The Curiosity Killers

by K W Taylor

  Ben straightened up. “What? No. No. That’s ridiculous.”

  Cob approached the desk. “No, dude, it’s not. Think about it.” He snatched up a piece of paper and a stub of pencil. “You’re here, right?” He drew a dot and labeled it with the current year. “You were born, when, fifty years ago?”

  Ben cringed. “Jesus, no. Do I seem so old?” He plucked the pencil from Cob and made a dot near the first one, labeling it “2062.”

  Cob blinked. “Wow, okay.” He looked Ben up and down. “I’m only a little younger, but you look much older.”

  Violet sighed. “Girls, girls, you’re both pretty.” She gestured at the paper. “Get on with it.”

  “Okay, so, you go back to 1935,” Cob went on, drawing a dot far to the left of the paper and connecting it with an arc to the “2100” dot. “Where, very tragically, Claudio Florence murders you.” He set the paper down on the desk and smudged out the arc and then smudged out the “2062” dot. “Ergo, you were never born, you never went back there, and we all forget you, because you never started this agency.”

  “What? No, no, that’s not logical at all,” Ben said. “My lifetime is still set. I didn’t undo myself. I just died at my current age, only it’s now in the past.”

  “I still think we would forget you,” Cob said. He balled up the paper and tossed it over his shoulder. “Which is pretty fucking dangerous for this whole gig. So that’s your imminent danger, buddy.”

  “Actually, I think it’s more dangerous if Florence goes back to Roanoke again and snatches me before Ambrose does,” Violet said. “What would happen? Would I fade out here, midsentence? What would happen to my dad?”

  “See? Imminent threat,” Cob said. “We don’t know what he’s doing or when he’s doing it.”

  “I’m not a murderer,” Ben said. “That’s stooping to his level.”

  “There’s murder and then there’s war,” Cob said. “There’s killing because you’re a sick fuck who enjoys it and there’s…” He turned to Violet. “What did the good doc call it?”

  “Strategic target elimination,” Violet replied.

  “Yeah, that. Which is totally different from being all, ‘Woo, I like chopping people’s heads off.’” Cob quieted for a moment and looked pensive. “You guys don’t know. I saw him at it. He almost got me once. He did get somebody I cared about.”

  “I’m not doing this, not this minute,” Ben said. “Look, let me get my bearings here. We can debate this when I’m cleaner and everyone’s had some time to think.” He finally made his way upstairs.

  ~

  Cob watched Ben leave and shook his head. “He’s gonna screw everything up, he’s gonna wind up being the death of one of us, or himself.”

  “He’s just being cautious,” Violet said. “Besides, we didn’t all agree ‘take Florence out.’ We agreed to consider it. If you’ll recall, I asked about rehabilitation or maybe even snatching him out of his own timeline, the way he wanted to do with me.”

  “And do what, then? Raise him to be an awesome guy?” Cob asked. He laughed. “So you’ll basically adopt this kid knowing he might have an evil streak?”

  “What’s your solution, then?”

  Cob thought of the blood on the light bulb, the blood pooling around Elizabeth’s body. “We find him as a kid, what’s wrong with killing him as a kid?”

  “Mister Cob.”

  “Like you wouldn’t do that to Hitler?” Cob felt a pounding in his head, an insistent throb over his left eye that blossomed across his whole forehead. He did his best to ignore it, but his voice grew louder the more the pain thrummed. “Like you wouldn’t flip the switch on Ted Bundy or Bin Laden or, yeah, Jack the Ripper? Because, little lady, we have that chance.” He flung his arms wide. “Hell, send me back and forth doing that over and over again, not just to Claudio Florence but to all those sick-o freaks. Use me as an assassin until I drop dead.” He took a step toward Violet and jabbed a finger at her. “Because it’ll be soon, so I might as well do something good with my sorry, shallow life, right?”

  They were inches from each other, Cob’s brown eyes boring into Violet’s blue ones. He was dying, he knew that, and he knew he wasn’t good enough for her, but he wished she would bridge the gap between them and—

  “I’m not your little lady,” she said. “And what you’re advocating is pretty brutal, especially if you’re talking about doing it to these guys in childhood.”

  I blew it.

  Cob stepped back. “Not necessarily.” His voice was quieter now, the pain in his head subsiding. “Look, I don’t know. I’m not the most moral guy. I don’t know what the right thing to do is.”

  “The right thing to do is maybe to learn from the past, but don’t…I don’t know, don’t risk it. Don’t mess it up.” Violet gestured around the parlor. “This place, what they do is about observation. Learning. Not acting.”

  “That’s boring.”

  “Yeah? Well, not boring is going to get somebody killed, and I don’t mean Claudio Florence.” She put a hand on his shoulder. “I mean you, or Ben, or hell, even me. Let’s stop this guy, not prevent him from even existing.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because.” Violet clenched her hands into fists. “Because not everybody is all bad or all good. Because even somebody who worked with him had the capacity to change.” She paced. “Because maybe Claudio has people who care about him—yes, even him—who might be messed up without him in their lives. I don’t know. But it’s not for us to play God.” She grew more and more animated as she spoke, and Cob watched the play of light over her hair, her skin, the flash of her eyes.

  “You’re too good for somebody like me, aren’t you?” he muttered.

  Violet stopped pacing and turned to him. “What?”

  Cob smirked. “Forget it.” He nodded backward toward the staircase to the second floor. “He’s the one who’d be good for you.”

  “Ben? Good for me like…what, like that?” Violet raised an eyebrow. “Instead of who, you?”

  “I didn’t—”

  Vere’s voice interrupted Cob. “Miss Moto.” His head poked up from the lab stairs as he ascended. “Where the devil is that woman? I’m in desperate need of some dinner, and I’m all out of bread down here.”

  Violet stared at him silently.

  “I didn’t mean that,” Cob said. He moved from Violet and pointed to the kitchen. “Think she marched off there after your partner made a mess of the rug, doc.” Vere nodded and headed to the other room. Cob didn’t look back, but he heard Violet flop down on the couch.

  Kris was nowhere to be found in the kitchen. “I’ll whip you up something,” Cob offered. He poked his head into the icebox. “Salami?” He withdrew a small plastic container. “Or…” He shook it, then opened it and gave the meat inside a whiff. “Hoo, no. That stuff’s been doing some time traveling of its own.”

  Vere took the container and deposited it into the trash. “There’s a covered plate of watercress we didn’t have with lunch,” he said. “I’ll fancy it up a bit.” He pulled down a few canisters from the spice rack. “So did you youngsters discuss the removal of Mister Florence?”

  “Ben didn’t take it so good,” Cob said. He found the plate of sandwiches and put it on the counter. “He thinks Florence can be rehabilitated or something.”

  “I don’t know,” Vere said. He crossed to the sink, primed the water pump, and washed his hands before peeling back the clear wrap on the sandwich plate. “People are complex, Mister Cob. How Florence is may simply be how he is. We may not be able to change or save him.” Vere took another plate down from an upper cabinet and transferred the top bread of the sandwiches to the empty plate. “He could be a product of his identity plus the zeitgeist of his moment in time.”

  “So you’re saying maybe if we did take him out of his timeline, he might not ever turn into the psycho killer he is now?” Cob asked.

  Vere shook his head. “Mm, not necessarily.” He sprinkled paprika
on the open sandwiches. “Oh, how I wish we had deviled eggs. Doesn’t that sound delicious?” He walked to the icebox and peered inside. “Blast. Oh, but jam, yes, that will do nicely.”

  “What do you mean, then?” Cob asked.

  “Fetch me a packet of biscuits. Top shelf,” Vere instructed. Cob opened the cabinet Vere indicated. “Those go so well with jam. No, Mister Cob, what I mean is that suppose we remove Claudio Florence and set him up with a nurturing family, expose him to all the things that would induce racial tolerance in others and then, yes, perhaps that saves him. But that zeitgeist, lad. That would still exist, as would the entire environment that created such a creature in the first place.” He punctuated his words with little jabs of a teaspoon. “You see? We remove one monster,” he explained, miming digging something out of the air with the spoon, “and yet one more—or even two more—spring up in its place.” He chuckled. “Bit like gray hair that way.”

  Cob laughed. “Pluck one, you get two back.” He slid the biscuit packet across the counter to Vere.

  “And those two new gray hairs,” Vere said, “who’s to say they wouldn’t be even worse than Mister Florence?”

  “Worse?” Cob blinked. “How can you be worse than Jack the Ripper plus raging racist?”

  Vere sprinkled rosemary on the sandwiches. “People never fail to find ways to be terrible to one another. I’m sure someone would find a way.”

  Cob cringed and felt another painful throb in his head. He rubbed his temple.

  Vere spotted the gesture and eyed Cob. “It’s getting worse, even just today.”

  “I can handle it.”

  Vere put the tops back on the sandwiches. “What’s Miss Lessep’s argument against this plan, hmm?”

  “Why don’t you ask her?”

  Cob turned. Violet stood in the doorway. “Did you ever find Kris?” she asked.

  “She probably went out through the back,” Vere said. “I suspect she went home. Poor thing hasn’t taken any time off since this whole fiasco began.” He pulled a sleeve of biscuits from its packet and arranged them on the now-empty second plate. “So, fine, dear, what’s your argument against removing Mister Florence’s influence on history?”

  “I don’t know that I said I was against it,” Violet replied. “After all, the science came along to lengthen life in the face of disease, to explore the stars, and now to time travel. Why not experiment and see what it’s actually capable of?” She eyed the sandwiches. “May I?”

  Vere nodded, and she took one.

  “Thank you.” She took a small bite of her sandwich. “So it’s unnatural for me to exist in this time and place,” she went on after she’d swallowed, “and yet if I’d lived and died when I was supposed to, I’d probably have gotten smallpox or died in childbirth much younger than I am now.”

  “But you said you felt robbed of your real life,” Cob pointed out.

  “Sure I do,” Violet admitted. “But I’m also a little bit glad to be alive now, healthy and witnessing the most exciting invention of the century, you know?”

  “So how does this explain your position on Florence, dear?” Vere asked. He spooned clots of jam on the biscuits.

  “It means if we can take him out in the past, either his own or just during one of his murder sprees,” Violet said, “then why not use this technology to its potential?”

  “I have to admit to both of you, one worry does plague me,” Vere said. He put the lid on the jam and returned it to the icebox. “A paradox. We might well be creating a paradox if we remove Florence at a very young age, either to protect or to…to eliminate him entirely. Such a thing could be catastrophic to all life as we know it. Time travel is a precarious thing, really.”

  “If it’s so dangerous, why did you invent it in the first place, then?” Cob asked.

  Vere smiled. “Selfish reasons. Reasons that, yes, would indeed cause a paradox.” He waved a hand through the air. “I’d never try it for that purpose now, mind you. All right.” He snapped his fingers. “Let’s make this a proper meal, shall we? Grab some glasses, Mister Cob, and let’s set the table.”

  ~

  The table set, Vere returned to his lab briefly to hang up his white coat. When he returned, he asked Cob if Ben was downstairs yet.

  Cob gestured back toward the kitchen. “Think finally, yeah.”

  Vere rose from his chair and walked back to the adjoining room. Ben was indeed there, robe-clad and opening cabinets.

  “We have a very meager supper out there,” Vere said, pointing to the dining room. “You’re welcome to join us.”

  “Thanks.” Ben let the cabinet he’d been holding open fall shut.

  “Tell me something, son,” Vere said. “History has patterns, does it not?”

  “Sure,” Ben replied.

  “In your professional opinion, do you believe that the war could be prevented without removing or killing Claudio Florence before it begins?”

  Ben’s cheeks puffed out as he exhaled a heavy breath. “Look, I said I don’t like the idea of killing, and—”

  “Hang about,” Vere said, holding up his hands and patting the air between himself and Ben. “I’m not trying to convince you of the viability of that idea, I’m just asking a question.”

  “If we do that, there are other consequences based on things he’s done, him and his people,” Ben said. He nodded out to the dining room and lowered his voice. “Violet would have lived and died as Virginia Dare, if we do that, because Claudio would have never recruited Richards, who would have never kidnapped her.”

  Vere’s eyes widened. “Ah, I see,” he said, nodding. “But that’s just it, Benoy. I think we kidnapped her. We kidnapped the whole colony and tucked them away somewhere safe until we could reach them again.”

  “What do you—what?”

  “Benoy, the Lost Colony is lost because we hid it. Don’t you see? At some point, we bring the entire colony to the future, and that’s how we prevent Violet from dying hundreds of years ago.” Vere almost wanted to hop up and down, but dreaded the risk to his bones.

  “Eddy, that’s crazy, there were over fifteen hundred people at Roanoke,” Ben said. “We can only transport one, two people tops with your tech.”

  “You don’t have to transport all of ’em.” Cob was standing in the doorway. “Just one. Violet.”

  “Where do you suggest we put the rest of them, then?” Ben asked.

  Cob grinned. “There’s a gorgeous place across a kind of veil from this world,” he said. “Only saw it once, but it looked really nice, and it’s full of Mothmen.” He laughed. “I don’t think they’re hostile, but maybe we should ask Violet if she wants her family living with a bunch of winged alien things.”

  Sunday, November 27, 1966, Point Pleasant, West Virginia, USA

  It was no longer late at night. It was barely dusk. And this was an open field. Overhead, a dozen Mothmen sailed through the air.

  Cob looked back behind him once again. Just before he stumbled into the field, memories of Elizabeth plagued him, and then there was the other man there, pale, cadaverous.

  Familiar.

  Now in the dazzling sunlight, away from the dark of the back country roads, he could think more clearly. The slender man wasn’t just any man; he was Claudio Florence, the leader of the RAA.

  But that’s in my own present. How is he time traveling, too?

  A Mothman soared down from the sky and landed, gently, on nearly human legs right in front of Cob. “Greetings,” it said in a feminine voice. “It has been years since one of your kind ventured this way. You must have bent the laws of physics repeatedly in order to do so.”

  Cob’s head throbbed. “I, um, guess?”

  “This was an error on your part, crossing as you did?”

  “Well, I was looking for one of you,” Cob admitted. “Proof you existed and weren’t, I don’t know, an owl or something.”

  “No, we exist,” the creature confirmed. She spread her wings wide, and the span was st
artling—nearly twice her height. The axillars were covered in a downy fur, like the rest of her body, but the inside linings were full of feathers, long and elegant and indistinguishable to Cob’s eye from those of large birds. “I am called Phalène.”

  The word was familiar, but Cob couldn’t quite place it. Before he could question her, she was emitting what sounded like faint giggles. “That is how you perceive my name, at least. It isn’t quite exact in any of the languages we speak.”

  “I’m Rupert Cob, but most people just call me Cob,” he told her, giving her a little bow. “Nice to meet you.”

  “I was wandering in your realm,” Phalène went on, “also a bit by accident. We are able to cross freely but try to avoid it, as it causes your kind undue alarm, and we aren’t able to communicate as well on that side.” Phalène reached out a gray hand and touched Cob lightly on the shoulder. “Do you want to go back? It’s very near, the place where you crossed.”

  “What are you?” Cob murmured.

  Phalène’s strange red eyes narrowed. “I am a walker on two legs, a flyer on two wings. I hold the title of historian in our tribe. I am the daughter of Agnetha, granddaughter of Zhiel, from the line of Gael, one who was killed by your kind many centuries past.” Her wings fluttered. “Time is different here, and as historian, I often travel to the past to observe and record.” She nodded at Cob. “But you ask what I am, not who I am. Perhaps I should ask the same of you. What are you?”

  “A human. Homo sapiens.” Cob smiled. “I don’t really get all the biology of it—”

  “But a human homo sapiens is who you are?” Phalène pressed. “That is the sum of your identity?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “You are a bender of the laws of physics,” she continued.

  “A time traveler,” Cob said.

  “And is that who you are?”

  Cob considered this. Was it? Or did time travel allow him to satisfy his desire to know, understand, and maybe even to triumph, somehow?

  I should have saved Elizabeth…