Brianna grabbed the doorknob. It twisted beneath her hand. The door was opening. The light poured in, and the piano played “Angels We Have Heard on High.” Before she entered the room, she thought, how many times has he played that song? Maybe he’s played it all night.
She stepped into the light…
…light in the darkness. The sign said WAGON MOUND GAS AND CONVENIENCE. Laird edged the truck onto the exit ramp. People sat in the café. He could see them, drinking coffee. Beside the window, under the wreath they’d painted on the glass, waited a phone booth topped by six inches of snow.
He could call his wife.
When he stepped out of the truck, the wind picked up. For a second, the snow came straight at him, unswerving lines, glittering in the parking lot’s light, like stars sweeping past a starship. He was a Watch Commander. He was a young girl hoping to escape. In the last tremor of [M]-space, he was the three of them, trying to get home.
Laird beat his hands together against the cold.
THE INN AT MOUNT EITHER
After a minute spent weighing a fear of appearing foolish against his anxiety, Dorian approached the concierge. Behind the glassy mahogany of the concierge’s booth, through the floor to ceiling windows, the afternoon clouds swept toward them across the neighboring peaks. As always, the view was spectacular. The sun cast long shadows through the valleys while the racing clouds caressed the mountain tops before swallowing them in gray, whale-like immensity, and when the clouds parted, the mountains would be the same but different, just a little, changed by their time in the clouds. That’s why people always looked. Are the mountains the same, they seemed to say, or have they changed?
If Dorian stood at the window, he could peer down the mountain at the long, railed walkways that connected one section of the inn to the next. Curved glass covered some of the walkways so the guests could pass in comfort from the casinos to the restaurants, or from the workout facilities to the spas, or from the tennis courts to the pools, but others were open and guests could walk in the unencumbered mountain air, their hands sliding along guard rails with nothing but the thought of distance between them and the rocks in the sightless haze below.
Dorian cleared his throat. “I can’t find my wife, Stephanie Wallace.” His fingers rested on the polished wood.
Without raising his head from the clipboard he’d been studying, the concierge looked at him. “It’s a big inn, sir. When did you see her last?” The man’s eyebrows had a distinctively rakish look to them, turning up at the ends like a handlebar moustache, and his hair was silvery-gray.
“We were supposed to meet for lunch, but she didn’t show up.” Dorian glanced into the lobby, hoping that she might appear. Behind him, the room towered fifty feet to skylights. Opposite the window, the mountain’s rocky side made another wall. Exotic plants that would never grow outside of the inn’s protection filled every nook, spilling vegetation over the deep-toned stone.
The concierge put the clipboard on the booth. “Perhaps her plans changed, sir. There’s much to do here at Mount Either.”
Dorian gritted his teeth. “Yesterday’s lunch! I’ve been looking for her since last night. Stephanie’s not late. She’s gone.”
“It won’t help for you to be short with me, sir. What is your room number?”
“4128.”
The concierge tapped at a personal digital assistant that nestled in his palm. “This is your wife, sir?” A picture of a smiling blonde woman, glasses slid part way down her nose, peered back at Dorian from the screen.
“Yes.” She’d worn her glasses on the airplane. Once they checked in, she switched to contacts.
“I show that she’s still a guest.”
Resisting an urge to throttle the man, Dorian said, “I know that. What I want is some help in finding her. Can’t you ask the other employees to keep an eye out?”
“Of course, sir. But, as I said before, this is a big inn. Maybe she wants some privacy. Perhaps she’s admiring one of our many gardens. She wouldn’t be the first guest to spend a few uncounted hours sitting on a meditation vista. In fact, getting lost at the inn is a selling point. We advertise it. ‘Lose yourself in the experience.’”
“It’s not supposed to be literal!” snapped Dorian.
The concierge picked up the clipboard again. “I will alert the staff. You don’t suppose she went through a transitionway unaccompanied, do you?”
Dorian felt himself blanching. “No, of course not.” But he remembered how she’d lingered yesterday morning in the Polynesian hallway.
“Guests are to be escorted through the shift zones.”
“I’m sure she wouldn’t do that.”
The concierge sniffed. “We’re very specific in our agreement when you signed in. The management will respond strongly to guests who ignore the rules.”
Dorian turned away from the concierge. A new tramload of tourists had arrived, pulling their suitcases behind them. Most were couples. Newlyweds, by the look, or retired folk. A pack of bellboys scurried to meet them, while a mellow-voiced recording intoned, “Welcome to the Inn at Mount Either. You are standing in the new lobby, two-hundred and fifty feet above the historical first lobby built on the site of where Mount Either’s special properties were discovered. If you are interested in a guided visit to the old lobby, dial 19 on your room phone.”
“If she did go…” said Dorian. A hand seemed to be grasping his throat. It was all he could do to croak out, “… unescorted?”
The concierge said, “It’s a big inn, sir. We will do all we can to help, but we don’t really count a guest as missing until forty-eight hours have passed.”
Dorian didn’t know what to say. He drummed his fingers on the counter. Some of the new arrivals were at the window, looking down. The glass leaned away from the mountain, and the lobby itself protruded like a shelf, so they had an unimpeded view of the two-thousand foot drop and the rest of the inn on this side of the peak, clinging to the sheer face.
“I can’t wait that long. I’m going to look for her myself.”
“That is your privilege, sir,” said the concierge. “I’m sure she’s just around the corner. Nothing stays lost here forever.”
The elevator to the Polynesian transition they had visited yesterday was out of order. Dorian looked both ways down the long, curving hall, but there wasn’t another elevator. The inn’s maps were almost impossible to read since the inn itself was aggressively three-dimensional, riddled with elevators, stairs, ramps, sloping halls, ladders, bridges and multilevel rooms. They’d followed a guide to the Polynesian transition, but none were in sight now. Dorian went left, around the curved hall.
Finally, he reached a stairwell that spiraled down for fifty steps. He didn’t recognize the hall it emptied into, but a distinctive arrow in blue and yellow pointed toward a transition. Yesterday, as they approached the zone, the wallpaper had changed from the art deco they’d grown used to, to a palm and beach motif. Following the guide, he’d held Stephanie’s hand until they stepped through the transition’s door and into a Polynesian mountainscape.
“You’re lucky, today, folks,” said the guide. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen it looking this good.”
The sun pouring through the open veranda spread heat like a warm flush on their skin. Stephanie’s hand drifted from his own, and she walked to the platform’s edge as if in a dream.
“Oh, Dorian,” she’d said. Instead of the snow-capped mountains of the Inn at Mount Either, a series of rounded hills rose in front of them, covered with forest so thick that it was hard to imagine ground beneath it. A flock of long-necked birds wheeled below, skimming the treetops and crying out to one another. She’d stared into the distance, entranced, her blonde hair just brushing her shoulders, and for a moment he saw the young woman he’d married twenty years earlier, the jaunty athleticism in her posture, the grace in her wrists and hands.