by Andrew Post
Her husband helped her to her feet. With their knives still hanging from harnesses all over their spidery bodies, they jangled loudly in the silence of the living room toward the door. Once out, we could hear them all the way down the front walk and to the sidewalk.
Thadius finally tossed the piece of wood into the fire. He bent to poke at the logs. “If you want to stay the night, you can.”
Namaste said nothing, merely got up and left. I expected her to slam the door, steeled myself for the terrific boom, but she did something altogether worse. She stepped outside and pulled it shut very, very gently. The only way to tell it had closed was the faint click. Her costume moccasins made a series of slaps as she went down the front walk. I listened for the front gate to open, then close. Gentle.
Now that we were alone, Thadius checked the front window and flipped the switch that electrified the fence. He turned around, gazing down, and returned to the fireplace, squatting there, adjusting the logs.
For a while, neither of us said anything.
“What now?”
Thadius stepped away from the fireplace, took the seat where Namaste had been sitting. “Before tonight, I thought the worst feeling in the world would be being blocked,” he said, wringing his hands and staring into the fire that seemed determined to put itself out. “When I couldn’t get a play or my cauldron to cooperate, I felt so lost. Everything was dissatisfying, as if the entire world needed a good scrubbing, but I didn’t have the mop to do it. Only when I could move forward on a project would things clear up. Things didn’t look so impossible to fix. But this—everything now—can never be swept up.”
“Did you save the tablet?”
He flinched, as if I just materialized in the room. He reached into his bag and handed me the tablet. “Yeah, why?”
“If what we’re trying to prevent already happened to that Cassetera, then maybe we can avoid it.” I swiped up and down through The Siren House e-book. So many pages were just jumbled strings of corrupted text.
“Things are falling into place.” Thadius cupped a hand over his mouth, as if he was about to get sick. His gaze swiveled over to me, and he lowered his hand. His lips were drained of color. “I don’t think there’s any way to avoid it. Your mom—your other self’s mom, I mean, she was in that first chapter. And what you say about Beth . . . you mention her in the past tense. We’re close. All they need is the evidence of me being a scratcher; then that will actually happen.”
“So what do we do?”
He sat up. “I don’t know. But we’ll need—”
“From who, though? Everyone just now made it pretty clear they hate us.” Not that I could blame them, really.
He took a deep breath. “We ask the Betrayer.”
Track 25
ALL APOLOGIES
“No more lies. No more keeping things from you,” Thadius said, steering the wheel of his LeBaron the next morning. We came upon the Mega Deluxo, checked all around, and went around back. We passed several rows of Dumpsters and a grime-coated grease trap that looked like a popular hangout for raccoons and feral cats, judging by the footprints in the muck on its lid. “Clearly, holding on to secrets is not the right way to keep friends.”
I appreciated him saying that, but I didn’t know if he really saw me as a friend or just as his possible escape from death. In a way, I hated Mosaic Face. I suppose he cared for Thadius and wanted him to know something bad was around the corner. But at the same time, bringing me into all this seemed selfish. It felt as if he knew there was a hole he might fall into, knew there was a copilot present for when it happened, but instead of trying to steer around it himself, he’d sought me out, lied to me, strung me along, and generally made a total mess out of things.
We had to drive to the Mega Deluxo. There was no getting to the tunnel in the Siren House basement any longer; the entire building now filled that basement. We drove past the rubble on the way to the store, and it looked even worse in the daytime. The overcast day didn’t help.
I hadn’t been an employee all that long, but I was still ripped up pretty bad seeing it like that. Especially the Siren herself, still trapped under the marquee. All that broken glass around her, her head split open like a cantaloupe on the pavement—the wood inside her head bright and unstained by weather. Seeing the inside of the wooden woman’s head like that was like seeing the very spirit of the Siren House.
A few people were sifting through the rubble, calling names down into the broken walls, and sparkling smashed glass laying everywhere.
Thadius tapped the brake.
They saw us. One man raised a plank of wood and started approaching the car.
Thadius pressed the accelerator.
Once at the store, he shut off the engine. He remained holding the wheel, the engine clinking as it cooled.
“You all right?” I said.
“About as all right as I can be.”
He yanked the keys out and balled them into his fist. Staring out the cracked windshield, he didn’t move. Just stared at the back of the Mega Deluxo—all of those uniformly gray cinderblocks, separated by mortar, none of them really touching each other but entirely dependent on the one above, below, beside to keep the wall standing.
“So Clifford is going to help us?” I asked.
Thadius dropped his head onto the seat back. “Yeah,” he said, throwing open the driver’s side door. “Hopefully.”
Inside, I clack-thumped beside Thadius to the front corner of the store, where his studio was set up. I was full of questions, and Thadius was forthcoming with answers but not to the ones I asked. It seemed to do him good just to talk.
We reached the studio area, and he began filling a big plastic tote with machinery, flash drives, laptops, hard drives, and the box Mosaic Face pony expressed to him.
“Before the A, I was working here.” He motioned at the store around us. “I was miserable. I was just doing it to pay the pills. Me and my husband . . .”
Another kind of pain. Another loss. One new and one old, but both fresh and stinging again. “The guy in the picture with you?”
Thadius nodded. “Yeah. Hamish.”
“He was cute,” I said.
“I always thought so. But anyway, I was working here, and . . .” There was a hitch in his throat. “Hamish was working on the wharf at this seafood restaurant. What we really wanted to do was open a theater together. Even though we weren’t doing that, we were happy. One night he came home and told me his coworkers had found this thing in this old glass factory. We went. It was like we were one of those urban explorers, like on that one show—before your time. Anyway, we went and there she was, this machine.” He turned to look at his cauldron, humming beside him. “A Flashcraft deconstructor reconstructor. Which he had to explain to me what it was.
“Kind of like how you said you and your daddy messed with it, unable to leave it alone, Hamish and I did the same thing. Every time we got through with work for the day, we raced out there with flashlights, went through the hole in the fence, always with something new to put in the machine to see what we could create.”
Thadius paused for a long while. “Hamish was in New York, visiting his folks when the A started. We were told a reactor outside of Rochester had melted down. He didn’t make it out in time. The evacuation line was like ten miles long, I heard. And he’d left too late and . . .”
“God, Thadius, I’m so—”
“You know how we ended every show with ‘Without You’?” He waited for me to nod. “That was our song. It was playing at the Grillers drive-through joint we met at. We played it at our wedding. Kind of my way of honoring him.”
He tossed a box of empty fixins canisters into the tote with a crash. “You were just a kid when the A started. It came without warning. No overture, no prologue. Things were normal; then they weren’t.” He turned and looked out into the store. Imagining it full of happy shoppers and all the lights working and the shelves full of merchandise ready to be taken home. Old-world
priorities, each fulfilled.
“When it got bad enough, they couldn’t in good conscience keep us here anymore. They let us take what we wanted and told us to go be with our families. I didn’t take anything. I just wanted to see Hamish. The phones were down, the TV soon after. The radio stations, then. I didn’t know what happened to him. Not until they started bringing these lists, sometimes hundreds of pages, and stapling them up around town. Names of the confirmed dead. Three weeks I went to read the new lists each time they brought them in. Crowding around with the others, begging to not see his name. Then, just some fucking post-A Tuesday, I went down, knowing I would read his name the whole walk down to where they’d post them, waited my turn with the other crying people to get a chance to check, and I did. Saw his name, presumed date of his death in plain black sans serif.”
Thadius reached into the collar of his shirt and showed me the chain with the tiny jar on its end. A lock of hair inside.
He pinched the tiny jar between the index and middle finger of his thumbless hand, studied it. “Kind of gross, I know. But we liked them. We both had one. I thought it’d be the ticket . . . that I could scan it, make a recipe of him with it, and, well, I don’t need to tell you the rest.” He dropped the tiny jar back inside his shirt, where it could rest near his heart. “There were a lot of dead people around after the A, just out on the street, unclaimed. At night, I’d take a few of them back to the glass factory, break them down, try to use them for raw materials to make another . . .” He shrugged, his eyes wet. “No dice.
“I knew the store was a safe place, so I stole a flatbed, moved my cauldron over here, and bunkered down. Found that tunnel, started going over to what would later be the Siren House. There were some squatters there, Ricky and a few of other people. Michael, the usher. Well, he wasn’t an usher then, but he would be in a few years.” He smiled faintly. “I was becoming a scratcher at the same time I was getting the Siren House up and running.” He’d set the Siren’s wooden arm on one of the tables, among the electronic junk and gizmos. It looked so odd there, something wood among the metal and cabling and circuit boards. He held it in his arms, cradling it against his chest.
“Sirens, in the mythology, are these beautiful creatures who draw sailors with their songs, usually making them crash into things.
“I found the figurehead downtown, about where the marketplace is now, in a pile of stuff that was going to be burned. They used to drag everything down there so people could scavenge for useful things. I found her and wanted to turn that myth around: a siren calling wayward folks who’ve already crashed to an inviting shore. Lemons to lemonade. A life raft with room for everybody.
“While I was getting the Siren House set up, with the help of pretty much everyone who stayed on until last night, I . . .” He cleared his throat. “Sorry. I still can’t believe the place is actually gone. All those people. People who came there looking for a good time, a break from having to live in this kind of world, a few hours to escape and . . . Christ, I brought it right to them. Try as I might’ve, the siren made us all crash anyway. Took a while, her song was long, but fuck if we didn’t all end up beached anyway.”
He sighed.
“Shortly after opening up, that’s when I got a letter in the mail, addressed to Hamish. Guy said his name was Mosaic Face. I wrote back to give him the bad news and the next letter he sent, right after his condolences for my loss, he told me about the WTF, about how the actual hours of sunlight were shrinking. Hamish had his time-capsuling-the-Internet project, and I went and found Mosaic Face’s old videos. When I wrote him, I told him I didn’t believe him, that he shouldn’t feel bad about it because a lot of us had lost our minds after the A, but I told him he’d clearly gone nuts. He told me to check out a spot up the road a piece, the pit. Said there were others all over the place, one even out by him in Pittsburgh. I went. Saw it. And wrote him that same night that I’d help.
I watched his videos again and . . . well, I had to have others see them. Started broadcasting everything I had stored. People found the signal, started learnin’ again. Learnin’ about the A, and who’d caused it. I didn’t steer anyone toward the videos—I let them find it for themselves, like you did. His letter after that said the Smocks were after anyone with a cauldron, anyone who had the means to scratch even if they weren’t regularly usin’ it to do so. That’s when we started the fight. I had no choice. If Mosaic Face was right, Hamish’s death was entirely their fault.
“Soon after the inspections began, and that’s when I took the whole thing underground. I told absolutely no one about it, not until Beth. I wrote Mosaic Face to tell him what I was up to, that I had a front, a way to hide my scratching. And that was when Mosaic Face sent me the tablet with the e-book, The Siren House, on it. With a note that said he already knew what I’d name the place. It was half-screwy with file corruption, but what I could make of it said I was going to die. Talk about an eventful year!
“And that’s when he found you. Or you found him.
“While we were waiting for you, he kept sending me info about the cauldrons—how we could use them against the Smocks. We were figurin’ out that was why the Smocks were here in our versh, why they started the A, messed up time: they were lookin’ for scratchers. I started going off the rails a little, jazzin’ things up I could never make without a better cauldron. Busywork so I wouldn’t go insane worrying. I guess I went a little anyway.”
“So, about Clifford . . .”
“We’ll talk on the road.” He brought a few boxes and plastic waterproof totes piled into his arms, leading us out the back of the store.
We got into the LeBaron. He took us the long way around town, along the port, avoiding potential Smockmobiles on patrol. Ours was the only car on the road.
“I was at the Siren House, just another Saturday after-party. I’m behind the bar, we just had a good night, we just reached twenty hundred subscribers, everyone’s in high spirits, and the door opens and we all clam up like it’s an old Clint movie and the man with no name’s sauntering in. We’re sure it’s the Smocks coming in for a surprise visit, but it’s just this one fella. Immediately I know he isn’t our typical client—this guy’s no trendoid. He’s dressed like it’s still the 2010s or something, much more contemporary—and out of style—than all of us.”
“Did you recognize him?”
“I did, but I didn’t. I mean, I could see parts of me there, but who expects to see your versh twin to come walkin’ up to you and order a sidecar? He’s acting like he knew right where to find me that night, exactly where I’d be standing. He says hello. I say hello. He says he has something to offer me. I expected him to threaten me into giving him a job or something. Or a handout. Or rob us. But, looking at him, I knew that wouldn’t be the case. Didn’t entirely get it right then and there, that lookin’ at him, it’s like lookin’ in the mirror when I was just twenty. And I say to go ahead, to offer me what he’s gonna offer me. And he just starts listin’ things. My mom’s name, her maiden name, the name of my elementary school, my old Social Security number. People are all around, mind you. Everyone at the Siren’s watchin’. I tell him to shut up and come with me downstairs.
“And that’s when he tells me he knows what happens to me—what happens to us—in another versh. He doesn’t even let it be any big surprise that he’s me.”
“Is he the Thadius that gets burned, then?”
“No. To make things even more complicated, that Thadius in your e-book comes from yet another versh.”
“Jesus,” I said, “how many are there?”
“I asked him the same thing, this pup version of me. He tells me I should go about this with a very open mind, that there’re an unfathomable number of vershes. Ones where the world is the same as ours with really minor differences, and then ones where the human race never existed. Some where the Nazis won. Some where the airplane never got invented. Some where the A—one the Smocks had nothing to do with—happened decades ago and no one made i
t through. Then he tells me he found your book in his versh, got nervous, and started looking for a Cassetera Robuck. He quit the Smocks but kept their versh-hopping gear. But he’s trying to find the one this happens to, any potential Casseteras, to prevent his—or any other versh twin, me included—from being killed. Naturally, I asked why he cared so much.
“He said, ‘Death by fire may not happen to me exactly, but I feel it’d be in my best interest to keep any me, no matter the versh, alive.’ Clifford was just that much of an incurable narcissist.”
“So you guys really aren’t different after all,” I said, just to lighten the mood.
Thadius coughed a humorless laugh. “Yeah, well. True. So I tell him that with the Smocks on the prowl, we can’t be seen together. If they know we’re versh twins, they might accuse me of encouraging him to give up the Smock life. He says that’s nothing to worry about because the Smocks don’t know who’s left their ranks. All they know is one of them went missing, never got recompiled in their versh at the end of their shift. They’ve stamped him as the Betrayer because of that and, besides keeping all of us in line and hunting down scratchers, they’re after him somethin’ fierce.”
“There has to be more to it than that,” I said. “Why would he care what happened to any other Thadius? He’s a Smock. I’m sure they live a pretty cushy life back in their versh. Why risk that for some other version of himself he doesn’t even know?”
“Like I said, while we may not be the same in all ways, parts of us happen in all the vershes we exist in. Telling it true, if I had the ability to jump vershes like him, I might do the same thing. The Thadius in the e-book that gets burned up? I can’t tell you how many times I wanted to find out how to keep that from happenin’. That was before, you know, it started to look like it’s goin’ to be me—the one sittin’ right here beside you.” He groaned.
“But that hasn’t happened yet.”
“Blame the WTF. We’re runnin’ on a different time line. The me that gets burned up, the you that ‘staples’ the e-book, theirs is a versh where time is ahead of ours, more of the planet stolen so the time is even farther ahead than it is here.”