The Jewels of Elsewhen

by Ted White

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Space Opera

Synopsis

You are riding home from work on the subway. There is a jolt - and as you fall against your neighbour you discover - he is a manikin. You investigate. The entire train is filled with manikins. Are there no humans in this world...? You approach a door. There is only an opaque blackness on the other side. You are wary. You put through only one arm. It disappears completely. You are curious. You must find out what lies beyond. You walk through the door into the void...

Release date: December 14, 2012

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

THE FIRST thing Arthur Ficarra noticed when the train stopped was that the man sitting across the aisle fell over.

He was a short man, withered, wizened even, lank wisps of colorless hair plastered across his balding pate. He seemed to be wearing three separate layers of outer clothing, three progressively larger and more ill-fitting suits. Each was faded to a stained grey. He had been nodding just before the train stopped, and when Arthur had followed him onto the subway train at Times Square, the man had carried with him the sickly sweet halo of wine.

Ficarra had considered doing something about the man, but decided against it. His tour of duty was over, and it was the end of one of those miserable twenty hour long working days, and he had only sufficient interest left in pursuing a direct path home to his door, and thence to about twelve hours of sleep.

But when the train jerked into the station, the wino fell over. He fell in a curious fashion, woodenly, as though frozen in the posture he had slumped into earlier. He fell upon his side on the long bench seat, his feet in the air, elbows still on his knees, like a carven parody of The Thinker, toppled from its perch. He made no sound, and no effort to rise.

“Well? Are you going to just stand there?” the girl asked.

Ficarra shook his head, wearily. It had been a mistake to approach the door before the train had stopped. The girl had swung up out of her seat next to the door without seeing him, and he’d pitched directly into her. Now, despite his muttered apologies, she was angry at him.

“A big man like you; can’t you help the old guy? Look at him! It’s some kind of a fit,” she was saying.

This had to be his stop; the first below Fourteenth St. But maybe the old man was having some kind of fit—the D.T.s most likely—he couldn’t just leave him like that. He couldn’t just step off the train and ignore him. Dammit, there were supposed to be uniformed cops on these trains at night now—TA cops. He allowed himself an ironic grimace. A cop was never around when you wanted one …

“All right, Miss,” he said aloud. “I’m an officer. I’ll look at him.”

It was nearly five in the morning; it might be getting light already up above, in the open air. It would be nice to climb the two flights of stairs to his Waverly Place apartment, throw his clothes on the floor, pull the blinds, and sink into an exhausted sleep even as the birds chirped outside. The car was nearly empty: just the old bum, the girl, and him. Now he’d like to reduce that count by one …

He took the old man’s shoulder, and a chill premonition swept over him. He felt the wrongness at that moment, and for that moment he paused, uncertainly. What it was he didn’t know, but—ah, hell! He was just tired.

When he tugged at the man’s rigid body, the cloth of the stained sleeves ripped, as though rotten, and the smell of dry mustiness curled brownly in the air. The old man’s arm came loose in his hand.

He stood, bent over the still figure, feeling extremely stupid. He was holding a lifeless arm in his hand. It felt rigid, wooden. The cloth at the shoulder joint had disintegrated like dry mummy wrappings.

“What’re you doing?” the girl asked him. “Why don’t you help him up?”

He turned around, holding the length of arm in his right hand, and gestured with it, helplessly. “What the hell do you think?” he asked.

She didn’t scream. Her eyes widened a bit, but then they narrowed. Her eyes were not unattractive; just a bit too over-made-up. “He’s wearing a false arm, huh?”

He turned the arm, and looked at the joint. It was of smooth-finished wood, a peg protruding. He gave a nervous laugh. “Yeah.”

There was a solid thump behind him. The old man, now unbalanced, had fallen to the floor.

He had hit head first. Now his head, cleanly separated from his neck, with only a peg standing in its place, was rolling down the aisle.

This time the girl screamed. She screamed because she had seen the old man enter the car even as Arthur Ficarra had; had seen him shuffle in from the platform, look about with rheumy eyes, and then take a seat along the middle of the long bench on the side he’d entered. His actions had seemed fuddled, but quite unmysterious.

Ficarra slapped her, not hard. “Cut it,” he said tiredly. “No good having hysterics.”

“I want to get off this train,” the girl said. “Right now.”

“Sure,” Ficarra said. But the doors were closed.

Outside, through dust-streaked windows, he could see the lights of a station. They were still sitting in the Christopher St.-Sheridan Sq. station. But the doors were closed. Come to think of it, he hadn’t heard them open.

Well, that was no problem. He knew the trick. A manual. switch was located under the short seats at the end of each car. He turned to the nearest, and tugged to lift it.

It came up readily enough, but there was no machinery, and no door-opening switch under it.

Instead he saw only neat folds of metal, slotted in place, other metal tabs stuck through them. There were slots on the portion which formed the base of the seat. They were marked, “A", “B", and “C".

The seat in his hand had three tabs. He didn’t bother checking their letters.

“What is this?” asked the girl. Her voice was sliding up the scale, nervously, like an elevator out of control. “What’s that you’re doing? You said you were a cop; let me outta here!”

Arthur Ficarra was feeling none too certain of himself now, but he put a calming authority in his voice as he said, “We have to go up to the next car. We can get out up there. All right? Let’s go.”

A claustrophobic mantle was settling down over his shoulders. Suddenly he wanted to be off the train as badly as did the girl. He yanked at the sliding door that led to the next car, and bumped it open. The door at the end of the next car was already standing open, and they stepped directly through it, into the long brightly fluorescent interior of the car.

There were six bodies in the car. Four were lying awkwardly in impossible poses, two on the floor. All had their knees drawn up and their backs hunched, as though sitting, although none but the sixth were. The sixth was leaning against the railing at the end of one of the seats, next to a door. He was a distinguished looking gentleman in an expensive suit. His hat lay on the floor in front of the closed doors. All looked frozen. Besides the man still sitting, there were four young men dressed in laboring clothes, and a middle-aged woman, her hair loose on the floor.

They looked almost like store-window dummies, but somehow too individual, too uniquely human of expression and complexion. There was something comical and ugly about the way they were sprawled, locked into their sitting postures, like ten-pins knocked over in a strike.

The girl gave a convulsive shudder, and Ficarra gripped her arm and hustled her through the car as quickly as he dared, steering her in front of him past the lifeless bodies in a forced march that was as much for his own good as hers.

The next car was easier to take. There were no bodies here: no one at all.

Only four cardboard cutouts, the two-dimensional representations of four middle-aged men in blue shirts and sweaters looking like toppled life-sized photo cutouts of matinee idols in empty theatre lobbies.

“What does it all mean?” the girl beside him asked, as they took it in. Her arm felt very thin in his big hand, and he found himself tightening his grip until his fingers ached, but she didn’t seem to notice.

He shook his head, and said nothing, only hustling her on, up the broad aisle of the narrow car. He kicked one of the fallen cutouts on the floor, but it gave him no satisfaction.

It was a short train. The next car was the front car. There was nothing in it at all. Just a few pieces of paper that looked like shipping tags.

Arthur Ficarra was fingering one of the tags, when the girl said, “Well? How do we get off, smart guy? Tell me that.”

The name on the tag was Calvin Demmon. He presumed each tag carried the name of a person. Wooden dummies, two-dimensional cut-outs, name-tags: there was a progression here, from the real to the abstract, from living, breathing human beings to their labels. It was a pattern, but that was all. It did not point towards any solution he could see.

What had happened on the train, or, maybe, to the train? What was going on?

The girl had remembered that she was angry with him, and had a scapegoat for it all. “Look, mister, I’ve had enough—” She kicked at the doors that barred their way to the station platform.

The doors thudded hollowly, and then tore.

Ficarra pushed past her and began kicking bigger holes and tearing at the flimsy doors. They were made of corrugated cardboard. It was like tearing out of a big box.

“Aw, come on,” the girl said. “That’s it, you know?” She sagged into a seat next to the doors. “That’s a cute bit, but I’ve had it. What is this, Candid Camera? Huh?”

Arthur Ficarra glanced out into the alien station, and said nothing.

“There’s a concealed camera, right? And you set this whole bit up, right?” Her voice was getting hysterical.

The station was all gleaming tiles and subdued pastel tones. Glowing panels were set flush in the flat ceiling, and filled the open platform with shadowless luminescence. “MACDOUGAL ST.” was repeated at frequent intervals along the wall.

“So where’s Allen Funt?” the girl asked.

“I don’t think he lives here,” Ficarra said slowly. “I don’t think I live here either.”

It was a nice idea: somebody had rigged an elaborate practical joke, somebody with a lot, of money, and a sadistic sense of humor. He could see it on television. But not quite this much. Not a whole subway train—the 7th Avenue IRT local—and not a whole station. He’d never heard of a MacDougal St. station on any New York City subway line. He wondered if the whole station was cardboard too, a phony set. He wondered about it, but he didn’t believe it, not for a moment. That sense of wrongness, an out-of-placeness was back with him, and his neck crawled with it.

Then the girl was running, in tiny clattering steps, down the long platform for the stairs visible at the end, a silent sprint that voiced as loud as words her fear and her desperation to escape.

He felt rooted, and he looked down from her running figure on the stairs to her scuffed footprints in the heavy dust on the platform. It made no sense. None at all.

Mechanically, Arthur Ficarra followed after the girl. As he walked he wondered in random patterns: a new station? A new subway line? They were still opening up new lines. Some monstrous publicity stunt? For the moment memories of impossible dummy figures; of a train put together like the ones that were printed on the backs of boyhood cereal cartons, all folds, slots, and tabs; these memories were pushed aside in the growing fog of exhaustion. He was bone weary, tired in body and spirit. A vague resentment was kindling in him, but he was too tired, and the growing numbness of his mind kept it from taking shape. MacDougal St. was only a few blocks east of home, and that was where he wanted to be. Forget the girl, forget this damned station. Try to forget the black foreboding.

The stairs led up to a similarly deserted mezzanine, from which another flight of stairs led up to the street. Arthur Ficarra found himself blinking in the sharp still light of early dawn. The thin sunlight carved clean horizontal lines across the street and sidewalk, and everywhere there was an artificial-appearing neatness. It was very much like finding oneself reduced into an elaborate model city of the sort a fanatic model railroader might construct. Although the low brownstones close at hand had the familiar look of the Village to them, they seemed to lack detail, to exist as rough sketches for reality. The line of the curbstone was sharp and clean, quite unlike the crumbled gutters of the New York City he had always lived in. There was no trash in the street or on the sidewalk. The place had an empty, deserted feeling, and yet a sort of unused newness, as though abandoned before ever put to use.

He was standing on a corner which seemed vaguely familiar, and he felt he should recognize it. The cross-street was narrow, and bent at an angle a short way down, while the main street looked a little like the MacDougal St. that existed just below the coffee-house area: tree-shaded, lined with comfortable brownstones, some of which had quiet little shops on their ground floors or basements. And the trees were there, and the houses, and he could make out a few conservatively placed shop signs, but yet the block was empty. There were no cars parked along it, and none in sight. That was totally wrong. And no people. No sign of people, no sound of people. No sounds at all, he realized. His own breathing was loud in his ears, and his heart thumped painfully strongly.

He lived in the West Village, and he rarely came over into this area. In recent years it had become the domain first of the tourists, and then their teeny-bopper offspring, who clogged the streets and sidewalks in milling knots. He was much too old for that sort of thing. But he wasn’t so out of touch that he could accept this.

His footsteps echoed loudly in the silence. The concrete of the sidewalk was uniform, neither brand-new in appearance, nor broken and cracked with age. It, like the anonymous buildings that lined its side, seemed prefabricated, and hence less real.

For a moment he considered the possibility that it was a large movie set. It seemed reasonable, and yet it didn’t. It felt different; he couldn’t say how.

The sunlight, and the crisp morning air, was invigorating, and he felt more awake as he walked. Yet his mind felt numbed and lost. He walked through the empty streets with a single, simple goal fixed in his mind: home. Find the way home. It was a simple, pragmatic choice. Once home, once lying in bed with the blinds drawn, he could work it all out. He could figure out the whole grotesque adventure in his mind, and perhaps even think of how he’d tell the boys at the squad room about it when he was back on duty.

Home.

He turned west at the next block up, and was rewarded by the vague familiarity of Bleecker St. He’d fallen into a rhythmic slogging pace, one he’d developed years earlier, as a rookie on the beat. The sounds of his marching tread fed back into him and reinforced the steady cadence. He stared sightlessly ahead, his mind already fixed on the hours to come.

“Oh! There you are!”

It was the girl, sitting on a stoop in front of a closed market. She looked up at him with streaked eyes. Her hair hung loosely on her shoulders now, only a few pins remaining in it to mark its former coiffure. She looked, if anything, younger, and more helpless.

She was looking up at him as if he had just materialized in front of her.

“Look, I gotta know something. Please, are you really a cop?”

Arthur had halted, and stood staring down at her. He was a beefy six-foot-two, and he had rarely been mistaken for anything else. “Yeah, I’m a cop. Detective Ficarr. . .