“And even if his story is untrue, it’s not necessarily a sign of mental illness in children his age to make up strange stories. So I’ll refer you to a child psychiatrist, but I suggest you keep an open mind and check that mural in Davey’s bedroom from time to time to see if it exhibits any... strange behavior.”
The Mural and the Cabinet
part 12 of 21
by Trismegistus Shandy
Thanks to Lucario and Maplestrip for feedback on story ideas, and to Yuki Kitsune for beta reading the manuscript.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Sashtun looked after Amanda’s car as it disappeared down the road, then straightened his shoulders and went into the shop with the strange name. Were many shops named with terse complete sentences here? Most of the others he’d seen had short, cryptic names, which didn’t say anything about what they sold. Probably from the names of their proprietors or founders; they must assume everyone knew who they were and what their business was. And maybe the colors of the signs and the ornamentation of the buildings were significant in some heraldic way? He’d wanted to ask Davey or Amanda about them, but there were other more urgent questions to ask, and they’d had only a short drive to get to the WE BUY GOLD shop.
There was a man behind the counter, with features similar to those of his new body and hair a little darker; he was younger than Kashpur, but older than his new body and a lot older than his real body. He smiled politely and said, “May I help you?”
“Yes,” he said. “I need money. I’d like to sell some gold.”
“Let’s see it.”
He didn’t show him everything he’d brought. After he knew his way around this world better, if he ended up staying for months like Davey had done in his world, he might learn how to get a better price for the rest of his gold and jewels. But for now, it seemed like a good idea to sell just one of the gold bars he’d brought, find a place to stay, and buy some food.
The man did various tests on the gold bar to ensure it was real gold and determine its purity, and then asked him how he would like to be paid.
“You mean, what form of money?” he asked, perplexed.
“Yes,” he said. “Cash or check?”
“Ah. Cash, I think. Wouldn’t I need money to travel to the bank to cash or deposit the check? My friend told me that you don’t have a free bus service here, only taxis.”
“Uh, yeah, that’s right. There’s a county bus service, but you have to schedule a ride in advance and it’s... cheaper than a taxi, I guess, but not free.” He looked at her closely. “Where are you from?”
“A long way off,” he said. There was no sense in trying to explain; if Davey’s family hadn’t believed it, with the little bit of evidence they’d seen, there was no chance he would with no evidence at all. “Can you pay cash?”
“I can give you five hundred in cash and the rest as a check,” he said. “Will that do?”
“That will do.” He could use some of the cash to get a ride to a bank and cash the check.
Once he had the money, five crisp pieces of rag paper with ornate designs including a portrait of a stout old man and the number “100” in the corners on one side, and a check for $1,172.18, he asked the man how he could get the county bus or a taxi. “You said you have to schedule a ride?” he asked. “They don’t have regular stops?”
“I’m not sure — I never take the bus myself. I have a friend who does, sometimes; I could look it up...”
He did something with a machine, looking at a flat black box and tapping buttons with letters painted on them on another box. Sashtun wondered which of the machines Davey had described this was: a phone? A computer? A television? There was so much he wanted to know, but he remembered how annoying Davey’s hundreds of questions had been, so many basic questions about things that even a child should already know, and he wanted to avoid wearing out his welcome.
“You can call the county bus and have them pick you up within an hour or so,” the man said. “They’ll take you anywhere in the county for five dollars.”
Three hundred rides, with the money he’d already gotten for the first bar of gold. But how much would he need for lodging and food? And how much did it cost to use a “phone” or a “computer”? Would he need to buy them or could he rent their use? Were there places he could use one for free?
“Thank you. How do I call them?”
The man wrote down a ten-digit number on a slip of paper and handed it to Sashtun.
“Excuse me,” he said. “I don’t know how to use this. Assume I know nothing.”
He looked at Sashtun and said: “You’ve never used a phone? Where are you from, lady?”
Amanda stepped into the hall with Dr. Menendez. “Well?”
“There are no physical signs of abuse,” he said. “As for his story...”
“Are you going to refer him to a psychiatrist or a neurologist or what?”
“Tell me something about this woman he mentioned, Sashtun. He said she spent the night at your house and you dropped her off at a gold buying place this morning?”
“Yes, that’s right. We woke up in the middle of the night and there was Davey, and he introduced us to this woman, who was upstairs sitting on Davey’s bed... and then they told us this fantastic story.”
“The woman corroborated Davey’s story?”
“Yes.”
“Did she exhibit any signs of mental illness, other than this story she told? Incoherent speech, facial tics, anything like that?”
“...No. Except she was wearing a man’s shirt and pants, with no bra. They weren’t typical American clothes, but I can’t place what other culture they might be from. Her accent was urban southern, though — I’d bet she’s from no farther away than North Carolina, and more likely suburban Atlanta. Don’t tell me you believe them?”
“I don’t, not without more evidence. But it all seems very odd. Except for the strangeness of the story, I don’t see any signs of mental or neurological illness in Davey. His reflexes and coordination are fine, and his story is coherent and consistent. It seems incredible that it could be true, but I can’t conceive why that woman would lie and back up Davey’s strange story. And even if his story is untrue, it’s not necessarily a sign of mental illness in children his age to make up strange stories. So I’ll refer you to a child psychiatrist, but I suggest you keep an open mind and check that mural in Davey’s bedroom from time to time to see if it exhibits any... strange behavior.”
“Do you think it’s okay for him to go back to school now, or should we wait until the psychiatrist clears him?”
“I don’t see why he shouldn’t go back to school. He’s already missed quite enough.”
“Thank you.”
After a great many questions and answers, Sashtun left the gold-buying shop and went to one of the other shops in the building, where he bought a phone and had the proprietor show him how to use it. He wrote down his new “phone number” and called Carson to give him the number.
He then called the county bus phone number and asked them to pick him up and give him a ride to somewhere he could stay. The woman on the other end insisted that she had to have a specific destination in mind, the name of a building or an address. Since Sashtun knew nothing about the city he found himself in, or the nearby cities, he had no way of knowing where exactly he wanted to go. He tried to explain that, and the woman recommended looking it up “on the Internet.” Davey had mentioned that during their mealtime colloquies about the differences between the two worlds, but Sashtun couldn’t remember much about it at the moment.
So, after frustratedly thanking the woman on the other end, he ended the call, and asked the proprietor of the phone shop how he could use the Internet to look up places to stay. After a moment’s further thought, he asked if he could look up places to eat the same way. Another bewildering lesson followed, but it seemed he could use the phone he had already bought to do so, which was a comfort; he was afraid he would have to buy another machine. A few minutes later, after writing down the address of a hotel that seemed to be nearby, and within walking distance of some places to eat, he called the county bus service and asked to be carried to that address.
After they left Dr. Menendez’s office, Davey and his mom went out to the car and drove over to the school. “We’re early,” his mom announced. “I’m going to make a call.”
She called a number from a sheet of paper Dr. Menendez' secretary had given her, and from what Davey overheard, she seemed to be making an appointment for him. With who, he didn’t know, but he could guess. He sighed loudly and resumed drawing in his notebook.
“...Is that the earliest I can get?... Thank you... Yes, that would be better, although — no, I understand... thank you. Goodbye.”
“So when am I going to see the psychologist?” Davey asked.
“A psychiatrist, and it won’t be until next Thursday.”
“What day is it today again?”
“Tuesday. February 13. You were gone for over six months, Davey,” she added, her voice trembling. Suddenly she reached over and hugged him again, causing his pencil to skid across the paper and ruin his drawing — not that it was going so great anyway.
“I missed you, Mom,” he said quietly. “I wish you’d believe me.”
They got out and went into the school office, and waited for a while in the lobby before someone was ready to see them. Davey had never met the principal or assistant principal of this school, having moved here in the summer and disappeared into Zindla’s world less than a month later, so he wasn’t sure at first who they were meeting with.
His mom talked with whoever it was, telling them how Davey had been missing at the start of the school year, and had just returned home. She claimed that he couldn’t remember what had happened to him, which, when he thought about it, made sense. After the way Mom, Dad, and Dr. Menendez had reacted, he didn’t think he’d be telling any more grownups about it. And no kids, either, not until he made some new friends he trusted as much as his old friends back in Marietta. Or more. He’d have to trust them a lot to tell them what had happened to him... His wandering thoughts were called back when the person Mom was meeting with (he still wasn’t sure what their position was) spoke to him.
“Do you feel like taking some tests this afternoon, Davey?” she asked. “Or would you like to come back and do it in a day or two?”
“What kind of tests?”
“To decide what grade you’ll be in, and what particular classes. We need to know how much you already know before we decide what to teach you next.”
“That makes sense, I guess. Sure.”
He’d had lessons while he was living with Zindla’s family, but obviously the history wouldn’t do him any good here, and the math Zindla had been studying was more advanced than the fourth grade math he’d studied, but their symbols for numbers, multiplication, division and so forth were all different. And their science and magic were obviously different... really, not much of those lessons had prepared him for fifth grade in an American school. He’d had lessons from Tashni, too, but mostly home economics — girl stuff. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that now.
A little later, the lady who’d been talking to Mom brought them to an empty room with some kid-size desks and gave him some papers. “Fill them out at your own speed,” she said. “And let me know when you’re done.”
“I’m going to go run some errands, okay, Davey?” Mom said. “I should be back by the time you’re done with the placement tests.”
“Okay, Mom. Bye.”
He wondered what was happening back at Kashpur’s apartment. Was he getting the portal open, only to find nobody at home in Davey’s house? Would he go through the portal, or send Tashni through? Davey hoped not. If the portal made people older going this way, Kashpur would be super old, maybe twice as old as Davey’s grandma. Maybe too old to stand up and walk. Hopefully he’d noticed how old Sashtun looked, back when they stood in Davey’s bedroom and looked back through the portal at Kashpur.
Sashtun collapsed onto the bed of his hotel room in exhaustion. It had only been a few hours since he’d left Davey’s house, but a very stressful few hours after an inadequate night’s sleep. Nobody seemed to believe that he could possible be as ignorant of this world as he seemed, while being perfectly fluent in the local language, and he kept having to probe deeper with more questions in order to understand the answers to his previous questions. Not many people had the patience for these long conversations, though he’d gotten lucky with a couple of unusually patient people at WE BUY GOLD and the phone store. And finding out how much this hotel room cost, relative to the money he’d gotten, was the latest and worst stressor.
He’d run out of money in less than a month and a half, unless he got significantly more money for his gold next time. That was just allowing for the hotel and a bus to take him to Davey’s house every few days, and he’d need food as well. At some point, he’d have to pay more to make his phone keep working — sometime later in the evening he needed to study the papers and booklet that the phone store proprietor had given him, to make sure he understood it. Not to mention food... he wanted to compare the prices of the various restaurants in walking distance to make sure his money went as far as possible. And try to use his phone, or ask questions of the hotel clerk, to figure out if there was a food market nearby where he could buy food to eat here in the room. And clothes — he needed things that fit his new woman’s body, two or three outfits at least. He remembered Davey saying that people in his world showered and wore different clothes every day.
But all that could wait until later. He lay still for a while, then forced himself to get up and undress, so his clothes wouldn’t be too rumpled tomorrow when he went out to buy more. Or later tonight, more likely, to eat at a nearby restaurant. Once naked, he walked into the bathroom and looked at himself again, taking a long careful look — not like the hasty glance at himself he’d had last night in Davey’s bathroom mirror, or the panicked denial he’d felt when he’d seen himself while bathing this morning. He’d showered with his eyes closed for the most part. Now she forced herself to look, and take in what she saw. This was her, until and unless Kashpur got the portal to open again regularly.
First it would have to open at a time when Amy, Carson the younger, or one of their parents could see it in operation, she thought as she walked back into the other room and got into bed. Then, perhaps, Sashtun would be allowed to move in with them, and be ready to go through the portal whenever it opened again, at a moment’s notice... perhaps she could borrow Davey’s bedroom for the nonce, and Davey could sleep with his brother, or on the sofa? It seemed like a major imposition, unguestly behavior, and yet it would maximize the chances of her being able to go home as soon as possible, and minimize the time she would have to impose on their hospitality.
Time enough for that later. She was finally able to relax enough to sleep. When she woke, she was hungry; she got dressed, ran wet fingers through her hair, and walked to the nearest of the restaurants the hotel clerk had mentioned.
If you want to read the whole novel (51,700 words) right now without waiting for the serialization, you can find it in my ebook collection, Unforgotten and Other Stories. It's available from Smashwords in epub format and Amazon in Kindle format. (Smashwords pays its authors better royalties than Amazon.)
You can find my earlier ebook novels and short fiction collection here:
Comments
I really hope he wont be trapped here
he's in a tough spot.
Patience
Just be patient for a couple of chapters. I rarely do downer endings, and (spoiler alert) this isn't one of them.
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