“Well, speaking for myself,” said Marie, “I’m going to start by having a shower. You can suit yourselves, of course, but it’s going to be a lot fresher around here if you do the same.”
Jane looked confused. “It’s the middle of the afternoon,” she said.
“Not here,” I said. “We’re somewhere in North America.”
“We think,” said Kevin.
“We’ve just had breakfast,” added Marie.
She opened some doors, and there were showers. Meanwhile, Jane went off exploring.
When we emerged, clean, she was excited, in a British sort of way.
“Come and see what I found,” she said, and led us to a stairwell.
We pounded down – it reminded me of the stairwells at school between classes, only noisier, because the treads were metal – into the big workshop that ran under the office area. Jane practically ran to a big object shrouded with canvas and began to pull it back. “Help me,” she said, and together we revealed it.
It was a van. Or rather, it was to a van what an extremely battered corpse is to a person. It had no wheels and was up on blocks, the motor was missing, and so were the seats. The controls were primitive, worn and dinged.
“It’s a beaten-up old van carcass,” said Marie, who hadn’t helped pull the canvas off. “So what?”
“I can fix it,” said Jane. “And when I say fix, I mean, I can make it… better than it ever was.”
“What do we need a car for?” said Marie. “I can open a door to anywhere.”
“You can open a door to anywhere with a door,” said Jane. “What if we need to go somewhere out in the open?”
“We don’t have licenses,” Marie said. “At least, I don’t.”
“We do,” I said. We had a programme at the school – we all learned to drive, though we didn’t get much practice. Kevin and I had been going to buy an old car, maybe, and tour around, camping.
“Good,” said Jane. “But nobody is going to check them anyway, because you’ll be driving, so nobody will notice our entirely boring-looking but actually rather good van.”
“I still don’t see why we need one,” said Marie.
“But that’s the thing,” said Kevin. “You always open doors to things we need, don’t you?”
“…Yes,” said Marie, cautiously.
“So, if there’s a van here, we need a van. And we definitely need you, because you can open…” he cast about… “this toolchest here, or that storage cupboard, and instead of a mass of rust and spiderwebs there will be good tools and new parts, right?”
I’ve watched Kevin do this before. He’s aware of people, and not just where they are in a physical sense. He’d spotted – which Jane and I hadn’t – that Marie was resenting Jane and needed to feel necessary.
Hesitantly, Marie reached out and opened the drawer of the toolchest.
Power-driven screwdrivers and a ratchet set gleamed up at us.
The cupboard proved to hold new wheels, still in their wrappings, which fit the van. Also, a large hydraulic jack.
“OK,” said Marie, “I guess we need a van.”
Jane had us do particular things to help her – she did most of the work, but aside from lugging an inexhaustible flow of parts from the magic cupboard, Kevin and I also got to work with her on sections of the car. She had Kevin work on the steering and the wheels, and I got to paint the chassis – plain, dull white. “Nobody notices a white van,” she said. “And I’m hoping that your talents will rub off. The van should always know where it is, and it will be completely unremarkable.”
I let that one go without remark.
The work went quickly. Under Jane’s hands, tools did exactly what they should. Even with a lunch break (Marie opened the cupboard and found lunch instead of more parts), by the late afternoon I was spraying paint onto what appeared to be a complete, driveable van. Jane put her hands over mine, and the paint just floated to where it belonged.
The steering wheel was on the left, confirming that we were in North America. I mentioned my trepidation at driving on the opposite side of the road.
“Don’t worry,” said Jane. “This van won’t let you drift into the wrong lane. When I make a thing, I make it to do what it should do.”
She sounded so confident, I didn’t argue.
We broke for dinner while the paint dried. Jane had mixed it, so it didn’t need to dry overnight or be baked in a kiln we didn’t have.
After the meal we hurried downstairs again to look at our new vehicle.
From the outside it looked totally unimpressive. Somehow, the dust from the workshop had drifted over it, so it didn’t look new or freshly-painted. The wheels didn’t even look new any more. The windows were a little dingy, with an effect like tinted windows without being actually tinted in any attention-getting way – you couldn’t really see inside, but it was completely unsuspicious-looking. But when we got inside and looked out, they were clear as diamonds.
The seats looked ordinary, but they adjusted to fit us in total comfort. The controls were in exactly the right places for me. It was all a bit spooky.
We had test-run the motor, so I knew it went, but I had a moment of anticipation as I reached out and turned the key. It started perfectly, smooth and even, no little hitches or rumbles to draw any attention to us at all. It was a stealth van in the same way as I’m a stealth person: it looked so ordinary on the outside that nobody was ever going to pay attention to it or remember it. Yet inside, it was completely comfortable. (OK, there’s where the metaphor breaks down.)
We had fixed a second set of seats in behind the front ones, and then a partition with a door. The idea was that the girls would sit in the back, and Marie would open the door if we needed anything, presumably up to and including a place to sleep – there wasn’t room between the second set of seats and the back of the van for a bed, let alone four of them and a bathroom and kitchen, but that wouldn’t be a problem for Marie.
Marie also had custody of the garage door opener which had been one of the last things to come out of the cupboard. She pressed it ceremoniously, and, as we had expected, the doors of the warehouse started rising. Jane had done something to the motors which apparently meant that the lack of electricity and the fact they’d been rusting for probably 20 years no longer mattered.
The fuel gauge showed full. Jane had assured me that it would continue to do so.
We pulled out from the warehouse, lit through high windows with the glow of a city, into the dusk of a country road. In the rearview mirror, someone’s barn receded.
Mike Reeves-McMillan lives in Auckland, New Zealand, the setting of his Auckland Allies contemporary urban fantasy series; and also in his head, where the weather is more reliable, and there are a lot more wizards. He also writes the Gryphon Clerks series (steampunk/magepunk), the Hand of the Trickster series (sword-and-sorcery heist capers), and short stories which have appeared in venues such as Compelling Science Fiction and Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores.
