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Part 1-21: Bed
We were quiet after that exchange. Fergus did not drive straight out of town. We arrived and parked at the office building at 12:25. In the daytime, Bannerman Drive was a lot less intimidating. It was still run down, but I could see the thin park now, and there were a few pedestrians out as well as some vehicle traffic.
I pretended to be taking pictures of the graffiti while we waited for a gap in the passersby. It was a straight, long street so it took a full five minutes before we were confident we could steal into the alleyway without being spotted.
The door was still loose from last night. Fergus turned on his phone’s flashlight and we entered the stairwell. The door whammed shut and the blueish light from the phone cut the darkness into sharp, shifting shapes.
“Here goes nothing,” I said, and cleared my throat. “Persimmon!”
Nothing much happened. The murmur of traffic from outside went on. Fergus swung his light around.
“Persi?” I tried. Maybe we’d imagined it after all.
“Should we try the fifth floor?” said Fergus. “Maybe we have to be closer.”
“Or just on a floor. Last time she didn't seem to like the stairs.” We went up to the second floor landing and I shouldered open the door. Light flooded in and there was Persimmon, leaning against the wall, scaring the bejeezus out of us. Fergus dropped his phone and this time I did yelp.
“Hello again,” she said, or rather her voice did. The girl on the wall only smiled.
I looked at the door. It had a five on it.
“Hi. I forgot how you tend to do that.”
She looked at me funny, then beckoned and walked down the hall. I glanced back at Fergus, who blew out a breath and shrugged. We followed the girl. The lights above did as well.
She spread her arms wide, and we heard, “Do you have news?”
“Something happened and I thought you might be able to lend some, uh, insight,” I said.
We got close to the corner. She stopped at it and did a little half pirouette until she was facing us.
“So what happened?” the voice asked.
“Can I tell you out here? I don't know if it's a great idea to go into that room and talk about it.”
She cast a longing glance down the hall, then back at me, her eyes searching mine. “It's… uncomfortable out here. How about a different place?”
“Uh, well,” I said, but then she went around the corner. The darkness pressed at my back as the lights chased her.
“Come on,” said Fergus, moving past me.
I tried to relax my jaw, and walked after them. Persi stood near the door that led to Eden’s room, but she faced the wall opposite, her hand touching the door to an office on the outer edge of the hallway. Fergus watched her with his arms folded.
As I got closer, the door clicked open and Persi strode in. Fergus followed, peeked his head in, then looked back at me.
“No ticktock,” he said.
I nodded a thanks, and we went in. It was like all the other clock-free rooms, except for the large queen-sized bed sitting dead center. It was all grey, from the frame to the pillows. Persi sat cross-legged near the head of it, and she patted the surface when I walked in.
Compared to all the other reality warping experiences I'd had in the past day or so, this seemed rather inviting. I got onto the bed and copied her pose. Fergus stood off to the side, beside the room’s window. I noted that there was no outside light coming in. I wasn't surprised.
“Is this okay?” asked Persimmon. Her voice came from her mouth; her lips moved.
“It is. Was this your bed? Before…?”
“I think so. It's hard to remember. It was something like this… but please, tell me what happened.”
I explained our encounter in the park, this time with as much detail as I could remember, taking my time even though I felt two o'clock marching ever closer.
The tiny ghost listened with intent, never taking her eyes off me, fidgeting not a bit. When I finished, she sat up a little taller, and said, “Wow.”
“Wow is right, lil miss,” said Fergus.
“Do you—can you think of anything that might help?” I asked, afraid of the answer.
She looked up and away and put two fingers in her mouth, chewing on their tips.
“I've never seen this place you describe,” she said. “But what you tell me feels familiar. And it also sounds like Eden is… exposed there.”
“When it spent too much effort it faded and blew away like a cloud,” I said.
She nodded. Fergus took a step closer, listening.
“If you can get it weak again, and strike it then, me and Willy… we could be free.”
“Strike it. With the wifi, right?” I said. I thought back to how scratchy and irritating it was when I first entered Eden’s strange world.
“Can Deluxe amplify the signal?” asked Fergus.
“If anyone can, it's her.”
“What if she can't?”
“I'm trying to hold on to some semblance of optimism here, Fergus,” I said.
“There could be another way,” said Persi.
“What?” we both said.
“If you can get back to… to where Eden took you, you may be able to stop it from there.”
“Um, I have several follow up questions regarding that plan,” I said.
She smirked at me. “As for how you get back, Alena, I am not sure. But you told me you had to touch Willy to get there. So there's that. But also, I remember when I first started to worry, there was always a feeling of strangeness about him. Something tingly, and fuzzy, like how you described the wobble. It wasn’t always around him, but on places where he spent time, like his room… or on things he cherished.”
“That’s great. But I have no real desire to go back there.”
Her expression hardened, and she uncurled from her cross-legged seat to come on all fours, and lean closer to me. I breathed In through my nose and resisted the urge to shrink away.
“When I first came here, I was afraid too,” she said. “I didn’t choose this! I didn’t desire this, but it happened. I pulled open the little door on the clock and it happened. And now it’s happening for you too. You think things will be bad if you don’t stop Eden from wrecking those stands and hurting that crowd? Ha! Do you know what will happen if it’s allowed out? If that clock strikes midnight?”
I shook my head.
“Neither do I. But I know that it’s not meant to get out. Surely you sense that too? Don’t you?” She looked at Fergus. “Don’t you?”
“It can’t… be good,” he managed.
“No. No it can’t. If your wifi doesn’t work, you have to go back in and try.”
“Try what?” I shouted. “Kick it in the spiritual balls?”
“That would be better than not trying at all, yes.” She leaned back and stared at me, her little mouth twitching.
I blew some hair out of my face and tried to think. It was almost time to go, we’d spent enough time in this place.
“How do you do it then?” I asked Persi. “This crazy shit, making a bed appear, changing rooms around, teleporting us. Give me something to work with.”
“I… I don’t truly know. It’s whatever happened to me when I got pulled in. I feel this building like it’s a part of me, I suppose. When I need to make it work for me, I picture the way… the way it feels? I don’t know. I thought about rest and the clean feel of sheets and this bed was here. I wanted happy thoughts for this room.”
My mind went back to when I was split in two, and how I made the different me’s do things by anchoring to what they could feel. How it could help me stop Eden, I did not know, but it was better than nothing.
“We’ve got to get back to the park,” I said, as I got down off the bed. “Thanks for your advice Persi. We are going to do our best.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“Thank you. Please try and take care of Willy, if you can.”
“Like I said, we’ll do our best.”
She bowed her head, then the lights flashed and she was gone. The exit had a push bar now, and we wasted no time leaving. The bright sun left us blinking and Fergus had to sneeze a bunch, but we made it to the car without incident, besides our phones buzzing with a flurry of texts from the other half of our team.
“Well then,” said Fergus, as we began to drive.
“Yeah.”
“This day, ma’am. I tell ya. I am going to need many more pints. Wifi hijacking to destroy one ghost. Two pints. Another ghost that thinks it’s a building? Three.”
“I’m sure John B. Zachary would be proud…” I said, half-watching the office retreat in the side view mirror, half-concentrating on answering Deluxe. Then it clicked.
“The book.”
“The what?” said Fergus.
“We’ve got to make a detour.”
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