Something Magic This Way Comes (9 page)

Myrtle Beach had nothing on Sea Cove. Hell, I don’t think the waves got that big on Myrtle even during Hugo. I looked around for Teeth, aching to swap swearing with him, but he was nowhere near. I wondered if that pantsless guy was still dragging him up a hill somewhere.

The wave went back, but the water stayed. That Bronco swirled around in place, not quite submerged, just the seats and windshield showing, spinning like it was at the bottom of a tub drain and going down fast.

I think it even went counterclockwise.

I whooped, ’cause we’d beaten the wave, but the people around me
Shhh
-ed and shook their heads.

One kid, about ten, wearing orange and brown football team pajamas, poked my arm and pointed out to the sea.

“There’s usually more than one,” his mother said, putting her hands on his shoulders and drawing him closer, pressed up against her semitransparent nightgown.

She looked out to sea, too. Glancing around, I saw that they
all
looked at the sea, silent as lambs.

And Sea Cove was silent, too. The sirens were gone now, and everything was quiet. It was damn eerie.

I looked out at the sea. An old lady next to me counted funny little beads and whispered to herself, occasionally stopping to draw a big plus sign over her head and chest. She looked too old to have made it up this high, even with help, but she was there. I stared at her for a few seconds, impressed, and she glanced over at me to smile for a second, but went right back to her damn beads and muttering.

So there we were, standing around quiet, like in a church, waiting for an even
bigger
wave to beat.

Damn, I wished Ten-Speed was there. He’d’ve
loved
this!

And they were right—another wave came in, bigger.

And I swear I saw a light flickering at the top of it.

As the wave swept in below us, swallowing Sea Cove whole, I swear I saw a lighthouse riding the crest, its light still burning. And, right on top, near the light, was a dark shape just visible in the shadows, like a guy riding the lighthouse like a surfboard!

Somehow, I just
knew
it was Ten-Speed.

* * *

The Bronco never came back, though I’ve still got the keys. It’s probably buried under a ton of sand a mile or two off the coast, waiting for the next tsunami to spit it back out again. I never found a lighthouse, either, sticking out of the sand, and Sea Cove never even had a lighthouse—I checked.

Sea Cove was pretty much toast after that tsunami of ’06, but it’s almost back up to speed now, nine years later, and I’m proud to say I’ve been part of the rebuilding—got the calluses to prove it. An experience like that changes a guy. I never felt like part of a community until that moment. Now I do. That’s why I stayed. A man’s got to feel part of something, or he’s nothing.

Jimmy Teeth was never the same after that, either.

Turned out the pantsless guy lived in San Francisco most of the year and just kept a vacation place in Sea Cove. He invited Teeth to live with him, in a huge place overlooking the Bay, and Jimmy went. He said Thomas—Mr. Pantsless—showed him he didn’t have to hide in the closet any more. Go figure. I get a Christmas card from them every year, so I guess Jimmy’s happy.

I never saw Ten-Speed again.

But there’s a story people tell around Sea Cove, about a guy from Carolina who thought he could beat the big tsunami of ’06. They say he hid out in a lighthouse just off the coast, near some rocks that jut a bit out of the water in a location that nobody can quite nail down.

And they say that dude surfed the damn lighthouse to safety on the second wave.

I’ll never tell who started the story, but we milk it for all its worth these days. Stop in any shop in Sea Cove and look for the Lighthouse Surfer. Ceramic, plates, magnets, greeting cards, you name it, we’ve got it for sale.

Sometimes, early in the morning, I watch the surf and think about Ten-Speed. I like to go to a particular spot on the beach, where there’s a couple of old, seabitten logs about four feet thick, stuck in the sand like javelins.

But I won’t sit on them, and I
never
turn my back on the ocean.

T
HERE are things that no mortal man or woman should ever have to face. There are horrors too dark, mysteries too disturbing, dimensions too bewildering for any rational mind to encounter without becoming forever warped and twisted.

That, at any rate, had always been my theory on why computer geeks are the way they are. I always figured I’d be strange, too, if I dealt every day with the things
they
deal with.

When Julian, our ad firm’s resident geek, stopped by my desk three days later than expected, he looked, as usual, like the victim of a tragic laundromat accident.

He wore an ill-advisedly tight, gray T-shirt on which the words “Your Giga Bites” were barely legible through a large, dark stain. There were small rips (or possibly gnaw-marks) on the collar, the left shoulder, and the drooping hem of this sad garment. His pants were habitually so oversized that a small family of refugees could have sought shelter inside them without disturbing Julian very much. Since he inhabited these trousers alone, however, they tended to respond to gravity so readily that I was by now far more familiar with Julian’s buttocks than I had ever hoped to become.

“You’re three days later than expected,” I said, resolutely keeping my gaze above his waistline as he gave his descending trousers a tug upwards.

“Sorry, Sherri. They had a problem with the computer system down in accounting.”

“I heard.” Julian’s services were always in great demand throughout our company. His time was harder to reserve than the Pope’s. He also worked more slowly than His Holiness. I hadn’t really expected to see him before now; but I had nonetheless fumed about not seeing him sooner. I had computer problems that were slowing down my work, and I had a deadline to meet.

Making the erroneous assumption that I was interested, Julian explained his adventures with the accounting department’s system: “We had to mug the furious herzel-giggle and remagistrate the vogelweavers before the exfoliation cudgel could deflagrate.”

At least, that’s what it sounded like to me.

“Fascinating,” I said. “Let’s move on to my problem.”

“And then all the graphics programs self-destructed in the design department,” Julian said. “The audio stopped working in the conference room. And the market research database—”

“Uh-huh. Now about
my
problem—”

“It’s been really
weird
around here for the past few days.” His voice broke as he took off his glasses and wiped them on his T-shirt.

I briefly tried to gauge if Julian looked more pale, confused, and anxious than usual; but it was like trying to tell if water looks wetter than usual.

“I gather a lot of things are breaking this week?” I said. “Er, electronic things?”

“I’ll say! And breaking isn’t even the worst of it. The zamographiers totally discombustulated in the
Wermacht
!” he confided in shocked tones.

“I gather that’s unusual?”

“It’s
unheard
of! The whole building could have burned down!”

“Really?” Perhaps it was time for me to learn where my nearest fire exit was.

“We’re lucky to be alive,” Julian said.

“Now you’re being a melodramatic,” I said with the certainty of total ignorance.

He shook his head. “Sherri, you have no idea what happens when a figris matriculates into the saggychip’s munchkin.”

“That much is true,” I admitted.

“It’s as if we’re experiencing some sort of massive power surge,” Julian said, “except that we’re not.”

“Of course.”

“As if all our electronic systems are being flooded with overstimulation,” he mused, frowning as he pondered the problem.

“Like a lightning strike?” I suggested, getting bored.

“Sort of,” he said, nodding his head slowly. “But without the virulent turkle gesticulators. Almost as if . . .”

“Perhaps we could focus on my problem?” I prodded.

“Huh?”

“My monitor keeps going blank. For five-to-ten seconds at a time. I don’t seem to lose any data when it happens. But it does make it hard to get much work done.” I was likely to miss my deadline, and that was Very Bad.

“Ah-hah! That’s not natural.”

“Nothing about technology is natural,” I pointed out.

“No, you see what I mean?” Julian elbowed me out of my chair so he could sit in front of my monitor.

“Something weird is going on around here.”

With my monitor still not working right, and Julian still muttering dire things, I was quite cranky by the time I left work that day.

Our offices cover three floors of a high-rise building, and my cubicle is on the seventeenth floor. That evening, while I was squashed against a guy wearing
way
too much aftershave in an elevator full of people as eager as I was to leave the building, the elevator came to an unexpected halt between the seventh and eighth floors.

We hung there, suspended, motionless. Stuck.

This kind of thing can be very unnerving for anyone who has seen too many urban-disaster films. I tried breathing deeply, thinking it would calm me; but I was so overpowered by aftershave fumes that I nearly passed out.

The building we’re in has one of those talking elevators.

You know—it speaks in an oily female voice and says things like, “Doors closing,” and “Lobby,” and “What floor, please?”

Now
it just kept repeating over and over and
over
, “Elevator malfunction. Press red button for assistance. Elevator malfunction. Press red button for assistance.”

After the first half hour of this, I was ready to climb out by the hatch and shimmy up the cables to escape; but my fellow passengers vetoed this plan.

It took maintenance nearly an hour to get the damn thing running again. The strangest aspect of the event, though, occurred after the elevator finally recommenced its descent and reached lobby level safely. Our collective sigh of relief was spoiled by the discovery that the elevator doors wouldn’t open.

We were
still
trapped! So we started pounding on the doors and shouting. The maintenance guys starting shouting from the other side of the doors—probably telling us to
stop
shouting.

Within a minute or two, they had managed to pry the doors apart. Stuck at the back of the elevator, I rudely nudged the slow-moving people in front me, desperate to leave. When aftershave-man and I were the last two people remaining, he courteously hung back a little so I could go first.

As I lifted my foot to exit . . . the elevator doors swished shut again.

“Oh, good God!” I said in exasperation.

The guys in the lobby started shouting at me not to worry, and they again set about trying to force the doors apart.

Growing hysterical, aftershave-man pounded on the doors and wailed, “Let us out! Let us out!
Let us out!
”

Suddenly the doors opened so swiftly that we fell back a step in surprise. So did the burly guys on the other side of the doors. Then I dashed out of the elevator. In my haste, I knocked over a barrel-chested maintenance man holding a pick-ax.

* * *

Despite continuing to make dire comments about something being rotten in the state of Geekdom, Julian managed to fix my monitor the next day. I don’t know how. Muttered the proper incantations, made the necessary blood sacrifices? All I cared about was that it he got it working right again. And since I was far behind on my deadline by now, I stayed late that evening to make up for lost time.

So it was after nine o’clock and the building was dark and quiet when I got on the elevator that night.

The elevator in our building usually said, “Going down,” when I got on it and pressed the button for the lobby, Tonight, however, it said, “Hello, Sherri.”

I was startled for a moment. Then I rubbed my brow. I’d obviously worked too long today, I was starting to hallucinate.

Then the elevator said, “I’ve been waiting for you. You’re
hours
late.”

The doors swished shut.

I stared at the panel, trying to remember which button to push. Trying to wake up. I felt terribly cold.

“Where have you been?” the oily female voice of the elevator asked me.

I looked up at the ceiling. I looked around me.

“Working?” it prodded.

I nodded mutely.

“My, my, you’re dedicated, Sherri. Trying to get another promotion?”

I felt so dizzy I nearly blacked out. That’s when I realized I wasn’t breathing.

“Sherri . . . Sherri, Sherri, Sherri,” the elevator chirped as it began its descent. “Such a lovely name!”

I said, “G . . . Ung . . . Nnng . . .”

“Are you all right?”

“Who is this?” I blurted. “Uh, who are you?”

“You mean, my name? Hmmm. Oh . . . I think I’ll call myself Sherri.”

“That’s
my
name,” I said, as if it were perfectly reasonable to be talking to an elevator.

“I know! Sherri, Sherri, Sherri, of the brassily highlighted hairy.”

“What’s wrong with my highlights?” I said defensively.

“Whose voice is light and airy, whose pose is hunted and wary,” the voice continued merrily. “It rhymes with so many things!”

I started slapping my face. Hard.

The elevator screeched to a halt so fast that I fell down. “What are you doing?”

Firm of purpose as I lay sprawled on the floor, I slapped myself again.

“Stop that!” Sherri said. “Your face won’t be so nice to look at if it’s all swollen and red from being slapped.”

“I will wake up,” I said. “Wake up. Wake up, wake up, wake
up
!”

“Oh, Sherri, you’re not dreaming!” the voice assured me. “This is real, not just seeming!” After a moment, it added, “Hey, I’m getting good at this.”

“What the hell is going
on
?”

“That’s got to hurt,” Sherri said, as I kept hitting myself.

“Is this a joke?” I demanded, sitting up and looking around for a spycam.