“Aren’t you always talking about gun safety?” Ivy hissed at him.
“I’m being safe,” he said. “Barrel’s not pointed at anyone. Besides, I have keen, iron control over every muscle in my body. I could—”
“Hush, both of you,” Tobias said. He held the picture closer. “My God . . .”
“Please don’t use the Lord’s name in vain,” Ivy said.
J.C. snorted.
“Stephen,” Tobias said. “Computer.”
I joined him at the sitting room’s desktop, then sat down, Tobias leaning over my shoulder. “Do a search for the Lone Cypress.”
I did so, and brought up image view. A couple dozen shots of the same rock appeared on the screen, but all of them had a larger tree growing on it. The tree in these photos was fully grown; in fact, it looked ancient.
“Okay, great,” J.C. said. “Still trees. Still rocks. Still boring.”
“That’s the Lone Cypress, J.C.,” Tobias said. “It’s famous, and is believed to be at least two hundred and fifty years old.”
“So . . . ?” Ivy asked.
I held up the photograph that had been mailed. “In this, it’s no more than . . . what? Ten?”
“Likely younger,” Tobias said.
“So for this to be real,” I said, “it would have to have been taken in the mid to late 1700s. Decades before the camera was invented.”
Two
“Look, it’s obviously a fake,” Ivy said. “I don’t see why you two are so bothered by this.”
Tobias and I strolled the hallway of the mansion. It had been two days. I still couldn’t get the image out of my head. I carried the photo in my jacket pocket.
“A hoax would be the most rational explanation, Stephen,” Tobias said.
“Armando thinks it’s real,” I said.
“Armando is a complete loon,” Ivy replied. Today she wore a grey business suit.
“True,” I said, then raised a hand to my pocket again. Altering the photo wouldn’t have taken much. What was doctoring a photo, these days? Practically any kid with Photoshop could create realistic fakes.
Armando had run it through some advanced programs, checking levels and doing a bunch of other things that were too technical for me to understand, but he admitted that didn’t mean anything. A talented artist could fool the tests.
So why did this photo haunt me so?
“This smacks of someone trying to prove something,” I said. “There are many trees older than the Lone Cypress, but few are in as distinctive a location. This photograph is intended to be instantly recognizable as impossible, at least to those with a good knowledge of history.”
“All the more likely a hoax then, wouldn’t you say?” Ivy asked.
“Perhaps.”
I paced back the other direction, my aspects growing silent. Finally, I heard the door shut below. I hurried to the landing down.
“Master?” Wilson said, climbing the steps.
“Wilson! Mail has arrived?”
He stopped at the landing, holding a silver tray. Megan, of the cleaning staff—real, of course—scurried up behind him and passed us, face down, steps quick.
“She’ll quit soon,” Ivy noted. “You really should try to be less strange.”
“Tall order, Ivy,” I mumbled, looking through the mail. “With you people around.” There! Another envelope, identical to the first. I tore into it eagerly and pulled out another picture.
This one was more blurry. It was of a man standing at a washbasin, towel at his neck. His surroundings were old-fashioned. It was also in black and white.
I turned the picture to Tobias. He took it, holding it up, inspecting it with eyes lined at the corners.
“Well?” Ivy asked.
“He looks familiar,” I said. “I feel I should know him.”
“George Washington,” Tobias said. “Having a morning shave, it appears. I’m surprised he didn’t have someone to do it for him.”
“He was a soldier,” I said, taking the photo back. “He was probably accustomed to doing things for himself.” I ran my fingers over the glossy picture. The first daguerreotype—early photographs—had been taken in the mid-1830s. Before that, nobody had been able to create permanent images of this nature. Washington had died in 1799.
“Look, this one is obviously a fake,” Ivy said. “A picture of George Washington? We’re to assume that someone went back in time, and the only thing they could think to do was grab a candid of George in the bathroom? We’re being played, Steve.”
“Maybe,” I admitted.
“It does look remarkably like him,” Tobias said.
“Except we don’t have any photos of him,” Ivy said. “So there’s no way to prove it. Look, all someone would have to do is hire a look-alike actor, pose the photo, and bam. They wouldn’t even have to do any photo editing.”
“Let’s see what Armando thinks,” I said, turning over the photo. On the back of this one was a phone number. “Someone fetch Audrey first.”
Three
“You may approach His Majesty,” Armando said. He stood at his window, which was triangular—he occupied one of the peaks of the mansion. He’d demanded the position.
“Can I shoot him?” J.C. asked me softly. “You know, in a place that’s not important? A foot, maybe?”
“His Majesty heard that,” Armando said in his soft Spanish accent, turning unamused eyes our direction. “Stephen Leeds. Have you fulfilled your promise to me? I must be restored to my throne.”
“Working on it, Armando,” I said, handing him the picture. “We’ve got another one.”
Armando sighed, taking the photo from my fingers. He was a thin man with black hair he kept slicked back. “Armando benevolently agrees to consider your supplication.” He held it up.
“You know, Steve,” Ivy said, poking through the room, “if you’re going to create hallucinations, you really should consider making them less annoying.”
“Silence, woman,” Armando said. “Have you considered His Majesty’s request?”
“I’m not going to marry you, Armando.”
“You would be queen!”
“You don’t have a throne. And last I checked, Mexico has a president, not an emperor.”
“Drug lords threaten my people,” Armando said, inspecting the picture. “They starve, and are forced to bow to the whims of foreign powers. It is a disgrace. This picture, it is authentic.” He handed it back.
“That’s all?” I asked. “You don’t need to do some of those computer tests?”
“Am I not the photography expert?” Armando said. “Did you not come to me with piteous supplication? I have spoken. It is real. No trickery. The photographer, however, is a buffoon. He knows nothing of the art of the craft. These pictures offend me in their utter pedestrian nature.” He turned his back to us, looking out the window again.
“Now can I shoot him?” J.C. asked.
“I’m tempted to let you,” I said, turning over the picture. Audrey had looked at the handwriting on the back, and hadn’t been able to trace it to any of the professors, psychologists, or other groups that kept wanting to do studies on me.
I shrugged, then took out my phone. The number was local. It rang once before being picked up.
“Hello?” I said.
“May I come visit you, Mister Leeds?” A woman’s voice, with a faint Southern accent.
“Who are you?”
“The person who has been sending you puzzles.”
“Well, I figured that part out.”
“May I come visit?”
“I . . . well, I suppose. Where are you?”
“Outside your gates.” The phone clicked. A moment later, chimes rang as someone buzzed the front gates.
I looked at the others. J.C. pushed his way to the window, gun out, and peeked at the front driveway. Armando scowled at him.
Ivy and I walked out of Armando’s rooms toward the steps.
“You armed?” J.C. asked, jogging u
p to us.
“Normal people don’t walk around their own homes with a gun strapped on, J.C.”
“They do if they want to live. Go get your gun.”
I hesitated, then sighed. “Let her in, Wilson!” I called, but redirected to my own rooms—the largest in the complex—and took my handgun out of my nightstand. I holstered it under my arm and put my jacket back on. It did feel good to be armed, but I’m a horrible shot.
By the time I was making my way down the steps to the front entryway, Wilson had answered the door. A dark-skinned woman in her thirties stood at the doorway, wearing a black jacket, a business suit, and short dreadlocks. She took off her sunglasses and nodded to me.
“The sitting room, Wilson,” I said, reaching the landing. He led her to it, and I entered after, waiting for J.C. and Ivy to pass. Tobias already sat inside, reading a history book.
“Lemonade?” Wilson asked.
“No, thank you,” I said, pulling the door closed, Wilson outside.
The woman strolled around the room, looking over the décor. “Fancy place,” she said. “You paid for all of this with money from people who ask you for help?”
“Most of it came from the government,” I said.
“Word on the street says you don’t work for them.”
“I don’t, but I used to. Anyway, a lot of this came from grant money. Professors who wanted to research me. I started charging enormous sums for the privilege, assuming it would put them off.”
“And it didn’t.”
“Nothing does,” I said, grimacing. “Have a seat.”
“I’ll stand,” she said, inspecting my Van Gogh. “The name is Monica, by the way.”
“Monica,” I said, taking out the two photographs. “I have to say, it seems remarkable that you’d expect me to believe your ridiculous story.”
“I haven’t told you a story yet.”
“You’re going to,” I said, tossing the photographs onto the table. “A story about time travel and, apparently, a photographer who doesn’t know how to use his flash properly.”
“You’re a genius, Mister Leeds,” she said, not turning. “By some certifications I’ve read, you’re the smartest man on the planet. If there had been an obvious flaw—or even one that wasn’t so obvious—in those photos, you’d have thrown them away. You certainly wouldn’t have called me.”
“They’re wrong.”
“They . . . ?”
“The people who call me a genius,” I said, sitting down in the chair next to Tobias’s. “I’m not a genius. I’m really quite average.”
“I find that hard to believe.”
“Believe what you will,” I said. “But I’m not a genius. My hallucinations are.”
“Thanks,” J.C. said.
“Some of my hallucinations are,” I corrected.
“You accept that the things you see aren’t real?” Monica said, turning to me.
“Yes.”
“Yet you talk to them.”
“I wouldn’t want to hurt their feelings. Besides, they can be useful.”
“Thanks,” J.C. said.
“Some of them can be useful,” I corrected. “Anyway, they’re the reason you’re here. You want their minds. Now, tell me your story, Monica, or stop wasting my time.”
She smiled, finally walking over to sit down. “It’s not what you think. There’s no time machine.”
“Oh?”
“You don’t sound surprised.”
“Time travel into the past is highly, highly implausible,” I said. “Even if it were to have occurred, I’d not know of it, as it would have created a branching path of reality of which I am not a part.”
“Unless this is the branched reality.”
“In which case,” I said, “time travel into the past is still functionally irrelevant to me, as someone who traveled back would create a branching path of which—again—I would not be part.”
“That’s one theory, at least,” she said. “But it’s meaningless. As I said, there is no time machine. Not in the conventional sense.”
“So these pictures are fakes?” I asked. “You’re starting to bore me very quickly, Monica.”
She slid three more pictures onto the table.
“Shakespeare,” Tobias said as I held them up one at a time. “The Colossus of Rhodes. Oh . . . now that’s clever.”
“Elvis?” I asked.
“Apparently the moment before death,” Tobias said, pointing to the picture of the waning pop icon sitting in his bathroom, head drooping.
J.C. sniffed. “As if there isn’t anyone around who looks like that guy.”
“These are from a camera,” Monica said, leaning forward, “that takes pictures of the past.”
She paused for dramatic effect. J.C. yawned.
“The problem with each of these,” I said, tossing the pictures onto the table, “is that they are fundamentally unverifiable. They are pictures of things that have no other visual record to prove them, so therefore small inaccuracies would be impossible to use in debunking.”
“I have seen the device work,” Monica replied. “It was proven in a rigorous testing environment. We stood in a clean room we had prepared, took cards and drew on the backs of them, and held them up. Then we burned the cards. The inventor of this device entered the room and took photos. Those pictures accurately displayed us standing there, with the cards and the patterns reproduced.”
“Wonderful,” I said. “Now, if I only had any reason at all to trust your word.”
“You can test the device yourself,” she said. “Use it to answer any question from history you wish.”
“We could,” Ivy said, “if it hadn’t been stolen.”
“I could do that,” I repeated, trusting what Ivy said. She had good instincts for interrogation, and sometimes fed me lines. “Except the device has been stolen, hasn’t it?”
Monica leaned back in her chair, frowning.
“It wasn’t difficult to guess, Steve,” Ivy said. “She wouldn’t be here if everything were working properly, and she’d have brought the camera—to show it off—if she really wanted to prove it to us. I could believe it’s in a lab somewhere, too valuable to bring. Only in that case, she’d have invited us to her center of strength, instead of coming to ours.
“She’s desperate, despite her calm exterior. See how she keeps tapping the armrest of her chair? Also, notice how she tried to remain standing in the first part of the conversation, looming as if to prop up her authority? She only sat down when she felt awkward with you seeming so relaxed.”
Tobias nodded. “‘Never do anything standing that you can do sitting, or anything sitting that you can do lying down.’ A Chinese proverb, usually attributed to Confucius. Of course, no primary texts from Confucius remain in existence, so nearly everything we attribute to him is guesswork, to some extent or another. Ironically, one of the only things we are sure he taught is the Golden Rule—and his quote regarding it is often misattributed to Jesus of Nazareth, who worded the same concept a different way . . .”
I let him speak, the ebbs and flows of his calm voice washing across me like waves. What he was saying wasn’t important.
“Yes,” Monica finally said. “The device was stolen. And that is why I am here.”
“So we have a problem,” I said. “The only way to prove these pictures authentic for myself would be to have the device. And yet, I can’t have the device without doing the work you want me to do—meaning I could easily reach the end of this and discover you’ve been playing me.”
She dropped one more picture onto the table. A woman in sunglasses and a trench coat, standing in a train station. The picture had been taken from the side as she inspected a monitor above.
Sandra.
“Uh-oh,” J.C. said.
“Where did you get this?” I demanded, standing up.
“I’ve told you—”
“We’re not playing games anymore!” I slammed my hands down on the coffee table. �
�Where is she? What do you know?”
Monica drew back, eyes widening. People don’t know how to handle schizophrenics. They’ve read stories, seen films. We make them afraid, though statistically we’re not any more likely to commit violent crimes than the average person.
Of course, several people who wrote papers on me claim I’m not schizophrenic. Half think I’m making this all up. The other half think I’ve got something different, something new. Whatever I have—however it is that my brain works—only one person really ever seemed to get me. And that was the woman in the picture Monica had just slapped down on the table.
Sandra. In a way, she’d started all of this.
“The picture wasn’t hard to get,” Monica said. “When you used to do interviews, you would talk about her. Obviously, you hoped someone would read the interview and bring you information about her. Maybe you hoped that she would see what you had to say, and return to you . . .”
I forced myself to sit back down.
“You knew she went to the train station,” Monica continued. “And at what time. You didn’t know which train she got on. We started taking pictures until we found her.”
“There must have been a dozen women in that train station with blonde hair and the right look,” I said.
Nobody really knew who she was. Not even me.
Monica took out a sheaf of pictures, a good twenty of them. Each was of a woman. “We thought the one wearing sunglasses indoors was the most likely choice, but we took a shot of every woman near the right age in the train station that day. Just in case.”
Ivy rested a hand on my shoulder.
“Calmly, Stephen,” Tobias said. “A strong rudder steers the ship even in a storm.”
I breathed in and out.
“Can I shoot her?” J.C. asked.
Ivy rolled her eyes. “Remind me why we keep him around.”
“Rugged good looks,” J.C. said.
“Listen,” Ivy continued to me. “Monica undermined her own story. She claims to have only come to you because the camera was stolen—yet how did she get pictures of Sandra without the camera?”
I nodded, clearing my head—with difficulty—and made the accusation to Monica.
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