On The Surface Tension Read online

  Tracey shrugged. “Actually, no. I have no memory of making the appointment or who you are. I’m sorry.”

  “Ah,” Maurice said, templing his fingers. “It is indeed a whole new world.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked.

  “Ms. Springs, I’m going to tell you something. And you are going to have a hard time believing it, but I’m going to ask you the courtesy of hearing me out.”

  “Ok,” she agreed. “I’m intrigued.”

  Maurice pursed his lips, nodded slightly, looking for where to begin.

  “This morning, you and your husband Ron were the richest people on the planet, but when he and his friend Jack Strong used his rift generator to jump to another universe, it caused the universal bubble that had been artificially created by his ancestor by jumping back to the nineteenth century to collapse because he and Jack Strong were the last double recessives in that universe. When they left, the universe collapsed into this one, which was the one that you and he had previously left to travel over to another universe, where you met with the Sea Tribes and where I was burned at the stake. Now your husband and Jack Strong are trapped in Hell, and you are going to need to continue your training to rescue them.”

  Tracey nodded, nonplussed.

  “Is that it?” she asked.

  “Not even remotely,” confessed Maurice feebly.

  “Well, Maurice with no last name, that is all very interesting, but first of all, Ron and I are not married, and I have no idea who Jack Strong is, and the rest of what you said really makes no sense whatsoever. But what do you mean Ron is trapped somewhere?”

  “I’m afraid that the world that he and Jack Strong jumped to is not really another universe bubble like others, but a companion one to this universe that is caused by the creative process of quantum collapsing from the collective consciousness of humanity, brought about by divine fiat. Some call it Faerie, some call it Hell. It is populated by all manner of beings made up by humanity, as well as an alternate population of humanity with other ground rules. They are trapped there.”

  Tracey’s eyes narrowed. She remembered back to the empty window that morning. Had this lunatic done something to him? She picked up the phone on her desk and dialed her house. There was no answer. She hung up and dialed Ron’s cellphone. His voice mail picked up. She felt a pang of worry, and mentally convinced herself that he had probably forgotten to pay the cellphone bill again.

  “Have you kidnapped Ron?” she asked sharply.

  “Oh no. But you will find that he is not at home anymore. You will have to join me to train to go to that world and rescue them.”

  “Mr. Maurice, I think it’s time for you to leave. But just in case I need to find you, where can I reach you?”

  “I will have to find you,” he said enigmatically, standing.

  “My, how hackneyed-sounding. Really, do you have an address or a telephone number?”

  “Truthfully, no to both. But I will promise to be back in three days, and maybe by then you will be ready to join me to begin your training. Actually, to resume your training.”

  Tracey was not sure what else to say but was glad the mentally-ill person was leaving her office.

  “Well, good day, sir,” she managed as he left with an odd little bow.

  Tracey called Claire in to her office.

  “Claire, if that guy ever comes back, call security. He was telling me some weird stuff about how Ron and some guy I’ve never heard of are trapped in Hell.”

  “You want me to call the cops?” her assistant asked.

  Tracey considered it.

  “No, what would I tell them? Ron isn’t exactly missing yet. He’s probably out looking for work,” she said, not really believing it.

  This is going to be a long day, she thought.

  It was.

  When she finally got home after fighting her way through the drizzle-exacerbated rush hour traffic, Ron was not at home, even though his car was. There were no dishes from him in the sink. In a near panic, she dialed his cellphone again. She heard it ringing in the bedroom and ran to discover it on the bed, along with his keys and wallet. His bathrobe was hanging on the hook on the wall behind the door. It was as though he had simply vanished.

  Shit.

  She picked up the telephone to call the police, but vacillated. She knew that, at least on TV, they told people they couldn’t start considering him missing until he had been gone twenty-four hours, but she wanted to do something.

  She called anyway and was indeed told by the dull-sounding policeman that she would have to wait twenty-four hours from when he was last seen. She told him about the long-haired black man in the suit who had visited her that morning, telling her that Ron had been trapped in what he had described as Hell. The policeman seemed more interested, but still they could do nothing. She hung up in despair.

  She did not sleep all that night, expecting every slight noise to be Ron returning from…wherever he had gone. All sorts of thoughts ran through her head as she lay in the bed, the lights still on. Had he killed himself? He had been depressed about not having a job, feeling useless and directionless. But there was no note, and Ron was not one to do something like that. Was he out partying with friends at a strip club or something? She knew that wasn’t like him either.

  It must be that Maurice guy, kidnapping him then telling her about it so…so what? He could convince her to go resume training for something? Why not a demand for ransom?

  Morning came and she called the police again. They sent around a car with two polite officers who took down what information they could and said that they would begin the process of looking for him.

  She decided to stay home from work, to see if Ron would come waltzing in which he would probably do at any moment.

  He did not.

  Nor did he appear on the second day. The police had no leads, aside from her description of Maurice. They could not find either Ron or Maurice. Her despair grew. She remembered that Maurice had told her that he would come back to see her on the third day. She called the police detective who had been assigned the case, a detective Ramsey. They planned an ambush instead of going public with a news story about a missing person.

  On the third day, she went to work, while the police lingered about behind the scenes. At precisely nine o’clock, Claire called her to inform her that Mr. Maurice had come to see her.

  “Please tell him to come in,” she instructed Claire.

  Maurice came and sat in the same chair.

  “Before the police come and take me,” he said, “I want to tell you that they will not be able to hold me, and I will come visit you at your home tonight. And I will ask you again to join me to resume your training.”

  Detective Ramsay and three uniformed Seattle Policemen stormed the office, guns drawn, and threw Maurice to the floor of her office, cuffing him. The three officers took him away, with a last knowing glance over his shoulder at her. Ramsay remained behind.

  She was shaking.

  “We’ll question him,” the detective said, “and he’ll probably let something slip. Crazy people tend to do that. But if he doesn’t, we can only hold him so long before we have to charge him with something. And right now, we don’t have any evidence of anything to charge him with. We’ll keep you posted.”

  The rest of the day crawled by, every phone call possibly the one informing her that Maurice had cracked and told the interrogators where the pit that Ron was buried in was located. Finally, at almost four o’clock, it was detective Ramsay on the line.

  “He didn’t tell us anything. Anything we believed, anyway.”

  Tracey placed her fist against her temple and squeezed her eyes shut.

  “He said he would get loose and visit me at my house tonight,” she said after a long sigh. “Could you have an officer stay with me?”

  “Ma’am, that will be unnecessary. This guy is going to be the guest of King County for a while. Seventy-two hours, at least.”

  When she got
home later, it was deep into dusk. The house was dark. She unlocked the mailbox and glanced at the letters in the light of the porch while she fished in her purse for her keys. Mostly bills, but one important-looking letter from the Department of the Navy.

  She unlocked the door, threw her keys on the foyer table. She turned on the light, and her heart almost stopped. Maurice was sitting at the dining room table.

  “Don’t be afraid,” he said.

  Strangely, she wasn’t. Her primal danger warning bells were not ringing.

  “I thought you were in jail,” she said, trying to be nonchalant, taking off her scarf and laying it on the couch.

  “I was,” he said. “But dying has its advantages. Optional corporealness being one of them.”

  “You are a ghost?” she asked, disbelieving, and sat at the table with him. She tossed the mail on the table next to her.

  He rapped on the table with his knuckles. “When I need to be.”

  “So if I called down to the jail, you would be there or be gone?”

  “Why don’t you call and find out?”

  She pulled out her cellphone, but it rang before she could start figuring out how to call the jail. She answered it.

  “Ms. Springs, this is Detective Ramsay. I have some bad news. This is really embarrassing, but your kidnapper has somehow managed to escape. I’m going to send some officers by right away, since he said he was going to go to your house. You are at your house, aren’t you?”

  “Actually, I’m still driving there. I should be there in twenty minutes,” she found herself lying.

  “We’ll have a car there in fifteen,” Detective Ramsay said.

  “Thank you, Detective,” she said, hanging up. “That gives you ten,” she said to Maurice. “Convince me.”

  Maurice nodded, still sitting at the table. He looked tired.

  “I want you to keep an open mind here, but this is going to be very, very hard for you to accept. I’m going to ask simply that you trust me. I told you earlier what went on that morning three days ago. Your…husband, who here is not your husband, has a rare gene that keeps universes from collapsing when they otherwise would. His friend Jack Strong also had it. When they left to go explore what they thought was an alternative universe, it left this universe with no more double recessives. There is an evil being, who you already had conflict with in another universe, who had done a thorough job of killing off all the other double recessives. So when Ron and Jack left, it collapsed the universe back into what it was before you both left to go to the universe I was originally from. So here you are, with no Ron because he ran into some…entities, for lack of a better term, over there who took his ‘rift generator,’ a small machine that allows jumps between universes.”

  He paused to gauge her reaction. She had none, and continued to sit still.

  “So tell me, since I’m still not sure how all this shook out a few days ago. Does Ron have any children?”

  “No,” she said guardedly, suddenly even more suspicious. “But I do.”

  “I was afraid of that,” Maurice frowned. “They are probably missing too, aren’t they?”

  Tracey picked up her phone again and dialed Chris’ cell number.

  “Hello?” answered a sleepy girl’s voice. But it was not Chris’ voice.

  “Who is this?” Tracey snapped.

  “This is Tanya,” the girl said.

  “May I speak to Chris?” Tracey asked, trying to sound calm.

  “She’s not here right now,” said the girl. “I’m her roommate. Who is this?”

  “I’m her mom. Where is she, and why isn’t she carrying her phone?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t seen her for a few days. She may be with her boyfriend. Can I take a message for her in case I see her tomorrow?”

  Tracey’s insides locked with unease.

  “Sure, tell her that she needs to call her mom right away.”

  Then she remembered the letter from the military. She snatched it up, fear giving way to anger. Phrases jumped out from the letter: Unauthorized Absence…Article 86(3) of the Uniform Code of Military Justice…”Absentee” pursuant to MCO 5800.10…Surrender to Military Authority as soon as possible….

  “All right, you bastard. How can you kidnap all three of them?”

  He looked at her with helpless pity.

  “You couldn’t. Not all three.”

  He let her sit for a while in silence.

  “So now you have to do something. You can help them. It is not all bad news.”

  “Talk to me. And you better be quick, the cops are on the way.”

  “You went over to that other universe with Ron and several other people. You actually stayed with me and a friend for a while, before I was captured and killed. You escaped her and lived with the Sea Tribes for a while and started your training, unbeknownst to you, with one of our number. You have met some of us: Silas Bell, Mr. Stone, Ms. Lake—they are the Mods. You also met some others of us, like me and Smithson: We are members of the Trident, who work with them.”

  Her memory stirred, squirmed like a snake under bed sheets. “I escaped from who? Who killed you?”

  “Her name is Eiffelia.”

  Tracey’s skin crawled at the name. Something wordless stirred in her memory.

  “Ah, I see you start to remember. You will remember more, after you begin the next phase of your training in the Trident.”

  “The Trident? Kind of gummy sounding,” she said.

  “Gummy it may sound, but not many are called to serve in this way, and even fewer are chosen.” he said.

  “What do I have to do to get Ron and my kids back?”

  “Ron first; kids are another matter. His path leads to rescuing them from her, with your help and protection.”

  “Ok, fine. What do I have to do?” she repeated curtly.

  “You will wait, at first. I know you are impatient, but you will have to wait until you have a dream that takes you to Andrew Morrow’s Scrytorium.”

  “His what?”

  “His Scrytorium. Dream Andrew Morrow, and you will find the way.”

  “Who is that?”

  “I’m out of time,” Maurice said, glancing out the picture window at the police car pulling up in the driveway. He stood, walked to the back door, and paused.

  “One thing I forgot to mention that you might have forgotten but needs reminding,” he said hurriedly. “Andrew Morrow is one of the Mods, and as such he is not a human being. Just sayin’.”

  He wrapped his suit coat around him a bit more tightly, and with a glance over his shoulder at her with a ghostly half smile, vanished into the night like smoke.

  —4—

  “Fuk Yu indeed,” thought Elanor 32 as the brash young captive was led away to the Food Shuttle. Those captives would be taken to the edge of Cambria’s main continent if they were lucky. On some days, on a schedule beyond Elanor’s knowledge, the captives would simply be dropped into the ocean to feed Eiffelia’s prehistoric sharks. At least on the beaches, they had a chance against her giant scorpions.

  “Next,” she called.

  A young woman with long, brown hair was led in by the security force soldier. She had big, brown eyes, but they were not as glassy and terrified as the others she had processed before. Instead, she looked earnest and quiet.

  “Name?” she asked reflexively.

  “Chris Springs. And I want to be taken to wherever my brother was taken.”

  Elanor kept her eyes on her computer screen, avoiding the uncomfortable gaze of the captive girl.”

  “What is his name?” Elanor asked.

  “Jeremy Springs.”

  Elanor looked at the intake master list on another screen.

  “We have no Jeremy Springs.”

  “He must be on there—he was taken out before me,” the girl pleaded.

  Elanor pursed her lips.

  “We do have a young gentleman who has a faint family resemblance to you by the name of ‘Fuk Yu’ who came th
rough a short time ago,” she said wryly.

  “That’s him,” said the girl immediately, with the flash of a frustrated smile. “I want to be sent wherever he goes.”

  Elanor’s finger hovered over the keyboard. Unbidden, and from an unknown place in her mind, she made a fateful decision that could endanger her life. The choice was made instantly, and she knew that once made, it could not be undone if the girl before her made the slightest hesitation or mistake. But she knew she must make it, in spite of the danger to herself and the other six members of her secret cell.

  “No,” she said quietly, still looking at the keyboard as though she were working. “You do not want to go where he goes. You must listen very carefully to what I am going to tell you, and you must trust me or we both are going to die. Do you understand?”

  The girl nodded, her brown eyes widening slightly.

  Elanor took a deep breath.

  “You are here to be processed. I am one of the people whose job it is to process new people. This planet is the home world of Eiffelia, the Goddess. She looks like the spirit of a woman, but she isn’t really. She is a giant sponge, as big as the whole ocean of this world. She has been growing for millions of years here. Human beings were brought here by her to serve her, and we do, but mostly only because we are given drugs to make us stupid and compliant. Me and a few friends have managed to avoid taking the drugs, and we meet in secret to help each other and…well, you will learn later what else. But for now, I have to keep you from being processed in the wrong line. Most of the people brought to this world are brought here for one reason: food. The rest are just slaves. For this shipment, she will try to breed you for your special genes. That is why they took the blood from you: to test you for them. If you have the genes, you will be bred, if you don’t, you will be food. We have to be very careful, very skillful and secret, to keep any of that from happening. I’m risking my life to help you.”

  She paused to see what affect her words were having on the new girl. She was sitting quietly, trying to take it all in.