“Is it secured in there?” Agent Kline asked, concern painted on his face.
Agent Allen jabbed a finger at the ceiling. “Ask your buddies upstairs.” As she spoke, the hanging lights dimmed. “Let’s go before that thing plunges us into the dark. It hates light.”
Agent Kline had a difficult time pulling his eyes off the beast. “It can control the electrical circuitry to the lights?”
“According to Mr. S, it doesn’t turn off the power—it suppresses the radiation of light.”
“How does it . . . I mean, what is it anyway?” They both started up the stairs.
Agent Allen commented over her shoulder as she climbed upward, “Like I’ve been trying to tell you, it is one freaking nasty, giant, green rat, but you have to see it to believe it.”
Agent Kline shook his head in disbelief and followed her up.
“I think we should try fixing the grandfather clock first.” Cal studied the military backpacks, camping gear, food packets, guns, and ammunition that were scattered in untidy piles by the fireplace. The food pile was pitifully small. His stomach growled noisily.
Lenny also studied the disorderly piles. Then, holding up the long, hunting knife, he said, “This is, like, dude, big time hunter-gatherer stuff.”
Cal and Lenny had pulled everything out of the backpacks that might be of use on a big-game-hunting expedition. After losing the giant jackrabbit, Lenny had pointed out that overly large animals needed more fauna and flora than grew in the desert. That kind of abundant greenery needed more water than was found anywhere near the mansion.
Lenny argued there had to be forests not too far away to sustain the big animals. His plan was to hike west over the foothills in the direction the giant hawk had flown with their dinner. There they would find greener lands with big game for Cal to shoot with his .357 pistol.
Lenny was optimistic. Cal knew it was a risky venture. Who knew how far away those greener lands might be. Cal knew they couldn’t travel far without food, and their travels would be over even quicker if they ran out of water along the way. If they went on a long expedition and found nothing, they probably wouldn’t make it back to the mansion.
Cal tossed down the box of matches he was holding. “If the clock works and gets us back to our own world, then, man, we’ve got no problems. We won’t need to go hunting. If we can’t get the clock to work, then we’ll have no choice. We can pack up what we’ve got here and go hunting.” Cal’s stomach rumbled again. “If we haven’t already died of starvation.”
Lenny reluctantly conceded the point, and they went to work on the gigantic clock. First, they made a careful search around the clock, gathering up all the parts and pieces they could find. Most of what they found was glass fragments.
Lenny called out, “Hey, dude, come over here. What’s this? It can’t be clock stuff.”
Cal hurried to see what he had found.
Lenny pointed at a huge picture frame, lying face up on the floor. All the broken glass from the clock had already been cleared away around it. “Dude, have you ever seen this before?”
Cal squatted down to get a better look. “It’s definitely not part of the clock, but it does look familiar.” He paused, then shook his head. “Man, I think I’ve seen it before, but maybe just ’cause the frame looks the same as those on the freaky paintings upstairs and on that rat picture down in the stone room, except this one’s empty. There’s no picture in it.”
He shrugged. “Let’s set it over by the wall and get it out of the way.”
It took both of them pulling together to drag the frame across the slate floor.
“Dude, what’s this thing made of? It weighs a ton,” Lenny complained.
Most of the clock pieces were inside the clock’s giant housing. Though the parts had been peppered with shotgun pellets, nothing appeared to be seriously damaged, except of course, the front panel of glass had been blown to pieces. Lenny cleaned and sorted the parts, then removed all the shattered glass from the casing. He examined the clock mechanisms, dusting as he went.
Doing the intricate repairs was a one-man job. Cal had taken to pacing back and forth, but stopped to peer over Lenny’s shoulder. “How does it look?”
“It’s going to be way easier to put together than I thought.” Lenny glanced up. “Hey, dude, how about making yourself useful, like, a little further away from me? You make me nervous, man, and I can’t afford nervous. How ’bout figuring out a way to climb up high enough to put these hands back on that clock face way up there?”
Cal left, returning several times with loads of chairs and other furniture to build a precarious stack for Lenny to climb on.
Carefully, Lenny replaced the hanged-man pendulum and wound the weights to the top.
Cal paced nervously in front of the giant grandfather clock while Lenny made final adjustments and brushed away more dust. Stepping back, Lenny admired his handiwork.
“Do you think this will work?” Cal looked anxiously at Lenny even though he already knew the answer.
Lenny returned his look and sentiment. “Dude?” The translation was, Who knows?
Climbing to perch on the precarious stack of furniture, Lenny returned the hands to the face of the clock. He scratched his head. “Dude, what time is it? What time do we set it to?”
Cal glanced at his watch. It was 2:35 pm. “I don’t know, man. It always went off exactly at midnight. I never saw the hands set in any other position, except straight up. Maybe we are supposed to set it for straight up twelve o’clock.”
Lenny pushed both hands until they pointed straight up. He climbed down from the improvised scaffolding. “I don’t know what else to do, dude. I don’t even know how this thing works, but the innards don’t seem damaged or anything.”
He shrugged. “Here goes nothin’.”
With that he reached through the open front of the clock, the broken glass having been completely removed, and pushed the pendulum to start it swinging.
Cal held his hands over his empty, shrunken stomach. Closing his eyes, he said a silent prayer. This had to work. It just had to.
Agents Allen and Kline had just returned to the main hall when, without warning, the pendulum in the large grandfather clock started swinging and the clock began to chime. The first dong startled them both. The clock said it was twelve o’clock, but it was actually early afternoon.
The clock donged again as Misters S and C hurried out of their upstairs study.
“Kline, what are you doing with that clock?” Mr. C shouted down at them from the second floor balcony. “I thought you said there was nothing more you could do. In any case, we told you not to start the clock again without clearance from us. We don’t know what it will do.”
Anger etched across their faces, Misters S and C tried to hurry downstairs. Clutching the handrail, both old men hobbled and limped as quickly as they could down the stairs. The clock continued donging its midnight chime.
Agent Kline held his hands up defensively. “We did not touch the clock, sir. I swear. We were just passing through the hall when it started chiming on its own. We don’t have any idea what’s going on now.”
Agent Allen put her hands on her hips. “Look,” she started, “we haven’t messed . . .”
Before she could finish, even though she hadn’t been moving, she lost her balance and started to stagger. It felt as if the floor beneath her feet was moving, sliding back and forth.
At the same time, the great hall, which had been warm with the heat of the day, suddenly became cold, icy cold. It felt as if all heat had been instantly sucked out of the room and was now being sucked out of their bodies.
Agent Kline widened the distance between his feet, securing his balance. He then reached over and placed a hand on Agent Allen’s shoulder, steadying her. The clock continued to chime as if it were twelve midnight. The temperature continued to drop.
Mr. S neared the bottom of the stairs, holding tightly onto the railing. “How did it . . .”
&nbs
p; He stopped mid-sentence, staring in the vicinity of the clock. Agent Kline furrowed his brow and slowly brought an arm up, pointing in the same direction. “There is something there.”
Appearing in front of the clock were two ephemeral figures. Not quite coming into focus at first, the figures seemed to grow solid with each dong of the clock, but in between dongs, they would evaporate, becoming transparent again. With the next dong, the figures became more substantial again, only to lose substance until the next donging of the clock.
“What is that!?” Agent Kline demanded.
Agent Allen shook her head. Could it be? She squinted, trying to bring the ghostly forms into focus. It suddenly hit her. Her mouth opened in disbelief. “That’s, that’s Jones, uh, Cal, and . . .” she stammered, trying to remember his friend’s name. “That’s Cal and that other kid!”
The room was spinning, without spinning. Everything moved in and out of focus. It was like looking at a double exposure of the same photograph, moving back and forth on itself.
“NO, NO, NO!” Mr. C was shouting at the figures. “It only works at midnight. Only at midnight! It won’t work now.”
Mr. S put his hand on Mr. C’s shoulder. “They can’t hear you.”
Mr. C had a panicked look on his face. “If they move wrong, they will end up being torn apart.” The clock continued to dong.
Mr. S hurried over to the figures. Withdrawing a notepad from his pocket, he started to write. Agent Allen had not been counting the number of times the clock had chimed, but it must be close to twelve. Ripping the paper from the notebook, Mr. S hesitantly held it toward the wavering images of the two boys, who didn’t seem to see him.
He reached out as if sticking his hand into a burning fire. With the last dong of the clock, the two images disappeared for good. Mr. S snatched his hand back to his chest as if it had been burned. Blood dripped copiously from his hand as he wrapped it in a handkerchief.
Cal would have thrown up, had there been anything in his stomach. It was unclear what, but something had happened. The clock had started donging. The room had gotten suddenly ice cold and had seemed to move, or jump, or something. And, it seemed as if other people, ghostly people, who faded in and out with each gong, had appeared in the main hall with them.
For a few seconds, he thought it had actually worked, and they would be back in their old world, the world where Trona was. But things from the Trona world never got substantial, never got completely solid. They saw a little of where they wanted to go, but didn’t get there.
At the last dong of the clock, what they could see of the other world disappeared. Just before it did, though, an apparition had hurried toward them and held something out. As the figure disappeared, it left something behind. A piece of paper floated toward them. Cal snatched it out of the air.
The following note had been hastily written on the paper.
“Only works at midnight. Try again in 57 hours.”
The boys read the paper together. Cal sighed and rubbed his empty belly. They had a few food packets left, but not enough to last them for fifty-seven hours. They were going to have to find something else to eat while they waited.
“It almost worked,” he said with obvious regret in his voice.
“We’re on the right track. Now we just have to do it at the right time.” Lenny smiled. “There is reason to be optimistic.”
“What fell on the floor?” Cal pointed down at a pink object, the size of a thimble.
Lenny bent over and squinted at it. “Dude, it’s the bloody end of someone’s finger!”
XIX
“Come this way.”
Martha followed the Navy ensign, the heels of the young officer’s shoes clicking on the worn linoleum as she led the way down a long dingy hall. Once the doctor had declared Martha fit to leave, the old men had informed her they had arranged for her to do her clerkship with the Judge Advocate General’s office at the nearby China Lake Naval Weapons Station.
“A very prestigious clerkship and well paid,” the tall white-haired man had declared. “It is much to your advantage, and we would like you close this summer to be sure you have no residual ill effects from the accident. You were, after all, injured in the company of a federal agent. Let us know if you remember anything more about what happened. It could be important.”
Martha’s requests to talk to the Los Angeles law firm that had hired her for the summer were brushed off.
“Everything is taken care of,” she was told. “It was the least we could do.”
“I can only work a few months before I must be back to law school,” she had pointed out.
“No problem,” the old man said. “We expect a full recovery by the end of the summer. This fall you will be back in school, continuing your legal studies right on schedule.”
That promise went a long way in putting Martha’s mind at ease. She could tolerate a lot if she wasn’t going to lose her place at the Yale school of law.
“Can I call my parents to tell them about my new clerkship?” Martha was excited when she was taken to a phone and given at least a show of privacy.
“Martha, are you sure you’re all right?” Her mom had been horrified to hear she had been in a car accident. “I can fly out tomorrow. I hate having you there all by yourself.”
“I’m fine, Mom, really. The doctor told me to just take it easy for a while and not do any sports or activities where I might hit my head again.”
Martha did her best to reassure her parents, not mentioning her painful, deep bruises. As Camm had cautioned, she was cooperating with the NSA, or more accurately, playing the thing out. She would wait to see what developed and formulate a better plan when she knew more.
In the meantime, she was hoping to hear from Camm, or at least discover what had really happened to her. She knew everything the NSA told her was nonsense.
Staring at the ensign’s back, Martha thought, At least they seem to be buying my story that because of my concussion, I can’t remember anything after we pulled into Valley Wells.
The young ensign, looking sharp in her navy blue skirt and white blouse, led Martha to the end of the hall where two small offices faced each other across the hallway. The hall ended in the open door of a small, bleak break room.
The offices were contained in a temporary structure, old and plain. Everything at this end of the long, narrow building had recently been covered with a thick coat of paint. There were no windows. A loud evaporation cooler blew moist air through a hole in the center of the break room ceiling. The rest of the old building was warm and smelled moldy, in spite of the paint job.
The ensign ushered her into the right-hand office and indicated her work station, which consisted of a simple square cubicle containing a small desk, an old computer, and a rickety secretary’s chair. A thin folder, a notepad, and a couple pens lay next to the computer. The color scheme was military blah. There were no pictures, no plants, nothing to brighten the atmosphere. It seemed very sterile, very isolated.
Martha glanced around for signs of any coworkers. There were none.
She had expected to be working near the Judge Advocate General’s office, but it seemed she was to be kept away from everybody. Even her living quarters were single-occupant military housing. All units around her were vacant.
Pointing at the bulky computer, the ensign said, “You will receive all your legal research assignments by email. You will find sign-in, email, and any contact information contained in that folder. Your computer is connected to all pertinent government and Internet sites so you can complete all your research online. Prepare and send all your reports in electronic format. Hard copies will not be necessary. After you have returned each report by email, you will be given another task. Any deadlines will be explained in the task summary. Any questions?”
“So,” Martha asked hopefully, “will you be working here with me?”
The ensign looked startled. Her eyes darted quickly around the barren room. “Oh no, I have other dutie
s, and I appear regularly in military court.”
Martha sighed. “Will I be working all alone?” She felt as if she had leprosy.
“Oh no,” the navy officer responded curtly.
Striding across the hall, she opened the door to the other small office. Inside were two teenage boys hardly old enough to be out of high school.
Each sat at his own small desk, the top covered by an ancient desktop computer. The back corners of the room were stuffed with what looked like abandoned office equipment.
The boys did not seem to be doing anything. Both wore dull expressions and appeared to be shell shocked. Neither boy looked up.
“These two young men will be assisting you. Let me introduce you. Boys, this is Martha. She will be your supervisor. Martha, this is Jim and Sean. They will be your assistants.”
XX
Cal leaned back against a large smooth rock that served as a chair back. Smiling with contentment, he patted his bulging stomach. For the first time in several days, he wasn’t hungry.
Above him, the sun was setting behind a bank of thick black clouds. Visibility immediately around him was not good because of the tall savannah grasses surrounding the little campfire he and Lenny had made in a small clearing. But Cal’s attention was on the sky, which was changing colors minute by minute as the sun went down.
Somewhere behind him, hidden in the lush vegetation, was a rustling noise. Cal knew he should be cautious about such noises, but in the mellow aftermath of his meal, he didn’t want to bother. Besides, the area was inhabited by large birds. He guessed he was hearing bird noises.
He glanced over at Lenny, sitting across the fire from him. “Do you want more?”
Sucking the meat off a leg bone, Lenny held up his hand. “Dude,” which meant, I’m full.
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