The Thirteenth Floor

      “And I’m never getting home back?” a new wave of fright rolled up to her throat, causing her heart to flutter frantically in her chest, and her arms and legs to freeze in an instant.       The woman patted her on the shoulder encouragingly. “Now we will call the master, and believe the problem is solved.”       Cassandra gently put her arm around her waist to avoid unnecessary injuries and falls, and led her inside her apartment. At the same moment, Peyton felt insects running all over her body. The hair on her head, carelessly gathered into a bun, stirred, and she shrank in disgust.       “Not the first, not the last. We often get out of here. In other realms everything looks so ridiculous, you know. By the way, your things often get here. It’s quite profitable though,” she opened the door and let Peyton go ahead, “but you’ll, honey, are the same as my cockroaches. That’s probably why the other siders like to feast on you so much,” and locked herself in.       “And how many realms are there in total?”       “Go to the living room, right down the corridor,” Cassandra pointed a long index finger in the direction of the littered dark passage. “I’ll call Sam now. And there are infinitely many realms, but if you know their mechanisms, you can easily get into the one you need. Have a seat on the couch.”       Cassandra disappeared into another aisle, continuing to chat cheerfully with herself, and Peyton was left alone again. How glad she was when she sat down on the sofa and could breathe freely. Instead of shaking with fear, she began to look at everything.       The room was not much different from an ordinary apartment in her understanding, only the mountains of junk that littered the usual coffee table, bedside tables, cabinets and chairs were a little confusing. But the first impression is most often deceptive, she repeated like a mantra, and she was absolutely right: all things were constantly moving from place to place by some tiny furry creatures that made a barely audible squeak. They dragged them to the most secluded places of the living room and necessarily numbered them, sometimes starting a roll call. Once one of them slipped on the smooth glass surface of the dial and fell to the floor. He was yelling and waving his fists ridiculously right up to the moment when he was picked up by passing comrades.       Meanwhile, more and more objects were constantly arriving from the wide-open window, as if on a conveyor belt. On the plants, which Peyton had once seen in a book describing the exotic flora of the Earth, black spherical thorns crawled, more like a burdock. They watered, irrigated, dusted off fancy sheets and sometimes cursed amusingly with spiders that crawled from the walls to their lush, well-groomed possessions. They also had thin ponytails with pompoms at the ends, which were constantly twitching and twisting.       The streets of the city deserved special attention. They looked like a large aquarium with constantly changing lights and a variety of fish scurrying from one end to the other. And all this bottom was tightly covered with a blue lid — clouds that floated across the gray joyless skies.       After five minutes, Cassandra finally emerged from the doorway, rubbing her wound-up lower back.       “Sam’s here.”       “Already? Peyton jumped up from the couch.”       “He’s a spider after all, honey. I tried to negotiate with him, but he’s too stubborn: he said he would take three hundred, no more, no less.” The woman reached into one of the drawers. “I can only pay for half, so you’ll have to work a little.       “But where? I don’t know anything here,” she spread her hands in complete confusion.       “Well, you can work the night shift at Winla’s. Moreover, she constantly complains that she does not have enough workers in the diner.       Peyton looked at her neighbor uncomprehendingly. She could not fully realize that the kind old lady, whose cats she often looked after when she went to visit her grandchildren, owned a whole cafe. But it turned out to be the truth.       Winla was really very pleased with the new employee. Moreover, Payton’s decency was proudly confirmed by a Wolf and a Fox — two fluffy purebred cats that exist, like all cats, in several worlds at the same time. However, here they were much larger, they were able to talk perfectly and sometimes interrupted their wet nurse — a fragile gray-haired mistress with a big red eye and four powerful fangs.       Winla handed Payton an apron and a notebook and disappeared in the hall, leaving Payton to deal with the rules of the cafe. “The shift is until three in the morning, after which the payment follows,” she said grimly.       Located inside the apartment, the cafe was a truck, on the roof of which there was a parking lot and an airfield. From the highway, surrounded by acrid darkness, futuristic or, conversely, industrial-style trucks and ordinary passenger cars drove in every now and then. At the same time, no one attached much importance to the fact that all this was also in the apartment on the thirteenth floor at the same time.       And the visitors were worth their vehicles: they were all so bizarre that Peyton began to suspect the possible existence of a freak contest: someone had three arms and several humps, someone had a beehive instead of a human body, and someone even crumbled right before her eyes.       That night she managed to see so many strange clients that she could easily have written some tabloid horror book and advertised for sale in the morning newspaper where she worked herself. But most of all she remembered one young man who looked incredibly much like a normal. He went into the diner just like everyone else, from the street, sat down at an empty table and made an order. After Peyton brought him a cocktail and went to the kitchen to finish the pasta prepared by the Fox for her services to them in that world, he called out to her, and a conversation ensued between them.       It turned out that Leslie — that was the name of the guest of their cafe — a few years ago accidentally fell into this world, falling inadvertently into one of the hatches on a rainy gloomy night. He never managed to get back, no matter how much he tried.       “I was a human being, but over time I began to change here,” he stretched out his hand to her, palm up, showing mutilated mouths that were sewn with ordinary threads and still managed to chew something. “If you stay, something similar will happen to you. People don’t belong here.”       His arms scared Peyton considerably. Her cheeks instantly turned red, her forehead was covered with perspiration, but she pulled herself together in time and courageously continued her work. Everything happens in life, she reassured herself. Although she was sorry as hell for the guest.       The second time she felt a similar anxiety was associated with the arrival of important visitors, who appeared to be the aliens. And as a result, they came out polite and even cute creatures, just smeared with unpleasant-smelling slime.       “It’s time to stop judging people by their appearance, Peyton,” she said through gritted teeth.       By the end of the working day, Payton was quite happy and caught herself thinking, which both pleased and frightened her: she wouldn’t mind working here some more. For some reason, the atmosphere of the restaurant turned out to be much closer to her than the monotonous day job in the office. But she still wanted to go home.       After saying goodbye to Wolf and the already dozing Fox, she took the honestly earned money and left the apartment into the corridor.       Cassandra chatted happily with spider Sam, waiting for her appearance.       “And here’s Peyton,” she sniffed affably, and Peyton thought that her children were about to appear, but nothing happened: it looked like the lady was just starting to runny nose.       Payton pulled the brand-new bills out of her pocket and handed the entire amount to Spider Sam.       “Nice doing business with you, miss,” he began to count the money smartly, and then handed over a twenty. “Superfluous. The elevator now works like clockwork. Bye-bye.”       He bowed, politely shook hands with Cassandra, grabbed his tools and quickly set off down the stairs.       The girl sighed with relief and timidly approached the elevator. The excitement was making itself felt.       “Come on, darling, move on quickly,” Cassandra winked with her third eye reddened from fatigue and leaned her back against the wall.       It seems that she, too, was noticeably tired during this long sleepless night and dreamed of getting back to bed as soon as possible.       Peyton went into the elevator, pressed the familiar button with the bold black number thirteen and began to wait. The doors closed smoothly, hiding the otherworldly floor from her brown eyes, and opened again ten seconds later.       She exhaled noisily and cautiously went out into the corridor, afraid to scare off luck.       “Not to be in Leslie’s place.” Although her excitement was simply in vain: it was really her own thirteenth floor.       Everything that happened during the night looked more like the ravings of a madman than a real incident, but the remaining twenty told the opposite. Peyton impatiently inserted the key into the keyhole, turned it inside clockwise twice and finally got home, which she was going to leave for a maximum of ten minutes:       “It’s nice to get home,” she breathed, stretching, “but it would be great to go back there someday.”