‘Mom!’ he managed at last. ‘You’re so - so - uh -big!’
Marty frowned. That wasn’t what he wanted to say. But what could he say?
His mother smiled at him reassuringly, as if her son could never say anything wrong. She opened a cigarette case encrusted with diamonds, then picked up a cigarette between two deep red, sculpted nails, and fitted it into a diamond-inlaid cigarette holder. Plac^ the mouthpiece of the holder between her deep red lips, she lit the cigarette with a solid gold lighter, an inhaled as if the smoke was the breath of life.
She looked over at her son again.
‘Everything’s going to be fine, Marty.’She raised one overplucked eyebrow. ‘Are you hungry? We can call room service -’
Marty swung his legs off the bed. This whole room was as overdecorated as his mother. The wallpaper was inlaid with golden thread. The paintings were set in heavy wooden frames painted in gold leaf. Golden tinted chandeliers hung from the ceiling.
He looked out the window, past the gold-braided drapes. There, twenty-seven floors below, he could see the twinkling lights of Hill Valley and, beyond that, the ring of factories, with a hundred smokestacks belching forth thick, black smoke that blotted out the stars. He must be on the very top floor of Biff Tannen's Pleasure Paradise.
But why was the Paradise here? How did a place like this end up in Hill Valley, run by Biff Tannen, of all people? A nice place like Hill Valley, ending up like this - Marty felt a coldness deep inside, like an ice cube in the pit of his stomach. He couldn’t think of anything to say.
‘I forgot,’ his mother jumped in, filling the void left by his silence. She waved happily at their surroundings with her manicured nails. 'You haven't seen the penthouse since we redecorated!’
We? Marty thought. Did that mean his whole family lived here? But what was his family doing, living in the penthouse of the Paradise?
‘Lorraine?’ a gruff voice called from the other side of the closed bedroom door. 'Where are you?'
Marty's mother frowned.
‘It’s your father.’
She took another quick drag on her cigarette.
‘My father?’ Marty asked. That gruff voice didn’t sound anything like George McFly.
Somebody kicked open the bedroom door.
Biff Tannen walked in. He had changed, too. He was in better shape than the last time Marty had seen him-in 1985, that is. His clothes were fancier, too - a silk suit of pastel green, and a shirt open half way down his chest to show off a dozen gold chains.
His three old gang buddies followed him into the room. All three of them smirked at Marty like they had been taking lessons from their boss.
Marty stared. His father? This was what his mother meant? Biff Tannen?
‘My father?’ Marty yelled.
Biff glared at Marty as if the teenager had just crawled out from under a rock.
‘You’re supposed to be in Switzerland,’ he snapped, ‘you little son of a bitch!! Did you get kicked out of another boarding school?- He waggled a pudgy index finger at Marty’s mother. 'Damn Lorraine! Do you know how much perfectly good dough I've blown on this no-good kid of yours? On all three of them?’
Mom took a couple of quick, nervous puffs from her cigarette before she replied.
‘What the hell do you care?’ she retorted. ‘We can afford it! The least we can do is make a better life for our children!’
She walked over to a portable bar next to the picture window, and poured herself three fingers of scotch.
‘Marty’syour kid, not mine, and all the money in the world wouldn’t do jack shit for that lazy bum! He’s a butthead, just like his old man was!’
Marty’s mother slammed her glass down. ‘Don’t you dare speak that way about George! You’re not even half the man he was!’
Biff took two quick steps across the room and slapped her full across the face.
‘Never talk to me like that, you hear me?’ Biff growled, his hand lifted to hit her again. ‘Ever!’
Marty's mother cringed.
This was too much! Marty couldn’t stand here and watch this happen. He ran for Biff.
3-D and Skinhead grabbed him and pulled him away.
Marty’s mother rubbed her cheek and jaw. Even with the heavy make-up, Marty could see an angry red welt forming there.
Biff smirked at the captive Marty.
‘Always the little hothead, huh?’ He walked up to Marty. ‘Come on, want to take a poke at me?’ -
It would be a little tough, Marty thought, to take a poke at Biff while his goons were still holding onto him.
Biff sucker-punched Marty in the stomach.
‘Damn it, Biff!’ she hollered. ‘That’s it. I’m leaving!’ She turned and walked purposefully towards the door.
‘Sure, walk out!’ Biff called after her. ‘And I’ll cut you off - you and your kids!’
She paused in the doorway.
‘I can get Dave’s probation revoked, and he’ll have to go to prison.’ Biff’s smirk spread across his face. He was really enjoying this. ‘Maybe he’ll even end up sharing a cell with your brother Joey. And Linda - I’ll close her accounts and she can settle her debts with the bank all by herself. And Marty, well -’
‘OK, Biff,’ she murmured. ‘You win. I’ll’ - it took her a moment to get the final word out - ‘stay.’
Mom’s shoulders slumped in defeat. She turned around and walked slowly back to the bar.
Biff grinned, showing all his teeth.
‘Damn right you’ll stay.’ He turned to Marty, the smile gone. ‘As for you, I’ll be back up here in an hour.’ He looked down at his fingers as his right hand curled into a fist. ‘So you’d better not be -’
Biff stormed from the room. His thugs let Marty go and followed their boss.
Marty looked over at his mother. She looked away, as if she couldn’t face the questions in his gaze.
‘I had it coming, Marty,’ she said slowly. ‘I was wrong. He was right.’
Marty couldn’t believe this.
‘Mom, what are you saying? You’re actually defending him!’
She shook her head. ‘He’s my husband, and he takes care of all of us, and he deserves our respect.’ This got worse with everything she said.
‘Your husband?’ Marty yelled. He was getting really upset. ‘Respect? How can he be your husband? How could you leave Dad for him?’
Mom looked back to Marty, the pain in her eyes turned to concern.
‘Leave Dad?’ she asked gently, 'Marty, are you feeling all right?’
‘No!’ Marty replied vehemently.‘ I'm not feeling aII right! I don’t understand one damned thing that’s going on around here and why nobody can give me a straight answer!’
His mother’s brow furrowed as she shook her head again.
‘They must have really hit you over the head hard.’
But Marty had had enough of this nonsense. He needed some answers!
‘Mom,’ he insisted, ‘I want just one thing. Where’s my father? Where’s George McFly?’
His mother reached out her hand to almost, but not quite, touch her son.
‘Marty,’ she said, slowly and sadly, ‘George - your father - is in the same place he’s been for the last twelve years. Oak Park Cemetery.’
Marty ran.
He raced across the cemetery in the bright moonlight, darting wildly from row to row of gravestones, barely avoiding dead trees and marble monuments in his panicked scramble to know the truth. He scanned the names etched in granite as he ran, half of him searching for the gravestone with his father’s name, the other half still somehow hoping, wishing, praying that his mother had lied, that there would be no gravestone, that his father would still be alive.
He stopped, and took a step backward.
There it was. A simple, granite marker, smaller than most of the others around it, with three lines etched in the stone:
IN LOVING MEMORY
GEORGE DOUGLAS McFLY
April 1 19
38 - March 15 1973
‘1973!’ Marty shouted to the sky. ‘No!’ He fell to his knees in front of the stone. ‘Please, God, no! This can’t be happening!’
A shadow fell across the gravestone. Marty looked up. There was someone standing behind him.
‘I’m afraid it is happening, Marty,’ a familiar voice said. ‘All of it.’
‘Doc!’ Marty cried as he turned.
Doc Brown nodded soberly down at Marty.
‘When I learned about your father,’ he explained, ‘I figured you’d come here.’
Marty stood so quickly that he almost lost his balance.
‘Then you know what happened to him?’ he asked. ‘You know what happened on’ - he turned back to the gravestone to check the date - ‘March 15 1973?’
Doc nodded again.
‘Yes, Marty, I know.’
Doc led the way into his lab - or at least what was left of it.
The place had been trashed. A lot of Doc’s gizmos had been torn apart. Pieces of experiments and bits of broken glass littered the floor, crunching underfoot as they walked. The windows had all been smashed, and most of them had been boarded up. The electricity was gone, too. Doc had lit a pair of candles when they entered, and handed one to Marty. He then proceeded to walk around the edges of the lab, lighting other strategically placed candles from the first one’s flame until the entire room was filled with a warm glow.
It didn’t matter, though. It could have stayed dark for all Marty cared. His father - dead?
Doc waved Marty over to the one table left standing, and the large and heavy bound volume open there. As Marty brought his candle close to the pages,
The book was open to the local Hill Valley paper, dated March 16 1973, the day after his father died. Marty stared at the headline:
GEORGE McFLY MURDERED!
And, in smaller type below:
Author Shot Dead in Apparent Holdup
Enroute to Receive Book Award!
Police Baffled, Search for Witnesses!
‘I went to the Public Library to try to make some sense out of all of the madness,’ Doc explained over Marty’s shoulder. ‘The place was boarded up - shut down. So I broke in and’- he waved at the book and a couple more like it still on the floor -‘borrowed some newspapers."
Marty glanced up from his reading.
‘But Doc, how can all this be happening? I mean, it’s like we’re in hell or something.’
Doc looked between the boards, studying the world beyond one of the broken windows.
‘No, it’s Hill Valley,’ he replied curtly, ‘although I can’t imagine hell being much worse.’
Einstein whined by Doc’s feet. Doc glanced down.
‘I know, Einie,’ he said with a sigh. ‘The lab’s an awful mess.’ He pulled a cushion from out of the rubble and dusted it off, then placed it on the floor.
Einstein dutifully sat on it.
Doc turned back to Marty.
‘You see, Marty,’ Doc explained in his best lecture mode, ‘the continuum has been disrupted, creating a new temporal event sequence resulting in this alternate reality - alternate to us, but reality for everyone else.’
Marty shook his head. He couldn’t understand a word.
‘English, Doc,’ he requested.
Doc picked up a fallen blackboard and propped it up against the table. Another moment’s search, and he had located a piece of chalk.
Doc drew a straight line on the blackboard.
‘Imagine that this line represents time. Here’s the present, 1985 -’
He wrote ‘1985’ in the centre of the line.
‘The past -’
He wrote ‘PAST’ to the left.
‘And the future.’
To the right of ‘1985’, he scrawled a big, fat ‘F’.
‘Now, prior to this point in time’- he pointed again to 1985 -‘somewhere in the past’- he put an ‘X’ above the line in the past -‘the time line was skewed’- he drew another line, from the middle of the past, straight down toward the bottom of the blackboard - ‘resulting in this alternate 1985. Alternate to you, me and Einstein, but reality for everyone else.’
Marty shook his head. ‘I still don’t get it, Doc.’
Doc reached in the pocket of his lab coat, and pulled out a silver bag.
‘Recognise this?’ he asked. He handed the bag to Marty. ‘It’s the bag the Sports Book came in. I know, because the receipt was still inside.’ Doc passed the receipt over, too. Yep, there it was, the name of the Antique Store, followed by the words ‘PURCHASED: GREY’S SPORTS ALMANAC 1950-2000’ and the incredibly inflated price. It was the book Marty had bought, and here was the bag he had carried it in. But Doc had thrown the book and the bag away, hadn’t he?
‘I found them in the time machine,’ Doc continued ‘along with this -’.
Doc pulled out a brass ornament on Ae top of a broken pole. Marty had seen that ornament before It was in the shape of a fist. In fact, he had personaUy felt that ornament, when a certain older gentleman had knocked him with it and called Marty a ‘butthead’ - in 2015! So Marty wasn’t at all surprised when he read the name engraved on the palm:
‘Biff H. Tannen’
This was the top of Biff’s cane,’ Marty explained, although he guessed that Doc already knew it. ‘Old Biff, in the future. And you found it in the DeLorean?’
‘Correct!’ Doc raised a finger to drive home his point. ‘It was in the time machine because Biff was in the time machine, with the Sports Almanac!’
‘Holy shit!’ Marty replied.
‘You see,’ Doc continued, obviously proud of his deductive abilities, ‘while we were in the future’- he pointed at the big ‘F* on the blackboard -‘Biff got the sports book, stole the time machine, went back in time and gave the book to himself at some point here - he drew a long arc, all the way from the ‘F’ to the ‘X - in the past!’
He picked up another of those large newspaper volumes from the floor, and opened the book at the place he had marked with a piece of broken ceiling tile.
‘Look.’
The headline on this issue read:
HV MAN WINS BIG AT RACES!
Underneath that was a photo of Biff collecting his winnings at the pay window.
Doc slapped the paper in front of Marty.
‘It says right here that Biff made his first million betting on a horse race in 1958. He wasn’t just lucky.
He knew - because he had all the race results in the Sports Almanac!’ Doc’s point making finger rose one more time. ‘That’s how he made his entire fortune!’
He pulled one more thing out of his lab coat pocket.
‘Look at this pocket with the magnifying glass,’ he told Marty.
Marty took the handle of the glass from Doc and held the lens over the photo. There, sticking out of Biffs pocket, was the top half of the Sports Almanac!
‘That bastard stole my idea!’ He put down the glass and looked up at his scientist friend. ‘Doc, he must have overheard me when I told you about -’
He stopped himself midsentence. This Sports Almanac scheme had been his idea. He was to blame for everything that happened to Hill Valley!
‘This whole thing’s my fault,’ he said aloud, his voice little more than a whisper. ‘If I hadn’t bought that book, none of this would have happened.’
Doc waved both his hands, as if Marty’s fears were, groundless.
Well, that s all in the past,’ Doc reassured him.
‘You mean in the future,’ Marty corrected him.
Whatever, Doc replied, ‘it demonstrates precisely how time travel can be misused and why the time machine must be destroyed’- he paused to swallow - ‘after we straighten all of this out.’
‘Right!’ Marty agreed. So maybe there was a way out of this after all. ‘We’ve got to go back to the future and stop Biff from ever stealing the time machine!’
Doc shook his head with a frown. ‘We can’t, because if we travel into the future fr
om this point in time’- he pointed to the line going to the bottom of the blackboard -‘it would be the future of this reality, in which Biff is wealthy and married to your mother, and in which this has happened to me!’
Doc picked up a third book, and turned to another page marked by a smaller piece of ceiling tile. He pushed the book back in front of Marty.
The paper was dated July 1983. The headline at the top of the page read:
EMMETT BROWN COMMITTED.
Crackpot Inventor Declared Legally Insane!
Below the headlines was a picture of Doc, in a strait-jacket! And next to that was another headline:
NIXON TO SEEK 5TH TERM
Vows to End Vietnam War by 1985!
This was terrible! The whole world had changed.
‘No, Marty,’ Doc went on, ‘our only chance to repair the present is in the past, at the point where the time line skewed into this tangent.’ Doc slapped his fist into his open palm. ‘Somehow, we must find out the specific circumstances of how, where and when young Biff got his hands on that Sports Almanac!’
They had to find out something from Biff? How could they possibly do that?
Marty glanced at the twin headlines in front of him; his father dead, Doc Brown committed to an asylum.
Marty ripped the page about his father’s death out of the book and stuffed it inside his jacket. Something had to be done, and he realised there was only one person who could do it.
Marty had gotten them into this. Now he’d have to get them out. It was up to him to confront Biff and get the truth.
‘I’ll ask him,’ was all Marty said.
Chapter Thirteen
‘The heart, Ramone.’ Clint said. ‘Don’t forget the heart.’
Ramone fired.
It had been surprisingly easy for Marty to get into Biff’s penthouse - especially with Biff distracted the way he was. He was sitting in the hot tub with a couple of well-built young women, one blonde, one redhead. Marty guessed they were showgirls from Biff’s Pleasure Palace. And Biff and the showgirls were all more or less watching some Clint Eastwood movie on a big-screen TV.
Back to the Future Part II Page 10