Clove & Moose 7: The Devious Doors

Clove and Moose is a serial fiction story. While there is an overarching plot, each episode can be enjoyed on its own without reading what came before. However, if you want to get caught up, click one of the buttons below.

Previously, on Clove & Moose: After the mysterious Cataclysm dried up the earth and its magic, Clove left home to search for pools of corrupted magic left behind in the Cataclysm’s wake. Along with her cat Moose, Clove has been repairing these pools while travelling toward a nearby city. Shortly after her arrival in the city, she rescued a young woman named Marissa from one of the corrupted areas, and the two agreed to stick together while continuing their travels.

“Where are you headed, again?”

Marissa had asked variations on the same question a few times, but Clove didn’t have a straight answer for her. She hardly knew the answer herself. So she shrugged and said, “West,” like she had every other time.

“Why west?”

“Because I started on the east coast.”

“Hmmm.” Marissa took a bite of her sandwich. After their abrupt meeting the day before they had spent the night in a nearby park. They were walking deeper into the city now, and Marissa had offered to share some of her food. “I guess that checks out.”

“And where are you going?” Clove asked. 

“West,” Marissa said. 

“Fair enough.” Clove couldn’t exactly demand an answer when she hadn’t been forthcoming either. She didn’t want to talk about the past and she didn’t have much to say about the future. The only topic that had kept them going for more than a few minutes was Moose, who was currently prancing ahead of them on his harness and rope.

“Nah, I’m kidding,” Marissa laughed. “I’m gonna check out Bone Gorge. I figure if my family’s going to be anywhere, it’ll be there.”

“Bone Gorge.” Clove had heard a few people mention the place recently, but she wasn’t familiar with the name. “Where is that?”

“Not sure, exactly.” Marissa hitched her bag higher on her shoulders. “It was one of the last things I heard about before the networks went down, on the first day of the Cataclysm. I’ve been asking everyone I meet about it ever since. The best I can gather is that it’s to the west. 

“So it’s new?” That explained why Clove hadn’t heard of it before, but it opened up a whole pile of other questions.

“Oh yeah. Soon as the Cataclysm hit, boom.” Marissa clapped her hands together. “This huge gorge opened up in the ground, with these massive bones sticking out of it.”

“Like… dinosaur bones?” Clove was having a hard time picturing this. 

“No, like human bones, but giant. People think maybe it’s a god or something.”

“And you think your family will be there?”

“Yeah. We always went to roadside attractions when I was a kid. Giant balls of yarn, the world’s largest blueberry, stuff like that. I figure this is the biggest roadside attraction in history.”

“Wouldn’t it be better to look for them at home?”

“Our home is an RV. My family’s been on the road since before I was born.”

“So what are you doing out here?”

“I was in university a couple towns over, but when they confirmed that classes were cancelled indefinitely until things ‘go back to normal’”--Marissa emphasized this last phrase with finger quotes–“I decided it was time to strike out and try to find the fam.”

Before Clove could respond, she was interrupted by Moose freezing in place, nose twitching, before doing a 180 and running back the way they had come, only coming to a halt when he reached the end of the rope.

“Woah, buddy, what’s going on?” Clove tried to walk back towards him, but for every step she took, he scurried farther, keeping the rope taut between them.

“Wait, I hear something,” Marissa said. Clove paused and cocked her head, listening. She heard it too: screaming.

“That can’t be good.” She sighed and tugged gently on Moose’s rope. “Come on buddy, let’s go see.”

But Moose had his legs locked, refusing to budge. Clove walked toward him, reeling the rope in as she walked so he couldn’t move any farther away. When she finally got close, she scooped him up and held him close. “Right, let’s go.”

They followed the screams to a crowd standing in front of a grocery store. 

“What’s going on here?”

“The doors are malfunctioning,” the woman beside them said. “People are trapped in there.”

Clove pushed forward until she could see; Marissa was close at her heels. The supermarket’s entrance was a revolving door, and it was spinning non-stop at a very fast pace. Three people were trapped in different compartments, running at top speed to avoid getting smacked by the door.

“They won’t be able to keep that up for long,” Marissa said. “There must be some sort of emergency switch, why hasn’t anyone pulled it?”

“They did,” said a man in front of them. “It didn’t do a thing. I think this is–hey, it’s you!”

He had just turned around and spotted Clove. She frowned. The man did look familiar, but she couldn’t place him. “Do I know you?”

“From the train? A few weeks ago?”

“Oh!” Clove remembered now. The red-headed ticket taker. She hadn’t recognized him out of his uniform. “Yes. How did that turn out?”

“Whatever you did must have worked. We got control of the train back a couple hours after you jumped off. It slowed us down, but we arrived safely.” He grimaced and jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “Think this is the same thing?”

“Could be,” Clove said, looking past him at the revolving doors again. “I don’t see any magic though. It’s always got an orange glow.”

“Maybe the magic isn’t touching the doors themselves, but the mechanism,” Marissa suggested. “That looks like an automatic model, there’s probably a motor inside that metal part above the doors.”

“How do we get to it?” Clove asked. She was already walking toward the building.

“We might have better luck from upstairs,” Marissa said, hurrying to catch up to her. “There’s probably a side door somewhere.”

Clove rounded the side of the building and saw the door in question. “Let’s go.”

She broke into a jog, hoping the door wouldn’t be locked. They were in luck. It swung open at her touch, and led directly to a set of stairs. She took them two at a time to get to the upper level, and was relieved to find the door there unlocked too.

They entered an office filled with cubicles. Most of the desks were covered in a fine layer of dust; clearly a lot of positions had been eliminated after the networks went down. Clove took a hard right turn toward the front of the building, hoping they’d be able to access the doors’ mechanism somehow. 

“I bet it’s through there,” Marissa said, pointing to a heavy steel door on the opposite wall. 

She was probably right. It looked like exactly the kind of door that hid a room full of machinery. They hurried over and Marissa jiggled the handle before letting out a frustrated sigh. 

“It’s locked.”

“Dammit.” Clove shifted Moose to her opposite arm, shaking out her hand as she looked around the office space for anywhere that looked like it might hold a key, or anything they could use to get the door open.

The door opened from the other side, revealing a tall woman dressed in a pair of blue coveralls. A frown creased the dark skin between her eyebrows. “Who are you?”

“We’re here to help with that,” Clove said, pointing past her at the familiar orange glow of corrupt magic.

“You know what that is?” the woman asked, taking a step back to let them enter. As Clove had predicted, it was a small room filled with machinery. “I’ve been trying to get the door stopped for five minutes. I’ve activated the safety mechanism. There’s no reason it should still be moving, but it just keeps going!”

Her voice was frantic. Judging by the number of tools that littered the floor around her toolbox, she seemed to be at her wit’s end.

“It’s not the mechanism, it’s the magic,” Clove said, handing Moose off to Marissa as she pulled the crystal out of her pocket. “I’ll explain once I’ve stopped it.”

She murmured the words of the spell, watching for the now-familiar changes that followed: the slowing of the magic’s swirl, the shift of the colour from orange to green, and the shrinking of the circle as the magic was absorbed into her crystal.

When it was done, she jogged out to the main office and thrust one of the windows on the front of the building open, sticking her head out. The crowd had moved closer, and when she looked directly down, she could see them supporting the exhausted shoppers as they existed from the now-stopped doors.

As if he felt her gaze, the ticket taker looked up and caught her eye. He smiled and gave her a thumbs up. She waved back and pulled her head out of the window, meeting Marissa and the mechanic as they exited the machinery room.

“All good?” Marissa asked. 

“We did it,” Clove said with a smile, taking Moose back from her and setting him on the floor, letting him have free rein to sniff the nearest cubicle now that the danger had passed.

“I think I’m going to like travelling with you,” Marissa said with a smile. “There’s never a dull moment.”

Moose hopped onto a desk and pushed a pen onto the floor. 

Clove laughed. “You can say that again."

Thank you for reading! If you’re not already subscribed, click below to get the next chapter delivered directly to your inbox. See you next month!

Katie Conrad is a speculative fiction writer living in Halifax, Nova Scotia. You can find her on twitter, instagram, and tumblr.