My strange talent is reliable but not 100 percent so, any more than the amazing Magic Johnson, at his peak, could lay the ball in the basket every time he tried. More often than not, yes, and some of the misses were breathtakingly close. But no matter what gifts we’re given, we can never apply them to perfection because we’re human, after all, and given to error.
The stable door was held shut by a hinged steel strap and a swivel bolt. I turned the bolt and, loath to make a sound, eased the strap back on its hinge.
I doubted that the children were kept in this building. If they were here, a guard would be stationed outside. But I had to check.
The door creaked slightly as it opened, and I slipped inside, leaving it ajar behind me. The darkness smelled of straw and mold and dust.
The smooth casing of the small flashlight lacked any features that would snag on the stretchy tube that secured it to my utility belt. It came out as easily as a sword from a sheath, and the on-off button, recessed in the handle, brought forth a blade of soft white light, around which I cupped my hand to restrict it largely to the floor, so that it might not fall directly on the windows and be too visible outside.
Although this was a stable, with stalls to either side of the central aisle, no animals had been housed here in years. The only evidence that the place had ever accommodated horses were the few horseshoe prints embedded like fossils in the once impressional but now hard dry floor of compacted earth. In some corners were bristling wads of pale straw, like spiny sea creatures from a distant era when these mountains had been the bed of an ocean. Dust filmed everything, and the only livestock were the spiders that hung in still expectancy or crawled their silken architectures.
I walked the length of the aisle. Although there seemed to be nothing for me here, intuition told me that the appearance of the place was not the entire reality of it.
At the end of the building were two rooms opposite each other, doors standing open. One might have been a tack room. The other contained empty feed bins. Neither offered me anything of interest.
I had never been here before, but something about the stable seemed familiar.
For a moment, I stood listening, convinced that if I cocked my head at just the right angle, I would hear something essential to my—and the children’s—survival. The silence held.
Keeping the cupped light directed down, I returned along the aisle. As I was about to push open the painted plank door by which I had entered, I realized that the dirt floor had undergone a metamorphosis. It appeared to be concrete now.
Overhead, chain-hung lamps with conical shades cast down a sour light, and I saw that the board walls were also concretelike now, that same too-pristine material that composed the interior surfaces of buildings in Elsewhere. When I put a hand to the wall, it felt smooth, flawless, cool. But when I thought about the rustic walls that had been here a moment earlier, I could feel the rough texture of the lumber and the uneven joints between boards, as if my reality must be submerged and somehow accessible just below the surface of this stable in Elsewhere.
Turning, switching off the flashlight, I found that the stalls and the two rooms at the farther end were gone, the building now just one long, wide space. A series of breakfronts from different design periods stood along both walls, as though stored here by an antiques dealer. No bristling wads of straw, no dust, no spiders or their webs. At the windows, where they weren’t blocked by the display cabinets, the night beyond seemed darker than the night in Nevada, the blinding black in which I had struggled with the Other Odd on the roof of that industrial building.
They used Elsewhere to hide things where the best detectives and the most diligent searchers could never find them, and to meet others of their kind to discuss their dark business where no one in this world could hear them.
Because of my paranormal abilities, when I entered these way stations, I perceived the other world that, at these specific points only, was connected to mine. But if I had entered with a friend, he would have seen only the dust-mantled long-unused stable, and when I moved into Elsewhere, I would have become invisible and inaudible to him.
Shower 5 and the basement room at Star Truck, the abandoned industrial building near Los Angeles, and this place did not phase randomly back and forth between worlds, as until now I had thought might be the case. I could neither be kept out of Elsewhere nor be trapped in it. These places existed in both worlds at all times. Unconsciously I had opened this other realm—and closed it away—with an act of will.
Interesting.
And what were they hiding here other than antique furniture?
The lamps dangled along the center of the building, their light pooling on the gray floor between swaths of shadow. Against the long walls, the polished mahogany and pecan and walnut and cherry of the hulking breakfronts glimmered here and there, but I couldn’t see what, if anything, the cabinets contained behind their wood-framed glass doors. I had no reason to suppose that anything was on display in them, yet even as dread seemed to shrink my heart within my chest, I felt compelled to take a closer look.