Behind him he heard a confusion of voices, footsteps, pounding, and then shouts.
“He’s flown!”
“He didn’t go out the window!”
“Maybe up on the roof?”
“What’s he think he’s gonna do, fly?”
It was four flights to the roof. Jeremy didn’t think at all on the way up. There was nothing in him but blind fear. But when he banged through the door and ran out onto the black tar expanse of the roof, he finally wondered where he was running to.
But of course there was nowhere to run to. He knew that, and he knew that he could never face arrest and jail.
He went to the edge of the roof and looked over the low tile-capped wall. Someone was climbing the sooty cage of the fire escape. All Jeremy could see was the top of an incipiently bald head and the flash of a yellow T-shirt, but he knew who it was: the cop. The guy was shouting into his walkie-talkie. The alley below was empty. Jeremy saw no squad cars in the alley behind the building, nor any in the part of the street that he could see. But how many cops does it take to bust one skinny nerd of a twenty-three-year-old in the thrall of arrested adolescence?
Three. Two to hold the nerd and the other to beat the living shit out of him. Just for the sheer joy of it.
It was clear what he had to do. He didn’t think he could get out of it. They had him dead to rights. All the money in his many accounts would be impounded, so it would be a public shyster for him, no fancy hired-gun lawyer who might be able to get him off or at least get him probation or maybe even into a halfway house or something. No, he was going to do hard time. The best he could hope for was minimum security. But even that would be hard to face.
Jeremy was scared. So deeply scared that he would do anything …anything to get out of this. Out. He wanted out.
He realized that he was already standing on the slippery terra-cotta tile of the wall, staring down into the alley, the hard, unforgiving bricks of which lay eight full stories below. He teetered forward. Could he do it?
He could, if he closed his eyes. Doing so, he stepped off the roof into thinnest air, still holding the computer.
He hit immediately, and he didn’t understand. He hit hard, but not as hard as he should have. He should have been a sack of shit and bones lying in the alley. But here he was … somewhere else.
Where the hell was he? He sat up and looked around. He was in a hallway, in a building, somewhere. Not his apartment building. He was sitting on a gray flagstone floor, the tan case of the little Toshiba lying upside down about two feet from his right hand. The corridor walls were of dark stone. He craned his head around. Behind him, the corridor ran in semidarkness to its vanishing point. What was in front of him was the problem: the top of the apartment building, only he couldn’t figure out how it could be there. Beyond his out-stretched legs the corridor extended a few more feet to a stone arch. But through the arch … well, there was the roof of the apartment building. Only it was canted kind of crazily, tilting to the right and sort of away. The angle was goofy. So, where the hell was this place?
The yellow-shirted cop appeared, peering over the wall. He seemed to be searching the alley below. Jeremy stared at him, but the cop didn’t see him at first. Then the cop did. He looked, then squinted. He blinked a few times, then looked again, right at Jeremy.
“What in the name of —?”
Then the roof and the building and the cop were gone, replaced by a view of a long, dim corridor.
Silence.
Jeremy rubbed his eyes and looked again. Nothing changed. Here he was in a place that looked like a church, or maybe a castle. And he had no idea of how he had got here. None.
His mind a total blank, he sat for a long spell before reaching for the computer and slowly getting to his feet. His rear end hurt, but it wasn’t bad. He hadn’t hit his head, he was pretty sure. Wherever he was, it was very quiet. He listened. Nothing. No voices, no heavy policemen’s footsteps. Nothing.
He turned away from the stone arch and began walking very slowly down the long, dark hallway.
Three
Queen’s Ballroom
Sheila Jankowski wasn’t worried yet, but she was getting there. Gene was now two days overdue. The guards posted at Halfway House, on the other side of the Earth portal, were reporting no sign of him. And no phone calls. But that didn’t mean much; you never knew when Gene would get the yen to ramble. Usually he satisfied his wanderlust in the castle. Inside Perilous there was no end of worlds to explore (well, actually there were exactly 144,000 of them, but let’s not quibble). Earth was a world, too, though, and was in fact one of the castle’s worlds. So, if he was off exploring, he was still doing it inside the castle. To be technical about it.
But that made Sheila feel no better. Gene still should have reported in.
She let her gaze wander to the huge chandeliers all aglow with hundreds of candles. She sighed. Best to take her mind off Gene for a while. Worrying would do no good. Just listen to the music, watch the people dance.
It was the annual Servants’ Ball, a Castle Perilous tradition, and this year the organizing committee had invited some of the castle’s Guests. Traditionally the lord of the castle and his family were invited, but Lord Incarnadine had been away for over a year. (No one was worried. The servants were used to their liege’s prolonged absences; one of the elderly chambermaids could remember a ten-year disappearance; but that was who knew how long ago.) So in Incarnadine’s stead, some of the more prominent Guests were invited, including Gene, whose official title was now Honorary Guardsman and Knight Errant Extraordinary.
“Good evening, milady.”
Sheila turned to find the castle chamberlain — Jamin by name — bowing in front of her.
“Good evening,” Sheila said.
Jamin straightened up, smiling broadly. He was a middle-aged man with wispy red hair and twinkling eyes. “I pray her ladyship is enjoying herself this night?”
“Oh, yes. Wonderful. You people have done such a good job. And thanks ever so much for inviting us. We’re very honored to be included.”
Jamin again bowed deeply. “It is you who do us the honor, milady.”
“Oh, no,” Sheila protested as the musicians struck up another number. It was nice music, Sheila thought. Sort of medieval-sounding, but then again not quite like anything she had ever heard before. Not that she was an expert in musicology.
Jamin said, “Beg to inquire, milady — might I have the honor of this dance?”
“Huh? Oh, sure!”
She was not at all sure she could do any of these dances. The steps looked fearfully complex. It was all orchestrated, somehow, like a square dance.
Laying a hand on Jamin’s proffered arm she said, “If you don’t mind clumsy old me. I just might step all over your toes.”
“It’s simple, milady. Allow me to show you.”
Jamin executed what looked like a simple box step, with one or two side steps thrown in.
Sheila tried it. “Well, I don’t know,” she said. “But if you’re willing, I’m willing.”
“’Twill be my delight, milady.”
Maybe a little magic would help, she thought. Wriggling her right finger she cast a facilitation spell that always worked well inside the castle.
Jamin took her in his arms and they began to dance.
Sheila did the best she could, and apparently she wasn’t doing badly. They whirled across the dance floor amidst the crowd and the music and the candleglow.
“Marvelous, milady!” the chamberlain beamed.
Sometimes it was all too much for Sheila. Being treated like an aristocrat, being called “your ladyship,” living in a fairy castle, a dream world, to say nothing of all the magic, the mystery — it was just too much. When would she wake up to find that she had never left her empty, overmortgaged house in Wilmerding, Pennsylvania? When would she come crashing back to reality? For clearly this was not reality as she knew it. It couldn’t exist, this world that she had stumbled into a year or so ago.