The Groove
Saturday March 16th, 2019 with Elorious Cain
EMILY BRISK 7 : Charmaine's Departure

F.B.I. Special Agent Nancy Brisk sat in an interview room at the Federal Plaza building holding her head, shaking. She could sense in every bone in her body that encountering that Charmaine girl on Locust Avenue was going to change her life forever. A knot in her stomach she got the second she first saw Charmaine was still there. She remembers thinking then that nothing good was going to come out of it at all. One of her superiors entered the room and said, " Are you ok?" When Nancy quickly indicated that she was, he continued, "It would be alright if you were not ok." As he was saying that a technician came in and hand signaled things were ready. Nancy was going to try her best to detail the events of the day: " I checked out of the Hilton with my identical twin sister Emily and my fiance Tom at 11 am. Our plan was to avoid rush hour traffic and drive back to Boston. Emily just wanted to take a brief detour to see an address on Locust Avenue in the South Bronx. It was supposed to be a brief drive by. Nothing more. That address was supposed to possibly be the house of this girl Emily had met during some strange odyssey she had experienced. Emily had mysteriously disappeared about ten months ago in a change room in Boston. When she reappeared there some days later, she was an emotional wreck. She insisted that she ended up on an abandoned island in the middle of the ocean. It was in some kind of parallel universe complete with a different America, where the official language that everybody spoke was Spanish. She met a teenager there called Charmaine and befriended her. Charmaine had invited Emily to her house on Locust Avenue. That end of Locust was a heavy industrial area. We were just driving down Locust when we collectively decided to turn the car around and head to the highway for Boston. As Tom turned his car around I noticed a young teenage girl in distress on the sidewalk holding a bike. Emily and I approached the girl on foot when suddenly Emily started calling her by the name 'Charmaine'. This teenager looked terrified. She knew Emily by name. She kept crying out for her house and her mother! It rather remarkably was that Charmaine girl from that other America. I just couldn't believe what my eyes were seeing! We spent the afternoon calming her down, putting her bike in the back of the SUV, feeding her and showing her sights around the city like the Empire State Building and One World Trade Center. This Charmaine girl had never seen a skyscraper before. She thought that the city was too busy and noisy. I really have to admit that I had serious reservations about what Emily had claimed she had experienced. It really sounded crazy. Here, right in front of me was living evidence of all of it. This poor kid was desperate: anxious to get back to the New York that she knew. She eventually admitted to us that she had responded to challenge or dare from her friends. She kept going on about the Egyptian Obelisk in Central Park being some kind of secret key to other worlds. She was supposed to ride her bike around the Obelisk chanting some kind of ancient Egyptian sentence. She told us when she did that she suddenly saw a brilliant flash and her friends had disappeared. It took her a few minutes to realise that everything had changed. The nearby museum was the same but the whole city had gone mad. It took her four long and terrifying hours to ride her bike from Central Park to Locust Avenue in the Bronx as the streets and bridges were totally different. She was completely devastated to see that there were industrial buildings where her house was. Tom had the crazy idea of Charmaine going back to the Obelisk and repeating the stunt again. The idea was that maybe she could simply go back the way she came. It was just a shot in the dark. Nobody really expected anything to really happen. All the same Charmaine was willing to give it a try. She was riding her bike around that Obelisk repeating that chant. Emily turned around to face me and began talking about how fruitless it all was when Charmaine just vanished right in front of Tom and I. We were both telling Emily when she suddenly described a man approaching us with a gun. I pulled my weapon and turned around. There were two men and one shot in our direction, I shot back and killed one of them." Nancy suddenly broke out in tears and her superior shut the interview done. He said, "Agent Peters will quickly drive you back to the hospital."