employee. I wonder who? And if they know where he went.”
Paper towels, toilet supplies, brooms, mops, a second kind of paper towel, sponges, and a bucket had all been stacked to the side of a neatly maintained sink and stall arrangement. Blocks and pipes in primary colors had been painted on the walls around the sink and mirror.
“Okay, so three’s not my lucky number. That just leaves you.” I rounded on the last door.
Unlocked, I flipped the light on a massive room. Far larger than the two gaming rooms combined, the place had been divided into two main sections. Off to the left, a small kitchen sat entrenched in a battle for space and cleanliness. The tiny counter next to the fridge was covered with far more microwaves than it was meant to hold, toasters, boxes of plastic forks, stacks of Styrofoam cups, and mountains of paper napkins.
A battered picnic-table-turned-concession-stand watched over the mess, itself guarded by two giant economy size trash cans.
Nearly a dozen computers all lashed together by thick cables dominated the other half of the room. Comfortably worn office chairs had been pushed neatly into place. Surge protectors had been taped to the cement floor, and plastic mats covered floor and cables alike for the ultimate in rolling chair protection.
Giant robots of all kinds—mech suits, composites of cars, even stylized lions contorted into limbs—marched stoically across the walls.
“A LAN room,” I breathed. “Oh, Dad.” A thought hit me. “Is this why you asked Baxter to come down here?” It’d make sense. Baxter knew all sorts of things about how to hook gaming computers together.
Not even considering the rent on their giant space, the computers must have cost thousands of dollars. How could any of this be possible? They looked brand new; for all I knew, they’d never been played on.
I flipped off the light, slipped back through the door, and retraced my steps to the front. I had just reached the hallway when I heard a tinkle from the front door.
“We’re closed!” I yelled.
“I know!” Baxter replied. “Find out anything?”
“No,” I groused and walked back up to the cash registers. “I can’t even find his office.”
“Did you
look upstairs?”
“Upstairs?” I eyed him. “In a gaming store?”
“I’m serious!”
“There aren’t any stairs.”
“Well, no, but there’s—” He glanced around a bit wildly, then pointed. “There’s the pull-string for the attic.”
“You’ve got to be shitting me.” It might have been a while, but I didn’t remember an attic. “An attic? In a business?”
I strolled to the string I’d entirely missed dangling from the ceiling. So much for my spot check.
“Yeah, I know. I thought it was weird too. Your dad had a hook thing he used to pull it down…” Baxter cast about. “I’d show you, but I can’t find the pole for it.”
“I don’t need it.” I stalked the string and eyeballed the distance.
“Size matters not,” he croaked again and wriggled his eyebrows. He obviously expected to see me sling some weirdness.
“It’s just a regular jump, Bax. Natural twenty, coming up.” I surged into the air, arm raised overhead, a demented combination of superhero and rocket ship. My vision narrowed to a single point of concentration as I stretched up to the string.
It cut into my palm as I grasped the rough rope. I clung to it and hung in mid-air for a split second before gravity caught up and slammed me back to the ground.
The loud creak I expected failed to make an appearance as the attic-ladder slid out of the now-open trap door smoothly.
“Incredible,” Baxter breathed at last. “No juju?”
“No, I caught it without my awesome cosmic powers.”
He stared, still stunned by my amazing physical prowess.
“Are you coming up?” I asked and resisted innocently batting my eyes, but it took a will check.
“Yeah.” He trudged over, shaking his head in disbelief.
2
Stained and scuffed wooden floorboards stretched seemingly forever into the distance. Worn rag-rugs wrinkled into piles around the edges of the room somehow emphasized rather than masked its length. The mismatched bookshelves lining the place didn’t help either.
I climbed fully into the room and edged close to a wall. The white painted plywood bookshelf sagged with the weight of stack upon stack of paper. Reams of the stuff; loose, bound into tiny booklets, professional looking memo books, leather-bound day-journals, spiral notebooks. Paper of every weight and color littered the room in tidy piles and covered every surface.
Baxter entered behind me and sidled over.
“Wh–what is all this?” I stammered. “It’s the size of an auditorium!”
He shrugged.
“No.” I looked to him. “I mean, it’s impossible. The building isn’t nearly this large.”
“I have no idea, Liz.” He gazed into the distance, his eyes wide.
“You—” I stared. “You were the one saying I should come up here to find the office!”
“I thought this might be it?” He cringed and gave me a shaky smile.
“Seriously?”
“What? I’ve seen your dad come up here several times!”
I let my head drop back and let out a loud groan.
“Sorry.”
I waved him off. “It’s okay. We might as well look around while we’re here.” A quick glance revealed a light switch above a wood-stained bookshelf that only reached to my hip, on the opposite wall. I wandered over and flipped it.
Strands of Christmas tree lights wound around the tops of the tallest bookshelves twinkled into cheerful life.
“Um,” I elocuted, “alright.”
Of course the room didn’t really go on forever, but with only the light filtering from the large round window that overlooked the street, I hadn’t been able to see the far end. Now shelves upon shelves formed a long corridor that abruptly turned to the left, cut off by a beat-up leather couch. There lay a badly preserved leopard skin, shoved haphazardly into a space barely large enough to hold it.
“Um, what’s all this crap?”
“Like I know?” I stepped past the couch, where the shelves opened before me like a forest clearing.
“It’s just hard for me to imagine your dad thinking ‘Man, I want to hoard a bunch of old garbage above my gaming store.’”
“No, I get it.” I moved further in and dodged random clumps of furniture that sprouted like toadstool rings. Various overstuffed chairs and tables crowded together, away from the more unusual items.
Abruptly, I stopped in place.
“What?” Baxter’s breath tickled my neck as he nearly stumbled into me.
“I’ve… I’ve seen that before.” A man-sized birdcage, empty, sat tastefully atop a violet-striped fur.
“Where?” Baxter stepped aside and toyed with the slightly ajar wardrobe door. When opened, the wardrobe revealed a wealth of canned and jarred foods, pre-packaged dry goods, and three plastic jugs of coffee grounds.
“I… it was a long time ago. Something that happened with Simon.” I shook my head as I fingered the thin bars. “It was another one. It had to be.”
“I assume you weren’t inside it.”
A harp taller than me languished, ostracized by the other furniture into loitering between a mini-fridge and a beautifully carved old wardrobe. I wandered to it, disturbed.
True to form, Baxter bent over and opened the mini fridge. It held hotdogs, cups of pre-cut fruit, and a twelve pack of soda.
“You may assume.”
“Want one?” He held up a soda.
I grabbed it and popped the tab and surveyed the rest of the massive room.
A large, unmade bed—with a canopy, no less—had been shoved in one corner. A pedestal sink and a lady’s vanity covered with an old fashioned men’s shaving kit, toothbrushes, and various hair-care tools hovered near it.
“He… he didn’t live here?” I turned to Baxter, who shrugged.
“It’s not like I was around all the time, Liz. How would I know?”
The thought of my father, living in an attic filled with detritus and old trash unsettled me.
I stared at a pile of maps taking up a rather large section of an otherwise clear area of floor. Off to the left stood a large wall of tiny, locked drawers, each neatly numbered.
My brow wrinkled. It seemed like a familiar set up…
“Wait. Those are safe deposit boxes.”
“Like from a bank?” Automatically ghosting along behind me, Baxter pulled his nose out of a leather-bound book to give the wall a passing glance.
“Anything in the books?”
“I’ve only opened a few. The first two were tax ledgers or something. This is an old book on New York real estate.”
“Exciting,” I groused.
“Oh, hey, a desk.” He ambled off, opposite from the safe deposit boxes, toward a cherry wood secretary desk on the other side of the room. “Maybe that’s his office.”
I followed, glancing at an easel between the desk and a heavy black door. A beat to shit old suitcase sat tucked under the easel legs. Full of paints and brushes, I assumed. Dad always did have a fondness for older ways.
“Uh, Liz?” Baxter gestured to something beneath the desk.
The moment I looked, really looked, I thought I might pass out.
The same. My mind boggled at the idea. It’s the exact same room. I scuffed my foot against the floor, casually noting the Aegis of Dudael, inscribed there. Small blue stones had been set into the wood.
My fingers trembled.
“Are you okay?”
“No.” I whirled around and stared at the bits of odd furniture and shelves. My heart pounded in my chest.
“We’re in someone’s attic?” I glanced around at a labyrinth of dusty bookshelves. I couldn’t see far in the dim light, but it appeared that a man-sized birdcage had been pushed into one corner.
“Someone’s,” he chuckled. “Yes.”
Simon and I had sat here, in this very room, waiting for the Silent Gentlemen to move along. We had talked for a couple of hours, and left th
e way we had come.
Had Dad been downstairs the entire time? How was he connected to Simon?
How could he be?
“He knew. He knew exactly what he was doing.” My fists balled up.
“Liz?” Baxter queried, but I waved one hand at him.
“Nothing. Just thinking.” My mind raced as I thought over our conversation.
“You’ll keep that on, and you’ll go to your dad’s shop. You’ll stay with him all nice and safe for a few days, and then I’ll be back.”
“Did you expect my dad to be here?” I muttered under my breath. “You did, I think.”
But Simon had been wrong.
Perhaps this explained why he had never been interested in my family or personal life. If Simon had kept this from me— if Dad had kept things from me…
It would be easier if Simon didn’t have to directly lie. Didn’t have to pretend to not know the people I told him about.
“This is what I pointed at, not the desk.” Baxter gestured again. Prominently displayed on the center of the gleaming desktop was an envelope.
With my name on it.
I set down the soda and picked up the envelope. It had an unexpected weight—something solid slid inside.
“Here.”
I glanced up.
Baxter held out a letter opener in the shape of a dagger. I had to smile. Dad opening his mail with a Father’s Sword replica was completely his style.
Slicing it open, I dumped out an ornate key and a short note. I pounced on the note and devoured it while Baxter picked up the key and eyed the black door.
My wayward daughter,
It’s important that you know nothing is wrong. In all probability, I am quite fine, even if I am a bit out of reach just now.
Quit crinkling your nose while you read.
“Shut up,” I murmured.
If you’re reading this, then you probably believe I am missing. I assure you I am not, I happen to be exactly where I last looked. If, once in a while, you would look for things where they are, you might find them.
“Smartass.” I couldn’t stop smiling, and my eyes teared a touch. I hadn’t realized how worried I had been.