“I knew it would work!” Tucket exclaims. He slaps the sides of the cockpit with both hands. “I had it shipped all the way from the seventies! What do you think, Ben?”
I can’t help but laugh as I take it all in. The truck driver turns on his heel and makes for his truck as fast as he can waddle. He doesn’t look back as he slams the door and fires up the engine. The truck lurches into gear and lumbers down the street at high RPM, still trailing straps behind it.
I smile back at the grinning young man in the sidecar. “I guess you did it, Tuck. Welcome to the team.”
6
"Time travel and parenting are both difficult enough on their own. Combining them . . . ? Let’s just say that when your five-year-old daughter discovers that every day really could be her birthday party, your cupcake and piñata budget is going to need to be revised.”- Journal of Dr. Harold Quickly, 1992
The Neverwhere
“You can call me Benny.” The ragged other me is standing near the gate of 355 Maple Drive, my childhood home. “I know it might get confusing with both of us being here.”
“I never liked being called Benny,” I reply. “Except maybe by Mom. She got away with it.”
“You remember the hideout under the house?” Benny asks. He unlatches the wooden gate and lets us into the yard. There is an eagerness to his movements, like he’s excited to show me this memory.
“I spent a lot of time under there.”
“Yeah, we did,” Benny replies, prying at the lattice work that blocked the crawl space under the house.
When I was around eight, I discovered the hole and built the hideout. At first it had only been cardboard boxes scrounged from local dumpsters laid flat on the dry dirt. I borrowed my dad’s flashlight and mom’s feather duster and started cleaning up the boards and pipes around my space. I had a hard time finding motivation to clean my bedroom, but for some reason my hideout got lots of attention. I layered some old rugs over the cardboard and found a way to stack books on the plumbing pipes that dangled from the floor beams. I hid and read, or drew imagined treasure maps on the boards until the batteries would die on the flashlight. I switched to Dad’s electric camping lantern but, when that proved unreliable, I finally had to run an extension cord under the house. That was what gave me away. That and my dog, Brisco.
The mostly retriever mutt was still young and inquisitive then and he sniffed me out and started barking. I tried to shush him through the lattice, but he was convinced I was trapped and needed rescuing. When Brisco wouldn’t stop barking I dragged him into the hideout with me. This was infinitely preferable for the dog and, after a few licks to my face, he was content to investigate the hideout in silence. It was too late. Mom had ears like a wild animal, tuned to the merest hint of danger. I was trapped, a victim of my burgeoning desire for independence and mystery, and my mom’s drive to protect me from black widows and all the creepy-crawly terrors that haunt a mother’s dreams. Even though I held Brisco tight and kept him from bounding to her call, she found me. The traitorous extension cord led her right to me.
Standing outside the memory of this house, almost twenty years later, I get a pleasant sense of nostalgia. I kick a few leaves around the flowerbed and uncover my ineptly hidden extension cord. Benny smiles and nods in appreciation. “You’re remembering that day.”
I squat and peer through the wooden lattice guarding the crawl space. “So how does it work? We see whatever we happen to remember at the time?”
“No. It’s more than that.” Benny studies the walls. “This is the real place. We can only see it how we remember it, but other people can remember the same place differently, like you just did.”
“You mean I changed it?”
“Yes. The extension cord wasn’t there for me until you remembered it. Of course I remember it now, so even if you stopped, I might still see it. It’s part of my memory too.”
“Who are you? I mean, what version of me—us, are you?”
“Time enough for that later. You want to see if Brisco is here?”
“What?” I recoil at the thought of my dog being in this place. “How would—”
Benny senses my concern. “No. Not here. But you can see him sometimes. See others, too. Come on. I’ll show you.” Without further explanation he heads for the front porch and enters the house.
It’s an oddly surreal experience seeing my childhood home this way. The interior is familiar, but slightly off. It takes me a few moments to process through the fact that various rooms are displayed in slightly different eras from one another. In some cases I’m seeing the most current incarnations of drapes and wall colors, but in other rooms I’m seeing furniture or fixtures that no longer exist. I know for a fact that my parents got rid of the portable dishwasher when they remodeled the kitchen a few summers ago, but having only been there to visit a few times, I couldn’t tell you what they bought. The prevailing memory of the kitchen contains the outdated countertops and the refrigerator from my youth. I wouldn’t be at all surprised to open the door and find a rack full of colorful freezer pops. I stare at the floor where two shiny silver pet bowls share a rubber spill mat.
“This is all an illusion, right?” I question my companion. “Brisco is dead, but he’s not here, is he?” I was home from college the weekend the old dog died. We buried him in the backyard. A sad day, to be sure, but a natural one. No sign of time travel involved.
“He’s not here with us, but he’s on the other side.”
Benny has the eager expression on his face again. Something about him seems foreign. I want to ask him how old he is and how he came to be in this place. He’s another me, but there is more than the scraggly beard and unkempt clothing that separates the two of us. Something in his eyes is different too.
“You have to cross over.” He crouches low, staring into the space near the dog bowls. “We’re already in the right place. You just need to find the time . . .” He furrows his eyebrows in concentration. To my surprise, the air where he is looking begins to shimmer. For a moment, the space he’s looking at takes on the multicolored hazy quality of the fog outside. The next thing to happen totally surprises me. I hear my mom.
Enraptured by this whole chain of events, I squat next to Benny and peer into the space near the fridge. Benny has created a sort of window into the kitchen. Roughly two feet square at first, it expands slowly as we stare into it.
“Good, good! Having you here helps,” Benny exclaims. “Keep concentrating, it’s almost big enough.” He has his hands held in front of him as if he can push the shimmering window higher.
The interior of the hole looks the same as the kitchen we are standing in, but there are distinct noises coming out of it. A screen door slams and then someone walks right through us from back to front, swishing into the kitchen in Capri pants and a lavender apron. She heads for the cupboard and swings it open.
“Oh my God! Mom!” I stare incredulously at the image of my mother looking younger by almost two decades. Her blonde hair is long over her shoulders and she is humming something. She plucks a can of dog food from the cupboard and sets it on the countertop. “Can she—can she see us?”
“No. She won’t hear us either. But wait. It gets better.” Benny smiles. The view of the kitchen has expanded now beyond the limits of the room, old memories building on one another and filling in the last of the gaps.
My mom scrounges through the drawer and extracts a can opener. The puncturing of the can cues a new sound, claws on the linoleum at high speed. A blur of fur comes hurtling around the corner and skids to a stop near the refrigerator. Brisco is full of life and wriggling. His hindquarters can barely contain themselves as he whips his tail back and forth. He’s young, somewhere close to the age he discovered me under the house, but it’s hard to tell.
“He looks so good.” The scene in front of me hits me all at once and I have a hard time even looking at it. I choke down the urge to cry.
I don’t want to be dead anymore. I don’t want Bris
co to be dead, I want to be back there, back alive where I can grab hold of my mom and tell her I love her, feel Brisco’s tail thwacking back and forth against my legs as he squirms in glee at being petted.
Benny looks at me sympathetically. “It was that way for me the first time, too. It gets easier though. Look.” Benny points to the dog.
Brisco has stopped wriggling under my mother and is staring intently in our direction. My mom steps past him and sets his now full food bowl down. Brisco takes a step toward it instinctively, but looks toward us again and freezes.
“Go ahead,” Benny says. “Call to him.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“Just do it.”
I squat a little closer to the dog, not much more than an arm’s length away now. “Brisco? Can you hear me, boy?”
The dog’s tail starts wagging again, but I can tell he’s conflicted—so many competing urges showing in his body language.
My mom has finished pitching the empty can into the trash and is now standing over the dog. “Come on, Brisco. Eat your food.”
The dog wags his tail harder and looks from the bowl to her face and then back in my direction again. My mom nudges the bowl with her toe. “Eat, you silly dog.”
I can’t help but smile at the dog’s curious but exuberant expression.
“You’re a good boy, Brisco,” I say. “It’s okay. Eat your food.”
The dog barks once at me, a quick greeting, then gives in to his desire for the food. He plunges his face into the bowl, but his head pops up again between bites, chomping down the Alpo while still trying to keep an eye on me.
“Can he see us?” I still find the situation unbelievable.
“I don’t know what he sees,” Benny replies. “But he knows we’re here. He can sense us somehow.”
“Smart dog,” I say. Brisco’s tail wags a little faster, even as he continues his lapping assault on the crevices of the dog bowl. My mom straightens a few things in the kitchen before hanging her apron on a hook and retrieving her car keys. She takes one lingering glance around the room and, for a moment I wonder if she feels something different, like she senses us too, but then she opens the side door and departs, locking it behind her. I watch her silhouette vanish with a fresh pang of loss.
I look back to the dog. “I feel like I remember that about Brisco. I always thought he was seeing things we weren’t.”
“He was. I know he’s seen me plenty of times.”
“How often have you done this—visited the past?”
Benny straightens up and brushes at his pants. The room goes back to vacant again. I consider the empty silver pet bowls. They seem even more abandoned now.
“It’s all I’ve had really. Trying to keep myself—trying to stay. . .”
“Sane?” I offer. “I can see how a place like this could get to you.”
Benny nods. “It does. It’s . . . lonely.” He glances around the room and finally settles back to me. “You can see why I was surprised to see you here.”
“Yeah, I can imagine.” I ponder the circumstances of his appearance from the tree and my subsequent rescue. “The others here—that guy in the robes. What are they all about?”
“You need to stay away from him. He’s bad news.” Benny twitches a little. “All darkness and storms, that one. Cities in ruins, deserts that catch on fire. His memories are all that way. Dead or dying places.”
“Why is he here? What is he doing?”
“I don’t know how he got here, but I know what he does. He’s a collector.”
I frown. “Collecting what?” I can’t remember any items in any of the places I’ve seen him that had any value.
Benny let’s his eyes wander to the window as he replies.
“Souls. He collects people’s souls.”
<><><>
St. Petersburg-2009
It’s after eleven when Doctor Quickly has finished laying out his plan. Despite his explanations, It takes me a bit to wrap my mind around all of it. The basic problem seems to be that there are a variety of places and times where the attackers who invaded his lab might reattempt to acquire him—if that was their goal. Assuming they are time travelers, they also might go after a different version of him in other timestreams, or try to attack him at a younger age.
Some of the other versions of Doctor Quickly are in contact with one another and will be able to call for help in the event they are in distress. Others won’t and will need to be located and warned in person. I don’t really understand the logistics of how Doctor Quickly has managed to keep his various selves from interacting and messing up each others’ lives, but I make a note to ask him later for his system. I get the feeling it may be a useful skill to have.
Mym, Tucket, and I have been tasked with checking up on a couple of the lab spaces in the not-too-distant future of the November Prime, starting with the scene of the first attack. I’m also supposed to search out any way of getting in touch with my departed self and find out what he knows about the mysterious symbol I’ve seen.
Francesca is going to be a contact at home while Cowboy Bob visits a few other timestreams near 2009. Doctor Quickly and Carson will investigate locations in the early part of the twentieth century. Tucket seems disappointed to not be tasked with that excursion, since it’s his favorite century, but he’s feeling too proud of being a part of the process to consider defecting from his assignment.
It took a little bit of time to get Tucket up to speed on the situation, but once he understood that Doctor Quickly was in danger, he committed whole-heartedly to the team. We are supposed to send reports from our various missions to Abraham, who will man the tachyon pulse transmitter back at Bob’s ranch, and keep us all informed of developments.
Doctor Quickly volunteers to help me gravitize the sidecar and turns down an offer of assistance by Tucket. When the two of us are alone in the garage, it’s clear that getting the motorcycle ready to go is child’s play for him. There is something more on his mind. He leans against my workbench and studies me as I fiddle with the bike.
“I want you to know, Ben, that Mym speaks very highly of you. It’s been wonderful seeing her so happy. Truly.”
“Thanks. I’m definitely glad to have your approval. It means a lot to me.”
Doctor Quickly nods, then runs his hand over the bike’s handlebars. “That being said, there are a few things you should be aware of. I’m always trying to do what’s best for her, protect her as much as a father can in these circumstances.”
I pause in my wrenching of the sidecar attachment bolts. “I’m a careful driver. I’ve actually been riding motorcycles a long time—”
“No, no. That’s not what I meant. Though that is certainly good to know.” He scratches at his head as if unsure of how to continue. “Mym is . . . well, special, as you already know. Raising a daughter who could time travel on her own from the time she was a teenager had its challenges. Not least of which was trying to define some sense of boundaries. It’s hard to put limits on a girl who can be anywhere, anytime.”
I smile. “I can imagine. Seems like you did a pretty great job though. She turned out well.”
“Indeed, but I need to level with you, Ben. As a father, I’ve had to keep some things from her. She’s a grown woman now, able to make all of her own decisions—and she has—but even so, there is a lot of her mother in her.
“It would be unjust to saddle her entire gender with this characteristic, but in my experience, at least the women in her family all have a natural predisposition for worrying. Perhaps it’s a side-effect of how caring they are. But worry can be a plague. It can cripple you if you let it. It eats away at your freedom. I didn’t want that for Mym. I wanted her to be able to enjoy herself in this world, see it in all its wonder.”
“I think she does,” I reply. “She’s certainly shown me plenty already.”
Doctor Quickly smiles. “I’m glad for that. You two have been good for each other.” He paces around to the other side
of the motorcycle. “You’ve had quite a bit of adventure yourself, and you’ve seen in your travels that not all time travelers share the values we do. Your experiences in the chronothon exposed you to some of the nastier elements of this world.” He trails off and I’m not sure if there was meant to be a question in there somewhere.
“Are you saying we’re going to run into more of that this trip?”
Doctor Quickly puts his hands in his pockets and nods. “I know the time has come when I can’t keep these aspects of my life away from her much longer. Danger is a real part of the path I’ve chosen and, as much as I would wish it away if I could, the danger still falls on the people I love.”
I finish mounting the attachment bolts and roll my wrenches up in their travel case. “If it makes you feel any better, she’s pretty tough. I’ve seen her in action. If anyone is likely to protect anybody, it will probably be her saving me.” I note the seriousness of Doctor Quickly’s face and add, “But I’m definitely going to look out for her in every way I know how.”
“I know you will. It’s possible that we may be dealing with a completely new threat here. I take security very seriously when it comes to my labs. I keep them completely secret whenever possible. The fact that this group located and attacked one of them does not bode well for us.”
“Who else knows about your labs?”
“The people in this house are the only time travelers I’ve trusted with that information. Bob and Abraham have been my confidants for decades. My assistant Malcolm watches over a few places for me in linear time and I’ve enlisted a few other assistants over the years, but, individually, none of them know more than a few locations. In fact, I don’t know that any one person in the group knows the locations of every lab with the exception of other versions of myself.”
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