Slices

by Michael Montoure

  Timothy was outside in the backyard, smoking a cigarette in the cool midnight air. He had only recently started smoking, started by finishing the pack Johnny Lee had left on his kitchen counter. Nights like this, a cigarette helped him think. Cleared his head a little.

  He was standing by a pond toward the far end of the yard, nearly at the edge of the house’s influence, but the angled tip of the roof’s shadow still penetrated deep into the pond’s shallows. It was old and unkept, its still water green and choked with Autumn leaves.

  Timothy flicked his dead cigarette into the pond, thinking that the leaves looked like faces, and knowing that the Dire Bride was close. This shadow, this pond, was another door, and idly he unlocked it and pulled her closer.

  He watched her floating beneath the surface, her ruined dress drifting like clouds, the faces under her flesh turning to look at him, and the newest stared back at him accusingly.

  “Hello, Johnny Lee,” he said, lighting another cigarette. He couldn’t hear Johnny Lee’s words, not really. But he could see his lips move, could hear the words in his head:

  They’ll figure you out, Johnny Lee told him. They’ll know, sooner or later. You can’t keep giving people to them like this, or they’ll realize —

  If there is a monster here, it’s you.

  Timothy just stared and didn’t answer. After a moment, he turned and went into the house.

  He didn’t sleep at all that night; he just watched his boyfriend sleep in the moonlight, watched his eyes track back and forth as he dreamed, and wondered, distantly, what the flesh above his heart tasted like.

  COUNTERCLOCKWISE

  He’d been on the bus for ten minutes before he remembered that this route didn’t exist any more.

  He shouldn’t have come back here. In the city he’d come to think of as home, it was easier to remember, to keep track of what was new and real, and stay out of the dead spaces. But here, in the streets he’d walked as a child, where everything felt old and familiar, it was too easy to see a sign where a bus stop once stood, wait for a bus that no one else could see, and climb aboard.

  James felt the cold biting into his skin, saw the steam of his breath hang in the air, and it jerked him awake and made him sit up and start paying attention to where he was. The bus driver’s fare box didn’t have a card reader or a slot for dollar bills. No one had smart phones or wires trailing from ear buds down to their pockets. Some kid in the back, who glared back at him for staring, had a ghetto blaster in his lap, size of a suitcase. Every conversation around him was hollow and distant, the sounds distorted, like an old and stretched tape being played back in another room.

  He closed his eyes and shoved his hand in his pocket — wrapped his fingers around his cell phone. Held his breath and counted to ten. Sometimes that worked. He opened his eyes and nothing had changed.

  He reached up and pulled the cord, but the bell didn’t ring. He couldn’t interact — that was always a bad sign. He got out of his seat and went up to the driver. “Hey. Hey. Let me off here, please. Please, I need to get off this bus.”

  The driver looked up at him blankly, frowning. He said something James couldn’t hear, and then turned back to the road.

  James looked out the window. He couldn’t tell what year it was outside, and he wasn’t sure if getting off the bus was the right thing to do or not, but he didn’t want to stay on it any more. Small tight metal box, all these cold people and their dead staring eyes. He closed his again, holding the phone in his pocket white-knuckle tight. Deep breath, count to ten, and he made it to five when the bus lurched to a stop and someone who couldn’t see him pushed past on their way out. He followed, blinking, looking around.

  A real bus shelter, this time — he rested a hand on one of the metal beams that held up the walls, and it was warm from the sun, and his breath was no longer visible. He took a half-hearted look at the bus schedule, and decided to just walk the rest of the way, no matter how far it was.

  This would be so much easier if he could still drive. But he hadn’t been behind the wheel since he nearly got in an accident driving through a dead space, and a car in a century he couldn’t see missed him by inches, jerked his mind back to the present with a blast from its horn.

  He didn’t know how long he spent walking, since he’d long since given up trying to wear a watch, but he kept going until he was exhausted.

  There was no use. He had no idea where he was. He thought he’d be able to go right to the house, or what was left of it, see if its bones were still standing. But things here had changed, just enough. It was just past the school, less than a mile maybe, no more than two, into the woods — but had he passed the right school? Were the woods still there, or had they been cut down, the space given over to condos and convenience stores? Hell, was he still even facing the right direction? He looked at the angle the sun hung in the sky and couldn’t be sure.

  He stopped outside a bakery — they had tables and chairs outside for customers, and he sat down heavily, folded his arms on the table, and rested his head on them for just a moment.

  “Can I get you something?”

  He sat back up, looked at the girl’s annoyed and suspicious expression. She probably thinks I’m homeless, he realized.

  “Oh — sorry, no, I’m — waiting for someone,” he said.

  “Yeah?” She looked young. Hell, she probably hadn’t even been born yet when it had happened.

  “He should be here soon,” James said, hoping the lie sounded convincing. “I’ll — I’ll call him again.”

  He pulled the phone from his pocket, and thumbed through his contact list until he found Darryl’s name. He hesitated for just a second, and pressed the button as the waitress walked away. He almost didn’t want to put the phone up to his ear, listen to it ringing, didn’t want to hear a voice he hadn’t heard in over twenty years.

  He didn’t even know exactly what he was going to say. Maybe he really should ask Darryl to come here and meet him. The last time he’d tried having a conversation like this on the phone, it hadn’t gone very well.

  Three weeks ago, and he was in a cheap hotel room, somewhere on the road between his new hometown and his old one. It was hard to tell that this wasn’t a dead space — the wallpaper, the television, even the towels in the bathroom, none of them looked like they’d been replaced any time since the 70’s. But it was cheap, and that was the important thing, to make what little money he had last.

  He’d been fired from his last job, the last job he’d been able to find. Fired wasn’t what they called it. He’d been “let go.”

  It was a fast food place, serving what white people thought of as Mexican food, and he’d been “let go” because he wouldn’t go in the walk-in freezer any more. He just couldn’t shake the conviction that someone was going to lock him inside by accident. Or on purpose.

  Looking back now, he thinks the cold is what did it. That it shocked something in his system, feeling it all over like a million needles reaching down into bone. He’d always had moments when he could see things that weren’t there anymore, ever since the accident — and seeing the “MISSING” posters on telephone poles long after they’d been taken down was the worst part — but ever since the first time he’d stepped foot in the deep freeze, let that heavy door swing shut behind him and seal him away from warmth and people and light, that was when something woke up inside him. Only then did he start really seeing the dead spaces, losing himself inside them, feeling the even deeper, numbing cold of time standing still.

  The cold was leading him home. Had led him here, so far, to this room that belonged to no one, where he’d sat watching movies in snowy black-and-white on the ancient TV, with his phone sitting in his lap, working up the nerve to make the first call.

  He’d found everyone online, tracked down a couple of names and addresses and phone numbers, given over his credit card number to websites he didn’t really trust to find the rest. His friends, from when he was a child.

  Not
all of them, of course. One name missing.

  He made himself dial the number for the first name on the list — Kevin — and smiled tight all through the opening pleasantries. “James, man, Jesus, how have you been? How long has it been? So good to hear from you! What have you been doing with your life?” And he sat on the edge of the bed, back straight, one hand pressing the phone to his ear and the other arm wrapped around his chest, hand clutching the opposite shoulder, and he made all the right sounds, all the right replies, until he finally found an opening for the question he needed to ask.

  “Sorry, what did you just say?”

  He repeated it a little louder —

  “Do you remember when we built a time machine?”

  Laughter. “When we built a what?”

  “You remember.”

  “No, man, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” There was amusement in his voice — he was waiting for the punchline.

  “It was out at that old, run-down house in the woods, do you remember? The old Sunderland house. We weren’t supposed to go out there, we knew we’d get in trouble for it, but we went all the time anyway? Remember the house? All the walls had fallen in, and — ”

  “Oh, yeah. Yeah, I do remember. Man, I hadn’t thought about that in — ”

  “And there was — there was all this old junk, and we used to haul it around to play on — like that washing machine we said was that weak spot on the Death Star — ”

  “Oh yeah! And we’d throw rocks at it and try to get them through the door. Yeah. Man, how do remember all this?”

  “And there was — the day we built the time machine. We had, like, an old hose for a cable, and we found the guts of an old television and a microwave, and other stuff, and we piled it around — ” His voice caught. “Around an old refrigerator.”

  Silence.

  “Kevin? Are you still there?” No sound but faint white noise. “Did you hear what I just said?”

  “Is that was this about? Is that why you’re calling me?”

  “Yeah, but, listen, it’s not what you — ”

  “Because, because I don’t know what you’re thinking, that was a long time ago and we were just kids then, and we didn’t know what the hell we were doing, and — look, if this is some kind of blackmail thing, you can just — ”

  “No, no, I’m not — I just want to know if you think — ”

  “I’ve got a wife. And kids. I’ve got a life now, and if you think you can just come back out of nowhere and fuck with me, you can just fuck off.”

  “No, just listen, please listen — do you think there’s any chance — ”

  “Just forget you know this number, all right? Don’t call here again, or I’m calling the police.”

  He hung up. James sat there with the silenced phone, feeling the biting dead cold creeping in at the corners of the room, his unvoiced question still echoing in his head.

  Do you think there’s any chance it might have worked?

  Thirty years before.

  They went to school together, the five of them. James and Kevin, Darryl and Chris. Oh, and Andrew. Drew was a year younger than them, still in second grade while they were in third, a world of difference, but they let him tag along when they played after school because they just simply got tired of trying to tell him not to.

  Drew was always nervous about coming along to the old ruined house — there were always stories, from the kids who said it was haunted to teachers who said child molesters hung out in those woods, and the warnings never made the woods any less attractive — just made the kids who played there sharply aware that if anyone caught them doing it, they’d be in Trouble, and Trouble was the last thing Drew wanted.

  But the lure of the old house, and all the junk around it, was too much to resist, and so was the company of older boys who were at least willing to tolerate him.

  And they did tolerate him, because he did think of cool shit to do sometimes, even though he was just a little kid. Clever, was what grown-ups called him. His friends were all interested in science-fiction, laser guns and spaceships, and James would cover his notebooks with elaborate space battles rendered in ballpoint ink, but Drew was the one who would make robots out of tin cans and bottlecaps and screws, turn them in as art class homework, and get A’s for it.

  So even though the other kids acted like they didn’t want him around, James had noticed that half the time, whatever they were playing was Drew’s idea.

  Like this time, when Darryl had asked “Whatcha doin’?” and Drew had answered “building a time machine,” and everyone else went along with it.

  They gathered the pieces for it, started putting it together, arguing over what should go where, talking about where they would go when it was finished. James wanted to go to the future — see what the twenty-first century was like. Chris wanted to go see dinosaurs, and Kevin just wanted to go kill Nazis.

  James found, in what used to be part of the garage, an old car battery, buried under piles of newspapers that had been half-destroyed by wind and rain. He had been trying to look through them, see if he could find somewhere in the past they could go, but all the headlines were lost and unreadable. But the battery, now — that, he could use.

  He hauled it back over to the refrigerator — it took him a minute, car batteries were way heavier than they looked.

  Drew had just stepped inside the refrigerator’s open door, and was going over some imaginary checklist with Chris.

  James set the battery down around the back. “This will be the power supply,” he said to whoever was listening, and started to attach it to the metal grill on the back with an unbent wire coat hanger.

  No one else was really paying attention to him. But they came running when the spark from the battery knocked him back on his ass.

  And that has to have been when Chris let the refrigerator door swing shut.

  “Oh, shit, oh, shit,” Kevin said, “are you okay?”

  “I think — so, yeah.” He was having a little trouble forming words. His hands were tingling and numb, and the length of his arm felt like it was burning, still. But all of it was fading, the moment moving on.

  “Guys?” James could barely hear Drew’s muffled voice. “Guys, what’s going on?”

  “Can you stand up?” Darryl said urgently, reaching a hand down to him.

  “Oh, man. We are going to be in so much trouble,” Chris was saying, already tearing up. “We are going to catch so much shit for being out here.”

  “I think I’m okay,” James said, climbing unsteadily to his feet. “I’ll be fine in a minute.”

  He let go of Darryl’s hand, and Darryl looked around disgustedly at what they’d built. “Fuck this. This was stupid,” he said, kicking the television innards. “Let’s get out of here.”

  “Guys? What happened? Can I come out now?” James could hear Drew banging on the door from the inside, flat-palmed. “Guys?”

  “Come on,” Darryl said, dragging James by the arm, and the others followed. James kept looking over his shoulder at their time machine. He was tingling all over now, light-headed, and each moment seemed to overlap the next.

  “What about Drew?” he asked.

  “Fuck him, too,” Darryl said flatly. “Let him find his own way home.”

  But he never did, of course.

  “We were just kids then,” Darryl was saying now. “Kevin’s right about that.”

  They were talking quietly in Darryl’s living room, James sitting on the edge of the uncomfortable-looking fold-out bed that had been a couch a minute ago.

  “So you never told anyone?” James said. “Not even — ”

  Darryl glanced down the hall, toward the room where his wife was reading a bedtime story to their son. “Not even Susan. Especially not Susan. What would I tell her? Besides, we don’t know what happened. Not really.”

  “Oh, come on.”

  “We don’t. Not really. I mean, no one ever found a — you know, his body, or anything.”
/>   “Did you ever go back and check?”

  “Did I — No.” Darryl smiled a weird, lopsided grin. “No. Nobody did.”

  They had all stopped playing there, after that day. When they got to school the next day and realized that Drew wasn’t there, and the day after that, and the day after that. They talked about it, argued about it, agreed to play dumb if anyone asked — too scared they’d get in trouble, scared they might go to jail if the worst had happened.

  “Maybe he did get out,” Darryl said. “Maybe he ran away.”

  “Bullshit,” James said. “You know how it is with those old refrigerators. I mean, I’ve read about this. They used to have mechanical latches. No way you could push the door open from the inside, especially not a little kid. Hundreds of kids died like that before they changed how they made them. Hell, it still happens sometimes. Kids still die, just like Drew did.”

  “We don’t know that,” Darryl said again, struggling to keep his voice down. “I mean, come on, somebody would have found the body by now. Okay, maybe he didn’t run away, maybe, somebody kidnapped him, or something. We left him there alone and somebody took him.”

  “And, what, do you think that’s better?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Is this how you live with yourself?”

  Darryl smiled that lopsided smile again. “Yeah. Yeah, it is. This is how I live with myself.”

  James leaned forward and said urgently, “Don’t you ever think about it? What it must have been like? Alone in the dark, four walls close around him, do you think he thought we were coming back? Did he think maybe it was a joke? Or did he realize we just didn’t care, do you think? Do you think he starved to death, or ran out of air first? Did he pound on the walls, did he scream, did he beat his fists bloody, or do you think he just sat down and gave up? How can you not think about this?”

  “I don’t think about it because I have to get on with my life,” Darryl hissed. “Okay, you’re right, we shouldn’t have left him there, it was wrong, for all I know we’re going to hell for it, but I can’t think about it every day! It was thirty fucking years ago and there’s nothing we can do to change it!”