But Al was seeing Andie Mae’s furious face, burning blue eyes. “But I promised I would get the posters there tonight,” he murmured.
“Well,” the doctor said, “you won’t. The number of the towing company’s probably on the card you had in your wallet. You can deal with them in good time. Right now, it’s my job to make sure you’re comfortable and you won’t come to any additional harm. Now. Is there anyone we can call to pick you up and keep an eye on you?”
“The California Resort,” Al said.
“What?”
“The California Resort. That’s where I need to go.”
“Are you staying there? You aren’t local?” The doctor consulted his chart again. “I thought I saw an address…”
“Everybody is over there. Nobody home right now.”
“Oh,” the doctor said, uncomprehendingly, staring at Al with a slight frown.
“You want someone to keep an eye on me?” Al said, quite lucidly. “Well, all my friends are there right now. At the convention. Where I was supposed to be — with the posters. What time is it?”
The doctor consulted his watch. “Almost seven thirty.”
“Call me a cab,” Al said. “I’ll go there and I’ll…”
“To a convention?” The doctor looked skeptically at the arm cradled in a sling and a collection of small cuts and darkening bruises elsewhere on the patient’s body. “I really think you’re in no shape to — ”
“Just do it,” Al said. “And please find me my stuff.”
The doctor’s brows drew together at that distinctly less — than — deferential tone, and then he shrugged. “As you wish. You’re leaving on your own recognizance, though, and against medical advice and I’ll put that on the record. I’ll send someone to help you dress — your clothes are over there on the table, in the bag, some of them are a little messed up but I guess we can’t help that. I’ll send a small bottle of Vicodin home with you, and it would really be good if you could look in on a doctor at some point during the next 48 hours or so. Just to make sure.”
“Fine,” Al muttered.
All of him hurt, as though he had been worked over by a professional boxer. His chest felt vaguely caved in, and he seemed to be having difficulty with the simple act of inhaling a lungful of air — but nothing major seemed to be broken, other than the damaged arm, and he could cope with the rest of it. Because movement was limited with one arm in a sling and because every small movement made him wince it took some little while before he could, with assistance, struggle halfway into a set of clothes which were not happy with the sling situation; another forty minutes or more passed before he walked, staggering a little, to a waiting cab and gave directions to the California Resort.
It was now past eight o’clock, and full dark, and it was later still by the time the cab pulled up and woke its passenger, dozing fitfully in the back seat. Al blinked several times and sat up, wincing as he jarred the strapped arm.
“We here?”
“Yes, sir, we’re at 2235 Bluff Road,” the cab driver said. “That’ll be $22.50.”
Al awkwardly pulled out a wallet with his good hand and ferreted out a twenty and a ten, passing them over to the cabbie over the back of the driver’s seat. “Keep the change,”
“Thank you,” the cabbie said. “I’ll just get the door for ya…”
It took something of an inelegant scramble, minding his injured arm and shoulder, for Al to extricate himself out of the back seat of the cab — and while he was still sorting himself out, at the curbside, the cabbie gave him a half — wave and pulled away. But it took a few more moments for Al to realize a few uncomfortable truths about his situation.
He should have been deposited at the front door of a hotel. He had not been. He had in fact been delivered to what seemed to be the side of a dark and otherwise empty road.
The place where the California Resort should have been — where it in fact had been less than twelve hours before this moment — was just a lacuna in the night.
The hotel — the entire hotel — had simply… disappeared.
Dave Lorne, the ConCom member who had been sent to chase his tail at the airport meeting the elusive Guest of Honor, finally pulled into the parking lot of the hotel at almost a quarter to eight on Friday night. The parking lot was packed. He circled for a few hopeless minutes, squinting to see if anyone would be stupid enough to vacate their spot, but most people were already ensconced for the night and were there to stay. Dave was hot and tired and frustrated and irritable and hungry. His day had not gone well. He had managed to miss both lunch and dinner, grabbing something unhealthy and sugary every time his stomach reminded him of how empty it was — and now he wanted something substantial to eat (he knew that if he didn’t he’d wake up at four in the morning and attack a packet of salty crisps from the vending machine). He also badly wanted a drink, preferably something strong, and in the company of somebody sympathetic to whom he could unload about the sort of day that he’d had. The prospects of that seemed dim as he inched forward in his clapped — out old Nissan — but then a car only a few spaces ahead of him suddenly came to miraculous life, its white reversing lights blinking on, and then, after an eternity of waiting to see if this was in fact happening, Dave was rewarded by the sight of the car beginning to ease out of its parking spot. He slammed on his indicator, just in case anyone else who may have been around got any ideas, and very nearly pulled into the parking space before its prior occupant had fully vacated it.
He savored his victory, clutching the steering wheel and closing his eyes after he’d turned the engine off. After a moment, though, his earlier desires reasserted themselves and he roused himself, reached out to the passenger seat to gather up a bulging folder of paperwork, and slipped out of his car, locking it with his remote and then crossing the lot to where the mother — of — pearl roof arched over the covered driveway at the front entrance of the California Resort.
It felt like coming to an oasis after an age in the desert, although Dave was all too aware that there was a convention waiting to be run and there were all sorts of other duties waiting to ambush him as soon as he stepped inside. Perhaps it was this thought that which made him pause just outside the glass doors, turning to look out over the curve of the driveway and a sweeping view of the ocean beyond — now just a glitter of stars in the darkening sky, and a slash of moonlight glimmering on water in the distance. A last look at something that still felt like a kind of freedom, a sense that there was still time to… escape…
He became aware that he was not alone, that someone very still and very silent was standing just a pace or two outside the doors, holding what looked like a computer tablet in one hand and moving the fingers of the other on the touchscreen with a speed that made Dave’s eyes water. At first he thought that he was just that tired and grumpy, that his own thoughts had slowed down sufficiently for everyone else’s thoughts and movements to appear superluminal in comparison. But then, slowly, it dawned on him that something very strange was going on around him. The view — with the distant islands now no more than a black — on — black oblivion — had begun to turn slightly vertiginous, and made his head swim; he felt, just for a moment, oddly weightless, as if his feet had literally left the ground and left him hovering an inch above the sidewalk before settling back down solidly on his heels; the horizon began to have a distinctly weird tinge to it, as though it was moving in ways a horizon had no business to be moving, and then stopped offering itself up as a straight line and started to curve downwards, a small but significant slope on the edges, turning into something that niggled at the back of Dave’s mind, something that he had seen before…