Worlds Away and Worlds Aweird Page 6

  There were doors leading out to daylight, but she couldn’t approach them. When she tried, there would be a moment of dizziness and she would find herself walking away from them. She was trapped in the building.

  She noticed that she was not tired from all her walking, at least not physically, but mentally she was exhausted from so much strangeness. She sat down on a bench to think. This place had driven everything else out of her mind, but now, as she relaxed, it all came back.

  Her wedding! It was only two weeks until her wedding day, when she would become Mrs. Lewis Tanner. Looking around, she began to doubt if that were still true. What had happened? The fever, she decided. She had caught a fever, and the doctor had put her to bed. Her only concern had been to get well in time for the wedding. She kept telling the doctor that. The last thing she remembered was the doctor standing by the bed, holding her wrist and checking her pulse, as she drifted off to sleep.

  Then this.

  She had awakened in the back of a bookstore. For a while, she had looked at the books, then she had wandered out and started exploring. Now, suddenly, the bookstore seemed homey, and she was afraid she had lost that too. She looked around her and spotted the sign reading “Sun Room – Books.” With a sigh of relief she headed in that direction.

  There were fewer people now, and some of the stores were closing, but the bookstore was still open. She went in and stood where she had awakened. Soon the bookstore workers closed up, chasing the last customers out, but they didn’t seem to see her. Lights went out, leaving the store dim. She wondered where she could sleep when, suddenly, there was another dizzy spell. It was morning and the bookstore was opening.

  The second day was a repeat of the first, as was the third, and many more. Sometimes Melanie listened in on people’s conversations. She learned that this was a “Shopping Mall,” and she learned how much time had passed. But the conversations soon became repetitious and Melanie was bored.

  Some of the people tried to be friendly. One young man she found especially attractive, as he bore an amazing resemblance to her long lost fiancé. She stared at him until he noticed and stopped to talk to her.

  “Hi there,” he said. “My name is Rich. I’m unbelievably wealthy and handsome, and obviously my fatal charm has attracted you, the way you were staring at me.”

  “No, no, I’m sorry. Please forgive me, sir. I know it isn’t polite to stare like that, but you remind me so much of the man I was going to…well, a man I know.”

  “Oh, rats!” His face took on an exaggerated grimace of disappointment. “It was his fatal charm you were attracted to. I’ll admit that I’m not wealthy, you decide for yourself about handsome.”

  “Oh, no, please, sir, don’t be mad at me. I did not intend to insult you. You’re one of the few around here who has taken the trouble to be friendly to me. Oh, dear!” She was on the verge of tears.

  “Let’s just start over again. My name is Rich, you don’t have to call me sir. I’m an intern at the hospital down the road. What’s your name?”

  Forcing a smile onto her face at his attempt to patch things up, she replied, “Hello, sir, er, I mean Rich, my name’s Melanie. But what’s an ‘intern’? I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that.”

  “I thought everyone knew what an intern was, but I guess you could say I’m sort of an apprentice doctor. Are you from around here?”

  “Well, yes and no. It’s rather hard to explain. I grew up over in town, but I’ve been, well…away…for a while, and now everything’s different. Please, don’t ask any more, I’d rather talk about you.”

  “Of course! My favorite subject. But let’s get more comfortable.” He took her arm and led her to a bench.

  They sat and talked, and by the time he had to leave, Melanie was feeling better than she had since she arrived here.

  Rich came to talk when he could and she enjoyed that, but his schedule seldom left much free time when the mall was open. As the tedium mounted, she began to long to go elsewhere, somewhere, anywhere. Finally boredom grew so great that she did leave the mall, only to find herself in a worse place. She was in her bedroom, during her illness, watching herself lie in bed. She could see and hear all that went on, but no one seemed to see her.

  The first trip lasted only a minute or two, but each successive trip she stayed longer. At last, she stayed right up until the time she remembered falling asleep. The doctor was holding her wrist, and as she dozed off, he continued to stand there. But minutes later, he shook his head, dropped her arm, and pulled the sheet up over her face. At last she realized! She had not fallen asleep, she had died! In shock, she returned to the mall, to her spot in the bookstore, and stayed there for days, hardly moving.

  Slowly her courage returned, and she began to explore whatever of the past she could reach, those times and places related to her present plight. Her bedroom during the fatal illness, her funeral at the little church outside town. There was no headstone because the stonecutter was ill, and only flowers marked the grave.

  Between trips she wandered the mall. Rich came whenever he could, and they would sit on a bench and talk. Once while she was in the past she sensed Rich looking for her, so she cut her trip short to see him. She felt herself falling in love with Rich, and that made her afraid because she knew it was impossible. Rich sometimes asked her if she lived in the mall, and he laughed when she said, “Yes.” He didn’t push her, which was one thing she liked about him. He just sat there, talking and enjoying her company.

  Melanie’s trips were now to later dates. She was horrified when she visited the old churchyard a few years after her funeral and discovered the church on fire. The parson was trying to put it out, with the help of the stonecutter who lived just down the road. They were both killed when the steeple fell on them, and the church was totally destroyed.

  Melanie noticed that her grave still had no headstone. What she couldn’t see was that all the papers about her grave and the headstone were in the church when it burned. With the parson and the stonecutter both dead, nobody was left to finish her headstone or put it in place.

  The fire unsettled her, and she didn’t want to visit the church again. But when she went into town, she got a worse shock. There were strangers living in the house she had grown up in! It wasn’t her house any longer. Her family had been depressed by her death and moved away.

  Melanie put off seeing what happened to Lewis Tanner after her death, but eventually she gave in. After a decent interval, he had paid court to a girl named Rose Carlson and married her. Rose’s family attended the big church in town, so the wedding was there, and afterwards Lewis went to church there. Many of his relatives followed him.

  With her family gone, and Lewis’s family attending a different church, and the parson dead, the old church was never rebuilt. The ruins lay abandoned for some eighty years. Melanie visited it at various times, but nothing interesting happened there during all that period.

  Finally, about three years before her awakening in the bookstore, something happened. A crew of men dug up the graves, taking the caskets and the headstones. She was horrified until she followed a truck and watched it pull into another cemetery—a big one. The caskets were carefully reburied, and the headstones reset.

  She went back to the churchyard. The men had removed all the caskets except hers. She waited to see where they would move her to, but the workers got in their trucks and drove off, leaving her grave untouched. Suddenly she realized that there was no headstone to tell them where she was buried. She looked at the paper the foreman was carrying as he checked the job, and her grave wasn’t even marked on it. She remembered the fire, and realized it must have burned all the records. In her shock, she again faded back to the bookstore and stayed there several days.

  She made only a few more trips to the churchyard after that. The last remains of the church were torn down, and big machines pushed dirt into the little hollow where the churchyard had been, filling it level with the surrounding land. The builders erected
a huge structure on the spot, and Melanie finally recognized the mall in which she was trapped. As the mall and the stores took shape, it at last became obvious that her grave, her unmarked grave, lay right below the bookstore. The spot she thought of as hers was right over her grave. She wept, but there was nothing she could do.

  ~Rich~

  Rich found her sitting on a bench outside the bookstore, her face tear stained. “Hello, Melanie. What’s wrong? Is there anything I can do?” He sat down next to her, placing his medical bag on the floor.

  “No, si—Rich, there’s nothing you can do. There’s nothing anyone can do for me. I fear I am doomed, trapped here for all eternity.” She dabbed at her eyes with a small handkerchief.

  “Wow, all eternity? That’s a pretty stiff sentence. Look, why don’t you come with me and let me try to cheer you up? Let me take you to visit a friend of mine, Bob Sondheim. He’s a shrink at the hospital. He might be able to cheer you up. Or come over to my place—nothing improper intended,” he hastily amended. “Just to see my proudest possession, the ancestral portrait.”

  “Rich, if I could, I would love to come with you. Even to your place, I know you don’t mean anything improper. But I can’t go with you. I can’t explain. It’s just the way it is.” She sighed, then continued, “But why don’t you tell me about your ‘proudest possession’? It might cheer me up a little.”

  “Oh, sure. It’s a portrait of my great grandfather and his wife and their seven kids. Everyone who sees it says I look identical to the picture of my great grandfather and to all of the seven children. It’s an old family joke. All seven kids look so much like Great Grandfather that they said he could have married any woman and the kids would have been the same.”

  “Oh, that is silly, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, but the resemblance is remarkable. Anyway, the portrait’s been in the family ever since it was made. It was part of my share of my grandfather’s estate. I sold everything else to pay for medical school, but I wouldn’t part with Lewis and Rose for a million—” He stopped short, alarmed at the expression on her face. “What’s the matter, Melanie?”

  “Lewis and Rose who?” She forced the question out between clenched teeth. “Please, tell me, Lewis and Rose who?”

  “Lewis and Rose Tanner, my great grandparents. Why?”

  She burst into tears. For a minute she just sat there sobbing, and then managed to get a grip on herself. “Rich, do you know any of your family history? About your Great Grandfather Lewis, before he married Rose?”

  “Oh, yeah, everyone in the family knows about that. He was going to marry another girl, only she died. Hey! Her name was Melanie, the same as yours. It was a real tragedy, just weeks before the wedding. And such a waste. Influenza and pneumonia. Today that would be easy to cure. I have enough stuff in there—” he gestured at the medical bag on the floor “—to cure her a dozen times over.”

  Melanie gasped. “You could cure her? Oh, sir! Are you certain? You aren’t just fooling a poor girl?”

  “Oh, yeah, no problem. A shot, maybe a couple of pills, wait a few hours, and she’d be well. Of course, nowadays, we wouldn’t let it get that far if we had the person in the hospital, but some don’t come in soon enough. We fix ’em up anyway.”

  Melanie looked at him. “Rich, do you really want to help me? Will you?”

  “Of course, Melanie. I really want to help you…” His voice trailed off in amazement.

  They weren’t in the mall anymore. They were in a dimly lit bedroom crammed with Victorian bric-a-brac. He looked around. Melanie stood next to him, and lying in the bed, flushed with fever, was—Melanie! He looked back and forth between the two, trying to remain calm.

  “Rich,” said the standing Melanie, “I’m not real. I’m a ghost. The ghost of that girl in the bed. When they built the mall, my grave wasn’t marked and they never removed it. I’m buried right under the bookstore, and I seem doomed to haunt the mall. But now, perhaps, you’ve given me another chance.” Gesturing at the Melanie in the bed, she said, “Please, oh please, cure her, cure me, like you said you could. I implore you, Rich. You did say you would help me.”

  Rich stood there for a moment, and then looked down. The medical case was at his feet. He looked again at the two Melanies, then he walked over to the bed and examined the girl lying there. He opened his case and pulled out a hypodermic, loaded it, and gave her a shot. Then he pulled out a couple of pills and woke her enough to take them. There was a glass of water by the bed, and he gave that to her to help her swallow them. As she took the pills, she managed to focus her eyes on him, and she whispered, “Lewis,” before dropping back to sleep.

  Rich turned to the other Melanie, and said, “Now we wait.”

  They sat down in a pair of chairs near the bed. Somehow, nobody entered the room to disturb them. Rich kept an eye on his watch. As time went by, the feverish look on the girl’s face subsided. The night passed and morning came. He checked and her fever was gone. She was also breathing much more easily. He woke her again and gave her some more pills.

  Finally, after another hour, he turned to the sitting Melanie and said, “We got it in time, before it really turned to pneumonia. Another day and it might have been tricky, but we got it. She’s going to get well.”

  The sitting Melanie jumped to her feet, threw her arms around Rich, and kissed him. Then, before he could react, he found himself standing alone, back in the mall. He shook his head, wondering if he had been dreaming. A clock in a nearby store window hadn’t moved from the moment when he had left, or started dreaming, or whatever it was that had happened. Then he noticed that his watch was wrong, by just about the amount of time he had spent in the bedroom. A cold shiver ran down his spine. He looked around, but Melanie was nowhere in sight. He shrugged, picked up his bag, and headed back to his apartment.

  When he got home, he dropped his bag by the door and went in the bathroom. As he came out, he found himself facing the portrait of his great grandparents. He didn’t consciously notice it, he had seen it so many times before. But something struck through to his subconscious, and he did a double take. The picture was changed! His Great Grandfather Lewis was there, and the seven children who looked just like their father were the same as they had always been, but his great grandmother…! Where all his life he had seen a picture of a woman he was told was his Great Grandmother Rose, now there was the face of…Melanie.

  Wizardry

  [If you haven’t read “Rain” yet, read that first]

  I WOKE WITH MY HEAD aching like I had drunk a barrel of wine and a mouth tasting like a family of squirrels had used it for their winter’s den. It was unclear where I was or how I had gotten to…well, wherever it was. I sat up from where I was lying on the ground and realized I was as weak as an infant. I had to stop and rest, so as not to black out again.

  When my head stopped spinning, I saw I was in a sort of cave. A small crack in one wall let in some light and fresh air, mayhap that was what had wakened me. I struggled to recall with wisps of gray fog plucking at my mind as if to prevent me from remembering, and suddenly I spoke the words Memoramex Clarifex! not knowing from whence they came.

  It was as if a great torch had been lit to illume the innermost part of my thoughts. The fog vanished, and I remembered. The battle with the Black Enchanter, how he had at the last moment trebled himself, how the three of him had struck at me with an overwhelming force, how I had felt myself sinking into the depths of eternal night.

  Even then it seemed he had been unable to kill me. He had put me under a sleep spell and a charm of forgetfulness and imprisoned me in this crypt-like cave, hoping I would slumber here until the end of time. But something, Mother Nature or the works of man, had thwarted him. Even the strongest mountain wears down in time, and the crack in the wall had let in the light and air to rouse me.

  I lay back to recover my strength and conjured up food and drink to restore myself, all this while the light outside faded to night and came back to day three o
r four times. During the daylight hours, noises could be heard from outside, many low rumblings and a few louder sounds, not unlike thunderclaps. I ignored them as I gathered my strength. At last I felt ready and cast an opening spell to spread the crack to a full-sized door. I took my staff, which had been lying by me—even the Black Enchanter had been unable to cleave it from my side—and stepped forth to see how the world now fared after my long slumber.

  Fortunately I didn’t step too far, as just outside the opening the ground ended. My door was in a near-vertical flat face of rock, extending thirty or forty feet down, and almost as far up. At the bottom was an even strip of ground running left to right, and across from me another rock face. On the ground were a number of strange mechanick devices moving around, the source of much of the rumbling noises. Suddenly I realized that what I was seeing was a road being cut through a mountain, insane as that seems. No one in his right mind would build a road over a hundred yards wide, and as for digging through a mountain rather than going over or around—totally senseless.

  I cast a levitation spell, stepped off into air, and floated gently down to the surface of the road below. One of the mechanick devices—I saw now how large they were, twice the height of a man, wider than high, and much longer—was heading toward me. It emitted a fierce blast of noise, then a man sitting inside it leaned out the window and ordered me in language most uncouth to move out of the way. It was obvious he knew naught of the respect due to a Wizard!

  I raised my staff and cried Impedimentia Totalis! The machine halted, but the wide bands of metal on which it rode continued to move, now grinding on the ground, spewing clouds of dirt out to the rear. The roar of the device, some sort of fantastic engine no doubt, grew louder and louder, shriller and shriller, until suddenly there was a tremendous bang and everything stopped and fell silent. Huge clouds of smoke began to pour out of the back of the machine. The man inside saw this and jumped down and ran, getting away just before the entire machine was engulfed in roaring flames.