Time Thieves

minutes, Pete could not find the proper floor. In the elevator, at the board of buttons, all the numbers seemed to be the same. He pushed a few at random, but they did not take him to the proper floor. He though of pushing each one, in turn, until he was where he wanted to go, but the moment he had pressed one button, he could not remember which one it had been.
        
        He felt like an idiot, having to ask someone to get him to the proper floor. He got out of the elevator the fifth time it opened on a hallway, and walked to the stairs. He had no idea whether he was nearer the roof or the lobby, but he decided to walk up, checking each floor for the Porter-Mullion offices. If he didn't find it going up, he could find it on his way down.
        
        He had gone up five floors, but he could not remember how many there had been. Sometimes, he was sure it had been five. Other times, he was positive it was ten. Again, it might have been no more than one. At some point in his exhausting journey, he found himself going down, though he could not remember having reached the last flight. He looked up. Stairs twisted out of sight, musty, dimly lit, smelling of old pine and floor wax. He shrugged, turned and continued downward. When he rounded the bend and looked down the next flight, it suddenly seemed endless. As far as he could see, steps followed steps, thousands upon thousands of them, dwindling in the distance. He swayed as vertigo took him, and he thought he would fall to his death down those thousands of steps.
        
        He looked at his watch to see how long he had been here.
        
        There were four watches on his arm.
        
        He wiped at his eyes.
        
        There were still four watches, all precisely the same, large-faced with a luminous dial. They all read ten minutes past twelve. He had been on the stairs for forty-five minutes, at least. Or perhaps two hours. It was even possible that he had been on the stairs for less than a minute. He looked away from the watches. There were only three of them now.
        
        The steps before him divided before his eyes. Where there had been a flight of twelve, there were now twenty-four.
        
        And now, forty-eight.
        
        He leaned against the wall, raising a hand to shield his eyes.
        
        There were a hundred fingers on his hand.
        
        He started to scream…
        
        … and unlocked his front door, walked in and closed it behind him.
        
        The aroma of freshly brewed coffee filled the air of the living room. Della sat in the large, yellow recliner, siping coffee from a ceramic mug. She was wearing a housecoat that fell only to mid-thigh, and she was enormously appealing.
        
        “What's for supper?” he asked.
        
        She watched him for a long, long while, as if she were unable to speak, “You were gone for three days, this time,” she finally said. “You disappeared again.”
        

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    V
        
        
        All things considered, the Emerald Leaf Motel was not the sort of place he would have chosen to spend three days. First of all, it was only thirty-one miles from home. And though it was clean enough, it was so sterile and secluded that it would have bored him to tears inside of a single afternoon; it had been designed for the tourist passing through, not for those with time to kill.
        
        Yet he had stayed here.
        
        The memory of those three days was curiously bright on his mind. He got out of the Thunderbird, fished the room key from his pocket, and led Della to Room 34. The door opened onto a small, unlit room that smelled predominantly of clean sheets and bathroom cleanser. He flipped on the light, revealing a pleasant chamber, with a television, a made-up bed, desk and chair, and a coffee table.
        
        They searched the desk drawers and even under the bed, but they found nothing curious. There was nothing out of the ordinary in the bath.
        
        “The maid would have straightened it, changed the sheets and all,” Della said.
        
        He nodded, distracted by the shimmering visions of those three days.
        
        “You remember it?” she asked, though she had asked the same question a dozen times before. She wanted to say, instead, “Why?", but she knew that was a question for later.
        
        “I remember it too