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> “War split the Guild once before, but this time I resolved, no matter what, to keep it together.”
For a hideout secreted away on a random uncharted island, the place turned out to be a dump. The dock was missing too many wooden boards for comfort, the front door barely opened, and the less said about the smell inside the better.
“What?” said Beatrice, after I walked back out of the house after stepping foot inside for exactly four seconds. “Do you know how much the nice private islands were going for? This was the best I could do without looting one of Garrett’s trust funds.”
“It’s … fine,” I said. “But what was wrong with your Bowery apartment? That at least had a cool secret doorway. And the added benefit of being, you know, easily accessible.”
“Oh. I cleared that place out weeks ago. It was only a matter of time before the Guild found it. Can’t tell you how many speed buffs I wasted packing that place up.”
“Why didn’t you tell me? I would have helped.”
Beatrice shook her head.
“Thanks, but I needed to do it myself. Plus you were still moping around about Frankie so you wouldn’t have been very useful anyway.”
I wanted to defend myself but she was right. I had been next to useless in the weeks after the lighthouse disaster. Even the sense of accomplishment from our discovery of the memory ring had only lasted a day or two, and I had withdrawn from almost every aspect of my life. That had included avoiding Lisa and Stacy, who had spent two nights in jail after their acts of vandalism at the Met. I hadn’t seen them since I had handed them the compulsion-ink notes, pretending to buried in 100-hour weeks at the office with barely a minute to brush my teeth.
And I also had avoided Duncan, who had flown to Paris a few days early to take in the sights only to immediately fly back to Hong Kong 12 hours later when I texted him that I was no longer going. We were technically still “together,” at least until next Monday when he was due back in town to review our latest game build with his boss. Part of me was happy that I hadn’t had to decide after all whether to move to Hong Kong. Now all that was left to do was have a really awkward dinner and get dumped. Hooray.
I held my breath and reentered the house.
The interior was dark, which made sense because the room was empty, the windows were all caked with layers of grime, and it was barely morning. It reminded me of the day I left my old apartment for the last time, after everything had been taken off to a storage locker, a few days before I left for college. I squinted to make out the dimensions of the room. For a Manhattan studio, it would have been luxurious but the lone room still felt small without anything inside. I opened the door at the back expecting to find a second room, but on the other side was only water.
“The place needs some work,” I said, closing the door. “And a light.”
“Obviously,” said Beatrice. “But I had to come here first before I could move all my stuff in.”
“That’s going to take a lot of trips on that boat. Unless Garrett’s parents have a yacht somewhere you can borrow?”
Beatrice smiled.
“Nope. But we don’t need a boat.”
“What do you mean?”
Beatrice reached into her back pocket and pulled out a small circular object. A brown door knob to be precise.
“Oh no. No no no,” I said, the feeling of helplessness as I drifted untethered through the dark void flooding back into my mind. I had traveled through the vervorium doorways enough in one night for a lifetime and there was no way I was going to do that ever again.
“Your choice,” said Beatrice. “You can leave the boat at the docks by the River Club. Just make sure no one sees you and I’m sure it’ll be fine.”
Before I could protest further, she walked back out the front door, leaving me alone in the dark. A wave of fear washed over me and I crouched down to the ground, as if that would help me avoid it.
I had tried so hard to hide from the aftermath of that fateful night at the Met and the lighthouse, to pretend like my life wasn’t in shambles. But denying my new reality only left me feeling like I was trapped in the space between the vervorium gateways, where up and down had no meaning, where time passed in an instant and dragged on for an eternity.
I had felt that emptiness before, when my mom had died, and it had taken me a long time to climb out of that pit and return to the world. But I had done it, one step at a time. And now I would do the same thing all over again.
Beatrice was fussing with the tarp-wrapped statue on the boat when I emerged from the house a few minutes later.
“Good, you’ve come to your senses. Let’s get this inside and then we can get out of here.”
“Her,” I said.
“Right, her,” said Beatrice.
I walked along the creaky dock and back onto the boat. With our remaining strength buffs, we easily carried the statue into the house before each taking another vitality buff. The tarp still wrapped around her, we placed Frankie in one of the back corners of the house, and, the task done, I collapsed onto the cold wooden floor. It was just a shade before 8 a.m., but even with the restorative effects of the vitality buff, I felt like I had just spent the last week hauling coal out of a dank mine.
The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
I heard Beatrice walk over to the front door and begin fiddling with the existing door knob. So, we were really doing this. I wondered where the door would now lead, how it would feel to again travel dozens of miles in an instant. But I had no time to dwell on the intricacies of the folding of the fabric of the space-time continuum, as Beatrice cleared her throat in a pronounced manner and I pushed myself up to my feet.
“See you on the other side,” she said, as she pulled open the front door, revealing a familiar black abyss instead of the path back out to the boat. Beatrice stepped across the threshold without hesitation and then vanished.
I looked back one more time at the woman frozen in stone before I closed my eyes and embraced the darkness.
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The fifth time I walked through the vervorium portal was different than the previous times. Instead of wondering if I would ever escape that hellish dimension, I simply gave myself to the emptiness and waited for the light to return.
So I was beyond surprised when no sooner had I entered the gateway, that I found myself stepping out of a door into a nondescript corporate office, the Manhattan skyline beckoning outside one of the windows.
“Good, that was quicker than I thought it would take,” said Beatrice, who shuffled past me and shut the door I had come through, which I saw sported one of the door knobs we had stolen from the Met. “Did the trip go by quickly for you too?”
“Yeah,” I said. “We’re … we’re back in the city?”
“Yep,” said Beatrice, smiling. “The 47th floor of the Chrysler Building to be exact. Welcome to the other half of our new HQ.”
The office was a single room with gray carpeting, fluorescent lighting, an old refrigerator, and boxes upon boxes stacked along one of the walls and Beatrice’s familiar workbench set against the other.
“This is everything from your apartment?” I asked.
Beatrice nodded.
“Just about. Had to put some of the other stuff in storage until we got the back office operational, but now that that’s done, we can finally get properly situated.”
“You don’t mean…”
“I do. Grab a box and get cracking. I need to head back to my apartment and deal with my familial responsibilities for the rest of the day. It shouldn’t take you more than a few hours to ferry everything through the door, especially after she gets here to help.”
“Who?”
The front door of the office suddenly opened and a tall blonde girl sporting an incredibly skimpy dress, platform heels, and way too much black liner waltzed in.
“Ah, good, you’re right on time,” said Beatrice to the mystery girl.
I stared at our new guest and my mind wandered back to something I thought I only had imagined in a haze of steam.
“Polly?” I asked, in disbelief.
The girl smirked.
“No, I’m Eva,” she said with a coarse voice as she grasped the small green stone that hung around her neck. Her visage shimmered, and the tall would-be model blinked out of existence and in her place was 12-year old Polly Janssen. She was wearing the same dress, which looked ridiculous on her, and the platform heels brought her height up almost to mine. I looked over to Beatrice to see if she was surprised at what we had just witnessed, but her expression had turned to one of annoyance.
“Were you out all night again? I’m not just going to give you a free buff because you thin-”
“God, you sound like my dad,” said Polly. “I’m here, aren’t I?”
“Wait, wait,” I said, interrupting the weird mother/daughter dynamic that was starting to develop. “Are we just going to ignore the fact that she just transformed from a 20-year old into a pre-teen who looks like she spent all night watching a makeup tutorial video?”
Both Polly and Beatrice rolled their eyes in unison.
“It’s a glamour, dummy,” said Polly, who walked over to the workbench and plopped herself down on top of it. “And you’re one to talk about makeup.”
“A what?”
“You saw it already, that day in the Russian baths.”
“Wait, what? I thought that was my eyes playing tricks on me.”
“They were,” said Beatrice. “And your ears. It’s one of the older uses of alchemy. When activated, the glamour projects a false image of the person. Your brain thinks you’re looking at a 20-year old wannabe model who sounds like she did way too much coke last night, but in reality, it’s just Polly.”
“For your information, I didn’t do an-”
“Don’t care, you’re not my kid. Anyway, I’ll let you two started. Let me know when you’re done.”
Before I could say anything further, Beatrice strode out the door.
But I was done being her underling and wasn’t about to spend my Sunday moving boxes through that damned portal. So I followed her out into the hallway to give her a piece of my mind.
“Hey!” I said to Beatrice, who had walked to the far side of the elevator bank. “You ripped up our agreement, remember? I’m not just going to do your grunt work because you have a Sunday brunch to attend.”
She looked back at me with tired eyes and sighed.
“It’s not grunt work, Jen. We need to get back up and running if we are going to locate that gold token. And since you were too busy feeling sorry for yourself for the last few weeks, I already did most of the hard work. So if you want to pull your fair share, moving those boxes would be a good place to start.”
The elevator opened with a ding and I let her go back to her domestic life. I would hold my tongue, for now. And, much as I was loathe to admit that Beatrice was right, I had not been holding up my end of the partnership. That needed to change if she was ever going to see me as an equal.
Eva was there when I walked back into the office and I stood there, staring at the illusion. My eyes could detect no trace of the 12-year old scamp hiding behind the magic, but I wondered how far the glamour extended to my other senses.
“Take a picture, it’ll last longer,” said Eva, before a coughing fit came over her.
“If I did, who would I see?”
The girl considered my question for a few seconds before nodding to herself.
“Me,” she said, matter-of-factly.
“Not helpful,” I said. “How do I even know that you’re the glamour and Polly is the real person? Maybe it’s been the reverse this whole time.”
Eva smiled.
“That would be something, wouldn’t it?” she said as she removed her necklace and the vision of Eva abruptly disappeared and there was Polly again. “You want to try it out?”
I took the necklace from Polly and looked at the green stone. It was tiny, no bigger than a raisin, but its color was dark and deep, like the redwood forest I hiked with my mom when I was 11. I wondered how something so small could hold so much magic. I started to put it on but then stopped myself.
“No thanks,” I said, handing the necklace back to her.
“Suit yourself,” said Polly, who slipped the delicate chain around her neck and tucked it into her dress. “And to answer your question, the glamour holds, even against technology. Course, it doesn't extend to my clothes, so I’m stuck in these ridiculous heels until we finish.”
For the first time in a while, I was the one who smirked.
“Just don’t walk out onto the dock, and you’ll be fine.”
“The loading dock downstairs?” asked Polly.
“You’re joking, right? Beatrice didn’t tell you where we were moving this stuff?”
“No, why? Is it far?”
“Yes. And also, no.”
“What the hell does that me-”
My phone suddenly starting blaring in my pocket, like a mini air-raid siren. I pulled it free to see a big, blinking red pop-up window covering the whole screen.
“JadePhoenix42: you have been summoned to appear at the next meeting of the Questing Council. 10:37 PM. March 5, 2019. 334 West 36th Street, Suite 4312.”