The Switch

  “Now that you mention it,” said Mose, “mine, too.”

  I rubbed my palms together. Then I wiped them on my blue jeans. “I guess you’re right,” I said. “What’s the second reason?”

  “The mask is part of my body unit. If we’re all touching it when we flip the switch, I think we’ll stay together. Don’t ask me why. I have it on good authority from my first coach. Some kind of transpersonal energy field. Remember, we’re ninety-nine percent empty space.” He gave us each a look. “I assume we want to stay together. At least, this time.”

  It’s not that I didn’t want to believe that holding onto Gordon’s helmet would keep us together. A little fairy dust—or a “transpersonal energy field”—would’ve been just what the doctor ordered. But I couldn’t believe it, and for a moment, that made me question everything the kid had said.

  “Gordon, look, you’re a very smart dude, but this is real. This is science. What you’re talking about…that’s magic.”

  “Did I use that word?” he responded calmly. “I don’t think so. But there’s stuff we don’t have an explanation for that will be science someday. Look, this mask has been with me through three universes. Think about that: everything else can change. Your birthday…your face. So why would I still have this mask? Besides, I always follow the rule of three.”

  “I’m gonna trust little Einstein,” said Mose. “No way I want to wind up on my own somewhere. Not the first time anyway.”

  “All right.” I slipped my fingers under the buckle. From this strange otherworldly kid, I was learning that science and what some people would call faith weren’t necessarily opposites.

  Gordon took hold of the handle with both hands, Mose grabbed it just beneath him, and I put my right hand on top.

  “One for all and all for one,” I said. They repeated my words like a prayer, and then together, we locked our feet against the wall and began to pull back. Nothing. “Let’s move our feet up a foot or so.” Still nothing. We had walked about three feet up the wall and the position of the switch hadn’t moved more than an inch.

  We were stuck there, braced against the wall, like astronauts in zero-gravity space, and feeling pretty stupid.

  “We’re gonna need more power,” said Gordon.

  And just as he said it, two large, gnarled brown hands joined ours on the handle, and we heard the Duke say, “Let’s give it all we got, shall we, boys?”

  “Sir Duke!” Mose cried out. “You comin’ with us?”

  “Not far as I intend,” said the Duke. “Though if the powers above have it in mind for me to travel, I will travel. But it looks like you fellas need a little more juice. On the count of three, all right? Push your feet into that wall for all it’s worth!”

  We counted off together.

  “One! Two! Three!”

  We all came down, tumbling over each other onto a floor that wasn’t concrete anymore, but some kind of linoleum. That didn’t make it hurt any less to land, or any less frightening to plummet.

  I think the fall may have knocked me out for a minute or two, because coming out of it, my vision was blurred and I felt the way you do when you wake up from sleeping in the middle of the day and have no idea where you are. Wherever I was, it was still a dark, cavernous place. I could tell from the sound. And at first, I couldn’t see my companions.

  “Gordon? Mose?” I called out. “You guys here? Did you make it?” Then, I whispered under my breath, “God, I hope so…”

  There was no immediate response, and that struck a cold spike of fear into my chest. The only thing I heard, aside from the humming of some machine, was what sounded like singing. Not one voice, but a group, and not music exactly, but a melodic chanting from somewhere above, with occasional shouts and whoops. I tried to remember if I’d ever heard anything like it. If I had, it might’ve been something like the way little girls singsong when they’re jumping rope.

  That sounds cheerful enough, but this particular singing brought me no cheer. In fact, it was downright eerie, and not even quite in tune.

  Then, came a cough. An unmistakable cough. Mose. I waited, holding my breath, because when Mose coughed once, it always led to more. But there weren’t more, just that single hack.

  “Jerrold…I mean, Jacobus?” He said. “That you?”

  “Yeah,” I whispered. Why I felt like I had to whisper, I don’t know. “Man, I think I blacked out. You see Gordon anywhere?”

  “Nope. But I can’t see anything yet. I’m just feeling around, and I don’t feel anything except the floor.”

  “I’m gonna try and find my way to you,” I said. “Maybe our eyes will get used to the dark in a minute. Keep talking. Or whistle.”

  He started whistling the same “John Brown’s Body” tune we’d sung with the Duke. Real soft, like he also felt we ought to keep quiet. It was enough for me to locate him, and as soon as we could see more than a foot in front of us, we started crawling side-by-side on all fours, calling out for Gordon. The floor felt smooth, cold, and empty, unlike the cluttered basement of the Hotel Clybourn. And so, when my fingers did finally hit something, I gave a shout. I shouted because the brain in my fingertips recognized what I’d touched. Mose reached it at the same time.

  Gordon’s catcher’s mask. Only Gordon wasn’t in it.

  “Shit,” said Mose.

  I floundered around to make sure Gordon wasn’t somewhere nearby, knocked out from the fall. An awful thought struck me that if we’d accidentally pulled his mask off when the switch flipped and we all got shot backward, he might not have made it. An image of Gordon Nightshade, floating in a timeless void, burst into my head.

  “Gordon!” I called in a loud whisper. “Nightshade! Tap on the floor or something if you can hear me.”

  For the longest time, there was no response. And then, a tentative…Tap. Tap. Tap. Weak knuckles on a linoleum floor.

  “Keep knockin’, Gordo,” said Mose. “We’ll find you!”

  He was on his back, about ten feet away, and just as Mose had predicted, he was flipped like a turtle. He couldn’t seem to talk either—only to make a soft moan like you do with a bellyache.

  “You made it, bro.” I patted his chest guard. “You’re all right. Probably got the wind knocked out of you.”

  Slowly, Gordon lifted his right arm, finger pointing up at a forty-five-degree angle, like a zombie corpse in an old horror movie. Together, Mose and I followed his finger—to make out a wall six or seven feet away, and about ten feet up that, the switch, in the downward position.

  “No wonder we got knocked out.” I gaped. “The freakin’ floor dropped ten feet.”

  “No,” said Gordon, his throat raspy. “It’s a diff’rent building. Or a deeper basement, at least.” He cocked his ear toward the sing-songy chanting. “What’s that? I don’t like the sound of it.”

  “Me neither,” I said. “It’s like a little kid’s song, but those aren’t kid voices. They’re grownups. There’s nothing creepier than grownups acting like kids.”

  I realized, as I looked down at Gordon and my eyes got used to the dark, that I’d never seen him without the face guard. The mask had made his head look round, but I guess I’d figured it was probably a different shape underneath. No, it was round. He wasn’t ugly, just likeably weird, with thick circular eyeglasses and a long, thin mouth.

  And that gave me a sudden thought.

  “Look at me,” I said to both of them. “Can you see my face?”

  “Uh-huh,” said Mose, nodding slowly up and down.

  “Is it the same face?” I asked. “The same as Jerrold’s?”

  “Uh-uh.” Mose shook his head back and forth. “No.”

  “Shit,” I said. “You guys have no way of knowing if it’s my real face or not. You’ve never seen my real face. I gotta find a mirror.”

  “It ain’t a bad face,” said Mose. “Whoever’s it is.”

  “Well, that’s a relief.” I bent down to help Gordon off the floor. “Now let’s go find out where t
he hell we are.”

  Suddenly, Mose drew up short. “What about me?”

  “Whaddaya mean, what about you?” I asked.

  “What about my face? Is it the same?”

  I checked him out as best I could in the dim light. “Yeah. As far as I can tell, you’re the same guy.”

  “That’s good,” he said. “I like my face.”

  Once we had Gordon upright and he’d gotten his wind back, I gave him my two cents. “So, I hate to break it to you, but you need to lose this chest guard. For one thing, it creaks when you move. For another, it slows you down. Not to mention, you can’t get up when you fall.”

  Gordon ran his hands lovingly over the leather, like it was his girlfriend or his pet golden retriever.

  “That’s actually kind of obscene, dude. Can you cut it out?”

  He sighed. “Okay. I guess you’re right. Unstrap me, would ya?”

  Without the chest guard, there was a lot less to Gordon. His body was still a little turtle-like. I guess his bones were shaped that way. But he was narrower and blockier. All this time, I’d seen him as kind of round and chubby. Then, it hit me.

  “Gordon,” I said. “Didn’t you used to be, well…chunkier?”

  He ran his hands over his torso the same way he had over the leather. “Whoa, I’m a rail. My ribs are sticking out.”

  “This is too weird,” said Mose. “Can we get out of this basement?”

  “Good idea,” I said. “You see over there, where the light’s coming from? That’s an exit sign.”

  We held onto each other as we made our way there, because it was still dark and because it just felt safer to do that. On the way, Mose turned to me.

  “You don’t think there’s any chance the Duke’s still up on the third floor, do you?”

  I shook my head. “Doubt it. I wonder if it’s possible that this is the building that’s here in my home world. You know how they always tear things down and build them up in Chicago.”

  The exit door was jammed. Either that or locked from the outside. “Put your shoulders into it,” I said. “All of us on the count of three. One. Two. Three!”

  We burst through into daylight harshly reflected off concrete, and in the process, set off an alarm bell loud enough to wake a coma victim. I wasn’t sure, but I thought the singing stopped, and was suddenly seriously paranoid.

  “Run for it!” I whisper-yelled.

  “W-w-wait!” Mose grabbed hold of my arm. “We don’t even know where we’re runnin’ to or from.” He pulled us back into the narrow, shaded gap between the Hotel Clybourn and the building next to it, safely out of sight for the moment. Across the alley, where before there had stood another derelict building, was now a newly poured asphalt parking lot occupied by a fleet of black, windowless vans and a couple of stretch limos. The Hotel Clybourn itself, while the same size and shape, was now laminated in some sort of shiny marble, the windows gussied up with stonework that made the place look like some rich French aristocrat’s forty-room house—only phony, like at a theme park.

  As I may have mentioned, phoniness sets my teeth on edge.

  “This does not look like my neighborhood,” Mose said. “No, sir.”

  “We’re not in Kansas anymore, that’s for sure,” said Gordon.

  “What the heck does that mean?” I asked.

  “What? You never heard that?” Gordon narrowed his eyes. “You never saw The Wizard of Oz?”

  “Anyway, in case it’s still a protected zone,” whispered Mose, “we owe it to the Duke to see if he’s here. Not to mention—he’d know what to do, if anyone would.”

  “Don’t know, Mose,” I said. “That’s a hell of a long shot.”

  The alarm continued to ring, an ear-piercing jangle like a school bell that wouldn’t stop, but alongside it was the new and more alarming sound of boots on gravel.

  “Don’t move,” I whispered hard. “Don’t make a sound.”

  The guard came round the far corner of the Clybourn and moved slowly along toward the exit we’d broken through. His hand was on the pistol in his holster. Crunch, crunch, crunch, on the gravel. He looked pretty much like most building security guards—a little paunchy around the middle, not that tall, and with a face somewhere between scared and mean. He checked the door, shut off the alarm, then stepped into the basement.

  “If we’re gonna look for the Duke, it’s now or never,” I said. “He won’t be in there for long.”

  There was a set of double doors, which I reasoned must be the rear entrance, about fifty feet away and up a set of steps. “Let’s just hope it’s unlocked,” said Mose.

  “I wish I had my mask,” Gordon said in a hush.

  “Now!” I hissed, and we moved as quickly as one six-legged creature can move, nearly tripping on the second step. No sooner had the last of us made it inside than I spied the guard coming out of the basement. “Go, go, go!” There was an elevator halfway down the hall, but that didn’t seem like the smartest way to get to the third floor.

  “Take the stairs,” said Mose. “Over there! Quick!”

  We took them two at a time, and I can tell you I was glad I’d made Gordon take off his outfit. The stairways, like the rest of the building, had been redone in marble with new iron banisters, and I was quickly losing hope that we’d find anything like the Duke’s old encampment.

  Out of breath and gasping, it took a minute for our bodies to quiet down enough to make out the chanting coming from right down the hall.

  Oh Captain, Oh Captain,

  Your hand is on the wheel

  Take us to the port

  And the truth to us reveal

  “What the—” said Mose, under his breath.

  It was like some old Bible school song. And just as out of tune.

  “It’s coming from over there.” Gordon pointed to a door halfway down the long hallway.

  I reeled, struck with this kind of radar sense, the same way I had been in the hallway at school after the bathroom incident with Connor. Everything stood out like the world was suddenly in ultra HD, with graphics bolder than any video game, down to…a chip in the marble near the floor on the right side of the hall. Someone had knocked a big chunk out. Behind it was the old wall, and sure enough, it was the same dull yellow-green it had been when the Duke ruled over it.

  “We’re in the future, Gordon,” I said. “Look, the old paint job is covered over.”

  “Not necessarily,” said Gordon. “That old paint job was probably there since they put up the building. That could’ve been, I dunno…1930-something? We could still be in the present. Just a really different present.”

  We had arrived at the chanting door. It was closed, but there was a half-cracked louvered window up above like they have in old schoolrooms, and with a boost from Mose and some steadying from Gordon, I was able to get up high enough to look through.

  What I saw made my knees wobble, and if Mose hadn’t caught me, I might’ve hit the floor hard and made a racket.

  “What is it, Jacobus?” Mose asked. “What’s in there?”

  There wasn’t the space of a breath to answer because suddenly footsteps echoed in the stairwell: the security guard.

  I scanned up and down the now unfamiliar hallway. At the very end was a men’s room. I grabbed hold of my friends and hustled them in there.

  A shudder shook me as the door swung closed. The three of us lined up at the washbasins, breathless and too panicked to move.

  “What’d you see in there, Jacobus?” Mose whispered urgently.

  “Shhh!” I held my hand up. “Wait a second. Listen…” The chanting had stopped, and there were no approaching footsteps in the hallway. I wasn’t at all sure that the silence was a good thing.

  “Okay,” I started. “There were about thirty people, all in these white shirts with…” I ran my finger along my shoulder. “What do you call those stripe things soldiers and sailors wear on their uniforms?”

  “Epaulets,” said Gordon.

  �
�Right. So, mostly grownups…a few kids. Holding hands in a circle and singing, with a guy in the middle who didn’t look happy at all. In fact, none of ‘em looked happy. But the freakiest thing—”

  “Was what?” Gordon prodded.

  I had just looked in the mirror. What I saw made me even more sure that this was a world apart. Maybe it was 2015. Maybe not. But the story was different.

  “Okay, Professor Nightshade,” I said. “What’s going on?”

  “Uh.” He stared numbly at his reflection.

  The three of us were recognizably the same guys, but key things were different. I already mentioned that Gordon was skinnier, but no, he looked downright undernourished, and haunted, as if he’d seen things a kid should never have to see. Of all of us, I think he was the most disturbed by the change. Mose looked like he had grown a couple inches in height, but that also might have been the weight loss. He didn’t look quite as spooked as Gordon. And me, I was back physically to being Jacobus, but something had changed inside me. A different world had made me a different person. I didn’t look older and wiser so much as harder and sadder. This world had changed me, but I had no idea what my history was in it. It was as if I didn’t completely exist.

  If there was good news, it was that I still hadn’t lost touch with whatever was at the core of me. I was still seeing with his eyes. My eyes.

  “This is nuts,” said Mose. “I wanted to lose a few pounds, but not—”

  “Yeah.” Gordon felt his torso. “We’re all kind of stretched out. How could that happen?”

  “Before I suggest,” said Mose, “that we get our butts back down to that switch and try again…the freakiest thing was what, Jake?”

  “They were all—” Now there were footsteps. Coming fast.

  The door burst open. In came the guard, followed by two men from the circle. A couple of kids peeked in through the door. I hadn’t needed to finish my description. But I did: “—all the same.”

  The same. The old ones and the young ones. Not identical, but made from the same recipe. Noses, mouths, ears—you could’ve switched them around and it wouldn’t have made much difference. They had red hair, thin, wide mouths, and flat noses. And white shirts with epaulets.