A Time and a Place

by Joe Mahoney

  That a walk in the woods wasn’t going to do a damned thing to help Ridley.

  Some instinct made me glance off the path to my left. A man was watching me from beneath the canopy of pine. A silver crescent moon glittered upon his chest.

  Schmitz.

  Abruptly, I remembered Rainer’s instructions to stay close to home. Was Schmitz here to drag me back? Pretending not to see him, I hurried on down the path.

  “Mr. Wildebear, wait.”

  Schmitz jogged the handful of steps it took to catch up to me. A dull ache persisted on the side of my head where he had struck me with the butt of his gun the day before—a reminder to conduct myself with caution.

  “Nice woods you have here, Mr. Wildebear,” he said upon reaching me. “Well done.”

  I increased my pace.

  “Going for a little walk, are we?”

  “That’s right. A little walk.”

  “Where you going?”

  “What’s it to you?”

  He grabbed my shoulder, forcing me to stop. “You’re not safe here.”

  I faced him defiantly, adjusting my stance and steeling my abdomen, just in case. Although I am not a small man, this fellow Schmitz scared the bejeezus out of me. He was ugly—damned ugly—having been cursed with a head that looked as if it had been jammed painfully, but firmly, into a piece of farming equipment back in some early, significant stage of development. Although he was shorter than I, his close-cropped auburn hair bristling about level with my chin, he was much stockier. I would have had better luck trying to knock down one of the big pines on either side of us than try to take him.

  “I’ve looped the surveillance satellites,” he said, speaking softly. It was all I could do to remain close enough to hear him—did the man not own a toothbrush? “But they’ll see through that before long, so we’ll need to be quick about this.”

  “Surveillance satellites?”

  “Rainer’s a good man,” he said. “A little off his nut since losing Angelique, but I wouldn’t hold that against him.”

  “So?”

  “He has plans to interrogate you, using Mind Snoop.”

  “Mind Snoop?”

  “He thinks you know something, something you may not even know you know. It won’t take him long to figure out what it is using Mind Snoop. But…”

  “But what?”

  “Here’s the thing. Mind Snoop is . . .”

  “What?”

  “It could leave you . . .”

  “What? What?”

  “An incontinent husk of a man.” He fished in his pocket and pulled out a tiny vial containing a bubbly blue solution. “This is an antidote. Drink it as soon as possible to make sure you’re protected. Don’t act any differently during the session, just answer like you normally would. Rainer doesn’t have a whole lot of experience with Mind Snoop. With a little luck he won’t realize it’s not working. When you’re still okay at the end of the procedure he’ll be surprised, but relieved.”

  I stared at the vial. “How do I know this isn’t some kind of poison?”

  Schmitz smiled—the first time such an expression had crossed his misbegotten face in the brief time that I’d known him. It sent chills down my spine. “You don’t.”

  “Why are you helping me?”

  He shrugged. “Because.”

  “What kind of answer’s that?”

  “The only kind you’re going to get.”

  I stared at the vial some more, then took it. “Thanks. I think.”

  Propelled by nervous energy I started off down the path. Looking back, I was relieved to see that Schmitz wasn’t following. He wasn’t even looking at me. He was just standing where I’d left him, idly kicking a fallen branch with his boot.

  Shortly afterward I deposited the vial in a garbage can beside a grocery store on the edge of the village. No power on Earth could have made me drink a single drop of whatever rubbish was inside the vial. Not for an instant did I believe all this Mind Snoop nonsense. Just the same Schmitz was clearly up to something. Had he been trying to poison me? If so, surely there were subtler ways to do that.

  I was just about to turn around and go home when I spotted someone familiar entering the grocery store: Sarah Frey, the world’s best extra-spatial analyst. It irked me, seeing her out here. She was supposed to be figuring out how to get Ridley and Humphrey back home, not fetching groceries.

  I set out to remind her of this fact. Following her into the store, I spotted her by the fruit and vegetable section, sorting through a sorry lot of wrinkled green peppers. Before I could confront her, the soporific muzak emanating from the store’s public address system was interrupted by a voice reverberating through the aisles.

  “Will-de-bear. Will-de-bear!”

  I jerked my head up at what had sounded like my name.

  “Will-de-bear, are you out there?”

  I stood transfixed. It was the inimitable growl of none other than Doctor Peter Humphrey. There was no mistaking that voice, though it possessed an odd, halting quality about it now. Could he have returned through the gate and followed me into town? Humphrey being Humphrey, he would think nothing of commandeering the store’s public address system in a bid to get my attention. There was a bizarre quality to the sound of his voice, but I chalked that up to the store’s poor sound system.

  Forgetting all about Sarah, I made for the cashier’s station where I supposed Humphrey to be, hoping that he had brought Ridley back with him through the gate.

  “Will-de-bear—Help! Quick—”

  Good Lord, was Humphrey in trouble at the front of the store? I broke into a mad run. Skidding to a halt near the cashier, I looked wildly about. Humphrey was nowhere to be seen. Neither was Ridley. Was I in the grip of some feverish hallucination, the only one present capable of hearing the doctor’s voice? No—like me, the cashier and my fellow customers were staring around them with alarm.

  Humphrey’s voice ploughed on. “Will-de-bear! Help me!”

  “Doctor! Where the devil are you?”

  His voice was fading in and out like waves breaking on a distant shore. He was shouting something now, but I couldn’t make out the words.

  “Doctor, I can barely hear you!”

  “Will-de-bear, I need my—”

  “What, Doctor? What do you need?”

  Suddenly such was the clarity of his voice that it was as if he were standing right in front of me. “My bag, Will-de-bear. I need you to bring me my bag!”

  IV

  Friends Like These

  The muzak returned to its prominence in the middle of a song featuring heavy strings and a mellow saxophone. I wandered the small store’s handful of aisles in a daze, reflecting on Doctor Humphrey’s final words. His bag? Bring it where? I didn’t even know where the man was. He certainly wasn’t in the store. Could he have reached out to me from beyond the gate? Was such a thing possible?

  I needed to think, preferably without muzak driving me to distraction. I bolted out through the front door and found a light post in the parking lot to hold me up. I closed my eyes and tried to control my breathing. After a few minutes I became aware of the pleasing scent of a perfume I couldn’t immediately identify—something peachy, with a smidgeon of lavender.

  Someone touched my shoulder. I opened my eyes to see Sarah Frey standing beside me.

  “Are you all right?” she asked.

  I let my breath out with a whoosh. “Sure. Fine. I’m fine.”

  “Seems your friend wants you to bring him his bag.”

  “It sounded like he was right there, talking to me,” I said. “But when I went looking for him, I couldn’t find him anywhere.”

  “That’s because he wasn’t in the store. We would have known if he’d returned through the gate. His voice must have been piped into the public address system vi
a the internet.”

  “But you just said he’s on the other side of the gate. How could he do that from there?”

  “That,” she said, “is the million-dollar question.”

  We looked at one another and something unusual happened, something that sounds corny now, but that felt quite profound at the time. When I looked into Sarah’s eyes, it was as if some kind of energy passed between us—a rush, a jolt of electricity, I wasn’t sure exactly what. If you had asked me before, I would have said I didn’t believe in that sort of thing. And yet there it was.

  “Walk with me?” she asked, hooking her arm in mine.

  I allowed her to lead me toward the woods, understanding now that I was in the presence of an unusually attractive woman—not just pretty, but highly intelligent. I told myself that this was interesting, but of no real significance. She was a conduit to getting Ridley and Humphrey back, nothing more.

  As we walked, she plucked a Brown-Eyed Susie from the ground and waved it idly about.

  “The air smells so sweet out here,” she said, breathing deeply of the forest air. “You’re lucky to live in such a beautiful place.”

  “I know it. Lucky to have grown up here.” We passed under the shade of the first few trees. “Don’t you have lots of work to do?”

  “Plenty, but we’re running a few tests right now. Thought I’d come out here and think while I waited.”

  I decided to accept that, and took a few seconds to appreciate our surroundings. “I take my classes out here on field trips each spring. I like them to see what the island must have looked like before most of the trees were cut down last century to make boats. Not many stands like this one left on the island.”

  Sarah nodded appreciatively “Barnabus, about your nephew Ridley.”

  I tensed. “What about him? Is he okay?”

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to alarm you. I don’t have any new information. It’s just that Ridley is the twenty-fourth person the entity has abducted so far, that we know of. We’ve done extensive background checks on each of them. Some we even knew personally.”

  I relaxed a bit. “Angelique.”

  “That’s right, Angelique. I suppose Rainer told you about her. A terrible loss. Barnabus, did you know that Angelique was a fifth-degree black belt in Matsubayashi-Ryu Karate?”

  “I did not.”

  “The thing is this, Barnabus. Every single man, woman, and child the entity has abducted has some exceptional talent. The entity’s quite selective. San Chow Ming, for example—a small-arms specialist and an award-winning marksman. Doctor Humphrey’s wife? A champion equestrian.”

  I had known that about Joyce. “You’re not seriously suggesting that Ridley has some special talent like that?”

  “There has to be something about him. Benjamin Muir, abducted seven months ago, is a specialist in guerrilla warfare. Maybe Ridley has some specialized body of knowledge like that.”

  “He’s only fifteen. I can’t think of anything. Unless you consider insolence something the entity might be interested in.”

  Sarah smiled. “Give it some thought. It might not be something obvious.”

  “These skills—they all sound martial in nature.”

  “They do,” Sarah admitted.

  “Almost as if the entity is putting together some kind of army.” The sudden realization stopped me dead in my tracks. What in blazes had Ridley gotten himself into? “Is that it? My nephew’s been recruited into an army? He was pretty good at board games when he was younger, now that I think of it. Strategy, that sort of thing.”

  “Maybe that’s it,” Sarah said. “Whatever the case, you have my word we’ll do our best to get him back.”

  I believed her, but if Ridley was caught up in some kind of bizarre intergalactic war, what chance did I really have of getting him back safely?

  We emerged from the woods near my back porch. I lingered, reluctant to part with this intriguing woman. Despite many burning questions, I found myself at a loss for words.

  Sarah, on the other hand, said exactly the right thing. “Come with me to the lab. See what we’re up to. Maybe there’s some way you can contribute.”

  I remembered Rainer’s warning to stay out of the way. The heck with him.

  “Count me in,” I told her.

  Little had changed in my nephew’s room since the morning. Iugurtha’s gate remained the dominant feature. Within the gate a lone avian form circled menacingly, silhouetted before a blood-red sun. Enormous rocks, like the discarded building blocks of giant children, cast long shadows on a shrub-encrusted rise. The gate could have been a giant travel brochure for Texas or New Mexico.

  Rainer paced impatiently from workstation to workstation, pausing occasionally to peer over shoulders and issue caustic remarks. He spotted me and frowned but said nothing. The stone-faced soldiers were unchanged since I’d last seen them, except for the absence of Schmitz from their ranks. Any trace that my nephew Ridley had ever inhabited the room had been scrubbed away like a stain.

  I excused myself from Sarah and made my way to the front hall closet. I found what I was looking for on the top shelf. A lick of orange flame emblazoned the front of the battered old baseball cap—the logo of Ridley’s favourite baseball team, the Summerside Silver Foxes. Ridley had worn the cap virtually every day before his personality change.

  I brought the cap to his room, where I stood in the doorway and considered where it might best be featured.

  Ah, yes.

  I strode forward, reached up, and—

  “Oof!” A snub barrel of advanced weaponry poked me plum in the belly. “What the—”

  “Sir,” an incongruously baby-faced soldier said. “No one may approach the gate, sir.”

  Rainer appeared at my side, hands clasped behind his back. “Problem?”

  Baby-face never took his eyes off me. “No one may approach the gate. Those are your orders, sir.”

  “Mr. Wildebear?” Rainer regarded me with one eyebrow arched. “Not considering a little interplanetary jaunt, are we?”

  “Of course not. I just want to hang Ridley’s cap up somewhere. There ought to be something of the boy left in the room.”

  “We did clean the place out pretty well,” Sarah conceded.

  Rainer scanned his surroundings as if for the first time, observing the walls, floors and ceiling, now devoid of even a hint of the room’s former occupant. “At ease, lad,” he told Baby-face. “What did you have in mind?” he asked me.

  Baby-face stepped back, but remained positioned to intercept me should I try for a dash through the gate. I made no such move. Instead, I stepped clearly to the side, rose on my tiptoes, and hung Ridley’s cap on the top left-hand corner of the gate.

  An audible gasp arose from those about me. “Good God, man!” a male voice exclaimed.

  The cap sat there perfectly fine, in no way disrupting the operation of the gate. You could see the cap from anywhere in the room. It made me feel better, seeing something of Ridley’s up there.

  Rainer chewed contemplatively on his lower lip. The index finger of his right hand performed two swift strokes of his moustache. With his other hand, he reached into his back pocket and pulled out something orange and silky. A woman’s scarf. He tied the two loose ends into an elegant bow and offered it to me.

  “If you please,” he said, not having the advantage of my six-foot, two-inch frame.

  “Certainly,” I told him, and hung Angelique’s scarf—for it had to be hers—on the top right-hand corner of the gate.

  Rainer nodded. “That’s what this is all about,” he announced to the room. “Lest we forget. Thank you, Mr. Wildebear.”

  “You’re welcome,” I said, studying Rainer’s features, trying to guess his thoughts. Was he just humouring me?

  At her workstation, Sarah donned a wireless headphone mike. “Se
bastian, let me see an abridged log for the time I was gone.” She stepped over to the food and beverage table as an image began to manifest itself before her console.

  It was a miniature hologram of Ridley’s room. The jaw-dropping realism of the thing left me goggling. I marvelled as tiny, three-dimensional doppelgangers of Rainer’s team went about their sundry tasks. If I reached a hand in, I could have clutched the obsessively pacing Rainer and lifted him, wriggling and perhaps crying out, into the air.

  I resisted the temptation to try, and accepted a glass of icy cola from Sarah, who had returned to her workstation with drinks and a plate of fresh cantaloupe. I swigged a mouthful of the cola and watched events unfold in the hologram just as they had a few short hours earlier in real life.

  A snappy holographic zoom and Iugurtha’s gate came to comprise the entire hologram. As Sarah and I watched, the gate experienced a transition quite a bit different from the one that had claimed the life of Commander Fletcher. A gentle ripple passed from top to bottom across the aperture of the gate, leaving in its wake almost, but not entirely, pitch black.

  “What’s that?” I asked. “Deep space?”

  Sarah shook her head. “It’s one of those transitions I mentioned earlier, difficult to get a handle on. According to our probes, what we’re looking at is almost wall-to-wall organic material. It looks black because there’s no light source illuminating it, except for the little getting through from our side of the gate.”

  “Organic material? You mean we’re looking at the insides of something that’s alive?”

  “That’s correct.”

  “Why the devil would the gate lead to the inside of a living creature?”

  “Barnabus, I’ve been studying this gate for over four years. In that time I’ve concluded it could lead just about anywhere.”