Hallow

by Renato Carreira

  *

  "Sarah! There's someone here for you!" The woman screamed without a care in the world about Margrit's eardrums. There was open hostility on her face. She went back inside the apartment when the other woman came to the door. Her expression was equally unwelcoming.

  "Yes?" she said, looking her up and down.

  "I want to speak with the man who lives here," Margrit said.

  If it was possible for the woman to look even more displeased to see her, it happened then. From inside, she heard the other one say: "Ha!"

  "Another one," the woman said, under her breath. "Look, Walt Jenkins doesn't live here anymore." Walt. Walter Jenkins. The target had a name.

  "He doesn't?" That was odd. The old-timers seemed certain he did. Then again, they had been driven mad by decades of temporal isolation. "Did he still live here two days ago?"

  The woman seemed surprised.

  "I see you're very well informed," she said. "He left. I asked him to. I'm his wife. Although I hope to change that very soon. Did you know he was married?"

  She did. Although details about the target's personal life were murky and mostly apocryphal.

  "I didn't," she said, playing it safe.

  "There you have it," the woman said, like it was a very relevant detail. "I got here two days ago and found him in bed with another woman. Yes, there's another woman. He also cheats on you."

  "There are probably lots more," said the woman who had answered the door, raising her voice somewhere inside the apartment.

  "What do you want from him?" asked the target's wife.

  "I... nothing important," she said, thinking of ways to stop the conversation there and move on with the search.

  The other woman's head peeked from a doorway inside the apartment.

  "Maybe she's pregnant!" she hollered. "Ask her if she's pregnant."

  "Are you pregnant?" asked the wife.

  No danger of that. All timenauts, male and female, were sterilized as soon as they passed their final test. To prevent 'accidents' that could result in people fathering their own grandfather.

  "I'm not," she said. So far, she was finding it surprisingly easy not to lie at local-timers.

  "Figures," the woman said. "We tried for a couple of years. I think the bastard shoots blanks. He really is completely useless."

  "You can say that again!" yelled her friend's voice.

  "Where does the bastard live now?" Margrit asked.

  For some strange reason, the woman seemed to dislike having someone else call him that.

  "No idea," she said. "But I'll bet he's staying with Zachary, the poor fool. He's the only person in the world who'll do him favors."

  "And where does this Zachary live?" Margrit asked.

  The wife pondered for a moment if she should share the information or not. She decided she should.

  "Got a pen?" she asked.

  Margrit started feeling up her jacket. It was all for show. What would a timenaut need a pen for?

  The woman's friend brought her a pen and a piece of paper and disappeared from view to keep listening to the conversation.

  "Here you go," the target's wife said, after scribbling a couple of lines on the paper and handling it to her. "Something else I can help you with?" the target's wife asked Margrit, with a voice that made clear she felt no inclination to be helpful. However, the unspoken invitation to leave arrived just in time.

  "No. Bye." She turned and walked towards the stairs. She had recognized the elevating box on her way in, but wasn't sure how to operate it and decided not to take unnecessary risks.

  "Good luck with the hunt," she heard the woman say before she closed the door.

  It was almost as if she knew.

  4

  They were in suits again, but, this time, Zachary felt even more uncomfortable. Walt, on the other hand, felt perfectly at ease. He always felt like that when he smelled easy money.

  The meeting with Reverend Parker couldn't have gone better. His wife had sweetened him up and Walt didn't need to work too hard to convince her husband that the Atkinson Encyclopedia of Revised Human Knowledge was just the thing the church needed for their African charity work. They shook hands on it and were asked to come back later to sign the supply contract, receive the generous payment and make things official.

  Of course, no one had informed them that, after the contract signature, there would be mandatory participation in one of the church's religious services. And there they were, surrounded by congregation members of all sizes, ages and shapes (not much variety in the color department, though), clapping, waving their hands in the air, singing along with the gaudy hymns and yelling hallelujahs like their life depended on it. For all Zachary knew, that could be precisely the case. He kept wondering if his and Walt's life weren't also balancing on the edge of a particularly sharp hallelujah and if he shouldn't take part in the whole Lord-praising euphoria just to make them feel more merciful towards him when they discovered the whole thing was an elaborate scam. No, he was wrong. It wasn't even an elaborate scam. And that made it even more perplexing that someone could have been fooled.

  Maybe he should stop feeling nervous and bask in the joy of abundance that Walt so kindly accepted to share with him. Half for himself, for coming up with the plan and doing most of the lip work, and half for Zachary for owning the CD-ROMs in the first place and for providing moral support and acting as his sidekick. Maybe it would all work out according to plan.

  And, if he thought about it, there wasn't any real harm being done. The encyclopedia had major flaws, but those were precisely the aspects that appealed to members of the Pastoral Church of Divine Light and Glory. And some kids in Africa would get to go to school and have access to a computer room with an overabundance of outdated CD-ROMs. It was much better than whatever they had before. If they had anything at all.

  Then why was he still feeling regret?

  Walt nudged him. They were both seated on the stage, with the wives and children of the ministers, standing in front of them, with their jackets off and holding microphones to conduct the celebration and direct the believers' faith towards the right targets. The music had stopped and some of the ministers were looking back. Precisely at them. Jade Parker, sitting between Walt and her husband's empty chair was looking at them as well and smiling broadly.

  "A big round of applause to Walter Jenkins and Zachary Bergson, the newest members of our church."

  The thunderous applause couldn't stop Zachary from thinking how bad the words 'members of our church' sounded when applied to him and it didn't stop Walt from hearing the small voices in his head, praising his skill in handling the situation and shouting possible applications for the money he had made with almost no effort at all. Reverend Parker was waving at them, inviting them to come to his lectern. Zachary felt his mouth go dry and his back getting covered with cold sweat. Walt felt entirely at ease.

  "Go on, then," Jade Parker told him. "Don't be shy."

  Walt Jenkins being shy. It had never happened and would probably remain so for the rest of his life. He got up, buttoned his jacket and approached the lectern. Zachary felt Jade Parker's fingertips on his arm. She wanted him to go as well. But she wasn't trying as hard as she did with Walt.

  He got up and crossed the stage, feeling his legs getting weak and with the applause making him dizzy.

  "Thank you," Walt was saying, already warming up to the place and loving the attention. "Thank you very much." It took a couple more seconds of thanking before the noise had lowered to a level that allowed him to be heard. "First of all, I'd like to thank all of you for this warm embrace with which you have welcomed both me and my associate to your church." More applause.

  Reverend Parker, who kept standing next to them, bent over the microphone and said:

  "Our pleasure."

  That made everyone present laugh. Everyone, except Zachary, who, at that moment, was changing his skin color from a pasty white to an increasingly bright green.

>   "I would also like to thank Reverend Parker," Walt went on, "and his charming wife, for making our partnership possible. Together, I believe we can build a better tomorrow for the children of Africa. Let Atkinson Encyclopedia of Revised Human Knowledge be responsible for educating the leaders the continent so direly needs to realize the enormous potential of that glorious land, where our ancestors first got down from the trees all those thousands of years ago."

  Silence. The silence of hands paused in mid-clapping and of screams of joy strangled by the sudden understanding of the words. Reverend Parker raised an eyebrow while his easy smile started to falter. Zachary felt the wide multipurpose room starting to spin wildly around him. He opened his mouth to say something, but nothing came out.

  Walt had things perfectly controlled. He put his hand on Reverend Parker's shoulder, smiled at him and turned to the congregation once more.

  "Just kidding, folks," he said. The collective sigh of relief was audible. Afterwards, they all started to laugh.

  Zachary would like to be a part of the collective relief, but he couldn't. He was too busy falling down and testing how painful it would be to let his head hit the red carpet.