by Angela Hunt
The professor threw me a glance of helpless appeal, then sighed and picked up his fork. “I think I’ve prepared you enough,” he said, sliding his fork into a mound of spaghetti. “Just remember—tomorrow’s lecture is not a forum for discussion. If you have questions—” he glared at Tank—“keep them to yourself. We can talk about them at dinner tomorrow night.”
I shot Tank a warning look—why was he trying to rattle the professor’s cage on the night before his big speech?—but Tank only gave me a wide-eyed look of innocence as the professor spun spaghetti onto his fork.
Chapter Three
Tank stopped halfway into the row of padded seats and turned to me. “Are you sure they don’t serve popcorn at these things?”
“I’m sure.” I pushed him forward. “You’re supposed to take notes, not feed your face. So keep moving, please.”
Tank sighed heavily, but I had a feeling he was actually looking forward to the professor’s presentation. Brenda and Daniel filed in after me, then we made ourselves comfortable in the big, comfy chairs of the university’s auditorium.
I took advantage of the house lights and looked around. Lots of scholarly-looking men and women in the audience, lots of jeans and elbow- patched jackets on people who looked as though they spent a lot of time reading. More men than women. Brenda and I actually stood out. So did Daniel.
Daniel pulled his iPhone out of his pocket and began to play one of his games. “Okay,” Brenda said, “but you have to mute the sound.”
Daniel grunted, then pressed the mute button and kept playing. Someone lowered the house lights and a hush fell over the crowd. An expectant atmosphere filled the room, the same sort of anticipation you might experience at a beauty pageant, a concert, or a play . . . except this would be a presentation on the Relationship between Dimensionality and Quantum Mechanics.
My fingertips began to tingle as vicarious stage fright triggered my adrenal glands.
“Is this speech any good?” Brenda whispered.
I shook my head. “No idea.”
A man I didn’t recognize walked onto the stage and smiled at the audience. “It is my very great pleasure,” he said, “to introduce one of our nation’s leading voices in scientific thought, philosophy, and sociology. Our guest this morning has more advanced degrees than I have time to read, so let me get out of the way and allow our speaker to take the stage. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Dr. James McKinney.”
Polite applause filled the auditorium as the professor stepped onto the stage and blinked in the bright lights. Instead of proceeding immediately to the lectern as he usually did, he walked to a stool in the middle of the stage and took a seat.
“In a few months I will be sixty-one years old,” he said, not even glancing at the typed pages in his hand, “and as a man enters the final seasons of his life, he has a tendency to look over the road he has traveled and question his choices—the job not taken, the pregnancy terminated, the shift in careers. The woman left behind.”
Though I kept my gaze on the professor, from the corner of my eye I saw Tank look at me, his brow lifted. He wanted to know what the professor meant, but I knew no more about the professor’s unusual approach than Tank did.
“Imagine,” the professor continued, “that you are holding a strip of paper only one atom high and several microns long.” The professor set his notes on a lectern, then spread his hands as if indicating a long strip of paper. “You are holding an object that exists, for all practical purposes, in only two dimensions: height and length. Agreed?”
He looked out at the audience, and as one, we nodded.
The professor smiled. “Now take one end of your imaginary paper and join it to the other so it makes a circle. If you were a tiny sugar ant, you could travel on that paper—over its length—without ever leaving the second dimension. But if you twisted the paper, so that the upper side joined the lower side at the junction point, a sugar ant could literally cross over to the underside of that paper and enter a world of three dimensions—height, length, and width, because you would be able to travel on the front and back of the one-atom width. Correct?”
We nodded again, but less collectively this time. I glanced at Tank, whose forehead had crinkled. Brenda was thinking hard, too, and even Daniel had looked up from his electronic game.
At least no one was bored.
“Einstein said time travel should be possible,” the professor went on. “All we have to do is find a way to fold dimensions so we can move from one to the other. If we discover a way to do that, a man ought to be able to choose a point early in his life and revisit it, making new choices the second time.”
The professor smiled as a murmur rippled through the crowd. “Ah, now I have your attention. Yes, time is the fourth dimension, and the fifth and sixth dimensions are planes of possibilities. If I left my current starting point and moved to the sixth dimension, I could find myself in an auditorium like this and face vastly different options. If I could fold over to the seventh dimension, I could find myself in a jungle or on a different planet, because the seventh dimension is composed of possibilities that merge not from my current starting point, but from the beginning of time. The eighth dimension includes the histories of all possible universes, and the ninth, all possible everythings. The tenth dimension is limitless, and includes every possible thing anyone could imagine.”
The professor stood, his eyes wide with the infinite variety of alternatives he was imagining. I found myself caught up in his fervor, and I barely heard him as he went on to compare dimensionality with inflationary cosmology and our expanding universe, which theoretically creates room for more universes. I was familiar with the cosmology material because my friends and I had met people and creatures from other universes, but I still found the concept mind-boggling.
“Snogg . . . rmph.” I elbowed Tank, who was contentedly snoring beside me.
I tried to follow the rest of the professor’s presentation, but his idea of time travel through folded dimensions had opened a door, and I spent the rest of the hour imagining the possibilities.
Chapter Four
“Honestly, professor.” I caught his arm as Tank, Brenda, and Daniel scooted past us into the house. “You did a great job. That may have been the best presentation I’ve ever heard on the subject of time travel and dimensionality.”
I expected him to brush me off—after all, the professor has never been one to easily pocket praise. But he held my gaze and the corner of his mouth wobbled. “You really think so?”
“I wouldn’t say it if I didn’t mean it.” I released his arm and jerked my thumb toward the narrow path that led to the beach. “Want to join us down on the beach? I think you deserve to relax a little now that your big speech is over.”
“Maybe later.” He smiled, then walked into the house and down the hall. I followed, on the way to my room, but lifted a brow when the professor went into his room and pointedly closed the door.
Okay, then. Maybe he needed some time to decompress.
I blew out a breath. I was hoping the professor would snap out of his preoccupation once he’d finished his presentation, but he seemed just as abstracted as he had when we left the house. Was something else bothering him? Something I hadn’t even guessed?
“Hey, Andi!”
I turned at the sound of Tank’s voice and found him in the living room . . . all wrapped up in a metal detector. Headphones covered his ears, a harness and elbow braced supported some kind of screen/joystick apparatus, and a circular disk on the end of a stick hovered above the carpeted floor.
I gave the contraption a skeptical look. “So that’s it, huh? You’re serious about this?”
He grinned. “I thought you might want a demonstration. Happy to show you the ropes.”
“Maybe later.” I forced a smile. “Let me change into shorts, then I”ll come outside.”
“See you later, then.” He went through the kitchen, then out the sliding glass doors and onto the deck. Maybe Da
niel would enjoy helping him look for buried treasure or whatever. I wasn’t particularly thrilled by the idea.
I was about to go back to my room, but the overabundance of light in the foyer reminded me that I’d left the door partly open. I stepped up to close it, and through the opening I glimpsed the two odd children I’d noticed yesterday. They were coming up the driveway, staring straight ahead, their arms hanging stiffly at their sides, neither of them smiling. Their deadpan expressions sent a cold hand down my spine—if they meant to creep me out, they were doing a good job of it.
But they were just kids, for heaven’s sake.
Abby, who stood by my side looking out the sidelights, saw the kids and stiffened. Then she began to growl.
“Easy, Abs.” I pasted on a bright smile and stepped onto the front porch, closing the door firmly behind me. “Can I help you with something?”
They halted in unison, then the boy swiveled his head and met my gaze. “Will you let us come in?” he asked, his voice flat and matter-of-fact.
I looked at the girl, who had also turned her head to look at me. “Is this some kind of joke? Maybe a dare?” I asked. I softened my smile. “Are you two lost or something?”
They didn’t answer. The girl stared at me, and something in her unwavering gaze lifted the hair at the back of my neck. “Will you let us in?” she asked in the same dull tone as the boy. “It will only take a minute.”
“What will only take a minute?”
“We need to use the telephone,” the boy said, staring at me without even blinking.
I hesitated. Most kids in this neighborhood carried cell phones that served as invisible leashes connecting them to their parents. With all the tourist traffic on this street, I couldn’t imagine any parent sending their kids out without one.
And something—some atavistic alarm signal—warned me not to let these kids in the house.
“Um . . . I’ll call someone for you, if you want to give me a number.”
Nothing flickered in their eyes—not interest, not gratitude, not even curiosity. “Will you let us in?” the boy repeated. “It will only take a minute.”
My heart hammered in my chest as I stepped back toward the door.
“Let us in,” the girl echoed, stepping forward in lockstep with the boy. “It will only take a minute.”
That’s when I smelled it—a scent of death and dying things, an odor so repulsive that my gag reflex kicked in. I made an effort to look away, then took another step backward. When I felt the threshold beneath the sole of my shoe, I spun and moved inside, slamming the door behind me. I flipped the deadbolt, then leaned against the solid wood, relishing its strength beneath my clammy palms. Abby stood next to me, her nose pressed to the crack between the door and the doorframe, hair lifted along her spine.
Only when my heart had calmed did I move to the peephole and look outside.
No one stood on the porch. No kids walked down the driveway. Since our porch faced the side of the property, I could see the Diaz house, where a giant sabal palm rattled its leaves in the breeze.
I was about to turn away when I saw them again—the boy and girl were walking up the sidewalk that led to the Diaz’s front door.
This was not good. I don’t know how I knew it, but I knew that if I did nothing, I would feel like I had walked away from someone drowning . . .
“Andi! Aren’t you coming?”
I turned, dry-mouthed, and saw Brenda and Daniel standing behind me in bathing suits, beach towels slung over their shoulders. I could smell coconut-scented sunscreen from where I stood—a far cry from the nauseating odor I’d inhaled a few minutes before.
“I’ll be right out,” I said, rummaging in my purse for my cell phone. “I just have to make a quick call.”
I dialed 911, then hesitated when the operator answered. How was I supposed to explain the panic I felt around those kids?
“I’m not sure this is an emergency,” I finally told her, “but two kids are wandering down Gulf Boulevard and asking people to let them into their homes. They seem sort of—I don’t know, maybe shell-shocked, and I’m afraid they may have been involved in something—”
“Ma’am? What are you saying?”
“I think they’ve been involved in something really bad. Maybe you could send someone to check on them?”
The woman took my name and address, then thanked me and promised to send a patrol car.
Feeling that I’d done my duty, I moved on down the hall, ready to put on my bathing suit and join the others. Before going to my room, though, I peeked into the other’s bedrooms to make sure they had plenty of towels.
I paused in the room Brenda was using—her sketch book lay on her bed, open to a drawing that immediately caught my attention. On the page I saw the two children, and in the stark lines of a number two pencil I finally realized what had alarmed me most about those kids.
Their eyes. Their eyes were solid black—no white, no iris, no color at all. Just solid orbs as dark as a starless night sky.
I caught Brenda down on the beach. “Your sketch,” I said, dropping to the towel I’d spread on the sand. “Forgive me for snooping, but I couldn’t help seeing your sketchbook on the bed. When did you draw those kids?”
She frowned. “The image came to me during the professor’s presentation. But don’t tell him I was sketching during his talk. I’ll never hear the end of it.”
“Wait—did you see them at the university?”
She looked at me as if I’d been out in the sun too long. “I didn’t see them with my eyes. I just saw them, so I drew them.” She snorted softly. “Why? You got spooky kids hidden in the attic or something?”
“They walked up to the house while you and Daniel were changing into your bathing suits.”
Her arched brows lifted. “Shut. Up. You’re kiddin’, right?”
I shook my head. “I wish. Because they are every bit as creepy as they look in your picture. But I didn’t realize why they creeped me out until I saw your sketch—it’s those eyes. But not only their eyes—everything about them is somehow off. Their speech, their posture, their clothing—it’s like they’re from the back side of the moon.”
Brenda’s eyes narrowed. “Maybe they are.”
“And they stink. I’ve never smelled a dead body, but something tells me it would smell just like those kids.” I shifted my gaze to the surf, where Tank and Daniel were walking around with the metal detector and studying the sand. “Here we go again. I was really hoping we’d have some time to relax. The professor could certainly use some down time.”
“Ditto,” Brenda said. “I love takin’ care of Daniel, but I tell ya—being a full-time parent is a lot harder than I thought. And Daniel’s not exactly a regular kid.”
“Is he giving you problems?”
“Nothing I can’t work out. Trouble is, I’m so busy bouncing between work and taking care of him that my time, patience, and creativity are in short supply. So I was glad when you invited us to come for some beach time. Even if we have to deal with crazy stuff, it’s good to be with you guys. I know you love Daniel, too, and that takes some of the pressure off.”
I gave her a sympathetic smile and remained silent while she rolled onto her stomach and pillowed her head on her hands. The beach was quiet, probably because it was a weekday and as hot as blazes. Maybe the rest of the week would be quiet and peaceful. After all, we hadn’t received any directions or plane tickets from the mysterious people who usually sent us on strange ventures. But Brenda had received a vision of those kids and I had actually met them, so the odds that we were about to be caught up in some bizarre situation were growing greater all the time—
“Andi!”
Uh oh. What now?
I turned at the sound of the professor’s voice. He stood on the edge of the back deck, and when he caught my gaze, he pointed to the house. “Someone here to see you!”
Who knew I was home?
Grumbling under my breath, I stood, picked
up my towel, and shook it carefully so it wouldn’t spray sand all over Brenda. “Looks like I gotta go. You think we should grill hamburgers for dinner?”
“Whatever,” Brenda murmured, her eyes closed. “Let me know when, and I’ll help.”
“Okay.”
I wrapped my towel around my chest and started toward the house.
By the time I reached the house, I remembered that I’d given my address to the 911 dispatcher. I was expecting to find an officer or two in the living room, but instead I found Mr. Diaz distractedly petting Abby in the foyer. Perspiration dotted his forehead, his thinning hair was disheveled, and his eyes were wide with fear.
I regretted taking my time about coming up the hill. “Mr. Diaz.” I tucked my towel more firmly under my arm and hurried toward him. “Is everything okay?”
His face suddenly rippled with anguish. “Have you seen Maria? I came home and the door was standing open. She’s not in the house. I’ve been through it twice, looking everywhere, and she’s not there.”
“Maybe—” I spoke slowly in an effort to counter his increasing panic— “maybe she went to the store to pick up something for dinner.”
“Her car’s still in the driveway. Her purse is still on the counter where we drop things. Her keys are still in her purse.”
I frowned. “Could she have gone down to the beach?”
“She hates the beach, especially now that she’s pregnant. She says she can’t see her feet anymore, let alone get sand off them.”
He was pacing now, moving toward the front door, then striding back to me. “I hoped she’d come over here to borrow something, or to talk to your grandmother—”
“Sabba and Safta are in New York for the week.”