Sunday Next: A Place Like Home

I was beginning to hate Sunday mornings. There was a certain fragile, unreal quality about them, not helped in the least by the events of Saturday night. I lay awake with my eyes closed for several minutes, trying to drift back to sleep, until I realized I hadn't woken up in the same bed for two Sundays in a row for the past two months, due to a combination of work, band gigs and time travel.

My eyes snapped open and I was rather disappointed to find I was still in my closet-sized room at the London Opera. There was something subtly wrong about the room. Alex was gone, but that wasn't it. I struggled to straighten the folds of my sari and was about to go look for Alex when I sneezed and realized what was wrong. There was a thick layer of dust over every flat surface and a haze of dust motes floating in the weak sunshine that streamed in from the light well. This much dust could never have accumulated overnight.

I flipped up the mattress. Our keys were in the same place we had left them, but they had developed a layer of rust which had stained the box spring underneath a dull red-brown. The cell phones were a total loss. The battery compartments had ruptured, leaking acid and creating a rather large hole in the box spring. My clothes, including the purple sari and my spaghetti strap shirt, remained in their normal condition, perhaps because I had been using them as a pillow in place of the block of wood that came with the room. The flip-flops, though, seemed to have disappeared.

I heard Alex's footsteps halfway down the hall. He flung the door open and we spoke at the same instant.

"We're home."

Alex stared at me. Then looked at the remains of his cell phone and nodded, realizing that I had made my own deductions.

"We need to get out of here," he said quickly. "I don't think they use these rooms as living quarters anymore."

"What time is it?" I said, gathering up my clothes/pillow. Alex glanced at his watch, which was mechanical instead of digital and unlikely to be effected by time travel.

"Ten-ish. And if it is still Sunday morning, I doubt there will be many people around."

Alex was only partially right. We nearly ran over a maintenance worker in the wings near the stage door. He stared at us in disbelief when we appeared from upstairs. We stared back for a long moment, until the worker shouted and we bolted, knocking over another maintenance guy in the alleyway.

One of the papers ran an editorial a few days later. It was the standard lament over the state of today's youth, using as a specific example two hoodlums who had broken into the London Opera in the early hours of the morning. That nothing was stolen, or even broken, was dismissed as an insignificant detail.

Alex dodged down a side alley and I followed, trusting in his knowledge of the rat's maze of London alleys and trying not to wince too much about having to run across London in my bare feet. We emerged on a busy street corner and a red mini Cooper honked at me when we crossed the street. I could have cried with joy and relief.

We were home.

Of course, there was hell to pay when we got to the actual places where we lived. Alex didn't have any problems, since his roommate worked the night shift and they hardly ever saw each other, much less noticed extended absences. I, however, lived with my bandmate and friend Lorelei, who had noticed the absence of the girl who usually bought the food.

I walked in the door, dropped my bundle of clothes on the laundry pile and collapsed on the couch to wait for my mind to stop spinning. I had the distinct sensation that the universe was laughing at me, and I didn't like it one bit.

Lorelei emerged from her room, put the kettle on the stove, and screamed like a banshee when she saw me. She yelled incoherently for a few moments before settling into her rant mode.

"I thought you two were dead in a ditch somewhere! I called the cops even! Not to mention I had to explain to James and Kevin why two-fifths of our band wasn't showing up for practice. Where the hell were you that you couldn't answer your cell phone for a week? I must have called fifty thousand times but all I got was that you were out of service range!"

Lei was just getting into her stride when the kettle whistled, breaking her momentum and allowing me to get a word in edgewise.

"I'll explain it to you later." I held up a hand to stop the inevitable protests. "I want to tell you, I really do, but it's kinda secret."

"What, so you're 007 all of a sudden?" Lei said sullenly, banging the tea tins around with a great deal more force than necessary. "What are you wearing anyway?"

I'd almost forgotten about the sari.

"We had to go do something." Now she was interested in spite of herself, and she started to forget she was pissed at me. Lei was aware of our tendency to get swept up in little mysteries, since she was a central figure in the first case Alex and I had ever worked together.

"I'll tell you everything I can, I promise. But not today. I need to get some sleep." It was the truth too. I was just glad classes hadn't started yet, or else I would have been in very deep trouble. But what I really needed to do was get my story straight with Alex. And get a new phone.

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.•´¨•»¦«•Kerowyn•»¦«•´¨•.