(Part O , XXIV , Revised Whole )
The setting was a marvelously plush country house hotel. Pictures of unknown authors from other times and places hung upon the corridor walls as fragments of memories left haunting the Dreamline. A harassed bellboy could be seen rushing in and out of the stairwell with luggage, despite a guest never appearing, and no other staff being visible from the reception area.
Minutes or hours passed, and the bellboy finally staggered behind the desk and collapsed to a crouch.
The bell on the desk rang. A gentleman stood before the desk, politely averting his gaze from the wretchedly tired bellboy. After a few moments, he coughed and asked the wall (a wall always a good listener), "Excuse me, can I please book in?"
"Of course," answered the wall, smiling loopily. "Would you like a single room, sir?"
"No, a double. My lady friend will be arrivigng within the hour. In fact, a suite would be better, if you have one available?"
"Of course," repeated the wall, whose conversational scope was a little on the limited side. "Name please, sir?"
"Simonson." The gentleman paused dramatically for a moment. "Stanley Simonson."
* * *
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* * *
The lady dropped on to the roof and let her parachute fall around her. Quickly, she gathered up the silk and packed it into her bag expertly, before stripping out of her jumping suit to reveal elegant evening dress and descending into the building via a handy roof door, which may or may not have existed exactly there a few moments before.
At the bottom of some steep steps, the lady emerged into a regular staircase, and descended all the way to the ground floor, and the foyer. The recovered bellboy had long since run away after working three shifts in a row, and now a mature woman was waiting behind the desk. She looked at the lady sternly as she made eye contact. "Yes? How can I help you?"
"You could offer me a chocolate? Or tell me which suite my gentleman partner checked us into? His name is Simonson, and mine is Helen Ostrander."
The receptionist grumpily examined the register and proffered a pen for the obligatory and non-negotiable signature. A moment later, the lady was heading up to the Macnee Suite with all despatch, or at least as much despatch as suitable under the watchful eye of the steely receptionist.
At the suite door, she stopped to make a specific sequence of knocks. Rap! Rap! Pause. Rap! Then, five seconds later, the door opened, and she entered with some trepidation. The suite seemed empty.
* * *
"Gotcha!"
Helen twirled and scowled at her partner in crime. "You crook! You scared me almost to waking up!"
Stanley had the grace to look abashed. "That would have been a problem, yes. Nice dress. You made that up out of your imagination?"
"Stop leering. We have something more important to do."
"You have the package?"
"Yes, I have the package."
"Then, let's go down to the casino." Stanley offered his arm to Helen, slung a jacket over his shoulder, and the two of them left their suite smiling."
* * *
The casino was on the lower ground floor, and overlooked a lake where some evening boating was taking place in the late summer sun. It was also manned by abstract shapes, which Helen and Stanley had some problem understanding to begin with. Finally, after a few rounds of 'Name That Fruit' roulette run by a dodecagon, a perplexing fall through a penalty trapdoor up to the basement, and then an utterly futile attempt to play a game called bluejack which seemed to depend on being able to name one hundred shades of blue between ultramarine and Egyptian instantly and precisely, they returned to the casino proper. They found themselves loopily back at the roulette wheel, but this time Stanley pulled Helen away before they could be dragged into any more dreamlike chaos.
"I feel like I've been dragged through nine nights of utter delirium!" whispered the waitress to the teacher.
"And now it's over. Take a look at the window."
Helen looked, and beheld their nemesis, who was staring absently out at the lake. The boats had gone, they noticed, and the water was still. The duo looked at one another and then quietly went over.
"Excuse us, but would you be interested in Box 31?" Stanley asked of the Tweedy Woman. She looked up, startled.
"You???"
"Me. And her. And this." A key labelled '31' dangled from his right first finger. "Your friend, the one you had locked up for all that time, he said you might be interested in this. Sadly, then he faded away to nothing." Part of this was a lie, but how would the Woman know.
The Tweedy Woman grabbed angrily at the key, and Stanley yanked it out of reach. There followed a tussle, which was finally resolved when Helen pulled in a zebra security guard from location unknown, who promptly inserted herself between the combatants implacably. In one corner of the casino, the Prisoner rolled a ninety four on some apples in the dice game, but of course no-one noticed.
* * *
The dream segued unconventionally onto a golf course. Helen and the Tweedy Woman were playing a round of matchplay, which had so far been marred by several putts into lifesize lighthouses and ramps of little apparent purpose. Indeed, the par nine trick hole which led around a half scale Windsor Castle snow globe was won by Miss Ostrander only when Tweedy's cheating with a boomerang and five small mice was discovered. The small mice were released back into the wild, and were last seen in a jazz club pretending to be a vibraphone.
At the tenth hole, Helen squared the match, thanks to a massive dash of good luck and Stanley falling over the golf bag at the best possible moment while caddying. At the twelfth she fell back to one down with six to play and then at the unlucky thirteenth a full cast performance of 'Happy Camping, Mr Jones!' forced a rain delay when the chorus accidentally activated the course rain machine. The Prisoner eventually fixed it, but again no-one noticed him.
It all came down to a tumultuous deciding eighteenth hole, which the Tweedy Woman was set to win with an easy putt, except for the fact that the Orient Express chose that moment to run directly across the green, and steal that moment of glory.
* * *
On the Orient Express, Stanley was enjoying his luxurious cabin when the knock came on the door. A porter came in, looking distinctly zebra-like, and invited him to the grand reopening of the gallery car and fortune telling service. Ambling toward that august carriage, he passed by Helen, on her way to the buffet and car wash, and finally entered the gallery. It was magnificent; Every artistic treasure he had ever bothered to notice, with a few more thrown in for variety's sake. Of course, it didn't make any sense within the geography of a train car, but then neither did the the Greenwich car, which smelled oddly of thyme, or the engine, which no-one had ever seen. Moving toward the far end of the gallery, and the fortune telling compartment, he spotted the Tweedy woman, who was beginning to look confused despite her long imprisonment in the bizarre Dreamline. She was hovering just outside the door to the august seer's room so be barged her in before she could notice him, and continued on his merry way.
Inside the fortune telling compartment sat the Prisoner. He and the Woman looked at each other.
"Madeleine." He acknowledged.
"How odd to find you here, Philo. Looking for something else to fail at?" The Woman was defiant.
"No, actually, I'm planning to do something very very successful."
The fortune telling compartment was ejected off the train directly up into the air.
* * *
The Prisoner and the Woman hung in mid air, engaged in an invisible battle which neither Helen nor Stanley could truly perceive. It was obvious that something was happening, but what?
"Do you think we should try to help?" Asked Helen.
"How? They're so much more poweful here, and experienced that we would probably just get in his way. I suppose we could send positive mental energy, but what else."
"That actually made some sense. It must be a Tuesday again. Positive mental energy." She took Stanley's hand, and they both did their best to help in whatever way they could.
"You know, whichever way this turns out, I guess this story's over." Stanley mused, while sending all the energy he could.
"What story? Have you been thinking of this as some sort of adventure?"
"Well, a romantic thriller adventure, perhaps. Or one of those stories that jumps out of any category you try to force it into." Stanley looked at her. "At least it's not a horror."
"Hush, look up there!" She pointed as the Tweedy Woman spun away wildly in an instant, and the Prisoner pursued.
* * *
"So, how long have you been a Gingerbread person?" Helen asked.
"Not long. It just came over me. You?"
"I think it's genetic. My mother said my father was a fruitcake."
"That figures. He probably gave her raisin to." Stanley punned in the quiet moment.
"A pun? You dare to pun? And at a moment like this?"
"What moment? We're suddenly in a forest, have turned into gingerbread people, and there's a quaint if spooky little cottage in front of us."
Indeed, a quaint little cottage did stand before them in the forest.
A loud voice came from within: "What, a witch? I haven't had to play a witch since the blasted beginning of this interminable exile!"
Stanley and Helen, gingerbread both, looked in at the door and saw the nemesis clad in the daftest of hats and pointing angrily at the furnace that inexplicably took up most of her living space. The nemesis looked up, and stared at them indignantly. "What are you supposed to be??? Oh, it's you two troublemakers, saving me the effort of hunting you down." She advanced menacingly upon the gingerbread teacher and the gingerbread waitress, who backed away from the door. "It's strange. You're not supposed to change yourselves. It's against the rules. Hand over the key."
"No." Stanley and Helen said together.
"Yes."
"Yes, why should they?" Asked the Prisoner from beside a tree. He strode forward, touched the gingerbread duo on their shoulders and returned them to humanity, and they surrounded the Woman. "You're already beaten." He took the key from Stanley, and they led the Woman back to the cottage and locked her in. Then the Prisoner slid to the ground and breated heavily for a few moments. "Thank you."
* * *
Stanley and Helen woke up in Goosing's facility and looked at each other. "Is it over?" Stanley asked.
"As over as it can be." Helen looked at him concernedly. "What do we do now?"
"Run away into the hills. I saw it in a television show once."
"That sounds nice. What about afterwards?"
"Well, I think we'd better think about that once things have settled down. I can be a right bore when not in soul-endangering strife."
"As long as you save me a plain chocolate biscuit, you can be as boring as you like."
They did run away into the hills, eventually, after a few nights of less eventful sleep and some fussing from Goosing and Kibbel. There was gingerbread, if you're curious, and a few more odd interludes in the Dreamline, but they will remain undocumented.
The End.
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