Paradox Bound: A Novel

by Peter Clines

  “Good for me.” Harry pulled three, four, five loops of the hose off its bracket and twisted the valve. The house’s guts groaned, burped twice, and then spat out some rust-red liquid. The splashing stream mixed with the silt and dirt on the driveway and became a thin mudslide that raced in four different directions. She watered the lawn while the hose ran clear.

  Another car approached, a big four-door Mercury with double headlights and a hardtop. The driver locked eyes with Eli, but drove on by.

  Eli took in a breath through his nose, then a second, deeper one through his mouth. The air smelled…different. The tang of car exhaust and gasoline trailing behind the Mercury seemed stronger, but the air itself seemed fresher. He wondered if the desert climate kept things separate somehow.

  A black-and-white squad car rolled by down the street and drove the pleasant thoughts from his head. They stayed gone even after Eli recognized it as an old Ford Fairlane, maybe a ’61. Eli glanced back. “You sure it’s safe to be sitting here like this, out in the open? What if those cops called ahead?”

  “They didn’t,” she said, dragging the hose to the Model A.

  “What if they call ahead to the local station?”

  She shoved the hose into the tank. “They won’t.” It rang and thrummed and sang as the water churned inside it. Harry closed her eyes and focused on the sound.

  He walked back to the Model A. “So,” he said, “guys with no faces.”

  “Yes,” she said without opening her eyes.

  “Who can order police around.”

  “Yes.”

  “Do I need to actually ask questions before you’ll answer anything?”

  She opened one eye. “Yes?”

  Eli rolled his eyes. “Come on.”

  Harry opened her other eye. “I’ll warn you now, Mr. Teague, I may not be able to give you a satisfying answer. Most of what I know is more of…well, stories and general ideas that’ve been passed along from one searcher to the next. My…” She paused to tap the top of the hood and listen to the drumbeat of the gas tank. “My old partner taught me a lot of it, but most of it was what he’d learned from the woman who’d taught him. It’s like a childhood game of secrets, where he whispers to me, I whisper to you, you whisper to someone else, but the story changes a little bit every time.”

  “Telephone game,” Eli said. “I remember playing that when I was a kid.”

  Harry nodded. “There’s a great deal to tell, but it’s all second- and thirdhand knowledge at best. So, as I said, it doesn’t lend itself to simple explanations.” She nodded toward the rear of the vehicle. “Would you check the reserve, please, Mr. Teague? I believe it took a shot.”

  He sighed and walked around the car. “I still want answers.”

  “You’ll get them.”

  A few drops fell from the base of the red gas can to a puddle under the Model A. Eli ran his fingers across the plastic surface and found the puncture about two-thirds of the way down. The tip of his pinkie could just fit into the hole. “Yeah,” he called out. “It caught a…” He glanced up and down the street. “It got hit.”

  Harry muttered to herself. “Straight through?”

  Eli checked. “Looks like.” He crouched down and peered through. A moment or two of lining up through the gas can showed him a small dimple and a scratch on the Model A’s dark-blue finish. “Yeah, clean through. Looks like the water slowed it down a lot, though. Barely dented the car.”

  She muttered again.

  “What?”

  “I said we’ll have to patch it for now.”

  The tail-finned Caddy drove past, heading home from the gas station. Eli admired its lines, then found his eyes drifting to one of the small homes. “I didn’t know they still made towns like this.”

  “From your point of view, they don’t.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  She didn’t answer. He walked a few paces back toward the house. His leg muscles flexed and tingled, thanking him now, warning him it would hurt later. He reached for his toes, his hamstrings quivered, and then he stretched back to look up at the house.

  Dust and cobwebs didn’t just cover the hose—they covered the whole structure. Gray strands rounded every corner of the porch and roof, every window frame and door frame. A fine coat of gray dulled each pane of glass and fixture.

  The house wasn’t just unoccupied, it was mummified.

  Eli took a few more steps and peered in through the window. A wooden chair stood a few feet out from the wall. A piece was missing from its elaborate back. A square cardboard box with sagging corners sat by the room’s lone door. An empty bookshelf stood against one wall. Not entirely empty, he realized. A handful of books lay flat on the various shelves, camouflaged with years of gray dust.

  Something sprawled on the floor, halfway between the box and the chair. Not quite at the center of the room. His first thought was a bundle of clothes, blanketed with more cobwebs and dust. Then he saw the bones and decided it was an animal that had gotten trapped in the house somehow and died, maybe a large cat or a raccoon.

  But the skull looked very round for an animal. And very large for the body.

  Harry set a hand on his shoulder. “Best not to look inside, Mr. Teague. These places accumulate history. Rarely the good kind.”

  “I think that might be—”

  “It’s long dead, whatever it is,” she said. Her hand patted his shoulder, just a faint tap, and she stepped back to the chugging hose.

  He looked through the window at the tiny skeleton. It was in plain sight, right by one of the main windows. He could see faint footprints in the dust all around it. Some looked like shoes. Others, like paws.

  “Shouldn’t we tell someone?”

  “About what?”

  Eli gestured at the window.

  Harry raised an eyebrow. “Do you think nobody knows?”

  “Well…” Eli looked at the town, than back over his shoulder. “Shouldn’t we tell the police?”

  “In a town this size, I’m sure some local deputy checks in on empty buildings at least once or twice a month.”

  “So why haven’t they done anything?”

  “Because they don’t want to know,” she said. “Or maybe they already know, and they just want to avoid confirming it. Whatever that is in there, it’s been there for years, at least. Perhaps decades.”

  Eli looked at her face. Her expression reminded him of his mother or a teacher trying to explain some basic truth that just wasn’t being understood. Boredom mixed with acceptance, seasoned with sadness, dusted with a few grains of annoyance.

  Harry must have seen her reflection in his eyes. Her face softened. “It’s a bad house,” she said. “Pretty much every town has one. One of the darker side effects of the dream.”

  “The dream?”

  “Yes.”

  He waited for her to continue. Instead she walked back to the car, swung the red tank from its bracket, and pulled her toolbox from the trunk. “I just need a few minutes to putty the reserve,” she said, “and then we’ll be on our way.”

  “I thought you were going to explain the faceless men.”

  “We’re getting there, Mr. Teague, I promise.”

  Eli sighed, stepped over the hose toward the door, and then changed course. He kicked one of the rolled-up newspapers around so he could read the headline. Even the top one had the brittle look of newsprint that had been exposed to the elements for weeks, maybe months. The banner named it the Herald Republican, established in 1938, which left Eli wondering if “Herald” referred to the paper itself or the name of the town. There didn’t seem to be a single main headline, but according to the largest one the president had announced a budget surplus of over a billion dollars, which didn’t seem terribly noteworthy, even to Eli’s dim understanding of government spending.

  Then he caught the first words of the article.

  In an official announcement in Washington, President Eisenhower declared a budget surplus of…

/>   Eli’s eyes jumped back up to the banner, and the date below it.

  JULY 20, 1960

  He glanced back at Harry, thumbing some kind of gummy material into the hole in the gas can, then at the Dodge Lancer parked across the road. He tried to remember seeing a single car from the ’70s or later since they came into town. He’d been distracted by all the classics, but there must’ve been one. He looked down the road, where the man in the hat and cardigan had gone with his dog.

  He walked back to Harry. “Where are we?”

  She stopped blowing on the patch, a yellow-clear goop that filled the hole. It already seemed hard. “We’re about a mile and half from the Nevada border.”

  “That’s not what I mean.”

  She blew on the patch again before flipping the plastic tank around. “Then say what you mean, Mr. Teague. No sense pussyfooting about it.”

  He stared at her. Then at the Lancer. “Did we…are we in 1960?”

  Harry shrugged and thumbed a wad of putty into the exit hole. “Mid-1960s,” she said. “Possibly early 1966, but I don’t think so.”

  “You don’t think so?”

  She shook her head, then packed a wrinkled tube of something chemical-smelling back into her toolbox. She stood up and blew on the patch one more time.

  Eli smelled the air again. Looked back at the papers. “How?”

  She sighed and closed the trunk. “That question covers a great deal of ground.”

  “We traveled through time?”

  “Through history, yes.”

  “When?”

  “That’s a bit of a brain teaser, isn’t it?” Harry carried the gas can over to the hose, swinging it back and forth through the air.

  Eli followed at a safe distance. “Shouldn’t…shouldn’t there have been a flash of light or a tunnel or a…I don’t know, something?”

  “Do you recall the tires skidding as we approached town?”

  He nodded.

  “That was it. That was when we slipped back.”

  “How?” he asked again.

  “ ‘How’ will take a little more to explain.” She stuck the hose into the gas can and cranked the spigot again. Water sloshed into the container.

  “Can you just give me a simple version?”

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Teague, but no. This may be difficult to believe, but the mechanisms of traveling through history defy simple explanation.”

  He looked at her. Back at the newspaper. Then back at the gleaming Lancer in the driveway across the street.

  The street in the small desert town that had looked old and abandoned when they’d approached.

  Before the skid.

  “Holy shit,” he said. “I mean, I kinda knew. I figured it out after the second time we met, but I still didn’t really…I mean, we actually did it. We’re in the past.”

  “Yes,” Harry said, pulling the hose free, “it’s very exciting.” She watered the driveway a bit more while twisting the spigot off. She tapped the dried plug on each side of the gas can, nodded, and heaved the plastic can up to her hip. Eli reached to help, but she turned away and lugged the reserve back to the Model A. He followed behind her. She lined up the tank, heaved again, and dropped it into the bracket. Its weight made the car bounce once.

  “The dream,” Eli said again.

  “Yes?”

  “Back when I was a kid, you said you had to see a man about a dream.”

  She nodded once and pulled a strap across the plastic tank.

  “Is that the thing you’re looking for? The dream?”

  Harry met his eyes. “Yes,” she said. “I’m one of many people searching for it.”

  “For…what?”

  She rested her hands on the red container, her back to him. “You’ve asked about a lot of things,” she said. “My search. History travel. The faceless men. What you don’t realize is that, in truth, these are all related questions about the same thing.”

  She looked at him and waited.

  “The dream,” said Eli.

  “Yes. What do you know about history?”

  “Ummm, do you mean the Middle Ages or the Renaissance or—”

  “American History. How the United States began.”

  Eli’s mind flitted back through grade school and high school and the half dozen college classes that had earned him a minor. There’d also been some casual independent studies into clothing and fashion, trying to learn more about the woman he’d last seen when he was thirteen. The history of automobiles had been his main focus. “More than the basics?” he guessed. “Still less than a lot of people, I guess.”

  “Words of warning,” she said. “Much of what I’m going to tell you will go against what you’ve learned. Not just in history but in many disciplines. Some of it’s just going to be unbelievable, but it’s all true.”

  “Okay.”

  “We should get going.”

  “Going…where? When?”

  “East, for now. I’ll explain everything as we go.”

  “Thanks.” He stood there in the driveway, his gaze flitting from the cars to the houses to the fresh pavement.

  The corners of her mouth flexed. “Get in the car, Mr. Teague. The road beckons.”

  Harry flipped the ignition switches, the Model A shuddered, and they backed out of the bad house’s driveway. As they headed back out of the town, Eli caught a quick glimpse of the dog walker heading into the small market and someone at the gas station with a blocky red Chevy pickup. Then the highway was under their tires again and the Model A—Eleanor—picked up a little more speed.

  12

  It had been dumb luck that Officer Zeke Miller had been there at the desk that day. Wednesday was supposed to be his day off, but Captain Deacon had come down with a bad case of food poisoning. It meant double shifts to pick up the slack. Goddamn perfect Barney ended up on patrol and Zeke got called in to man the station’s phones and radio. Which was the most boring part of the job, especially in a town like Sanders.

  The man on the phone had introduced himself as Agent Fifteen and rattled off a badge number to confirm his authority. He asked for the senior officer on duty. Zeke introduced himself. Agent Fifteen had been looking for a dangerous fugitive, an insurgent. According to him, she’d been seen in Sanders.

  Zeke had found this hard to believe. One, that any kind of major-league fugitive would be in Sanders. Two, that a woman could be all that dangerous. There were hot, kick-ass women in movies and stuff, sure, but that was all pretend.

  Fifteen had assured Zeke the woman, Harriet Pritchard, was dangerous. However, the agent already had a man dealing with her. He needed Zeke to keep an eye on her accomplice in town. He’d asked if Zeke knew of a man named Elias Teague.

  Zeke knew him all right, and had said so. He’d known Eli Teague pretty much his whole life. Fifteen said this was good, and had asked Zeke to keep an eye on Eli until further notice.

  That had been last week.

  Now Zeke sat at the station’s front desk and glared at that same phone. He’d glared at everything for the past few days. He snapped another pencil. Then he snapped the two pieces. He put his thumbs against the short, stubby remains and managed to break three of them. He couldn’t get leverage on the fourth.

  Barney had been on the phones when Zeke had shown up for his shift. Goddamn perfect Barney. Two years ago Zeke would’ve thought a man named Barney would need brick balls to be a small-town police officer. Barney’s were solid marble all the way through. A walking Greek statue, the people of Sanders called him. He’d transferred up from York Beach with glowing recommendations.

  Zeke didn’t get along with him.

  They’d exchanged a few basic courtesies. Barney offered some news on Captain Deacon, and mentioned a few items in the logbook. Then he grabbed his coat and headed for the door for a night patrol.

  And Zeke had settled in behind the desk. The desk where he’d be for the next. Fifty-nine. Nights.

  After he’d questioned Nicole about Eli
’s disappearance, she’d had called Deacon with a bunch of exaggerated stories about intimidation and police brutality. It was all lies. She didn’t have any bruises. She was just an uppity bitch who’d had it in for Zeke since he broke up with her in high school.

  And, yeah, he’d kicked in the door to Eli’s crap little apartment above Tanner’s garage. He’d been chasing a fugitive. Time was of the essence and all that shit—he couldn’t wait for a search warrant. His only real mistake had been keeping Agent Fifteen’s call to himself and not telling Deacon about it.

  Now half the town’d turned against Zeke. Just that morning, getting off work, he’d heard whispers at the grocer when he stopped in to get a coffee and a knockoff McMuffin. Robin Furber talking with Thatcher behind the counter about how Eli was too responsible to just up and leave without saying anything, everyone knew that. They’d clammed up when they saw Zeke, but they weren’t the only ones. Everybody in town kept wondering what had really happened to Eli. The fact that he’d asked his boss at Stahlbank for a few days off didn’t matter. Everybody gave Zeke the eye, like he was some kind of movie maniac with an ax or something. Like he’d done something.

  At least Deacon was a fair man. He’d said it didn’t look good, but he wouldn’t be the one to start a witch-hunt. Zeke just wasn’t going out on patrol for two months. Or dealing with the day traffic in the office. Two months manning the phones and radio, every night for the next fifty-nine nights. And counting.

  Rookies, cripples, and old men did desk duty. He was young and strong. At the peak of his game, like they said about star quarterbacks. He should be out keeping the town safe with Barney, not sitting in the station. Especially at night.

  Zeke left the desk and stomped around the office. His left hand flexed open and closed, open and closed, open and closed. They only got three or four calls a night, and at least two of those were always that old fossil Mr. Moreland, calling to complain about barking dogs or a loud car driving by his house or someone walking by outside. Late shift on the desk equaled punishment, no question about it.

  Zeke glared at the wanted posters. A collection of losers the Staties were looking for, plus three or four from the FBI. The real smart criminals almost never got wanted posters. One of the teachers at the academy had told him that. These people backed it up. A bank robber. A few aggravated assaults. One attempted murderer. A car thief from Ogunquit. Seriously, who was stupid enough to steal cars anymore with all the alarms and stuff?