by Pete Hautman
Lia looked at Herr Boggs, who was staring at Iyl Rayn with his mouth open.
Iyl Rayn turned to him and said, “Herr Boggs, do you, too, wish to leave this place?”
Herr Boggs nodded slowly.
“You have traveled the diskos before.”
“Many times,” Herr Boggs agreed.
“Your memories are damaged.”
“This I know.”
“And now you would enter the disko with your family, knowing nothing of where it might take you?”
Herr Boggs hesitated, then said, “There is nothing here for us.”
“Where would you go?”
“To a time where there is still a future for us.”
“I can help you. Gather your family. Now. There is not much time.”
Herr Boggs left the barn.
“What about me?” Lia asked. “What about Tucker? Can you send me to Hopewell?”
“You must first go to Kosh. Kosh will help you.”
“Kosh? Tucker’s uncle?”
Iyl Rayn laughed. The Gate crackled and hummed loudly, changed from pale gray to rusty orange, then went back to gray.
“Go now,” Iyl Rayn said. “Quickly.”
Lia hesitated for only an instant, then stepped into the Gate.
She landed with one foot on either side of a roof ridge. She was on top of a barn. Before her stood a man dressed in black leather, gaping at her in astonishment. He was swaying slightly, holding a can of beer in one hand.
“Hello, Kosh,” Lia said. She looked at the beer in his hand. “You’re drunk.”
TUCKER APPROACHED THE BARN CAUTIOUSLY. THE banging came every few seconds at irregular intervals. He stopped just outside the large double doors at the end of the barn. One of the doors was standing open.
He shouted into the doorway. “Hello?”
Bang. It was coming from inside. He stepped into the dimly lit barn — the only light inside was from the open door and a few small windows. Bang. Tucker zeroed in on the sound. Bang. A shutter, slamming against the side of the barn. He went to the window and latched the shutter. For a moment, he heard only the hiss of wind coming from outside, then something closer. A faint buzz, growing louder, from the back end of the barn.
A disko.
Unlike the diskos in Awn’s woods, this disko was not freestanding. It was constrained by a metal armature similar to that used by the Medicants. Tucker stared into the gray disk and thought about all the other diskos he had jumped, fallen, or been thrown into. A part of him wanted to just do it. Jump in and take his chances. He had told his father that his destiny was what he made it, but he had only half believed it at the time. Maybe his father was right — maybe the past could not be changed, and he was nothing but an actor playing out a role. If that were true, then it didn’t matter what he did.
He didn’t even know for sure that Lahlia had been here. This might be Harmony or just some abandoned farmstead. And the Lahlia he had been following, according to Awn, was an earlier version of Lahlia. A Lahlia who hadn’t yet been to Hopewell County Park with Kosh.
The surface of the disko went from gray to green. A single Klaatu, blobby and indistinct, emerged.
“Get lost!” Tucker swung his arm through the Klaatu. It broke apart into shards of mist, then floated up and regathered itself above his head. “I don’t want you watching me!” he shouted. He spotted a long-handled rake leaning against the wall, grabbed it, and swung wildly at the Klaatu. The misty form broke into wisps of vapor and dissipated. Tucker glared at the disko, waiting for more Klaatu. The surface returned to its normal gray color.
Tucker dropped the rake, sank to the straw-covered floor, and sat gazing dully into the whorl.
Even after millennia of living as a Klaatu, Iyl Rayn had not learned to overcome the vexing corporeal emotion known as frustration. She could see Tucker Feye sitting in the Boggsian’s barn, but every time she tried to manifest herself upon his awareness, he swung at her with a rake.
It had been easier to communicate with the girl and the Boggsian, but the Boggsian had taken his projection device with him when he left with his family. To the boy, she was nothing but an intrusive cloud.
Iyl Rayn hovered among the rafters, looking down at Tucker Feye. She had adjusted the disko to take him where he must go. But he was just sitting there doing nothing.
The Gnomon cannot be right, she thought. If she had not created the diskos, she would not exist. The events set in motion by the creation of the diskos had produced the circumstances that moved her to build them in the first place.
The Gnomon were distressed by such paradoxes. Iyl Rayn chose to embrace them.
If only the boy would move.
The Klaatu kept coming back. Every time it did, Tucker swung the rake at it. Awn had once told him that breaking up a Klaatu did not hurt it or change it in any way. You are merely disrupting your awareness of them, she had said.
The fifth or sixth time the Klaatu re-formed itself, Tucker threw the rake at it, left the barn, and went back to the house. The front steps were covered with leaves. He kicked the leaves aside and opened the door. The house had the smell of a house that has been empty for weeks, or maybe months. A fruit bowl on the kitchen table held three shriveled apples. The pantry contained bins of flour, sugar, salt, and other staples. The flour bin had been chewed through by mice.
In a closet upstairs, he found several changes of Boggsian-style men’s clothing. There was also some women’s clothing — long dresses in black and gray. That still didn’t prove that this was Harmony — it could be some older Boggsian settlement.
He went back outside, trying to decide what to do. He could keep searching for Harmony, hoping to find some living Boggsians, or return to Awn. Or take his chances with the disko. Looking down, he noticed the impression of a boot in a dried-up mud puddle. Tucker squatted and traced the edge of the footprint with his hand. His heart began to pound. It was the right size. More important, it was identical to the footprint he had seen in the creek bed.
Lahlia had been here.
But the puddle had dried since Lia had stepped in it. He had spent only a few hours at the North Pole, but weeks — even months — might have passed here.
He looked toward the barn. If there were answers, he would find them there.
“THE BLOOD SHOT UP OUT OF YOUR CHEST LIKE A geyser,” Will told Tom. “Everybody thought you were dead.”
Tom and Will were sitting in an examination room at the Chalmers Medical Center, waiting for the doctor. Their dad was with their mom in the next room. She had hit her head when she fell, but the doctor said she just needed a few stitches and she would be okay. Everybody was okay — except for being totally freaked. A lot of the people at his funeral had been at the county park that day and had seen Father September plunge a knife into his chest. Nobody could believe he was alive.
“Where did you go?” Will asked for the tenth time. “What happened to you?”
“It’s kind of a long story,” Tom said again. “I’ll tell you later.” It was too confusing to think about right now.
The doctor, a middle-aged man with a serious demeanor, came into the room, sat down, and regarded Tom.
“So, you are the young man who is supposed to be dead. Let’s have a look, son.”
Tom took off his T-shirt. The doctor leaned forward and examined his chest.
“I see a scar here, barely visible and completely healed. Do you remember how you did that?”
Tom shook his head. “I don’t remember.” If he told what he did remember, the doctor would never believe him. Nobody would believe it. He wasn’t sure he believed it himself. When he’d been stabbed, he’d had a hood over his head. The only reason they had thought he was dead was because they’d seen him go up on the stage and into the tent. Then they’d seen him brought out with a hood over his face, and they’d seen him get stabbed and dragged back into the tent. Everybody figured he was a goner, even though the police couldn’t find his body.
; The doctor listened to his heart and gave him a thorough examination, then sat back and regarded him skeptically. “Whatever caused that scar, it happened a long time ago. I see no signs of recent trauma. In fact, you seem to be remarkably healthy for a young man who was supposedly stabbed in the chest, then disappeared for a month.”
“I feel fine.” He just wanted to go home.
“These stage magicians are very clever with their illusions. I imagine this was all rehearsed beforehand?”
“No,” Tom said. “I didn’t know anything about what was going to happen.”
The doctor gave him an artificial smile. “Just a little practical joke, eh, son?”
Tom didn’t know what to say.
The doctor shook his head. “You’ve caused your parents a great deal of unnecessary grief, young man.”
“I’m sorry,” Tom said.
Tom walked out of the clinic with his parents and Will. His mom had three stitches in her forehead. She still seemed dazed, going back and forth between smothering him with hugs and staring at him as if he were a ghost. His dad was stony faced and silent, glaring at him with a mixture of love and anger. Tom figured he was going to get a talking-to when they got home. They were getting into their car when the sheriff and two men wearing suits approached.
“How are you doing, son?” the sheriff asked.
“Good,” said Tom. “The doctor says I’m fine.”
“I imagine you know you’re in a lot of trouble.”
“I am?”
“You certainly are. We had a dozen men and dogs out combing the county for you for a week. Your friend Father September is in jail now. Not to mention you’ve put your family through seven levels of hell. What were you thinking?”
“I didn’t do anything!” Tom said. “This guy asked me to go up to the stage, and Father September . . . well, I thought he stabbed me, and then I had all these weird dreams, and all of a sudden I’m in the middle of Hardy Lake.”
“Son, that just won’t do. I have a man in jail who’s been charged with murder. In fact, he has confessed to murder. Only he says it wasn’t you he killed; he says it was his son. Meanwhile we’ve got police in seven counties searching for another man, the one who escaped. You understand, this is a problem for us.”
“It’s a problem that I’m alive?”
“That’s one way to look at it, I suppose.”
Tom’s father broke in. “Sheriff, I don’t know myself what happened with my son, but my wife is not feeling well, and if you don’t mind, we’d just as soon go home. I can bring Tom in to talk with you tomorrow.”
The sheriff scowled. “I guess that’d be okay.”
On the way home, Will kept pestering him about what had happened. Tom’s head was swimming with memories that made no sense. Every time he opened his mouth to reply, he became confused. How could he convince anyone of something he wasn’t sure he believed himself? The doctor had suggested it was a stage trick and that Father September was some sort of twisted magician. That didn’t begin to explain the hospital, or meeting Tucker Feye in a snowstorm in a nightmare version of Hopewell, or the men in black attacking them. . . . It had to be a dream. But almost drowning in Hardy Lake — that was no dream.
“I mean, you had to be someplace,” Will said.
“I can’t remember,” Tom said.
“You must remember something!”
“Will, leave your brother alone,” his dad snapped.
Will shut up, but he kept giving Tom this weird sideways look all the way home.
By the time they got there, Tom was half convinced that none of it had really happened. The more he tried to get his thoughts together, the more elusive they became.
After dinner, his dad sat him down in the kitchen, where all the important conversations happened in their house.
“Now, Tom,” he said in the voice he used when he was trying to act calm and reasonable and serious, “I want you to tell me, man to man, where you’ve been for the past month.”
Tom had been preparing himself for this conversation for the past few hours, but he still didn’t know what to say.
“I’m not sure,” he said. “It’s kind of blurry.”
“Blurry?”
“I remember stuff, but it’s all like a dream. I mean, the last thing I remember for sure is falling into Hardy Lake. That was this morning.”
“What were you doing at Hardy Lake?”
“I don’t know,” said Tom. “I was just . . . It was snowing where I was.”
“Snowing? I haven’t seen a flake yet this year.”
“I don’t know. Everything is all fuzzy.”
“Tom, are telling me you have amnesia?”
Tom felt as if he’d been thrown a life preserver. “Yes! That must be it. I must have hit my head or something.”
His dad sat back and crossed his arms. Tom could see doubt, frustration, and concern in his eyes. He asked a few more questions, none of which Tom could answer. Eventually, he gave up.
“We’ll talk some more tomorrow. Maybe you’ll be feeling better.”
Tom slept poorly, tossing and turning, slipping in and out of nightmares that felt like memories. He woke up before dawn, thinking about Tucker Feye.
The last time he’d seen Tucker — really seen him — had been that night last June at Hardy Lake. The rope swing. The fireworks. That was the night before Tucker’s parents went away and before Tucker went to live with his uncle. He remembered the rope, the rough hemp texture of it in his hands. He remembered climbing the tree and swinging out over the lake with bottle rockets exploding around him. He thought about the tree. Yesterday, when he had dragged himself out of the lake, he’d looked at the tree and seen no sign of the rope swing.
A chill ran up his spine. He sat up and swung his legs over the side of the bed. What if the rope swing hadn’t been real? What if none of this was real?
Impossible. That rope swing had been the realest thing he’d ever done. But then why did it seem so dreamlike? He was swinging, and Tucker was swinging, and that girl, Lahlia, she’d been there, too. And Will. Will would remember it.
Just because the rope was gone didn’t mean it had never happened. He could imagine his dad finding the swing and thinking it was too dangerous. Taking it down. That must be what had happened. But the steps were gone, too. Maybe his dad had taken the steps down, too — but he hadn’t noticed any nail holes in the trunk. Maybe he hadn’t looked closely enough.
Tom looked at his younger brother, not six feet away in his bed, in his own dreams, snoring lightly. He rolled out of bed.
“Will! Wake up!”
Will did not wake up. Tom pinched his nostrils closed.
Will snorted, swatted Tom’s hand away, and pulled the covers over himself.
“G’way,” he muttered.
Tom switched on Will’s bedside lamp. “Wake up. I have to ask you something.”
Will squinted at the light. “Whasamatter?”
“Are you awake?”
“I wasn’t.” Will dragged an arm across his eyes. “What?”
“The rope swing.”
“What?”
“You remember the rope swing? Hardy Lake? What happened to it?”
Will sat up. “You having a nightmare?”
“No! I’m asking if you know what happened to the rope swing! The swing we made on the big cottonwood?”
Will rolled his eyes. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Tom grabbed his brother by the shoulders. “The rope swing at Hardy Lake!”
“Jeez, cut it out! Let go of me!”
Tom let go.
Will said, “You want to build some stupid rope swing, fine. You don’t have to wake me up to tell me about it.” He flopped back, pulled the blanket up, and buried himself under his covers. “Turn out the light,” he said, his voice muffled.
Tom felt as if a cavern had opened in his gut. He turned off the light and crawled back into bed, thinking about the swing. So real.
He remembered something else. He had carved his initials in the trunk of the big cottonwood. Someone could have taken the rope down and ripped off the steps, but they couldn’t uncarve his initials.
He slipped out of bed and dressed quietly so as not to wake Will, who was already snoring again. As he was leaving, he remembered something else — the gray coveralls he had found himself wearing, the ones they had given to him in the hospital with the weird doctors. He dug in his pile of laundry where he’d thrown them. They were gone. He went to the bathroom and looked through the trash can where he had dumped the rubbery blue things they’d put on his feet. He found nothing but used tissues and dental floss.
Swirls of mist hovered over Hardy Lake. Tom could hear the sluggish clicking of a late-season cricket, the distant honking of migrating geese. The sun was just showing on the horizon — an orange dome, slowly rising. Tom followed the edge of the bank around the west side of the lake, moving toward the cottonwood. There was definitely no rope. He stopped about twenty feet away from the tree. No steps nailed to its trunk. His heart was pounding. He didn’t know what he hoped to find. He moved closer, then placed his hand on the trunk. Solid. Real. He examined it closely but could find no sign of nail holes. It was as if none of it had ever happened. He moved around the trunk and looked at the place where he had carved his initials.
There was nothing — no initials. He stared at the tree. The trunk grew blurry and began to tilt. Tom realized he had stopped breathing. He forced himself to take a huge breath, then another. The dizziness passed. He sat on the bank and looked over the lake and tried to think. Okay, so he had dreamed the rope swing. What else had he dreamed? Was Tucker Feye a real person? Was there really a girl named Lahlia? Did he really have a brother named Will?
The sun had risen above the horizon and was burning off the last wisps of mist and fog from the lake. Tom took out his pocketknife. He unfolded the blade and tested it with his thumb. Blood welled up. The blade was sharp. He stood and walked up to the tree. There was one thing he knew. He knew who he was.