on gate duty not to let me, Adams, Madison, or Monroe out.
“All right then, Tommy boy, follow us,” Curtis said, rubbing his hands together. We all tiptoed out of the dorm and crept around to the back wall. Curtis helped boost me through the gap in the wall while Martha kept watch.
She winked at me just before I went through. “Have fun, Tommy. Bring Teresa back and introduce us to her when you have the chance,” she whispered.
I nodded and climbed over the wall to freedom.
* * * *
It was a cold night, but I barely noticed the wind as I darted through the streets, hoping desperately it would not take me too long this time to find the strange, vague neighborhood around the bookstore. Even using Gloria’s recommended method of not consciously seeking my way, it had never taken me less than an hour to get there before, and I was afraid Teresa would not wait.
But for some mysterious reason, this time the streets seemed to fall behind me as if I was an artillery shell in the Great War zooming straight to its destination, and I found myself standing in the doorway at one minute to five, stroking Tiferet’s head as she purred.
My heart thudded in my ears as I walked toward the secret back room, calling Teresa’s name. There was no answer. I had to duck my head to fit through the makeshift doorway through the bookshelves that led to the back room. A warm breeze scented faintly with oranges wafted from out of the darkness. On my previous visits, the back room had a warm orange glow from gas lighting, but now it was plunged in darkness.
Reaching up, I waved my arms around until I bumped into a gas sconce, on which I cleverly managed to scrape my hand. I muttered words that would have resulted in a caning at school as I fumbled around looking for the switch. At last I found it and turned it carefully to the left, striking the spark that lit the gas.
The shadows retreated. Was that a girl’s voice calling my name?
“Tom! Tom, where are you?”
“I am here in the back room!” I said.
“Huh? But I’m in the back room!” the voice said.
“Well, I am here as well. Right in the corner where the audio platters are,” I said.
She sounded as if she stood beside me, yet her voice seemed to come from everywhere at once, even from inside my body. I turned completely around, but no one was there except for Tiferet, who had wandered into the room in that offhand way cats have but was now trotting purposefully towards the opposite corner. I was looking right at her when she vanished.
I rubbed my eyes. I must be seeing things. In that instant came the sound of something heavy shifting, followed by a thump. Then two girls stood in the corner, a dark-haired, slightly plump girl my own age, and a tall, slim girl—no, a woman of about thirty, as far as I could tell in the shifting light—with long red hair and a mischievous gleam in her green eyes.
The dark-haired girl hugged the woman tightly, but then she yelped and did the most amazing double-take I have ever seen in my life, which made her lose her balance and go reeling backward toward the nearest row of bookshelves.
I leaned forward and caught her. She was out of breath and her skin was cold to the touch, as if she had just come in from outdoors.
“Teresa?” I said, my voice cracking on the second syllable. Her head was cradled in my arms and she looked straight into my eyes.
She nodded slowly. Her eyes were a much richer, warmer brown than Martha’s. Suddenly it seemed to be very hot in the room. I released her hastily, after ensuring she was standing steadily on her feet. Then we both turned and stared at the flame-headed lady, who grinned broadly.
“Hello. I’m Gloria,” she said, and curtseyed—she was wearing a long, bright green skirt, almost a gown. “I would ordinarily say how very pleased I am to make your acquaintances, but I feel we have already been on much too intimate terms for such formality.”
She smiled again and brushed what looked like orange cat hair off her sleeves. Her voice was warm and confiding, like your oldest and best friend in the world. Her accent was vaguely Home Islands, but not quite like Mum’s. It was impossible to place, I would have to say.
She began to chuckle, then threw back her head for a full-throated belly laugh, her arms clutching her bosom.
“Oh, my dears,” she said finally, dabbing her eyes on a corner of her skirt. “Look at you! You have positively turned to stone! You must accompany me to the front room for your tea and cocoa. This chamber is propitious for traveling, but not for proper introductions. And you must be properly introduced to one another. Much depends on it.”
Chapter 7
I swayed and clutched onto Tom’s arm, I hope not too hard, as we walked up to the counter where our drinks waited. After all, he’s a stranger. This is the first time you’ve met him. Also, he wasn’t exactly what I’d imagined, physically, though I’m sure I wasn’t quite what he was expecting, either.
He did have an inch or two on me, with hair midway between sandy and a chestnut color instead of the straw color I’d imagined, almost Marines-short in front but over his collar in back. Later I saw that all the guys our age in his Philadelphia had that same hairstyle. He was also skinnier than I’d expected, with long, thin features and stick-out ears that made me want to grab them as handholds when I kissed him.
Okay, okay, cool out, girl, we’re not quite there yet. His eyes were the one feature that really were more beautiful than I could have imagined, brown and dreamy with flecks of green, the kindest eyes I’d ever seen. Still, he looked a little frail to be holding up my big fat body, and I would never have done it if I hadn’t been quite so wobbly.
It had been very fast, the trip from the bookstore here to the bookstore there, a trip that may not have involved any actual movement, if you know what I mean. Certainly the secret back room looked the same, or almost the same, except there were gaslights instead of a bare electric bulb.
The books and records seemed to be in the same places on the shelves, most of them, though I noticed another copy of the Beatles reunion album that hadn’t been there in my world. I was sure I’d “bought” the only one. I think I saw it, but my brain was still trying to wrap itself around the impossible information I’d seen at the moment of passage.
I swallowed bile at the memory. Dizzy doesn’t begin to describe how I’d felt, seeing everything turned inside out, exploded and sort of flattened, but in a three-dimensional way. Oh, I can’t really describe it.
Picture an inside-out sports sock that you pull out of the dryer (this is always happening to me because I pull the socks right off my feet and toss them into the hamper, after much nagging from Mom). Okay, so you see all those loose threads and stuff, right, and the white stitching crossing over the colored bands. Not the view of the sock you’re supposed to get.
So, ramp that up to three dimensions. Somehow I was able to see the inside pages of all the books in the room, books that were closed and standing on the shelves. Not only that—I saw both sides of every page, all at once! I could have read every page, except that I was only there (wherever “there” was) for less than a second, and I felt more like screaming than reading.
There were two reasons for that. One was that I got an exploded view of Tom as well, a moment before I actually got to meet him in the normal way. He looked like road kill, except that I could see his blood was still pumping, his lungs were expanding and it looked like everything was working the way it was supposed to. But the other reason I wanted to scream was that I got a full-on glimpse of Tiferet, or Gloria, or whatever her name really was.
A full-on, multidimensional view. Give me points for not fainting. There was the living road-kill effect stuck to a bunch of orange cat fur stuck to something that looked like a woman’s head, with the brain fully visible…and then there were glimpses of other—
“Facets,” said Gloria, who was watching me closely.
I jumped.
“What