Views from the Tower (14 page)
An odd look flashed across Luke’s face. “Sure, sorry I didn’t—”
Alex cut him off again, “You better get back. Thanks for walking me. See you later.” Before he could even reply she spun back around on her heel and marched determinedly for the bus stop.
“Sure, see you later,” he said from behind her, but she didn’t turn around to acknowledge him.
Alex sat resolutely on the bus stop bench, refusing to even glance back toward the museum to make sure he had indeed gone back. As she boarded her bus a few minutes later she realized it was the first time she’d ever purposefully stopped a conversation with Luke. Up until this point avoidance had always worked fine. She wasn’t sure if she was relieved, sad, or just plain sick to her stomach.
*****
The sun was barely peeking over the San Gabriel Mountains to the east when Alex arrived at the museum the next morning. She wasn’t a morning person in general, and the only thing that could have propelled her from her bed before dawn in the middle of summer was a bona fide emergency. According to the slightly incoherent, frantic sounding message that Nicholas Hunt had left on her cell phone the night before, this, whatever it was, qualified as an emergency.
She rubbed her gritty eyes. On top of getting up early, she’d had gone to bed late. The Los Angeles area had been rocked by an earthquake late the night before. Not a huge one, only 4.5 on the Richter scale, but located almost directly under downtown Los Angeles.
Alex and her mom had taken their usual bets on location and size, while they watched the news reports filter in. Alex had five bucks riding on the high desert with a size of around six. Her mom was insistent that it was Northridge and only a 5.5. They were both surprised to hear how close it actually was. In the end all ten dollars ended up being dumped into the vacation fund, which resided in an overly large ceramic piggy bank her mom had picked up in a little Mexican shop. All the excitement, most of which resulted from the betting after the fact and not the actual earthquake, kept her awake past her usual bedtime.
There was no sign of life from the closed museum, and Alex trudged around back to check the parking structure, which was similarly empty. She had tried calling Nicholas back the night before right after she had first heard the disjointed message, and again this morning before she left. She tried once more from outside the museum and he still wasn’t answering his cell phone, so she stowed her cell in her backpack and decided to try her luck at the employee entrance.
She was pleasantly surprised when the automatic lock blinked green when she swiped her key card, she had a vague memory of having been told she only had access between eight am and seven pm—a few hours before and after closing. It was barely six am and yet the key card unlocked the door and she let herself in.
Nicholas must have changed my access hours when he asked me to meet him so early, she thought.
There was no sign of Nicholas in the staff break room, and there was no response to her knock at his office door. This early, without the faint hustle and bustle of visitors in the galleries, and with all of the staff offices firmly closed, the museum felt overly large and silent. The automatic lights flicking on as she walked past lit everything up in a fluorescent glow that was irritating during the day but more than a bit spooky mixed with the murky morning light coming in through the few windows.
Alex was overly aware of the squeak of her Converse on the linoleum that lined the back hallways as she headed toward the storage and display access areas. Her left shoe was squeaking louder than the right, and in the silence the unbalanced sound annoyed her. She deliberately tried to quiet the squeak of her left shoe by shifting her balance, although in reality she was trying to distract herself from the creepy feeling the empty, too-quiet museum was giving her.
She soon reached a fork in the corridor. To the left lay the storage rooms, or she could go right toward the back ends of the display areas for the front galleries. She hesitated. He’d been extremely excited and unclear in his message, so she wasn’t quite sure where to look for him.
“Nicholas?” Her voice reverberating off of the walls and linoleum floor was the only response.
After another moment of consideration, Alex veered left to check the storage rooms. She figured the only thing that could have made Nicholas so excited as to be basically unintelligible would have to do with the shipment he was expecting from Professor Gagnon in France and the most likely place for any new items would be the storage area.
She checked the first few storage rooms but found nothing more interesting than cardboard boxes and a few old posters highlighting former exhibits. She pulled open the door to storage room B-23 and stuck her head inside.
Set back about halfway into the room was a huge, cobweb-covered four poster bed. Alex started when the door banged shut behind her. She'd been so focused on the bed, she hadn't even realized she'd been moving, walking towards it slowly.
She vaguely noted that the rest of the room was filled with wooden packing crates of various sizes. But she couldn’t pull her attention away from the bed long enough to really look at them.
The head and footboards were covered in intricately worked gold and silver which at first appeared to just be a tangle of shapes. After a moment’s observation, the metalwork resolved itself into heavy coils of twisting vines and branches, each covered in wicked-looking thorns. The dull gold and silver vines twisted off the headboard and footboard and up the four posters, snaking like living plants around the sturdy posts, here and there seeming to sprout leaves and more thorns as they went up. The whole pattern gave the illusion of a violent twisting and upward movement, as if you were watching the vines growing rapidly before your eyes. She wondered if the bed was solid metal—the weight would be astronomical—or possibly a heavy wood covered in a silver and gold overlay.
But it was the gems that banished all other thoughts from her mind. Bursting out of the vines in huge clusters on the head and footboards and running down each of the posts were huge flowers crafted of precious and semi-precious stones. The flowers were pink and red, the soft colors of rose quartz and the deep reds of rubies and garnets. The stones ranged in size, many of them larger than anything Alex had ever seen before. All had faceted cuts that gave the illusion of depth and individual petals. At the heart of each flower were clear, hard stones that Alex knew without a doubt were diamonds, although they were in a strange, partially polished state. The vines were dripping with the flowers. It took her slightly addled brain a few moments to put the whole picture together.
Roses. Dozens of jeweled roses bloomed like living flowers on the gold and silver vines.
Alex had never seen, or heard of, anything like it.
She took a step closer to examine the metalwork. The items they were receiving from France were supposed to be twelfth-century, but the workmanship on this bed was far, far beyond what any metal smith of that era would have been able to accomplish. It looked like something out of fairytale. Not that Alex believed in fairytales, or even really knew much about them, but she did know that what she was looking at skirted the edges of possibility.
A soft sound interrupted her rapid thoughts. She wasn’t alone. She had been so entranced by the bed itself that she hadn’t noticed there was someone actually on it—sleeping on it, in fact.
At first Alex thought the sleeping figure, like the bed, was covered with fine cobwebs. As she looked closer she saw that it wasn’t cobwebs draping over the figure but hair – foot after foot of sandy-colored hair streamed from the sleeper’s head and over its face and body, moving gently as the figure breathed in and out. The hair wasn’t growing just out of the sleeper’s head, but from the face as well–a beard that would have done Rip Van Winkle proud flowed down to well past the knees. And that is when she figured out that she didn’t have a sleeping beauty on her hands, but an enchanted sleeping man.
As she stared at the figure in shock, trying to calculate how long it would take for that much hair to grow, the sleeping man emitted a soft snore. Alex jumped back at the quiet sound, trying to stifle her slightly hysterical giggles. She may not know much about fairytales, but she was pretty sure that enchanted sleeping princes weren’t supposed to snore.
“Holy crap!” Alex whispered, almost as if it were a prayer, under her breath.
She slid her backpack off, set it down quietly by the door, and walked slowly toward the bed. As she got closer she had a flashback of creeping into her mother’s room after having a nightmare as a child—that moment of indecision. The desire to wake up her mother for comfort weighed against the fear of startling her mom out sleep and thereby scaring herself even more. She wasn’t sure at all that she wanted to wake up this sleeper. She was thankful that the floor of the storage room had quieted the squeaking of her shoes as she crept up to the bed.
She knew that the smart, sensible thing to do would be to turn around and run out of the room, report the whole thing to Nicholas or the police, whoever answered their phone first. Alex could usually be counted on to do the smart, sensible thing, but for some reason she felt almost physically incapable of turning around and leaving. Whether it was the bed, or the sleeper in it, something was drawing her in.
As she reached the edge of the bed she took a steadying breath and looked down. Under the masses of slightly curling dark blond hair, she could see the sleeper’s chest rising and falling in a slight, but steady, rhythm. She wasn’t sure why—maybe the cobwebs and the masses of hair gave the appearance of great age, but she had expected the sleeper to be frail and fragile looking. Yet the breadth of his shoulders and chest surprised her. Now that she was closer, she could tell he was actually quite tall. He took up most of the bed, which was oversized to start with.
“Um, hello?” She cleared her throat and started again. “Are you going to wake up?” She leaned over and continued in a stage whisper, “Who are you? Why are you here?”
There was no response, other than the quiet, steady breathing.
She screwed up all of her courage and poked the sleeper in the chest with her index finger, immediately jumping back in anticipated response.
Nothing.
She clapped her hand over her wildly beating heart and almost laughed.
“I’m going to give myself a heart attack!” she muttered under her breath, leaning back over the sleeping figure. “Curiosity killed the Alex...Oh, Mr. Enchanted Person...” She poked again at his chest a few times. “At least I assume you’re enchanted there’s really no other explanation for hair like this...” she trailed off mid-poke as a memory flickered through her mind. A memory of almost-curly, sandy-colored hair, the sun flickering through the strands as he looked down and laughed at her.
“Oh my god.” Alex flattened her hand against the sleeper’s chest, her palm against the compact, corded muscles.
“Oh my god,” she repeated, as she began frantically brushing the hair out of the sleeper’s face. It was tangled with his beard, and her frenzied, grasping hands fought with it for a moment before she was able to brush it off of his face.
Alex’s world rocked on its axis. Not just her world, but the room was rocking too. The floor and ceiling began to swirl together, and almost switched places.
I am not going to faint. I am not going to faint. Alex thought to herself. I am not going to faint.
Slowly, the room righted itself, but her world was still horribly upside down.
The sleeper was Luke Reed.
*****
We hope you enjoyed this sample of
Awake: A Fairytale by Jessica Grey
The full book is available for purchase
in either ebook or paperback format
on Amazon.com
eBook:
http://www.amazon.com/Awake-Fairytale-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B0075WO1Q0/
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http://www.amazon.com/Awake-A-Fairytale-Jessica-Grey/dp/0985039612/
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About the Author
Jessica Grey is an author, fairytale believer, baseball lover, and recovering Star Wars fangirl. A life-long Californian, she now lives in Montana with her husband and two children, where she spends her time writing, perfecting the fine art of toddler-wrangling, and drinking way too much caffeine.
You can follow Jessica on Twitter @_JessicaGrey or read her blog at
www.authorjessicagrey.com
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