Untimed: A Time Travel Adventure

by Andy Gavin

  Yvaine glances at me, but I’m no judge of girl feet.

  “Can you measure her?” I say.

  “Jolly.” The boy fetches a wooden ruler from under the try-on bench. “I ain’t apprenticed to a storekeep for nothing.”

  “Everything’s so different,” I say when he goes to fetch the shoes. “And it’s all our fault.”

  “Mostly yours,” she kicks at me playfully.

  Way to make me feel better. “How does apprenticeship work?”

  “His parents, or mayhap the parish, sell him to the master. He learns the trade, but mostly the one be concerned with losin’ a mouth t’feed and t’other with workin’ him for free.”

  “He doesn’t get paid?”

  “Usually only in beatings,” she says. “You still gots me da’s page?”

  I open my jacket to show her. “Arm-wrestled Longshot for it. I won.”

  She snickers as the shop boy returns with pink moccasins tucked under his arm. No shoebox. Funny, these little changes. But I’m sure we’ll still have to pay.

  We’re not three minutes out of the store when an explosion across the street nearly knocks us off our feet. The pop of the blast is all too like Donnie’s teapot bomb. There’s no fireball, just a gout of glass and wood and smoke that used to be a storefront.

  There’s a moment of silence, then the screaming starts. People run every which way. Vehicles squeal and smash into each other.

  “Damn terrorists!” a pedestrian yells. “Second bombing this week.”

  “The owner’ll be a Tory,” another says. “Royalist scum ought to crawl back up the king’s arse.”

  The shouting is interrupted by the noisy arrival of another steam-powered train-truck.

  Yvaine grabs at my arm. “We dinna want to be caught up in this.”

  Agreed, but I can’t get the screaming out of my head. Is everything bad that happens in this history my fault? No. I have to treat this like some other place or time, not really my old home at all.

  Yvaine’s new shoes pay for themselves as we scramble across a sidewalk covered in broken glass.

  “I dinna like all these engines.” She points up at the ominous tower. “Particularly that Tick-Tock cock.”

  I can’t help but smile. “Even if it’s got your family name on it?”

  “We take our names from the travelin’ side — de Verge and proud of it.”

  That earns her my best smile. And a pronouncement.

  “The clockwork tower, the Tiny-Tock in the alley, the funny cars… I think the Tick-Tocks want it like this.”

  “Maybe they plays at being God, Charlie. Creatin’ things in their own image.”

  Man is not God.

  We turn off near my house.

  It’s still there, looking more or less the same. It’s grungier, but the building was on the old side anyway, a brick duplex we shared with the Montags — the family that includes Michelle, who provided all fifteen seconds of my pre-Yvaine love life.

  In my day — lacking a better sideways-universe term — the front door opened into a little hall with mailboxes and separate entrances to the units. It was usually unlocked.

  Not so here. And there’s no buzzer, so I have to rap on the door.

  My apprehension mounts with each passing second.

  “No need to break it down,” a man says from inside.

  I hear the sound of one bolt sliding, then another, until the door swings open to reveal a pot-bellied man in a wife-beater undershirt and suspenders, from which dangles a brass pocket watch.

  “Hi, Mr. Montag,” I say. “Do you know if my mother’s home?”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “Charlie Horologe.” He won’t remember the name, but he knows vaguely who I am. “Renni Horologe’s son.”

  “Huh? The only Renni here’s Renni Montag, and she ain’t got no son.”

  My stomach clenches. Everything clenches.

  Yvaine squeezes my hand.

  “Can I see her, then?” I say, even though I’m terrified of what this might mean.

  “Just a social call,” Yvaine says.

  “How I know you ain’t ARA?” He snatches up his pocket watch, flips it open, and presses something that emits a loud BING! “Lemme check your Identikeys.”

  “Um…”

  “No Identikey, no entry.” He makes it rhyme.

  Then slams the door in our faces.

  Another round of pounding gets me nothing but a threat to call the police.

  I lead Yvaine around to see if I can get at the tiny area we called the backyard. In this version of 2011, it’s fenced in with barbed wire and strung with clothes lines, but a girl’s there, leaning against the back porch and dragging on a Cruella de Vil cigarette.

  No wonder I didn’t recognize her at first. It’s Michelle, but her eyebrows are scarlet, her hair is dyed black, and she’s wearing a red dress so tight it must hurt. Combined with the cigarette it lends her a Shanghai opium den look. Well, except for the flip-flops.

  “Michelle, can I talk to you?”

  Her crimson brows furrow, but she slinks over and toes open the gate in the fence.

  “How come you know my name?”

  Closer, she doesn’t look so great. She has a lot of makeup on, what my mom calls cover-up, and it’s doing a piss-poor job of covering a patch of bruises and scabs on her neck.

  “I just want to talk to my mom. She used to live here, her name’s Renni, brown curly hair, hazel eyes.”

  She licks her chapped lips.

  “Sounds like my step-mom, but she never mentioned any kids. You scamming me?”

  Panic is edging in. Step-mom? And where’s my dad in this picture?

  “Can you ask her to come out?”

  Michelle shakes her head. Slowly. She seems to have trouble remembering the question.

  “She never comes out,” she says finally. “And why should I help? I feel like crap.” She knocks the cigarette to the ground and takes out a device the size of a ping-pong ball. Two needle-like prongs project from one end. She winds a knob and presses it. CLICK!

  “I’m jolly squeezed out.” She winds the knob again. I hear a soft ticking, just like a mechanical watch being wound.

  “It’s probably an Edison-Bréguet,” I whisper in Yvaine’s ear.

  “Not my fault,” she whispers back. “We dinna choose family.”

  “What are you two talking about?” Michelle says.

  “Inside joke,” I say.

  I could have told her anything. She grabs my arm and says, “I need some juice. Take you inside if you have some.”

  From the look of her, what she needs is an intervention.

  “These?” Yvaine hands Michelle a vial of brown liquid.

  “No!” I say. “Don’t give—”

  I’m too late. Michelle has already snatched the vial out of Yvaine’s hand. She slams it into the bottom of the little clockwork thing and punches the needles into her neck—

  And drops like a stone. Just drops her ass onto the pavement. I catch her shoulders before she can hit her head.

  “What’d I do?” Yvaine says.

  Twin trickles of blood snake down Michelle’s neck. Her eyes roll back. Drool oozes from her mouth.

  “Don’t ever give an addict drugs,” I say. “I hope she hasn’t OD’d.”

  “What be an addict? Do she need medicine?”

  How to explain?

  “It’s like those beggars with the shakes outside the gin houses. She needs the stuff in the little bottles.”

  “Then why shouldna we give it to her?”

  I sigh. Yvaine’s world is a long way from ‘just say no.’

  “It’s bad for her, could even kill her. Never try this juice stuff, or anything like it. Not even once. It’s deadly.”

  “Feels so good,” Michelle mumbles.

  At least she’s conscious. I use her sleeve to wipe some of the drool off her face. Too bad it doesn’t wipe off that creepy smile.

  “Yvaine,
look at me.” She looks. “Promise me you’ll never use this stuff — or anything like it.”

  She glances at the girl on the ground, then at me. “I promise.”

  I pry the little clockwork thing out of Michelle’s fingers. The tiny cylinder embedded in the end is empty now. The prongs glisten with blood. As I thought, the device is built like a watch, all gears and little rotating parts. I can’t see any battery or electronics, but I see a spring. Carefully I turn the knob she used to wind it. The spring coils and tightens.

  “Look at this.” I hand it to Yvaine, who studies it for a moment.

  “Like the Monsieur’s pocket watches.”

  “Or a really crude Tick-Tock.”

  “Bugger them!” She drops the device to the cement and stomps on it with one of her new moccasins. There’s a satisfying crunch.

  “My juicer… no….” Michelle says. But she doesn’t look too stressed about it. She doesn’t look too stressed about anything.

  “Now take us to see Renni.” I feel bad, but if I can find Mom maybe I can find my dad, and maybe down the road Michelle can go back to being the straight-A student who snubs me at the park.

  Chapter Twenty:

  Mom & Dad

  Philadelphia, March, 2011

  BETWEEN THE TWO OF US, we manage to get Michelle up the steps to the back door.

  “Need the key.” Her voice sounds weird.

  “Where is it?” I say.

  “Necklace.”

  There’s a thin black cord around her neck that goes right down into the low collar of her dress. I reach in this general direction—

  “No you don’t.” Yvaine slaps my hand away and lifts the cord-cum-key over Michelle’s head.

  I’m feeling pretty stoked that I managed to make my miss jealous when a whirling series of clicks and a BING unlocks the door. The room is dark, but where the light switch used to be I find a round knob. I give it a little twist. A really pathetic light flickers to life.

  It’s creepy, being inside my own house like this. The washer-dryer is gone, the place smells funny, and a tiny Asian woman in a ratty blue robe covered with even rattier dragons is folding laundry.

  “Who’s that?” I whisper to Michelle.

  “Don’t mind Sung,” she says, “Renni’s family has owned her forever.”

  The eyes in Sung’s toothless walnut of a face never rise from her folding.

  “Owned her?” I hear the quaver in my own voice.

  “House drudge, duh!” Michelle moves into the hall.

  With a final glance at the old lady, I follow.

  Both halves of the duplex look to be combined now. We come to what still seems to be the living room, but the furniture is brightly colored velvet and the knob on the wall turns on two lame gas-powered overhead lanterns.

  Mr. Montag drifts in, drinking beer from a bottle.

  “You two again? How’d you get in?”

  “They’re with me, Dad,” Michelle says. “Wanna see your wife.”

  “Ren!” he hollers, “you got visitors.” He slumps into a violet velvet armchair and takes another swig from the bottle.

  Mom rolls into the room in a wheelchair. It’s all I can do not to run to her. She’s wearing a frumpy pink nightgown and she’s lost weight, a lot of weight. Her stick-figure legs are twisted at a funny angle. It hurts to think of all those afternoons I spent at the racquet club, reading on the sidelines while her tanned, muscled legs raced across the court underneath that short white skirt.

  Her eyes are the same, though, and even her hair isn’t so different, though it could use a wash and cut. It’s not even dyed some funny color.

  “Mom?”

  She spins a little mechanical wheel on the arm of the chair and it drives forward. The carriage beneath is filled with gears and cogs and a huge spring.

  “What’s this git’s game?” Mr. Montag says. “Playing at being the son of a barren woman!” He drains the last of his beer. I look down at my mom.

  “What happened?” I say softly.

  “Could be worse,” she says. “Polio put thousands in the brass lung.”

  Her gaze meets mine. It’s sad, sympathetic, all the things Mom always is. But those aren’t the eyes of a mother who’s been missing her son for two months.

  “Are you friends of Michelle’s?” she asks.

  I can’t help myself now. I step to the chair, kneel, and take her hand.

  “You don’t know me?”

  Behind me, Mr. Montag belches. “This is rich,” he says. “Michelle, hon, get me a beer.”

  Michelle zombie-walks toward the kitchen, but as she passes the wheelchair my mom grabs her by the hand.

  “Honey,” Mom says. For a second my heart surges. “Have you been juicing again?”

  Mom has always been big on the hand-touching. I can almost feel her fingers on the back of my own hand.

  “Of course not.” Michelle turns her head to hide the raw marks on her neck.

  My mom pinches her wrist.

  “Ouch,” Michelle says after a second.

  “If you were sober,” Mom says, “you’d have slapped me for that.”

  I know that tone. It’s the you-lied-about-doing-your-homework tone. I’d give anything to hear it directed at me right now.

  Michelle laughs, a slow-motion sort of giggle.

  “Duh, bitch, but I’m too stoned to care.”

  “Don’t talk to your mother like that,” Mr. Montag says.

  Michelle looks at her dad. “Just because you married her doesn’t make this withered husk my mom.”

  I’m starting to breathe fast and heavy. My head feels light.

  “These be bonny flowers.” Yvaine’s over by the window fingering some crocuses in a china vase. She gives me a sad little smile, but everything is somehow made worse by the fact that I know Grandmom left Mom that vase, and the flowers come from her garden.

  Michelle tries to go, but my mom still has her wrist. Michelle tugs and the heavy clockwork wheelchair rocks.

  “I know I can’t replace her,” Mom says, “but I do love you.”

  I can’t help it. I make a squealy sound — like a Yorkie that’s been drop-kicked.

  Michelle pulls free and stomps off.

  “You two should leave,” Mom says. “You clearly haven’t been a good influence on Michelle.”

  I try to take a deep calming breath but find I can’t draw in any oxygen.

  Yvaine says, “Charlie tried to stop her. Be nice t’him.”

  Whoosh! Now I’m breathing too fast, and it hurts. Mom looks at me again, more closely this time. Is there a flicker of recognition in her eyes? A whiff? I don’t care how faint it is.

  “Thank you.” She’s talking to a stranger, which kills me. “But I think Michelle needs to be alone right now.”

  “And if I find out you’re the ones that juiced her up…” Mr. Montag makes a little boxing motion with his hands, one of which is still holding the empty beer bottle.

  I have to get out of here. I bolt through the back door, the clotheslines, the gate, and into the alley.

  I mash myself into a corner of the alley and drop, pressing my back to the rough brick wall, the pavement hard beneath my ass, hoping the discomfort will distract me from the pain that drove me out of the house.

  Up to now, I’d say this whole adventure has been sometimes scary, sometimes smelly, sometimes painful, often exhilarating, but overall? Fun more often than not. Like a weird summer camp where one of the campers even knows my name. That’s the part that makes me feel like a dick-wad — the fact that I destroyed the free world while I was having a good old time farting around with Yvaine.

  I’ve screwed things up so bad I don’t even have a home. I’ve deleted my life, my parents’ marriage, my whole freaking country — the democratic version, anyway.

  “Charlie? Charlie!” Slowly the voice penetrates and I feel the hands shaking my shoulders.

  I look up. Yvaine has tears in her eyes.

  “Stay with m
e,” she says. “You promised.”

  “My mother doesn’t even know me.”

  She kisses me — on my eyelids. It might be the sweetest kiss I’ve ever had.

  “At least she be alive, Charlie. Tick-Tocks left me only empty ghosts. You can save her.”

  She presses something dry and scratchy into my hands. The thistle I gave her in France.

  “Us travelers only has each other.” She closes her hands over mine and the flower. “For us, normal folks canna never be enough.”

  The world behind seems lost in a blur, but her face stands out crisp and focused. Real.

  “What about your da?” she says.

  “That wasn’t him,” I say. “Here my mom married the loser neighbor.” Although, to his credit, in my time Mr. Montag is a computer contractor who probably wouldn’t be caught dead in a wife-beater.

  “Wherever your da was, the timequake would’ve left him alone. History changes around us. Unless the Tocks got him, he remembers you still.”

  BING! We startle. Another of those clockwork garbage-eating robots is right next to us. A little panel on its head opens to reveal a round keyhole just like the one on Michelle’s door.

  BING! It scuttles back and forth on its toy-sized wheels, gear-guts whirling.

  “What do you think it wants?” I ask.

  “Nothin’ good.” She lunges at it. My girl is brave.

  The Tiny-Tock scoots back, spins around, and whizzes across the alley, right into an eight-inch hole in the wall. Yvaine runs over and squats to look inside, but it’s vanished.

  “There be all sorts of gears an’ stuff in there,” she says, “but I don’t see—”

  The alley rocks and sways beneath our feet. Not for long, and not too hard, but there’s no mistaking it.

  Timequake.

  I hear the sirens in the distance and feel the tingle of fear in my veins.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I say.

  We’re both standing now.

  “That running away sounds—”

  “Young master?” The voice comes from the yard behind the house. The old Asian house slave.

  She holds a small lacquered red box out to me. It’s covered in dust.