Outcasts

by Nick Wisseman

  It didn’t matter. He put his head in his hands, shifting on the seat as he did so. What’s done was done, sci-fi logic be damned. All he needed to figure out now was how to go back…Janet? But Janet was never anything more than a fling; now that he thought about it, the prospect of doing anything significant with her would ruin the whole point of their affair. And their sex had been fairly uninspired anyway.

  Not like with Rachel. Not like how they used to make love…

  His hand slid under his boxers almost of its own volition. Those first years had been so good, so passionate. So creative, and inventive, and perfect…And then he’d spoiled it.

  Jim slowed down for a moment and then sped back up. No matter what he’d done and what he’d changed, he’d still have the memories. His mind hadn’t been altered when he went back before: it shouldn’t be now—

  Someone knocked on the door. He slowed down again as the intruder jiggled the handle, made an embarrassed murmur on finding it locked, and walked away.

  Jim sped back up.

  But this wasn’t the way to go out. Not by himself in the bathroom at work…He needed to stop. Better he went back with Janet than this…Or even Rachel…Or—

  He came and went just as somebody knocked on the door again.

  * * *

  Claudia chuckled, Jim groaned, and someone rapped on the driver’s side window.

  Disoriented and furious—with himself, with the whore, with whoever was complicating things more than they already were—he rolled over and glared at…an officer, bathed in the flickering light of a silent siren.

  The cop motioned for him to open the door. After a moment’s pause, Jim complied, terrified of what the charge would be.

  * * *

  “Hey, you don’t get all day.”

  Jim mumbled an apology to his guard but still hesitated. The charge had been prostitution, not murder; the police didn’t have any knowledge of Rachel being dead. But if she was, it probably hadn’t been long enough for them to know…

  He couldn’t bring himself to start dialing until the officer rebuked him again with a “Hell, do you want it or not?”

  One ring…don’t pick up, Rachel.

  Two rings…pick up, Rachel.

  Three rings…don’t pick up, Rachel.

  Four rings…pick up, Rachel.

  Five rings…and the scraping sound of someone removing a handset from its receiver.

  Jim dropped his phone and let the incredulous officer hang it up for him.

  LOVE AND WORLD EATERS

  Aliah went statue-still as the immensely large and valuable urn wobbled violently.

  She’d only bumped against the shelf the urn was on—and not the urn itself—but the impact had been enough to set the relic from ancient Greece vibrating like a dropped penny flopping on the floor. Even if her gloved hands hadn’t already been clutched around another (much smaller) artifact, she wouldn’t have tried to steady the enormous urn; she didn’t trust herself to do anything but watch.

  And pray.

  And hope desperately that the painted figures on the urn’s surface really were starting to gyrate less and less like figures in a flipbook…

  Mercifully, the urn eventually stopped shaking. Aliah exhaled with enough force to blow her dark bangs from the right side of her forehead to the left. Breaking a small artifact would have been bad enough, but shattering an irreplaceable example of ancient pottery-making…That would have been a disaster. For both her self-respect and her chances of continued employment at the Chicago Field Museum.

  But the potential catastrophe had averted itself, and she still had two more lots of artifacts to photograph today. So with an effort, Aliah started moving again, carefully setting the small artifact she’d been clinging to—a cute Tuscan bowl—on her padded cart.

  Telling herself everything would be fine if she slowed down and kept her lumbering bulk in check, she started inching the cart towards the next aisle on her list. Normally she was pretty careful, even excruciatingly so…But the rush to get everything ready for the upcoming World Eaters exhibition had churned her and the rest of the Anthropology department into a frenzy. Registration was cataloguing new and loaned additions at a breakneck pace; Conservation was working overtime to restore damaged artifacts selected for display; and Collections—the division in which Aliah served as a temporary peon—was running around like an army of headless chickens in its haste to pull the needed items from storage.

  Hence her scurrying in and out of basement aisles at a stupidly fast pace.

  At least no one else had seen her hit the urn; things were too crazy for partners right now. Usually staff worked in pairs to gather artifacts from the museum’s various storage areas. The most delicate artifacts always seemed to require a ladder, and it was easier to have one person read (and re-read) each object’s location from the database printout while the other person kept his or her hands free for carrying.

  As she brought the cart to a halt, Aliah was reminded again of how the larger storage rooms made her feel like she was in the warehouse at the end of the first Indiana Jones movie: both areas were cavernous, stuffed with acres of tightly packed shelves, and utterly dark when the lights were turned off (in the museum’s case, to minimize light degradation). There weren’t any boxes here, though. Aside from a few small pieces stuffed away in lockable drawers, everything was in the open, visible to museum staff and no one else. The artifacts on display in the public area were cool enough, but they were literally only the tip of the iceberg…The real treasures were down here in the “dungeons.”

  And Aliah loved that.

  Maybe it was snobby and insiderish, but every time she wandered through a storage area she saw something new…Like this little cylindrical bone bead lying beside the next urn she was supposed to pull. It wasn’t on her World Eaters list—no one had identified the bead as having any connection to history’s great conquerors—but something about the elegant simplicity of its foreign inscription called to her.

  A door opened, and Aliah started slightly, trying not to look guilty. The noise had come from above, though; the floor between these two storage areas was only a thick grate, which meant it was easy to tell which level people were on. And Gavin—it had to be him; she could hear Metallica leaking from his headphones even at this distance—was clearly upstairs, tending to his own task.

  So he couldn’t see her break the rules.

  The best part of being behind the scenes was that you could touch the artifacts that interested you. You weren’t supposed to, of course. And she never handled anything that looked fragile. But now and then she indulged herself by picking up something fascinating and taking the time to observe it from all angles…Besides, she’d already had her clumsy moment for the day; this would be a good way to get over herself.

  Stooping slightly, Aliah slid one gloved hand gently under the bead while her other hand supported it from behind. As she stood, she noted that for something made of old bone, the bead seemed remarkably well preserved—

  It twitched.

  Aliah froze for the second time in as many minutes, but this time pretending to be a statue didn’t help: the bead twitched again, and then slithered off her palm.

  She’d almost found the breath to scream when the bead landed on her foot through a gap in her Birkenstocks. The contact brought a sudden stab of pain and a rush of foreign images…

  …An older man kisses a younger in an opulent bed while sliding a ring onto his junior’s finger…

  …The young man yells a drunken protest as several stable-hands hold him down for a gang rape…

  …The young man breaks from a crowd to run up behind the old man and stab him in the neck before the elder can finish turning…

  …The young man is dead, nailed to a cross and drained of blood by a spear-wound in his side…

  …Her scream finally came, and Aliah used its volume to clear the unwelcome montage from her mind. The images had only played for an instant—the bead was just no
w bouncing off her foot—but she was still too paralyzed to even consider catching the fragile object before it clattered on the floor.

  Especially when she saw what the bone artifact had left in her foot: a wafer-thin splinter that wriggled once, slid under her skin, and swam away in her bloodstream.

  She blacked out to the sound of urgent footsteps and Metallica’s increasingly loud “Enter Sandman.”

  * * *

  Theresa had already spent the last five minutes poking skeptically with her extremely sharp tweezers, and the look on her face suggested she wasn’t going to do any more probing, no matter what Aliah said. “I’m pretty sure everything’s out of there…You’re probably just feeling a phantom pain or something. I’d be more worried about arsenic.”

  Aliah stared hard again at her now slightly bloody foot, trying and failing to find evidence that there was still a bone splinter inside her…And wondering if it wouldn’t be better if she’d just hallucinated, if the whole artifact-coming-to-life-thing had just been a stress-induced mirage brought on by nearly breaking something priceless and then actually breaking something else…Theresa probably wouldn’t care either way. She was only worried about running Conservation with an iron fist, keeping her safety record spotless, and staying pretty. “When will we know if the…if I do need to be worried?”

  “Arsenic tests usually take a few days to get back,” Theresa replied as she turned away with efficient grace, her blonde hair dangling long and perfect behind her. “So probably not until after the weekend. But it’s not a big deal: you couldn’t have been exposed to much from something so small.”

  Aliah furrowed her eyebrows at Theresa’s back as the head conservator tidied up her first-aid kit. Hadn’t she just said arsenic was something to worry about? It was one of the main reasons they wore gloves. (Another was to safeguard the artifacts from the oils of human skin.) Back in the fifties or so, large parts of the collection had been sprayed with the chemical in a misguided attempt to protect against pests. Bug damage was still a big deal today—staff members were required to catch or kill any insects they saw, and then file a report—but coating artifacts with known poisons was a thing of the past.

  The aftereffects weren’t, though.

  But…Theresa was probably just mad that a new artifact had been added to her queue of things to fix; the slightly fractured bone bead was on a tray at the far end of the conservation lab, one of a hundred objects in need of attention. Gavin and his headphones had gone back for the bead after he’d patiently helped Aliah out of the storage area and into the elevator. When he’d turned her and the damaged artifact over to Theresa, she’d flashed him a long-suffering look that all but said “what a spaz.” It had reminded Aliah way too much of her parents.

  She closed her eyes as Theresa applied an alcohol swab. To make matters worse, the conservator’s first attentions had all been directed at the bead. Only after she was satisfied that the artifact was salvageable did she pretend to give two shits about—

  Aliah could tell where the bead was, even without being able to see it.

  Her eyes flew open. It had felt like there was a…connection between herself and the bead, some sort of invisible bond.

  She fled the lab as soon as Theresa handed her a Band-Aid.

  * * *

  Aliah’s cart wasn’t far from where she’d left it.

  At some point during the past week (which she’d spent avoiding this storage area), someone had moved the “tray-on-wheels” against the far wall to clear the main passageway. The artifacts she’d gathered before she’d dropped the bead were still there, waiting to be photographed as if nothing happened.

  And since those inexplicable few moments, nothing had.

  Probably because she’d gone well out of her way to make sure nothing did: Aliah had spent the last several days doing everything she could to avoid handling actual artifacts, mostly by catching up on image editing and organizing. She’d even volunteered to help Belinda, the head registrar, do some rote data entry for the coming move to the new underground storage area, the state-of-the-art facility that would supposedly make issues like climate and pest control disappear. Aliah couldn’t justify more than a day of busy-work, though; Belinda had been appreciative, but the World Eaters grant which funded Aliah’s photography ran out at the end of the summer, and if she blew that exhibit’s deadline…she wouldn’t have even a chance of staying on.

  Which would probably mean crawling back to her parents for help paying rent on the tiny studio apartment she could barely afford as it was…Aliah shook her head determinedly. To make sure that didn’t happen, she had to suck it up and get back to work.

  Despite an involuntary shudder, she made herself grab hold of the cart’s handles and maneuver it back to the aisle where she’d left off. Consulting the database printout on the cart, she identified the next object she needed—a small knife—and forced herself to go find it. Once she had, Aliah lifted the blade off its shelf with painstaking, fearful care, cradled it to the cart, and set it down as it if were a newborn. So far, so good…Feeling more confident, she did the same in the next aisle, and the one after that, until her cart was full and it was time to start photographing.

  Her equipment was where she’d left it, too, undisturbed at the back of the next storage area. It wasn’t an ideal setup—whenever someone was working in the room above, their light filtered down through the grated ceiling and played minor havoc with her camera’s settings—but it wasn’t bad: Aliah had a decent tripod, a much more expensive Nikon than she had at home, ridiculously nice shoot lights, and more backdrops and staging props than she knew what to do with. It felt good to be in her element again. Here, away from everyone else, she didn’t have to worry about looking fatter or sounding duller than the other Collection girls.

  She’d definitely stayed away longer than she should have.

  Settling into the familiar routine, Aliah began assembly-lining the artifacts on the cart through the image capture process: objects that needed overhead shots first, smallest to largest (to minimize tripod adjustments); then those that needed head-on shots, in the same order; between each object, an in-shot label; after each object, a checkmark on her list…

  Within a few minutes, Aliah was so completely on autopilot that when she took off her right glove to adjust the camera’s focus on a bronze oil scraper, she forgot to put the glove back on before reaching out to adjust the scraper itself. She realized her mistake as her fingers touched the object’s bronze handle and another series of flashbacks immediately flooded her vision…

  …A young serving girl rubs the scraper sensuously down a fat man’s back before moving in to start a massage…

  …A young boy does the same for a thin man…

  …An aging matriarch hurls the scraper at an equally old—

  Aliah jumped back as if burned, and the images stopped…the instant she was no longer in contact with the scraper. She clung hard to this observation, using it as an anchor against her rising tide of panic, rolling the thought over in her mind as she hugged her arms around her chest and scooted up against the far wall…Until the realization helped her wonder overcome her fear, and she found herself back in front of the scraper.

  As a final, tentative test, she touched the object with the hand that was still gloved.

  Nothing, just as she’d started to expect.

  So after taking a deep breath, Aliah touched the scraper once more with her bare hand. And as soon as her skin brushed bronze again, the foreign scenes rushed back. Fully awed now, she let the images wash over her for several minutes. Vignettes of love, hate, friendship…Countless moments, involving dozens of people…All of which revolved around the scraper in one way or another.

  Finally, Aliah stepped away, drained yet tingling with excitement. It didn’t make sense—she couldn’t even swear she was awake—but if she could view one…make that two artifacts’ histories…Then why not more? Her gaze turned to the other objects on the cart as she ripped off her
remaining glove.

  The ring remembered every proposal, every acceptance, and every rejection.

  The vases recalled being gifted in love and thrown in anger.

  And the weapons…The weapons recounted every savage swing and brutal impact. She didn’t linger on them.

  The memories were too jumbled to fully comprehend, filled with dialogue in too many languages she didn’t speak and permeated by too many smells she didn’t recognize…But as she sat in her chair to collect herself, Aliah thought she had at least one thing figured out: these scenes she could…see…were all emotionally charged in some way. It was as if every instance of human—or in some cases even animal—sentiment the objects had been exposed to was seared into their inanimate structures.

  Which meant there were literally lifetimes of remembrances just on the shelves within ten feet of her. And in the museum as a whole…The possibilities were truly mind blowing. Somehow, she’d acquired a unique insight, a historical perspective that could shed light on the myriad daily details people never bothered to record, an angle that—

  That she couldn’t explain having.

  That originated last week for no apparent reason when the bone bead came to life just long enough to break itself on—and in—her foot.

  Standing up abruptly, Aliah reassumed her gloves, briskly tidied up her artifacts, and headed for the elevator with a pounding heart.

  * * *

  She had to wait until lunchtime before she could get the conversation lab to herself. It only meant standing around for five minutes—it was 11:55 when she got off the elevator—but it felt like an eternity. To keep from going nuts, Aliah occupied herself by thoroughly washing her hands and fabricating an alibi for why she’d be poking at priceless objects in the lab. The best excuse she could come up with was printing off a few database spreadsheets so she could pretend she was trying to hunt down missing artifacts; not a great story, but some three to five percent of the collection was mislabeled or improperly shelved…so a treasure hunt was vaguely plausible.