Free InkStains January by John Urbancik Page B

maps to discourage dishonest
cartographers. Maybe there is no Stone Lane.”
    “ I have an
appointment.”
    “ Ah.”
    Kenny glances at his watch again. “In twelve
minutes.”
    “ So are you just going to
stand here as the time winds down and wait for your non-magical
street to suddenly appear?”
    “ Do you have a better
idea?” Kenny asks. He’s being sarcastic and mean, quite
unnecessarily.
    “ You could perhaps search
for it.”
    It’s not an entirely stupid idea. She walks
with him around the block, turning right then right then right
again, but there are no other lanes or alleys or streets or roads
or paths leading into this tightly packed block of buildings.
    “ That was useless,” Kenny
sighs – not a complaint about her suggestion but about the lost
five minutes.
    “ Not entirely,” she says.
“You’ve determined, quite scientifically, it seems, that there’s no
entrance to Stone Lane on the outside.”
    “ The outside?” Kenny
asks.
    She shrugs.
    Inside both buildings, through the glass
doors, he sees unadorned walls adjoining the missing street.
    The glass doesn’t extend to that wall in
either building; he can’t be sure they’re back to back, that
there’s nothing between them. Could there be enough space for Stone
Lane?
    Each of the glass doors is, however,
locked.
    “ Well,” the woman says,
dangling her keys. “I happen to live right here.”
    She unlocks one of the glass doors. They
enter the vestibule. There are no doors on that side, no hallways
except the one they’re in. There’s an elevator and a set of stairs,
behind a closed door, on the other side.
    “ What floor are you on?”
Kenny asks.
    “ I’m not inviting you to my
place,” she tells him. She returns the key to her purse.
    Kenny tries the stairs. At the first landing,
there’s a hall. For whatever reason, the elevator doesn’t stop
here, but there are restrooms and a water fountain and conference
rooms on that wall. The inside wall, facing the next building, has
a few framed photographs and one window sill. There’s no window.
It’s been bricked up.
    “ Maybe there is no more
Stone Lane,” the woman suggests. “Maybe they built over and through
it.”
    Kenny glances at his watch. One minute to. “I
have an appointment.”
    “ Maybe you’d better call
them.”
    “ I can’t.”
    “ No?”
    Kenny shakes his head. “I don’t have a
number.”
    “ You don’t have an
appointment,” the woman says. “Not one you’re going to get to, at
least.”
    “ 77 Stone Lane.”
    “ Ah.”
    “ There’s that Ah again,”
Kenny says.
    “ You’re right,” she says.
“There it is.”
    “ Maybe I can get at it from
the other building.”
    She shakes her head. “I don’t have a
key.”
    They go back downstairs. As they pass the
elevator, its door slides open. No one comes out. Kenny
hesitates.
    “ Go on,” the woman says.
“Seems like an invitation to me.”
    She follows him into the elevator. He presses
the button for the Basement. When the door opens again, it’s onto a
poorly lit hallway. Here, the opposite wall has another bricked
over window – but also a doorway.
    At first, it seems locked, but it’s merely
wedged tight. Kenny pushes into a tiny vestibule and out through
another door into a narrow alley, brick walls on three sides of
him, a plaque stating Stone Lane.
    It’s narrow, and the bricks walls on all
sides are tall. They’re not unbroken, but every window seems to
have been closed up, some of the brickwork is chipped or faded, the
ghostly images of words – Bostonian Cigars, for instance – showing
what had once been written on the sides of these buildings. There
are doorways a little further in, and a cul-de-sac that’s actually
a courtyard, at the center of which grows a single, bare tree in a
tiny plot of dirt. The woman sits on a wrought iron bench next to
the tree.
    “ Go on,” she says. “You’re
late.”
    77 Stone Lane is a small green door with a
small, fading window,