by Cam Rogers
“They might be watching the house.”
Nick shot a glance at the red-tiled roofline. Nothing suspicious.
“If they were,” Jack said. “We’d know about it by now.” Jack thought of his worn-out little apartment. The rusted key that fit the battered door. They may as well have belonged to someone else. “No,” he said. “I’m staying.”
Nick flipped his key ring in his hand, gunslinger-style, and got in the car. Jack found the white-painted latch flipped smoothly, but the gate stuck. He remembered the trick: lifted the gate, then pulled, and it swung just fine. Nick rolled the Charger over the hump and Jack got in.
The cab rolled in quiet and slow, lights off.
“Follow the drive.” By the fence was a dilapidated toolshed, unused and kept for color, next to which a shallow wooden boat sat gathering age under an orange tarpaulin. That had been his father’s, and something neither brother had wanted to be rid of. Grass grew wild and uncut around it, still green despite the fall weather.
The drive wound past a stand of four aged sycamore trees, each having dropped a flame-orange shadow of turned leaves, bringing the house and barn into full view. The last time Jack had seen the place it had been white-sided with dark-brown detailing. Since then Will had clearly decided it needed a paint job. Half of one side of the house was painted haphazardly sky blue; next to it a scissor-lift sat unattended and partially rusted.
“Jesus Christ, Will. Follow through man, or just hire someone.”
It hurt his heart to see the place like this. Some windows were obscured with grime. Others had been soaped opaque or covered in newspaper.
“This place looks abandoned.”
“No, pretty sure Will was living here.”
“While time-sharing with bears?”
“Paul…” The name stuck in Jack’s throat. “I was told Will may have gone off his meds.”
Nick switched off the engine and the car rumbled to a stop.
“Come on,” Jack said, getting out. “It’ll be an adventure.” He climbed out, booted feet touching down on home soil. The early morning air smelled like way back when.
An uncertain laugh made the hairs on his arms stand up.
Will spoke, attempting to make light of something. “… you can’t just…”
And there he was, but not really, at the foot of the wooden porch steps. It was happening again. Will was younger, bearded, wearing glass frames Jack hadn’t seen since Jack was, what, fourteen or fifteen?
“Hey! Hey! Shut it!” someone snapped, but Will didn’t react. His nervous smile was still there, as if waiting for feedback he could interpret. This abuse didn’t parse.
Someone else cut in, and Jack saw them now, two men who had been dead for six years, blown away at Bannerman’s Overlook: Princess and Aberfoyle’s second-in-charge. They were younger, too. Leaner. Better hair.
The second-in-charge cut in, more reasonable but no less intimidating. “You’ve had three months. No payment. No payment means we take the house.”
Will wasn’t making eye contact. “You … you don’t get the house. I … I dealt with Mr. Aberfoyle.” Will was talking to himself, the way he did when he worked, when teasing loose some complicated theoretical knot. He wasn’t present. Those fuckers were totally taking advantage of him. “Mr. Aberfoyle is the one … the one … who…” Will twitched, blinked hard, once, twice, three times.
Jack knew that tic. He wiped his eyes. Whenever this was, Will had been in a deep hole.
Will shook his head, blinked hard, shook his head again. He used thumb and forefinger to readjust his glasses. He still wasn’t looking at the men, his eyes on the steps or the trees. His tics were getting the better of him. Jack whispered his brother’s name, to no effect.
Princess glanced at the second-in-charge, smiled that prehistoric fish smile, then scowled at Will. “We make you nervous?”
Something hit the gravel, grassy and clattering—groceries—and a kid twelve years away from where Jack stood barked, “Hey!”
Jack felt himself surrender, déjà vu dragging him around again.
Princess didn’t even look at the new arrival. “Fuck off, kid.”
The knees were gone from his jeans; those thrift-store sneakers had lasted four years. Jack had forgotten that he once had a T-shirt with NOT blasted across the chest and he had loved that jacket. He thought that jacket made him look like serious business: khaki canvas, two big pockets, plenty of zippers.
Jack knew those groceries in the drive were paid for by three hours of collecting cans after school. He remembered buying them from a supermarket owned by Orrie Aberfoyle.
Will was a caricature of good manners. “Jack. Welcome home.” He swept his arm toward the door, a cartoon maître d’, still not looking anyone in the eye. “Why don’t you go upstairs?” Will never had any real idea what he was doing when it came to the human race. He had gotten better as time went on, but it still beggared belief. The poor bastard.
Jack Joyce, aged fourteen, got between the two wide-bodies and his brother, hair hanging in his eyes. “What’s the problem?” The size differential was shocking. The eye lines of Princess and the second-in-charge dropped toward this kid like two safes being lowered from a twelfth-floor window. The kid met their gaze unflinching. He raised his eyebrows helpfully—can I assist you?
Princess looked right at the kid, and said: “That smart mouth is gonna get your little brother hurt, Will.”
The kid’s eyebrows dropped. His voice was very level. “If I was being smart with you, dickhead, you’d never know it.”
Jack laughed, his hand slapping over his mouth. His eyes prickled.
Princess snapped his fist skyward—intercepted by the second-in-charge. “Dude. He’s a kid.”
Princess hesitated, eyes beaming death. Then he lowered that broad fist. “We’ll be back,” he promised.
“I’ll be here,” the kid said.
You magnificent little shit, Jack thought.
The goons exited stage right and literally vanished. The kid watched them go.
Vibrations took hold of the kid’s legs, and Jack watched as he hit the dirt—first those shredded knees, then his hands as well. They curled in the gravel, hard. The kid’s breath was staccato. He was shaking.
Will said, “Foul language is unacceptable, young man. Mom and Dad would have been appalled.” It sounded as if he were talking in his sleep.
The kid’s head snapped toward Will, wild-eyed and furious. Will didn’t move. He was doing that fiddly thing with his fingers, eyes on the gravel, or the trees. The kid’s fury shaded to fearful, to outraged, then to disbelieving. Then contained. Then the kid was coping. Business as usual.
Will’s tics were subsiding, but he still wasn’t moving. “Appalled…”
The kid got to his feet and slapped white-dusted hands against his serious-business jacket. Looping Will’s arm over his shoulder the kid turned his brother toward the house.
“Privileges revoked, mister,” Will mumbled.
“You’re right, Will. I’m sorry.”
“Your grades are suffering. Bad grades are unacceptable. Your education—”
“Is my future. I know, Will. Steps.”
The brothers climbed the steps to the porch.
“Let’s get you to bed,” the kid said.
“No, too much work.”
“Let’s get you to bed.”
“All right.”
The kid moved his brother to the front door and then opened it for him. “How much do we owe?”
“Owe?” Like he was talking in his sleep again.
“Mr. Aberfoyle.”
“How do you know Mr. Aberfoyle?”
The kid escorted him into the house. “Let’s get you to bed.”
“All right.”
The ghost door closed behind them, and the world came back into focus.
Nick was looking at Jack weird. Which was fair enough.
“I guess you’re wondering…”
“Pretty much.”
“A lot of memories.”
“My grandmother used to do that. Talk to the air. God, specifically.”
“Did she get answers?” Jack said it as a joke.
“The good Lord told her when she was gonna die, right down to the minute. Were you communing with something just then?”
Communing. Man, everybody in Massachusetts had some story about the life beyond. Jack had called an electrician out, years ago, to fix a light socket that wouldn’t stop flickering. The guy hadn’t been able to fix it and had advised Jack that it was most likely a spirit thing and to just make friends with it.
There was no point complicating things. “No. It’s just been a bad night.”
Jack climbed the bowed porch steps. He fished out his keys, looked for the one he never used. There it was, still stamped with the name of the shoe repair place on Ducayne where he’d gotten it cut when he was fifteen. “You know, Nick,” Jack said. “Ghosts don’t hang around because they can’t let go of us. They hang around because we can’t let go of them.”
“You’re a surprising man, Jack.”
“That’s not one of mine.” Jack turned the key, the lock clacked. “Something an electrician told me.”
The door opened, shoving aside a loose bank of uncollected mail. The cold air inside was stale, faintly rancid. Nick commented that it smelled like his old dorm room.
The date stamps on the mail were at least a week old, some dating further back. “The power might be off.”
The door opened straight into the living area, staircase angling up and behind the fireplace. The kitchen was through an entry to the right, and before that was space for the dining table and china cabinet. A bay window looked onto the drive and sycamore trees.
When Jack lived here he had managed to keep back Will’s piecemeal encroachment onto a house that was a memorial to his parents. So much of the interior character existed because of choices their mother and father had made; echoes Jack wanted to keep hearing for as long as he could. They were silent now. The place had changed.
Minor things remained as they had been: powder-blue walls, framed pastoral oils by some anonymous gas station artist, and homemade shelves where Jack had often set up action figures to be blasted down with dart guns. He smiled for a moment, before the memory of the previous few hours and the ghost-weight of a real gun in his hand fouled the recollection.
Atop that base layer Will had made the place his own. A whiteboard balanced on top of the mantle, gone smudge-blue from countless scrawlings and erasures. The china cabinet had been cleared and the dishware replaced with haphazard arrangements of scientific periodicals. The dining table was a work space, piled with papers and correspondence, the four chairs stacked in the corner, replaced by a single threadbare ergonomic saddle seat on four casters.
It hurt to see the place like this, faded and dusty and wrong.
“Your brother really believed in taking work home with him.” Nick crossed to the plastic-sheathed sofa—moving with a pronounced limp—and rested there.
“Did you hurt yourself?”
“I’m fine. Busted my knee a few years back, is all.”
“Hockey?”
“I was … in a car accident.”
It clicked: the ignition in Nick’s cab, slaved to a Breathalyzer. Nick “The Prez” Marsters. Jack knew this story. It had made the news a year or so before Jack left Riverport.
The realization must have been all over Jack’s face because Nick rolled his eyes, laid his head back, and said to the ceiling: “It wasn’t like the news reported it. I wasn’t drunk.” Shooting Jack a glance: “I wasn’t. Drinking, yes. Drunk, no.”
Jack went looking for coffee, found the kitchen had been used more often than cleaned. The fridge was empty, save for four small cartons of milk, a jar of pickled ginger, two bottles of sterilized water, and a decaying clutch of rubber-banded shallots. Coffee was in the cupboard, the milk was barely decent, and the sink held a stack of plates textured with outcroppings of dark green mold. That would have been the musty scent that Nick found so familiar.
The faucet juddered and spat. He rinsed the kettle, lit the burner, set the water to boil, then wandered back to ask Nick how he took his coffee.
“It was a pedestrian,” Nick said. “They popped up in the middle of the road, I swerved and the car I was driving barrel-rolled through a fence and destroyed a gazebo.”
Jack hooked a thumb back toward the kitchen. “Black?”
“A judge’s gazebo.”
Nick was asleep on the couch by the time the coffee was ready. Jack cleared a space among the papers on the dining table, set both cups down, and took a seat. Morning light brought out more color in the place. Coffee steam rose fragrant and pleasing from Jack’s faded mug. Washed-away lettering advised never ever, ever, ever giving up. It was a Churchill quote. Jack’s father had given him the mug when he started taking guitar lessons.
His high school yearbook lay open on a page of class photographs. The university security guard looked back at him in black and white, thirty pounds heavier and braces on his teeth.
Jack memorized his name.
10
At that moment, Paul was off-site in an operations room composed of a nine-rack of monitors and three operators handling six different hazmat drones—not so different from those used for exploring radioactive death zones, though these had finer motor control. Here, within the green zone of the area designated in official Monarch documentation as Ground Zero, Paul watched as tracked, claw-handed drones and lumbering quanton-insulated scientists worked the forsaken landscape within Warehouse 21B. The view these multiple screens offered was not always perfect. The crews at Ground Zero had to replace cameras frequently. Not much survived in the red zone.
“It pains me that Will is going to be remembered as a lunatic,” he said to Sofia. “That his theories were never taken seriously.”
Sofia leaned into one console, bending the thread-mic toward her. “Doctors Connor and Chang, please attend to remote unit C. One of the receivers has degraded. Thank you.” She turned to Paul. “As will you, so you tell me.” She snapped a penlight on, flicked the beam from his left eye to right and back again, snapped it off. “As will I, for all the work I’ve done here.”
“The activation of the machine fractured the Meyer-Joyce field. The Fracture will grow, universal chronon count will hit zero, and time itself will end.” This was fact. “In that sense humanity is not going to remember anything: trapped, unaware, in a submoment self-dividing into infinity. Those of us chosen to go on will be tortured by more important things than a lack of recognition.” He sighed. “But we have five more years. Time enough for Project Lifeboat to be properly developed and become operational.”
Sofia pressed two fingers to his carotid. “About that,” she said. “I have rechecked my calculations for a third time and can find no error.” She checked his pulse against her watch.
“Sofia…”
She removed her hand. “You have been to this end-of-time event, yes, I understand. You saw clocks and calendars and papers. They provided you a date. But the data does not lie: we have mere days, not years. At the current rate of decay the Meyer-Joyce field will collapse—in two, perhaps three days at the most. You must take these findings seriously.”
“The waveform—”
“Has collapsed, as you have said so often. The future is written because events in the past led you to witness the future. I understand. But you must consider the likelihood that the reason your visions do not extend beyond a few days from now is because that is when time ends. Not five years, not next month, but this week.”
“Enough!”
Sofia flinched, stepped back.
“Please,” he said. “Enough.”
Another moment of lost control. This was becoming common. He was fighting to retain focus, to maintain his discipline and resolve. He had decided upon and built a protocol for his behavior when this final week arrived, knowing tha
t raw programming may be the only thing to keep him on mission once his illness properly asserted itself. If he had to think too much, plan too much, adjust too much—it opened the gates to error, flawed thinking, damaged reasoning, and a lack of perspective. He had to trust to the plan laid out by his clearer-headed and less instinctual past self. He was a soldier now, taking orders from the more complete person he used to be. He could not tolerate anyone interfering with that coding.
“It is too late for a course correction. The future is locked.”
Sofia’s jaw was set. “I am not working night and day simply to pass the time between now and doomsday.”
“Let’s…” Paul glanced at the monitors. “Let’s change the subject. The Tower’s chronon stores, how are we doing?”
Warehouse 21B, nestled on the fringe of what had once been Riverport’s thriving dockyards, had been a very respectable laboratory. In some ways the fingerprint of the original owner survived, despite the fickle entropic fluctuations that possessed the place. The work benches remained upright, though most of the original equipment had long since crumbled to dust. A bunk bed, neatly made, survived layered in the accreted powdery fallout of age and time. Resting atop a caved-in twelve-cup coffee maker, angled toward the camera, was a dusty photograph of a family of four: mother, father, two sons. Tape yellowed and withered and curled on three corners.
How Paul wished he had never activated that machine.
The scientists at Ground Zero clicked life back into the tracked claw-robot and gave a thumbs-up to the camera. In the operations room a controller leaned forward on a throttle and trundled the ’bot toward the room’s centerpiece: a roiling and thumping time-space anomaly encapsulated and trapped within a twelve-billion-dollar contraption designed to harness and siphon off the rampant torrents of chronon energy it had been spraying out for the last six years.
Delicately, the operator manipulated the fine-work pincer to replace various burned-out components on the shell. Racked about the site an elaborate array of chronon batteries absorbed the anomaly’s output as fast as they were able.
“Our chronon stores are holding level,” Sofia said. “Containing Dr. Kim is our biggest drain, currently. But a necessary one. If we didn’t have the Regulator I doubt we would be able to contain him at all.”