The rain never seemed to stop falling in the city.
Rufus thought he could remember a time from his childhood, when the smalltown sidewalk grass sprouted like dead hair underfoot, and the sky was perfect fresh-paint blue. It rarely rained, back there, in the days where they watered the plants with dishwater and momma always kept a row of buckets in the garden. Back in my day, indeed.
The stern staccato of droplets at the window brought him back to focus. Rufus rubbed an eye and sat up, gazing at the three cork boards he had pinned to the wall. At the centre of each, an obiturary-perfect picture of a victim, surrounded by pictures of the crime scene and related articles. He had connected little threads from paper to paper, and Rufus would have very much liked to think himself one of those paranoid detectives from the movies, kicked from the force and in proud possession of a convoluted cork-board-web diagram spanning hundreds of little pins, scores of locations, and dozens of obscure newspaper clippings. In fact, Rufus did plan on purchasing a few spools of red thread, like in the movies, but the rain had dampened his moods considerably. So, all he had to show for one afternoon of work was a disappointingly simple-looking wall of three cork boards and precisely twenty-one sheets of paper, some connected with slightly yellowish white thread. It was by no means impressive or informative, but setting down the case in pictures seemed to help his mind somewhat.
Three separate disappearances, victims presumed dead. All apparently disappered where they stood, leaving behind nothing but clothings and blood, appearing almost as if they were snatched out of their shoes by a banshee, or a ghoul. Furthermore, there was a substantial amount of blood, a violent, long, splash towards a wall, or a window. A week ago, he would have dismissed the notion of a ghostly kidnapper, but after some walking and a man called Proprietor, Rufus could assume with some confidence that the unfortunate victims were dragged through the wall by some discorporeal thing, into realms elsewhere and beyond. The middle of the three cork boards was for the last one who went missing, the kiddo who told him about the cafe. At the top of it was "Other Side" printed in large block letters, of which most of the little yellowed strings were connected to. Slightly less important, but prominent all the same, was a picture of the young man. The third and final victim.
Behind him, a particular telephone began to ring.
Rufus sighed, and answered it. There was no need for introductions. Just an address and a name, which were frantically scribbled down. Before he knew it, he was out of the flat, soaking wet, and on a taxicab bound for the Chinatown port.
Another kid had disappeared. He had the courtesy to drop his wallet, though, which the inspector had used to conveniently bring up a full-body mugshot of the young delinquent, eighteen years old and sporting more studs than a high school locker room. His pile of clothes were found in an old shophouse in the Chinese enclave, crumbling but certainly not derelict if word on the street was anything to go by. The port was positively bursting with traders and smuggers, sailors and stowaways, all crammed into five streets' worth of ancient, flaking buildings. One couldn't really call them "streets" anymore, with even formerly straight sections splitting into alleyway detours and meandering pathways owing to the numerous roadside stalls, which firstly, weren't as much roadside as they were roadcentre, and secondly, weren't as much stalls as permanent shacks stocked with arcane scents and mysterious powders. This wasn't helped much by the age of the buildings, which always seemed to be pouring over at the top onto each other, choking out the sky and leaving the inhabitants to rot in the stinking half-light.
Rufus got off even before the entrance to the street, and if he had hung around a bit longer after paying, he might have heard the cabbie sigh in relief at the prospect of not needing to navigate the twisted streets of Chinatown. In one of many possible realities, he did, and might or might not have smiled while dropping another coin into the cabbie's hand, which did happen in one universe, which coincidentally was the same one with the premature development of the vacuum bomb and eventual extinction of humanity in twenty years. Such is the nature of rift space, with every possibility opening up from each other like fractals, bubbling in a sea of cosmic froth that the Other Side Cafe overlooked out of its second-floor room window. And looking through this window was an average of five eyes belonging to an unnamed observer. For the sake of narrative, we shall name this nameless window-gazer Leslie.
At about the same time as Rufus entered Chinatown, Leslie was residing at the cafe's guest room. It was also the same time when Rufus lay dying on the top floor of a run-down building, and the same time a particular phone rang earlier in this narrative. Alas again, such is the concurrent nature of rift space, with the whole of times and spaces to see from the guest room window in the Other Side. Leslie, however, wasn't paying much attention to that one universe, choosing to admire a nice gas-based sentient civilisation evolving in the center of a faraway nebula.
It was a while before Leslie decided to move several carefully packed suitcases from the bed and head downstairs to check out. It wasn't easy, especially with the stairs being non-Euclidean, but eventually our dear Leslie was at the counter sliding a key across to the perfectly indescript man who ran the place. The head honcho. The boss. The Proprietor, if you will.
"You've overstayed again," observed Proprietor as he tucked away the key.
"Yes, I found the room especially comfortable. The room service, on the other hand, ssssssucked." Leslie smiled and made an impression of a gas mask. It wasn't too good.
"If you step out of that door the same way as you stepped in, you're going to be dead."
"Excuse me?" Leslie's smile broadened.
"You're wanted everywhere. Forty-three everywheres, to be exact. Don't tell me you aren't aware of that when I am."
"But you are."
"Are what?"
"Aware."
Proprietor crossed his arms.
"I mean, aware. Of everything. The rift space and all that," explained Leslie, who was also aware that he was killing his own joke. And it wasn't even a very good one, he thought in hindsight. Of which he had a lot. Average of five eyes and all that. Ha ha. Now, there was a good joke. If only the Proprietor could read his mind.
If Proprietor could, he would still not be amused.
"Out. Now. And when you come back, think about repaying that tab."
"Yeah, geez. How much is it up to, now?"
"You're four stays overdue. Do the math."
Leslie sighed, and dragged the suitcases out of the door. New world, new life.
Proprietor sighed as the door swang shut. Leslie was trouble. He had seen so himself, out of the window on the second floor, where a good portion of the bubbles seemed to be plain barren. Proprietor followed the traces with his finger; they all led to any one of forty-three particular root universes. A root universe wasn't borne from the possibility tree of another universe, they just were if something outside the equation entered them. In this case, that something was Leslie. These null bubbles would eventually pop, the rift recycling the material for more universes, but in the meantime there would be just all this junk floating there. Very unsightly, thought Proprietor.
He made a mental note to do something about Leslie even if he finally received payment for that enormous tab.
