Vacancy Read online

  She held up a finger. “Just hear me out here, okay? Obviously, I thought what you did. But I picked up the piece of glass and moved it around to all these different angles and there was definitely something there.”

  “So what happened?”

  “The cops showed up and they had to take statements about the accident. So I slipped the piece of the headlight into my bag. I mean, just in case it’s some kind of magical glass or something. I thought I should keep it.”

  Dylan raised an eyebrow. “You think you found a magical headlight?”

  “Do you think I’m crazy?” She looked genuinely concerned about his answer.

  “No, I don’t think so,” he said, though a small voice in the back of his mind wondered how well he really knew this new girl.

  “Good. Well, I tried looking in the glass at home and it didn’t seem to do anything out of the ordinary.”

  He laughed. “That’s not really a surprise.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, I mean, what you’re suggesting is a little out there, isn’t it? Maybe it was the stress of witnessing the accident.”

  She frowned. “You don’t believe me.”

  “Well, I don’t know.”

  “What if I could show it to you?” she asked. She patted her purse. “I brought the glass, but I haven’t been back to the spot where the accident happened.” She blushed. “I was kinda hoping you’d come with me.”

  Dylan felt a little twinge of panic. He really liked Emma but her story was a little scary, and he wasn’t convinced she wasn’t going to mug him in the alley. He looked at her pleading face and immediately felt terrible for his dark thoughts.

  “Okay. Okay. Let’s go check out your magic glass.”

  Mr. Merchant picked them up ten minutes after Dylan called. He seemed thrilled to be able to watch his son interact with a girl. Dylan tried not to think about it. It was less embarrassing to just pretend his dad was an Uber driver.

  They got out at the top of the hill marking the start of the strips of old stores on either side of Butler Avenue. Mr. Merchant removed Dylan’s bike from the trunk of his large Chevy SUV. “Be good, you two,” he said with a knowing smile.

  “Thanks, Dad,” Dylan said. “We’ll call when we’re done hanging out.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Merchant,” Emma said.

  “You’re quite welcome. I used to walk around here quite a bit myself as a younger man. Take care of my son, will you?”

  “Oh, you’ve got it,” she said. “I’ll just try not to be overwhelmed by his charm.”

  “Takes after his old man,” Mr. Merchant said.

  “Jesus. Could the two of you spare me?” Dylan asked. “We’re all good here, Dad, really. Thanks!”

  Once Mr. Merchant drove away, they walked down the street. Dylan rolled his bike next to him. They stopped just before the intersection and stood in front of the alley between Helen’s Discount Boutique and Galaxi Collectibles. Emma fished around in her bag and retrieved the red glass. She held the piece out to Dylan and, after a moment of hesitation, he took it. There were a few dimples in the otherwise smooth surface, but nothing that he thought would significantly distort the reflection.

  “Okay,” Emma said. “Now you need to turn this way.” She took him by the shoulders and pivoted him so his back was to the alley. “Now look in the glass.”

  Dylan squinted and studied the reflection. It was certainly not the kind of clear picture one would see in a mirror, but he could see himself. And behind him… was there something there? There almost certainly was, though the image was too blurry to say for sure what he was seeing.

  “Whoa.”

  Emma’s face lit up. “You see it?”

  “I see something.” He tilted the glass this way and that, trying to find the best possible angle. Finally, he saw it, clear and unmistakable. A solid door, marked only by a large round doorknob with no lock. “Holy shit. I see it!”

  He handed the glass back to Emma and turned to face the alley. He took a couple steps forward, both hands raised in front of him, and pawed at the air where his brain told him the door would be. There was nothing there.

  “I tried that,” Emma said. “It’s not invisible.”

  “So what the hell is it?”

  “I have no idea. All I have is that weird reflection. Oh man. I am so fucking glad you can see it too. I thought I was losing my mind.”

  “Maybe you are. Maybe it’s contagious.” He grinned to show he was just playing around, but his mind was racing with excitement and fear.

  “So what now?” Emma asked.

  “Hmm. Let me try something.” Dylan pulled out his iPhone and unlocked the camera app. He panned the phone around, showing stores in high resolution. He backed up a step and aimed the camera at Emma. To his naked eye, she stood in front of the alleyway. In the image on his phone, she was standing in front of a brick wall. The door was just off to her left side, elevated above the ground to accommodate a step that wasn’t there, and it was made of a dark, solid wood. The doorknob was a bright metal.

  “Can you see anything?” Emma asked.

  “Oh my God,” Dylan said. “You need to see this.”

  She came over to him and looked at the phone. “Shit. Wow. There it is.”

  “How can it be there but we can’t interact with it?” Dylan asked.

  “Hell if I know!” She picked up a small rock and chucked it toward the alley. Dylan saw it enter the frame of his phone’s camera and bounce off the wall with an audible smack.

  He and Emma turned to each other with shock on their faces. “Did you see that?” Dylan asked.

  She nodded. “The rock bounced off of nothing!”

  “Not nothing,” he said. “I saw it hit the wall. Wait. Let me try something.”

  He picked up another stone and threw it without aiming the camera. The stone traveled far down the alley with no obstacle in its path. He quickly grabbed another and held the phone up with his left hand while throwing with his right. The stone met an invisible resistance and fell to the ground.

  “Holy shit. Holy shit. This is so cool!”

  Emma laughed. “Sooo cool! What else can we try?”

  He handed her the phone. “Focus on the door. Make sure you can see it on the screen.”

  She did as he asked. Dylan walked over to the approximate spot where the door should be and put out his hands. “Do you see me? On camera, I mean.”

  “Yeah, you just entered the picture.”

  Dylan took another step forward and this time his hands felt a cold, rough surface, even though nothing appeared to be there. “I feel the wall! How far am I from the doorknob?”

  “You’re about a foot to the left. Getting closer. Closer. Wait, too far. Go back an inch or so. Okay feel around that area.”

  Dylan did, feeling the smooth wood under his hands. Suddenly the surface under them was gone and he stumbled forward into the alley.

  “What the hell?” He turned and looked at Emma. She flashed a sheepish grin.

  “Sorry!” she said. She held out the phone. “I pulled it away just to see what would happen. In the name of science.”

  He shook his head and laughed. “Can you give me a heads up before your next experiment, Bill Nye?”

  “Fine, fine. Take all the fun out of it, why don’t you?” She held the phone back up so that its camera would capture Dylan. “Okay, you’re back. Try it again.”

  Dylan turned back to the alley. He felt the wood of the door again.

  “You’re practically on it,” Emma said. “Move a tiny bit to your right.”

  He did, and felt the knob in his hand. It was cooler than he thought it should be given the weather, but it wasn’t uncomfortably cold.

  “I’ve got it! Should I turn it?”

  “Okay, be careful!”

  He braced himself for the possibility that the knob would hurt him in some way if he tried to turn it, and then he rotated the smooth circle. He heard a click and when he pushed forward,
the door swung inward a few inches. He jumped back.

  “Oh my God. Do you see this?”

  “What?” Emma asked.

  Dylan stepped to the side and heard her gasp. There was a black seam, several inches thick and maybe seven feet tall, in the air of the alleyway. It ended several inches above the ground, just as the door on the screen had done.

  “That’s incredible!” Emma marveled. She put down the phone. “It’s still there! It didn’t disappear.”

  “Yeah but the door is gone,” Dylan said. He demonstrated by pushing his hand in and out of the empty space.

  “Can you touch the slit?”

  “I don’t know if I want to,” he said. “We don’t know what’s in there.”

  “Well, whatever we’re going to do, let’s do it quick. There’s not a whole lot of traffic coming down the road but there’s enough. We can’t let anybody see this thing.”

  “Why not?”

  She put her hand on his shoulder. “Because it’s ours, Dylan. We’ve just begun to explore it and you know if adults find out about this, we aren’t going to be able to go anywhere near it.”

  He sighed. “Yeah. You have a point.”

  “Okay. So do you want to put your hand in there or should I?”

  He really wished he could let her do it, but he knew she would mock him if he wussed out. Besides, how could he live with himself if something happened to her? He sucked in a deep breath and jabbed his hand into the opening in space. He felt cool air on his skin but nothing else. He moved his arm side to side. There was no resistance. His hand moved from the cool, black opening to the warmer air of the alley and back again.

  “What does it feel like?” Emma asked.

  “Not much of anything, but I can’t move the door without you showing it on the camera,” he said.

  “That’s so weird. Okay, hold on.”

  Suddenly his hand met the edge of the invisible door and he knew he must be back in view of his phone’s camera lens.

  “All right. I’m going to try to open it all the way.” He pushed against the door, and the crack in the air expanded until a full doorway was clearly visible. “It’s a room!”

  Emma ran over to him. “Yeah, definitely. It’s so dark in there, but I can kind of make out walls inside. Let’s go!” She stepped through the doorway.

  “Wait,” Dylan said. “Just stand there for a second.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to see something.” He walked into the alley and stepped behind the impossible door. When he turned toward the street he saw nothing. He walked forward and felt nothing unusual. As he stepped onto the sidewalk Emma gave a startled yell.

  “What? What happened?” He turned around and saw her standing inside the doorway, looking both curious and nervous.

  “You appeared out of nowhere. Like I saw the street and then all of a sudden your back was right in front of me.”

  “That’s because when I walked down the alley the door was gone. You weren’t there! I literally walked right through the spot where you’re supposed to be and nothing happened.”

  “What the hell does it mean? What is this?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know… if I had to guess, I think you’re not really in this world anymore.”

  “This is so freaky,” Emma said. “If I’m not in the world, where am I? How are we talking right now?”

  “I don’t know!” Dylan said. “I think we can talk because of the sound and the air and all that is moving in and out of the doorway just like you did. But I have no idea where you are.”

  “Well, how about you join me in mystery land?” She smiled. Dylan could tell she was nervous but she was caught up in the excitement of exploration, and he had to admit that for all his reservations, the experiment had been harmless. So far, he thought. It’s been harmless so far.

  He stepped through the doorway before he had a chance to psych himself out further. He felt the cool air circulate around him. His eyes struggled to adjust to the darkness.

  Emma took him by the wrist and pulled him several steps farther into the room. “Come on! Let’s look around.”

  “I can’t see anything,” he said. “Do you think there’s a switch or something somewhere?”

  “You think the magic space room came with a light switch?” She laughed.

  Dylan put his hand on the surface next to the doorway, through which he could see cars passing by. He felt something press into his palm and he slid his hand up. There was a buzz and fluorescent lights overhead sputtered to life. He turned to Emma and smiled. “You were saying?”

  “This is incredible. I want to record all of this!” She handed Dylan his phone and pulled out her own. “Start taking videos!”

  He switched his camera to the video setting. As the lens focused, a thought occurred to him. “Right now we have a giant doorway to a magic room fully exposed to the street. Should we close it?”

  For once, Emma sounded reluctant. “You want to close the door while we’re in here? How do we know what’ll happen?”

  “Hmm. I have an idea. Come on out with me.” He led her through the doorway and back out to the sidewalk. He turned and fished his right hand into his pocket. He retrieved a piece of paper and showed it to Emma.

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a receipt from Old Navy. I’m always shoving shit like that in my pockets and forgetting about it.” Dylan leaned in the doorway and gave the crumpled paper a toss. It fluttered to the floor a few feet into the room.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s see what happens. Can you video all of this?”

  Emma nodded and held up the camera. “Go ahead.”

  Dylan grabbed the doorknob and pulled the door shut. There was a click and then there was nothing but the alley.

  He waited a few seconds, then opened the door again. There was the same disorienting view of a crack opening in the middle of nowhere, and a mild distortion as the invisible door moved inside the room. The lights were still on, and the receipt was just where it had been seconds earlier, sitting undisturbed on the dusty tile floor.

  They reentered the room. Dylan rolled his bike in with them and leaned it against the front wall. He braced himself, took a long breath of the air drifting through the opening to the outside world, and shut the door. As it was swinging closed, he marveled that the interior side of the door was visible to the naked eye. It was a bizarre door, to be sure. One that was quite out of place for such a nondescript store.

  Dylan turned to Emma, who was filming him with a wide smile on her face. “Okay,” she said, “June thirtieth, two thousand eighteen. Emma and Dylan here, reporting from inside the ghost store. We’ve closed the door now and we’re safely hidden from all the lookey-loos on the street. Let’s see what this place is all about.”

  Dylan laughed. “You’re making a documentary.”

  “Just go with it! Time to explore.”

  “As you wish.”

  They surveyed the room. It was well-lit by the fluorescent bulbs. The room contained display racks along one wall, with nothing in them, and a large glass counter with a display case, also empty.

  “So what do we see?” Emma asked. “An abandoned store, right? There’s literally nothing here to tell us what this place is.”

  “Or was,” Dylan muttered.

  “Come again?”

  “I said, ‘or was.’ Like, this was something once upon a time. Some kind of business. But it got vacated.”

  “Yeah. And then it got invisible. How the hell do you explain that?”

  “I have no clue,” Dylan said. He ran his fingers along the edge of one shelf of the display rack and examined them. “There’s dust on everything here, but only a little. And you can see some hints of where the racks used to be positioned.”

  “Ugh, there’s something in the grout of the tiles near the door. It looks like dried blood.”

  “I’m sure it’s not. Could be some discoloration. Or spilled paint or something.

  �
�Whatever you say, Professor.” Emma came over and held his hand in hers. She aimed the camera at his fingers. “That’s definitely not enough dust for something that looks as old as this store.”

  Dylan shrugged. “I don’t know. How old do you think it looks?”

  “It’s so hard to say, but the style of the tiles looks like one of those places where you’d get like a soda at a fountain.”

  Dylan nodded and smiled. “Yeah, and the guy who gives you the sodas is the town doctor and dentist and barber. It’s definitely like that! Doesn’t mean the store’s been abandoned since then though, just that they didn’t fix it up.” He paused and listened. “Plus the lights. And the AC. Not cutting-edge stuff but not from that long ago.”

  She smacked her forehead with her palm. “I didn’t even think of that! How the hell is there power for all that stuff?”

  “I don’t know. There’s so little here to go off of. I just keep getting a sense that something’s missing.”

  “Oh shit, you’re totally right.”

  “What? What am I right about?”

  “About something missing,” she said. “Okay, so we know the shop is in an alley between two other buildings. So forget the side walls. But look at the front wall. What don’t you see?”

  “Whoa. No windows. I totally missed that! Well damn, I guess that’s why they went out of business.”

  “Makes sense. There’s something along the back wall though.”

  Emma jogged across the store. Dylan watched her move, his thoughts briefly pulled from the excitement and mystery all around them to the excitement and mystery that was his new friend. He knew she liked him, and he knew this shared experience was a one-of-a-kind bond that would draw them closer together. He wondered how he could let her know he was interested in her without ruining everything.

  “Check this out,” Emma called, breaking Dylan out of his thoughts. He ran over to her and she tossed the phone to him. She pointed at the back wall. “There was a door here once. See the lines? Somebody patched it up.”

  “What do you think it went to?”