Castle for Rent

Seven Wilmerding, Pennsylvania

Ohmygawd. Saturday night and no date. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Invoking all deities, great and small.

Sheila turned the water in the tub on and yanked up the thingee on the spigot that made the water come out of the shower head.

Oh Jesus H. Christ on the proverbial crutch. Sorry, sorry, don’t mean to offend any supernatural personages. Can’t afford that, not with the way things have been going. Oh hell.

She looked in the mirror. Same face. It doesn’t go away, doesn’t change. Still Sheila. Who did you expect?

Another Sa-tur-day night and I AIN’T got no-BOD-y … da da da da da dee dee dum dum DUM —

She let the ratty old robe drop and looked at herself. Her breasts seemed to sag just a little lower than they did the last time she’d looked at them. Mygawd, could this process be taking place overnight? Did they go — plop — just like that? Or was it her imagination?

She couldn’t quite see her butt, though she knew she was okay in that department, at least. Thank heaven for small favors. She wasn’t going completely to pot. Her weight was fine.

Oh, for Christ’s sake, stop this damn fixation about the body, okay? So you’re getting older. It’s inevitable. Completely natural process. Everything’s fine. Just … fine. So you’ve had two horrible marriages. Great. So you hate your job. Okay, so you hate the goddamn world. So what? That’s life, kid.

The bathroom filled with steam and her image grew misty and faded. Faded away.

She wiped the mirror with two fingers and saw one green eye peeking back at her. Still there, Sheila?

Still there.

She got in and the water was a little hot, so she adjusted it. She let the spray sting her until it cooled down, perversely enjoying the discomfort.

No date. No men in her life. No men anywhere. No guys at work she wanted to work with, let alone go out with. The bar scene was deadly. 99.99999 percent of the men she did meet were: (1) pinheads; (2) multiple-attempt losers (like herself!); or (3) married. Most of them, it seemed, were (3). Why was she always meeting married men she liked? Some weird psychological thing, no doubt.

She poured a cold gob of Herbal Essence into her hand, slapped the stuff on her head, and smooshed it around until it lathered.

Two disastrous marriages. Actually the latest had been the worst. Frank was … still is, from all reports … nuts. He had problems;serious problems. Her lawyer files, he gets the papers at work, and what does he do? He leaves work, goes straight to the house, breaks in (the locks had all been changed), and proceeds to trash the place from top to bottom. All the furniture, slashed, ripped, broken apart. Carpeting slit down the middle with a linoleum cutter. Dishes smashed, the stereo stomped on and wrecked, the bed … the bed, for Christ’s sake, a complete shambles. The crazy bastard didn’t miss a piece of communal property. Property settlement! Hah! What property?

What if she had been home at the time? Ohmygawd. He would have killed her.

Sure, she got a judgment against him for the damages, but who knew when he’d pay up, if ever? The schmuck was broke. Meanwhile, she had a house full of broken junk, this monster mortgage, a shit job at Mellon Bank, and she was stuck in Wilmerding.

Wilmerding.

Wilmer …ding.

She rinsed, then poured out another gob of goop and lathered again. Gonna wash that jerk right outta my … yeah, right.

No date. So we bathe,madame, and we brush on a little Clinique, and spritz on a touch of … oh, what would be good for tonight? — some cheap smelly crap, real whory stuff, and then, mesdames et messieurs, we go down to Chauncey’s and watch the pretty lights and listen to the music and nurse a glass of Chablis until some insurance underwriter sidles up and asks us to dance to a disco (migraine-inducing rhythm track overlaid) redub of an old Beatles number.…

A sudden cold blast of air hit her, and she began to shiver. Her heart thumped against her breastbone.Somebody had come in! Somebody had opened the bathroom door!

But the draft was coming from the wrong direction, from the wall. Suds-blind, she reached out.

And there was no wall. She felt the shower curtain to make sure that she hadn’t gotten turned around somehow. No! But … there was nothing but empty space to her right, where the side of the one-piece molded-fiberglass tub and the section of water-stained wall above it should have been. She stretched her arm and swung it in a wide arc. Nothing! She was freezing. She bent and reached out as far as she could.

She slipped, stumbled, and fell onto a hard cold floor.

There came a sudden quiet.

Soap burning her eyes, she struggled to her feet. She wiped and wiped at her face but stuff wouldn’t get out of her eyes and she yelled in pain.

After an agonizing few moments she could see a tiny bit.

What the hell —?

She was standing in a room with walls of stone and a ceiling like a church or something. There was a table and two chairs, and cold fireplace, and a sort of couch. Nothing else. She was standing on a gray stone floor, naked, dripping wet, and covered with suds. And freezing to death.

She whirled. She stood about two feet from a blank stone wall. The shower, the water … her house, were gone. Gone.

Slowly she turned around, her soap-reddened eyes in a zombie stare.

Gone. One second she was … and then she …

She screamed. But it didn’t do any good. Nothing changed. She was still naked, cold, wet, scared, and in a situation she didn’t understand.

She screamed again, then decided not to do it a third time.

She searched the wall for any sign of an opening, a hole, a seam, a crack, something, anything — any trace of a connection or bridge or transition between her existence of not half a minute ago and her existence now. There was nothing. The wall was as solid and as unyielding as stone walls rightly should be. She searched again. No change; no bathtub, no bathroom, no house, no Wilmerding. This was someplace else. Someplace else entirely.

There was a doorway to her right and she approached it cautiously, her sudsy feet precarious on wet, slippery stone. She poked her head out into a hallway, looked one way, then the other. Nothing but a corridor lit only by a few windows up and down it.

Grimacing from the chill and hugging her rib cage, she went out into the hall and trotted to the nearest window.

She was in a church, a cathedral, or some huge Gothic stone edifice. She could see a forest outside, and mountains. It was a bright day. Last time she had looked outside, it was a dark winter Saturday night. Now it was broad daylight. Different place, different time.

A castle — yes, the building looked more like a castle. A huge one, from what she could see. The window must have been forty stories off the ground.

She was cold. She toddled off down the hallway, at length discovering a huge wooden door to the left. She tried the wrought-iron handle; the door wouldn’t budge. She passed another window and came to a dead halt, as if hitting an invisible barrier. No, she couldn’t have seen what she thought she’d seen. She backtracked and looked out.

Yes, she’d seen it. There was a desert out there, vast and dry and empty. A molten sun beat down on endless salt flats, scorched and featureless, upon which there grew not a weed, nor a blade of grass.

She went back to the first window. The forest — as lush and green as before — was still out there, as were the glorious snow-capped mountains that rose in the distance.

She returned to the second window and stared out, forgetting her nudity, forgetting herself.

Presently the drying soap began to itch, and she turned away and continued down the hall. She again grew aware that she was cold.

“Help,” she called, as calmly as possible. “Somebody help me, please.”

No one answered. She came to a casement window with panes of leaded glass, but declined to look out. She called out again, and again no answer came.

She tried another door, then another. The third was unlocked, and she peeked in.

It was a bedroom. The bed was huge and looked quite comfortable, covered with blankets and quilts and decorated pillows. There were night tables on either side which held lamps, and a big wooden chest lay at the foot of the bed. A tall pine wardrobe stood off to the right, and a dressing table lay near the huge open window. She went to the window and looked out.

The castle spread out endlessly beneath her, a tumult of walls and towers and courtyards and buildings. Beyond the farthest wall there was a sheer drop and then a wide plain. On the horizon, black mountains bulked against the sky like storm clouds.

The window had thick velvet curtains which she untied and let fall. The room darkened. She checked the door and found that it had an old-fashioned lock turned by a huge old-fashioned key. She twisted the key until she heard a click, then ran for the bed. She tore the covers down and slipped in. The sheets had been warmed by the sun, and she luxuriated in the comfort of it, sighing with relief.

She looked around the room. Ohmygawd, what a place to spend a Saturday night. Naked — and no goddamn date!

She pulled the covers over her head.