Daniel continues sweeping. He knows enough about Miss Posey to keep his distance. He’s been coming to stay with his uncle in Brokeneck and helping out in the shop during the summer months since he was a kid. He’s overheard many conversations down at the diner about Posey’s tendency to embellish even the smallest incident, and polish it until it is a big, shiny scandal. Daniel is unimpressed.
“What I think is,” Posey continues, “that I know, or I think I know, where your uncle is. Or where he might be. Or… ” She throws up her hands in front of her in a defensive gesture when she sees Daniel’s expression, and the video camera swings from her wrist. “Hear me out.”
“Really, Miss Van Buren, I appreciate your concern, but I’ve got a lot of work to do here… ”
“Alright, alright. Just humor me for a second.” She turns and with her thin arm makes a graceful, sweeping gesture at the stacks, video camera swinging as she moves.
“Everything in here means something to somebody. A memory, a life event, something. Everything in here has passed through people’s lives. It all carries people’s memories. Each and every little detail—it matters to someone. Your uncle understood that. So before you take the store apart, or throw anything away, look very carefully at what’s what. What’s stacked where. That’s all I’m going to say.”
Daniel considers this for a moment. While he is considering, Miss Posey turns toward the door, video camera swinging, and says, “And, you might think about starting with the notebook underneath the cash register. If you want to talk about it, you know where to find me.”
Daniel watches Miss Posey leave the store, the door swings shut behind her and the bell tinkles. That lady has to be the most obsessive person he has ever encountered. No single detail about anything, anywhere, fails to capture Posey’s attention. But, the fact is that Posey Van Buren sees. A lot. As annoying as she is, she is a human encyclopedia on the subject of Brokeneck and everything and—everyone—in it.
Daniel sets aside the broom. He sits down on the stool and leans back, squints, tilts his head and takes a look around the massive, antique, scroll-covered brass cash register. Papers, books and other unfinished business cram every space on the counter. There hardly seems to be enough space to put anything underneath the register. Certainly not enough room for a notebook.
But he stuffs a pinkie finger under there anyway, to see if Miss Posey is making things up. He feels the edge of something—but as he pushes on it, it slides farther away. Now he can’t get at it. He slides open a drawer and pulls out a pencil, and tries that—but it doesn’t fit. He peers under there—he can clearly see some kind of flat object wedged in the space. After sliding it around with a finger again with no success in moving it any closer, he has an idea. He pulls out a paper clip and straightens it, leaving a hook on the end. He carefully slides his newfangled fish-hook under the register, and voila—a hand-sized paperbound booklet appears. In pulling it out, Daniel drops it onto the floor along with a few clumps of dust.
When he picks the notebook up off the floor, Daniel notices that the thick paper cover carries a strange round symbol embossed in the center. It looks like a circle with a square in the middle, and a line spiraling from the corner of the square out to the circle’s edge.
Daniel runs his fingers over the symbol, turns the book over a couple of times and opens it.
Many of the pages inside are blank, and the ones with writing are uninteresting; each page contains merely a single name and a date. Anna Blunderford, June 18. Gus Donaldson, June 23. Bobbie Hendricks Henderson, July 8. And so on. The dates are in order. A name, a date. Another name, another date.
Daniel doesn’t recognize a single name. He continues flipping through:
Jesse Ironsides, August 15. Deanna van Patten, August 17. Julie Chen, August 18. And so on. August, September, October… looks like about a year’s worth of names. But what year? It doesn’t say.
Daniel flips to the last page with writing on it and looks at the final name.
Marvin Brush.
Mr. Brush.
His uncle.
Come to think of it, something about the book does seem familiar.
Daniel yanks open the drawer beneath the cash register. He needs a receipt, a note, anything. He rummages around until he finds a paper with his uncle’s signature on it and holds it up next to the book. He was right.
The book is in his uncle’s handwriting.
“Sandy, these eggs are as bad as you’ve ever made ‘em.”
“Thanks Earl. Eat up so you can grow into a big, strong boy.”
The Brokeneck Diner is busy this morning, as busy as it ever is. The diner faithfully serves the exact same group of people each and every morning, sitting in the same seats and eating and drinking mostly the same things.
The diner sits like a lookout at the end of Brokeneck’s Main Street, the farthest building from the Brokeneck Hotel. The structure itself resembles an oversized silver train car that got stuck in the dirt, topped with a triangular neon sign that reads simply: EAT. It sticks out amongst the gold rush era wooden buildings that line most of the rest of the street.
Mrs. Woods, having made the short trek from the opposite end of town, pushes open the diner’s double glass doors and enters. She smiles at Earl and the other scattered patrons, and slides onto a red vinyl-covered stool at the counter.
“Morning Eleanor,” the waitress behind the counter says while scooping up an empty coffee cup and stray salt and pepper shakers. “How are things down at the hotel?”
“Morning Sandy, just fine, thank you,” Mrs. Woods says.
Sandy places a full cup of coffee on the counter in front of Mrs. Woods without being asked. “Earl’s in an especially good mood this morning,” she says, nodding in the direction of the man a few seats down.
Earl, a broad man in a short-sleeved shirt and suspenders who doesn’t look a day over 85, is situated at his customary place at the counter. He gives Sandy a look and hunches over his newspaper.
“What’s in the news today Earl?” Mrs. Woods asks. Sandy makes a face, as if to say that’s not a good question to ask at the moment. But Mrs. Woods remains undeterred.
“Aw, everything’s goin’ to hell, as usual,” Earl says. He plunks his thick finger down on a headline on the paper and taps it several times. “See this?”
Mrs. Woods leans over to look. It’s an article about a dog show in Boise, Idaho. “Okay,” she says.
“Can’t you see it? Look.” He shoves the paper over into the space on the counter between them, upsetting a ketchup bottle in the process. “Here, and here and here.” He scrunches the paper around so a couple of other headlines are now closer together. One headline contains the word, THEY’RE, another the word COMING, and a third, SOON.
“There you go,” Earl says, leaning back triumphantly. “I told you.”
“You told them what, Earl?” says a voice from behind him. The voice belongs to Ted, whose slight frame is completely hidden by Earl’s bulk. Ted is a wiry, sun-dried old man in a grimy baseball hat. He always wears the hat down just a little too far, then lifts his chin to peer at people under the bill. This gives him a look that is both defiant and comical.
“It’s all here Ted,” Earl says to his much smaller friend. “All you have to do is look for it. The message is there.”
“Earl,” Ted says, “don’t you think if ‘they’ wanted to tell us something, ‘they’ would save us the trouble and just put the whole thing in ONE headline? You know, so we citizens could read it instead of conducting some ridiculous origami experiment to put it together?”
Earl laboriously turns around to face Ted, rotating his stool and stuffing his knees under the counter. He puts both hands in front of him, elbows out, and leans forward. If he wanted to, he could probably squish Ted between his fingers. But he hasn’t done that yet in the fifty or so years they have known each other, so he’s not likely to do it now.
“Ted, you are as dense as these eggs. You know as well a
s I do that you can’t just spell things out like that; you’ll panic the general population. You have to inform the knowledgeable people first. That’s exactly what they did last time, and now they’re doing it again. That’s all.” Earl rolls his eyes to convey the absolute obviousness of what he’s just said.
“Okay Earl,” Ted says with more than a touch of sarcasm. “It worked so well last time. That’s why they’re doin’ it again, no doubt.”
Everybody goes back to their eggs and coffee for a minute.
“Did you hear Mr. Brush went away?”
The question comes from a booth in the window. Rose Mayfield, a tiny woman with wire-rimmed glasses and frizzy hair, sits knitting an endless scarf that stretches across the formica table in front of her and then drops to the bench seat opposite her. Everyone turns to look at her. It’s easy to forget Rose is there, most of the time. When she speaks, she doesn’t address anyone in particular.
“I heard he went off to Vegas,” Ted says.
“Vegas? You dimwit,” Earl says. “Marvin Brush has no use for Vegas. What is wrong with you? He probably just needed some time off, and went for a nice walk in the woods. Maybe he wanted to get outta that musty bookstore for a while. Got that Daniel kid looking after it.”
“You have to admit that’s unusual, though,” Mrs. Woods says. “It’s not like Marvin to leave without telling anyone. I didn’t see or hear a single thing, even with my hotel right there across the street from the bookstore. I hope everything is alright.”
“Seriously, he’s fine,” Ted says. “I tell you, he just needs a vacation.”
“Mr. Brush is not on vacation,” Rose says, never lifting her eyes from her knitting.
“Who told you that, Rose, your husband?” Earl says.
“Yeah Rose, did your husband pay you a visit?” Ted asks. “Did you stop knitting for a little while? That’s when he comes back from the dead, isn’t it? When you stop knitting?”
Rose shoots them a look. “As you can both see, my knitting continues unabated.”
“Well, good,” says Earl. “Because I don’t want ol’ zombie Don coming around. You keep knitting, Rose, don’t stop. Keep that fellow in his grave, where he belongs.”
“Anyway, Mr. Brush didn’t go on vacation.” Rose says, and goes on knitting.
Ted uncrumples Earl’s newspaper and flattens it on the counter so he can read the articles. “Any ideas on where he went then, Rose?” he says without looking up. “Or maybe we should consult with the newspaper folding czars?” Earl glares at Ted and then down at his eggs.
“He went into the lake,” a voice says in the unmistakable drawl of Miss Posey Van Buren. Posey has been waiting silently just inside the door, listening to the discussion.
Earl exerts enough effort to turn all the way around, in the other direction, to look at Posey. His face lights up. “Here’s Posey! How are you, young lady?” Earl has always had a secret, or not so secret, crush on the glamorous woman with the camera.
“What do you mean, ‘into the lake?’” Mrs. Woods asks, setting her coffee down on the counter.
“I saw him,” Posey says. “He walked into that lake and didn’t come out. It’s happening again.”
“See?” Earl says. “Here we go again. People going into the lake. Just like they did before.”
“Now that’s odd,” Mrs. Woods says to herself. But of course everyone hears her.
“That lake, it’s no good,” says Rose at her table, knitting needles moving back and forth. She has probably added a foot in length to that scarf the last few minutes. “That lake enchants people, it does. Makes ‘em lose their minds.”
“You mean like ol’ Zombie Don?” Ted asks. “Zombie Don doesn’t like when you stop knitting, now does he, Rose?”
“My knitting is my way of telling him I still care about him,” Rose says. “Don just gets restless, is all.”
“Fine, just keep ‘im away from my eggs,” Earl says, popping the last bite into his mouth.
“Posey, did you get any video?” Mrs. Woods asks. “Did you make a recording of Mr. Brush at the lake?”
Posey’s face broadens into a wide smile, revealing a magnificent set of teeth. She certainly must have been a beauty back in the day. “Why yes, I did,” she says.
Everyone in the diner gathers around Posey at the counter to peer at the tiny screen. Posey presses play. Nothing happens. She presses again.
“Now that’s strange,” Posey says, shaking the camera a bit as if to loosen the movie so it will come out of the camera.
“No battery,” Ted says, peering from underneath his hat brim. “Posey, I fear that you’re outta battery.”
Sure enough, the camera is dead as a doornail.
“Well, I… ” Posey stammers, looking down at the camera.
“It’s alright young lady,” Earl says with a smile, “You just charge that thing back up and then we’ll watch.”
“That is, if it wasn’t already dead when you tried to film this incident,” Ted says unhelpfully.
“Well,” Posey says, disappointed. She straightens. “I know what I saw. With my own eyes. And it was Mr. Marvin Brush, all right. Walked into the lake. I saw him. Plain as that bottle of ketchup there on the counter.”
“Maybe we ought to set up some kind of lookout from the hotel, Eleanor, since you’ve got the best view,” Ted says. “Perhaps there’s comings and goings that might reveal important facts.”
“Eleanor?”
But Mrs. Woods is no longer there—she has left behind a still-steaming refill of coffee on the counter, as the glass door swings closed.
Gabriel Silverwood looks down at the padded, unmarked manila envelope that dropped down through the trees from a drone overhead. This, most likely, is the information that the Chairman promised to send. He scoops it up from the ground and pulls out a clear piece of plastic about the size and thickness of a placemat at a pancake restaurant. When he touches it, it lights up with files, photos, maps, and layer upon layer of information. He sits down on a rock to take a look at it. He can hear far-off crows screeching, disturbed at the sight of the delivery drone. Gabriel can’t say that he blames them.
He doesn’t think too hard about how the Chairman knew his location. He’s used to that fellow popping up everywhere. In Gabriel’s opinion the Chairman has way too much power, he’s got his hands on far too much information. There’s really nowhere to hide from the Council.
Except, apparently, in prison.
A video pops up in the center of the display. It’s the Chairman. He is looking dapper, as always, in a dark double-breasted jacket and black dress shirt with an expensive sheen to it. He keeps his tailor busy.
“Hello Mr. Silverwood,” he says. “As we agreed, you are to locate and track Tromindox T-441, who is in possession of a large number of portals as well as The Book of the Future. You are to relieve him of the portals, and the Book, and return them to me. Once I have received these items, you of course will be released to travel to the same timeframe as your wife and children. This will be a one-way trip as per our arrangement. Oh, and Gabriel, do keep yourself focused on the task at hand. Because if you don’t, you will be filed away again. For a very, very long time. And no one will be coming to liberate you this time. I hope we understand each other.”
The window shrinks and disappears from the display. Gabriel picks up a metal cup filled with lukewarm coffee, and sips it.
“Got your marching orders there?” Christopher Silverwood emerges from the trees. Christopher is Gabriel’s younger brother. His black hair is chopped up into a sloppy mohawk. Like Gabriel’s, his twenty-year-old body is wiry. But his skin is tan, because he hasn’t been locked up in prison for the last several years. Or months, depending on how you count being filed away in another time frame. Christopher takes a seat on a nearby log and waits for a reply from his brother. He scrunches leaves around on the ground under his thick boots.
“Yep,” Gabriel says, staring down at the jumble of information comp
eting for his attention from the light sheet. The portals, tiny white circles, move across the map along with what he presumes is T-441. As far as anyone knows, this Tromindox could have been back and forth and eaten a large number of humans already. 441 took a lot of portals, so it’s probably a real party right now.
“We’re supposed to go find this guy.” Gabriel hands the light sheet over to his brother. It’s showing a photo taken of T-441 in the last year or so, on a grey day on a city street. Looks like San Francisco. This is one busy Tromindox.
“He’s digital,” Christopher says, squinting.
“No kidding,” Gabriel says. “We’re looking for a fellow with no face. To say that’s inconvenient is an understatement.”
“Being in prison is inconvenient, and you dealt with that okay,” Christopher says, attempting to be encouraging. “We’ll locate this individual somehow.”
“This job is going to require fraternizing with a lot more Tromindox than we’d like, Chris. We will need a strategy.”
“Well you don’t need too much of a strategy, with that special anti-Tromindox blood flowing through your veins. Those critters won’t come anywhere near you.”
Gabriel knows that’s true. He’s got the same blood as his daughter. Any Tromindox that comes in contact with Gabriel’s blood is done for, a pile of dust. It’s a Silverwood trait, although a recessive one. He wishes both his kids had it. At this moment he also fervently wishes Christopher had it. But Christopher doesn’t, and that worries Gabriel.
“Wait, I know,” Gabriel says and jumps up to rummage through various duffle bags. Out comes equipment of all shapes and sizes, cups and batteries and other items rolling out onto the ground. Christopher watches this process patiently. He knows better than to interrupt his brother when he has an idea—even if it turns out to be a pretty poor idea.
“Ah,” Gabriel says. He yanks out an object and holds it up. It is a tiny vial with a metal cap, attached to a chain. A wide grin takes over his face.
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