A Trick of Light

by Stan Lee

  Juaquo springs down beside him. “Christ, it’s dark. What is this place?” He looks back, past the end of the boat, and points. Far behind them, at what looks like the end of a long tunnel, is the faint glow of lightning. “That’s where we came in. So your girlfriend . . . what, lives here? In a floating airplane hangar? In the middle of Lake Erie? How did this not come up on the radar? How can it—”

  “We’ll ask her when we find her,” Cameron says. “There’s definitely something here. I can feel it.”

  Juaquo taps his own head. “Like the boat, you mean. Something . . . smart?”

  Cameron nods, but that’s not quite right, he thinks. The presence he senses in this place, it’s not just smart.

  It’s intelligent.

  * * *

  They move only a short distance through the dark before a small domed structure rises out of the ground up ahead of them, a shadow at its center that turns out to be a narrow doorway. Juaquo’s phone flashlight, dimly reflected by the floor beneath their feet, illuminates the dome as they step inside: smooth, windowless walls, a rounded ceiling, and a floor. All made from the same material as the island itself. He bends down, pressing a hand against the floor, his finger tracing the dark outline of a seam beneath their feet. A trapdoor. Juaquo runs his fingers along the edge, stops halfway, and pries it up by a handle; it rises with a soft whoosh. He looks at Cameron, who nods. The door slides open on silent hinges, exposing a dimly lit staircase that spirals down to a destination unknown. A glow emanates from the walls themselves, which are not black but a deep violet, like the skin of an eggplant.

  “Are you sure about this?” Juaquo asks.

  Cameron grits his teeth. “This is the place, and she needs me. Let’s go.”

  They descend in cautious silence, the minutes ticking by as the trapdoor vanishes into darkness somewhere above their heads. Cameron steels himself for what lies ahead—but with every step, he grows more and more aware that he no longer knows what that is. Even after he stole the capsule yacht and set out for the center of the lake, he still imagined that the confrontation ahead would follow a typical action movie script. That he’d find Nia trapped on a houseboat or something, maybe bound and gagged but more likely just locked in her bedroom, and her dad—whom Cameron had never met but kept picturing for some reason as Bruce Campbell from Ash vs. Evil Dead—would try, but fail, to stop them from freeing her. In his wildest fantasy, the one he dismissed as too outlandish as quickly as he could imagine it, Bruce Campbell was holding a shotgun that Juaquo had to wrestle away.

  Now, Cameron is forced to admit that the reality he’s stumbled into is weirder by an order of magnitude than anything he’d imagined, and they haven’t even found Nia yet.

  Juaquo’s voice interrupts his reverie. “Hey. Do you hear that?”

  “No,” Cameron says, but the words are scarcely out before he hears it too. It’s faint but growing louder, and he stumbles on the stairs in confusion. Juaquo steps up beside him, grabbing his arm to steady him, and the close space is suddenly filled with the pulsing of a familiar bass line.

  “It’s coming from there,” Juaquo says, pointing, and Cameron realizes that the staircase ends just below where he’s standing. They take the last few steps side by side, and find themselves on a small platform that stretches into a narrow catwalk in front of them, lined on either side by smooth and faintly luminous walls. At the end is a door, hanging slightly ajar. The music coming from the other side is so loud now that Cameron can feel every beat as though it’s coming from inside his chest. He crosses the catwalk, peering over the side as he does so, and grips the railing hard as a wave of vertigo sweeps over him. The space seems to go on forever, curving away on either side into an immense nothingness, but he can hear the babble and chatter of software inside. It’s everywhere—but the strongest signal is coming from right in front of him, seeping through the crack of the open door. He lays his hand against it, stepping through—and then stopping dead in his tracks, so that Juaquo bumps roughly into him from behind. The pounding music fills his ears as he gazes across a sea of cheering people waving purple glow sticks, their eyes on a stage flanked by massive screens two stories tall. A man in a white tuxedo is dancing frantically at center stage, mimicked by a dozen identically dressed backup dancers, and all Cameron can do is stare.

  “Heeeeeeeey, sexy lady!” sings the man on stage, as the crowd writhes and shrieks in front of him, and Cameron feels himself grabbed roughly by the shoulder.

  “Am I hallucinating?” Juaquo yells.

  “No!” Cameron yells back.

  “In that case,” Juaquo shouts, “since when is the ‘Gangnam Style’ guy on tour in our city?”

  “He’s not,” Cameron shouts, but Juaquo points furiously at the stage, using the gesture to punctuate each word.

  “But! He! Obviously! Is!”

  “I don’t—” Cameron starts to reply, then trails off, staring. Gooseflesh ripples over his skin, and for a moment, everything—the storm, the concert, even the whole reason they’re there, even Nia herself—is utterly forgotten. In the midst of the screaming crowd is a man, standing with his back to the stage, staring between the jostling bodies at Cameron, who stares back, unable to breathe. This is a moment he’s imagined countless times over the past ten years, one that always seemed to bring unsettling questions with it. What would I do? What would I say? Would he even recognize me? Would I recognize him?

  But in this moment, all the questions fade away.

  There is no question at all, only amazement, and a flood of feeling.

  Cameron takes a step forward, his eyes fixed on a face he’s only seen in pictures, and in his own memory, for so very long.

  “Dad?” he says.

  He can barely hear his own voice over the thump of the music, but it doesn’t matter. His father—and it is his father, sporting the same shaggy haircut and scruffy beard that Cameron used to yank on with his little boy’s hands—takes a step toward him.

  “My boy. You shouldn’t be here. It’s too dangerous—you have to leave! Now!”

  “But—”

  He doesn’t finish his sentence.

  On stage, the song concludes with an explosion of fireworks. Cameron raises his hand involuntarily to shield his eyes.

  When he looks again, his father is gone.

  “Dad!” he yells, moving forward at an awkward run. The crowd parts before him as he scans frantically in search of the familiar face, the abundant dark hair—and then quickens his pace as he catches a glimpse of William Ackerson up ahead, being pulled through the crowd by two angry-looking men who are holding him, dragging him, by the arms. They’re going to take him! I’m going to lose him, Cameron thinks, his senses flooded with panic. He takes off after the men, dodging between two people who yelp and leap out of the way. He emerges from the crowd just in time to see his father dragged through another door up ahead.

  “DAD!” he yells, again, charging forward as Juaquo shouts from behind him to wait up. He hurls himself at the door, stumbling as he passes through, falling roughly to his hands and knees—and then looking up with a gasp. There’s a threadbare carpet under his knees, the soft murmur of voices all around him. Filtered sunlight shines softly through a huge, ornate stained-glass window set high in the wall, touching the shoulders of a pair of sculpted angels who flank a long aisle between rows of pews. The throbbing of the music and the roaring of the crowd are gone; when he looks back, he sees only Juaquo standing in front of a closed door, looking around confusedly. Cameron struggles to his feet, looking for his father.

  “Dad?” he says, again, but where his voice was nearly drowned out by the music in the last room, here it seems thunderously loud. The murmuring people, praying with their hands pressed together in front of their bowed heads or folded neatly in their laps, cast sidelong glances at him; one old woman in an elaborate hat whispers, “Shhhh.”

  Cameron stares at her. Like his father, she, too, is familiar—except this time, he doesn’t kno
w why. He only knows that the sight of her fills him with dread, and when he looks closely at her hat, the dread only intensifies. Something terrible is about to happen. He feels it, but how does he know?

  This time, Juaquo supplies the answer.

  “Oh God,” he says, in a low voice. “What is happening? How are we here?” Cameron turns to look at him, and finds Juaquo staring back with huge, haunted eyes. “It’s that church. The one from the news, the one where—”

  The clip, Cameron thinks, and everything clicks. The same soft light, the same sculpted angels, rendered grainy and indistinct by someone’s shaky cell phone video. The pop-pop-pop of gunfire, the screams of the wounded. An old woman lying sprawled in the center aisle, her blood-spattered hat obscuring her face.

  “Oh shit,” Cameron says, and the old woman glares again.

  “Shhhhh!” she hisses.

  It’s the last thing she’ll ever say.

  Behind Cameron, the door to the church creaks open.

  “Run!” he screams at the people in the pews, who turn to gape at him. The old woman, the one whose hat is about to be blown off with most of her head still inside it, stands up with one index finger extended, like she’s about to give him a piece of her mind.

  The gunman shoots her first. Cameron feels the bullet whiz past his ear and sees the woman rock back with its impact. She topples over the pew ahead of her and lands slumped in the aisle, in exactly the pose she’ll be photographed in when this story hits the internet—only it has hit the internet. It was last week’s big news. The clip was everywhere; Cameron even shared it on his own feeds. And yet she’s dying in front of him now, in real life, in real time. They all are. The man in the black mask strides in, shooting, as the people in the pews scream and scatter. He makes his way up to the front of the church, then whirls, spraying gunfire that splinters the wooden benches and blows the angels to smithereens. Juaquo grabs Cameron’s arm and drags him to the ground as they scurry frantically down a side aisle, past a wooden table lined with burning candles. Cameron knows he shouldn’t look but can’t help it. The gunman is standing just in front of the apse—and as Cameron peers back, he grins. He inserts a finger under the edge of his mask, and a low moan escapes Cameron’s lips.

  No. It isn’t him. It isn’t real, he thinks, even as some absurdly detached part of his brain pipes up to suggest that it certainly is real, it’s right here in front of him; he can even smell the heady scent of the wax mixing with the sharp aroma of gunpowder.

  The mask peels away.

  Cameron’s father grins, his eyes twinkling maniacally.

  “You shouldn’t be here, son,” he says, again, in the same tone that he once used to chide Cameron for playing in his office. “This is no place for children. Now, Daddy has some important business to attend to—and I don’t need a partner for this deal.”

  Cameron gapes as his father raises the gun, pointing at him. It’s not real. His finger caresses the trigger. It’s not real!

  The column explodes into dust just above his head.

  “MOVE!” Juaquo screams, dragging Cameron by the arm as gunfire rings out behind them. Cameron looks over his shoulder just in time to see the gunman, mask back in place, raising the barrel of the weapon toward his own head. Sirens are wailing in the distance. He reaches out blindly in front of him as the final shot rings out, finding the polished handle of the confessional door, flinging it open—and then the two are running headlong through a close and fetid darkness, the church lost somewhere behind. Cameron’s foot rolls on the uneven ground and he stumbles into Juaquo, the two landing together in the dirt with a rough thud.

  Juaquo lets out a sound that’s somewhere between a laugh and a scream, rolling over onto his back.

  “We’re time traveling, aren’t we? That’s the only explanation, right? Tell me that’s the only explanation. Tell me we’re in a time machine right now. That shooting was last week. And that concert, that concert wasn’t happening. That concert happened like ten years ago! That’s it, right? It’s the only explanation.” Juaquo pauses. “I mean, I don’t know what your dad was doing there. I haven’t figured that part out yet. Are we time traveling inside your mind? Is that, like, a feature of your superpowers that you forgot to mention? Because if we’re time traveling, I’d like to see the dinosaurs. Can we do that? Let’s see a dinosaur and then let’s rescue your girlfriend and then let’s get the hell out of here.”

  Cameron grimaces, realizing his friend is hysterical, but also wondering if his questions aren’t something close to the truth. Is it time travel? It seems impossible, and yet . . . maybe? They’re surrounded by tech, the most advanced he’s ever felt; it’s been humming inside his head like a background soundtrack the entire time. And he hasn’t been trying to interface with it, but . . . What if it’s interfacing with me?

  Cameron closes his eyes, concentrating. He feels so close to understanding what’s happening, yet the answer is still out of reach; he feels it dancing just past the edge of his consciousness, sly and teasing. It’s as though his own mind is working against him, muddling his thoughts. He tries to retrace his steps and sees only his father’s face.

  You shouldn’t be here. That’s what he’d said. Was he right?

  For a moment, Cameron can’t quite remember why he came in the first place.

  Then a floodlight glares above him, and his mind goes blank.

  Cameron sits up, and Juaquo starts laughing in earnest as the landscape around them suddenly illuminates. The air is filled with the dry rustling of leaves—of corn. Hundreds of thousands of plants stretching in neat rows toward a far-off horizon on one side, but ending abruptly on the other. Cameron can see close-cut green grass between the stalks, a diamond-shaped dirt track beyond that. Juaquo lets out a final hysterical giggle and says, “Excuse me, but I believe I ordered Jurassic Park, not Field of Dreams.”

  Cameron gets to his feet and stares, trying to understand what he’s seeing—only he doesn’t need to. Juaquo was right. The corn, the grass, the dirt—it’s a baseball diamond. It’s the baseball diamond. And when he sees the man on the mound, his pinstripe uniform blazing under the lights, the swooping S emblazoned on the breast, he steps forward as if in a dream. But it’s not a dream. The world outside, the one he came from—that’s the dream, distant and unimportant. This, this moment, is what’s real.

  Cameron’s father holds out a baseball glove.

  “Wanna play catch?” he says.

  Cameron nods wordlessly, taking the glove.

  He doesn’t know how long it lasts, the two of them tossing the ball back and forth under the floodlights. He’s only dimly aware of Juaquo, sprawled on his back out in left field, singing “Back in Time” by Huey Lewis and the News and occasionally pausing mid-chorus to yell, “Hello, McFly!” at nobody in particular. At one point, he has the presence of mind to think that whenever they get home, he’s going to be on the hook for Juaquo’s therapy bills—maybe he can buy his friend a few sessions with Dr. Kapur. But . . . wasn’t there something about Dr. Kapur, something he might need to remember?

  The ball zings into his glove, chasing the memory away.

  “It’s time for you to go, Cameron,” says his father. “You shouldn’t be here. Go back home, to your mother.”

  “But I don’t want to go. I can’t. I have to . . . I need to . . .” Cameron trails off. He knows there’s a reason he came here, but it’s as though someone has hidden it away, drawing a thick black curtain over his own motivations. He no longer knows why he’s in this place. He’s not even sure anymore where this place is. There’s a distant memory of a boat, a storm—but was that today?

  “You must leave, my boy,” says William Ackerson.

  “If I do, will you come with me?” Cameron asks.

  “I’m afraid that’s not possible.”

  “But why?” says Cameron. “Why did you even leave us? Did you leave? Mom told me you wanted to. She thinks you just walked out and made a new life somewhere else—but then ot
her people said that you had to be dead; they said you got mixed up with the wrong people and something went wrong.”

  “And you, Cameron? What did you think?”

  “I don’t know. I used to think that you had to be dead, because if you weren’t, you would have come back. But now . . .”

  He hesitates, and the next time the ball comes to him, he feels himself throw it wild off to the side—but no, he must have imagined it, because his father catches it easily. He feels dazed, like he’s running on autopilot with his brain asleep behind the wheel. The way the ball flies back and forth, back and forth, a white orb against the black sky, is mesmerizing. Hypnotizing.

  “You thought I was dead,” his father says. “Are you sure I’m not?”

  Cameron thinks about that. Unlike the other mental calculations he’s tried to make, the memories he’s tried and failed to access, this question is one his brain seems eager to consider. It seems like the only thing that matters. Is he sure? No, he’s not. In fact, it makes a certain kind of sense for his father to be dead. It would explain just about everything, including why he’s here on a Field of Dreams baseball diamond, wearing a 1919 Chicago White Sox uniform. Cameron is playing catch with his ghost.

  Somehow, that doesn’t seem so weird.

  “Then . . . is this heaven?” he whispers.

  His father smiles. “No, it’s Iowa.”

  Cameron drops the ball.

  His father stops grinning, the smile replaced by a frown, then a confused look, then a quizzical one. Cameron blinks, feeling the fuzz clear from his brain, the mist clear from his eyes.

  “Isn’t that what I say?” the man says, but Cameron only stares at him—first with suspicion, then with horror, as his father’s face begins to seize, morphing from cheerful grin to worried frown in a series of spasms that happens too fast to be human.