Four

Okay, there's an explanation for this, Terra thought.  I'm just... there's something I'm not remembering, or my clock was wrong or... something.  She turned on the light in the sun room.  The plastic chairs they had used for orientation were stacked in the corner again and all the lounge furniture was back in the middle of the room.  She looked over toward the corner, the old man's chair.  Empty.  No sign that anyone had been here at all.

Terra stood still for a few minutes, trying to make sense of what seemed to be an impossibility.  Finally she came up with an idea, and quickly crossed the room to the far door.  She swung it open and stepped out into the breezy evening air.  Going outside the hotel was forbidden for this retreat, but at this point she cared little for the rules.  She walked out about twenty feet from the hotel and turned around, half-afraid of what she might see.

But there was nothing to see.  All the upstairs windows were dark.  Even Rose had abandoned her post.  After several minutes of intense thought, Terra could only come to two conclusions: either everyone was asleep at half past seven, or the hotel was empty.  Neither scenario made any sense, but neither did about half the things that had happened to Terra since she'd arrived here.

It was then that she caught some movement out of the corner of her eye, and Terra turned to her right.  The cats.  They were in greater number than ever now, perhaps a hundred or more, still not crossing the invisible barrier that kept them from approaching the hotel.  The were quiet, though there was an energy about them, and they were staring at her.  She felt a chill in her blood and ran back to the hotel door.  She hurried through the sun room and the hallway, and back up the stairs.  She stopped when she got to the second floor, the men's floor.  There was only one way to find out if people were asleep.

"Hello?  Hello, is anyone awake?  Hello, I need help!"

Nothing.

She tried again, this time knocking on the first door she saw.  "Hello?  Is anyone in there?  Can someone please come out and speak to me?"

She knocked on the door repeatedly, loudly.  No answer.

Terra took a deep breath and shouted down the hall, "CAN ANYONE HEAR ME?  HELLO?  ANYONE?  PLEASE?"

No response.

She spun back toward the door she'd been knocking on.  Her heart pounded as she tried the doorknob.  True to the rules, it wasn't locked.  It turned easily in her hand and the door swung silently inward.  She clicked the light switch inside the doorway.

The room was empty.

That doesn't necessarily mean anything, Terra thought.  There were fewer people than rooms, that's for sure, so they probably didn't use every room.  This is just a room that never had anyone in it.

She paused.

But if the other rooms are occupied, why isn't anyone answering me?

Terra turned and leapt up the stairs again.  When she got to the third floor she ran around like a madman, flinging open every door on both sides of the hall while shouting unintelligibly.  When she got back down to her end of the hall, right in front of room 36, she finally broke down.  She dropped to her knees and sobbed.

"Where is everybody?" she screamed through her tears.

She cried on the floor for several minutes and then made an attempt to pull herself together.  "Okay, okay, it's all going to be okay, I just have to get out of here, I just have to get back to the bus station," she told herself.  She went back into her room and turned every light on— bedroom, balcony, bathroom, bedside lamp.  She grabbed her duffel bag and took it over to the dresser, sweeping her arm across the top of the dresser and forcing all of her toiletries to tumble into her bag at once.  She yanked her clothes from the drawers and stuffed them in the bag also, and finally put her computer in her backpack.  She did a couple of circuits of the room just to make sure she hadn't forgotten anything, and then, satisfied that she was packed, slung a bag over each shoulder and quickly exited the room, leaving all the lights on.  She ran down the stairs as fast as her bags would allow, but just as she reached the front door she had a sudden thought—

My phone.  The stuff in the envelope.  My goddamned phone.

Terra stopped with her hand already touching the door out of this place.  She wanted her stuff back, wanted her phone back especially.  She wanted to speak to Mehmet, wanted to hear the friendly voice of someone who was on her team.

 Terra paused for a moment to think.  Should  I just forget the envelope and go? She wondered.  She knew that her personal safety was more important than easily replaceable gadgets, but was she really in danger?  There didn't appear to be anyone around and Terra didn't feel threatened.  I just feel creeped out, she thought, and that's probably just my imagination rather than real danger.  It would be silly if I ran out of here and didn't even make an attempt to get my stuff back.  I mean, how complicated can it be?  It's probably somewhere obvious like at the reception desk.

Or it's locked in a safe where I have no chance in hell of ever getting at it, she added.  But at least I should find out.  At least I should try.

She turned around and made her way back into the hallway.  She vaguely remembered that the reception desk was somewhere to the right, or at least that's the direction she had seen lots of people coming from earlier in the day.  She turned right at the staircase and headed down another hall, turning lights on as she went.  Sure enough, very soon the hall opened out into the reception area.  Terra couldn't see offhand how one was supposed to get behind the front desk, so she dropped her bags and hoisted herself onto the countertop.  Swinging her legs around, she dropped down to the other side.  Where would they have kept those envelopes?  It suddenly crossed her mind that if all the people were gone, so might be the valuables.  Could it have been a scam?  If it was, they went through a lot of trouble just to get her phone and iPod.  But Terra knew now that she could assume nothing, and she set about in search of anything that might give her a clue as to where her belongings had gone.

The desk behind the reception counter was full of papers and all the normal office supplies, so Terra started at one end and began opening every drawer and cabinet.  There was nothing resembling the manila envelopes anywhere.  As she searched she became more frantic, raking things from the drawers out onto the floor in her panic to find her phone.  When she got to the other side of the desk, however, she spotted something— the hotel phone, sitting on the counter and plugged into the phone jack on the wall.  It was an old rotary phone, but as long as she could make a call it would do.  Her hand was trembling as she raised the phone to her ear and laughed in relief as she heard the wonderful sound of the dial tone.  It seemed to take forever for the rotary wheel to go around as she entered Mehmet's number.

"Hello?"  Terra thought he sounded eager, maybe even panicked.

"Hey, um... it's me."  I thought I would have had a lot more to say than that, Terra thought.

"Where the hell are you?"  Mehmet asked.  "I thought you would have called hours ago.  I've been trying to ring your phone but it's switched off.  I've been worried sick.  Are you not on the bus yet?"

Terra stood in stunned silence.  She had no idea what this conversation was about.

"Hello, are you still there?" Mehmet asked.  "Please tell me what's wrong, did you lose your phone?"

Terra tried to collect her thoughts.  "I... I'm at the hotel, of course, I... yeah, I did lose my phone, actually.  Well, they never gave it back to me, I mean, they're not here, they're... what did you mean when you asked if I was on the bus yet?"

"Terra, what's wrong with you?"  Mehmet sounded worried.

"I just... I don't understand why you would expect me to be on a bus when I only started this retreat today and you weren't expecting to hear from me for ten more days."

Now it was Mehmet's turn to be silent for a moment. "Baby, what are you talking about?  The retreat finished this morning, didn't it?  At least, that's when it was scheduled to finish according to the calendar in our bedroom.  Are you feeling okay?"

Terra had no clue what was going on, but she needed a few minutes to think.  She gave a little nervous laugh and told Mehmet, "yes, of course, of course it finished, I'm just... you know, getting used to being back in the real world.  But I'm fine, really.  I'm on my way to the bus station now, and I'll be home in the morning, okay?"

Mehmet sighed.  "Well, okay, as long as you're sure you're all right... look, call me when you get to the bus station, okay?  I'm worried that place has addled your brain."  He tried to laugh, but failed, and his voice trailed off.

Terra swallowed.  "Yeah, okay," she said.  "I'll call you from a pay phone at the station.  I'll speak to you soon."

After she hung up the phone Terra nearly lost her balance.  She was overwhelmed with confusion and fear, and sat down for a moment in the leather chair meant for the front desk clerk.  Her head was spinning and she wanted so badly to be home.  She buried her face in her hands and tried to slow her breathing down.  Finally she swivelled the chair around to face the back wall.  There was a door with glass panels, leading into a place which was presumably the manager's office.  A huge desk dominated the room, a desk which appeared to have nothing on it except for one small item in the middle.

And from a distance, that item certainly did look like it might be a stuffed manila envelope. 

Terra stood up slowly and made her way over to the glass door.  She tried the handle, but the door was locked.  The one door I need to open, and of course that's the one they lock, she thought.  She strained to see what the light-coloured object on the desk was, but it was dark inside the office and the desk was too far away from the door to see anything for sure.  Terra turned back around and scanned her eyes over the reception desk.  They settled on the heaviest-looking object there— an old manual typewriter.  Terra grabbed the typewriter firmly and carried it over to the office door.  Closing her eyes, she swung the typewriter toward the glass panel nearest the door handle.  There was a crashing noise as glass shattered.  Terra placed the typewriter on the floor and carefully reached through the jagged hole in the glass and  unlocked the office door from the inside.

As the door slowly opened, Terra slowly stepped into the office.  She made her way over to the desk and leaned over to pluck the object from it.  The weight in her hand felt comfortable, and when she turned the package around, sure enough— there was her name scrawled across the envelope in her own familiar handwriting.  She ripped the top of the envelope open and was relieved to find her phone, iPod, and camera inside.  She shoved the gadgets into her pockets, ran out of the office, launched herself over the reception desk, quickly slung her bags over her shoulder and sprinted for the exit door.

When she got outside Terra took a moment to catch her breath.  The next thing she needed to do was get herself to the bus station.  She liked neither thought of having to struggle with speaking to Turkish directory assistance about a taxi, nor the option of phoning Mehmet back and worrying him further by asking him to call a taxi for her.  The cats, now a heaving mass of several hundred, waited impatiently at the invisible barrier.  Terra wasn't afraid of them, in fact she couldn't wait to get on that side of the barrier herself.  As she tried to come up with a plan to get back to the bus station, she saw some movement out of the corner of her eye, in the direction of the hotel.  Terrified, she managed to force herself to look.

As soon as she turned to face the hotel, all the lights she had turned on all turned off at once, and the hotel went dark.  Terra gasped.  She glanced up where she thought she'd seen the movement.  There in the corner of the third floor, where her room had been, Terra thought she saw two shadowy figures on the balcony, one much taller than the other.  Terra's heart pounded in her chest, and she ran with all her might toward the invisible barrier.  As she reached it, the cats made a small pathway for her to pass, and they bounded after her down the dark beach walkway.  She didn't stop or turn around to see how many of them were following her.  Judging from the endless sound of pattering paws on the pavement, she figured it must be all of them.  Terra didn't care why they were doing it, she just hoped it was only the cats behind her as she ran with all her might toward the direction of the town.

She ran for about fifteen minutes until she couldn't anymore, her bags weighing her down and making her prematurely tired.  She finally slowed to a walk and noticed that she already felt better just from getting away from the hotel and having a little exercise.  Terra's muscles felt stiff and weak, and she asked herself why.  Is it possible I really did sleep for ten days? she wondered.  She searched for her phone and found it in her front pocket.  As she turned it on, she told herself this was probably all a mistake, all just some weird series of unfortunate coincidences and crossed wires between her and Mehmet.  After all, it was inconceivable for a human to sleep for that long.  It was the stuff of children's stories, of fairy tales.  As her phone sprang to life, Terra punched in her password.  She stood in stunned silence as the phone found a signal and the time and date came up on the display.

No, Terra thought.  Impossible. That can't be today's date.

She pressed the button that would take her to the log of her recent call history.  This would straighten everything out once and for all.

When she saw the log, there it was, plain as day: Terra's most recent outgoing call had indeed been to Mehmet, in the early afternoon... eleven days ago.

Terra felt her throat tighten and her breathing quicken as cats meowed and swirled around her feet.  They seemed happy just to be in her presence, pleased to follow her wherever she went.  She checked the time on her phone.  It was nearly nine in the evening.  She decided she'd better get to the bus station before the last cross-country buses departed for the night.  Terra waded through the cats as they once again parted in the middle to give her room to walk.  She couldn't even contemplate the strangeness of this whole situation.  She just wanted it to be over as soon as possible.  She wanted to get home.

As Terra made her way down the length of the beach walkway, the weather suddenly turned very cold and windy.  Two minutes later, the skies opened up and torrential rain came pelting in almost horizontally from the beach.  Terra couldn't even be bothered to dig her rain coat out of her bag; by the time she thought of it she was already soaked through anyway.  It was the cats that held her attention now— not one of them had been scared off by the rain.  She knew that cats didn't like water, they would normally do anything to keep from getting wet... and yet, here they still were.  Their mood was distinctly more subdued than before, most of them had stopped meowing, but they didn't run away.  They seemed to be refusing to leave her side.  They followed her quietly, hundreds of them swarming around her in the pouring rain as if she were their queen.

Terra reeled at the bizarreness of it all.  She briefly thought about how it would look if she arrived at the bus station with several hundred cats in tow.  She hoped that they would disperse before then, that perhaps there would be another invisible barrier at the other end of the walkway, near the town itself.  After all, when she first came to this place she was pretty sure she hadn't encountered any cats until she reached the beach, so she figured they were probably confined to that area for some reason.

But once Terra reached the marina, she knew she'd been wrong in her assumptions.  Not only did the cats follow her into the town, but she picked up some new ones along the way.  The rain had mercifully stopped, and as she started to come across people, mostly shopkeepers shutting down for the night. Terra was torn between being relieved to see them and being embarrassed that she couldn't explain why this gigantic mass of felines was thronging around her.  She got more than a few strange looks from the locals, but eventually she did manage to make her way up to the bus station.

She had no idea how difficult it was going to be to get a bus ticket.  Aside from the fact that it was getting pretty late and many of the buses were already fully booked, some of the ticket agents didn't even want to speak to Terra because of the cats.  She had to admit to herself that it must look strange, and even though she'd managed to leave the majority of the cats outside, a few had managed to sneak into the bus station, and every time someone opened the door to enter or leave, a few more cats would squeeze through.  Eventually though, Terra did manage to find a ticket for a bus that was leaving just before midnight.

She went back outside and sat down on a bench, careful not to crush any cats as she settled down to rest for a minute.  Other travellers were not hiding their amazed and sometimes accusatory stares, but Terra was so glad to be among normal people again that she didn't care what they thought of her.  After she sat down, cats poured up onto the bench and into her lap, and she giggled a little.  She wished she understood what was going on— she had a feeling the cats meant well and had some legitimate reason to be drawn to her, but she couldn't imagine what that reason might be.  She had cats nudging her arms, curling up in her lap, and sitting at her feet.  This is cute and creepy at the same time, she thought, if that's even possible.  I love cats, and yet... something's not right about this.  "You guys are freaky,"  Terra said.  "And no, I don't have any food," she added.

When the time for the bus departure was drawing near, Terra stood up and approached one of the bus station attendants.  He looked frightened, but he at least attempted to smile.  Terra smiled back and asked if he would help her.

"Wh-what kind of help did you need?" the man asked, clearly afraid of what she might say next.

"I need to get on the bus without these cats," Terra replied.  "As you can see, it's a problem."

The man nodded vigourously and looked nervously at the animals.  "Can't you just tell them to go away?" he said.

Terra rolled her eyes.  If I could do that, don't you think I would have done it already? she thought.  "Um, it's not really as simple as that," she said to the attendant.  "I mean, obviously they don't understand human speech.  Believe me, nothing would make me happier than if I could just tell them to go away."  She smiled to let the man know she wasn't annoyed with him, but rather with the situation.

He laughed softly and tried to make a joke by looking at the cats and saying, "go away!  Go away!  Go bother someone else!"  There was no response from the cats.  The attendant laughed harder.  Terra decided to put him at ease by joining in on his joke.  "Go away!" she said to the cats.  "Go back to the beach and stay there!"

No sooner than the last word had escaped her lips, the attendant gasped and covered his mouth.  Terra turned around to face the direction he was looking, and her jaw dropped.  The cats were leaving.  Not just a few of them, but all of them, as if they'd heard her command.  No way, she thought, and she just stood there for a moment watching them head down toward the direction of the marina.  They walked slowly, purposefully.  Terra paused and bit her lip, and then tested what seemed to be an impossibility.  "Wait," she said.  "Wait, don't go.  Stop," she told the cats.

They stopped, all of them, and they turned to face her as if waiting for the next instruction.  A look of horror passed over the attendant's face, and as Terra's bus pulled into the station, the attendant ran inside the building and started hurriedly whispering something to one of the security guards.  The security guard craned his neck to see what was going on.  Terra panicked and turned back toward the cats.  

"Go!" she shouted.  "Get out of here!"

As the cats departed, Terra ran toward the bus.  The security guard and the attendant were now both staring at the cats, and then the guard focused his gaze on Terra.  She wanted to get out of here before anyone made more problems for her.  All she wanted to do was be at home where things were normal and safe.  She gave the driver her bags and took the stairs into the bus two by two.  She found her seat quickly and sat as low in it as she possibly could.  The security guard and the attendant walked over to the bus, looking around suspiciously, and spoke to the driver.  There was an animated conversation among the three of them, with lots of pointing glances in the direction of the cats, but eventually the driver shrugged and sent them away.  Clearly he didn't care about such nonsense  Terra sighed in relief as the attendant and the guard retreated back into the bus station, looking over their shoulders periodically to check the progress of the cats.  Terra looked down toward the marina herself.  She could see the shadows of a few retreating animals, the stragglers at the back of the group, but for the most part the cats were already gone.  With a lump in her throat, Terra settled back into her seat.  She was so exhausted that she was asleep before the bus even left the station.