Bad Grrlz' Guide to Reality: The Complete Novels Wild Angel and Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell (58 page)

She climbed the stairs that led from the recreation deck to the observation deck. When she was halfway up the stairs, the howling fell silent and she heard a rattling sound—like claws scratching against the deck surface. But when she reached Cyclops’ Lookout, it was empty. She listened for the wolves, and heard nothing. Only the wind of the ship’s passage as it traveled across the face of the deep.

“You’re not looking for adventure?” The pirate laughed. “That’s no guarantee of a comfortable life. Perhaps adventure is looking for you.”

—from
The Twisted Band

by Max Merriwell

Tom stopped by the security office after dinner. On his desk, he found a note from Ian: “I’m meeting Pat and Susan in Aphrodite’s Alehouse for a nightcap—want to join us?”

Tom was tired, but restless. Dinner had been tedious. Susan, Pat, and Ian had been absent, Max had been quiet. That left Charles Rafferty and Bill Carver, supported by their wives, to dominate the conversation. They discussed, at great length, the quality of the wine list on various cruise lines. Charles had worked up quite a head of steam over the selections of merlot available on the
Odyssey
—apparently his educated palette required more than four choices.

Tom decided that a nightcap might be just what he needed. He headed for the bar.

Aphrodite’s was noisier than usual; the crowd seemed drunker than usual. Tom watched a waitress carry a tray filled with flaming drinks to a group of ladies at a table near the stage. Some new invention of the company, no doubt. Tom couldn’t keep track of all the cocktails served aboard the
Odyssey
—silly things with umbrellas and strange names like Juno’s Revenge and Cupids Sting.

Tom spotted Ian, Pat, and Max deep in conversation at one end of the curving bar and went to join them. “Hello, Tom!” Ian called as Tom approached. “Pull up a stool.”

Tom looked around for Susan. Perhaps she had stepped into the ladies room. He pulled up a stool.

Max looked up from his brandy snifter. He had been quietly drinking brandy at dinner, as well.

He looked rumpled and sleepy, Tom thought. He was not wearing his usual tweed sports coat, having finally surrendered to the tropical heat. He wore a knit polo shirt from the ship’s boutique and he did not look entirely comfortable in it.

“Max was just telling us about a dream he had last night,” Ian said.

“Strangest thing,” Max said. “I dreamed I was in the ship’s library and I saw a novel titled
Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell.
I took it from the shelf, but before I could open it, I woke up.” He shook his head.

“Who was the author?” Pat asked.

Max shrugged. “I don’t know. I didn’t look.”

Tom watched the waitress carry another tray of flaming drinks to the table by the dance floor. “What is that drink?” he asked Ian.

“A Flaming Rum Monkey,” Ian said. “It’s a drink your friend Susan suggested to Frank.”

Tom took advantage of the opportunity. “Where is Susan, anyway?” he asked.

“Frank said she stepped outside with her friend Mary,” Ian said. “Maybe half an hour ago.”

“A Flaming Rum Monkey?” Max said. “I didn’t think that drink really existed.”

“She left with Mary?” Tom continued, not willing to stop for Max’s interruption. “A woman with short dark hair?” Ian nodded. “That’s what Frank said.”

“I saw Susan on the promenade on my way in,” Max said. “She was alone then.”

Tom nodded. “Thanks,” he said. “I’ll go look for her.”

As he walked away, Tom heard Max say, “I’ve always wondered what a Flaming Rum Monkey tasted like. I made up the name a number of years ago. It’s Mary Maxwell’s favorite drink, you know.”

Tom walked the promenade that led around the ship. The night air was pleasantly cool, and he passed a few couples, but he didn’t see Susan or Mary. He was thinking about checking some of the ship’s other bars, when he got a call on his radio from one of the security staff. A woman was on Cyclops’ Lookout, the observation platform at the front of the ship. She’d been there for the past hour. Did Tom want to check on the situation?

He went.

The woman stood at one side of the observation platform, staring up at the sliver of a moon. The wind tousled her curly hair.

“Susan,” he said, and she turned to look at him.

“Hi, Tom. What are you doing out here at this hour?”

“Just checking up on things. Where’s your friend Mary?”

Susan shrugged. “Abducted by aliens,” she said solemnly. She was drunk, Tom thought. He wondered how many Flaming Rum Monkeys she had consumed.

“Ian said you left the bar with her.”

“I did. Then she disappeared. Abducted by aliens.” She was gazing at the horizon. “I heard some wolves howling and I came looking for them.”

“Wolves?” he said.

“They sounded like wolves,” she said. “I suppose they could have been drunken Clampers. There are so many possibilities.”

Tom leaned against the railing beside her. She wasn’t making much sense, but she seemed relaxed and cheerful and a little drunk. “So what are you doing up here?”

“Watching a UFO.” She pointed up at a blinking light crossing the constellation of Orion. “I figure it could be the aliens who abducted Mary.” She smiled, clearly joking.

Tom watched the blinking light in silence for a moment. “I could ask the navigator if he knows what it is. He pays attention to satellites and such.”

“You could do that. But if he doesn’t know, he’ll just explain it away. Swamp gas, he’ll say.” She watched the blinking light for a moment. “What do you think UFOs are?” she asked him.

Tom frowned at her. “What do you mean?”

“Some people think that they’re swamp gas. Some people think that they are filled with little green men who are coming to rescue us. Some people think they are filled with little green men who are coming to destroy us. What do you think?”

“Remember the other night when Max said that people lie,” Tom said. “I don’t think they always know that they’re lying. I think sometimes, people make things up and decide to believe in them.”

Susan nodded, staring out to sea. “Sort of like a dream that everyone agrees to believe in,” she said. “Sort of.”

She turned her head and studied his face. “Did you ever watch
The Twilight Zone
when you were a kid?”

The summer that Tom was ten years old, he had watched
The Twilight Zone
with his father every Thursday night. It had been reruns, all reruns, but his father had loved the show.

Tom’s father had been a plumber, a big, hard-working man with callused hands. Tom had two older brothers, but they had spent their Thursday evenings with friends, with girls, in the parks, on the street corners. Tommy had spent his days with friends, but on Thursday evenings, after dinner, he would sit with his dad on the battered brown sofa. He remembered it well.

He could hear his mother in the kitchen, washing the dinner dishes. His dad held a can of beer in one big hand, a cigarette in the other. Tommy could have had a glass of lemonade if he had gone into the kitchen to get it. But his mother would have put him to work—drying dishes, running an errand, something, anything. His mother thought TV was a waste of time. So Tommy stayed with his dad, laying low and hoping to escape her notice.

“Oh, this one’s a good one, Tommy,” he remembered his father saying. Every episode was a good one, according to Dad. Thinking about it now, Tom wondered about why his father—a practical man who worked hard for living—had had such an affection for the show. “The strangest things can happen, Tommy,” his father had said. “Anything is possible.”

Tom watched the blinking light that Susan said was a UFO. His father might have agreed with her. “Yeah,” Tom said. “I used to watch
The Twilight Zone
with my dad. He loved that show.”

“Do you remember the part at the beginning,” Susan said. Tom smiled and mimicked the music of the theme song.

“Yeah, there was that,” Susan said. “Then Rod Serling would say, ‘You unlock this door with the key of imagination. Beyond it is another dimension.’ You remember that part?”

Tom nodded. “Sure. This door would come looming out of the darkness.”

“That part always made me shiver,” she said.

Tom remembered how the eerie music and the looming door had affected him. “That was a scary door. Not quite as scary as
The Outer Limits,
where they took control of your television set, but it was still scary. I can see why you would shiver.”

“It wasn’t just that it was scary.” Yes, Susan was definitely drunk, Tom thought. She was speaking with exaggerated care. She had the thoughtful air of someone who had drunk enough to make commonplace occurrences seem very profound. “That door made me think that anything was possible. I could step through the door and escape into somewhere strange and different. All I needed was my imagination.”

Escape, he thought. Maybe that was part of the attraction for his dad. Escape from work, from his nagging wife, from the day-to-day chores.

“My mother didn’t like me to watch the show,” Susan was saying. “She said I already had too much imagination. She said I didn’t need to watch that weird stuff.”

“But you watched it anyway?” When Tom was a kid, he had defied his mother at every turn.

She nodded. “Every chance I got.”

She fell silent, gazing out to sea. He watched her face. The wind caught her short hair, mussing it, but she did not reach up to try to push it back into place. He liked her new haircut. He liked this slightly drunk, much more relaxed Susan. He felt like reaching up and playing with her curls, but he fought the urge.

“Submitted for your approval,” Tom said, mimicking Rod Sterling’s measured tones. “A cruise ship, passing through the Bermuda Triangle. The vacationing passengers are looking for sunshine and relaxation. They don’t know that this vacation will take them into …” He paused dramatically. “… the Twilight Zone.”

“That’s all right,” Susan said very seriously. “Some of us don’t mind a visit to the Twilight Zone. What do you think will happen?” He shrugged. “Hard to say. But as long as all the meals are served on time, most passengers won’t even notice.”

She glanced at his face. “You’d notice, though. You and Max. You’re both always paying attention. Keeping an eye on everything and trying to make sense of it all.”

“It’s my job.”

“Even if it weren’t your job, you’d be paying attention,” she said. She stared at the waves. “Ian told me that Mary signed into the beauty salon as Mary Maxwell. I know the guy you’re looking for is Weldon Merrimax. What do you think is going on?”

He shrugged. “A couple of Max’s fans are having some fun,” he said.

“Do you really think so?”

He shrugged. “Best explanation I can come up with.”

“There are other explanations,” she said. “Suppose, just suppose, that those people really are Max’s pen names. Somehow they are …” She hesitated, then went on. “Somehow they are leaking through from some other dimension. Like on an episode of
The Twilight Zone.
What are you going to do about it?”

Tom kept smiling, willing to go along with the joke. She was so very sweet and so very drunk. “Well, I don’t see that I have to do anything, really. I can’t confirm that any crimes have been committed. Oh, there was one drink that didn’t get paid for, but that’s minor. Max is getting strange fan mail slipped under his door, but he told me that writers have to get used to that sort of thing.”

“Didn’t Weldon Merrimax cheat someone at poker?”

Tom raised his eyebrows. Ian had been talking. “Nothing illegal about gambling on board,” he said. “We’re in international waters. It’s against Company Policy, but all I can do is advise passengers of that.”

“Didn’t he stab Patrick Murphy?”

“As far as I can tell, no Patrick Murphy was ever on board. The man who reported that incident now says it never happened. So it’s tough to make much headway.”

She nodded. “Maybe it was just a dream,” she murmured. Tom studied her face. She was smiling, but her eyes were drooping, like the eyes of a tired child who didn’t want to go to bed just yet. “I’ll think about it more in the morning,” she said, stifling a yawn. “It’s past my bedtime.”

“Can you find your stateroom?” he asked. “I’ll just wander around until I find it.”

“I’ll escort you there,” he said. “No telling where you’ll end up if you get lost in the Twilight Zone.”

“No telling,” she agreed.

At her stateroom door, he said, “I’ll check on your UFO.”

“Okay,” she said. “See if you can find out what galaxy it’s from.” She closed the door behind her.

It was past Tom’s bedtime as well, but he still felt restless. He headed up to the bridge, figuring he’d see if anyone on duty knew what Susan’s UFO was.

The bridge was the highest point on the ship. A broad bank of windows offered a view of the observation deck below, the sun deck below that, and the dark ocean waters beyond them both. A light over the main control console spotlighted Michael, the officer on duty. Lights from instrument panels glowed brightly in the darkness. As always, a quartermaster kept watch through the windows. Lounging on a chair beside the quartermaster was Geoffrey, the ship’s navigator, a lanky Brit. All three men grinned when they saw Tom.

“Hello, Tom,” Geoffrey said. “You all done on the observation deck? I was planning to do my monthly sextant check and I didn’t want to interrupt anything.”

“Nothing to interrupt,” Tom said easily. “just having a pleasant chat.”

“About the moon and the stars,” Michael said. “I know where those pleasant chats lead.”

A little romance between passengers and crew was not unusual. Some officers made a habit of it, keeping an eye out for single women who might be open to a vacation fling. Tom had never taken advantage of such opportunities. He’d been involved with other crew members—with an Irish woman who worked in one of the bars, with a back-up singer in one of the shows. Nothing serious; nothing that lasted beyond a few cruises. But he had avoided any involvement with passengers.

Tom shook his head. “We were talking about an unidentified flying object crossing our bow. Maybe a satellite.”