Black Valley

by Jim Brown

  Piper cut loose on the piano, playing the song by memory. Dean, knowing a surprising amount of the lyrics, began to sing, supplementing dah, dah, dah’s for unrecalled words and both belting out the chorus, “. . .let’s do the time warp, again. . .”

  They finished, both of them laughing.

  “I haven’t heard that song in years,” Piper said, flushed with relief and a tinge of embarrassment.

  “I’ve had it in my head since . . .” He mentally chased the thought.

  “Dean?”

  “It’s not just a song. It’s a dance.”

  “A dance?” Piper said.

  “It’s the dance Elijah was doing.” He straightened. Color had returned to his cheeks. The fire of certainty reignited behind tenebrous pupils. “Maggie, how many people can you scrounge up?”

  The administrative assistant, who had been watching them like a teacher deciding whether to weigh in or not, hesitated for just a moment. “As many as we need. Nobody is going anywhere. Why?”

  “We’re going to need them.”

  She smiled, still tentative but optimistic.

  Piper shared her emotions. “For what?”

  “The answer, Piper, the answer. And do you know what the answer is?”

  A cocky smile this time. “You’re the professor.”

  “That’s right, I am. And the answer is science.”

  “Yes!” Piper cheered, pumping her arm in victory. Impulsively she lept into his arms.

  Before either of them realized what was happening, before doubt had a moment to be born, Dean leaned forward and kissed her.

  “Thank you,” he said a moment later.

  She almost thanked him back, but he was deep in the burning fire of ideas. “Maggie, I need a clock. Something from the office, with hour, minute, and second hands. No digital. Digital won’t work.”

  “A clock. They all stopped.”

  “Exactly. Get someone over to that farmhouse near the Willamette Bridge, Dub Pelts’s place, and Nathan’s. I’ll go by my house, then the school. Tell everyone to look for clocks, watches – again, anything with hands, not digital. Then bring them to me at the school.”

  “But the sheriff wanted us to stay put,” one of the part-timers said.

  “No, the sheriff wanted us to solve this thing,” Maggie Dane said. “And this is the man who can do it. Whatever you need, Dr. Truman, whatever you need.”

  “Thanks, Maggie. Piper, I’m going to need all your research papers, everything you have on the history of the city. Can you drive me?”

  “To the moon.”

  He smiled. It was a nice smile, crooked and imperfect, exquisite in its flaws.

  “That won’t be necessary. At least, not yet.”

  The air was acidic and smelled of burning phosphate, wood, and bodies. Sirens screamed, strobe lights flashed – staccato tableaus in blue, red, and white. The scene was one of chaos and death. The wounded were being pulled from the rubble. The building, at least what remained of it, continued to burn. Screams of pain and the electronic warble of emergency sirens all mingled to produce a symphony of turmoil.

  Whitey Dobbs laughed.

  Here again? Well, not exactly again. He couldn’t do that. But close. He had been here before and after, but never now. He judged the scene and estimated how long before his next move. Not long.

  He rubbed his hands together, then held them out toward the destruction, warming his palms on the fires of disaster. He laughed, louder this time. A fireman turned his head, faceplate covered in soot. Dobbs could make out his expression of disgust and confusion. Which only made Dobbs laugh louder.

  Here, always here – no, not always, just often. Which seemed like always. If he could stick around, he would see himself. But that could never happen. He searched the crowd, the faces. Somewhere out there was Dr. Dean Truman.

  The thought of the doctor warmed him more than the fire.

  Whitey Dobbs cackled, his voice merging with the cacophony of devastation, a high- pitched squawk like a crow on a live wire. And then he was gone.

  32

  The classroom throbbed with activity, the sound of multiple computers doing multiple calculations, the sound of idea and theory colliding, of mysteries revealed and secrets solved. They worked into the evening. Piper had been collecting, sorting, and logging information as person after person arrived with timepieces of various shapes and sizes, all frozen at specific times. She dutifully noted where each was found and the when the clock had stopped. She then passed that information on to Dean, who absorbed it silently, then continued with his mantra of clacking keys.

  Her own research lay beside him in various stacks and piles – individual dates circled, events underlined. Occasionally he would ask a question, always about a location, and she would respond. Outside, the snow continued to fall from a sky that seemed permanently stained black-gray.

  At ten till eight John and Nathan arrived, directed to the school by Maggie. Their faces told the story. Something had happened. Something else. And while John talked, describing the events in the Timber Limb Lodge, the death of David Levin, the amputation of Tina Evans’s finger, the disappearance of the white-haired man, Dean continued to work. His mind like the machines around him, multitasking, performing dozens of calculations, evaluating and deducing even as he listened.

  It was only when John repeated the message, the personal challenge leveled to Dean and written in a young girl’s blood, that he stopped. Even then, as he looked at the sheriff, as he absorbed the words with his eyes, his mind was somewhere else.

  He’s still thinking, Piper noted, slightly alarmed by his icy detachment, but at the same time, relieved at his determination.

  Thirty-one minutes later, when Piper returned with a plate of sandwiches and another round of soft drinks, Dean began to explain the unexplainable.

  He walked as he spoke, punctuating his thoughts with his gestures. Piper listened and felt a new coldness.

  “Real?” John asked. “You’re saying it’s all real?”

  “Yes.”

  It was just the four of them – Dean, John, Piper, and Nathan. Everyone else had been sent home or on an assignment.

  Nathan looked to Piper. “Is he – ”

  “Sane?” Piper finished.

  “I was going to say ‘on the level’, but yes, that does cut to the chase.”

  Piper studied Dean, this older man who had been both teacher and friend, this brilliant yet shy genius, who in a rare unguarded moment had brushed his lips with her own, and she smiled. He echoed the gesture with his slightly crooked grin.

  “Yes, he is same.”

  He thanked her with a tip of his head, then continued. “Not only am I saying it’s real; I’m saying I was a fool for not realizing it sooner.”

  “So the ghost of Whitey Dobbs is haunting us?” John asked.

  “No. There’s no such thing as a ghost. At least, not in the conventional sense. Whitey Dobbs is a living being, as tangible and physical as any of us.”

  “But he still looks like a teenager.”

  “Because he is a teenager. By my calculations he is a little more than a year older than the last time we saw him.”

  The small fans in the nearest computers hummed. Others clicked and clucked like strange exotic birds. The mayor and the sheriff exchanged a look. Nathan nervously nibbled the crust on his ham and cheese sandwich and looked up.

  Dean continued. “I believe Dobbs is encompassed in a harmonic wave distortion.”

  “Come again?” John said. He sat on the end of a lab table, sandwich untouched in his hand.

  “He is out of phase with reality, stepping between the seconds, days, weeks, months, years. He’s out of concert with time.”

  “Time travel,” Nathan mumbled. “I think I liked it better when he was a ghost.”

&nb
sp; Piper took a bite of her sandwich, chewing without thought, swallowing without taste.

  “And it’s not just Dobbs,” Dean continued. “I think the same thing is happening to Elijah.”

  “Which is how he disappeared from his cell,” John finished.

  “You said the same thing is happening to Elijah. You mean, it’s not voluntary?”

  “For the most part, I don’t think it is. This isn’t the result of a time machine. It’s the result of radiation.”

  “Radiation? You mean plutonium or something?” Nathan asked.

  Dean shook his head. “No, not radiation in the conventional sense. This is something different. Think of it as neoradiation. As far as I can tell, it’s not overtly harmful. Actually, it acts a bit like electricity, much like an electric fence is rife with electricity, which is not a bad comparison, since it does seem to affect electromagnetic fields. If you’re exposed to small amounts, there is no apparent effect. But if you’re radiated with enough, you shift out of phase with normal space-time.”

  “Others, like Piper” – he pointed to her with his sandwich – “have just enough exposure to make them sensitive to it.”

  “Radiation? I’m radiated?”

  Dean smiled at her. “Actually, you’re radiant, but that’s another story.”

  Piper felt herself blush.

  Dean continued. “Your neorad exposure is not enough to harm you, but it is enough to allow you to sense distortions in the space-time continuum. I believe the same was true of your mother.”

  “How? Why me?”

  Dean motioned out the window. “Hawkins Hill. Both you and your mother were born in that farmhouse at the foot of Hawkins Hill.”

  Mama lying on the floor in a growing shadow of red. Lightning that seemed to last forever. A stranger in the doorway.

  “And this neoradiation comes from the hill?”

  “It comes from that location, yes,” Dean said.

  “This Elijah character” – he’s irradiated like Dobbs?” John asked. “Is that why he dresses the way he does, like he could have stepped into the future from the past?”

  Dean nodded. “Very well may have.”

  “Time travel.” John shook his head. He waved with the still-untouched sandwich. “Is such a thing really possible?”

  “Of course it is. You’re doing it right now.”

  Dean stepped up to the new, pristine blackboard that replaced the ruined one. “Look at it this way.” He drew a straight line with an arrowhead at the end. “We are all traveling in time, as is the world around us. But only in one direction -- forward. So we tend to think of time as a forward progression. But it’s not.”

  John frowned.

  “I can show you how to see into the past right now, and not just minutes, but hundreds, thousands, millions of years.”

  “I’d like to see that,” Nathan mumbled.

  “You have.”

  “The stars,” Piper replied, suddenly understanding..

  “Exactly. Even looking at the Sun is looking back in time. It takes approximately eight minutes for the light from the Sun to reach our eyes here on Earth. It takes more than three and a half years for the light from the nearest star to reach us. For others it can be billions. A star could be dead and gone for hundreds of thousands of years, but because of the distance we still see it in our night sky. We see what was, the past, even as we continue into the future.”

  “That’s all well and good, but as you said, time only flows in one direction,” Nathan rebutted.

  Dean pointed with the chalk. “Or so we thought. But a tortured interpretation of a recently published theory on a relatively unconnected subject indicates otherwise.”

  “Your theory on quantum physics and superstring mechanics,” Piper said.

  “Right. On the surface it has nothing to do with time travel per say, but if you look at it from a different perspective, it not only supports time travel, but explains it. You see, under my theory a superstring of pre-existing hydrocarbons . . .”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” John said. “Save the fancy talk for the journals.” He had finally taken a bite of his sandwich, consuming close to half of it with one chomp. “Give me the nickel version.”

  Dean began again. “Okay, here’s the thing: I’ve accidentally invented time travel. I haven’t worked out all the details yet, but I can see where it’s going, and recent events more than support that it works. It’s the only thing that makes sense.”

  “But time travel is impossible,” Nathan said. “Every scientist says so.”

  “Every scientist used to say so. Then along comes quantum physics, and it all changes. Now we know that at a subatomic level the rules change become counter-intuitive. The same experiment produces different results if it’s being watched. And in some cases you have the effect before you have the cause.”

  “That ridiculous,” Nathan said emphatically.

  “That’s science. It’s a fact. I know it sounds crazy. You might say that explaining quantum physics is like describing a rainbow to a person without eyes.”

  “What about the radiation?” Nathan asked. “How were Dobbs and Elijah exposed to this neoradiation, and what does any of this have to do with burning trucks, silos, glass, and severed hands?”

  “And don’t forget the brick,” Dean said.

  Dean paused. For a moment his mind appeared somewhere else. “Flash Five,” he mumbled then, “Oh my God, that’s it.”

  “The old gang?” Nathan asked.

  Dean looked up, his eyes still unfocused. “No. The experiment. I’ve developed a plan, based on my string theory, to create a new energy source. I’ll call the experiment Flash Five.”

  He paused for a moment, his eyes squinted like someone experiencing an intense headache. “At some point in the next few years I’ll try it. But instead of creating an energy source, I’ll create time travel. And I’ll make a mistake.”

  “How can you know that?” Piper asked.

  “Because the plant is going to blow up.”

  John’s thoughts ran rampant. Everything is real. If that was true . . . ? He inhaled deeply and forced himself to remain calm, at least on the outside.

  If Dean was right and everything was real, then so was the severed head sitting in the morgue freezer less than two miles away. And that meant John was going to be decapitated and his head thrown into the sheriff’s department like a bloodied bowling ball.

  The thought of his own death was disquieting but nothing new. As a cop, he had long since come to terms with his own mortality. Still. He reached up and touched his face, his fingers tracing a thin nick created when he shaved less than eight hours ago. John had seen the same nick on the severed head. Unhealed. Fresh. Which meant John was going to die before this day was over.

  He took a bite of his sandwich and wondered if his last meal on Earth would be ham and cheese.

  “Blow up?” Nathan repeated.

  “That’s it,” Piper said. “That’s exactly it. While experimenting on your time theory, something goes wrong and the whole place explodes. But it’s not a normal explosion.”

  Dean sighed. “No, no it’s not.”

  “Excuse me again,” Nathan said, raising his hand like a second-grade student. “Layman in the room. Give me the bottom line.”

  Dean smiled. “The building will not only explode in physical space; it will explode in time. Think of it like this.” He drew a circle on the board. “The blast starts here, sending shockwaves and debris hurling out in an expanding fashion. But due to the nature of the blast, it doesn’t just radiate outward, it radiates through time.”

  “The truck,” Piper said.

  “Was or will be parked near the plant at the time of the explosion. The truck flickered through time, which is how Cheevers saw it several days before Piper and I witnessed it crashing into
the Willamette Bridge. The silo, I think that’s the top of the one lost back in 1974. It wasn’t a minitornado but a shock wave that blew it off. And it was burning shards that most likely caused that elementary school fire back in 1948. Glass blown out by the explosion is what killed Meredith Gamble. The shock waves and debris are being hurled backward and forward probably, dispersing over centuries, usually in small amounts – like the brick that came through my window – but occasionally in larger doses with rather spectacular results. Using Piper’s research, I’ve been able to isolate at least fifty-three incidents that support this theory.”

  “Fire and stone,” Nathan whispered. “Piper’s report says the first settlement here was destroyed by fire, the second by stone.”

  Dean nodded. “That’s consistent with my theory.”

  “You said shock wave,” John said. “Is that what hit the building? Knocked down the helicopter?”

  “Exactly.”

  “That explains the hot wind,” Piper said. “And the weather.”

  “I think so. I believe dozens of fissures are opening in space-time, allowing cold and hot air, from heaven knows when, to rush out and mix with our own air, creating these bizarre meteorological effects.”

  John shook his head. “So an explosion in the future is sending debris into the past. But now that we know about it, can’t we just make sure the plant is never built? No plant, no explosion; no explosion, no debris.”

  “Doesn’t work that way. It’s a common mistake and part of the conundrum of time travel. It’s called protected field theory.” Dean tossed the chalk in his hand. “It was Einstein who first proposed that space and time were opposite sides of the same coin, like heads or tails. Different but joined – space-time. I’m sure you’ve heard this one before. Time passes slower for someone traveling near the speed of light than someone standing still. So if you travel at the speed of light for ten years, five out and five back, when you returned to Earth, one hundred years will have passed.”

  “Go on,” John urged.

  “Just because a hundred years pass on Earth doesn’t mean you, the space traveler, will age a hundred years. That’s because of protected field theory. While traveling at an accelerated speed, you are governed by your own individual laws of physics.”