Episode 22
Sharp stood dumbfounded, which was a new experience for him. There were certain facts rolling around his brain, but he couldn’t accept them. He began with the beginning of the day to keep his sanity in check.
Wudgepuck stole the NFC time clock thingamadoo at the elevator to make him late. Bizarre, but within the parameters of what he expected from that petty, vindictive weasel. The annoying receptionist girl was replaced with a MIB so there were no witnesses. Also bizarre, but if you’re going to accept that Wudgepuck would go so far as to vandalize company property to make Sharp late, then it seemed perfectly reasonable.
After being tortured by Darity all day with menial labor, he got shanghaied into working late in the WMD lab. This seemed like a good idea at the time. The network was a clown show on wheels, but nothing he couldn’t fix. Finding a hidden mining rig with his name on it caught him off guard, however. He was still processing that one when the main event began with him on the stage. All of these events were bizarre, aggravating, even insane, but it was part of the fabric of his life. People hated him now, and they bent the rules to get even with him, as if he personally hurt them.
But doorways into another place?
Sharp still couldn’t grasp what was staring him in the face. It was too wild to believe.
Look. It was a wormhole experiment with no terminus. It found a terminus. This shouldn’t be hard to accept. The lady with the horns, however, makes that a bit challenging. Horns! She has horns. This should be cool, but I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. Is this a setup?
“Mr. Hikoboshi! Yeah, hi. Kyle here. This is amazing. We don’t know what you did, but there’s a portal open to another place where the door should be. It’s amazing. So amazing.”
“Wait, what do you mean what I did?” Somebody was already framing him with the mining rig. Now they wanted to pin this fiasco on him, too? He was certain Wudgepuck would have him fired. Darity would scold him. Novell would shake his head in that annoying way he does. But none of this was his fault.
“Hey,” Sharp shouted back. “I just fixed the network. You people locked me in here, and turned that stupid thing on!” Sharp gestured to the still smoldering wormbox.
“You ruined our project just like you ruined your own company, you jerk!”
“Sid, shut up.”
The room buzzed as Kyle took an unusually sterntone as Sharp began to smolder almost as much as the wormbox.
“We won’t know what happened until we run diagnostics and analyze the logs. Just calm down.” Kyle directed his comments towards Sid’s group.
“Mr. Hikoboshi,” Isabelle began. “Our WMD experiments have been a wonderful success, but we’ve run into a little problem. We can’t get you out at this time.”
Sharp turned to the door. Even in the dark, the clothes closet was longer than the hallway was wide, and it opened up into another room beyond. His brain finally accepted what his eyes could see.
“What about knocking a hole in the wall? I could crawl out that way.”
“About that,” replied Kyle. “We have protocols and the entire lab is locked down in quarantine, including us.”
“Yeah! You should be wearing a mask! You’re going to kill us all!”
“Julian, just…that’s not helping right now,” Kyle said while moving his hands as if he were trying to calm a horse. Other voices began to rise and shout. Tempers were short.
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“Everybody! Just pipe down!” Some girl he hadn’t met yet spoke up in the back.
“Thank you, Phoebe.” Isabelle turned back to Sharp. He couldn’t make out much of her face, but her voice was filled with sympathy. “You and your new friend are stuck there in quarantine until we can figure out what to do. My big concern right now is everybody’s safety. You should probably step back from the, uh, portal, until we know it’s safe.”
“Excuse me. All of this is very interesting, but I never gave you permission to enter my closet. I would like you all to kindly leave.” The horned visitor spoke with regal authority. “You with the sharp tongue. Help me gather my belongings.”
“Sorry. It’s not in my job description.”
“How droll. The faster you help me, the faster we can part. Come now. Don’t be a nuisance.”
A nuisance? What’s her problem?
Sharp looked up towards Kyle who shook his head helplessly. Isabelle jutted her chin at him as if to tell him to hurry up and help the stuffy lady in a bathrobe already. With a hard roll of his eyes, Sharp relented.
Sharp gathered bloomers, dresses, blouses, and various sheets of paper and photographs into his arms. The wormhole had blown her belongings from one side of the room to the other. Some had even landed on the upper level of the wormhole generator. He’d have to climb the scaffolding to get at them. Eventually, Sharp couldn’t pick up anything else without dropping things, which was his cue to head to the doorway to throw everything in. The visitor had found herself in the same situation, and had begun to move towards the doorway as well. The red lights glinted off her horns, which Sharp had to admit fascinated him. Her eyes met his and she cast him a suspicious look.
They crossed paths at the still smoking wormbox. She looked over his armload, then wrinkled her nose when she noticed he was holding her bloomers. Sharp merely shrugged his shoulders in reply.
“I suppose we will have to make multiple trips,” Lady Primguard announced.“I cannot fathom how much of a mess you people have made of my belongings. This is positively indecent.”
“Fine fine. Whatever.”
“Let us place everything by the door. I’ll sort them as I bring them into my dressing-closet.”
Sharp plopped her belongings on top of her pile by the entrance from a standing position, letting them all cascade into a messy tangle.
“Must you be so difficult!”
“What. They were a mess to begin with. Oh, wait, is it this?” Sharp reached down and picked up some bloomers. “Does this bother you?” He made a swirling motion with them in the air, then threw them back down. “You’re making a fuss about your dressing-closet, but this is my doorway out. It’s been a long day, I’m tired, I haven’t eaten in hours, and now I can’t go home because your closet’s in my way. Why don’t you kindly leave?”
“I will! I’ll be happy to never see you again!” Her nose flared as she spoke in a huff, and Sharp turned his head so she couldn’t see him laugh, but he wasn’t quick enough. “Oh, you think this is funny?”
“Well, yes. Let’s say you go home. Right now. Go ahead! Step on through. And then what?”
Lady Primguard stood flummoxed, looking from her closet to Sharp and back. She clearly hadn’t thought things through.
“How do we close the Traveler’s Door?” She put on proper airs and began gathering more of her belongings.
“What did you call it?”
“Traveler’s Door. These open up all the time in our world and Travelers wander through and become trapped on our side. It hasn’t happened in our country for several decades.” Her tail twitched, then wrapped around her waist as she clung to it. “You opened the door. Surely you can close it!”
“We weren’t trying to open a door. We were supposed to open a tiny pinhole in this burning contraption right here.” Sharp gave Kyle an exasperated look, though Kyle likely couldn’t see his face in in the dark from across the room. “Suddenly your bloomers are flying everywhere and we became neighbors. Hi.” Sharp said with a sarcastic sneer. “Now we’re both trapped here without food or water, and…hey! You have food, right? And we can get more through your…” Sharp drifted off as a scent wafted across his nose through the door. He could smell the vanilla and butterscotch he had smelled earlier, though this time it wasn’t as pleasant.
“Is something burning?” he said.
Lady Primguard turned to the wormbox.
“No, not that. Something smells like burning butterscotch.”
“My pudding!”
The horned lady threw her belongings down and rushed past Sharp towards the exit. Just as she reached the wormbox, however, it began to throw off sparks.
“Get back!”
“What’s happening?”
There were sparks, but no wormhole was forming in the box that Sharp could see, but the doorway began to glow. A low sound like a rusty hinge with a flange effect filled the room, and the doorway wavered as if a sheet of water was rippling over Lady Primguard’s closet. Then the groaning stopped.
“Mr. Hikoboshi! What’s going on?” Somebody was shouting to Sharp over the intercom, but he wasn’t paying full attention.
“I’m not sure if anything has happened,” he said in distraction as he reached into the doorway and fingered a large fur overcoat. “I’m still looking at a closet.”
“That’s not my dressing-closet!”