by Joe Mahoney
There was no time to argue or wonder what had just happened there. I had no issues parting with Sebastian. I threw him in the sea of lollipop wrappers beside Jack, who promptly unlocked the doors. Gathering Katerina’s helmet and my knapsack containing the gate, I scrambled out of the Nissan as fast as I could, with Humphrey not far behind.
Outside the cab, two little girls wielding matching umbrellas splashed gleefully in a large puddle on the sidewalk. Humphrey just about knocked them over in his haste. A young couple that had been patiently standing by shot him dirty looks as they stepped forward to hurry the girls along.
Undeterred, we hurried as fast as we could to the entrance of Samuel’s and looked wildly about. There was no sign of Katerina. Thank God—we’d made it in time. One hundred metres away a man with an umbrella was strolling nonchalantly along Water St. with his back to us. He was the only one around. It had to be him, the one responsible for Katerina’s death. All we had to do was warn him, keep him off the street. If necessary, physically restrain him for the few paltry seconds it would take for Katerina to pass.
A single headlight crested the hill beyond the man with the umbrella.
“Wildebear!” Humphrey shouted beside me.
I saw Katerina speeding beneath a streetlight, her long red hair streaming behind her like a banner. The sight of her was like a kick in the gut with a steel-toed boot. With my damned limp, I would not catch up to the man with the umbrella in time.
“Don’t move!” I shouted to him, limping as fast as I could. “Stay where you are!”
The roar of traffic was too loud. He couldn’t hear me. He kept on walking.
I tried again. “You with the umbrella! Stop!”
Still nothing. In desperation, I reached out to him the only way could think of: I threw Katerina’s helmet at him. It struck him in the back and clattered to the sidewalk. The man turned to see what had hit him, but he was too close to the road, and the curb took him by surprise. To my horror, he tripped and fell.
As Katerina’s motorcycle bore down on him, he held the umbrella forth as though a thin layer of nylon might somehow ward off half a ton of screaming metal. Katerina faced an awful choice. She could continue on her current heading and mow him down, or she could bear right onto the sidewalk and crash into a light pole or garbage can. Or she could steer left into the oncoming lane.
She chose left, successfully avoiding the man with the umbrella but failing to save herself. A Chrysler Newport struck her bike head-on. Katerina flew over the handlebars like a large, wingless bird and bounced off the windshield of the Chrysler Newport with such force that I clearly heard the breath expelled from her body.
“Iugurtha!” I cried out.
The book burst from my knapsack, propelling me forward and almost off my feet as it blossomed into the gate. Mentally, I adjusted a few parameters and everything appeared to freeze, just as it had in Ridley’s room.
Katerina hovered in the air mere inches from the asphalt. The man with the umbrella was as still as a bug on a wall. Humphrey stood with his mouth agape, his eyes wide, and his right arm thrust forward as if to snatch Katerina from the air. The silence, as they say, was deafening.
Nothing had changed. My sister was going to die. Worse: now it appeared that I had contributed to her death.
Desperate to forestall the inevitable, I concentrated on the gate. It seethed and roiled on the road before me. I willed it to change pages, to flip back over the events of the last hour. Locating the moment that Katerina had tricked us into letting her use her spare key, I entered the gate in a single bound.
The gate did not deposit me where I wanted to go. Instead it placed me inside a dark and empty room. Beyond the door I could hear the clink and clatter of a busy restaurant. Samuel’s? There was no way to tell. I tried to open the door but it was locked or stuck. In the distance a squeal of tires. A muted crash of metal on metal. The crowd beyond the door hushed. My entire being clenched with the realization of what must just have happened, beyond my reach.
No matter. There were an infinite number of points leading up to Katerina’s death. I could change any one of them. I opened the gate and chose Water Street shortly before Katerina’s arrival. I found myself across the street from Samuel’s. Traffic was too heavy to jaywalk. I limped to the lights but they were not with me. I heard the roar of a motorcycle, saw Katerina cresting the hill. A man fell into the street.
Not to worry. I opened the gate again. This time I went to Katerina’s house the day before the accident. She didn’t answer the door. I lingered, hammering on the door until a police car showed up and I was forced to flee.
I travelled further back in time. To my surprise the gate transported me to Katerina’s favourite pizzeria, Michael’s on Central Street. Katerina was there. She treated me to lunch. I revelled in her company. I tried to warn her. She didn’t take me seriously. You need to take better care of yourself, she told me. You look terrible. Seeing Katerina young and healthy and alive, I choked back the tears until I could bear it no longer and fled back through the gate.
That was the last time I ever saw Katerina alive. I visited the past countless times afterward but never made it that close to her again. Finally, I could deny it no longer: I could visit the past, and be a part of it, but I could not change it. It has been written that what’s past is prologue, and it is so, with my sister’s fate a bitter prologue indeed. The future was all that was left to me now, to shape as best I could.
XIV
Feathers
I awoke to find myself lying on a rock the size of a coffin, waves lapping disconsolately at my feet. Humphrey sat on an adjacent rock, staring blankly out over grey rocks, grey water, grey skies, a sullen fishing boat tied to a dilapidated wharf, a couple of seagulls wheeling lethargically not far above us, and not much else. Fog shrouded everything like a veil. What might have been a merry little port in the sunshine had assumed a potent air of melancholy in the fog—or maybe it was just me.
I battled my way to a sitting position. My leg throbbed, my throat hurt, my muscles ached.
Humphrey heard me groan and turned round.
“Where are we?” I asked, my voice a croaky caricature of its former self.
“How should I know?” He pitched a small pebble he’d been holding. It disappeared into the fog, producing a tiny splash. “You were the one who took us here.”
“Right.” I vaguely remembered returning to the accident scene to collect Humphrey. I had transported us to the first acceptable destination that had presented itself. It looked like Port Kerry, though I couldn’t tell what year. Summer, sometime.
“How long have I been out?”
“Hours. I don’t know exactly. I don’t have a watch.”
“I knew that. Sorry.”
He sighed. “No, Barnabus. I’m sorry.”
He was talking about Katerina.
We sat and stared into the fog. By all rights a foghorn should have sounded in the distance, but it didn’t. “What now?” I asked.
“We go back. Back to where we can be of some use. Back to where everything isn’t preordained.”
Where was that? Back to Ridley? The boy didn’t want my help, even if I could help him, which seemed less and less likely. Was that any reason not to help him? Maybe. That and the fact that I didn’t feel up to it anymore. I just wanted to forget about the whole thing. Call in sick. I wanted to spend my time doing what I wanted to do, not what I needed to do, or what somebody else wanted me to do.
A tiny voice in the back of my mind reminded me that I was supposed to be working for Iugurtha now. The gate wasn’t my property, it was hers. Moreover, Iugurtha was about to go to war, and Ridley would be going with her. Katerina’s fate might have been preordained but Ridley’s wasn’t. He could live or he could die and I needed to be there to make sure it wasn’t the latter. My place was beside my nephew.
&nbs
p; Take care of my boy.
I sighed. I had no choice but to do what Katerina had asked of me. Which meant doing what Iugurtha had asked of me.
“Iugurtha,” I said, opening the book.
I felt a little better with the power of the gate coursing through me. I selected Iugurtha’s bookmark and located Humphrey’s patient. The bookmark had advanced slightly, reflecting the last time I’d seen the man through the gate. There was something familiar about him. Just as I was thinking that, he turned his head. To my astonishment, I beheld the face of my brother-in-law, Jerry Doucette. Katerina’s husband, Ridley’s father. Missing and presumed dead.
“Humphrey, it’s—”
“I know.” Humphrey had known Jerry too.
The notion that Ridley wasn’t an orphan after all gave me a renewed sense of purpose. Afraid I might get Humphrey to Jerry too late, that I might somehow fail Ridley’s father within hours of having failed his mother, I clung to Iugurtha’s bookmark with all my might. Only when I was absolutely certain that the coordinates would not somehow slip through my fingers did I thrust the gate all the way open, and step through.
Which is why I was at somewhat of a loss to explain what happened next.
Each transition through the gate was different in its own way. This time was no exception. It began with the sensation that I was falling. The earth flipped into and out of view. I beat my wings and the horizon stabilized before me. I glided for a while, trying to get my bearings. Not far ahead a seagull drifted on the same current. I shook my head, trying to clear my thoughts. Jerry should be here somewhere, and Humphrey…
My wings?
I angled my head to see. Air rushed past me with a whoosh that only now registered on my consciousness. Wings… I had wings! Complete with feathers. Were they mine? I lifted the right one up to see. It was my wing all right, upholstered in white feathers with a smattering of grey. The manoeuvre together with the shock of discovering that I was a bird threw me into a stall, and I plummeted earthward.
This was not good. I had never flown in an aircraft of any kind. I had no experience flying anything more than a kite. Down I went. I began to spiral. I tried flapping my wings but it was no use. The force of the wind had glued them to my sides. Before me the ground loomed large. Briefly, I wondered if I would feel anything when I struck the earth, or if death would come fast enough to cheat pain. I was not keen to find out.
When I had been trapped in Sweep’s mind it had been different. Then, Sweep had been in control. Why was I in charge now? The bird should be in charge. It knew how to fly, not me. Maybe that was the problem. Maybe, as with Sweep, I was just hitching a ride on the bird’s consciousness. I needed to get out of the bird’s way and let it do what came naturally. Holding on to the seagull’s faculties with a death grip was not the answer. I forced myself to relinquish control.
Once the seagull was back in the driver’s seat, it responded instantly, riding with the dive instead of fighting it. It forced its wings even closer to its body and pointed its beak straight downward. We picked up speed. I would have been terrified had not the posture felt exceedingly natural. Just when I thought that it was too late to pull up, that we were about to burrow beak first into a wharf, the seagull spread its wings just a hair and we levelled off. Soon we were gliding naturally over Port Kerry out into Malpeque Bay. My terror was replaced by a feeling of exhilaration. We were flying!
Now if only we could avoid crashing into the cabin cruiser looming out of the fog. Several people were standing on the deck watching us. Certain that we were about to collide into the side of the boat, I wanted nothing more than to take over and beat the seagull’s wings furiously to avoid impact. I resisted the urge. Sure enough, with just a flick of its wings, the seagull altered our trajectory and we cleared the upper deck with inches to spare. The seagull circled the boat a couple of times, then descended to perch on a railing to collect itself.
The poor bird’s heart was pounding. It was badly frightened. One minute it had been minding its own business, flying along the beach searching for a nice bit of trash to pick through, and the next it had no control whatsoever over its own body. The experience had been scary enough for me. It must have been terrifying for the bird. Whether it could detect my presence I could not say, but it was quite shaken up, and required some time to preen and pick at its feathers in an effort to calm down and reassure itself that it was okay.
This was altogether different than my experience with Sweep. Then, Iugurtha had been controlling the gate. She had made me a prisoner inside Sweep’s brain. This time, I had placed myself inside the seagull’s consciousness, albeit unintentionally. I was in charge. It was up to me whether I stayed or went. If I so chose, I could make the seagull do whatever I wanted. This was fortuitous, as I had no intention of remaining a seagull any longer than absolutely necessary.
I needed to get back to my own body so I could reunite Ridley with his father. And what of the doctor? Had he too come through the gate as a seagull? Could he even survive as a seagull? Not that long ago (though it felt like ages), Iugurtha had placed an enormous store of information in my brain. It included the languages, motor and social skills of a thousand different beings, if not more. I was only just now beginning to make use of the tiniest portion of this information. That which pertained to a bird native to the planet Earth: Larus Argentatus, or herring gull. Whatever kernel of myself was transmitted through the gate included this magnificent store of information, making life as a seagull relatively comfortable for me. Humphrey had received no such preparation.
Helping both Ridley and the doctor would require the gate. Unfortunately, I had no idea where to look for it. My host had wandered widely in his distress after my arrival. It could have fallen anywhere.
I would have to scour the entire island if that’s what it took. Doing so would require that I assume control over the seagull’s body, so after mentally reviewing the mechanics of flight, I did just that and took off.
I hadn’t gone far when I noticed a lone seagull trailing me: a slender female with grey wingtips. It was the same bird that I had seen when I arrived. Thanks to my host’s memories I knew her well enough: in English her name would translate roughly as Rise Swiftly. Rise was following me because the seagull I inhabited was her mate. I had known this on some level but hadn’t given it a second’s thought, thinking that seagulls probably didn’t take relationships that seriously.
I ignored her for a while, hoping that she would lose interest and go away. When it became apparent that this wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, I allowed her to catch up.
“Sky,” she called, addressing me by a variation of my host’s proper name. “Where are you going?”
I decided to be honest with her. “I’m not your mate, Rise. I’m not even a seagull. I’m a whole other being. But don’t worry—Sky is here. I’m just borrowing his body for a while. When I finish what I have to do, I’ll give it back to him, and you’ll live happily ever after.”
“Now listen to me, bird,” Rise said. “You’re not going anywhere without me.”
I was taken aback. Surely, of all God’s creatures, birds could come and go as they pleased, alone if they so chose. But when I allowed myself to peek into Sky’s brain, I saw his relationship with Rise clearly laid out. The emotional life of seagulls is more complicated than I had ever imagined.
Born days apart, the same spring on the same shore, Rise and Sky did not know a life apart. Together they had endured harsh winters and known lean days. They had raised young and experienced loss. Although they had been known to exchange harsh words as well as loving ones, they were as committed to one another as any human couple. They rode the winds together, both hot and cold. Though a warm spring day, it was a bit of a chilly wind we navigated now.
“Where are you going, Sky?” Rise asked, as we flew low over a sandy beach inhabited by children frolicking in the whitecaps.
“Away.”
She buzzed me, flying so close that I had to swerve to avoid being hit.
“Stop that!”
“Come on, Sky. Let’s go home and soar among the cliffs, just you and me.”
“Soon. There’s something I have to do first.”
“What?”
“I have to find an old friend.”
“An old friend? What old friend?”
“His name is—” I stopped. There was no translation for Humphrey in gull. Nor was there a word for doctor. “I don’t know how to say his name. You don’t know him, though.”
“How could I not know him? All our friends are the same. Where is he?”
“I don’t know,” I told her.
“How will you find him?”
“I don’t know.”
She looked over her wing at me. “Let me get this straight. You think you’re someone else. You’re looking for someone you say is an old friend but you don’t even know his name. And you have no idea how to find him. Sky, are you okay?”
I was definitely not okay. There was a better-than-even chance that I was actually curled up in a foetal position on the floor of my bedroom lying in a puddle of my own urine. But if I wasn’t really a seagull, then the illusion was remarkably convincing, and I didn’t have much choice but to go along with it until another, more convincing version of reality presented itself.
When I didn’t answer, Rise asked, “Okay. What does he look like?”
I had no idea. At that point I couldn’t even say for certain that Humphrey had come through the gate with me, or become a seagull—everything I was doing was based on a bit of a hunch, really. “He’ll be scared, probably confused. He might not be able to fly.”
“So he’s hurt?” Rise suggested.
“Kind of. In a way.”
“And you’re trying to help him.”