I chuckled as I watched Jessica dusting off her lingerie. "Now you'll have to clean it!"
She frowned as she snapped her panties back up. "I suppose I could take them to a dry cleaner..."
We brushed ourselves off some more and stood up, coughing as we took in our surroundings. It seemed we had broken open a sort of time capsule.
The room had sort of an old western motif. Canopied four poster bed, polished mahogany dressers and end tables in a French style, wardrobe instead of a closet. A thick layer of dust had settled over everything, indicating that nobody had been there for decades.
"I'm not sure how we're going to explain this to the hotel owner," I said. "I don't think I have nearly enough to cover this much damage."
Jessica shrugged. "Put it on your credit card."
"Yeah," I said facetiously. "That sounds like a freaking brilliant idea. Once they find out I can't afford to pay it back, that'll drop my credit score from seven hundred to, I don't know, three?"
"Just an idea," she said.
"Remind me to never cosign a loan for you."
She slipped a finger inside my elastic waistband. "So you're that kind of husband, huh?"
"What?" I stammered. "Look, we're not even-"
She stretched my waistband out and let go, creating a cloud of dust as it snapped back.
"You're crazy," I said. "Maybe it's a good thing we didn't go any-"
She jumped on me, throwing her arms around my neck, legs around my waist. "You sure?"
I blushed. "Uh..."
"That's what I thought," she purred. She pressed her lips to my neck, licking my skin.
She grimaced, sticking out her tongue. "Bleah! You're all dusty!"
Jessica hopped off me, strolling up to the bed.
She idly ran her fingers through the dust, making little lines and squiggles. "Anyways, we're closer to our goal. Let's take a look around."
"Wonder why they walled it off instead of remodeling it," I said.
She didn't answer. She was too busy staring at the graffiti.
Near the gaping hole in the sheetrock we found a charcoal sketch of a French clown juggling balls. Jessica placed her hand on the wall, sliding her fingers over the corner of the coal markings.
All of a sudden, her silk teddy flashed a brilliant pastel blue, becoming cartoony.
"Thirty minutes already?" I said.
She laughed. "Hardly."
When she took her hand away, her outfit turned real once more.
"That's funny."
She touched the wall, and she was back to wearing ink and paint.
"Somehow this wall is...stabilizing it," she said.
And so it was. Her blue silk number stayed animated for an entire minute.
I slid my hand down the back. The substance felt like plastic. "That's amazing!"
My hand was on her rear, but she paid me no attention. She only pointed at the clown. "Look!"
My hand dropped to my side. The clown was moving.
A charcoal sketch.
On a wall.
Moving.
Balanced on a unicycle, it juggled its patterned balls in an arc above its head as it turned the pedals.
When Jessica's finger slid across the path of the juggled objects, the balls dropped from the space above the clown's head, falling onto the thin line that represented the floor.
The clown, looking annoyed, got down from his unicycle, bending over to pick them back up.
The character froze as Jessica took her hand away, her lingerie turning normal.
Her hand slid to the next vignette, a sketch of a simple cube. Again, she was wearing cartoon clothes.
"It's the drawings," she said. "There's something unusual about them."
Her hand disappeared into the wall like it were made of liquid. When she brought it out, I saw her fingers clutching a small block.
"This is literally a simple geometric figure! If the measurements of all the sides are identical, this could be a mathematician's wet dream! You'd prove that everything in the universe has a mathematical order!"
She tossed the block to me, but it turned into a piece of wallpaper in my hands.
The drawing next to that was a cartoon cat putting a cartoon mouse between two slices of bread with an olive and all the fixings. The scene came to life when Jessica touched it, but unlike all those Tom and Jerry shows I'd seen as a kid, the cat actually ate the mouse, and it stayed eaten. Gore dripped from the cat's mouth.
We both laughed, but it was uneasy mirth. It's one thing to wish for the cat to win for once. It's quite another to watch a cartoon that looks like something on The Twilight Zone. I think we were both close to screaming.
"Moving on..." Jessica muttered, removing her hand from the wall.
Deciding she was hogging all the fun, I stepped ahead of my strangely clad girlfriend, examining a hyperrealistic drawing of a cat.
The moment my hand touched the charcoal, an orange ball of hair exploded from the wall with a frightened meow, knocking me back on my ass.
A real cat.
Just jumped out of the wall.
The creature bolted from the room like its tail was on fire.
"How odd," said Jessica. "It's almost as if someone...put it in there."
"Your guess is as good as mine," I said.
A still life of a bowl of fruit hand been drawn in the corner of the room, beside an old lamp. Jessica walked around me, placing her hands on it, and out came a crystal bowl filled with apples, oranges and a banana.
She took one bite of an apple and spat it out. "Wax."
She tossed it on the bed, stirring up a cloud of dust. Unlike the cube, it remained...a bowl of wax fruit.
We stared at the item above the end table with puzzlement.
A drawing of a closed window.
Once Jessica's hand touched the sketch, the window gained definition, projecting from the wall like a real window. The frame was wooden and varnished, just like the one opposite the bed.
The smallness of the window was its main fault, for one could not fit anything larger than a dog's head through the opening. Still, what we saw through the glass astonished and tantalized us.
We were looking at a scene straight out of The Smurfs cartoon. Little mushroom shaped huts with polka dotted roofs and crooked chimneys. We saw no Smurfs anywhere around, but the clouds were moving, the grass waving in the breeze, and across the way we could even see animated steam rising from a pie in someone's window.
Navigating around the bed, we came across something even stranger: A realistic drawing of a folder, with an army stamp and serial number across the tab. Operation Blackout, it said.
I tried to pull it out, but nothing happened. Only Ms. Glowing Lingerie was able to accomplish the feat.
I peered over her shoulder as she opened the battered tan piece of card stock, flipping through the papers.
The first couple pages consisted of a dossier about a Professor Heinreich Baubelsen, AKA Doctor Bubbles, AKA Professor Whiskers, German ex-patriot, board member of the Nazi SS V-2 Rocket program near the end of the Second World War.
A monochrome photograph showed a bald little man with large round glasses.
A colleague of Einstein, this professor contributed several top secret weapons to the United States atomic research department, creating a rift between he and the pacifist genius, inspiring the latter's now famous letter of apology regarding nuclear technology.
The next section was a stapled stack of papers describing Operation Blackout.
Blackout's purpose was to disable all electrical devices within a ten mile radius of enemy territory. If successful, they intended to drop a warhead containing the technology into the middle of Tokyo. The plan was drafted roughly the same time as the blueprint for Little Boy, but it employed slightly different technology, based upon questionable scientific theories, such as a muddled early version of String Theory.
Laboratory tests, though mostly inconclusive, produced enough unusual interference with electronic devices that the Professor got the green light and a bomb was built.
Nicknamed the "Bubble Bomb," the warhead was dropped at White Sands testing facility on April 10th, 1945, only a few short months before the first successful detonation of atomic weaponry in Trinity, New Mexico.
The results for the Bubble Bomb were less than impressive. Electronic devices remained in operation. A black and white television was found to be showing a color picture, but it was later dismissed as a distortion brought on by heat damage.
Five iron railroad ties, or spikes, were also reported to be giving off an eerie unnatural glow.
"The spike of power!" Jessica cried. "There's more than one of them! This explains everything! One's under the prison, one's here..."
"And the rest is speculation," I finished. "I mean, granted, we're reading a drawing. But we've yet to see an actual spike, even here."
She grabbed my hand, pressing it to her cartoon bra, which somehow hadn't reverted to its real counterpart. "Isn't this enough proof? And what about that cat? And the juggler?"
"I admit that is pretty convincing. But it doesn't prove there is a spike here. Maybe the room is...just...paranormal."
The next section of the booklet consisted of detailed sketches, cityscapes, building interiors, cars, and several pieces of paper filled with scrawled handwriting. That last item was German, so I couldn't read it.
Then we had a blueprint of a missile, along with a complicated formula I couldn't decipher. Several key portions had been clipped out with a scissors for some reason.
Jessica closed the folder, dropping it on the bed. "Five spikes! How exciting!"
A few feet down from the folder, we found a life sized drawing of a door. Like everything else in the room, it responded to Jessica's touch, this item materializing into a flat shaded unnaturally lit image with a large bulbous knob and a small keyhole.
We both tried pulling on the thing, turning the knob back and forth, but it only stretched the door like taffy.
The moment we stopped trying, we saw a mouth and a pair of googly eyes appear on its surface, looking rather bored.
"Where's the key, buddy?" it said.
"Key?" I said.
"Mmm hmm," the door replied, its large eyes bugging out as they traveled up and down my companion's body.
The mouth let out a wolf whistle, then disappeared.
The eyes, giving her a wink, also vanished an instant later.
"Well," Jessica groaned, hands on her hips. "A key. Where would I find that?"
"It's a cartoon," I said. "And it digs you. Maybe you can just, you know, sit on its face or something?"
The door was only a drawing now, but I could pretty well guess its reaction.
"No way," she said. "I'm not whoring out my body just to get into cartoon land."
I coughed in protest.
She misread my slight. "I have lozenges back in the room..."
I just shook my head. "Let's keep looking. Maybe we'll find something."
The dressers were full of musty moth eaten clothing. Sweaters and slacks. Kind of frumpy college professor type stuff.
It amused me to find men's garters in there. The owner, I guess, lived in an era where guys wore such things all the time, maybe because they didn't have elastic in their socks or something.
Feeling self conscious, I actually dusted off a pair of pants and a button shirt and tried them on, but found them a tight fit, like I had slipped into something owned by Pee Wee Herman. Still, I decided to wear them anyway, in case the security guard came by.
I found handkerchiefs monogrammed with the letters H.B., but no keys.
Jessica, in the meantime, had opened a nightstand, setting a bible aside to dig around underneath.
When her hand came out, she was holding a glowing gun.
She pointed it at the wardrobe, pulling the trigger.
A cartoon toilet shot out across the room, suckering onto the side of the wardrobe, the gun connected to the plunger by a rope.
The gun retracted its projectile without warning, throwing Jessica headfirst into the wood paneling.
The moment she collided with it and fell to the floor, a cluster of tweeting bluebirds circled her head.
"Drew! Are you seeing this? I'm getting little birdies!"
"Yeah," I said. "I see them, all right."
One of the birds looked at her cleavage and gave a low whistle.
"This is incredible!" Jessica cried. "Where's my camera?"
I frowned. "In...the room?"
"Damn. What about a cel phone? You had a cel phone in your pocket, didn't you?"
I scowled at her. "Do you see me wearing my pants?"
The birds flew in lower circles, landing on Jessica's breasts. She giggled.
I heard another one of them whistle, then a larger one, strangely enough, went "Rrrow," causing the other birds to stare at him.
It just shrugged its wings, as if to say, "What."
Jessica held out a finger, and the tiniest one perched on it, whistling that little ditty they keep whistling on The Hunger Games.
The second largest hopped higher on her finger, chirping the instrumental line to Rockin' Robin.
The biggest one hopped on her knuckle, whistling Patience by Guns N' Roses.
Again, it got stared at.
"Are those the Car-X birds?" I asked.
Jessica squinted at them. "I...don't know."
The birds turned around to stare at me, cocking their heads in puzzlement, pointing blue wing tips at their little breasts.
Then the fat one sang, "Save a bundle with your Car-X man!" in a deep baritone.
I smacked my head. "Oh great. Just what we need. Animated commercial sponsors brought to life."
On cue, an orange head popped out of the wardrobe, yelling, "Ya-hoo! I'm kookoo for Cocoa Puffs!"
The door slammed shut an instant later.
I heard a guy in the room below us pounding on the ceiling, yelling, "Turn off your TV!"
"Isn't this great?" Jessica giggled as the birds hopped back on her cleavage.
"You're...just going to let those things sit there?"
She gave me a look that seemed to say `Are you kidding.' "When's the last time you had something animated sitting on your breasts?"
"Well, uh, never," I admitted.
The smallest bird stuck out its tongue at me.
In cartoons, this was the big guy's cue to chase the bird around and try to strangle it. I just rolled my eyes. "Are we gonna stand around here all day, or are we going to figure out what all of this stuff is?"
Jessica pointed at the nightstand. "What's that?"
"It's a little dresser," I said.
"No, I mean, I see something behind it."
We pulled the nightstand back and found a drawing of a safe.
"I feel like I'm playing Paper Mario in real life," I muttered.
"`You do me a solid, I do you a solid,'" Jessica said.
This comment went way over my head. "What?"
"Kingdom Hospital. A guy draws a fire extinguisher and it becomes real. Never mind."
She knelt in front of the drawing, touched her hand to the wall. An animated safe popped out.
She tried to pull the handle, but it was locked.
"Great," I said. "What are we going to do with that?"
"The more important question is why that folder was out here when it could have been stored inside this safe?"
"I don't know, maybe because people don't normally put on cartoon lingerie and pull drawings off walls?"
She gave me a funny look, then tried turning the dial.
The moment both her hands left the wall, the safe snapped back like a spring, becoming a drawing again.
"That's funny," she said. "I didn't have a problem when I was looking at that folder..."
"That's because the folder was real to start with," I suggested. "And the safe is animated. You were touching the wall those other times. Even with the cube, I think your foot was touching it. Need some help?"
She brought the object back out of the wall. "Do you even know how to crack a safe?"
I shook my head. "But it's a cartoon safe. How hard can it be?"
Jessica paused and thought a minute. "Generally, cartoon safes are opened by dropping them out windows."
"Oh no," I protested. "If we do it that way, we'll probably send someone to the Emergency Room."
"Why? It's not a real safe."
"What about that toilet plunger gun? Did hitting that closet feel good?"
"Not...especially," she admitted. "But I got birdies!"
"Do you want someone's corpse with birdies around it?"
"Okay, okay," she sighed. "Point taken."
The moment I touched the knob, Jessica's birds fluttered off her breasts, landing on the safe. The large one began singing.
"To everything, turn, turn, turn, turn," the bird sang.
"That's ironic," I said.
"You think it's a hint?" Jessica said.
"I'm not sure I'd read that far into it."
When I turned the dial, the bird sang again. "I turn right, then I turn around, turn left, then I turn around, turning, and turning, and stop."
"I guess it is a hint," I muttered.
When I turned the dial right, the big one sang The Loneliest Number by Three Dog Night, so I put it on 1. I turned it left, and the bird sang a jazz song called Sixteen Different Ways. Turning right yielded "When I was twenty one, it was a very good year..."
After a few more games of musical numbers, the door popped open, and we could view its contents.
A stack of paper bills, all bearing the likeness of Daffy Duck, Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse, several blueprints, including the missing squares from the ones in the folder, blueprints for devices whose purpose I couldn't fathom (including a modified version of the missile), a real handgun, complete with holster and bullets, and a wallet stuffed with vintage currency.
I pocketed the wallet, then threw the rest of the stuff on the bed.
"No key," Jessica said.
"Yeah."
She got up, pulling back the other end table. A moment later, she held aloft a jangling key ring. "Here!"
When we stuck the key in the cartoon door, the keyhole chewed on it, bit it off the ring, and swallowed it. "Delicious," it said, swinging open. "You may pass."
Strangely enough, it turned into a real door when this happened.
"There it is!" Jessica squealed. "The gateway to Cool World!"
We were looking into a painting of a dark alleyway, where a blue animated cat with a bandaged tail dug fish bones out of a garbage can.
I never understood the cliche. Yes, fish bones sometimes had meat still stuck to them, but the ones in cartoons never showed a millimeter of gristle or anything chewable whatsoever.
I stuck out my hand to touch the picture, but I only encountered air.
"It's real!" Jessica shouted with giddy excitement. "It's really real!"
She jumped through the doorway, clomping down the illustration of pavement.
She looked bizarre in that setting, a flesh and blood person in a shadowy world made of brush strokes, clad in an outfit of bright blue paint.
"Hey!" I yelled. "What do you think you're doing!"
"What does it look like?" she called back. "You coming?"
I just stared through the door.
Just then, I heard the chirp of one of those walkie talkie cel phones behind me.
"It's the couple from 320," a voice was saying. "The man's still here."
A pregnant pause followed this, in which I could hear static and a few tinny mumbles.
I glanced back and saw it was the security guard that had teased us earlier.
The stranger narrowed his eyes at me as he lifted his phone to his mouth, pushing a button. "Tony, could you come up and take a look at this?"